The Cairo Geniza

Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World

Today’s episode is not the story of an individual but rather of a collected body of sacred and secular writings, or rather bodies of writings. It’s a story of scripture, court records, correspondence, literature, scholarly studies, and more, of human life as it has left its echoes in writing.

This is the story of the Cairo Geniza, an incredible collection of historical documents, from medieval manuscripts to modern divorces. It's about how that collection, brought from the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Egypt, has reached us, and some of the figures involved.

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I'm on Twitter @circus_human, Instagram @humancircuspod, and I have some things on Redbubble.

3 Things:

1. The photography of the Scottish twins, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson
2. A short Cambridge University Library video on the conservation of Geniza fragments and the painstaking work involved
3. "From Cairo to Kolkata, Traces of a Vibrant Jewish Past" by Michael David Lukas

Sources:

• Goitein, S. D. A Mediterranean Society, Volume III: The Family. University of California Press, 1978.
• Hoffman, Adina & Cole, Peter. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. Shocken Books, 2011.
• Jefferson, Rebecca. The Cairo Genizah and the Age of Discovery in Egypt: The History and Provenance of a Jewish Archive. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.
• Jefferson, Rebecca. "Deconstructing ‘the Cairo Genizah’: A Fresh Look at Genizah Manuscript Discoveries in Cairo before 1897." The Jewish Quarterly Review 108, no. 4 (2018): 422–48.
• Lewis, Agnes Smith. Eastern Pilgrims: The Travels of Three Ladies. Hurst and Blackett, 1870.
• Outhwaite, Ben. "A Hoard of Hebrew MSS," Limn issue 6, The Total Archive.
• Reif, Stefan. A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: The History of Cambridge University's Genizah Collection. Routledge, 2013.
• Princeton Geniza Project. https://geniza.princeton.edu/en/

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