#cairo genizah

[artifacts-and-arthropods]

Child's Writing Exercises and Doodles, from Egypt, c. 1000-1200 CE: this was made by a child who was practicing Hebrew, creating doodles and scribbles on the page as they worked

This writing fragment is nearly 1,000 years old, and it was made by a child who lived in Egypt during the Middle Ages. Several letters of the Hebrew alphabet are written on the page, probably as part of a writing exercise, but the child apparently got a little bored/distracted, as they also left a drawing of a camel (or possibly a person), a doodle that resembles a menorah, and an assortment of other scribbles on the page.

This is the work of a Jewish child from Fustat (Old Cairo), and it was preserved in the collection known as the Cairo Genizah Manuscripts. As the University of Cambridge Library explains:

For a thousand years, the Jewish community of Fustat placed their worn-out books and other writings in a storeroom (genizah) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue ... According to rabbinic law, once a holy book can no longer be used (because it is too old, or because its text is no longer relevant) it cannot be destroyed or casually discarded: texts containing the name of God should be buried or, if burial is not possible, placed in a genizah.

At least from the early 11th century, the Jews of Fustat ... reverently placed their old texts in the Genizah. Remarkably, however, they placed not only the expected religious works, such as Bibles, prayer books and compendia of Jewish law, but also what we would regard as secular works and everyday documents: shopping lists, marriage contracts, divorce deeds, pages from Arabic fables, works of Sufi and Shi'ite philosophy, medical books, magical amulets, business letters and accounts, and hundreds of letters: examples of practically every kind of written text produced by the Jewish communities of the Near East can now be found in the Genizah Collection, and it presents an unparalleled insight into the medieval Jewish world.

Sources & More Info:

Cambridge Digital Library: Writing Exercises with Child's Drawings

Cambridge Digital Library: More About the Cairo Genizah Manuscripts

[medievalistsnet]

New Medieval Books: Interconnected Traditions: Semitic Languages, Literatures, Cultures—A Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan

Volume 2: The Medieval World, Judaeo-Arabic, and Neo-Aramaic

[gliklofhameln]

From the Cairo Genizah: the earliest musical notation of a Jewish song in the hand of Ovadiah the Proselyte, a 12th century convert and former Norman monk, previously named Johannes of Oppido. You can hear different versions sung here and here.

The website https://johannes-obadiah.org/index.html is devoted to the life and works of Obadiah, with all manuscripts related to him digitalised and available for perusal.

[pollyj]

Oral Torah (Mishnah)

Cairo, Egypt 1041 CE

These Mishnah leaves come from the Cairo Genizah, the famed storeroom discovered in a synagogue's attic containing 400,000 carefully preserved document fragments dating from the 9th to 19th centuries.

[ancientstuff]

Medieval Hebrew document could reveal why Dead Sea Scrolls were found in Qumran

Damascus Covenant could hold the answers.

Fascinating.

[boneandpapyrus]

Medieval Jewish papers tell vivid stories in Cambridge exhibition

11th-century documents from Genizah store in Old Cairo synagogue cover whole range of human life, co-curator says

[April 2017] From the faded brown ink on the yellowed paper of a document going on display this week in Cambridge, a startling picture emerges of a young man who lived and loved in 11th-century Cairo.

Toviyya wanted to marry Faiza, but he evidently had quite a reputation. The document, translated into English and on show for the first time in an exhibition at Cambridge University Library, records at great length that Toviyya swore in front of witnesses that his life would henceforth be blamelessly dull.

He promised to avoid mixing with bad company for the purpose of “eating, drinking or anything else”, to not spend one night away from Faiza unless she wanted him to, and not to buy a slave girl unless Faiza gave her permission.

The document is one of 200,000 drawn from the Genizah, the store room at the 11th-century Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo. The Cambridge collection is the largest in the world of the medieval Jewish manuscripts.

For 800 years, the community stored texts and religious volumes at the Genizah, as well as wills, contracts, letters, a magical charm against scorpions and the doodles of a small child struggling to learn Hebrew script.

“The first scholars to study the papers were only interested in the biblical material, but what is extraordinary about the collection, and was almost ignored for many decades, is that it covers the whole range of human life,” said co-curator Benjamin Outhwaite, part of a team that has translated many of the papers into English for the exhibition. “We’ve gone for the documents that draw out these human stories.”

The characters featured within the tattered pages include an errant son-in-law, a wife threatening a hunger strike (but only by day) in protest against her husband’s behaviour, a Jewish woman in love with a Christian doctor, and a rich woman excommunicated for adultery.

Read the rest

[medievalistsnet]

New Medieval Books: The Illustrated Cairo Genizah - Medievalists.net

The Cairo Genizah stands as one of the most significant collections of medieval documents, offering unparalleled insights into the past. Thi

[mental-mona]

Mysterious trilingual Cairo Geniza vocab list found to be penned by Maimonides

Housed at Cambridge University's Genizah Research Unit, crib sheet with words in Hebrew, Arabic and a Romance dialect gives a glimpse into r