Solomon Schechter generously donated his Cairo Genizah manuscript collection to Cambridge University Library in 1898, where it was named for him and his friend (and funder), Charles Taylor, as the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection. The terms of the donation required the University to make provisions for preserving the manuscripts and drawing up a catalogue or list within ten years. This proved to be a rather ambitious commitment. Schechter had immediately set to sorting the fragments with a team of assistants, but after a few short years of productive work, he left Cambridge for America, heeding a spiritual call to revive Conservative Judaism in the United States. Schechter’s successor, Ernest Worman, continued in a similarly productive vein, only to pass away after a sudden illness in 1909. The unclassified fragments—the bulk of the collection—survived the threats of war and librarians inclined towards decluttering, but festered away in crates until the 1950s, when the historian Shelomo Dov Goitein arrived in Cambridge seeking manuscripts relating to the economy of Islamic lands in the Middle Ages. Finding an unloved trove of manuscripts that Schechter left behind, Goitein pushed the University Library to invest in the collection. A curator, Henry Knopf, was reassigned from working on Hebrew printed material to have special responsibility for the Genizah fragments, and work slowly restarted. In 1973, Stefan Reif took over from Knopf as Assistant Under-Librarian “responsible for the cataloguing and arrangement” of the collection. In February of the following year, Reif succeeded in establishing a Genizah Research Unit (GRU), and a comprehensive programme to improve access to the manuscripts and facilitate research began.
The Genizah Research Unit is now 50 years old. To commemorate this milestone, this volume offers contributions from three generations of researchers who have worked in the Unit over the years. It is also a moment to remember those who once served amidst Schechter’s “battlefield of books” but who are no longer with us. The scope of the articles—from Maimonides to medical science, Talmud to overland trekking, and Bibles to buried treasure—celebrate the scope of research on the collection and the achievements of the Unit’s alumni.
The first article is co-written by a former GRU researcher, Amir Ashur (University of Haifa), and our good colleague from across the pond, Alan Elbaum (Princeton Geniza Project). They share the fruits of Ashur’s efforts to search Cambridge Genizah collections for manuscripts written by Moses Maimonides and his circle during his twelfth-century tenure as Head of the Jews in Egypt. Around 60 fragments in the hand of the Rambam have been discovered in the Genizah collections, including letters, responsa, and drafts of his works on philosophy, medicine, and Jewish law. It is no exaggeration to say that the Maimonides’ autographs draw some of Cambridge University Library’s biggest crowds, and we are honoured to be the custodians of manuscripts that are deeply moving to so many. During our 2017 exhibition, Discarded History: The Genizah of Medieval Cairo, the display case for T-S 12.192—a signed Maimonides letter—needed much more frequent cleaning for the fingers and occasional lips pressed to the glass! Some autograph discoveries even become international news. In 2022, visiting researcher José Martínez Delgado and Amir Ashur identified pages of a Judaeo-Romance glossary as Maimonides’ handwriting, and the news about Maimonides studying or collecting Romance vocabulary made headlines in Spain, Israel, and across South America. This discovery led to the 2023–2024 exhibition La Edad de Oro de los Judíos de Alandalús—The Golden Age of the Jews of al-Andalus—at the Centro Sefarad Israel in Madrid.
The fragments which Ashur and Elbaum publish in this volume deal with Maimonides’ personal involvement in distributing communal charitable funds to those in need. They are from three different Genizah collections (Taylor-Schechter, Mosseri, and Jewish Theological Seminary) and the authors are from two different continents. Although researchers have always collaborated and worked on manuscripts at a distance, the digitisation of Genizah manuscripts in collections around the world—through the generosity of Dov Friedberg and the Friedberg Genizah Project—has transformed Genizah research. Digitisation of the entire T-S collection took place between 2009 and 2012.
Bible fragments attracted the first generations of Genizah scholars. When the Genizah Research Unit was established, the first cataloguing endeavours focused on the biblical fragments, eventually producing a four-volume set of catalogues edited by Malcolm Davis and Ben Outhwaite. Despite (or rather, because of!) these undertakings, the Genizah Bible manuscripts are a goldmine for researchers: approximately 25,000 fragments, comprising leaves of grand Masoretic Bibles and ancient Torah scrolls, as well as pages copied by laypeople for personal use. Tracing the work of Samuel ben Jacob, GRU research associate Kim Phillips pieces together small biblical fragments copied by the scribe of the Leningrad Codex (‘the scribe who wrote the Bible’). He reconstructs not only pages of prestigious biblical codices but also the working practices of this consequential scribe. Phillips’ painstaking analysis of the Masoretic notes in the fragments sees him wrestle with one of the most fundamental and challenging laws of Genizah research: the likelihood of a lacuna in a particular place on a page is directly proportional to the significance of what was once written there.
Since 2007, GRU researchers have published short, online articles on fragments of interest, a series known as the ‘Fragment of the Month’. This series has grown into a key peer-reviewed source for disseminating new discoveries in Genizah Studies, soliciting contributions from Genizah scholars around the world. To accompany Kim Phillips’ article about Samuel ben Jacob, Ronny Vollandt, former GRU research assistant and now Professor of Judaic Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, has allowed us to print his ‘Fragment of the Month’ from November 2009 on fragments of Saadya Gaon’s Tafsīr copied by Samuel ben Jacob. Vollandt catalogued many such Judaeo-Arabic Bible translations during his time in Cambridge.
Siam Bhayro (University of Exeter), former GRU researcher and founding series editor of Brill’s Cambridge Genizah Studies Series (the very series that this volume appears in), offers editions of two fragments from a copy of an early rabbinic work known as the Scroll of Antiochus. The fragments are from different Genizah collections: the Taylor-Schechter collection and the Mosseri collection. Jacques Mosseri collected around 7000 fragments in Cairo in the early twentieth century, and since 2006 his collection has been in Cambridge on long-term loan (the 20-year loan period will end in January 2026). Bhayro’s article highlights the close relationship between these two collections, evidently gathered from the same source, as well as the fascinating preservation of works of ancient Judaism in the Genizah.
Paul Fenton (Université Paris-Sorbonne), a research associate from the early years of the GRU, offers the text and translation of a sole fragment of philosophical commentary on Talmudic aggadot, found many years ago but still awaiting the discovery of other pages that might confirm its authorship. Its exegesis being pietistic, he discusses the arguments for and against attributing the text to Abraham Maimonides. During his years at the Unit, Fenton assisted with the cataloguing of fragments and worked on the long-running Genizah Bibliography Project.
From the GRU’s earliest days, it was recognized that a bibliography of all publications on Genizah manuscripts would be extremely useful to researchers. This project migrated from a card index to printed catalogues.1 Over the years, many researchers have contributed to the compilation of entries. After Fenton, Simon Hopkins, Geoffrey Khan, Eleazer Gutwirth, Amitai Spitzer, and Avihai Shivtiel all worked on the project. Deborah Patterson and then Shulamit Reif helped to migrate the project from index cards to computer. The entries now form a searchable online resource, currently maintained by Julia Krivoruchko.2 In addition to her work on the Genizah Bibliography Project, Julia is the GRU’s Greek specialist. For this volume, she has allowed us to reproduce one of the longest ‘Fragment of the Month’ articles ever written—her April 2021 analysis of a medieval Talmud with Greek glosses found in the Taylor-Schechter collection.
The Hebrew word ‘Genizah’ is borrowed from a Persian term ‘ganza’ meaning ‘treasury’—a repository for valuables. There are, of course, many literary treasures among the Genizah manuscripts, but Avihai Shivtiel’s contribution offers more than just historical value. Preserved on the back of a Hebrew poem are directions to the location of a buried treasure (a hoard of Roman coins!) in a village of the Fayyum district. Shivtiel worked for many years in the Genizah Research Unit, and edited, along with our late colleague Friedrich Niessen, the catalogue Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections: Taylor-Schechter New Series (2006).
During her time as a GRU researcher, Leigh Chipman edited, with Efraim Lev, Medical Prescriptions in the Cambridge Genizah Collections: Practical Medicine and Pharmacology in Medieval Egypt (Leiden, 2012). In the present volume, she presents two Judaeo-Arabic fragments of a pharmacopoeia by an East Syriac Christian Baghdadi physician, Ibn al-Tilmīḏ. It contains recipes for a range of ailments, including coughing and vomiting in children (the treatment is a pill to be placed in the mouth at bedtime, which sounds like a recipe for choking instead!). The work was not previously known to be part of the medical ‘library’ of Jewish physicians in Cairo, but Chipman’s proof of Jewish readership of this text is further evidence for the multi-confessional character of medical knowledge.
Geoffrey Khan, former GRU researcher and current Regius Professor of Hebrew in Cambridge, describes two Arabic-language documents from the Second Firkovitch collection of the National Library of Russia. The documents are contemporaneous with Genizah documents that Khan previously published in his catalogue, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections (1993), and they allow the Karaite and Rabbanite Jewish ownership of properties in Cairo to be traced over multiple generations. These documents have not been seen outside of Russia since Abraham Firkovitch collected them in the 1860s, but Khan has kindly allowed us to reproduce photographs that he acquired during his research trip to St. Petersburg in 1993.
Arabic-script material in the Genizah has attracted increasing attention in the last decade. Alongside legal deeds and administrative documents, there are numerous Arabic narratives and folk tales. Former GRU researcher Magdalen Connolly (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich) presents an example of the many Arabic-script texts in the Cairo Genizah collections that have yet to be properly identified and examined. It is an early Arabic version of ‘The Story of the Skull,’ a popular narrative in the pre-modern Islamic world, in which Jesus converses with a talking skull on themes of life and death.
Arabic poetry has been another fruitful area of research. Mohamed Ahmed, former GRU researcher, now leads a project at Trinity College Dublin called ‘Arabic Poetry in the Cairo Genizah’, which sent two exhibitions (Geniza in the Gulf and Hidden Literature) of Arabic Genizah fragments to Abu Dhabi and Dubai in 2023. For this volume, Ahmed has permitted us to reproduce his ‘Fragment of the Month’ from February 2021, where he outlined his discovery of six Hebrew-script folios from the most famous book of Arabic fables, Kalila wa-Dimna.
Thanks to yet another former GRU researcher, Nadia Vidro (University College London), Saadya Gaon now has one fewer polemic to his name. In her contribution to this volume, Vidro shows that what were previously thought to be two separate polemics against the Karaite scholar Ibn Sāqawayh are in fact only one. While two different titles had been in circulation, she demonstrates that one was a descriptive moniker to ‘tone down’ the Saadyanic belligerence of the polemic’s actual title. During her time in the Genizah Research Unit, Vidro published two critical editions of Karaite grammatical works in the Cambridge Genizah Studies Series and developed a digital timeline tool to use dated calendrical fragments as a means of palaeographical analysis.
In contact with a highly literate Islamic society that grappled with questions of the reliability of the transmission of the biblical text, Karaites engaged with the issue and developed new techniques for understanding the historical narratives in the Bible. Meira Polliack, former GRU researcher and now Professor of Bible at Tel Aviv University, explores the Karaite conception of ‘mental time’. She argues that a shift in the idea of time away from traditional rabbinic-midrashic readings of the Bible influenced the development of Karaite understanding of Scripture. In her time at the GRU, Polliack edited, with Colin Baker, the catalogue Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections: Arabic Old Series (T-S Ar.1a–54) (Cambridge, 2001).
It is not often these days that new Genizah fragments arrive at Cambridge University Library, but that is exactly what happened in 2013 when the UL purchased, jointly with the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, the manuscripts collected by Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson in the 1890s. The first-ever fundraising collaboration between the former (?) rivals raised £ 1.2 million from a successful public appeal. The manuscripts then made a short, half-mile journey along Queen’s Road from Westminster College (a member of the Cambridge Theological Federation) to the University Library, where they were conserved and digitised. In 2018, Oxford’s share of the collection was transferred to the Bodleian, housed in new, purpose-built bindings constructed by CUL’s conservation department. Public interest in the colourful lives of the intrepid sister-scholars was stimulated by Janet Soskice’s 2009 biography, The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels. To commemorate and celebrate the twins and their role in bringing the Cairo Genizah to the attention of Western scholars, the former Westminster Collection was renamed the ‘Lewis-Gibson Collection’. Agnes Lewis published an account of their travels and discoveries in the late nineteenth century, but in her contribution to this volume, Catherine Ansorge (emeritus Head of the Near Eastern Collection at CUL) presents two unpublished travelogues by the more reticent sister, Margaret. Her narratives were preserved in the sisters’ archive at Westminster College, along with photographic records of their travels in Palestine and the Sinai Peninsula.
Nick Posegay—GRU researcher and Genizah Instagram influencer—offers an account of another figure from the early years of Genizah research, Ernest James Worman. Worman worked as Schechter’s assistant and was employed in his stead to complete the cataloguing of the collection after Schechter left Cambridge for New York. Worman threw himself into his responsibilities as curator, teaching himself Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew, and began handlists of the documentary materials in the collection. Decades before Goitein would arrive in Cambridge in search of data for his research on the medieval economy, Worman was already building a collection of merchant traders’ letters. His carefully written handlists and notes, some of which became mixed up in Genizah papers and have since been accidently accessioned into the collection, began a task that is still ongoing today: to create a catalogue record for every Genizah fragment. Had Worman lived longer—he died of tuberculosis in 1909—the work may well have been finished in the early twentieth century and the story of the Genizah Research Unit would look quite different today.
Rebecca Jefferson, former GRU researcher and current Curator of the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica at the University of Florida, continues the theme of the early history of Genizah research. Solomon Schechter’s skill in recognising and conveying his astonishing finds have somewhat overshadowed his contemporaries and predecessors, but as Rebecca has shown in her 2022 book, The Cairo Genizah and the Age of Discovery in Egypt: The History and Provenance of a Jewish Archive, the race to secure the fragments was populated with a murky cast of librarians, dealers, collectors, and agents. The early scholarship on Genizah manuscripts is equally complex. Until the Cambridge manuscripts were all systematically assigned classification numbers—an achievement of Stefan Reif’s Genizah Research Unit—fragments were published with awkward descriptors (“Cambridge University Library, drawer 34”!) that must first be unraveled to identify the fragment in question. Jefferson’s contribution to this volume traces the manuscript provenance for a group of Haggadah fragments in an early publication by Israel Abrahams, demonstrating the extraordinary detective work that must be done to locate fragments without a complete classmark to hand.
In the final contribution to this volume, Stefan Reif, the founder of the Genizah Research Unit, reflects on his memories and experiences working with the grandfather of modern Genizah studies, Shelomo Dov Goitein. The GRU would not exist were it not for the efforts of both men. Goitein revived Cambridge’s interest in a forgotten collection that was, for the most part, languishing in crates marked ‘Rubbish’. His work led to a programme of conservation and classification, and to the hiring of curators to care for the collection. Reif, appointed in 1973 at the tender age of 29, sought advice from Goitein on the first challenges to be addressed (conserving the remaining 32 crates’ worth of manuscripts!). When the Genizah Research Unit was founded the following year, Goitein and his protégés began to mine the newly-available manuscripts for their research, alongside Reif’s team of GRU researchers (for almost a quarter of a century these included his beloved late wife, Shulie Reif). Reif recollects the advice and constructive guidance offered by Goitein, as well as their occasional clashes, in a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the Unit’s early years.
Ben Outhwaite took the helm as the GRU’s second director upon Reif’s retirement in 2006. In October 2024, Outhwaite was appointed Professor of Genizah Studies at the University of Cambridge. After a quarter century of Genizah scholarship, leadership, and teaching, it is an honour well deserved. During his tenure, work on the fragments has been transformed by the digitisation of all Cambridge Genizah manuscripts, an effort sponsored by Dov Friedberg. Now, much of the work on the manuscripts takes place online rather than by consulting large, unwieldy folders, and cataloguing metadata is mounted digitally rather than in printed catalogues that are out of date by the time they are published.3 New discoveries are now announced in the long-running ‘Fragment of the Month’ series and on the GRU’s ‘Genizah Fragments’ blog, an evolution of the Genizah Fragments printed newsletter started by Reif in 1981.4 The GRU can—for the moment, anyway—also be found on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads (@CambridgeGRU).
With the GRU’s more public-facing role, and greater public awareness of the collection and its significance, each year brings a new crop of exhibitions around the world requesting to borrow Genizah manuscripts. Genizah fragments find themselves flying back and forth across seas and continents, carefully packed by Cambridge University Library’s devoted conservation team. 2011 saw the publication of two books about the Cairo Genizah aimed at a public audience: Sacred Treasure. The Cairo Genizah: The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten Jewish History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic, by Rabbi Mark Glickman, and Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole (in 2007 Cole, a MacArthur-awarded poet, was the GRU’s first poet-in-residence). In 2013, BBC Radio 3 broadcast a series of five episodes about the Genizah in their documentary series The Essay. The episodes, by Esther-Miriam Wagner, Ben Outhwaite, Melonie Schmierer-Lee, Dan Davies, and Gabriele Ferrario, can be found on the Audio and Video page of the GRU’s website.5 This experience of writing for a general public audience proved useful a few years later, and the major public exhibition Discarded History: The Genizah of Medieval Cairo brought over 40,000 visitors to Cambridge University Library in 2017. It kept the Unit staff busy with daily curator tours and events (including a Genizah-inspired stand-up comedy evening). In 2018, the Canadian filmmaker Michelle Paymar released her documentary film, ‘From Cairo to the Cloud’, featuring interviews with dozens of Genizah researchers around the world. In 2019, the Littman Genizah Educational Programme was established to support guided show-and-tell visits to see Genizah fragments in Cambridge (today the Genizah manuscripts attract more visitors than any other single collection at the University Library). In addition to this collection of essays, 2024 will also see the publication of The Illustrated Cairo Genizah—a glossy, full-colour introduction to the collection accompanied by hundreds of manuscript images.6 Since 2001, Sarah Sykes has managed the essential tasks of wrangling the GRU’s researchers, fielding visitor enquiries, keeping records, and generally providing research support for all these projects. She is now the third longest-serving member in the history of the Unit, trailing only its two heads, Stefan Reif (33 years) and Ben Outhwaite (25 years).
As we in the Genizah Research Unit look over the horizon to the next 50 years, we can only imagine a landscape shaped by advancements in text recognition and machine learning technologies that will transform Genizah research for generations to come. However, in this moment in 2024, we only have people to thank. Thank you to those who created the Unit, those who have served it since 1974, and those who have supported our work now for five decades. Thank you to all who have been part of the GRU story.
First in S.C. Reif (ed.), Published Material from the Genizah Collections: A Bibliography 1896–1980 [1988] and then R.J.W. Jefferson and E. Hunter (eds.), Published Material from the Genizah Collections: A Bibliography 1880–1997 [2004].
Cambridge University Digital Library (CUDL):
Fragment of the Month:
Nick Posegay and Melonie Schmierer-Lee, The Illustrated Cairo Genizah (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2024).