The Cairo Genizah manuscripts: Taylor-Schechter Old Series and the Mosseri Collection

The Cairo Genizah Collection is a vast trove of medieval Jewish manuscripts recovered from a synagogue in the town of Fustat, Egypt. One hundred years ago, a Cambridge scholar, Solomon Schechter, visited the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo, and was astounded to discover that the Jewish community there had, for nearly a thousand years, been placing their worn out and unusable documents in its storeroom (Genizah).
It is prohibited in Jewish religious law to destroy any text that contains God's name; instead such texts should be stored away and deferentially buried. For reasons unknown, the Jewish community of Fustat buried no more than a small proportion of their texts, and instead stored them away in the Genizah from the 11th century to shortly before Schechter's visit. Moreover, the community took to secreting away all kinds of text, not just sacred writings such as the Bible or prayer books, but all manner of texts: from the central texts of rabbinic Judaism to personal letters, from collections of liturgical poetry to butcher's bills, from Jewish trader's accounts to children's writing-exercises.
Schechter carried nearly 200,000 of these precious manuscripts back to Cambridge University Library, where today they form the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection, the largest and most important single collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts. Schechter himself moved on, and the work passed to other hands, including the Cambridge librarian Ernest Worman, who sorted much of what became known as the 'Old Series' of the Collection. Following Worman's premature death, the Library's interest in the Collection waned, and much of it remained uncatalogued and loose in boxes until the 1960s. With the establishment of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit by the Library, however, interest revived, the Collection was properly conserved, and scholars began the arduous task of deciphering and cataloguing the tens of thousands of often difficult to read Hebrew, Judaeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew characters, used by Jews), Arabic and Aramaic paper and parchment fragments.
The Collection is divided into various series, such as the 'New Series' and the 'Additional Series', determined by when the manuscripts were sorted and numbered. Recent projects, including a major AHRC-funded project, have concentrated on the New and Additional series, which had previously received little or no scholarly attention. It is the aim of the present project, however, to look at the oldest core of the Collection, the 'Old Series', which contains material that Schechter, Worman and the earliest scholars picked out and conserved, and which they found most fascinating. Here are some of the most important manuscripts in the Genizah, but no comprehensive catalogue or handlist exists. Using the expertise of research staff in the Genizah Unit, the incomplete handlists of Worman and others, 14,000 manuscripts from the T-S Old Series will be deciphered and comprehensively described. These catalogue descriptions will be made available on the Library's web-site, where they will be matched with images, and for the first time, this most important core of the Collection will be adequately described and widely accessible.
The T-S Collection is the largest, but not the only, collection to emerge from the Cairo Genizah. Some years after Schechter's visit, an Egyptian Jewish businessman and scholar by the name of Jacques Mosseri also gathered up a collection of Genizah manuscripts. These remained in the hands of the Mosseri family and, until recently, were off limits. Now, however, they are deposited on loan at Cambridge University Library, where they are being conserved, digitised and catalogued. The current project aims to assist with this task by describing and digitising 1,000 items as they are conserved from this new collection. As with the T-S fragments, these will bedisplayed online, allowing anyone interested to browse and examine these hitherto hidden treasures.