The New Yorker on the Cairo Geniza

THE CAIRO GENIZA is profiled in some detail by Emily Greenhouse in The New Yorker: Treasures in the Wall.

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 longer afford to keep it—from division and dispersal. (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. (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. “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.”

Background here.