Cairo Genizah - Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts

A Genizah is store room found in a Synagogue used to hold worn-out copies of sacred Jewish writings. The Genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Fostat (Old Cairo), often simply called the Cairo Genizah, held a thousand year accumulation of documents. Documents which highlighted not only Hebrew and Jewish literature, but virtually every aspect of life in the Mediterranean and focus not only on Jewish culture, but the surrounding Muslim and Christian cultures, as well.

This treasure-trove of documents was brought to the attention of the world by Dr. Solomon Schechter, the Reader in Talmudic and Rabbinic literature at Cambridge. Several trips from 1896 to 1897 allowed him to recover over 100,000 documents and fragments and bring them to Cambridge University in England.

These documents now form the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection which is housed in the Cambridge University Library. They have been the core of an active conservation and research program for more than a century and are still a source of exciting discoveries.

Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/

Read about The Taylor-Schechter Genizah Fragments at the University of Cambridge

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/Collection.html#par01

A brief article about two lady scholars who made a number of manuscript discoveries at St. Catherine's Monastery including a version of the Old Syriac Gospels.

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/lewis-and-gibson.html

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View manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah in The Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/

The Genizah On-Line Database (GOLD)

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/GOLD/

Joint Cambridge-Princeton Genizah Project

CAMBRIDGE

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/GOLD/princeton_images.html

PRINCETON

http://www.princeton.edu/~geniza/index.html

TEXTGARDEN (The all-purpose database for scholars )
http://gravitas.princeton.edu/tg/tt/auth_login_form.html

Further reading

Solomon Schechter's original account of his exciting discoveries in the Cairo Genizah can be found in Studies In Judaism - Second Series by S. Schechter, M.A., Litt. D. ,
The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia (1908)

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For an on-line version of the the first two sections of this book visit

A Hoard of Hebrew Manuscripts

http://members.tripod.com/~papyri/texts/hebrew.html

The Penn/Cambridge Genizah Fragment Project

is a collaborative effort to reunite the contents of the Cairo Genizah in a single online presentation.

http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/genizah/