Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit.
The Taylor-Schechter Genizah
Collection is a window on the medieval world. Its 190,000 manuscript
fragments, mainly in Hebrew, Judaeo-Arabic and Arabic, are an unparalleled resource for the academic study of Judaism, Jewish history and the wider economic and social history of the Mediterranean and Near East in the Middle Ages. They shed light
on the mundane as well as the religious and
cultural activities of that world, since the Collection preserves a huge number of personal letters, legal deeds and other documents, alongside literary and sacred texts. The manuscripts were recovered from the the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo, in 1897–8 by the Cambridge scholar Dr Solomon Schechter. In the 1970s Cambridge University Library established the Genizah Research Unit to carry out a comprehensive program of conservation, cataloguing and research on the manuscripts, which is leading to all manner of important discoveries about Jewish religious, communal and personal life, Hebrew and Arabic literary traditions, and relations between Muslims, Jews and Christians from as early as the ninth and tenth centuries CE. The Genizah Research Unit relies upon external support for its projects.
* Read about us in the New Yorker: ‘The Treasures in the Wall’.
Genizah Research Unit
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