genizah

genizah, in Judaism, a repository for timeworn sacred manuscripts and ritual objects, generally located in the attic or cellar of a synagogue. In the Middle Ages most synagogues had a genizah, because ceremonial burial (often with the remains of a pious scholarly Jew) was thought to be the only fitting manner of disposing of sacred documents. Countless sacred manuscripts—called shemot (“names”) because they contained the name of God—were thus left to gather dust or to disintegrate slowly.

In 1896 Solomon Schechter investigated a genizah in the old Ezra synagogue in Cairo. In time, some 300,000 fragmentary manuscripts were uncovered there, a cache so priceless that biblical scholars referred to the site simply as “the genizah.” This vast collection of liturgical, legal, commercial, and literary documents—among them a fragment of the original Hebrew text of Ecclesiasticus—generally revolutionized the study of the medieval history of Palestinian and Middle Eastern Jewry. Schechter’s conclusions regarding a Zadokite sect were confirmed years later, after the discovery (late 1940s and ’50s) of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The scrolls were found in caves that apparently also served as genizot. The manuscripts from the Cairo genizah are now preserved in many of the great libraries of the world.