Cairo Geniza - the largest archive of medieval Jewry , preserved in the genius of the synagogue of the city of Fustat (now within Cairo ). Documents covering more than a millennium (from the end of the 9th to the end of the 19th century) are written in Hebrew in Arabic , Hebrew , Aramaic , Yiddish, and some other languages.
Among the treasures of the “Cairo Geniza” are the Jewish-Khazar correspondence , the Cambridge document , the Kiev letter , ancient fragments of the Koran and the sacred texts of Judaism , as well as the Book of the Wisdom of Jesus, the son of Sirakhov . Most of the documents are everyday business papers of merchants and money lenders. The total number of sheets is estimated at 250 thousand; they mention up to 35 thousand people from Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Sicily, France, Spain, Morocco, Khorezm, India and many other countries.
The manuscripts of the “Cairo Geniza”, unlike the genesis in other centers of the diaspora, survived due to the semi-desert climate of Fustat. The wandering rabbi Jacob Sapir (1822-1888) became interested in the first of these documents, however, the attention of the general scientific community to the Cairo archive attracted Solomon Shekhter , who brought up to 140 thousand documents from Egypt to Cambridge University . Another 40 thousand Cairo manuscripts settled in the Jewish theological seminary in New York. The study of the “Cairo Geniza” became the life work of the orientalist Shlomo Goytein [1] .
The library of the University of Manchester , which has at its disposal 11 thousand documents of the “Cairo Geniza”, is currently implementing a project of their translation into electronic form and the creation of an online library of Cairo geniza . A group of Israeli scientists uses computer technology to match fragments, many of which are fragments of no more than an inch in diameter. [2]
Notes
- ↑ Shlomo Goitein : A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Vol. I - Vol. VI.
- ↑ Computer Network Piecing Together a Jigsaw of Jewish Lore