Two Englishwomen, a Market in Cairo, and a Discovery

Two Englishwomen buying old paper in a Cairo market set off a discovery that reshaped how medieval Jewish history could be studied.

Fragments that reached Cambridge

In the 1890s, twin scholars Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson acquired manuscript fragments in Cairo and brought samples back to Cambridge, where the scholar Solomon Schechter recognised their significance and travelled to Fustat himself in 1896, eventually transporting the bulk of the Ben Ezra Synagogue's geniza, a store-room where worn documents bearing God's name were kept rather than discarded, to Cambridge University Library for study.

What ten centuries of paper contained

Because Jewish practice generally forbids destroying writings that include divine names, the geniza had accumulated not only religious texts but centuries of everyday material, letters, contracts, marriage documents and business records, giving historians an unusually direct window into the ordinary life of medieval Jewish communities across the Mediterranean and Middle East rather than only their formal religious literature.

A famous name among the fragments

Among the hundreds of thousands of fragments recovered were documents in the handwriting of the philosopher and physician Maimonides, who lived and worked in Fustat in the twelfth century, giving scholars direct manuscript evidence connected to one of medieval Judaism's most significant thinkers rather than only later copies of his work.