Genizah

From JudaismWiki

GENIZAH. Term denoting a depository where Hebrew books and ritual objects no longer in use are stored. The most famous Geniza is the one found in the ancient synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo), the synagogue of the Palestinians, also known as the Shamyin, the Elijah, the Moses or the Ezra Synagogue (see R. J. H. Gottheil and W. H. Worrell, Fragments from the Cairo Genizah in the Freer Collection, New York 1927, p. xi). In this Geniza over 200,000 pages and fragments from Hebrew books, letters and documents were found. The Cairo Geniza was visited by Simon van Geldern as early as 1750, but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that any of its treasures were taken out. In 1889 or 1890, when the synagogue building was being renovated, the roof of the Geniza chamber was torn down and all the thousands of fragments it held came to light. Gottheil and Worrell, quoting an ‘anonymous correspondent’, wrote that for weeks the MSS were lying in the open courtyard and dealers could obtain bundles of leaves for nominal sums (op. cit, p. xiii). These leaves were sold to tourists and libraries. Among those who acquired Geniza fragments during the early 1890s were Solomon Wertheimer (who sold many fragments to the Oxford, Bodleian Library, and the Cambridge, University Library), Elkan Adler, A. H. Sayce and G. Chester. The latter, in turn, sold to Oxford (see the letter sent by Sayce to Adler published in a Hebrew translation: א"מ הברמן, הגניזה והגניזות, ירושלים 1971, עמ' 76–78 ). In 1896, Solomon Schechter went to Cairo and returned to England with all the fragments that remained in the chamber, over 140,000 in all, and presented them to the Cambridge library (for a detailed account of Schechter’s mission to Cairo see N. Bentwich, Solomon Schechter – A Biography, Philadelphia 1948, pp. 126–163). It should be noted that not all the so-called ‘Geniza’ fragments come from the Ezra synagogue repository. A large number of fragments were excavated from the Basatin cemetery east of Old Cairo. Most of the fragments in the Mosseri collection were found in a systematic excavation of the cemetery in 1912 and 1913. Some of the overflow from the Geniza in the synagogue was buried in the courtyard near the synagogue. Sayce sold some fragments excavated from the courtyard to the Bodleian Library (see his letter to Adler quoted above). In the Firkovich and Adler collections, and quite probably in others as well, are fragments that were found in cemeteries and genizas in other places (Damascus, Jerusalem, Crimea, etc.) as well as fragments found in bindings and elsewhere, and it is often difficult or impossible to distinguish the Cairo Geniza material from the other fragments. Geniza fragments served as the raw material for a large number of scholarly works in various fields of study. Much of the work of scholars such as L. Ginzberg, J. Mann, S. Assaf and S. D. Goitein is based on this material. While there exist catalogues of Geniza materials held in a few individual libraries, there is no catalogue of all the Geniza fragments in print or online nor even a complete bibliography of the Geniza. Perhaps the first attempt to publish a comprehensive bibliography of Geniza texts in a single field was: Saul Shaked, A Tentative Bibliography of Geniza Documents, Paris - The Hague 1969, which lists all documentary material from the Geniza published until 1965. The Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at the Cambridge University Library has published a series of bibliographies and catalogues of parts of its collection (for a list of these publications see entry for Cambridge University Library). In an attempt to remedy this situation the Friedberg Genizah Project (FGP) conceived and initiated by Albert D. Friedberg of Toronto, Canada, started to operate in 1999. The goal of the FGP is to produce an on-line union catalogue of all the Geniza texts, to digitize all the fragments and make them available to scholars on-line, to transcribe as many texts as possible and to promote research in the Cairo Geniza. A survey of the latest research in Geniza studies may be found in the second edition of Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 7 (Detroit 2007), pp. 460–483.

Substantial collections of Geniza fragments are found today in over 25 public and private libraries. The principal collections are listed below. The number (or approximate number) of fragments in each collection, is given in parentheses. The abbreviation ‘Cat.’ following some of the listings indicates that a catalogue exists for at least part of the collection. Details concerning these catalogues and the collections in general may be found in the respective main entries in this Guide.

Major Collections of Geniza Fragments Collections extant: Cambridge, University Library (140,000). Cat.

New York, JTSA (24,000). Cat.

Manchester, John Rylands University Library (10,000, mostly small scraps).

St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia (1,200 in the Antonin collection and many, perhaps, in the Firkovich collection). Cat.

Oxford, Bodleian Library (5,000). In Cat. Neubauer-Cowley, II, 2,675 fragments were described. The remaining fragments, mainly purchased from Joseph Offord, acquired in exchange for books from Christian Ginsburg or presented by Arthur Cowley, are briefly described in a typewritten list in the library.

London, British Library (5,000). A few fragments are described in Cat. Margoliouth. Most of the fragments, with the exception of those from the Gaster collection, are in MSS Or. 5556–Or. 5566. S. D. Goitein described ‘Geniza Papers of a Documentary Character in the Gaster Collection of the British Museum’, JQR, LI (1960/61), pp. 34–46. A typewritten list of the Geniza fragments in the British Museum collection exists in the library.

Mosseri, Jacques N., and family collection (4,000). Cat.

Paris, AIU (3,500). Cat.

Cambridge, Westminster College (2,000).

Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire (1,000).

Budapest, Academy of Sciences (650). Cat.

Philadelphia, CAJS (formerly Dropsie College) (400). Cat.

Jerusalem, JNUL (300). Cat.

Cairo, Museum of Islamic Art (260). About 260 fragments, mostly from very late MSS, recovered from the Mosseri cemetery in El-Basatin by a mission of Egyptian archaeologists, were described in Arabic in the catalogue Guide to the Latest Geniza Documents Collection (Cairo 1993) [compiled by H. M. El-Hawary] and edited by H. M. Rabie.

Cincinnati, HUC (250).

Vienna (Austria), Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Rainer Collection (150). Cat. The fragments seem to derive from the Geniza.

Geneva, Bibliothèque publique et universitaire (120).

Washington, Smithsonian Institution. Freer Gallery (52). Cat.

Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania (44). Cat. Twenty-three fragments in the University Library (including one in the Law Library) are described in Cat. Halper. Twenty-one fragments in the University Museum were described by S. D. Goitein, JQR, XLIX (1958/9), pp. 35–52.

Birmingham, Selly Oak Colleges, Mingana and Mittwoch collections (40). Cat.

Sassoon, Solomon (30). MSS Nos. 17–19, 187, 217–227, 521–532, 537, 566, 713. Cat.

Toronto, University of Toronto (19).

Kiev, Vernadsky National Library,Harkavy collection (dozens of fragments).

Collections that were destroyed or lost:

Frankfort o/M, Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek (4,314 fragments).

Berlin, Jüdische Gemeinde. Partly in Cincinnati, HUC.