By Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Amir Ashur
on Wed 2 Feb 2022
Amir, you made an exciting discovery last week. Can you tell us about it?
Yes! I'm describing some documents at the moment for the Princeton Geniza Project, and while going through some of the manuscripts of the Jewish Theological Seminary I encountered two fragments containing a long piyyut.
There are tens of thousands of these piyyutim – liturgical poems – in the Genizah, and they’re not your area of research. Why did this one catch your eye?
It was written by a hand very familiar to me. It was the handwriting of Halfon b. Nathaniel... Read More
Has tags: al-Andalus, Genizah Fragments, Jewish Theological Seminary, Judah ha-Levi, poetry, Q&A
By Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Malachi Beit-Arié
on Wed 26 Jan 2022
Malachi, your book Hebrew Codicology is a classic of the field, and you've recently completed the most up to date version yet. Will the latest Hebrew and English versions be the final versions of the book?
Yes. The Hebrew and English versions, published by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, are now final. They are distributed by Hamburg University with the Open Access DOIs: https://doi.org/10.25592/uhhfdm.8848 (Hebrew) and... Read More
Has tags: codex, Genizah Fragments, Hebrew, palaeography, Q&A
By Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Sacha Stern
on Wed 19 Jan 2022
Sacha, what are you working on at the moment?
I’ve been looking at a fragment in T-S NS 98 – it's full of calendar texts. This one is T-S NS 98.51. It’s extremely damaged and fragmentary. We’ll probably never find the rest of it, and the missing bits are almost certainly lost.
It’s a parchment fragment and looks quite old. How old is it?
I’m not an expert, but palaeographically speaking it looks to be from around the year 1000.
What is... Read More
Has tags: calendar, Christian, Genizah Fragments, Q&A
By Shulamit Elizur
on Tue 18 Jan 2022
How was writing in Hebrew practised in the Middle Ages? A glance at the discoveries from the Cairo Genizah supplies the answer and also reveals that little has changed over the years.
How do children practise writing the alphabet? By writing each new letter, one at a time, over and over again, of course. This is common practice today and it was common practice back in the Middle Ages. There are several pages preserved in the Cairo Genizah that contain these kinds of children’s writing exercises, from about a thousand years ago.
... Read More
Has tags: education, Genizah Fragments
By Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Thu 13 Jan 2022
Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issue 27 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in April 1994, by Uwe Glessmer of the University of Hamburg:
With Heinz Fahr, I have published an edition of T-S B13.12, entitled Jordandurchzug und Beschneidung als Zurechtweisung in einem Targum zu Josua 5, which appears as No. 3 in the Orientalia Biblica et Christiana series published by J. J. Augustin (Glückstadt, 1991).
The manuscript T-S B13.... Read More
Has tags: Bible, circumcision, Genizah Fragments, Targum
By Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Wed 12 Jan 2022
125 years ago today, Solomon Schechter sat down to write this letter to his colleague and friend Francis Jenkinson, the University Librarian. Three weeks ago he had arrived in Egypt, made the acquaintance of Chief Rabbi Ben Shim'on, and started to delve into the contents of the Ben Ezra Synagogue's genizah. Schechter writes to Jenkinson describing his work in the dusty, insect-infested chamber and his dealings with the local men who were assisting him ('I have constantly to bakeshish them'). Interestingly, he first mentions working on 'the Genizas' (plural), before then describing 'the... Read More
Has tags: Francis Jenkinson, Genizah Fragments, Solomon Schechter
By Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Fri 7 Jan 2022
Points of Contact: The Shared Intellectual History of Vocalisation in Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew ● By Nick Posegay ● Open Book Publishers, 2021
This book is the newest entry in the Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures series, and it is authored by the Genizah Research Unit's very own Nick Posegay. It investigates the shared history of ideas behind the vocalisation systems of three medieval Semitic languages, examining the work of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars as they developed ways to... Read More
Has tags: Arabic, Bible, Book, Genizah Fragments, grammar, masora, Qurʾan, Syriac, vocalisation
By Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Rebecca Jefferson
on Wed 22 Dec 2021
Rebecca, you have a new book coming out in February 2022. What’s it about, and how did you come to be interested in it?
The book, The Cairo Genizah and the Age of Discovery in Egypt: the History and Provenance of a Jewish Archive (I. B. Tauris, 2022), solely focuses on what we now call the ‘discovery of the Cairo Genizah’. It attempts to tell the provenance stories of the many other Genizah collections around the world whose stories have not been told as fully as that of Cambridge’s Taylor-Schechter collection. My interest in it began when I started working... Read More
Has tags: Adolf Neubauer, Bodleian, Count d'Hulst, David Kaufmann, Elkan Nathan Adler, Genizah Fragments, Greville Chester, Mordechai Adelmann, Moses Shapira, Mosseri, Q&A, Rabbi Ben-Shim'on, Samuel Raffalovich, Solomon Schechter, Solomon Wertheimer, Yemen
