![]() The community may have been somewhat atypical-many of its Jews were wealthy, living at the center of a mercantile network, and Fostat was safer for Jews than the Land of Israel. As a result, we have a frozen postbox of some two hundred and fifty thousand fragments composing an unparalleled archive of life in Egypt from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries. ![]() (Instead, they stored it in what was literally a hole in the wall). Historians were doubly lucky with the worshippers at Ben Ezra, who not only deposited written texts into the genizah, but, for some reason, never buried its contents. To this day, synagogues collect expired prayer books and ritual objects, and bury the contents every few years. (Addressing a man might involve blessing him with one of God’s names an enemy might be cursed with an invocation of God’s malice.) David Kraemer, a professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary, explained that Fostat’s Jews spoke in Arabic but wrote in Hebrew-the Holy Tongue-and may have viewed the alphabet itself as sacred. It’s not precisely clear why, but Outhwaite told me that medieval Jews hardly wrote anything at all-whether personal letters or shopping lists-without referring to God. The Jews of Fostat, though, preserved not only sacred texts but just about everything they ever wrote down. “It is not hyperbole,” he wrote, “to talk about it as having rewritten what we knew of the Jews, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages.”Īccording to Jewish law, religious writings must be interred if they bear the name of God. (The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, which Schechter would go on to lead as President, holds the second largest.) Ben Outhwaite, the head of genizah research at Cambridge, explained to me how crucial the Cairo Genizah collection is for scholars. ![]() (The New York-born, Oxford-educated financier Leonard Polonsky has already promised £500,000 of the £1.2 million needed.) This uncommon partnership is a testament to the value of the collection, which is the largest assembled from Ben Ezra. Oxford and Cambridge are longtime rivals, but in February, the two universities launched their first-ever joint fundraising campaign in order to save the Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection-named for the intrepid twins who led Schechter to it and, not incidentally, endowed Westminster College, which owns the collection but can no longer afford to keep it-from division and dispersal. Schechter and Neubauer would not exchange any more friendly postcards. They published their account of the discovery in 1899 and facsimiles of the documents in 1901. John’s College, donated the fragments to Cambridge in 1898. He and his patron Charles Taylor, who was then Master of St. But Schechter did them one better, and made it back to England with the Genizah mother lode. In 1897, Neubauer and Cowley beat Schechter to publication of the Ben Sira discovery. Deep within the building, in a hidden repository called a genizah (from the Hebrew word ganaz, meaning to hide or set aside), Schechter uncovered more than seventeen hundred Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts and ephemera. See Griffin, The Paleographical Dating of P-46 (1996).Enraged, Schechter set off to Fostat (Old Cairo), where the manuscripts had been found, eventually making his way to the Ben Ezra synagogue-the site, according to legend, where baby Moses had been found in the reeds. Beatty purchased 46 more in 1935, and his acquisitions now form part of the Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri– eleven codices of biblical material.ĭating of this manuscript is problematic with dates ranging from the first century CE to the third century CE. Ten leaves were purchased by Chester Beatty in 1930 the University of Michigan acquired six in 1931 and 24 in 1933. Following its discovery in Cairo, the manuscript was broken up by the dealer. The provenance of the papyrus is unknown, although it was probably originally discovered in the ruins of an early Christian church or monastery. P-46, estimated to have been written between 175 and 250 CE, is also one of oldest surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. Papyrus 46 (P-46), an incomplete papyrus codex containing most of the Pauline epistles in Greek, remains one of the oldest surviving manuscripts of some of the earliest Christian documents, which were originally written circa 51-58 CE.
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