The genizah, which means «hiding place» in Hebrew, is a place where books and documents that are no longer useful are kept. Because they contain the name of God, they cannot be destroyed. Since it is also customary to write God’s name at the beginning of a letter or other document, these are also eventually kept in the genizah.

The most famous genizah is the Cairo genizah, due to the size and content of the documents found there. For nearly a thousand years, the Jewish community of Fustat, in the old part of Cairo, deposited used books and other documents in the genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, built in 882. In 1896, Solomon Schechter, professor of Talmud and rabbinic literature at Cambridge University, arrived in Cairo with financial assistance from Charles Taylor and, after several months of arduous work and with the permission of the Egyptian Jewish community, brought nearly 190,000 documents to England. The Taylor-Schechter collection of the Cairo Genizah in Cambridge is the most extensive, although not all of the genizah documents are housed there.

The Cairo Genizah is one of the greatest treasures of Judaism ever found. Its contents provided the world with invaluable information about the Middle East in medieval times. In addition to documents on the Bible and the Talmud, there were also documents on daily life. Schechter even found a letter signed by Maimonides himself. In 1970, Professor Stefan Reif, an expert in medieval Judaism and Semitic languages, was appointed head of the department responsible for the genizah collection. Reif tells us: “Before the genizah, if we wanted to know something about that period, the only way was with documents from the 16th and 17th centuries. Thanks to the genizah, we have documents dating from the 9th to the 13th centuries.”

Professor Reif explains that letters, certificates, wives’ complaints about their husbands, lists of jewelry, and so on were found in the genizah. This material reflects daily Jewish life at the time. There are also documents that have revolutionized fields of study, such as some with Hebrew punctuation forms different from those previously known. Reif tells us that the genizah documents reveal the great dispute that existed between the academies of Babylon and those of Israel, where halacha was more flexible. The Babylonian sages accused those of Israel of not being strict enough in their practice. Reif also found material that now allows us to better understand the Jerusalem Talmud, relegated to the background by the Babylonian Talmud.

Reif says: “We don’t know much about prayer books from before the 9th century. Until then, prayer was prayed orally, and each leader prayed according to his own preferences, without a unified text. The Babylonian sages favored a single text, while those in Israel allowed each leader to pray according to his own preferences. The Genizah documents showed that Babylonian custom prevailed over that of Israel.” There is still much to be discovered among the Cairo Genizah documents. What we do know is that the Cairo Genizah hid different ideas stored in old documents.

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Interview with Dr. Stefan Reif by Tali Farkash and other sources.