Janet Soskice’s excellent The Sisters of Sinai piqued my interest in the Cairo Genizah several years ago. Rabbi Mark Glickman’s introduction to the Cairo Genizah for lay readers provided the additional detail I craved, and his enthusiasm for his topic is infectious.

Since its discovery by the broader community of Jewish scholars in the late 19th century, the Cairo Genizah has contributed to Jewish textual history, religious history, the social and cultural history of the medieval Middle East, and Jewish-Muslim relations in the middle ages. Glickman provides a history of the discovery of the treasures in the Cairo Genizah and of the scholars who have dedicated their lives to its study into the 21st century. Glickman explains the significance of the discovery, highlights ways that the Genizah documents have challenged scholarly opinion (many of the surviving documents reflect the Palestinian Jewish tradition, which differed from the Babylonian Jewish tradition that more closely resembles modern Jewish practices and customs), and describes the work of current Genizah scholars and custodians to bring order out of chaos and make the documents more accessible to the next generation of researchers. ( )

I had no idea about any of this! I am not Jewish, but then, my Reform Jewish friends had no idea about this, either!

I came across this book as a member of Audible.com. Periodically they have "deals" where for "two credits" you can purchase 3 books. While going through the lists of what was being offered, I thought this looked interesting. Instead, I found it fascinating.

I highly recommend this to anyone fascinated by the finds of antiquity. In a sense it is like finding a new cave at Qumran. However, the book only hints at the totality of what was found in the "attic" in Cairo. For scholars who read Hebrew and Arabic, entering the libraries (or, since the collections are being digitized, opening their browsers) which house these finds must be like entering a candy store.

The genizah was "discovered" by western scholars in the 1890s. The documents housed in the attic were thought to be in the thousands and turned out to be in the 100s of thousands, and dated back to the middle ages. Stop reading this quasi-review and read the book. It is well worth the time.

As Constantijn Huygens wrote to René Descartes " it takes the same amount of time to read the work of fools and it does to read what matters" (paraphrase). ( )

Interesting that both this book and [b:Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza|9135913|Sacred Trash The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza|Adina Hoffman|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1320455529s/9135913.jpg|14014664] were published almost simultaneously in 2011, so I decided to read them both back to back. Both detail [and I do mean detail] the history of the discovery of the Cairo Geniza, a repository for old Jewish manuscripts. But both books are more a history of the scholars who worked on the geniza manuscripts than on the geniza itself and the amazing things they found there.

One would never know from this book that the majority of geniza texts are spells, incantations, and instructions for performing these from myriads of ancient magic manuals. Still this was an engaging read, well written, and even funny at times.

( )

Imagine you are a forty-year old who was severely injured in an automobile crash and suffered amnesia that wiped out thirteen years of your life, two periods: ages 10-12 and 21-30. Then after enduring the dark space in your memory, sometimes agonizingly, you stumble on several trunks in your attic. You open the trunks with difficulty and find old, frequently torn, moldy, disheveled letters, scrapes of paper, and memoranda that were written during these thirteen years. You read them with astonishment. Like the plot of a mystery novel, you find that these papers reveal facts about your life that you had forgotten. They disclose things about you that are radically different than your image of yourself. This is what happened in a synagogue storeroom, called a Geniza, in Egypt, at the end of the nineteenth century.

Civilization lost its memory of Jewish happenings during the first half of the second Temple period, from about 536 until about 165 BCE, and for centuries of the Middle Ages. Then, like the amnesiac in the example, scholars unearthed some three hundred thousand documents from these periods.

Jews and many Christians considered God’s name so holy they felt it was wrong to treat the name as trash and toss it like garbage. Thus, in ancient time, they stopped mentioning or writing God’s name and substituted “Lord” for y-h-v-h. This sensitivity was later extended. Jews began to bury papers containing God’s name, as people bury relatives, with respect. Soon, in Cairo, Egypt, from about the eleventh century, Jews placed many of their unwanted documents in a storeroom in the Cairo synagogue, as well as other synagogues, and they buried some as well, even papers without God’s name, for writing too, they felt, has a holiness.

This well-written, easy to read, well-researched, and informative book tells about the remarkable materials found in the Cairo Geniza and about the lives of the people who made the finds and the difficulties they encountered. I suggest that readers of this review read my review of Rabbi Mark Glickman’s Sacred Treasure of Cairo Genizah (the latter word can be spelt with and without a final h). That review discusses some of the significance of the finds, and places them in perspective with the Dead Sea Scroll finds and those of the Nag Hammadi Library. I will not repeat this information here.

Among many other discoveries in Cairo were the following. Scholars knew that the famous book by Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus, composed in the second century BCE and quoted frequently in the Talmud, was composed in Hebrew, but the original Hebrew was lost. It was found in the Geniza. Many of the poems of the seventh century poet Yannai were unearthed; we only had a fragment of his writings until then. He was probably the first poet who composed poems for synagogue services. Writings by the famed philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) including compositions in his own handwriting with corrections he made were in the Geniza. There were interesting palimpsest, writings written over scratched out prior writing, a process used to save parchment. Modern science is able to restore the underlying older, frequently more valuable text. Manuscripts penned by members of the Jewish sect Karaites, who rejected rabbinical innovations, were in the cache, including marriage contracts that disclose interesting stories of how fortunes were made and lost and wives retaken after a divorce. There were business contracts, trade documents between Jews and India, letters that tell tales of family life, information about common people and community leaders, records and deeds, a host of scholarly writings, letters finally revealing what happened to the famous Jewish poet Yehudah Halevi during the final years of his life, and much more. There is even a document by Maimonides containing the ingredients of a medieval Viagra.

In summary, like amnesiacs who see themselves differently after the attic finds, civilization now has a new perspective of its past after the Geniza discoveries. And, what is more, scholars are still today continuing to decipher and disclose the secrets that were buried in the Geniza. ( )