Imagine Rabbi Solomon Schechter cast in a role like Harrison Ford’s in the movie “The Raiders of the Lost Ark” and you’ll get the flavor of this true life, swashbuckling history of the treasures of the Cairo Geniza.The Cairo Geniza, located in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (or Old Cairo), contained nearly 1,000 years of documents and manuscripts from one of the wealthiest and most centrally located medieval Jewish communities.
Among its 300,000 manuscript fragments are scraps handwritten by Maimonides and renowned poet and thinker Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, both of whom lived in ancient Cairo during this period.
An accidental discovery
Although Schechter, like any Jewish scholar of his day, was aware of the Cairo Geniza, he didn’t fully appreciate its significance until he was asked by globe-trotting friends, widowed twins Agnes S. Lewis and Margaret D. Gibson, to look at curious document fragments they’d picked up on a recent trip to Cairo.Buttonholing Rabbi Schechter on a Cambridge street, one of the sisters brought him back to the house. Mrs. Lewis gave him a piece of paper that her sister Margaret described as looking “as if a grocer had used it for something greasy.” After taking it away to study more closely, Schechter realized that it was a piece of the original Hebrew of Ecclesiasticus. Before the end of the year, Schechter himself was in Cairo, talking his way into the Genizah.
The treasures of the Cairo Geniza
“Barely more than eight feet long by six and half feet wide, and extended to a height of some six yards, the Ben Ezra Geniza was the size of a glorified walk-in closet. Yet here was an entire civilization. After Schechter had climbed a rickety ladder to reach that dim attic-like opening, and once his widening eyes had adjusted to the dark, he found himself staring into a space crammed to bursting with nearly ten centuries’ worth of one Middle Eastern, mostly middle-class Jewish community’s detritus—its letters and poems, its wills and marriage contracts, its bills of lading and writs of divorce, its prayers, prescriptions, trousseau lists, Bibles, money orders, amulets, court depositions, shop inventories, rabbinic responsa, contracts, leases, magic charms and receipts.”Schechter himself called it a “battlefield of books.”
In its medieval heyday, Fustat was “home to the most prosperous Jewish community on earth and served as a commercial axis for Jews throughout North Africa and the Middle East and as far away as India.”
The significance of the find
Some scholars say the discovery of the Cairo Geniza is more significant than the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Where the Dead Sea Scrolls document the world of a small number of men who abandoned the world to find God in a wilderness, the Cairo Geniza “embraces and embodies the world as it really was, warts and wonders alike for the vast majority of medieval Jews.”How the geniza survived time, neglect, scavengers and misguided plans to raze the synagogue are all part of the adventures that Hoffman and Cole weave into this absorbing book.
More than a century after Schechter shipped the bulk of the Geniza’s contents to Cambridge for study, the material is still being identified and cataloged. Most of the treasure is at the Taylor-Schechter Collection at Cambridge University. A small collection was brought to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America when Schechter was appointed its president. The John Rylands University Library in Manchester also holds the Rylands Cairo Genizah Collection, which is being digitized and uploaded into an online archive.
About the Authors: Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole
Hoffman also wrote House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, a biography of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali. In 2016, her book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, was published. She has also written a biography of screenwriter Ben Hecht.
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