AN ARABIC DOCUMENT REGARDING TURKS FROM THE COLLECTION OF CAIRO GENIZA (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: The History of Cambridge University's Genizah Collection (review)
Jewish Quarterly Review, 2003
One of the most spectacular yet quiet revolutions in the modern study of the history of the Mediterranean world has resulted from the recovery just over a hundred years ago of the contents of an attic storehold in the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Old Cairo. The Cairo "genizah" (the technical, religious term applied to a storage area for consigning, or "hiding away" the worn remains of texts considered narrowly or generally sacred, or even heretical, but in either case unfit for ritual use), has yielded an unprecedented cache of more than 200,000 fragmentary documents, most of which date from the 9th through the 15th centuries CE. The story of a major part of this treasure trove, its origins, rediscovery and relocation from Cairo to Cambridge University, and the significance of its contents is the subject of this much needed survey by Stefan C. Reif.
Jewish Quarterly Review, 2018
The discovery and relocation of genizah material is a multi-layered and complex story. This article re-examines, to the extent possible given the current available evidence, the discovery and distribution of Cairo genizah manuscripts in the late nineteenth century by taking a closer look at known historical accounts in conjunction with some lesser-known contemporary reports. Much provenance and provenience history was lost or destroyed during the course of multiple relocations and reorganizations of these materials; thus, this article emphasizes the need to pay greater attention to the multifaceted history of the Cairo manuscripts, and the need to be more circumspect when using an "across-the-board" term like "the Cairo Genizah." Such a label can prevent us from truly appreciating the breadth of Jewish material culture in Cairo in all its varied manifestations over time. More detailed provenance history for the genizah manuscripts will increase our knowledge about how culture is transmitted and how attitudes towards the preservation of Jewish cultural heritage have evolved.
2003
One of the most spectacular yet quiet revolutions in the modern study of the history of the Mediterranean world has resulted from the recovery just over a hundred years ago of the contents of an attic storehold in the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Old Cairo. The Cairo genizah (the technical, religious term applied to a storage area for consigning, or hiding away the worn remains of texts considered narrowly or generally sacred, or even heretical, but in either case unfit for ritual use), has yielded an unprecedented cache of more than 200,000 fragmentary documents, most of which date from the 9th through the 15th centuries CE. The story of a major part of this treasure trove, its origins, rediscovery and relocation from Cairo to Cambridge University, and the significance of its contents is the subject of this much needed survey by Stefan C. Reif
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2022
The Cairo Genizah is well known as a repository for hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Foreign "collectors" acquired most of these manuscripts for European libraries in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the majority arriving at the Cambridge University Library in 1897 under the auspices of Solomon Schechter. Less well known is the fact that hundreds of Genizah fragments were produced in the late nineteenth century, even as European collectors were scouring Cairo for ancient texts. This later corpus includes witnesses to the social and economic history of late Ottoman Cairo and provides copious evidence for the material history of Egyptian Jewish literary activity at that time. Despite this, it remains understudied for both Ottoman and Jewish history. Late Genizah material also raises questions about the integrity of "Cairo Genizah" manuscript collections around the world, as some fragments postdate Schechter's Genizah "discovery," and others were never in Egypt at all.
Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time, 2023
The Cairo Genizah is famous as a source of manuscripts for the study of the medieval Mediterranean world, especially Jewish communities during the High Middle Ages. However, among the hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern manuscript fragments in Genizah collections are more than 12,000 moveable-type printed items, most of which come from Europe. They are the remnants of a significant trade in Hebrew-script books that crossed the Mediterranean in the centuries following Gutenberg’s printing press. This corpus is severely understudied, with few previous surveys of printed Genizah material and no systematic cataloguing data currently available to organise it. This article takes several steps to rectify this situation by examining 57 printers’ colophons in Genizah collections. The resulting analysis allows a preliminary reconstruction of the European and Ottoman networks through which Cairene Jews obtained Hebrew books between 1500 and 1900. This paper also serves as an introduction to Hebrew printing for Cairo Genizah scholars and an introduction to the Cairo Genizah for specialists in Hebrew printing. This article comes from the Gorgias Press book, "Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time" (eds. George Anton Kiraz and Sabine Schmidtke). The full book can be downloaded from this link: https://www.gorgiaspress.com/images/uploaded/Gorgias%20Open%20Repository/978-1-4632-4400-2\_QAOK.pdf