̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Hebrew

Discarded History exhibition lifts the lid on 1,000 years of medieval history

sjr81 — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 06:07:10 +0000

Discarded History: ̽��ֱ��Genizah of Medieval Cairo opens to the public on April 27 and provides a unique and unparalleled window into the daily life of men, women and children at the centre of a thriving city over the course of a millennium.

From the 9th to the 19th century, the Jewish community of Fustat (Old Cairo) deposited more than 200,000 unwanted writings in a purpose-built storeroom in the Ben Ezra synagogue. This sacred storeroom was called the Genizah. A Genizah was a safe place to store away any old or unusable text that, because it contained the name of God, was considered too holy to simply throw out.

But when the room was opened in the late 19th century, alongside the expected Bibles, prayer books and works of Jewish law – scholars discovered the documents and detritus of everyday life: shopping lists, marriage contracts, divorce deeds, a 1,000-year-old page of child’s doodles and alphabets, Arabic fables, works of Muslim philosophy, medical books, magical amulets, business letters and accounts. Practically every kind of written text produced by the Jewish communities of the Near East throughout the Middle Ages had been preserved in that sacred storeroom.

Dr Ben Outhwaite, Head of the Genizah Research Unit and co-curator of the exhibition, said: “This colossal haul of writings reveals an intimate portrait of life in a Jewish community that was international in outlook, multicultural in make-up and devout to its core; a community concerned with the very things to which humanity has looked for much of its existence: love, sex and marriage, money and business, and ultimately death.

“ ̽��ֱ��Genizah collection is undeniably one of the greatest treasures among the world-class collections at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library. We have translated most of these texts into English for the first time – and most are also going on display for the first time, too. With Discarded History we hope to make this medieval society accessible and recognisable to a modern audience.”

Among the highlights going on display in Cambridge are the earliest known example of a Jewish engagement deed (Shtar Shiddukhin, from 1119), showing the complex legal relations that existed around marriage, the oldest-dated medieval Hebrew manuscript (a Bible from 9th century Iran) and an 11th century pre-nuptial agreement where the groom, Toviyya – who clearly had a bad reputation – was forced to make a series of promises about his future behaviour.

In the presence of witnesses, he declares that he will avoid mixing with the wrong sort, for the purposes of ‘eating, drinking or anything else’. He also states that he will not spend one night away from Faiza, unless she wants him to, and that he will not buy himself a slave girl, unless Faiza agrees.

̽��ֱ��existence of the Cairo Genizah was first brought to the attention of Western scholars by the fearless and intrepid travellers Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson in 1896. ̽��ֱ��twin sisters, devout Presbyterians who had inherited a great fortune, returned to Cambridge from a research trip to Egypt and Palestine. They brought with them a treasure lost for a thousand years: a page from the original Hebrew book of Ben Sira, accumulated along with thousands of other documents in the Ben Ezra Synagogue.

Cambridge lecturer Solomon Schechter was so excited by the sisters’ remarkable discovery that he raised the money to travel to Old Cairo to see for himself what the Genizah held – although not before swearing the twins to secrecy about the nature of their discovery, lest a rival scholar from Oxford be alerted to their existence.

Upon arrival in Cairo, the Chief Rabbi of Egypt gave Schechter permission to take whatever he liked. Schechter declared that he ‘liked all’, and shipped almost 200,000 manuscripts back to Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��material that arrived in Cambridge, packed in wooden crates, dates from a period when 90 per cent of the world’s Jews lived in Islamic lands. ̽��ֱ��broadly tolerant regime under which they lived contrasted with the usually harsher treatment meted out to Jews in Western Europe. ̽��ֱ��documents paint a picture of economic stability and social growth. Cheques for goods ranging from wax candles to lemon sherbet pay testament to the variety and richness of the 200,000 documents in Cambridge’s possession – almost all of which have been conserved to avoid any further damage to the priceless collection.

“Women and children are invisible in most archives – especially those from medieval times,” added Outhwaite. “But through our collections, myriad individual voices can be heard through children’s copy books, prenuptial agreements and books of magic spells.

“A broad brush picture of the medieval Middle East as a crucible of cruel oppression or, conversely, an interfaith utopia does not do justice to the eye-level history recorded in these sources. Life, for the culturally rich and socially conscious citizens of the medieval Middle East, was more complicated, sophisticated and interesting than that.

“ ̽��ֱ��Cairo Genizah speaks vividly of the community’s links to other lands and other faiths. Its fragile contents, brown with age when Schechter acquired them, give us a picture of life that includes piracy and human trafficking to the intimate drama of domestic life. We can read about ancient cures for headaches and see school teachers complain bitterly about children’s unruly behaviour, just as they do today. It’s this richness that makes the Genizah unique.”

Discarded History: ̽��ֱ��Genizah of Medieval Cairo opens to the public on April 27, 2017 and runs until October 28, 2017. Entry is free.

Treasures from the world’s largest and most important collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts – chronicling 1,000 years of history in Old Cairo – have gone on display in Cambridge today for a six-month-long exhibition at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

Myriad individual voices can be heard through children’s copy books, prenuptial agreements and books of magic spells.

Ben Outhwaite

A Brush With History

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Cambridge lecturer Solomon Schechter among thousands of Genizah fragments in his office after their transportation from the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo.

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Historic rivals join forces to save 1,000 years of Jewish history

ljm67 — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 12:02:58 +0000

̽��ֱ��campaign was officially launched this week at the British Academy in London.

̽��ֱ��collection comprises more than 1,700 fragments of Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts, originating from the Cairo Genizah, dating from the 9th–19th century. They represent an invaluable record of a thousand years of the religious, social, economic and cultural life of the Mediterranean world.

̽��ֱ��fragments were brought back from Cairo by the intrepid twin sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson in 1896 and deposited at Westminster College. Treasures of the collection include the earliest known example of a Jewish engagement deed (dating from 1119), an eyewitness account of Crusader atrocities, and letters by leading Jewish traders of the 11th and 12th centuries.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “In the late 19th century, Oxford’s Bodleian Library and Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library were rivals in trying to acquire materials from the Cairo Genizah. Today we are taking a different stance, seeking to build on our collections while recognising that there would be a greater benefit to scholarship if we joined together to save the Lewis-Gibson Collection from division and dispersal.”

Both libraries are already holders of substantial Genizah collections in their own right. Cambridge is home to the largest collection in the world with some 200,000 fragments out of the estimated 350,000 to be found in public collections worldwide. Meanwhile, the Bodleian holds 25,000 world-class Genizah folios, the size and quality of which rank it among the most important global collections.

A genizah is a sacred storeroom, a room set aside inside a synagogue for the interment of old religious writings, which, because they contain names of God or use the sacred Hebrew alphabet, cannot be simply discarded. For more than 1,000 years the Jewish community of Fustat (now a suburb of Cairo) deposited all manner of writings (not just sacred texts) into the sacred storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue.

̽��ֱ��significance of the manuscripts haphazardly stored in the synagogue was recognised towards the end of the 19th century, and the Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection represents some of the earliest fragments to emerge from it. Given its status as a ‘hand-picked’ collection, the Lewis-Gibson Collection contains perhaps more than its share of rare or unique items compared to its modest size.

Other treasures are a large leaf of Moses Maimonides’ (d. 1204) famous Commentary on the Mishnah in his own hand, an autograph poem by the medieval Spanish Hebrew poet Joseph ibn Abitur, the earliest known example of a Jewish engagement deed (Shtar Shiddukhin, from 1119), showing the complex legal relations that existed around marriage, and a rare, very early (10th-century), copy on vellum of the great Jewish sage Saadya Gaon’s translation of the Bible into Arabic.

̽��ֱ��libraries’ fundraising campaign has received an early, significant and much-welcomed boost with the promise of a £500,000 lead gift from the Polonsky Foundation which in 2010 also gifted £1.5m to Cambridge’s Digital Library Project and £2m to the Bodleian Libraries’ initiative with the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana. Both libraries are now appealing for donors to come forward and secure the remaining £700,000 necessary to buy the collection outright.

Dr Polonsky, Trustee of the Foundation, said: “I strongly support collaboration and am delighted to give momentum to the joint venture of these two great Universities in acquiring such an important manuscript collection.”

Bodley’s Librarian Dr Sarah Thomas said: “This is a rare and special opportunity to jointly acquire the Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection by Cambridge and Oxford, which combined hold almost 70 per cent of the fragments in public collections. Together, we will share the work of curating, conserving, digitising and presenting the manuscripts, making the best use of the strengths of each institution.”

̽��ֱ��Lewis-Gibson Collection holds a special place in the modern history of the Cairo Genizah. When the twin sisters showed a selection of their fragments to their friend, Cambridge scholar Solomon Schechter, he set off to Egypt to find the source. What followed was the discovery of the Cairo Genizah, changing the study of Judaism – and of the study of the wider history of the Middle East – forever.

Professor David Abulafia, author of the acclaimed ̽��ֱ��Great Sea: a human history of the Mediterranean believes that the Genizah is a unique historical archive. He said: “ ̽��ֱ��Cairo Genizah documents are like a searchlight, illuminating dark corners of the history of the Mediterranean and shedding a bright light on the social, economic and religious life of the Jews not just of medieval Egypt but of lands far away. There is nothing to compare with them as source for the history of the tenth to twelfth centuries, anywhere in Europe or the Islamic world.”

For those who would like to make a donation to the appeal to purchase this fascinating collection of medieval manuscripts, please visit our online giving page.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library and the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries have today announced their first ever joint fundraising campaign to purchase the £1.2 million ‘Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection’, currently owned by the United Reformed Church’s Westminster College.

Governors of Westminster College, Cambridge

Mrs Gibson on a camel in the Sinai, 1893.

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Ancient Bible fragments reveal a forgotten history

ns480 — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:56:50 +0000

̽��ֱ��study by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� researchers suggests that, contrary to long-accepted views, Jews continued to use a Greek version of the Bible in synagogues for centuries longer than previously thought. In some places, the practice continued almost until living memory.

̽��ֱ��key to the new discovery lay in manuscripts, some of them mere fragments, discovered in an old synagogue in Egypt and brought to Cambridge at the end of the 19th century. ̽��ֱ��so-called Cairo Genizah manuscripts have been housed ever since in Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

Now, a fully searchable online corpus (http://www.gbbj.org) has gathered these manuscripts together, making the texts and analysis of them available to other scholars for the first time.

" ̽��ֱ��translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE is said to be one of the most lasting achievements of the Jewish civilization - without it, Christianity might not have spread as quickly and as successfully as it did," explained Nicholas de Lange, Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the Faculties of Divinity and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, who led the three-year study to re-evaluate the story of the Greek Bible fragments.

"It was thought that the Jews, for some reason, gave up using Greek translations and chose to use the original Hebrew for public reading in synagogue and for private study, until modern times when pressure to use the vernacular led to its introduction in many synagogues."

Close study of the Cairo Genizah fragments by Professor de Lange led to the discovery that some contained passages from the Bible in Greek written in Hebrew letters. Others contained parts of a lost Greek translation made by a convert to Judaism named Akylas in the 2nd century CE. Remarkably, the fragments date from 1,000 years after the original translation into Greek, showing use of the Greek text was still alive in Greek-speaking synagogues in the Byzantine Empire and elsewhere.

Manuscripts in other libraries confirmed the evidence of the Cambridge fragments, and added many new details. It became clear that a variety of Greek translations were in use among Jews in the Middle Ages.

Not only does the new research offer us a rare glimpse of Byzantine Jewish life and culture, but it also illustrates the cross-fertilisation between Jewish and Christian biblical scholars in the Middle Ages. "This is a very exciting discovery for me because it confirms a hunch I had when studying Genizah fragments 30 years ago," said Professor de Lange.

̽��ֱ��online resource enables comparison of each word of the Hebrew text, the Greek translation - knows as the Septuagint after the 70 Jewish scholars said to have translated it - and the fragments of Akylas' and other Jewish translations from antiquity.

̽��ֱ��resource was created following collaboration between research teams at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, including Dr Cameron Boyd-Taylor and Dr Julia Krivoruchko, and King's College London. "This ambitious piece of collaborative digital scholarship required challenging technical difficulties to be solved," explained Paul Spence, who led the team at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's. "It draws together a wide variety of materials under a standards-based framework which provides multiple entry points into the material."

̽��ֱ��research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Image: Genizah palimpsest with Hebrew (shown upside down) written over the top of a 6th-century copy of Akylas' Greek translation (c. 125 CE) of the Books of Kings (shown the right way up); T-S 12.184r. Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

New research has uncovered a forgotten chapter in the history of the Bible, offering a rare glimpse of Byzantine Jewish life and culture.

̽��ֱ��translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE is said to be one of the most lasting achievements of the Jewish civilization - without it, Christianity might not have spread as quickly and as successfully as it did.

Professor Nicholas de Lange

Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit

Genizah fragment

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̽��ֱ��Greek Bible of the Byzantine Jews

bjb42 — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

One of the greatest and most lasting achievements of Jewish civilisation in the Graeco-Roman period was the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. It was an unprecedented project: not only was it the first translation on such a scale, but it also opened up the core teachings of the Jewish religion to Jews who did not understand the sacred language, as well as to the non-Jewish world. Without this translation, it is doubtful whether Christianity could have spread as quickly and successfully as it did. ̽��ֱ��translated books – which came to be known collectively as the Septuagint, after the 70 Jewish scholars said to have translated them – became a keystone of teaching and worship for large numbers of Jews and Christians for centuries, and still constitute the Old Testament for Greek-speaking Christians today.

̽��ֱ��study of the Christian history of these books has long been pursued in European universities. But the Jewish origin of the translations, although not entirely forgotten, has been sidelined, according to a general supposition that Jews gave up using the translations along with their use of the Greek language.

However, evidence has been unfolding to the contrary, aided by the discovery of long-lost manuscript fragments confirming that Greek Bible translations continued to be used in Byzantine Judaism. A project led by Nicholas de Lange, Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the Faculties of Divinity and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, is spearheading this re-evaluation of a mysterious time in biblical history. It is also providing the latest instalment of a quintessentially Cambridge story.

Rediscovering Jewish tradition

In the 1890s, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge was the world centre of Septuagint scholarship. Cambridge academic Solomon Schechter had returned from Cairo with the largest and by far the most important hoard of Hebrew manuscripts ever discovered. One of the most exciting discoveries to emerge from a first trawl through the fragments was a palimpsest, a manuscript that had been reused for writing another text. ̽��ֱ��original writing was from a handsome Greek copy of the Books of Kings, not in the Septuagint translation but in a later translation made in the early 2nd century CE by a convert to Judaism named Akylas. This was the first evidence of the continuous transmission of Greek Bible translations; many others were to follow.

Since the 1970s, Professor de Lange has been collecting and studying evidence for the use of Greek Bible translations by Jews in the Middle Ages. Over the past three years, these have been gathered into an online corpus that, for the first time, has made the texts and analysis of them available to other scholars.

With funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the corpus is being prepared with the help of Dr Cameron Boyd-Taylor and Dr Julia Krivoruchko in the Faculty, as well as the highly specialised IT expertise of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London. ̽��ֱ��fully searchable corpus permits comparison of each word with the Hebrew text, the Septuagint, and the fragments of Akylas’ and other Jewish translations from antiquity.

Lifting the shroud of mystery

̽��ֱ��project will aid understanding of the Jewish tradition of Bible translation in Greek-speaking lands throughout the Middle Ages: who produced the translations, who used them, and for what purposes? How widespread was their use at different times? To what extent was it an oral rather than a written tradition? ̽��ֱ��project will offer us a rare glimpse of Byzantine Jewish life and culture, the cross-fertilisation between Jewish and Christian biblical scholars in the Middle Ages, and add to our understanding of the history of the Greek language at that time.

For more information, please contact the author Professor Nicholas de Lange (nrml1@cam.ac.uk; https://gbbj.org/) at the Faculty of Divinity.

Image: Genizah palimpsest with Hebrew (shown upside down) written over the top of a 6th-century copy of Akylas’ Greek translation (c. 125 CE) of the Books of Kings (shown the right way up); T-S 12.184r. Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

Researchers at the Faculty of Divinity are using ancient manuscript fragments to re-evaluate a forgotten episode of biblical history.

Since the 1970s, Professor de Lange has been collecting and studying evidence for the use of Greek Bible translations by Jews in the Middle Ages.

Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit

Genizah fragment

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