Genizah Fragments

For over 150 years, scholars have debated a fascinating question: To what extent did the Geonim—the heads of the great academies of Sura and Pumbedita—engage with the Jerusalem Talmud? The Geonim saw themselves as the guardians and transmitters of the Babylonian Talmud, which became the dominant text of Jewish law. But was the Yerushalmi, composed in the Land of Israel, also part of their intellectual world?

The term ‘silk road’ likely conjures up images of a well-trodden track, somewhere in central Eurasia, walked by merchants and camels carrying exotic cargo. From the outset, the British Museum’s new major exhibition, Silk Roads, challenges this image with the addition of a single letter – this fabled route was no single road. It also involved much more than silk.

Drew, you visited Cambridge this summer to look at Genizah Psalms fragments – tell us about your project.

I came to examine a dissertation here, and then stayed for an extra week to work on Psalms manuscripts for a critical edition of the Hebrew text of the Psalms for the HBCE (Hebrew Bible: a Critical Edition) series. Brent Strawn and I have funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a three-year project to produce the printed edition, and it will be accompanied by a digital edition too.

Which manuscripts will you include?

Yesterday evening, Nick Posegay and I stood in Heffers Bookshop before a supportive crowd of family, friends, and Genizah enthusiasts to speak about and officially launch 'The Illustrated Cairo Genizah'. The book marks the Genizah Research Unit's 50th anniversary, and celebrates the increasing public interest in the Genizah collection.

We are delighted to announce that Ben Outhwaite, Head of the Genizah Research Unit since 2006, has today become Professor Outhwaite – Professor of Genizah Studies. The appointment was announced in the Cambridge University Reporter of 31 July 2024, and comes into effect today, on the 1st October 2024.

Nick, you’ve recently published an article about a Bible fragment.

Cairo Genizah manuscripts are usually torn or damaged in some way. There are often pieces missing or words that are hard to read where the ink has rubbed or flaked away. But what happened to the missing pieces? Some of the scraps are kept in a crate in our manuscript storage area – blank or believed to be too damaged or fragmentary to be worth conserving, and picked several times over for anything worth assigning a class mark.

My colleague, Estara Arrant posted an image on social media of one of the nine fragments that constitutes T-S K22.16, jokingly remarking that the streaky brown mess resembled a slice of toast.

As one might expect the catalogue entry on these fragments is short. Very short. It consists of one word - ‘illegible’. This of course piqued my interest. What was the ‘toast’ hiding? Also, I love a challenge. Thus, the day after the 2024 Ullendorff lecture, Estara brought the manuscript into the Genizah Unit and we set to work to solve the puzzle.

We are very excited to announce that our new book, The Illustrated Cairo Genizah, is now available for pre-order! See https://linktr.ee/CambridgeGRU to order.

From 15 September 2023 to 31 March 2024, the Centro Sefarad-Israel in Madrid hosted a new bilingual Spanish-English exhibition ‘La Edad de Oro de los Judíos de Alandalús’ (The Golden Age of the Jews of Al-Andalus). In its 6-month run in the atmospheric brick-lined basement of the Centre, the exhibition received 15,000 visitors.