Genizah Fragments

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. Towards the bottom of the crate, the fragments become smaller and smaller, until they are just ink crumbs and dust: 'the dust of centuries' as Schechter once...

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.

2024 marks 50 years since the founding of the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library. To celebrate our 50th birthday, we are publishing a large coffee-table style book to share the highlights of the Cambridge Genizah Collections. 320+ manuscript images are presented over 12 thematic chapters, accompanied by facts, background, and answers to...

As a Sofer STa”M (scribe) one of the tasks I undertake is to write giṭṭin – Jewish divorce documents – sadly, usually one or two a month for the last 25 years.

There are many giṭṭin in the Genizah and, as dated documents,¹  with mention of the husband and wife and the ʿedim (witnesses) they provide a window into the society, bringing real people to the fore. However, whilst looking through these, one fragment caught my attention as it was not about the individuals,...

The Jewish calendar that is in almost universal use today, and in the Middle Ages was associated with the Rabbanites, was instituted at some point in the ninth century (its attribution to a Hillel in the mid-fourth century is a medieval tradition that has long been disproved in modern scholarship).¹  It is a fixed calendar, based on a calculation. Its origins are yet to be fully understood, although some of its elements can be traced back to Talmudic sources. The fragment I present here reveals new ‘missing...

Among the most charming of the dozens of thousands of Bible fragments found in the Cairo Genizah,¹ are the hundred or so in which the biblical text is written in some sort of shorthand, or abbreviated, manner.² At least three different methods of abbreviation are found among these manuscripts. Sometimes, only the opening few words of each verse are written (the ‘Lemma Method’). The great pronouncement of comfort in the opening...

In recent weeks Genizah researchers recorded two radio interviews about the collection and its Bible fragments for the Catholic radio station Radio Maria England. On 24 July 2023, Dr Ben Outhwaite gave an introductory talk on the Cairo Genizah covering its history and importance to our understanding of Jewish medieval life, and on 25 September, Dr Kim Phillips followed up with a talk about early Bible fragments in the Genizah collections, explaining how scribes maintained the accuracy of their holy texts and how that relates to the Bible you read today. 

Radio Maria England aims to...

Most Genizah fragments are damaged – “torn”, “stained”, “rubbed”, “faded” occur frequently in Genizah catalogues – but some fragments are more damaged than others. Ink corrosion can destroy a text almost completely. A page torn vertically is harder to make sense of than one torn horizontally. It is especially frustrating but also tantalising when writing is preserved but earlier conservation work has, through error or a misunderstanding, obscured it. In such cases, working today with the UL’s Conservation...