By Melonie Schmierer-Lee and José Martínez Delgado
on Wed 12 Oct 2022
Pepe, what are you working on at the moment?
I’m working on a new book about daily life in al-Andalus, and I’ve been looking for new materials to include in it. I decided to have a look at a list I made when I visited 6 years ago of lexicographical Genizah fragments, to see if any of them might be suitable for the book, and saw in my list one I had described as ‘Andalusi script’. I had a look at it and something about it seemed familiar. At the last line, I realised what I was looking at. I had seen this handwriting before. I quickly sent a message to my friend Amir... Read More
Has tags: al-Andalus, Genizah Fragments, glossary, language, Moses Maimonides, Q&A, Romance, vocabulary
By Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Phil Lieberman
on Wed 24 Nov 2021
Phil, what are you working on at the moment?
For the past decade I’ve been working with my Vanderbilt colleague Lenn Goodman – a philosopher and accomplished Judaeo-Arabist – on a new translation of the Guide for the Perplexed for Stanford University Press. We come from very different disciplinary approaches – he’s a philosopher and I’m a social historian – so we look at Maimonides in different ways. We’ve actually written different introductions to the book (I’m writing a historian... Read More
Has tags: Genizah Fragments, Moses Maimonides, Q&A
By Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Thu 2 Sep 2021
Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issue 4 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in October 1982:
The Genizah has proved to be a mine of biographical information about the scholars of mediaeval Egypt, especially of the Maimonides family who were leaders of Egyptian Jewry for over 200 years. Indeed, communal and literary documents have come to light which testify to the sustained intellectual activity of Oriental Jewry’s most illustrious family.
Dr Paul Fenton,... Read More
Has tags: Abraham Maimonides, Genizah Fragments, Moses Maimonides, mystical, Sufism
By Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Zina Cohen
on Wed 18 Aug 2021
Zina, you have a new book coming out soon about inks in Genizah manuscripts. How did your interest in the fragments come about?
I have a Masters in archaeology, but have always been interested in science. I came to be interested in archaeometry – science applied to archaeology. During my Masters degree I worked on an Islamic complex in Morocco dating to the 14th century, analysing the mortar to try to understand if there were strategies involved in preparing the mortar. My main subject of interest, though, was manuscripts and pigments, and I planned to continue my... Read More
Has tags: Genizah Fragments, ink, ketubba, Moses Maimonides, paper, Q&A, scribe
By Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Thu 5 Aug 2021
Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issue 16 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in October 1988, by Joel Kraemer:
The importance of the Cambridge Genizah for the study of Maimonides manuscripts is widely acclaimed. Not long ago, Dr David Goldstein (of blessed memory) delivered a lecture at Cambridge on these manuscripts (see Genizah Fragments 11, April, 1986).
The survival of a... Read More
Has tags: Genizah Fragments, ink, Moses Maimonides, responsa
By Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Moshe Yagur
on Wed 21 Jul 2021
Hi Moshe, what are you working on at the moment?
In my new project I’m working on dwelling patterns of Jews, Christians and Muslims in medieval Egypt (and a bit elsewhere). We know they lived side by side, but to what extent? How did it effect notions of communal identity, religious practices, inter-religious contacts and sympathies, and so on?
Which kinds of Genizah manuscript are you utilising for this?
There are several kinds of documents to look at:
1. Deeds of sale or rent, written either in Jewish or Muslim court,... Read More
Has tags: Fustat, Genizah Fragments, Goitein, legal, Moses Maimonides, Muslim-Jewish relations, property
By Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Ben Outhwaite
on Wed 30 Jun 2021
So, Ben what are you working on today?
Well, life’s pretty varied at the moment. The GRU has a number of projects on the go, and so I’m spending quite a lot of time happily immersed in manuscripts (or, at least, their digital surrogates, since I am still working from home) in a way that I haven’t had the opportunity to for about the last 15 years, since I was a full-time researcher myself. At any one time, I may be describing documentary fragments from the T-S New Series, checking descriptions produced by other GRU researchers, enriching the TEI of descriptions with... Read More
Has tags: Genizah Fragments, liturgy, Moses Maimonides, Q&A, Saadiah Gaon, Solomon of Sijilmassa
By Ben Outhwaite
on Fri 7 May 2021
The Jacques (or Jack) Mosseri Collection arrived in Cambridge in 2006. After Schechter brought his famed hoard to Cambridge, Mosseri, a prominent member of Egypt’s Jewish community with a keen interest in its history, and knowing that other manuscripts had been buried, set about retrieving these from various places. Following his death, and with his family leaving Egypt, scholars lost track of the collection, but it re-emerged in the... Read More
Has tags: bulla, Dunash b. Labrat, Genizah Fragments, Gershom, Isaac Luria, Moses Maimonides, Mosseri, podcast, Stefan Reif
