Sacred Treasure-The Cairo Genizah: The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten Jewish History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic

Prologue

In late December 1896, on a balcony overlooking the main floor of Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue, Rabbi Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University climbed a crudely built ladder set against a limestone wall, his eyes fixed on a dark opening above. The opening led to the synagogue’s genizah, an attic-like chamber where Cairo’s Jews had been depositing texts and documents of every kind for more than eight hundred years.

Schechter had good reason to hope that the Genizah contained a sizable mass of Jewish writings, but as he scaled the ladder, he had no way of knowing that this repository, packed with nearly three hundred thousand documents, represented the largest trove of early and medieval Jewish manuscripts ever discovered. It would transform the world’s understanding of medieval Jewry, biblical and Rabbinic literature, medieval Islamic history, and much more. So vast was the collection that nearly a century after Schechter’s death in 1915, scholars would still be poring over the contents of the Cairo Genizah and still making discoveries.

Reaching the portal, Schechter held his lantern in the dusty, silo-like space, still unsure as to what riches it contained. In Cambridge, Schechter had recently identified a Genizah manuscript as a page of a long-lost book from biblical times. Would he discover more of its pages in the Genizah? (He would.) Schechter knew that the great twelfth- century rabbi-philosopher Moses Maimonides lived within walking distance of this synagogue. Might the Genizah contain documents from the hand of Maimonides himself? (It did.) Schechter also knew that Cairo was an important cultural and economic hub during the Middle Ages. Did the Genizah hold important information documenting the lives of Jews and non-Jews who lived in and traveled through that great Egyptian metropolis? (More than Schechter could ever imagine.)

Peering into the illuminated chamber, the bearded, red-haired rabbi beheld an astonishing jumble of texts piled yards high, the sheer quantity of which must have left him breathless. Schechter immediately realized that one person—one Cambridge scholar—would never be able to sift through all this material in ten lifetimes. It would fall to others, including generations of Cambridge researchers, to uncover many of the Cairo Genizah’s most spectacular documents.

Buried in the Genizah was the last letter to Maimonides from his brother David, a merchant who was lost at sea on a voyage to India; the oldest-known Passover Haggadot in the world; the earliest fragment of Rabbinic literature ever discovered; and the clay seal of the prominent tenth-century sage Rabbi Nehemiah Gaon. The paper chaos also held the earliest example of Jewish sheet music—a Hebrew poem set to Gregorian chant during the twelfth century by a former Italian priest who converted to Judaism during the Crusades. And much, much more.

In February 2010, more than a century after Solomon Schechter entered the Genizah and set this massive scholarly project into motion, I too climbed up to the Genizah portal. Like Schechter, I am an ordained rabbi, though I serve as leader of two small congregations in Washington State rather than as a Cambridge don. Like Schechter, I have long had a passion for old Jewish books and manuscripts, though I cannot lay claim to scholarly achievements even remotely as extensive as his. Like Schechter—who, according to some accounts of his life, was forty-six years old when he first viewed the Genizah—I too was forty-six when I climbed that ladder in Cairo. I had first heard the Genizah story when I was a rabbinical student in the mid-1980s, and I had been researching it intensively for three years. To see the Genizah chamber for myself, I had traveled from Seattle to Cairo with my fifteen-year-old son Jacob. As far as I knew at the time, nobody else pursuing the Genizah’s story had peered into it for nearly a hundred years, and no one had ever photographed the interior.

I’ll never forget the moment I first looked inside. The room is now empty of documents, but what riches it once held! I imagined page after page after page fluttering down onto the growing pile of manuscripts—letters, Bibles, medical prescriptions, and countless others. Each was a tiny gem; each carried a spark of human memory and wisdom; each was part of the greatest literary treasure ever discovered.

And it was discovered in that very room.

I have countless other memories of this trip with Jacob. Our expedition included stops in Cambridge, England, and New York City to meet Genizah researchers, view additional Genizah-related sites, and see firsthand some of the Genizah’s most magnificent discoveries.

It was the experience of a lifetime, and a fitting culmination to my years of research on the story of the Cairo Genizah.

Sacred Words, Sacred Scraps

This is the story of that roomful of sacred scraps—of ripped Torah scrolls, rotted Talmud pages, old business receipts, fallen-away leaves of wisdom books, love letters, friend letters, and large letters of the Hebrew alphabet written in schoolhouse primers. It is the story of a rabbi raised in a Romanian shtetl who moved many of those scraps from the gloomy repository to the bright light of modern scholarship. It is the story of two erudite Scottish sisters whose discovery of a crumbling page of Hebrew text spurred that rabbi toward his find. It is the story of conservationists who preserve the texts, scholars who study them, technicians who digitize them, philanthropists who support this painstaking work, and curious readers around the world who can now peruse these ancient treasures online.

Most important, it is the story of countless Jews from many lands and centuries who somehow left a bit of themselves in those old documents. For in those sacred scraps we see reflections of the lives of millions. We read of their daily activities and encounter their sages’ wisdom. We see what stirred their souls, what they loved and what they feared, what set their hearts soaring, and also what angered them. They wrote to one another, for one another, and about one another. They composed poetry, recorded business transactions, and signed legal deeds. They transcribed scripture; they wrote philosophies, theologies, and commentaries on sacred text; and sometimes they just doodled. They believed that the words and images they had inscribed were so sacred that they never threw them away. Instead, they stashed the documents in a synagogue chamber. Perhaps forever.

Built in the ninth century or earlier, then destroyed and rebuilt during the eleventh century, the Ben Ezra Synagogue was home to a Jewish community that thrived and flourished for centuries. Not only did its members excel in scholarly, artistic, and business endeavors, but the community was also a center of artistic, commercial, and intellectual life for Jews and non-Jews throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and beyond.

Historically, Judaism has viewed any document containing Hebrew as sacred, and Jewish law forbids the disposal of sacred documents. As the renowned Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon—Maimonides—wrote in thirteenth-century Cairo: It is forbidden to destroy any sacred writing or its commentary or its interpretation.¹

Words, in Judaism, carry sacred power. Especially Hebrew words. And even more especially, the words of Torah. The Jewish mystical tradition teaches that the letters of the Torah were fire—black fire inscribed on white fire. They are to be handled only with great care.

So what are Jews to do when their Hebrew books and papers become damaged, destroyed, or simply out-of-date? One option is to bury them in a Jewish cemetery, customarily near the grave of a scholar. The other (often more convenient) option is to designate a room, usually an attic or a cellar in the synagogue, as a genizah—a repository for damaged sacred documents.

Originally, the only documents placed in genizahs were those bearing one of the many names of God that appear in sacred Jewish literature; those documents are called shemot, names. But over the years, the genizah requirement broadened. Eventually, not only documents including the name of God, but any document with any Hebrew on it also went into a genizah. If you used a Hebrew name on a business receipt, or quoted the Bible in a letter to your mother, or wrote a secular poem containing some Hebrew words, Jewish law and custom called upon you to put it into a genizah rather than a trash can when you were done with it.

Still later, the genizah requirement broadened even further. Jews began depositing in their genizahs any paper even remotely related to their Jewish lives. Many such documents were in Hebrew, but others, especially in the Cairo Genizah, were in Arabic, Persian, Yiddish, and at least one language yet to be identified.

So, from the tenth through the nineteenth centuries, in that tall, narrow, dark chamber, there grew an astounding pile of tattered old documents. The texts were unusable, but in a literal sense, they were also indispensable. And into the Genizah they went—one torn page, one tattered parchment, one scrap at a time. For nearly a thousand years.

Then one day in 1896, Solomon Schechter’s lantern illumined the Genizah, and from the dusty recesses of the ancient chamber, the light of the old letters began to shine once again.

Introduction

Treasures in the

Synagogue Attic

In 1025, the first papers of the Cairo Genizah fluttered to its floor. We don’t know what they were—loose pages of decrepit prayer books, a bundle of old letters, or perhaps some unneeded business records. Whatever their identity, they began a steady stream of texts flowing into that unlit room for centuries. Many of the documents were composed locally in or around Cairo. But others had traveled great distances. Some came by camelback from the west, in caravans from Algeria, Tunisia, or Morocco. Others arrived on ships from Europe or trade routes between Africa and India. And some came from Babylonia in the north, often by way of the Land of Israel.

From all of these places and others, the documents flowed to Cairo. The Egyptian capital, whose name means Triumphant, was not the world’s largest Jewish community back then—Baghdad and Cordoba were larger. Nor was Cairo considered sacred, like Jerusalem. It was, however, a major crossroads of medieval Arabia where Jewish life thrived. Its Jews were active in Egyptian commercial life, had Egyptian friends and business associates, and sometimes even held high-ranking government positions.

The Narrow Place

Egypt was, of course, an odd place for Jewish life to flourish. Many centuries earlier, the Egyptians had enslaved the Israelites, oppressing them with hard labor. Jewish legend minces no words in describing the Egyptians’ cruelty: they deprived the Israelites of straw to make bricks and flogged their foremen when the work teams came up short; they punished workers who produced too little by killing one of their children; when a baby fell into a vat of mortar, the taskmasters refused to allow the Israelites to save it, sealing the child’s body forever inside a brick. The Hebrew word for Egypt is mitzrayim, meaning the narrow place, the place of constriction.

And yet, Jewish tradition is not complete in its vilification of Egypt. Abraham, the first Jew, traveled there with his wife, Sarah. In Egypt, Joseph rose to great heights of power and saved his brothers from famine. Jacob, on his way to Egypt to be reunited with his beloved son Joseph, feared that God would be angry at him for willingly going into exile. But God reassured Jacob, saying, Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for there I will make you into a great people (Exodus 46:3).

Indeed, it was in Egypt that the ragtag clan of Israelites first became a people, and Pharaoh was the first to notice it. Behold, he said, the people of the children of Israel are too numerous and mighty for us (Exodus 1:9). The realization frightened Pharaoh into enslaving the Israelites, and it was in the crucible of Egyptian suffering that they forged their identity into a nation.

In Jewish memory, then, Egypt is a land of both enormous torment and invaluable national growth. And it was from that place of narrowness and constriction that Jews first ventured toward vast horizons in pursuit of their shared destiny.

Return to Egypt

After they left Egypt, God forbade the Israelites from turning back: You shall not return this way ever again (Deuteronomy 17:16). But they returned anyway, those wandering Jews. Legend has it that the prophet Elijah (ninth century BCE) visited Egypt and revealed himself at a spot that would later become the site of a Cairo synagogue. Later, it is said, the prophet Jeremiah (sixth century BCE) mourned the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem at the very same spot. Decades later, the Temple was rebuilt, partly under the leadership of Ezra the Scribe. Legend has it that he, too, journeyed to Egypt, where he penned a Torah scroll for the Jews who lived there.

The first permanent, post-Pharaoh Jewish community in Egypt appears with the dedication in 332 BCE of Alexandria, built in northern Egypt where the Nile meets the Mediterranean. There are reports of Jews present at that ceremony, and there is evidence that within a few years of its founding Alexandria had become home to a sizable Jewish population.

In the seventh century CE, Arab armies conquered Egypt and established the national capital at their encampment along the eastern bank of the Nile, at the border between the ancient kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt. They called their capital Fustat—tent city. By the ninth century, an estimated 120,000 people lived in Fustat; by 1168, that number had grown to 200,000.

Fustat remained the capital until the tenth century, when an invading Arab army from Tunisia called the Fatimids conquered Egypt and moved the capital to Fustat’s northern suburb, a city called Al-Qahira—Cairo. In time, Cairo would grow large enough to engulf Fustat, but the two cities existed side by side for many centuries, and a sizable Jewish community remained in Fustat even after the capital moved to Cairo.

The Ben Ezra Synagogue and the Cairo Genizah

Among the earliest references to Jews in Fustat is a Christian document indicating that in 882, a patriarch of the Coptic Church—an Egyptian Christian denomination—needed to sell a church there to pay a tribute to Ahmed ibn Tulun, the ruler of Egypt. He sold a former Greek Orthodox church and the land around it to the Jewish community, who turned it into a synagogue.

By then, there were three distinct groups of Jews in Cairo: the Babylonians or Iraqis, who were allied with the Rabbinic sages of Baghdad; the Palestinians, who were connected with the Rabbinic sages of the Land of Israel; and the Karaites, a group that rejected the authority of the Rabbis and were allied with no Rabbinic sages whatsoever.

For many years, scholars believed that the church sold to the Jews by the Coptic patriarch in 882 later became the Ben Ezra Synagogue, which housed the Cairo Genizah. But the Ben Ezra belonged to the Palestinians, and it turns out that the Jews to whom the patriarch sold his church were newly arrived immigrants from Iraq—Babylonian Jews. Other documents indicate that the original Ben Ezra Synagogue was pre-Islamic, though we don’t know exactly when it was built. At any rate, the Ben Ezra Synagogue was established prior to 822 and might date back much farther than that. Sometime around 1012, the caliph Al-Hakim ordered the destruction of all Jewish and Christian houses of worship in Egypt. The Ben Ezra Synagogue was duly demolished, its bricks and timber sold as scrap. Soon afterward, however, the environment in Egypt changed, and the Palestinian Jews of Cairo received permission to rebuild their synagogue. Visitors during the Middle Ages report an inscription above its entryway indicating that the building was rededicated and reopened in 1025.

The newly redesigned building included a genizah. This genizah was larger than most—two stories high, more silo than attic—with a rooftop opening accessible from above. With so much room inside, the synagogue caretakers could avoid moving its contents to the cemetery several miles away. This genizah had plenty of room. With luck, it would last for many centuries.

The oldest known dated document in the Cairo Genizah is a fragment from a ninth-century ketubah—a Jewish marriage certificate—that predates the Genizah by about 155 years. It is small piece of paper, 5½ inches wide, 3½ inches high. In keeping with custom, the scribe who penned the ketubah recorded the date—Friday, the seventeenth of Tishri, Seleucid year 1183 (October 6, 871)—and other details. Partway through, however, the scribe realized that he had made a mistake. The seventeenth of Tishri that year was a Saturday, not a Friday as he had written. Not only was it an error, but if anyone caught it later, it might look as if he had been trying to cover up a wedding that had taken place on Shabbat, which Jewish law forbids. The scribe put aside his partially written ketubah and began again from scratch. The mistaken document would need to go into a genizah.¹

The oldest dated document in the Cairo Genizah

The Genizah’s Ancient Origins

Jews have saved unusable scraps of text since ancient times. The practice dates back to the very first Jewish text of all: the tablets that Moses received on Mount Sinai. Jewish legend teaches that Moses engraved the entire Torah onto those tablets and that those rock pages were God’s greatest gift to the Jewish people before or since. After engraving the text, Moses lugged the tablets down the mountainside, only to discover the Israelites worshiping a golden calf instead of God. Perhaps in anger, perhaps to prevent his people from being held accountable to the laws, Moses smashed the tablets on the ground. Later, after the situation calmed and cooler minds prevailed, Moses returned to the mountaintop to get a second set of tablets.

The tablets were placed in an ornate box, the Ark of the Covenant, and it was said that any army carrying that Ark into battle would be invincible. When Jews built the First Temple under King Solomon’s leadership in Jerusalem in 960 BCE, they placed the Ark in its innermost sanctuary, the Holy of Holies. Nobody but the High Priest ever entered that sanctuary, and even he only ventured inside once a year, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

Jews have studied the Temple rituals and the story of the Ark in detail for centuries, and one detail about the Ark puzzled a fourth-century sage from Babylonia, Rabbi Joseph. What, he wondered, was really in that box? Did it hold only the second, unbroken set of tablets, or did it also hold the shards of the first set—the ones that Moses smashed? His answer was clear: Rabbi Joseph taught … that both the [unbroken] tablets and the fragments of the [broken] tablets were deposited in the Ark.²

The Ark of the Covenant, in other words, was the world’s first genizah.

The Power of Language

Judaism considers language—the spoken and written word—to be a tool that is both sacred and powerful. In one of the most widely acclaimed of all divine acts, the book of Genesis tells us that God created the world through a linguistic act: And God said, ‘Let there be light! As a result of the magical and creative power of God’s spoken word, scripture hastens to add, there was light (Genesis 1:3). God also created humanity through an utterance: Let us make man in our image (Genesis 1:26). Among the most significant passages in the Torah is the Ten Commandments—in Hebrew, Aseret Hadibrot, the Ten Utterances. At the very heart of Judaism, then, is the Utterance, and from its very inception, Judaism has seen in language the power to create, the essence of humanity, and the commanding voice of God.

Of all the world’s languages, Judaism sees Hebrew as the holiest of all. It is lashon hakodesh, the sacred tongue—so holy that some Jews have insisted on speaking it whenever possible, and so holy that others reserve it for special settings. In ancient days, Hebrew was spoken by Jews in the Land of Israel. When Jews moved to other lands and spoke other languages, it became a rarefied parlance of prayer and study, too sacred for everyday use. But in modern times, the ancient language was reborn in the State of Israel, and some Jews saw it as indispensable for the redemption of the Jewish people. Others argued that using Hebrew in schoolyards, department stores, and restaurants was nothing short of sacrilege. Both perspectives share a reverence for Hebrew as the ancient, hallowed language of the Jewish people.

Of all Hebrew words, the holiest to Jews are the words of Torah and other sacred texts. Judaism sees the Torah not as a book that is full of wisdom, but a book that is the very embodiment of wisdom itself. Judaism teaches that at Mount Sinai, God gave Moses not only the words of the Five Books of Moses—what we call Written Torah—but also a vast amount of additional material. These additional words, Jewish tradition teaches, were passed down through the ages by word of mouth as Oral Torah, and eventually they, too, began to be written down in the Talmud, Rabbinic commentaries, law codes, and other sacred texts. According to Jewish tradition, they are all revelations of God’s wisdom.

As a result, Jews see each word of Torah—each word of the enormous library of sacred Jewish literature—as packed with meaning. Through the centuries, Jews have studied and dissected these words, striving to wring as much truth and wisdom from them as possible. Jewish law calls upon Jews to study the words of Torah, to recite them in worship, to read them regularly in the synagogue. Before studying, Jews praise God: Blessed are You, O Eternal our God, Ruler of the Universe, who has sanctified us with commandments, and commanded us to engage in the words of Torah. In Judaism, relating to these ancient words is a holy act.

The Torah’s Most Sacred Words of All

In the Torah, the holiest word of all is the name of God. The Torah sometimes refers to God as El or Elohim, derived from an ancient word for judge, but many scholars see this as a divine title or job description rather than as a private name. God’s intimate name, God’s first name, is a word so sacred that we never pronounce it. As mortals, we are not on a first-name basis with God.

God’s secret name is the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable fourletter word spelled with the Hebrew letters corresponding to YHVH. The Hebrew alphabet is all consonants; its vowels are usually dots and dashes beneath the letters, and the vowels don’t appear in Torah scrolls. There are book editions of the Torah that do include the vowels, but the pronunciation of God’s secret name is shrouded in mystery, and modern readers use a replacement: Adonai, Sovereign. Indeed, the only person who ever knew how to pronounce God’s name was the High Priest. It was the word he uttered during his annual Yom Kippur visit to the Holy of Holies as he atoned on behalf of himself, his family, and all Jews everywhere. If an impure thought entered his mind as he uttered God’s name, the world would come to an end.

One word. It is imbued with power and danger; it is shrouded in mystery. As God’s name, it can transform a people; misused, it can lead to utter catastrophe.

Storing the Sacred and the Forbidden

Nowadays, the word genizah refers to a repository for damaged or destroyed Jewish documents, but this wasn’t always the case. Genizah derives from the Persian ganj, meaning treasury or storehouse. In the Bible, the term appears in the books of Esther and Ezra referring to the rooms holding royal treasuries.

By the sixth century CE, however, the term had taken on several more specific meanings. For example, the Talmud refers to a genizah as a storage place for sacred objects that had become unusable. The Talmud’s oldest section, the Mishnah (codified around 200 CE), teaches:

Articles used for fulfilling religious obligations may be thrown out. But articles used for sacred purposes need a genizah. What are articles used for fulfilling religious obligations? Sukkah,* lulav,† shofar,‡ and