Genizah

Introduction

Various communities take credit for their contributions to the development of modern business transactions. However, the contribution of Islamic civilization in this area is not as well known. In fact for some mischievous reasons the golden ear of Islamic civilization is termed as the “great gap” in the history of economics. Either the writers of economic history were not aware of the contributions of Islamic civilization in this area or they just chose to ignore it.

A great treasure of records from all over the Mediterranean countries and mainly from Eleventh through Thirteenth centuries, has been preserved in the so-called Cairo geniza. These documents were discovered in 19th century in a synagogue in old Cairo. The Hebrew word Geniza (pronounced gheneeza) like Arabic janaza (which means “burial”), is derived from the Persian. In Persian ganj denotes a storehouse or treasure. In medieval Hebrew, Geniza or rather beth Geniza designates a repository of discarded writings.

This write up is an analysis of the two volumes titled, “A Mediterranean Society: the Jewish communities of the Arab World as portrayed in the documents of the Cairo Geniza”, written by S.D. Goitein. He was one of the Jewish Orientals pioneers. His work is divided into six volumes and there are altogether ten chapters in them. This work is published by the University of California Press, and for my analysis, I had taken the one published in 1967. The chapter that concerns us is Chapter Three from the First Volume, titled, ‘The world of Commerce and Finance’. Goitein has done an excellent and painstaking work to study these documents and then write a commentary on it in the best possible way.

Though Goitein was not looking at these documents from the point of Islamic finance principles or its application but whatever is clear from his commentary proves that Islamic finance was well developed during this period; the theory was fully implemented in practice.

History

These documents written in Arabic and Hebrew give clear image about the people living between 900 and 1500 A.D in the Mediterranean region during Islamic rules. A clear economic, political and social environment could be imagined after reading them.

There were many Genizas which were discovered across the world, but the one which was the most ancient and which had huge source of documents was the one found in Cairo. Geniza was discovered near the turn of century when Oriental and Jewish studies had reached an unprecedented peak. Between 1896-1914 Geniza came to be known to the world.

Now the question arises why were these documents stored? Amongst Jews there is a custom to store discarded books and writings. It was believed that the burial of the dried out sacred books was conducive to the precipitation of heavenly moisture. At every seventh year it was cleared and also in the year of drought. Hence

most of the Genizas found did not have ancient documents expect the one in Cairo. It is believed that because of wars and occupations it was forgotten. In terms of numbers, there are around 10,000 items of some length out of which around 7,000 items are self contained. Leaves plus fragments of books are around 250,000.

The script of these documents is mostly Hebrew though a considerable quantities of writings are also found in Arabic. Unlike Arabic script the Arabic language prevails in most of the documents. This shows the tremendous usage of Arabic and its influence. During this period the language used in the Jewish courts was Arabic. For some of the Arabic words found in the documents Goitein could not find their meanings in the standard modern Arabic dictionaries. To his surprise he found the meanings of these words when he found them being used in Yemen in their local dialect.

This work brings out some real nuggets, which can broaden the thought process of many. And which could challenge the misconception of many. The documents show the practical side of the economic scenario during this time. And it shows that Islamic finance was very much living and vibrant. Most of the Geniza documents originated from Tunisian merchants living in Egypt or other countries of the Muslim east. Geniza is a primary source for social and economic history during the Fatimid and Ayyubid periods.

Types of Contracts

In transactions the most common types of documents were releases, declarations, by one or several persons renouncing all claims against another or others. Letters of attorney are also available describing parties, subject matter, sale agreements, gift agreements and lease agreements. Few employment contracts are also available: reasons are two fold, even a poor laborer preferred to enter into a partnership with a rich fellow craftsman than to become his employee.

When it comes to business-letters, trust and friendship was the underlying element in them. They used to begin with enquiring about the health, then the family situation and in the end about business. So these documents also have some lessons on business communication.

In terms of commercial banking it is further illustrated by accounts, inventories of stores and workshops or pawnshops, by bills of lading, promissory notes and orders of payment. A large portion also refers to public affairs be it seeking donations for research and soliciting contributions to works of charity.

The distinction between retailers and wholesalers was well developed in the society represented in the Geniza papers but not along the same lines as in our own time.

Even a cursory examination of the Geniza material reveals that lending money for interest was not only shunned religiously, but also of limited significance economically. Goitein analyzed this as being the reason because of the feeling the people had: ‘the borrower is a slave to the lender’. The main reason for the avoidance of interest was because of the strict Islamic abhorrence to the interest in the financial deals.

‘Interest’ was not accepted in the commercial transactions. And a complete well-developed security system was present for business to grow. Traders from across the world brought their goods from different countries. Export and import was a common practice. Insurance was developed. Letter of Credit was developed. Forms of guarantee were available. Courts were there to protect the rights and governments were co-operating with each other in their trade relations.

Concept of Partnership

Concept of partnerships in business was quite common. This legal institution was enormously developed. It encompassed practically every economic activity: such as running a workshop, building a house; tax farming; working in the royal mint or exchange; and occasionally even in public office such as that of judge, court clerk, or cantor.

Almost all the commercial industry was set up on the concept of partnership. Partnerships could be concluded with regard to money, goods, work or any combination of the three. Any of them could be referred loosely as partnershipshirka in Arabic and shuthafuth in Hebrew. In the documents, two main types of contracts are found; in one, the contractors offer the various services in equal or unequal shares and partake in profit or loss in proportion to the investments (this is called musharakah in Arabic); and in the other, one or several partners contribute capital or goods or both, while the other or others do the work, in which case they receive a smaller share in the profits, normally one-third, but do not participate in the losses (this is called mudarabah in Arabic)

Goitein is of the view that these concepts of partnerships were adopted by the Business community in Europe then. From this it can also be concluded that even in the modern western commercial principles there is a great contribution of Islamic commercial law. This was because as an idea these principles were available quite long back in Muslim civilizations. And as mentioned they have their roots in Islamic commercial law.

As the Geniza records tell us the following points had to be considered in the establishment of a partnership.

The Number and Status of the Contractors

• The object of the contract and the aims pursued with it (not always evident from the definition of the object)
• The nature and extent of the contribution of the partners (capital, goods, premises, or work or two or more of these), and the specific rights and privileges granted to each partner.
• The partner’s share in profit and loss and their responsibility for the capital invested.
• Conditions governing expenditure for the partnership and living expenses of the partners.
• Conflict of interest, namely whether or not the partners could enter into other partnerships involving a similar object while theirs lasted.
• The duration of the partnerships had to be defined, except in the case of specific commercial ventures, which were, however, the most common object of an association.

Business Procedures and Practices

Buying and selling were done either by man-to-man dealings, “in sitting” namely in a store, a bazaar street, a bourse, or in a toll house, or by public auction through participation “in a circle” fi’l-halqa

In terms of business localities and seasons as even in our sophisticated society, business tends to concentrate in certain areas and periods. The same was the case during the medieval times. Streets were named based on the types of merchants located there such as clothiers, wool merchants, dealers in second-hand garments, vendors of wax or of seeds of spices. In addition to open bazaars and squares, there were buildings devoted specifically to commercial transactions. These buildings were referred as qaysariyya.

A chief pastime of well-to-do ladies was not only shopping, but also selling whatever they wished to dispense with from their wardrobe. No wonder, then, that the dealers in second-hand clothes in Old Cairo had a bazaar. And even today we can find such kinds of bazaars.

Transaction procedures

With some exceptions transactions of sales were not put in writing. It was therefore of utmost important to have them witnessed by as many trustworthy and easily available persons as possible.

Written contracts of sale were made only for houses and other immobile property, for slaves and for books. For prompt payment or rather for what the Geniza documents call, ‘speeding up’, and cash discount was granted. Similarly, references to earnest money or down payment are also seen.

Business Principles and Policies

The guiding rule of commerce discernable in the Geniza papers was in keeping one’s capital working all the time. A letter reads, “Do not let idle with you one single dirham (currency unit) of our partnership, but buy whatever God puts into your mind and send it on with the very first ship sailing”.

The very technique of trading was governed by this principle. Another business principle was “ Profit is made through buying well” therefore “ never buy when you are in hurry”

Indeed we find that the greatest concern of the writers of the Geniza letters was business intelligence. The term used for it, akhbar, “information”, was identical with what we today call, feasibility study report, market intelligence report, business intelligence report and country economic report.

As for sale, one tried to be first on the market. The ancient New Eastern maxim,

“Sell as long as the dust is still on your feet” [from the journey to the market]”

Another maxim found in the letters, “Leave one thing for the sake of another”, that is do first things first, or renounce even attractive projects in order to succeed in the really important undertakings. And another, “In case of doubt hold back.”

If, however, through acts of God or through his own fault a merchant found himself unable to meet his commitments, his fellow merchants, as a rule, would come to his assistance and prevent him from becoming bankrupt.

Accounting system was also seen to be quite developed in the Geniza papers. All the financial aspects of the business were documented cautiously and diligently. Business co-operation was regarded as a relationship of mutual trust and friendship and consequently, did not require minute reporting on the actions taken.

Profits and Losses

The merchants of the Geniza period met the constant menace of impending losses in three ways:

By spreading the risk, by striving for substantial gains and in extreme cases, by mutual help. No type of formal insurance was known to the people of the Geniza letters, but this readiness for mutual help must be regarded as a form of it.

The Geniza papers have two different terms for the notion of price, si’r the price of the unit sold, and thaman the total proceeds of one sale. The market price as apposed to that actually obtained is also designated by the word si’r

Banking Practices

The roles of the banks in this period were as follows.

• Moneychangers acted as a banker and for this service they charged a fee. Secondly, a moneychanger of higher standing used to issue suftajas (Bill of Exchange), whose service, as we have tried to show, carried a substantial fee.
• In terms of money lending on securities, these securities were mostly jewellery. Goitein also tried to find out any explicit mention of the word “interest” in the documents but he failed.
• Finally, the moneychangers/bankers invested the money at its disposal in partnerships and commendas and this was perhaps the main benefit it derived from the sums deposited with it.

The vital role played by the moneychangers was a function of the monetization of the economy. Gold coin was called ‘ayn’, and silver coin was called ‘waraq’. Money was handled largely in sealed purses of coins whose exact values were indicated on the outside.

Two types of purses are discernible in the Geniza records, those that bore the seal of certified money –assayers of government office; and of a semi official exchange. A banker would act thus only for an accredited customer, mu’amil, and we have to remember that many merchants were “merchant bankers” who were themselves experienced in handling money.

The moneychangers/banker’s second field of activities also provided the general term for his profession, money changing (cf. sayrafi, changer). At any one point of time a great variety of coinages was on the market and it required expert handling.

The economic strength of a country was as it is today—a strong currency. Despite predominance of the local coinage, money changing was one of the most common activities on the medieval markets. Numismatics and economic historians will have to co-operate in order to meaningfully explain the rich information about money changing contained in the Geniza records.

The rates of exchange granted by the brokers clearly depended not only on the metallic content of the coins concerned but on market conditions and commercial considerations as well. Moneychangers were found everywhere. In Alexandria there even existed a suq-al-sarf. The economy of the period was, to a certain extent, a paper economy.

Normally wholesale and retail commerce both were conducted on credit. One did not pay in cash for the daily supplies, but sent the grocer written orders, and after a certain number—5,10, 20 had accumulated, they were returned and payment done.

The form of such a medieval order of payment was very similar to a modern check. Legally, orders of payment were forms of transfer of debt or assignment hawala (a word, by the way, from which French aval, endorsement on a bill of exchange is derived). The term for order of payment in Arabic is ruq’a, meaning piece of paper.

From this general term, the suftaja, a Persian word usually translated as bill of exchange, is to be differentiated. Muslim lawyers defined the suftaja as a “loan of money in order to avoid the risk of transport”. As far as the Geniza papers are concerned the term was used in more restricted sense. Payment through a third party in another city fell under the general category of transfer of debt.

The suftajas were of more special character. As a rule they were issued by and drawn upon well-known bankers or representatives of merchants. A fee was charged for their issue and presentation.

Conclusion

The Geniza documents that were unraveled and discovered have opened quite a few doors, which were shut for long. It has not just made people visualize the commercial scene of the Middle Ages but has also shown how developed and disciplined the system had been. It also shows how the dynamics of Islamic finance was working; how it was controlled and how it was monitored. And how it derived laws from religious tenets. This discovery is in fact a great treasure for any student of modern economics, business, law and anthropology. And nonetheless this study is of great importance to the students of Islamic economics and finance.

A genizah (or geniza; Hebrew: גניזה "storage"; plural: genizot or genizoth or genizahs)^[2] is a storage area in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery designated for the temporary storage of worn-out Hebrew-language books and papers on religious topics prior to proper cemetery burial.

Etymology[edit]

The word genizah comes from the Hebrew triconsonantal root g-n-z, which means "hiding", and originally meant "to hide" or "to put away".[3] Later, it became a noun for a place where one put things, and is perhaps best translated as "archive" or "repository".

Description[edit]

A genizah in a synagogue (Samarkand, Uzbekistan, ca. 1865 - 1872 CE)

Genizot are temporary repositories designated for the storage of worn-out Hebrew-language books and papers on religious topics prior to proper cemetery burial, it being forbidden to throw away writings containing the name of God. As even personal letters and legal contracts may open with an invocation of God, the contents of genizot have not been limited to religious materials; in practice, they have also contained writings of a secular nature, with or without the customary opening invocation, as well as writings in other Jewish languages that use the Hebrew alphabet (Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Spanish, and Yiddish).

Genizot are typically found in the attic or basement of a synagogue, but can also be in walls or buried underground. They may also be located in cemeteries.[3]

The contents of genizot are periodically gathered solemnly and then buried in the cemetery or bet ḥayyim. Synagogues in Jerusalem buried the contents of their genizot every seventh year, as well as during a year of drought, believing that this would bring rain. This custom is associated with the far older practice of burying a great or good man with a sefer (either a book of the Tanakh, or the Mishnah, the Talmud, or any work of rabbinic literature) which has become pasul (unfit for use through illegibility or old age). The tradition of paper-interment is known to have been practiced in Morocco, Algiers, Turkey, and Egypt.

History[edit]

A possible geniza at Masada, eastern Israel

The Talmud (Tractate Shabbat 115a) directs that holy writings in other than the Hebrew language require genizah, that is, preservation. In Pesachim 118b, bet genizah is a treasury. In Pesachim 56a, Hezekiah hides (ganaz) a medical work; in Shabbat 115a, R. Gamaliel orders that the targum to the Book of Job should be hidden (yigganez) under the nidbak (layer of stones). In Shabbat 30b, there is a reference to those rabbis who sought to categorize the books of Ecclesiastes and Proverbs as heretical; this occurred before the canonization of the Hebrew Bible, when disputes flared over which books should be considered Biblical. The same thing occurs in Shabbat 13b in regard to the Book of Ezekiel, and in Pesachim 62 in regard to the Book of Genealogies.

In medieval times, Hebrew scraps and papers that were relegated to the genizah were known as shemot or "names," because their sanctity and consequent claim to preservation were held to depend on their containing the "names" of God. In addition to papers, articles connected with the ritual, such as tzitzit, lulavim, and sprigs of myrtle, are similarly stored.

According to folklore, these scraps were used to hide the famed Golem of Prague, whose body is claimed to lie in the genizah of the Altneushul in Prague.

Modern genizah collection receptacle on street in Nachlaot, Jerusalem

By far, the best-known genizah, which is famous for both its size and spectacular contents, is the Cairo Geniza. Recognized for its importance and introduced to the Western world in 1864 by Jacob Saphir, and chiefly studied by Solomon Schechter and Shlomo Dov Goitein, the genizah had an accumulation of almost 280,000 Jewish manuscript fragments dating from 870 AD to the 19th century. These materials were important for reconstructing the religious, social and economic history of Jews, especially in the Middle Ages.

In 2011, the so-called Afghan Geniza, an 11th-century collection of manuscript fragments in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian, was found in Afghanistan, in caves used by the Taliban

The Cairo Genizah, alternatively spelled Geniza, is a collection of some 300,000^[1] Jewish manuscript fragments that were found in thegenizah or storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat or Old Cairo, Egypt. These manuscripts outline a 1,000-year continuum (870 CE to 19th century) of Jewish Middle-Eastern and North African history and comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world. The Genizah texts are written in various languages, especially Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic, mainly on vellum and paper, but also on papyrus and cloth. In addition to containing Jewish religious texts such as Biblical, Talmudic and later Rabbinic works (some in the original hands of the authors), the Genizah gives a detailed picture of the economic and cultural life of the North African and Eastern Mediterranean regions, especially during the 10th to 13th centuries. It is now dispersed among a number of libraries, including the libraries of Cambridge University and the University of Manchester. Some additional fragments were found in the Basatin cemetery east of Old Cairo, and the collection includes a number of old documents bought in Cairo in the latter nineteenth century

Discovery and present locations[edit]

Solomon Schechter at work in Cambridge University Library, 1898

The first European to note the collection was apparently Simon van Gelderen (an ancestor of Heinrich Heine), who visited the Ben Ezra synagogue and reported about the Cairo Genizah in 1752 or 1753.[3] In 1864 the traveler and scholar Jacob Saphir visited the synagogue and explored the Genizah for two days; while he did not identify any specific item of significance he suggested that possibly valuable items might be in store.[4] In 1896, Scottish travelers, the twin sisters Agnes S. Lewis and Margaret D. Gibson[5] returned from Egypt with fragments from the Genizah they considered to be of interest, and showed them to Solomon Schechter at Cambridge. Schechter, already aware of the Genizah but not of its significance, immediately recognized the importance of the material. With the financial assistance of his Cambridge colleague and friend Charles Taylor, Schechter made an expedition to Egypt, where, with the assistance of the Chief Rabbi, he sorted and removed the greater part of the contents of the Genizah chamber.[6]

The Genizah fragments have now been archived in various libraries around the world. The Taylor-Schechter collection at Cambridge is the largest, by far, single collection, with nearly 193,000 fragments (137,000 shelf-marks).[7] There are a further 31,000 fragments at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The John Rylands University Library in Manchester holds a collection of over 11,000 fragments, which are currently being digitised and uploaded to an online archive. The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford has a collection of 25,000 Genizah folios.[1]

Westminster College in Cambridge held 1,700 fragments, which were deposited by Lewis and Gibson in 1896.[8] In 2013 the two Oxbridge libraries, the Bodleian Library at Oxford and Cambridge University Library, joined together to raise funds to buy the Westminster collection after it was put up for sale for £1.2 million. This is the first time the two libraries have collaborated for such a fundraising effort.[1][8]

Contents and significance[edit]

The Cairo Genizah documents include both religious and secular writings, composed from about 870 AD to as late as 1880. The normal practice for genizot (pl. of genizah) was to remove the contents periodically and bury them in a cemetery. Many of these documents were written in the Aramaic language using the Hebrew alphabet. As the Jews considered Hebrew to be the language of God, and the Hebrew script to be the literal writing of God, the texts could not be destroyed even long after they had served their purpose. The Jews who wrote the materials in the Genizah were familiar with the culture and language of their contemporary society. The documents are invaluable as evidence for how colloquial Arabic of this period was spoken and understood. They also demonstrate that the Jewish creators of the documents were part of their contemporary society: they practiced the same trades as their Muslim and Christian neighbors, including farming; they bought, sold, and rented properties.

The importance of these materials for reconstructing the social and economic history for the period between 950 and 1250 cannot be overemphasized. Judaic scholar Shelomo Dov Goitein created an index for this time period which covers about 35,000 individuals. This included about 350 "prominent people," among them Maimonides and his son Abraham, 200 "better known families", and mentions of 450 professions and 450 goods. He identified material from Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria (but not Damascus or Aleppo), Tunisia, Sicily, and even covering trade with India. Cities mentioned range from Samarkand in Central Asia to Seville and Sijilmasa, Morocco to the west; from Aden north to Constantinople; Europe not only is represented by the Mediterranean port cities of Narbonne, Marseilles, Genoa and Venice, but even Kiev and Rouen are occasionally mentioned.[9]

In particular the various records of payments to labourers for building maintenance and the like form by far the largest collection of records of day wages in the Islamic world for the early medieval period, despite difficulties in interpreting the currency units cited and other aspects of the data. They have invariably been cited in discussions of the medieval Islamic economy since the 1930s, when this aspect of the collection was researched, mostly by French scholars.

The Ben Ezra Synagogue

The materials include a vast number of books, most of them fragments, which are estimated to number nearly 280,000 leaves, including parts of Jewish religious writings and fragments from the Qur'an. Of particular interest to biblical scholars are several incomplete manuscripts of Sirach.

The non-literary materials, which include court documents, legal writings, and the correspondence of the local Jewish community (such the Letter of the Karaite elders of Ascalon), are somewhat smaller, but still impressive: Goitein estimated their size at "about 10,000 items of some length, of which 7,000 are self-contained units large enough to be regarded as documents of historical value. Only half of these are preserved more or less completely."[10]

The number of documents added to the Genizah changed throughout the years. For example, the number of documents added were fewer between 1266 and circa 1500, when most of the Jewish community had moved north to the city of Cairo proper, and saw a rise around 1500 when the local community was increased by refugees from Spain. It was they who brought to Cairo several documents that shed a new light on the history of Khazaria and Kievan Rus, namely, the Khazar Correspondence, the Schechter Letter, and the Kievian Letter. The Genizah remained in use until it was emptied by Western scholars eager for its material.

A number of other genizot have provided smaller discoveries across the Old World, notably Italian ones such as that of Perugia.[11] An 11th century Afghan Geniza was found in 2011.[12]

The Cairo Genizah fragments were extensively studied, cataloged and translated by Paul E. Kahle. His book, The Cairo Geniza was published by Blackwell in 1958, with a second edition in 1959.[13]

In 2010, Rabbi Mark Glickman, of Congregation Kol Ami, in Woodinville, Washington, traveled to Egypt with his son and became the first person to take usable photographs of the Genizah chamber.

Treasures in the wall

In 1896, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, the identical-twin daughters of a worldly Scottish widower, returned to Cambridge from a trip to the Middle East bearing pages from several ancient Hebrew manuscripts that they had purchased from a Cairo bookseller. They showed the parchment leaves to a fellow Cambridge University scholar named Solomon Schechter, who was startled to discover among them an original copy of the Hebrew proverbs of Ben Sira, a second- century B. C. Hebrew book of wisdom. He wrote to his friend Adolf Neubauer, a like-minded librarian at Oxford, with the news. Neubauer replied two weeks later, saying that he couldn't quite make out Schechter's postcard but that he and his assistant, Arthur Cowley, had just-"coincidentally"-discovered nine pages of Ben Sira at Oxford. Of course, there was no coincidence about it. Schechter's postcard had sent Neubauer on a hunt through his own Cairo trove.

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. 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.

In 1897, Neubauer and Cowley beat Schechter to publication of the Ben Sira discovery. But Schechter did them one better, and made it back to England with the Genizah mother lode. He and his patron Charles Taylor, who was then Master of St. John's College, donated the fragments to Cambridge in 1898. They published their account of the discovery in 1899 and facsimiles of the documents in 1901. Schechter and Neubauer would not exchange any more friendly postcards.

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. (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."

According to Jewish law, religious writings must be interred if they bear the name of God. The Jews of Fostat, though, preserved not only sacred texts but just about everything they ever wrote down. 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. (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.

To this day, synagogues collect expired prayer books and ritual objects, and bury the contents every few years. 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. (Instead, they stored it in what was literally a hole in the wall). 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. 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. Still, scholars can extrapolate a great amount of information from the Genizah documents about life for Jews during the Islamic Period in cities such as Baghdad, Damascus, and Aleppo. No other record as long or as full exists.

For centuries, historians had relied for their understanding of restrictions on Jewish life on Islamic legal documents mandating that Jews carry bells and wear badges and distinguishing clothing. But the contents of the Cairo Genizah show that Jews were allowed a far more vibrant lifestyle, and treated much more tolerantly, than had been assumed. The Fatimid Caliphate, a dynasty that ruled from 909-1171, "embraced the organs of Jewish government even to the point of financially supporting the ancient Academy of Jerusalem, promoting self-governance by the Jewish community and assisting the progress of pilgrims to the holy sites," Outhwaite said. Jewish merchants partnered with Christians and Muslims; they ran perfume shops and silk weaveries together. Hundreds of letters buried in the genizah show that Jewish merchant princes set sail from Egypt or Yemen to India and returned along the Red Sea and Malabar Coast if they didn't marry Indian women and settle there. Marriage contracts in the collection show that divorce was common. While very few Jews married Christians and Muslims, there is ample evidence of close relationships with interfaith neighbors, like letters seeking rabbinical advice about husbands who kept apartments for their Muslim concubines. Instances of day-to-day anti-Semitism were less common than imagined.

The Cairo Genizah also preserved telling artifacts of Biblical and Hebrew literature, like a large leaf of the great twelfth-century scholar Moses Maimonides's Commentary on the Mishnah in his own "very distinctive (i. e. messy) handwriting," an exceptional tenth-century vellum copy of the Jewish sage Saadya Gaon's translation of the Bible into Arabic, and an autographed poem by the Spanish Hebrew poet Joseph ibn Abitur. It contained Torahs and Talmuds from all over the world. Beyond these canonical works, the Genizah reveals profane and even occult texts related to superstition and magic; it holds spells for erotic conquest, and others for inflicting bodily harm. (One leaf had this enchantment to make a woman sleep with you: "Take your trousers and put them on over your head, so that you are naked. Say: 'So-and-so son of So-and-so is doing this for So-and-so daughter of So-and-so, in order that she will dream that I sleep [with] her and she sleeps with me.'")

But it is the social history of Fostat's Jews that the Genizah colors in most splendidly. We see what people bought and ordered, and what got lost in shipments between Alexandria and the Italian ports. We learn what clothes they wore: silks and textiles for the middle classes, from all over the known world. The Genizah includes prenuptial agreements and marriage deeds from the eleventh century listing the full inventory of a woman's trousseau. It also contains the oldest-known Jewish engagement deed, from 1119, which was invented to grant a woman (and her dowry) legal protection as the time period between betrothal and marriage changed in medieval Egypt.

Some of the liveliest contents add a human dimension to what Outhwaite calls "dry history." There's a letter written by a woman to her husband who, fed up with living under his in-laws' roof (and, worse, paying them rent), moved out. So as not to break Jewish laws regarding husbandly duty, he returned every Shabbat to her bed, but his wife was not pleased. She promised to find a more suitable place to live, but vowed to starve herself until he agreed to return.

Documents in the Genizah also bring to life periods of persecution. Eyewitness accounts of the First Crusades, at the turn of the eleventh century, testify to atrocities committed. One woman who fled from Jerusalem to Tripoli recorded the gore: "I was with him on the day I saw them killed in terrible fashion.. I am an ill woman on the brink of insanity, on top of the hunger of my family and the little girl who are all with me, and the horrid news I heard about my son."

Solomon Schechter might have objected to Oxford's crowing about its "skillful" selection of Genizah material, glossing over the fact that Cambridge bested it in the treasure hunt. (When he discovered the lost original of Ben Sira, he wasn't aware that Neubauer and Cowley were scheming, with the help of an Oxford Assyriologist and a dodgy German count, to buy up Cairo Genizah goodies.) But he wouldn't have minded the joint university effort to keep intact his collection, which has been of immeasurable importance to scholars. Economic historians of the Mediterranean developed a "reputation model" based on activities of Maghrebi Jewish traders recorded in the Genizah, and recent books by scholars including Marina Rustow, Arnold Franklin, and Jessica Goldberg have probed the Genizah to write on relationships between Jews, Karaite Jews, and Muslims in the region.

Other than the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are Biblical manuscripts, the documents in the Genizah are some of the oldest records of Jewish life in existence (the two oldest Haggadahs in the world, for instance, were found there). The mid-century German-Jewish historian and ethnographer S. D. Goitein made the Cairo Genizah the subject of his life's work, and reimagined the Middle Ages in his monumental "A Mediterranean Society." More recently, in 2011, Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole published "Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Genizah." Perhaps the most notable recent scholarly development is The Friedberg Genizah project, a major international effort to catalogue, transcribe, translate, and digitize the Genizah's holdings. As David Kraemer told me, the Friedberg Genizah Project is "first time [the Cairo Genizah cache] has been back together since its origins." It will live in the modern age's equivalent of an infinite storeroom: the Internet.