One of the biggest problems in discussions about Israel is that most people have never heard of the Cairo Geniza.
And yet it may be one of the most devastating pieces of evidence against many of the myths surrounding the conflict.
The Cairo Geniza was a storage room in a synagogue in Egypt where Jews deposited old documents for nearly a thousand years. When scholars finally examined its contents, they discovered roughly 300,000 manuscript fragments dating from the 9th to the 19th centuries.
Not religious texts - Real life:
In other words, not propaganda.
The actual paperwork of ordinary people living a thousand years ago.
First, it destroys the claim that Jews are foreign colonists with no historical connection to the land.
The Geniza contains countless references to Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, Safed, Ramle, Acre, and other towns throughout the Land of Israel.
Before the twentieth century.
Centuries before any of those things existed.
The documents show Jewish pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem, donations being sent to Jewish communities there, rabbis corresponding with scholars in the land, and families moving between Egypt and the Land of Israel.
The connection never disappeared.
It never had to be "invented."
Second, it shows that Jewish identity remained tied to the land even after centuries of exile.
The Jews of Cairo, Baghdad, Yemen, Morocco, and Spain did not view Jerusalem as some distant historical curiosity.
They viewed it as the center of their civilization.
A place they prayed toward.
A place they supported financially.
A place many hoped to return to.
Long before modern nationalism was invented.
Third, it destroys the fantasy that Jews and Muslims lived in some utopian age of perfect coexistence before Zionism arrived and ruined everything.
The Geniza records periods of cooperation and prosperity.
But it also records jizya taxes, discrimination, legal inequality, extortion, restrictions, persecution, and the vulnerability of Jewish communities living as dhimmis under Islamic rule.
The reality of a subordinate minority.
Forth, the Geniza also challenges another popular myth: that Hebrew was a "dead language" resurrected out of nowhere by Zionists.
The Geniza contains countless Hebrew documents - letters, contracts, legal rulings, religious texts, poetry, and correspondence between communities separated by thousands of miles.
For centuries, Jews used Hebrew as a common civilizational language connecting communities from Morocco to Iraq and from Yemen to Jerusalem.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda did not resurrect a dead language. He transformed an ancient, continuously used literary and religious language into a modern spoken one.
The Cairo Geniza proves that Hebrew never disappeared. It evolved, adapted, and survived long before modern Zionism emerged.
Fifth, it reminds us how sparsely populated and underdeveloped much of the region was before modern times.
The Land of Israel was not some densely populated "Palestinian" nation-state waiting to emerge. It was part of a larger Ottoman and earlier Islamic world, with small communities of Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze, Bedouins, and others living across the region, that was vastly abandoned.
Perhaps most importantly, the Geniza reveals something that infuriates modern anti-Zionists:
The Jews never left history.
The Jewish people did not disappear from the land.
They did not forget Jerusalem.
They did not suddenly arrive from Europe one day and invent a connection.
The connection is documented continuously across centuries by the people who actually lived it.
It proves that the story told by activists - that European Jews arrived in a foreign land with no roots there - is historically indefensible.
The Cairo Geniza is thousands of voices speaking across a millennium.
And together they tell a story that modern ideologues desperately wish did not exist:
The Jewish connection to the Land of Israel was not created by Zionism.
Zionism was created because that connection never died.
