In 1896, in a forgotten storeroom above the ancient Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Jewish history changed forever.It's good to re-tell this story from time to time.The room was dark, dry, and filled with dust—and also with nearly 400,000 fragments made of paper and parchment that had remained untouched for centuries, preserved by Egypt's arid climate. When scholars, notably Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University, first began sorting through this treasure, they unearthed something profound—a time capsule preserving nearly a thousand years of continuous Jewish life and rare texts previously thought to be extinct.
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Especially notable for PaleoJudaica's purposes:
What makes the Cairo Geniza genuinely unparalleled is how it preserved texts once thought lost forever. Among its most significant discoveries is the Damascus Document, an ancient Jewish sectarian manuscript previously known only through medieval copies but later found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Geniza's fragment predates the Dead Sea Scroll version by centuries.Likewise, the most complete manuscript of the Aramaic Levi document, from the same period and with more fragmentary manuscripts also found at Qumran. And some Psalms of David, arguably from late antiquity or even older. And Sefer Ha-Razim, a Hebrew magical tracate from the Talmudic era. All three have been published in new translations, two by me, in MOTP1 and MOTP2.Similarly, it contained the original Hebrew text of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus), a wisdom book composed around 180 BCE that had vanished from Jewish tradition for nearly a millennium.
For more discoveries from the Cairo Geniza, see here, here, here, here, here and many links.
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