Origin from 870
A storeroom, usually attached to a synagogue, where worn or damaged writings containing the divine name are placed rather than destroyed, since Jewish law forbids the destruction of God's name in writing. Contents are periodically buried in a cemetery. Because scribes and communities were not fastidious about what counted, storerooms accumulated far more than liturgical fragments: letters, contracts, court records, medical notes, children's exercises, poetry and account books all went in.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodThe best documented genizah, that of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo), holds material beginning around the ninth century. Origin PeriodThe Cairo Genizah's documents continue into the late nineteenth century, when the collection was removed to European and American libraries beginning in the 1890s. FoundedAncient; the practice is rabbinic 1 Organisation
Category of Structure Distinguishing FeatureHolds writings bearing the divine name, not destroyed 1 Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Learn More
The Storeroom That Preserves Because It May Not Destroy
The genizah is a place of deposit rather than a place of worship, and it exists because Jewish law forbids the destruction of writings that bear the name of God.
Why nothing is thrown away
Any worn or damaged text containing the divine name may not simply be discarded, so it is placed in a genizah, usually a room or cavity attached to a synagogue, and left there until it can be buried in a cemetery with due respect. The rule extends in practice to a great range of Hebrew writing, since the name might appear anywhere, so a genizah accumulates not only sacred books but letters, contracts and everyday documents that happen to be written in the sacred script.
The Cairo discovery
That indiscriminate accumulation made one genizah into the single most important trove of medieval Jewish life recovered anywhere. The genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, old Cairo, held documents deposited across roughly a thousand years, and its recovery from the 1890s transformed the study of the medieval Mediterranean, preserving the ordinary paperwork of a Jewish community that no archive would deliberately have kept. The institution, designed only to avoid a sacrilege, thereby became by accident one of the great preservers of the past.
The Storeroom That Became an Archive
Jewish law's prohibition on destroying anything bearing the divine name gave every synagogue a practical problem: worn prayer books, damaged scrolls and outdated documents had to go somewhere, and a genizah, typically a storeroom or a walled off chamber, was the ordinary answer, with contents eventually removed for burial in a cemetery. Most genizot were used exactly this way and left little for later scholarship. The exception that transformed the practice's reputation entirely was the genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, old Cairo, which accumulated material for centuries longer than most communities preserved theirs and was never fully cleared.
The Cambridge scholar Solomon Schechter examined its contents in 1896 and 1897 and recognized that the storeroom held not only religious texts but personal letters, contracts, medical writings and marriage documents spanning centuries of Mediterranean Jewish life, material later brought largely to Cambridge and other collections. The Cairo Genizah remains the reason a ritual disposal practice, followed quietly by synagogues everywhere for centuries without any expectation of scholarly use, is now cited as one of the richest single archives for the social history of the medieval Jewish world.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Instances
The Cairo Geniza is the best-documented genizah in existence and the reason the institution is known in detail.
Related To
Sources
1. A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza
S. D. Goitein, University of California Press, 1967Volume 1, on the Cairo storeroom and what it preservedView the Source Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition
Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.), Macmillan Reference USA, 2007on the genizah and the Cairo findView the Source Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition
Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.), Macmillan Reference USA, 2007On the practice of storing worn writings and on the Fustat findView the Source Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005on the preservation of sacred writingView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.