Professor Stefan Reif, Cambridge University Library
2005 award - major research project
£62,275 for 18 months.
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Cambridge University Library has been presented with a unique opportunity of rescuing from a bank vault in Paris a collection of precious medieval Hebrew and Arabic documents from the Cairo Genizah, currently under threat of being broken up and sold. Cambridge University Library is already closely involved in Genizah research because it has the world's largest and most significant Genizah holding (140,000 items, representing 70% of the total).
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In the past hundred years, the documents found in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, have revolutionized the study of most aspects of medieval Jewish culture in the Mediterranean area. Some 200,000 items (comprising almost a million leaves), held in various libraries around the world, have not only made possible the reconstruction of many of the best-known Hebrew, Aramaic and Judeo-Arabic works of the 10-13 th centuries but have also brought to light the existence of numerous literary items previously unknown. In addition to providing novel data about such literary discoveries, and their significance for religious history, the Genizah materials have also illuminated the daily lives and culture of Jews, Muslims and Christians in the eastern Mediterranean during a period that included the Crusades and that saw contacts with the western Mediterranean and North Africa on the one hand and with India on the other. These fragmentary pieces, in vellum and paper, include bills, lists, itineraries, letters and cheques that have fascinated social and economic historians. Their linguistic characteristics have furnished specialists with insights into the development of various Semitic and a number of European languages (the latter because of their transcription in Hebrew characters). The Genizah texts are undoubtedly as important for scholarly and popular understanding of cultural history as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Mosseri Genizah archives are owned by the Mosseri family who inherited them from their father, Cairene businessman Jacques Mosseri, who re-located to Paris in the 1930s. The material, though smaller and more fragmentary, is very similar in content to much of the Cambridge collection and covers many important areas of Hebrew, Arabic and Jewish studies. Much of it dates from the classical Genizah period (10-13th centuries) but there appears to be a greater preponderance of 16th century items. Although 80% of the material has been sorted and placed between acid-free papers, it all urgently requires standard manuscript conservation, especially those items that are in ungainly clumps of paper and vellum. The Mosseri Collection will be lent to Cambridge University Library for a substantial number of years so that it can be safely housed, made available to scholars, professionally conserved and fully digitised.
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The current plan is that, as soon as the first batch of 1,000 fragments is received, work will commence on its description and digitisation. An efficient and expeditious treatment of these items, and an arrangement to make them widely available to scholars, will demonstrate just how important this collection and this project are to the world of scholarship. The cost of the necessary conservation work will be met from alternative sources.
The Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit's website is at:
www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter
