Reading news across the internet, I discovered this video, “The Geniza in Cairo: a rich source of Jewish life in the Middle Ages.” In the video, Miriam Frenkel (Department of Jewish History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) “examines the Cairo Geniza records as a source of Jewish life in the Middle Ages, focusing on clothing and textiles, the importance of clothes in medieval society, food and the strange rareness of recipes in the records, and finally a shopping list written by a Jewish judge from Jerusalem.”
An article in Akadem by Édouard Drumont states, “A Geniza is the store-room in a synagogue, used specifically for worn-out Hebrew-language books and papers on religious topics that were stored there before they could receive a proper cemetery burial, it being forbidden to throw away writings containing the name of God.” Read more about a Geniza, and in particular the Geniza in Cairo.
Michelle Paymar and a host of experts are finishing up a documentary entitled Cairo to the Cloud, which explores the Cairo Geniza, which “is not only the largest cache of Jewish history ever found, it is a window into a vanished civilization, with over 350,000 documents illuminating over a thousand years of Jewish, Christian and Moslem life in the heart of the Islamic world.”
