GENIZAH, CAIRO

Introduction

The term genizah is a word shortened from the rabbinical Hebrew phrase bet genizah (see also *Genizah). Its counterpart in late biblical Hebrew is genez (pl. genazim, ginzei) which in Esther evidently means a "treasury," as well as the term ganzak (i Chron. 28:11, ve-ganzakkav). The term ganzakkah occurs a few times in rabbinical Hebrew, along with bet genazim, in the sense of "treasury." The verbal noun genizah signifies the act of storing something away, and is used a few times with bet in the phrase bet genizah to signify a "house of storing"; subsequently, in colloquial but not literary usage, the bet was dropped and genizah alone came to mean "the [place of] storing." There are other cases of verbal nouns used as nouns of place in Semitic languages.

The Jewish custom of storing away old books and manuscripts seems to have grown out of the rabbinical rule that worn-out Torah Scrolls should be buried, hence that all papers bearing the Tetragrammaton or other divine appellations should likewise be buried. Such manuscripts as a rule were only temporarily stored away in some chamber of the synagogue until such time as they were able to be given a permanent burial in the cellar or in the local cemetery; but in time the first process seems to have become as important as the second, and in some places, to take precedence over it. Such was the case with the genizah, or bet genizah, of the ancient synagogue of Fustat.

The term "genizah" (pl. genizot) should be used and understood as a generic term. There was more than one genizah. In Cairo alone there was apparently more than one such storage, or deposit place, for old, outworn writings, mostly, but not exclusively, in Hebrew script. An important genizah was at a Karaite synagogue, which was apparently the source of much of the material that came to be known as the Firkovitch Collection, housed in the National Russian Library in St. Petersburg. There were additional such institutions in other communities of the east as analyzed by Y. Khalfon-Stillman and M. Cohen.

Therefore, any genizah is not an organized comprehensive archive or deposit library. Furthermore, genizot are not representative of the daily or spiritual life of their users. Yet, they are more representative than any private archive or collection of books. In the absence of comprehensive archives and deposit libraries the importance of the genizot lies in their randomness. It is this randomness which makes the contents of genizot so varied and rich, and which kept for us organized family archives of such families who were not immortalized in "classical" sources together with haphazardly preserved documents, official documents relating to communities or persons or properties that were no longer extant and were of no interest to anybody. The same randomness also preserved for posterity complete or fragmentary literary works that at some point of time seem to have lost their attraction or importance for their owners in particular, or for the reading public at large, or for book collectors and dealers. The common denominator of almost all texts found in Cairo genizot is the Hebrew letter; not necessarily the language. The Hebrew letter was regarded holy since it was studied in the context of religious life; it was taught in order to participate in the public synagogue ceremonies and prayers, expecting children to present what they had learnt in class. The less the Hebrew language was understood the more it became holy since the sign became a symbol and reminder to the elementary studies of the language. Hence any remnants of it were regarded holy and kept in the most respectable way discards could be kept. No wonder therefore that the genizot contain all signs of documented life, even the most secular ones like bankers' accounts, merchants' lists, children's jottings, and even transliterations of other religious texts as the Koran or the New Testament or any scientific text.

A large section of the material relevant both to history, i.e., documents, and religious thought, as in fact many other areas of knowledge and learning, is in Judeo-Arabic. Hebrew translations to Arabic and Judeo-Arabic works, started mainly in the second half of the 12^th century, are rather rare among the genizot.

During *Fatimid rule in Egypt (969–1171) the newly-founded city of Cairo mainly served as the political and administrative center of the country and the realm. The great metropolis of Egypt was Fustat, a few miles to the south, and the majority of the Jewish population lived there. This community had a tripartite religious complexion: aside from the sectarian Karaite Jews, there were two groups of Rabbanites – the one showing allegiance to the Jewish academies of Babylonia; and the other group, the "Palestinians," whose allegiance was to the Palestinian academy. These groups had many differing customs and legal regulations; they consequently possessed separate synagogues in each of which a different custom prevailed. The one which has survived until today and from which the Cairo Genizah fragments come, was not the one of the Karaites (as a number of writers formerly thought) but that of the Palestinian Rabbanite Jews. This synagogue is still standing in Old Cairo after its renovation by the World Jewish Congress in the 1980s, almost a century after the previous community renovations of the site that might have led to the discovery of the Genizah.

Many documents have been discovered during the years which throw light on the history of the synagogues of Fustat and Cairo and on the basis of them scholars traced with some exactness the important changes through which the communities passed, including the status of the waqf, or property holdings, of the several synagogues during the reign of al-Hākim. It seems most likely that due to this series of acts there is relatively little documentary material of the preceding age among the Genizah papers.

Collections of Genizah Documents

The largest and most usable collection of the Ben-Ezra synagogue's Genizah manuscripts is at University Library, Cambridge, where the individual fragments were set, at the beginning, either under glass or in bound volumes, or, in the case of some thousands, were placed loosely in large shelve-boxes. Holdings are dispersed: Cambridge University Library Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection, containing some 135,000–150,000 "fragments." This Genizah collection accounts apparently for about 60% of all Genizah fragments known and available today; New York – The Library, Jewish Theological Seminary of America (jtsa), has about 30,000 Genizah "fragments." Other more modest collections are scattered all over the world.

writing materials of the genizah texts

University Library, Cambridge, possesses fragments of a papyrus scroll found in the Genizah and containing old liturgical poetry (t-s. 6). A few papyrus documents, perhaps emanating from the Genizah, are also located in the Erzherzog-Rainer Papyrus-Sammlung in Vienna and in Heidelberg. All other texts from the Genizah, however, are written either on vellum, parchment, or paper, with the preponderance of texts being written on paper. The vellum and parchment texts are either fragments of Scripture used for worship purposes (which by halakhic precept had to be written on skin) as well as for ceremonial purposes or, more importantly, old texts (10^th–11^th centuries) of either a literary or documentary nature. A few are written in a palimpsest way, namely, rewritten on deleted elder text. The few very old documents emanating from non-Islamic countries are written on these materials. Texts written on paper seem to have come largely into vogue during the 11^th century. The paper of 11^th–13^th-century texts is of a heavy weight, and as a rule brown in color, whereas Genizah papers of later periods tend to be thinner and more lightly colored.

History of Genizah Discoveries

Knowledge of the existence of the Cairo Genizah spread slowly to the West. The first traveler who appears to have been there in modern times was Simon van *Geldern, a grand-uncle of Heinrich Heine, who in 1752 visited Egypt and recorded in his diary that he had been to the "synagogue of Elijah" and made a search through the Genizah, situated within it. Moshe Haim Capsutto met an Italian scholar and traveler who visited the synagogue and gave a generous description of the site and relying on this source some reconstruction of the site was suggested. Capsutto, however, did not refer to the chamber and its content. Abraham *Firkovich, the Russian Karaite who on his trips to the East collected great numbers of rare, valuable, and ancient manuscripts, visited Egypt in September/October 1864 (to wit, the second half of Elul 5624) during his second visit to the Middle East (1863–65). He gave explicit and detailed descriptions about his findings and whereabouts during his visit. His main and first interest in Egypt was the Karaite genizot of Cairo, and indeed he took back with him to Crimea a substantial amount of Mss that were sold to the Russian National Library in 1876, two years after his death. The Firkovitch Collection is by far the world's largest and most important collection of Judeo-Arabic manuscripts, containing over 10,000 Judeo-Arabic manuscripts ranging in size from a single page to 800 folios. And indeed, the way Firkovitch described his work in the genizot (before arriving to Egypt and in Egypt likewise) points to a very selective method – he would choose the best of manuscripts and leave the others in order to avoid un-needed investment both in time, money, and loads. While dedicating almost all of his time to the Karaite "genizah," Firkovitch visited Ben-Ezra synagogue, accompanied by the chief rabbi, R. Elijah Israel Shirizly, and claimed to be requested to take with him also the treasures of Ben-Ezra and of the Rabbanite synagogue of Alexandria. Firkovitch described in his letter to his son-in-law, Gabriel, in Russia that he saw the Ben-Ezra Genizah and planned to take care of it likewise. Shortage of money and length of his stay in the region may have accompanied his desire/haste to share his findings from this second visit with colleagues and scholars and brought him to leave the Middle East without emptying, or even taking, the Ben-Ezra hoard. According to his letters and tentative catalogues the material brought from Egypt (named by him Gefen Mitzrayim after the verse in Psalms 80:9 and also pinkas kadmoniyot shel genizat Miẓrayim) was from the Karaite genizah and Basatin cemetery, and indeed it consists of dominant Karaite material. Some important rabbinical works are testified to be owned by prominent Karaite scholars and affluent members of that community. A major question remains however whether some of the material sold to the Russian National Library came from the Ben-Ezra room, since in a few cases other parts of the same copies can be found in western libraries thought to brought from Ben-Ezra. At the same time it might as well be the case that fragments left by Firkovitch, that were originally part of the books he took with him, were brought by others to these libraries mistakenly referred to as Ben-Ezra. At this time of writing (October 2005) not all Firkovitch and other related archives have been searched and new data may clarify this point.

In the same summer of 1864 the traveler Jacob *Saphir attempted to see the manuscripts hidden in Ben-Ezra synagogue, but he was not as fortunate as Firkovich had been. The beadle was reluctant to allow him entrance into the chamber, which he claimed to be an abode of snakes and demons; once inside, he could not get to many of the manuscripts, for the entire collection had been buried under debris that had been deposited there by workmen some years previously. He had to content himself with a few worthless scraps, but later remarked in his travel diary, "Yet who knows what else is to be found underneath?"

Toward the end of the 19^th century local dealers in antiquities began the clandestine task of removing certain fragments from their old hiding place. Cyrus *Adler visited Egypt in 1891 and was able to purchase a small collection of manuscripts, which he brought back with him to the United States and later bequeathed to *Dropsie College, now the Center of Advanced Jewish Studies of the University of Pennsylvania. Oxford's *Bodleian Library also acquired about 2,600 fragments in the same way, mainly through the periodic purchases of Greville Chester and A.H. Sayce. In 1896 Elkan N. *Adler made a trip to Egypt, and while in Cairo was permitted by the Jewish communal authorities to take a sack full of Genizah documents with him; using an old Torah-mantle which they gave him for that purpose, he stuffed in as many of the documents as he safely could and took them back with him to England. These manuscripts later found their way to the U.S. and became the nucleus of the collection of the *Jewish Theological Seminary of America. By this time the fame of the Genizah, induced partly by the reports of the abovementioned travelers and partly by publications in the early 1890s of Genizah studies by Rabbi S.A. *Wertheimer (who also sold fragments to the Bodleian Library), had begun to spread. In May 1896 Mrs. A.S. Lewis and Mrs. M.D. Gibson of England brought manuscripts which they had purchased to Cambridge and showed them to Solomon *Schechter. He was able to identify one of the leaves as part of the original Hebrew text of *Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus). Thereafter, Schechter sent word of his discovery to Adolph *Neubauer at Oxford, who soon announced that he had discovered nine leaves of this same long-forgotten text among the Genizah manuscripts of the Bodleian Library. Schechter at once proposed that a trip be made to Cairo to ascertain the possibilities of bringing the Genizah treasures to England. Money was secured for this purpose from Charles Taylor, the master of St. John's College; in December 1896 Schechter sailed for Egypt, and once there proceeded immediately with his task of securing the documents. The communal authorities consented to allow him to take practically that entire precious "hoard of Hebrew manuscripts" back to England.

With Schechter's return to Cambridge the first period of activity involved in making the new manuscript sources available to the world came to an end. The old Ben-Ezra synagogue of Fustat had been almost completely emptied of its contents, which were scattered throughout the length and breadth of Europe, and had also reached the U.S. During the years, many public and private libraries – in London, Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester, Paris, Strasburg, Breslau, Frankfurt, Vienna, Budapest, St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), Kiev, Moscow, New York, Washington, d.c., Philadelphia, Toronto, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem University Library – managed to acquire Genizah fragments in smaller or larger quantities, with Cambridge in the foremost place. Soon after Schechter's return to Cambridge, the time came to explore the texts themselves. The discovery among the Genizah manuscripts of fragments of Ben Sira immediately set off a search for still further remnants of this old work, and for other ancient texts which were (rightly) assumed to be hidden either among the hundreds of thousands of leaves brought back by Firkovitch and by Schechter, or in the other collections. Due to past Soviet policy which prevented access of western scholars to the Firkovitch collections, these manuscripts have been largely unknown to scholars. The vast majority of the works contained in the manuscripts are not known from other sources. Study of these manuscripts and publication of their contents is expected to revolutionize the knowledge of Judeo-Arabic culture and to be a major contribution to the study of Jewish history overall. This collection was photographed due to an agreement between the Russian National Library and the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. Scholars had access in the last decade of the 20^th century to the treasures of the Firkovitch collection and a great deal of attention has been given to its deciphering and cataloguing.

Luckier were most other collections. A new period in the history of Jewish studies opens after the arrival of the fragments from Cairo to Western libraries. As scholars began their explorations ancient texts came to light – not only Hebrew sources, but Greek and Syriac ones as well. Among the Greek fragments brought to light were portions of the Jews translation made by Aquila. This translation, which differed from that of the Septuagint in being far more literal and meticulous, yet considerably less comprehensible, constituted one of the columns of the multi-versioned Jews, the Hexapla, edited by Origen in the first part of the third century. It was employed mainly by Jews in the synagogal service, but fell into disuse when Greek declined in reading and speaking by the people after the Islamic conquests. In the case of these fragments and of texts containing parts of the Palestinian Syriac version of the Jews and of the Hexapla, the original writing, while still legible, was partially effaced through long and constant use, and a later scribe had employed the parchments to copy down some Hebrew liturgical hymns which to the men of that age were undoubtedly of much greater worth than the incomprehensible words written beneath. Another fact of interest is related to a statement of Origen, to the effect that "in the more exact [biblical] versions, the Name [of God] is written in Hebrew characters – not the modern [Aramaic square] Hebrew, but the ancient [Canaanite] kind." Tallying exactly with the description given by Origen, the Greek fragments of Aquila were found to employ consistently the old Canaanite letters rather than the square characters or the Greek word for God [Kyrios] when mentioning the Tetragrammaton.

While these discoveries were in progress Schechter worked on important sectarian manuscripts. One of these turned out to be fragments of the Aramaic law book of *Anan ben David (eighth century); when added to the previously published parts of Anan's law book (edited by the Russian Jewish scholar Albert *Harkavy in 1897–98), it considerably increased understanding of the methods of this schismatic. Another short document created a sensation when finally published by Schechter in 1910. At about the turn of the century he uncovered fragments of a text containing laws and quasi-historical statements of an unknown Jewish sect; a study of the text brought him to the conclusion that the represented schismatic group was related to the "saddukiyya" especially mentioned by the Karaite writer al-*Kirkisānī as being a Jewish sect of pre-Exilic times. Since the views of this sect did not conform to those of the historical Sadducees, but in a few important respects did correspond to certain doctrines of al-Qirqisānī's "saddukiyya," Schechter judged the leaves to be fragments of a work written by "Zadokites," i.e., people belonging to the sect mentioned by al-Kirkisānī, or to a closely similar one; thus, while the text was copied down in medieval times, the document itself went back to Second Temple times. An extensive controversy over the age and importance of this text followed its publication. The discovery in 1947 and following years of the first *Dead Sea Scrolls – some of which proved to be closely related in phraseology and ideas to the Cambridge document – made it evident that Schechter had been correct in his intuition that this text had been conceived perhaps 21 centuries previously. It is not known how it came into the Genizah in fragments of two medieval copies.

Another of Schechter's early discoveries was the remains of an extensive literary epistle concerning the kingdom of the *Khazars. The ruler of this Caspian kingdom, and along with him many of his subjects, accepted Judaism before the ninth century. Some correspondence between the Khazar king Joseph and Ḥisdai ibn Shaprut had been published at the end of the 16^th century and much later (in 1879) by Harkavy who used material brought from Cairo to Russia; the Cambridge document considerably increased the knowledge of the conversion and of subsequent Khazar history, and supplied many useful geographical details as well. In recent years still another Cambridge Genizah manuscript pertaining to the Khazars was discovered by N. Golb.

Information about the "*Four Captives" – Shemariah, Ḥushi'el, Moses, and Ḥanokh – who were thought to have come from Babylonia or Southern Italy in the tenth century, been captured by pirates, and subsequently sold out of captivity, and later to have founded the new seats of learning in Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, also came to light in the Cambridge documents. In this case some of the legendary stories surrounding these figures were seen as suspicious; as it could be shown from a letter of Ḥushi'el's (written by his son Hannan'el/Elhannan) that he had settled in Kairouan (now *Tunisia), after a trip there from some Christian country, probably Italy. Shemariah, on the other hand, turned out to be a native of Egypt. Thus, the whole story of the capture by pirates, as told, at least of these two sages was evidently a fabrication.

A personality which emerged most clearly from the Genizah was that of *Saadiah ben Joseph al-Fayyumi, the gaon of Sura. It became clear from Genizah texts that it was Saadiah who was chiefly responsible for conducting the struggle over the calendaric authority of the Babylonian academy which had been initiated by Aaron ben Meir, the head of the rival Palestinian school (922), and that he initiated a bitter quarrel with the exilarch, who had appointed him gaon (928), and with the latter's followers. Other polemics of his also came to light with the publication of treatises against the heretic Hiwi al-Balkhi, the masoretic scholar Aaron ben Asher, and Anan ben David and various later Karaites, many of whom fought Saadiah with equal vigor. Another side of the gaon's personality was revealed in some of his letters which were discovered during the early years of the 20^th century. Many fragments of his Arabic commentary on the Jews were found, especially by Hartwig Hirschfeld, and parts of his grammatical treatises – probably the first systematic works on Hebrew grammar to be composed – were edited years afterward by S.L. Skoss, although a beginning had been made by Harkavy. Fragments of his legal (by M. Ben-Sasson and R. Brody) and philosophical (by H. Ben-Shammai and S. Stroumsa) writings were also discovered, and one manuscript emanating from his children gave the exact date of his birth (882) and the approximate time of his emigration from Egypt to Palestine, Syria, and finally Babylonia. Indeed, if all the Saadiah fragments that were discovered in the Genizah had not been found, it is unlikely that H. Malter's richly documented study of the gaon would have been possible. Much important research on the Saadiah fragments, and on the polemic literature of that age, was carried out by Moshe Zucker, Yehuda Ratzaby, Eliezer Schlossberg, and Haggai Ben-Shammai, especially on Saadiah's biblical translations and commentaries. Saadiah's poetry was enriched and studied through the reconstruction of his Siddur (S. Assaf, I. Joel, I. Davidson, E. Fleischer, R. Brody, and J. Tobi).

The search for lost writings of the gaon of Sura also led to the discovery of numerous legal responsa of the other geonim of Babylonia; many of the Hebrew ones were first edited by A. Harkavy, S. Assaf, and L. Ginzberg and later also those in Judeo-Arabic by Sh. Abramson, R. Brody, and M.A. Friedman. These fragments were of value not only for the legal discussions they contained, but also for the inadvertent descriptions which the geonim gave of the way of life pursued by their countrymen. L. Ginzberg and J. Sussman found old leaves of the Jerusalem Talmud, which were of service in clearing up numerous obscurities in the printed texts of this work. Letters of the geonim were recovered by Schechter, J. Mann, and B.M Lewin, and new discoveries were made in the field of midrashic literature. A work of considerable interest was the Book of Precepts by Ḥefeẓ b. Maẓli'aḥ, a tenth-century dignitary of *Mosul, which was published by Benzion Halper in 1915. Much work has been done on the legal and halakhic texts by S. Abramson of Jerusalem, who published works on R. Nissim Gaon and on other subjects, based mainly on Genizah manuscripts.

Another area of Genizah studies was initiated with Paul Kahle's arrival in England from Germany. A considerable number of biblical manuscripts were being discovered in the collections which exhibited different systems of vocalization from the one commonly in use (i.e., the so-called Tiberian system, with most of the vowel signs written below the line). Such texts, which possessed supra-linear punctuation, and which later were discovered to be of three different kinds, had indeed been known before. Specimens of the two "Babylonian" systems were published during the last half of the 19^th century, and the third system, "punctuation of the Land of Israel," was mentioned as far back as the 12^th century in Simḥah b. Samuel's Maḥzor Vitry. The Genizah fragments greatly supplemented the then-known collections of Babylonian texts and gave the first examples of the Palestinian variety. Kahle was the first to realize the possibilities inherent in the new finds and to take full advantage of them. During his several trips to England, where he settled after the advent of Nazism, Kahle copied and photographed large quantities of material, and in the course of the years was able to publish extensive studies on the biblical traditions of the Babylonian and Palestinian Jews. This was of importance not only for determining what were the various systems of punctuation, their probable dates of inception, and spheres of influence but also for arriving at the pronunciation of Hebrew, before the time of the Tiberian punctuators, in the various countries of the Arabic world where Jews lived. Furthermore, it was possible to see in what ways the ninth-century biblical scholars of Tiberias had been influenced by other traditions in evolving their own "standard" pronunciation of Hebrew.

The "punctuation of the Land of Israel" could be discovered in only a few of the Genizah biblical fragments. Kahle, however, found other kinds of texts which preserved this system – fragments of the Palestinian Aramaic translation of the Torah and a few leaves of the Mishnah and of early liturgic poetry (piyyut). Almost without exception, each of these proved to have its own particular value for the history of Hebrew vocalization. Kahle and his students contributed much to the understanding of these texts. The various texts of the Aramaic translation of the Jews which came to light were highly instructive, for they supported the view of scholars such as Geiger and Zunz that there were earlier substrata in the official Aramaic translations (Targum Onkelos to the Torah and Targum Jonathan to the Prophets). To a large extent these were preserved in Genizah manuscripts of the so-called Palestinian Targum, the author(s) of which version not only interpreted some passages differently but also added homiletic remarks. The standard Targum Onkelos itself was then able to be subjected to renewed scrutiny, as collections in the Genizah collections of fragments of this Targum were found that had been written and vocalized in Babylonia many centuries previously. This field enjoyed two more generations of scholars focusing their works on it – E.J. Revel, Y. Yahalom, I. Yevin, and I. Eldar.

The Genizah also supplied specimens of the Mishnah text vocalized in the Babylonian manner. There is, of course, no traditional Tiberian vocalization of the Mishnah, the pronunciation having been handed down orally from generation to generation. This Babylonian tradition of the pronunciation of mishnaic Hebrew, which differs considerably from that employed by Jews of the West, is corroborated to a very high degree by the living Yemenite tradition of pronouncing post-biblical Hebrew – a fact demonstrated later by H. Yalon and S. Morag.

Thus, even during the first few decades of Genizah research, outstanding discoveries were made in many fields of Jewish learning. The job of sorting out the Leningrad Fragments has been at the core of the work of several scholars over the last century, among them Harkavy, Strack, Kahle, Fenton, Sklare, Beit Arie, Glazer, Almagor, Ben-Shammai, Stroumsa, and Ben-Sasson, but it is still far from being completed. A large part of the Cambridge fragments was studied by Schechter, E.J. Worman (a librarian at Cambridge), and Hartwig Hirschfeld who published a considerable number of manuscripts. Not only the Hebrew fragments but thousands of Arabic documents were placed in their respective places in boxes, bound volumes, or – in the case of exceptionally valuable and fragile pieces – under glass. In the last decades the management of the Cambridge Genizah Research Unit has been allocating substantial attention and resources with the goal of intensive cataloguing of its collection according to subjects and fields. In Oxford, Neubauer and A. Cowley issued a catalog of the fragments deposited there; the same was accomplished at the British Museum by Margoliouth, and was eventually also done for the Adler collection at Dropsie College and the Freer Collection of Detroit (later removed to Washington). The collection given by the Russian archimandrite of Jerusalem, Antonin Kapustin, was fully described by Harkavy, who was in charge of the Hebrew collections at the Russian Imperial Library in St. Petersburg and was later published by A.I. Katsh.

The publication of important fragments from the Cairo Genizah, covering many aspects of Judaism, has continued. Many manuscripts and fragments in the various libraries of the world, particularly in the Russian National Library of St. Petersburg [= Leningrad], the Schechter-Taylor collection in Cambridge and the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York (N. Danzig catalogue), have been catalogued and edited by different scholars. As a result of these, it has become possible to reconstruct the position of the Jews in Ereẓ Israel and the Middle East in the religious, cultural, and economic spheres from the 10th to the 13th centuries. On the other hand, a large number of texts and thousands of fragments remain un-catalogued, and it is estimated that there are no less than 250,000 Genizah items, of which about 50,000 deal with biblical exegesis, language, Jewish law, Talmud, and piyyut.

Liturgy and Poetry

The poetic literature of the Genizah was especially prominent and its discoveries enabled new understanding of the history of Jewish worship as well as of the diversity of Jewish literature in the late Byzantine and Muslim periods. A new field of research emerged which is credited to the discoveries of Cairo genizot – the study of the Ereẓ-Israeli [known also as Palestinian] rite of prayers and synagogue life. At an early date Kahle realized the value of the Palestinian liturgical fragments for the history of Hebrew vocalization, but the literary significance of these texts, in the minds of many scholars, was far greater. While it is quite frequently difficult to make sense of the hints and allusions of the early liturgists (paytanim), and to comprehend their poetic vocabulary, it is also true that what can be understood is often poetry of supreme beauty and fine religious feeling.

The first paytanic texts were published in facsimile at the end of the 19^th century – but only for the Greek and Syriac writing which they contained underneath. Israel Davidson recognized in the later script five compositions of the early Palestinian poet Yannai, of whose writings only a single poem was known during the previous centuries. Davidson's publication (1919) marked the beginning of systematic investigations in the field of paytanic literature. Kahle's students took a considerable part in this work, as did Davidson himself. At the same time the most important step was taken with the founding, in 1930, of the Schocken Research Institute for Hebrew Poetry, which began its activities in Berlin and transferred to Jerusalem a short time after the rise of Nazism. In the first few years of its existence the Schocken Institute collected several thousand photographs of Genizah manuscripts, including many in Leningrad. Among them were scores of fragments containing the piyyutim of Yannai, on the basis of which Menahem Zulay published in 1938 a collection of over 800 compositions by this poet.

The scholars of the institute – H. Brody, J. Schirmann, A.M. Habermann, and Zulay – were chiefly responsible for knowledge of literary activities of the paytanim, and of the religious and secular poets of Spain. Brody discovered many religious poems and encomiums of Hai Gaon, Moses ibn Gikatilla, and Abraham Ibn Ezra among the Genizah fragments. A score of contemporary poems by Moses Ibn Ezra were described by Schirmann, whose success in this research was greatly aided by Genizah manuscripts. Schirmann was the first to systematically explore the poetic fragments in the libraries of England, and he catalogued these and had them photostatted for the institute. Zulay demonstrated that the paytanic literature was of a class seldom equaled in the poetic literature of the Jews. He not only discovered the writings of many of the unknown early Palestinian poets but also added immensely to the knowledge of those already known – Yannai, Kallir, and Solomon al-Sanjari. He also proved that the country which in the time of Zunz had been regarded as barren of all creative production during the early Middle Ages was in reality a center, if not the center, of paytanic activity that continued unabated until the Crusades. These poems, far from artificial, could not be considered as only a subterfuge by which the Jews sought to avoid the consequences of Justinian's decrees prohibiting the deuterosis (or study of the rabbinic exposition of Scripture). Zulay showed – on the basis of the Genizah texts – that the Jews of Palestine constantly had to add to the set prayers of the day, and inspire them with new vigor. Much important work on these texts was conducted by Ezra *Fleischer of Jerusalem through the second half of the 20^th century. Fleischer represents the demand to publish broad scholarly works based on the genizot in contradiction to previous generations' work of publishing fragments and small pieces of information reflecting the excitement of the very early meeting with new material. His broad works consist of extensive reconstruction of complicated oeuvres of the time and their analysis in the broadest cultural and historical contexts. Among his works one may find an intensive analysis of the Palestinian rites based on earlier publications (J. Mann, N. Wieder, and N. Fried), correcting their partial pictures and drawing a fresh new representation of that forgotten rite; the profile of old-new poets like Sa'id Ben Babshad, Solomon the Babylonian, and even R. Judah Halevi. A group of students of Schirmann, Fleischer, and S. Spiegel of the jts has continued the research and opened new venues: Y. Yahalom, Y. Tobi, R. Scheindlin, Sh. Elizur and T. Be'eri. In this discipline, as in any other of the Genizah research, typical publications of the fourth generation consist of two aspects – publication of extensive new material and the drawing up of a broad analysis of a substantial part of a scholarly field.

Historical Discoveries

In 1915 Jacob Mann began to search through the British collections. During 1915–20 he studied the fragmentary documents of the Genizah, gathering data for a history of the Egyptian and Palestinian Jews from the 10^th to the 12^th centuries. There were extant remnants of the copies of letters of the Jewish community of Cairo-Fustat, once one of the leading centers of Jewish population. On the basis of these fragments it was possible to reconstruct the personalities of the people and the significant events in their collective history.

The task that Mann first set out to accomplish was twofold: that of establishing a chronological sequence from the mass of data, and of describing the important religious and communal authorities of Egypt and Palestine during the period involved. These are the chief characteristics of his study, The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine under the Fatimid Caliphs (2 vols., 1920–22). Later, when professor of history at Hebrew Union College, he was able to supplement this material in two additional volumes entitled Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature. Such outstanding figures as Solomon b. Judah and Ephraim b. Shemariah, leading dignitaries of Egyptian Jewry, were first fully revealed by Mann. It became clear from his work in what towns of Palestine and Egypt the Jews had chiefly settled. There was much that he elucidated about the communal ban (ḥerem), the ransoming of captives, the functions of the head of the Jews [= the *nagid], and the Palestinian custom of completing a Torah cycle only once every three years (to this latter subject he devoted his final book, The Bible as Read and Preached in the Old Synagogue, which is also based chiefly on Genizah material). Mann described the whole complicated story of the relations between the Rabbanites and Karaites – especially those in Jerusalem – and cast new light on the writings and activities of such Karaite notables as Daniel al-Qumisi, Sahl b. Maẓli'aḥ, and Salomon b. Jeroham. Ḥisdai ibn Shaprut was revealed as a statesman of the first rank, to whom appeals were sent from other lands, and who corresponded with Helena the empress of Byzantium. Mann also uncovered the story of the Norman proselyte to Judaism, Obadiah ha-Ger. His historical research in the Genizah treasures provided a scientific foundation which could be built upon and elaborated by later scholars.

The first scholars who explored the Genizah manuscripts pursued their own particular interests in studying the documents. They turned, in so doing, mainly to the documents written in Hebrew and Aramaic, languages which were prominent in the Genizah finds. Only a few researchers gave their attention to the mass of documents written in Arabic, which for hundreds of years had been the vernacular of the Jews of Egypt and the Near East. The score or more of Judeo-Arabic fragments which Hartwig Hirschfeld published were mainly of literary interest: remnants of the writings of Saadiah Gaon, some texts pertaining to the polemics between Karaites and Rabbanites, a few autograph fragments of *Maimonides, and some short documents pertaining to *Muhammad and the Jews of Khaybar. Samuel Poznański used some Judeo-Arabic fragments (some from the Russian genizot collections) for his own researches on the Karaites and leading rabbinic figures of the Middle Ages; and other scholars – I. *Goldziher, W. Baecher, and G. Margoliouth – also made contributions. This work, however, was sporadic in nature, and gave few clues to the value of the Judeo-Arabic fragments. Even Mann relied mainly on Hebrew documents in producing his works; however, his appreciation of the Arabic texts grew in time, and considerably more of them were used in his Texts and Studies than in his first work. All agreed that the fragments were important, but little was done to make their contents known.

In the early 1930s the Genizah papers became a subject of interest in Jerusalem, mainly as a result of Mann's investigations and the establishment of the Institutes of Jewish Studies and Oriental Studies at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. There it was possible to study the way of life of numerous communities from Arabic-speaking lands and to become intimately acquainted with their language. Some of the scholars in Jerusalem thus developed a close familiarity with the cultures of the Middle East, and under these conditions it was possible to make considerable advances in Genizah research.

D.H. Baneth did the most important work in establishing Arabic Genizah research on a sound philological basis. Philological correctness and exactitude were essential to the proper understanding of these texts; sometimes scholars who preceded Baneth had been led into making blunders in understanding the vernacular used in the manuscripts (which quite often differed considerably from the literary language). In conjunction with S. Assaf, Baneth published a series of Genizah studies which rank as exemplary specimens of such writing. The historical information he elucidated from them was also of value; he discovered in one document that it had been a prevalent custom among the Egyptian Jews to determine, through witnesses, whether a couple who planned to marry were of the same social and economic status (Heb. hagunim).

Assaf was mainly interested in the Genizah papers for the information they contained about the legal, social, and cultural history of the Jews. He found numerous documents about the Jews in Palestine from the time of its conquest by Omar until the period of the Crusades, and afterward as well. It was learned from a tradition represented in one document which he discovered that when the Arabs conquered Jerusalem, Omar allowed them to build or occupy only 70 homes (although they had asked for 200); they chose the southern part of the city as their quarter, and the first Jews to resettle there were some families from Tiberias. Other texts which Assaf published and elaborated upon provided information about the slave trade, in which he thought to confirm that the Jews of that time engaged in it (although they could not take Muslims as slaves); new information was derived about Jewish trade in the Mediterranean, as well as the main centers of learning in Palestine and elsewhere. Other texts of importance pertaining to Palestine were published by Braslavski, among them a "tourist guide" to Jews who came in pilgrimage to the holy city, mentioning local sites of interest. E. Strauss (later Ashtor), the historian of Jewish life during the Mamluk period, published a letter in 1940 which was written in Aden and addressed by the sender to a business associate in Fustat; it mentions Jews traveling to India on their own ships, taking various goods with them to sell in Malabar. Other texts, when finally deciphered and interpreted, revealed the economic and social life of the Jews of Egypt and neighboring lands in great detail, and, incidentally, matters pertaining to general Islamic history and economic development. Ashtor's later publications, including his History of the Jews of Muslim Spain, numerous articles on economic and social life, and his book-length study of prices and salaries in the medieval Near East (Histoire des prix et des salaires dans l'Orient médiéval, 1969), rely heavily on Genizah manuscripts.

However, with all the real importance of Mann's works as pioneering ones, which guided generations of historians, and his awareness of the uniqueness of these materials in comparison to whatever sources of Jewish history that had been known previously, and with his enthusiasm to publish this wealth of materials, he saw this history mainly as a rather formal history of texts, and not of concrete human and social actualities and processes, the like of Ashtor's works based on these documents.

The most important accomplishment, or achievement, in the field of history is no doubt the monumental oeuvre of S.D. *Goitein. Goitein was initially educated within this unusual combination of deep rooted Jewish tradition and 19^th-century German humanism. He was then trained as a philologist and developed it in the years he worked at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in the rigorous methods so typical of German universities. He later turned his attention to Islamic historical sources, and still later made another turn, to Genizah studies, mainly on the documentary material. In his works the extent to which the Genizah has shaped the picture of the medieval history of Jewish communities in the East came to its fullest manifestation. The uniqueness of his works is imaginable only as a result of the uniqueness of the material, namely the fact that here we have at our disposal direct sources that shed light not only on the actions and the views of the leaders of the communities, but also, and mainly, of many ordinary individuals that made up the rank and file of these communities. Already in his early Genizah studies Goitein paid special attention to the light shed on the social structure of the communities in the Genizah documents. He focused his attentionon individuals whose personalities and activities could not have been known from the formal, literary sources. Such was his study of Ibn ʿAwkal, a noble North African Jewish merchant who settled in Cairo in the early 11^th century, conducted from there his international commercial ventures, and became a prominent figure in the local community. Already in the early stages of Goitein's work on the Genizah documents he also encouraged his students to work on individual personalities from the Genizah. At that stage it already became clear that certain segments of the Genizah documents were not just randomly disposed off by their owners, but constituted entire family "archives," or at least parts of such archives, while others were parts of court archives, mainly from Fustat. This recognition led Goitein and his students to pursue the remains of such archives. The first such archive that served as a subject of a Ph.D. thesis by Murad Michael was that of Nahray b. Nissim, another North African Jewish merchant who settled in Cairo in the middle of the 11^th century. From there he directed his merchant banker activities that stretched virtually over three continents, from Spain, through North Africa and Egypt, to the Fertile Crescent and further through Yemen as far as India. When Michael finished his work on the archive over 30 years ago, he was able to trace about 260 documents. Since then over 100 additional documents from that archive have come to light through Goitein, Udovitch, and Gil, and enabled us to draw a fascinating picture of commercial and postal connections, banking practices of the High Middle Ages, transportation routes in the Mediterranean Basin, variations and prices of a very wide range of commodities, communal and family ties of the Cairene merchant banker and his agents who were stationed in many important ports and commercial centers, as well as in some important communal centers such as Jerusalem.

In the late 1940s S.D. Goitein began his researches in the field of Genizah manuscripts. He soon became convinced that they were of inestimable value for both general and Jewish history. He found eyewitness accounts of the crusaders' attack on Jerusalem: from one letter it was learned that the story of the massacre of the inhabitants, so widely accepted by students of the Crusades period, was really somewhat exaggerated – it had been a savage attack, but many lives were spared, evidently so that those taken prisoners could be ransomed for a handsome sum of money. Another letter made it evident that, contrary to the contention of many scholars, other nationalities than the French were represented among the crusaders, for in it mention was made of the "cursed ones who are called Ashkenazim." Other letters emanating from Palestine made it clear that the crusaders' attack on Beirut in February 1110 was a surprise attack, and that the Jews were driven out of Jerusalem during the second occupation by the crusaders, under the command of Frederick of Hohenstaufen. Goitein also found further fragments pertaining to Obadiah the Proselyte, from which it was learned that he was not a crusader, as had been contended by Mann and others, but a man of some learning who converted because his religious studies convinced him of the truth of Judaism and who was saved from Christian persecution by some fellow Jews who brought him to *Aleppo. One of the most unusual discoveries made by Goitein consisted of fragments from Cambridge and the Jewish Theological Seminary which turned out to be letters sent by Judah Halevi to his friend Ḥalfon b. Natanel al-Dimyati of Cairo, an affluent trader who engaged in large business with India. Three of the letters deal mainly with Judah Halevi's endeavors to raise the dinars necessary for the ransom of a Jewish woman kept in prison by the ruling authorities, while in a fourth he expresses the fond wish to travel to the East, as he indeed did some years later.

Goitein also gathered over 400 letters on the Mediterranean trade with India. This commerce, which went by way of Egypt, East Africa, and South Arabia, was the chief economic factor in the status quo of the countries of the Middle East. Not only did Goitein discover complete itineraries of the journey to India, descriptions of the dangerous voyage through the Indian Ocean, and the names and prices of numerous goods which made up that trade, but he also found eyewitness accounts of events barely known from the writings of the Arabic historians. One such account, in a letter from Aden to Egypt, gives a detailed description of the number of soldiers, the types of boats, and even the military tactics used by the rulers of the island of Kish (in the Persian Gulf) when they tried to extend their control over the sea route to India by conquering Aden.

Goitein collected all of the documents from the Cairo genizot that pertain to trade between India and the Mediterranean, and was preparing them for publication, translating the Judeo-Arabic documents and adding notes. Goitein did not finish preparing his work on Indian trade (referred to by him as the "India Book"), when he passed away. One of his leading students, M.A. Friedman, agreed to complete the work. The final book (scheduled for publication in 2006 by the Ben-Zvi Institute) will be the product of work by both scholars. The book, which contains more than 400 texts from the genizot in the original language, generally Judeo-Arabic and in Hebrew translation, is a remarkable source of information on the contacts – commercial, social, and cultural – between India and the Middle East in the Middle Ages. Because of the great interest in these matters in the scholarly world and among the educated public, the book will be published in both Hebrew and English versions.

Goitein published over 250 articles based on Genizah documents. This work was climaxed by his magisterial study, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Genizah, in five volumes enabling the description of a society and its daily life as well as its beliefs and views, based on their own writings – the documentary genizot.

Goitein's approach paved the way towards comprehensive historical studies that were focused on specific sections of the material, such as geographical ones (the most important one to date is by Moshe Gil on Palestine), or social ones (such as the studies of Menahem Ben-Sasson on the beginnings of communal organization in North Africa in the ninth century), or social and halakhic ones (the most important to date are M.A. Friedman's studies on marriage documents and practices). Such works resulted from a synthesis between the unique primary Genizah material and well-known literary materials from a wealth of Jewish and non-Jewish sources. On the solid basis of Goitein's approach and oeuvre, it is possible to conduct many and diversified cross sections, which can shed light on every imaginable aspect of Jewish life and culture in the Middle Ages, such as Joel Kraemer's projects on women's letters from the Genizah, the several projects dedicated to Maimonides and his descendants by P.B. Fenton, M.A. Friedman, and M. Ben-Sasson, and a new comprehensive collection of Maimonides' letters by J. Kraemer. In fact Goitein's first published book on the Genizah was a study on education. Goitein's final, concluding work in the field was the multi-volume A Mediterranean Society in five volumes. When Goitein started this work he had already been well into the studies of economic, social, and cultural history. This fact had a decisive impact on the structure and plan of this gigantic opus. It is basically planned along social lines – its five volumes corresponding to five social levels:

i: Economic Foundations; ii: The Community; iii: The Family; iv: Daily Life; v: The Individual (see below).

Goitein inspired many researchers, such as N.A. Stillman, Y. Khalfon-Stillman, M. Gil, M.A. Friedman, and M.R. Cohen.

The Genizah manuscripts also aided in the study of post-Inquisition Jewish history. Already S. Schechter, S. Assaf, and J. Mann published documents and other literary texts having to do with this period. A major contribution was made by Meir Benayahu who found on trips to England and the U.S. approximately 2,000 documents relating to the Jews of the Mediterranean after 1492. On the basis of photostats of these manuscripts in the possession of the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem, Benayahu made an extensive study of the Jewish communities during the 15^th–18^th centuries. He found that even at this late period the Jews were enterprising merchants, traveling to such places as India, North Africa, Spain, and Italy, carrying on an extensive trade in pepper and skins. During this period there was considerable migration to Palestine, and many talmudic academies were founded there; in some documents there are descriptions of the dormitories which the yeshivah students occupied, and in one dating from the 15^th century there is an account of the rebellion staged by a group of students against their academy for having allowed poor living conditions to prevail in the dormitories. A most important document gives a detailed history of the Hebron community. Moreover, Judeo-German and Judeo-Spanish texts are included among these relatively late manuscripts, which have been studied by several scholars in recent decades. The work on the post-expulsion generations has been continued by I. Tishbi, J. Hacker, A. David, and E. Gutwirth (the latter extended the research to texts written in Judeo-Spanish).

There is rich information in the Genizah about many aspects of life, such as the role of women in society, loans and interest, the communal organization, the Jews as ahl al-dhimma (people of the covenant, or tolerated minority), their actual place in Muslim society, etc. Information on the following salient topics, inter alia, may be found in the Genizah texts: the Jews of Alexandria; Babylonian Jews; letters of Byzantine Jews; begging letters; book lists and letters about books; communal records and affairs; dated letters; diseases; Fustat and Cairo; geographical data; houses and housing; Jerusalem; Karaites; Maimonides; medicine – practice and theory; relations with Muslims and Christians; occupations; plagues; police; prisoners; letters of recommendation; seafaring and warfare; Sephardim, i.e., Spanish Jews; synagogues; Syria, including Ereẓ Israel; tenth-century documents.

Many additional topics are included, such as individual personalities of the time, place-names of Egyptian-Jewish settlements, artifacts, etc. On the other hand, a few topics deserve special treatment:

(1) Documents of European Provenience, or Containing Information about European History. The first to publish such fragments and documents were D.S. Schechter, L. Ginzberg, J. Mann, and S. Assaf – some enlightening events and phenomena back in the early ninth and tenth centuries. After a long pause in such publications it was N. Golb who drew attention to the Genizah's importance for the reconstruction of the history of these communities. He published an article (Sefunot, 8 (1964), 87–104) based on the U.L. Cambridge manuscript 1080 j, no. 115, in which he shows that the document is a letter of recommendation sent from a certain Samuel b. Isaac the Spaniard in Jerusalem to Shemariah b. Elhanan in Fustat at the beginning of the 11^th century (more precisely c. 1006), and that it concerns a Jewish proselyte from a prominent Christian family who fled his homeland, arrived in Damascus, thereafter made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and from there, because of persecution by the Christian community in Jerusalem, decided to go on to Egypt, where, we may assume, he finally settled. On the basis of internal evidence, it appears that the proselyte is probably the Slovenian cleric Wecelinus (cf. Alpertus Mettensis, De diversitate temporum, 1.7; ii. 22, 23), who converted to Judaism in 1005 c.e. This proselyte, who fled to Egypt, is the earliest of the 11^th century converts to Judaism described in the Genizah fragments, and the manuscript in question furnishes additional evidence pointing to the phenomenon – already brought to light in prior Genizah publications – of conversion to Judaism on the part of prominent European Christians in the 11^th century, who subsequent to their conversion left their homelands to settle in non-Christian countries. Other such proselytes of the 11^th century were Andreas, the archbishop of Bari, who converted about 1070; an anonymous proselyte of the last half of the 11^th century; an anonymous proselyte from a wealthy family who first settled in France during the same period; and finally, Obadiah the Norman proselyte, who had been demonstrated by N. Golb and A. Scheiber to be the scribe of a musical manuscript (Adler 4096b). Documents of actual European provenience include a Cambridge manuscript (t.s. 16.100), evidently from the town of Monieux, Provence (Golb, in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 113 (1969), 67–94); and a British Museum manuscript (Or. 5544, Vol. 1), evidently written in Arles and concerning a wealthy Jew of Rouen.

(2) Illuminated Genizah Fragments. Still almost totally unutilized, and lying undisturbed among Genizah manuscripts of Cambridge, Oxford, and the British Museum, are approximately 60 illuminated fragments of the Fatimid and Ayyubid periods which, taken collectively, characterize both the quality and the content of the Judeo-Arabic culture during the period of its highest development. In addition, among the Genizah fragments one should count also around a dozen wood pieces engraved in the same period; fragments that testify to the history of the Ben-Ezra Synagogue and the Maimonidean circles (Ben-Sasson, Synagogue and Fortress). Artistic remains of any kind from the Fatimid period are rare; besides architectural subjects, all that have been previously known are illuminated Korans, some wood carvings, linens and decorated bowls, and a certain number of items of glass and metal. The addition to this material of a body of 60 illuminated fragments may therefore stimulate research not only in the field of medieval Jewish art (students of which have heretofore had no knowledge whatsoever of these manuscripts) but also in the general area of Islamic art and culture. The illuminated fragments, mostly at Cambridge, may be classified as follows:

(a) Marriage contracts, approx. 20 items; (b) Children's readers and school books, approx. 10 items; (c) Bible leaves and prayer book leaves, approx. 20 items; (d) Miscellaneous fragments, as follows: (1) Architectural plan of Ezekiel's temple, 1 page; (2) Leaf from an early materia medica, 2 folios; (3) Illustrations from a book of magic, 2 folios; (4) Child's drawing of a boat, 1 page; (5) Two warriors engaged in combat, margin of 1 page; (6) Painting of two water birds, standing on either side of a tree (of life?) within a decorative border, 1 page. The richness of this material is all the more surprising in view of the previously held opinion that for the entire Fatimid period only a single illuminated fragment had survived, namely, the Bodleian ketubbah of the 11^th century.

(3) Historical Geography. E. Ashtor and N. Golb have studied the work of the historical geography of the Jews in medieval Egypt. The main purpose of this research has been to clarify the problem of the continuity, or lack of continuity, of Jewish life in Egypt between the Hellenistic period and the Middle Ages. The salient result of their study of Genizah fragments bearing upon this problem (in: Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Summer 1965) is the conclusion that the Jewish community of medieval Egypt represents not a new phenomenon but the continuation of an ethnic and cultural pattern which stretched far back in time, and that in this respect it is very difficult to accept the view that the small number of Hebrew documents of the Byzantine period, "extending over 300 years, may serve as a good indication of the gradually declining importance of Egyptian Jewry in the Byzantine period" (Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, ed. V. Tcherikover et al., 3 (1964), 88). Just the contrary may be claimed – that there was a continuous, if necessarily irregular, line of development from ancient times through and despite cultural reorientation, political upheavals, and the assimilation of a fair proportion of the people. This is made especially manifest by the comparison of the known places of settlement of Egyptian Jews in antiquity with their more than one hundred communal settlements in the Middle Ages, which stretched from the very border of Egypt far up the river to Elephantine-Aswan.

It is thus apparent how valuable these preponderantly Arabic papers and the hundreds of others like them are for purposes of historical research. If studied together with the responsa and historiographic literature of that age, unparalleled source material can be found among them for this still obscure period in medieval life; and it may therefore be concluded that when all the material has been systematically edited and the texts brought into proper relationship with one another, there will be an integrative account of the Jewish community of medieval Egypt, and a reliable record of the general social and economic conditions prevailing at that time in Egypt and the Middle East.

Genizah Research, 1960s–1980s

The following survey reviews in more detail some of the specific work that has been done from the 1960s to the 1980s in fields of scholarship which rely extensively on *Genizah sources. Only books and monographs have been taken into account, since the inclusion of periodical publications would have swelled the survey beyond permissible bounds. A complete list of publications relating to the Genizah can be found in Published Material from the Cambridge Genizah Collections: A Bibliography, produced by the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit under the direction of Dr. Stefan Reif, published by Cambridge University Press for the University Library's Genizah Series. It should also be noted that G. Khan of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit is now preparing a more comprehensive description of publications relating to the Genizah, including both books and periodicals. Bibliographical details on the books discussed in the present survey can be found in the bibliography accompanying this article.

documents

The private and legal documents of the Genizah have provided the primary source material for several studies in the socio-economic history of the medieval Near East. S.D. Goitein in Volume I of A Mediterranean Society made a synthesis of information gleaned from hundreds of Genizah documents in order to build up a comprehensive portrait of the economic foundations of the Jewish communities in the Arab world during the High Middle Ages. The bulk of this study concentrates on commerce and finance with special attention to overseas trade. This latter area of economic activity is particularly well documented in the many commercial letters that have been preserved in the Genizah. Such correspondence indicates that trade was conducted for the most part on the basis of mutual trust and personal friendship rather than formal agreements. Goitein also published a collection of 80 letters of medieval Jewish traders which reflect this personal aspect of overseas commerce. These letters show how a man's piety and fear of God were invoked when he was urged to adhere to good business practices. Moreover, although distant trade involved interaction between people of different social classes, it seems that the long months spent together in foreign parts or on perilous voyages brought people close together. Two of Goitein's research students, M. Michael and N.A. Stillman, have made a specialized study of Genizah letters which relate to specific Jewish traders. Michael's dissertation deals with the correspondence of the medieval businessman and community leader Nahray ben Nissim and includes an edition of many of his letters together with those of his son Nathan. Stillman analyzes and edits documents relating to Joseph ibn ʿAwqal, who likewise was both a trader and a leader of the community. The business correspondence of both Nahray and ibn ʿAwqalreveals the great diversity of goods which were handled by the traders of their time and gives a detailed picture of the organization of medieval business houses.

Ashtor in his Histoire des Prix et des Salaires dans l'Orient Médiéval made extensive use of Genizah documents as a basis for a detailed analysis of the standard of living in medieval (mainly Fatimid and Ayyubid) Egypt. The documentary portion of the Genizah furnishes a unique source for such a study, for it contains many specific references to contemporary prices. By contrast most Muslim sources for the period are literary texts that are often tendentious and prone to adapting figures that suit their purpose. The Genizah papers also give firsthand evidence of changes in currency. They demonstrate, for instance, that there was a shift from gold to silver during the Ayyubid period. The Egyptian scholar Hassanein Rabie has used Genizah sources for a large portion of his work on the financial system of Egypt between 1164 and 1341. He relied for the most part on Cambridge University Library's Taylor-Schechter documents which are written in Arabic script (viz. t-s Ar. 38–42) as opposed to those in Hebrew script. Rabie has shown that the Genizah gives us valuable information on the poll tax (jawālī) and the mawārīth ḥašriyya, i.e., the law determining that property without heirs was to be confiscated by the state.

Volume ii of Goitein's monumental Genizah synthesis, A Mediterranean Society, deals with the social and communal life of the Jewish minority in Egypt between the 11^th and 14^th centuries, with the most abundant information being provided for the earlier part of this period. The topics discussed include the communal authorities at the national, regional, and local levels. He not only brings a great deal of new material to bear on the nature of these institutions, their historical development, and their relations with the politically dominant Muslim authorities but, in the case of the nagid, has totally and conclusively revised the accepted view of the origin of this office. The description of the organization and operation of the local communities is particularly valuable, since the unmediated character of the Genizah documents makes them a unique source for information about everyday life and ordinary people. Goitein portrays the medieval Egyptian Jewish community as a "religious democracy" in which there was a balance between authority and communal sanction. The loosely structured and highly mobile Islamic society in which the community was situated also influenced its structure. There is, for instance, no reference in the Genizah to enactments restricting the entry of strangers into the community analogous to the ḥerem ha-yishuv of the communities in medieval Christian Europe.

M.R. Cohen in his book Jewish Self-Government in Medieval Egypt develops Goitein's thesis with regard to the origin of the office of the Egyptian nagid. Goitein first showed by means of a wide selection of Genizah documents, that, contrary to the opinion of earlier scholars, the nagidate was not instituted by decree of the Fatimid caliph. Rather it evolved within the Jewish community in the second half of the 11^th century. Cohen emphasized that the nagidate evolved in response to the political and spiritual vacuum created by the decline of the Palestinian yeshivah, to which a large portion of Egyptian Jewry had given allegiance.

A number of Goitein's research students have worked on Genizah documents relating to the communal life of the Egyptian Jewish community. The general format of these doctoral dissertations is similar to those of Michael and Stillman, in that considerable space is devoted to editing the documents which constituted their source material. G. Weiss has edited 255 legal documents written by the court scribe Ḥalfon ben Manasseh during the period 1100 to 1138. A large proportion of the legal documents which are preserved in the Genizah were written by this scribe. Apart from providing ample material for research on legal formularies, the study demonstrates the value of working on a corpus of documents written by the same hand. For instance, undated fragments can be more easily dated and a greater accuracy of reading achieved. A.L. Motzkin has made a study of Judge Elijah ben Zechariah (first half of 13^th century) and his family on the basis of their correspondence which has been found in the Genizah. Genizah documents have been employed by M. Gil as a source for a detailed examination of the medieval Jewish institution of the kodesh or "pious foundation" which was essentially equivalent to the Moslem waqf. Although these Jewish foundations flourished during the Fatimid period there is no evidence of their existence under the Ayyubid dynasty. The chief motivation for the Jews to dedicate property to a pious cause was apparently religious, charity being one of the most important precepts of Jewish law. The institution was, however, also exploited to circumvent Islamic legislation, especially the mawārītḥašriyya (see above).

Volume iii of Goitein's A Mediterranean Society is concerned with the family. The body of the book deals with the nuclear family and marriage, the main source for which are the many medieval ketubbot (see *Ketubbah) which have been preserved in the Genizah. From an examination of over 600 of these Goitein has illuminated the manifold economic and social aspects of marriage. He shows that divorce was common and that 45% of brides whose marriages are recorded were marrying for the second time. From the itemization of the dowry in the ketubbot of the High Middle Ages Goitein concludes that prices were remarkably stable during this period. The mobility of the population often disrupted family life; this especially applied to the long business trips which were undertaken by many members of the community. In general, the Genizah portrays a male-oriented society. Private letters and genealogical lists usually mention only sons. Nevertheless many women played an active role in economic life. They owned properties, took charge of them, and also made or took loans.

Since the Middle Ages the marriage contracts of all known Jewish communities have followed the basic model of the Babylonian geonim. Scholars assumed that the ketubbah formulary had remained uniform since early Talmudic times. M. Friedman, however, has discovered in the Genizah a substantial number of fragments of medieval marriage contracts, mostly emanating from Palestine, which reveal traditions of formulating the ketubbah distinct from that of the Babylonian geonim. He has made a thoroughgoing study of these Palestinian-style ketubbot in his book Jewish Marriage in Palestine. They contain many distinctive features. For instance, the woman is granted the right to initiate divorce proceedings and the husband is obliged to bury his wife, should she predecease him, or to care for her if she becomes insane. Friedman also shows that the Palestinian formulary influenced the marriage contracts of several Jewish communities along the northern shores of the Mediterranean and North Africa.

Y. Stillman, in her doctoral thesis, examines the female attire of medieval Egypt as portrayed in the trousseau lists of the Genizah ketubbot. These lists contain the names and details of many previously unknown garments and fabrics. Moreover, on the basis of the prices which are given for each item Stillman has been able to establish a relative scale of quality between many varieties of textiles. J. Sadan, in a similar manner, has made extensive use of Genizah trousseau lists in order to study household furniture in the medieval Near East. These two aspects of material culture, viz. clothing and furniture, are dealt with in Vol. iv of Goitein's A Mediterranean Society.

Several scholars have used Genizah documents as a basis for studies in the socio-economic history of medieval Palestine. Gil has studied many aspects of life in Palestine during this period on which the Genizah has shed considerable light. These include the institution of the Palestinian yeshivah together with the personalities who headed it and its relations with Jewish communities in Egypt, Syria, and the Byzantine Empire; the relationship between Karaites and Rabbanites; Jewish life in Jerusalem and in many other localities in Palestine; problems of taxation; pilgrimage and immigration, etc. Goitein has published a collection of studies on Genizah texts pertaining to the history of Palestine, in particular its Jewish population, in the century preceding the Crusades and during the Crusader period itself. The documents show that life in Palestine returned to normal relatively quickly after the Crusader conquest. Several documents refer to the activities of Moses Maimonides in the ransoming of prisoners captured by the Franks when King Amalric i took Bilbays, Lower Egypt, in November 1168. Goitein suggests that Maimonides' meteoric rise to the leadership of Egyptian Jewry, only a few years after his arrival in the Nile country, is partly to be attributed to his initiative in the ransoming of these captives.

In connection with the history of Palestine we should mention two works under the editorship of J. Prawer: The History of Eretz-Israel under Moslem and Christian Rule (634–1291), some of whose contributions employ Genizah documents as source material, and Sefer Ha-Yishuv. The latter work presents a wide variety of source material, much of it from the Genizah, relating to the Jewish community in Palestine during the period from the Crusader domination until the Ottoman conquest at the beginning of the 16^th century.

In the course of Gil's research on the history of Palestine he published a short study on the Tustarī family which had considerable influence on Palestinian Jewry. The information about this family is pieced together largely from Genizah documents. Its two most illustrious members were the two sons of Sahl, Abū Naṣr Faḍl (Ḥesed) and Abū Saʿd Ibrāhīm (Abraham). They engaged in trade and banking and involved themselves in the political affairs of both the Fatimid court and the Jewish community. Gil attributes the Tustarīs' influence on Palestinian Jewry to the fact that Ḥesed was secretary to a Fatimid general much involved in Palestinian affairs. He also argues that the Tustarīs belonged to a distinct Karaite sect known as Tuṣtarians or Dastarians.

The documentary portion of the Genizah has also furnished sources for the history of Jewish communities outside the Mediterranean area. Goitein has published a collection of articles about the Jews of Yemen, several of which had previously appeared in a variety of periodicals. The section on medieval Yemenite Jewry is based almost entirely on Genizah sources. These documents show that the Yemenite Jews enjoyed considerable prosperity in the High Middle Ages, since they formed the link between the Mediterranean and the India trade, and that they remained in close contact with the Jewish academies of Iraq and Palestine.

N. Golb and O. Pritsak have made a contribution to the history of the Jewish *Khazars in their book Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century. This work contains an edition and detailed analysis of a recently discovered Genizah document relating to the Khazars together with a re-edition and reassessment of the Genizah letter from a Khazarian Jew to the Spanish dignitary Ḥisdai ibn Shaprut which was published by Schechter in 1912. All the sources which refer to the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism are reexamined with special attention to the extent to which they reflect the historical and geographical background of Khazaria in the Crimea. The newly discovered document (t-s 12.122) is the autograph of a letter of recommendation written by Khazarian Jews residing in Kiev in the first half of the tenth century. It is signed by Jews with Khazarian names and contains a remark in the Khazarian language written in runic Turkic script. This document proves conclusively that the judaization of the Khazars is a fact and not a forgery or romance, a view which has been canvassed by many scholars. Golb and Pritsak also show that the text which was edited by Schechter could have been written only by a Jew of Khazaria who had firsthand acquaintance with the historical and geographical circumstances of his country during the first half of the tenth century.

We must also include Volume iii of Ashtor's History of the Jews in Egypt and Syria under the Rule of the Mamluks, published in 1970 (the first volume appeared in 1944). This final volume contains the texts of the Genizah documents referred to in the preceding volumes. Finally, the sources for Ashtor's A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages and Stillman's The Jews of Arab Lands include Genizah documents, principally in sections which deal with the socio-economic realities of the Southern Mediterranean in the High Middle Ages.

The focus of M. Ben-Sasson's research has been the social and intellectual history of medieval Jewry in Muslim lands from the 7^th to the 14^th centuries; based on work integrating legal, historical, and literary Genizah fragments. In examining social structures of Jewish public life from the perspectives of both the central leadership and the local community, each in its special locations and each with its special expression, institutional form, intellectual achievements, and self-consciousness, he pointed to the shift of power from the Eastern centers to the Maghreb, the building of the local Jewish community through a reconstruction of the Genizah corpus related to the community of Kairouan. He also found that the Maghebri-Jewish immigrants became involved in the central Jewish leadership in the East starting in the second half of the tenth century. Their involvement signified the beginning of a process of building a regional and local functional leadership. In this venue he published sources on the history of the Jews of Sicily. The analysis of the Babylonian-Iraqi center was done by means of research on the activities and personality of Saadiah Gaon. With Prof. R. Brody (Dept. of Talmud, The Hebrew University) he prepared a critical edition of the first halakhic book written in Judeo-Arabic. It is the "lost" Book of Deeds and Decrees of Saadiah Gaon, compiled in the year 926. They reconstructed the book almost in toto, on the basis of more then 100 Genizah pieces scattered over 25 libraries in the East and in the West. This book was written according to the order and with the terminology of Islamic legal works. Like many of Saadiah's books, this had great influence on most of the Jewish legal monographs and on the practical life of world medieval Jewry in its formative years.

Then Ben-Sasson turned to a Genizah study of the Maimonidean dynasty that headed the Jewish communities of the East from the 12^th to the early 15^th centuries.

biblical commentary

The commentary of Isaac ibn Ghayyat to the Book of Ecclesiastes was published from fragments in Cambridge and New York and the commentary of Samuel ben Hophni Gaon to the Pentateuch was published by Aaron Greenberg in Jerusalem (1979).

commentaries and novellae on mishnah and talmud

1. Abraham I. Katsh has published Ginze Talmud Babli (Vol. 1, 1976; Vol. 2, 1979). The first volume includes 178 pages of the Babylonian Talmud from nine tractates from the Antonin Collection in the National Library of Leningrad, and the second, 90 pages from 11 other tractates. A comparison between these fragments and the printed edition, as well as the Munich manuscript, reveals important variations. 2. Tractate Bikkurim with a list of the variae lectiones, which indicates the extent to which the readings differ from those in the printed texts. 3. Fragments of the Mishnah with Palestinian vocalization. 4. Mishnah fragment of Berakhot 1:1–3:1; Peah 4:3–6:3, written in the tenth century. 5. Tractate Shevi'it. 6. Fragments of the tjBerakhot, Chap. 3; Shabbat, Chap. 12; Kiddushin, Chap. 3, written in the early style of the Jerusalem Talmud. 7. A fragment of tjShabbat, Chap. 10. 8. Fragments from tractates Bava Mezia, Bava Batra, and Sanhedrin, revealing considerable variants from the standard texts.

Texts from the Talmud provide readings that approximate more closely those of Rashi and Alfasi than the printed version. Scores of ketubbot include an undertaking by the bridegroom not to take a second wife, even though legally he was permitted to do so. When an additional wife was taken, a detailed agreement was made binding the husband to treat all his wives equally.

An example of the wealth of new material in this sphere is seen in the recent publication of tractates Ketubbot and Sotah by the Institute for the Complete Israel Talmud (see *Talmud, Recent Research). Altogether 150 pages or fragments of the tractate Ketubbot from the Genizah were collated (pp. 75–91) for this purpose. Genizah Fragments of Rabbinical Literature; Mishnah, Talmud and Midrash (1973), edited by N. Aloni, contains no less than 219 facsimile pages of 60 Genizah manuscripts in the various libraries. This collection is of special importance in that it includes rabbinical texts with the Palestinian system of vocalization. Genizah Bible Fragments with Babylonian Masorah and Vocalization (5 vols., 1973), edited by Y. Yeivin, provides the scholar with all the ancient sources with the Babylonian vocalization.

midrash

Of particular interest is Ginze Midrash by Z.M. Rabinowitz (1977). The author deals with the early form and style of the Midrash as revealed in the texts, which are written in the early Palestinian script and belong to the 11^th and 12^th centuries. The copyists later changed the text – both the Hebrew and Aramaic – to conform with the Babylonian usage. Although the majority of the fragments are from well-known Midrashim, they also include a few hitherto unknown ones.

the geonic period

S. Abramson's Inyanot be-Sifrut ha-Geonim (1973) includes an appendix (pp. 319–89) on the text of the She'iltot of *Aḥa of Shabha and deals with the variae lectiones therein. The Genizah fragments have vastly increased the knowledge of the development of the halakhah in Ereẓ Israel after the completion of the Jerusalem Talmud. The publication of Hilkhot Ereẓ Israel min ha-Genizah by M. Margaliot, set up for publication by I. Ta-Shema (1973), disproves the theory that the gaonate in Ereẓ Israel was reestablished in the 10^th and 11^th centuries in order to fight against Karaism. There was an unbroken chain of authority and heads of yeshivot until the end of the geonic period, and it seems that there was a separate halakhic tradition in Ereẓ Israel, deriving from the Jerusalem Talmud and differing from the Babylonian tradition. Various fragments of this tradition have now been published (cf. Sefer ha-Ma'asim li-Benei Ereẓ Israel). The Hilkhot Ereẓ Israel includes an appendix on another Ereẓ Israel work, Perek Zera'im, edited by J. Feliks, which is the most complete work on agricultural products and nature found in ancient Jewish literature. M.A. Friedman was the latest to publish additional fragments of Sefer ha-Ma'asim.

Other items on the geonic period, also published by M.A. Friedman, are (1) Additional material on Pirkoi Ben *Baboi. (2) Fragments of a large collection of geonic responsa which include the following: the intervention of the authorities in Kairouan in the case of the divorce of a betrothed woman; the concluding portion of a responsum dealing with the complaint of a woman whose marriage settlement had been sold by her husband, or lost. It provides data on the custom of Kairouan with regard to a moredet (a wife who "rebels" against her husband), and on the community and the relationship between the civil authorities and the Jewish leader. There have also been found fragments from the Siddur of R. *Amram Gaon, providing details of the compilation of the work. 3. Fragments of geonic commentaries to tractate Shabbat which are ascribed to Sherira Gaon and Hai Gaon.

maimonides

1. Fragments of the Mishneh Torah written by Maimonides himself. It has been shown that these fragments are from a first text of the Mishneh Torah, whereas all later editions were based on a second edition which he wrote. The differences between this holograph and the printed are considerable, including the order of the books and the chapters, and sometimes even the order of the individual laws in the chapter, and there are also differences in language. 2. A commentary by Maimonides on the Laws of Tefillin from the Sefer ha-Menuhah of Manoah of *Narbonne. M.A. Friedman and Sh. Abramson added new findings from the genizot reflecting students' shorthand writings in Maimonides' school as well as the school's traditions.

rishonim

1. Fragments from the novellae of Yom Tov b. Abraham Ishbili (the *Ritba) to tractate Beẓah. 2. New fragments from the commentary of Ḥananel b. Ḥushiel on Bible and Talmud. They consist of many pages, partly fragments of complete works and partly fragments of commentaries on individual chapters. They include commentaries on tractates Berakhot, Kiddushin, Sotah, Bava Kamma, Bava Batra, and Sanhedrin, as well as portions of his commentary to tractate Zevaḥim. 3. A complement to a commentary of a pupil of Naḥmanides to tractate Pesaḥim.

liturgy

Following the publication of "An Unknown Blessing on the Reading of the Chapter Bameh Madlikin (Shabbat 2) from the Genizah," N. Wieder has come to the conclusion that the inclusion of this chapter in the liturgy was the result of the controversy between the Rabbanites and the Karaites. This blessing, which has been completely forgotten, was in the nature of a public declaration of faith in the authority of the rabbis and the continuation of tradition, and of the authority for kindling lights for the Sabbath which was forbidden by the Karaites. N. Wieder deals with the formula of the ʿAmidah in early Babylonian usage and shows that the words "Possessor of heaven and earth" were included in the formula of both Israel and Babylon.

poetry

The last two decades have seen the publication of many critical editions of early piyyutim and of medieval religious and secular poetry, the majority of which draw to a greater or lesser extent on Genizah sources. The Genizah has preserved not only many previously unknown poems of the famous poets but also a substantial number of the works of forgotten or little-known poets.

J. Schirmann published an anthology of Hebrew poems discovered in the Genizah. This collection includes secular and religious poetry from the Jewish communities of the East and from Spain, North Africa, Italy, and Byzantium. Especially worthy of note are the oldest example of a Hebrew poem in praise of a beautiful youth; the full text of a muwaššaḥ (muwashshaḥ, see 13: 684) of Samuel ha-Nagid, of which previously only a few lines were known; three secular poems of Judah Halevi which are not known from other sources; several muwaššaḥat of Abraham Ibn Ezra including one which describes his flight from Spain; and Hebrew maqāmāt (see *Maqāma) including a section of maqāmat Yamīma, an allegorical love story, of which Israel Davidson published some fragments in the 1920s. This new fragment enabled Schirmann to identify the author of this work as Joseph bar Judah ben Simeon, the famous pupil of Maimonides. Also noteworthy are a number of rhymed proverbs, many of which show that their authors must have been familiar with the Hebrew version of Ben Sira.

Several scholars have collected the works of various paytanim which have been preserved in the Genizah. A. Mirsky used Genizah sources extensively in his edition of the piyyutim of the early paytan Yose ben Yose. These piyyutim show that Yose ben Yose was one of the first Hebrew poets to make the oral law a basis of his works. Wallenstein published and analyzed a number of *Yoẓerot by Samuel ha-Shelishi (10^th–11^th century), discovered in the Genizah, to which Ezra Fleischer and Yoseph Yahalom dedicated substantial scholarly work. E. Fleischer has critically edited 580 short liturgical compositions from the Genizah which were all written by the same anonymous author (called "Anonymous" by Zulay). These poems (called pizmonim by the copyist of the Genizah manuscript) were composed in the late tenth century and were intended to serve as choral additions to several pieces of a cycle of kedushtaot written by R. Simeon ha-Kohen b. R. Megas, an early Palestinian paytan who was active in the seventh century. They reflect the increase in the participation of the choir in synagogue worship towards the end of the first millennium c.e. Fleischer has also used Genizah sources in his edition of the piyyutim of the tenth-century Italian paytan Solomon ha-Bavli, who was one of the first Hebrew poets to write in Europe. His works molded the Italian Ashkenazi school of paytanim. The Genizah has also preserved many of the poems of his pupil Elya bar Shemaya, which have been edited by Y. David.

Owing to the ties between the Andalusian and Egyptian Jewish communities, manuscripts of religious and secular poems written in Spain found their way into the Genizah. Consequently scholars who have collected the works of the Spanish medieval Hebrew poets have found abundant source material among the Genizah papers. This applies to the following collections: the liturgical poems of Solomon ibn Gabirol, the religious poems of Judah Halevi and the Diwan of Samuel ha-Nagid by Jarden; the collections of the secular poems of Ibn Gabirol by Allony and Jarden and by Brody and Schirmann; the religious poems of Abraham Ibn Ezra by Levin; the poems of Isaac ben Abraham Ibn Ezra by Schmelzer; the poems of Levi Ibn al-Tabban by Pagis, and the poems of Joseph Bensuli by David. Mirsky has published a collection of poems by Isaac Ibn Khalfun (10^th–11^th century), almost all of which were recovered from the Genizah. These poems show that Ibn Khalfun played an innovative role in the development of Hebrew verse in that he was one of the first to compose secular poems and introduce elements of personal experience into his poetry. D. Jarden published an anthology of medieval Hebrew verse Ẓefunei Shirah. This includes several poems of little-known or anonymous authors which have been discovered in the Genizah: 1. A list of secular poems by Solomon ibn Gabirol hitherto unknown from any other source. 2. A kerovah of the liturgical poet *Yannai to the portion Ha'azinu (Deut. 32). 3. Piyyutim to the Avodah on the Day of Atonement. They include a "bibliographical" piyyut giving a detailed list of the titles of ten such orders of service. 4. Early Yemenite piyyutim and Seliḥot for the Day of Atonement.

historical

S.D. Goitein devoted himself particularly to the economic life of the Jews as revealed in the Genizah documents and fragments. He points out that as a result of the economic changes which took place in the Middle East as a whole, in which trade superseded agriculture as the basis of the economy, Jews tended to abandon agriculture and engage in skilled occupations and trade. In one text a Jewish girl writes to her widowed mother urging her to see that her brother, in addition to studying Torah, also learn a trade, adding "if he will have a trade, he will be a man."

Other published material includes (1) Documents appertaining to the life of the Jewish community of Egypt. (2) M. Gil's Documents of the Jewish Pious Foundations from the Cairo Genizah (1976) gives the religious and sociological motivation behind them, the halakhic aspect, income and expenditure, etc. (3) Horoscopes from the Genizah (1977). (4) A letter from the community of al-Mahdiya in Tunis to Fustat in Egypt in the 11^th century reflects the commercial movements between the ports on the Mediterranean Sea in which Jews played a prominent role. The letter was addressed to Nahray b. Nissim, originally of Kairouan, who later settled in Egypt, and reflects the golden period of the Fatimids in the first half of the 11^th century. (5) There has been discovered the earliest document emanating from *Salonika, a letter from an Egyptian scholar who immigrated there, dated approximately 1090. (6) Three documents from the beginning of the Crusades, consisting of letters from Tyre and Tripoli in Lebanon and Arqa in northern Syria which reflect the need of the Jews for mutual assistance in the difficult circumstances which prevailed at the end of the 11^th century, and lastly, evidence of the connection between the Jews of *Yemen and the Babylonian communities. (7) Additional material concerning the Jews in Ereẓ Israel and the role of the ketubbah is to be found in a book by M.A. Friedman, Jewish Marriage in Palestine: A Cairo Genizah Study in two volumes (1980/81), Vol. 1, Ketubbah Tradition in Ereẓ Israel; Vol. 2, Texts.

aliyah to ereẒ israel

In A. Kupfer's Konteros Ereẓ Israel (1968) are included pages from a work written by a sage desirous of immigrating to the Land of Israel, for which purpose he composed a pamphlet to serve as a guide for those contemplating immigration. A. David published new documents from the "late" Genizah illuminating life in Ereẓ Israel and its vicinity after the Spanish expulsion.

[Yehoshua Horowitz /

Menahem Ben-Sasson (2^nd ed.)]

masorah

Yeivin has undertaken research into the Babylonian vocalization system. He has examined all the known manuscript sources of Babylonian vocalization and described the linguistic tradition which it reflects. A large proportion of his manuscript sources are from the Genizah and contain principally Bible texts, rabbinic texts in Mishnaic Hebrew, and piyyutim. Yeivin discovered numerous variations within the Babylonian vocalization system and divided the types of systems which he found in his sources under three headings: (a) Old Babylonian; (b) Middle Babylonian; and (c) Late Babylonian.

The texts using the Old Babylonian system were only partially vocalized, whereas Middle Babylonian vocalization was complete. Late Babylonian is a mixed system consisting essentially of Tiberian vocalization with vestiges of Middle Babylonian pronunciation. With regard to the chronology of the Babylonian system, Yeivin concluded that our earliest sources must date from approximately 800 c.e. Yeivin has also published facsimiles of all Genizah Bible fragments with Old Babylonian and Middle Babylonian vocalization and a few with Late Babylonian vocalization. The Spanish scholar Diez Merino has compiled a catalogue of all known Babylonian Bible manuscripts and written a synopsis of the work of former scholars on the Babylonian vocalization system.

Several scholars have collected and studied Genizah fragments with Palestinian vocalization. M. Dietrich has edited and analyzed a number of Bible fragments with Palestinian vocalization which he discovered in Cambridge and Oxford Genizah collections. E.J. Revell has published two books on Palestinian vocalization. In Hebrew Texts with Palestinian Vocalization he analyzes and classifies the pointing of Hebrew texts with this vocalization system. The work is based on non-biblical texts discovered by Dietrich in the Taylor-Schechter New Series and on some 30 other texts, including biblical material, which were found by Revell himself in the Cambridge Genizah Collections. The classification consists of two parts, one of biblical and the other of non-biblical texts, and is based on the number of vowel signs which are used and the manner of their use. According to Revell, in the non-biblical texts there are 11 different types of vocalization, all of which belong to one of two major divisions or dialect groups. In his assessment of the relationship between Palestinian and Ben-Asher Tiberian vocalization, Revell advances the view that the Palestinian system represents a stage of Hebrew which has developed further than that reflected in the Ben-Asher system. This theory is contrary to that of the majority of scholars who maintain that the Palestinian system reflects an earlier stage of Hebrew than the Tiberian. In his more recent book, Biblical Texts with Palestinian Pointing and their Accents, Revell lists all known Biblical manuscripts with Palestinian pointing, including several new fragments discovered in the Taylor-Schechter Additional Series, and studies the use of their accent signs. He contradicts P. Kahle, who claimed that Palestinian accent signs did not mark stress. According to Revell, it is quite reasonable to hold that they indicate stress if it is assumed that stress in Palestinian Biblical Hebrew frequently fell on the penultima rather than on the ultima.

B. Chiesa has made a comprehensive study of fragments of biblical texts with Palestinian vocalization. His work includes a summary of previous studies on Palestinian vocalization as well as a catalogue of all the Palestinian Bible fragments which were known to him before the Taylor-Schechter Additional Series became available. He discusses the historical position of the Palestinian system and its cultural milieu and concludes that it was molded by provincial Jewish communities which lacked strong scholarly leadership. Chiesa also collects the variant readings which the Palestinian texts exhibit in comparison with Ben Ḥayyim's Bible as edited by van der Hooght in 1705. These variant readings show that the text of the Palestinian Bible fragments belongs to a textual family which is distinct from that of the Tiberian and Babylonian traditions. It is close to the lost Hebrew tradition whose remains are now to be found in the Greek and related variants.

N. Allony has published facsimiles of 60 Genizah fragments of Talmud and Halakhah with Palestinian vocalization. None of these fragments is later than the 11^th century; they thus invalidate the generally accepted view that vocalized Mishnah texts did not exist before the 14^th century (the date of the Kaufmann manuscript).

In his book Manuscritos hebreos y arameos de la Biblia, H. Diez Macho discusses the work which has been done on the various vocalization systems and attempts to elucidate many of the problems which these involve. Chapters are devoted to Babylonian, Palestinian, and Tiberian vocalization and also to what he calls "Pseudo Ben-Naphtali" vocalization, i.e., the mixed system of Tiberian and Palestinian vowel signs which Kahle erroneously called Ben-Naphtali. Apart from the standard Tiberian systems, most of our knowledge of these types of vocalization is derived from Genizah fragments. The work also includes a catalogue of Genizah Bible fragments with "Pseudo Ben-Naphtali" vocalization, which supplements the list published previously by Diez Macho (Hebrew and Semitic Studies Presented to G.R. Driver, 1963, pp. 16–52). This new catalogue shows that there are more Bible manuscripts of this type in the Genizah than was formerly thought.

grammar and lexicography

Allony has reconstructed Saadiah Gaon's lexicographical work Ha-Egron from Genizah manuscript fragments and published it in a critical edition. Until the discovery of the Genizah this work was known by name only from Abraham Ibn Ezra's introduction to linguistics, Sefer Moznayim. The work was designed as a handbook for poets, the entries being arranged both according to their initial letter to assist the writing of acrostics and also according to their final letter in order to help poets find a rhyming word. Allony has also published, in the form of a monograph, Genizah fragments of the Kitāb al-Kāmil by the Spanish grammarian Jacob ben Eleazar. Previously this work was only known from citations in medieval grammatical treatises and Bible commentaries. The fragments of the original work show that the Kitāb al-Kāmil formed the apex of the Spanish school of Hebrew philology. The book was a comprehensive and systematic exposition of grammar, which was more clearly organized than the compendious Sefer ha-Rikmah of his illustrious forbear Ibn Janah.

S. Abramson has used Genizah sources extensively to reconstruct the Kitāb al-Tajnīs (Book of Homonyms) of Judah ibn Bal'am. This is a lexicographical work which lists words with two or more different meanings. Genizah fragments have also been used by A. Dotan in his edition of the Sefer Dikdukei ha-Te'amim of Aaron ben Asher and by Halkin in his edition of the Kitāb al-Muhaḍara wa-al-Mudhākara of Moses Ibn Ezra. The very beginning of the mediaeval linguistic learned works, Kutub al-Lugha by Saadya Gaon was reconstructed and edited by A. Dotan.

targum and versions

M. Klein has published all the primary sources of the so-called Fragment Targums to the Pentateuch, two of which are Genizah manuscripts from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the British Museum. The Fragment Targums are not complete verse-by-verse renderings of the Hebrew text but contain only a selection of isolated verses or parts of verses. The two Genizah texts are both of Palestinian provenance and are the earliest of the fragment Targum manuscripts (11^th–13^th century). S. Lund and S.A. Foster have made a study of the Targum traditions as represented in the codex Neofiti i, which was discovered by Diez Macho in 1956. The codex Neofiti i contains the complete text of the Palestinian Targum to the Pentateuch. This text belongs to the same tradition as the Genizah fragments of the Palestinian Targum which were published by Kahle in 1930 and also to the same as is represented by the Fragment Targums. The codex also includes a large number of interlinear and marginal notations which constitute two variant Targumic versions of the main text. Lund and Foster correlate these two margin texts with the Palestinian Targum as found in the Genizah manuscripts and with the Fragment Targums. They conclude that one of the margin texts is derived from the same tradition as the Genizah and Fragment Targums whereas the other belongs to a different tradition, which has certain affinities to the Pseudo-Jonathan Targum to the Pentateuch.

M. Goshen-Gottstein reconstructed parts of the Old Testament in the "Syro-Palestinian" version on the basis of all the known sources. This version was written in Christian Palestinian Aramaic and was used by the Melchite Christian community in Palestine in the first half of the first millenniumc.e. The bulk of the source material for this version is provided by palimpsests which have been discovered in the Genizah. These contain Hebrew overscripts and Syro-Palestinian underscripts.

miscellaneous

The Genizah has furnished sources for the edition of two important Jewish mystical works. M. Margalioth has reconstructed Sefer ha-Razim almost entirely from fragments which were preserved in the Genizah. The general contents of this work have long been known, especially from extracts scattered in Sefer Raziel. It is only now, however, that we have the text of the original. Sefer ha-Razim is an exposition of the names and functions of the angels in the six heavens which precede the supreme heaven, together with an assortment of magic formulae for suppliants of various types. The recently recovered original text shows that the work was heavily indebted to the Greek Gnostic literature of Hellenistic Egypt. It contains many Greek magic terms and even has a prayer to the sun-god Helios. P. Fenton has edited the Treatise of the Pool (al-Maqāla al-Ḥawḍiyya) by Obadiah Maimonides (1228–1265), the grandson of Moses Maimonides, from Genizah fragments and from a manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. This mystical work is a manual for the spiritual wayfarer along the path to godliness. A man's heart is compared to a cistern or "pool" which is to be filled with pure water. Obadiah's work is permeated by a philosophical mysticism that owes much to the influence of Islamic Sufism. It is therefore an eloquent testimony to the close relationship between Muslim and Jewish mystics in the 13^th century. Fenton added more substantial editions of Maimonidean mystical traditions based on sources found in Karaite and Rabbanite genizot: Moreh Derekh ha-Perishut of David the 2^nd Maimuni and several works of earlier generations of this dynasty.

An important contribution to the history of Hebrew printing has been made by H. Dimitrovsky, who has published Genizah fragments of incunabula of the Babylonian Talmud from Spain and Portugal. These fragments are valuable because the Expulsion from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1497) and the Christian Inquisition led to the almost complete destruction of Jewish printed books, so that very few examples of early Jewish printing in these countries have come down to us. Moreover the text of the Talmud which these fragments preserve has many particular features which distinguish it from other known texts of the same work. Apparently old texts of the Talmud, which were not preserved elsewhere, reached Spain from Babylonia in early times.

The Genizah has preserved the oldest Yiddish work which has so far been attested (14^th century). It was first published by Fuks in 1957 and has been critically edited more recently by H.J. Hakkarainen. Hava Turniyanski published a series of letters written in Yiddish.

Scholars of Hebrew paleography have been furnished with abundant source material from the Genizah. S.A. Birnbaum and M. Beit-Arié, for instance, have used Genizah fragments as representatives of the medieval and, to a lesser extent, post-medieval Oriental and Sephardi scripts. Beit-Arié's work Hebrew Codicology, which reports the preliminary conclusions of the Hebrew paleography project of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, is particularly important. Owing to the mobility of the medieval Jewish population in the Mediterranean area, the form of script used by a manuscript scribe is not by itself a reliable guide to its provenance since the scribe may have had his training in another country. Consequently Beit-Arié has taken into account a wide variety of physical and graphical characteristics of medieval Hebrew manuscripts, which were cumulatively less sensitive to population fluctuations, and established a typology of general codicology. This typology will enable scholars to identify the date and provenance of medieval Hebrew manuscripts with greater accuracy. Edna Engel continues this work and formed types and schools of Genizah writers intended to characterize cultural traditions of Oriental communities and to set the basis for future matching projects of fragments from different libraries.

[Geoffrey Khan /

Menahem Ben-Sasson (2^nd ed.)]

Genizah Material at Cambridge University Library

old and new series

At the beginning of the 20^th century, a few years after the presentation of the Collection to Cambridge University by Charles Taylor and Solomon Schechter in 1898, a total of some 31,000 fragments had been examined and sorted in a classification series which became known as the Taylor-Schechter Old Series. The fragments were conserved in various ways. Over 2,000 were sealed between glass, almost 7,000 were bound up in volumes, and about 22,000 were individually preserved in paper folders and stored in boxes. The remaining pieces, now known to number approximately 109,000, were left in crates, being considered for the most part of lesser value. It was not until 1955 that their importance was acknowledged and that work began to sort and classify them under the direction of the university librarian, H.R. Creswick. A new classification was adopted for them and they came to be known as the Taylor-Schechter New Series. The sorting of the fragments for the New Series was, however, unsystematic. The bulk of the work was done by visiting scholars who, in the absence of a well-coordinated program, tended to make selections, each according to his own interests, in a rather piecemeal fashion. One reason for this was that, until the appointment of H. Knopf in 1965, no member of the library staff had specific responsibilities for the Genizah Collection. The fragments that had been assigned classmarks were stored in boxes like the majority of the Old Series.

Shortly after the initiation of the New Series a program began to microfilm all the classified fragments of the Collection and so enable them to be studied by scholars in academic institutions other than Cambridge. In the late 1960s, on the initiative of the university librarian, Eric Ceadel, a conservationist was appointed to treat the New Series material. The most up-to-date methods were used to ensure that the maximum protection was given to the priceless fragments. They were cleaned, flattened, and repaired. Moreover their storage in boxes was considered unsatisfactory, since they could easily be damaged or misplaced when removed for consultation. Consequently they were placed in a transparent polyester film known as Melinex, sewn onto uniform-sized sheets, and placed in looseleaf binders.

taylor-schechter genizah research unit

In 1974 the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit was established under the directorship of S.C. Reif. A ten-year project was initiated, the aims of which were the increase of personnel engaged in work on the Collection, the conservation of the material and its being made available to scholars, the compilation of bibliographical aids for users of the Collection, the initiation of an organized research program in the Genizah field, and the publication of material for both the scholarly world and the informed public. Part of the cost of this project was met by Cambridge University Library and the remainder was to be in the form of grants and donations from outside sources. A steering committee was set up for the unit consisting of representatives of the University Library and the Faculty of Oriental Studies, and has ensured the close involvement of the Faculty in the Unit's work.

sorting

The New Series was terminated after it had come to contain about 42,000 fragments. The material still remaining in 32 crates was sorted in 1974 by a team of scholars in a joint project with the Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The result of this work was entitled the Taylor-Schechter Additional Series. Since the sorting was coordinated and completed in a short space of time the classification of the fragments in this series was more systematic than that of the New Series. The Additional Series contains about 67,000 fragments and so the total number of pieces in the Collection can now be calculated to be in the region of 140,000, well in excess of Schechter's original estimate of 100,000.

conservation

A team of full-time conservationists was appointed to deal with the Taylor-Schechter Collection. They continued, with a number of improvements, the modern methods which had been initiated for the treatment of the New Series. After the New Series was completed they treated the newly sorted Additional Series fragments and placed them under Melinex in small manageable binders. Subsequently the Old Series fragments received the same attention. Finally the other Genizah fragments which had been acquired by Cambridge University Library before and after Schechter's expedition to Cairo, including the Or. 1080–81 material, were given the same protection as the Taylor-Schechter Collection.

This conservation work was completed in 1981 and now all the material of the Cambridge Genizah Collection is fully accessible to scholars and may be freely consulted without any risk of damage.

research and publications

From 1974 a systematic-cataloguing program was established in Cambridge. As a result, the first comprehensive catalogues of Cambridge Genizah material in a variety of scholarly fields are now making their appearance. The following numbers in the Series have already been published: No. 2. Hebrew Bible Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections: Volume 1: Taylor-Schechter Old Series and Other Genizah Collections in Cambridge University Library, by M.C. Davis, incorporating material compiled by H. Knopf (1978). Volume 2: Taylor-Schechter New Series and Westminster College Cambridge Collection, by M.C. Davis (1980).

No. 3. A Miscellany of Literary Pieces from the Cambridge Genizah Collections, by Simon Hopkins (1978). An Introduction to the Cambridge Genizah Collections, by S.C. Reif. Hebrew Bible Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections: Volumes 3 and 4: Taylor-Schechter Additional Series 1–31 and 32–225, with addenda to previous volumes, by M.C. Davis.

No. 4. Vocalized Talmudic Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections: Volume 1: Taylor-Schechter Old Series, by Shelomo Morag.

No. 5. Post-Talmudic Rabbinic Manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections: Volume 1: Taylor-Schechter New Series, by E.J. Wiesenberg.

No. 6. Published Material from the Cambridge Genizah Collections: A Bibliography (three volumes).

The Bibliographies of publications relating to the Cambridge Genizah Collections covers all published material up to 2005. Genizah publications are scattered in a wide range of periodicals and books, some of them unavailable in most libraries. Consequently, a scholar who is interested in a fragment is very often unable to trace what has previously been written about it. Each reference to a fragment was checked against the original manuscript and, if necessary, corrected before it was entered into the Bibliography.

microfilm

The Taylor-Schechter Unit has completed the microfilming of all the fragments in the Cambridge Genizah Collections on 320 reels. It has made whole sets of the films available to several institutions around the world including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Yeshiva University in New York. Over the last few years Cambridge University Library has itself acquired microfilms of Genizah material held elsewhere. Consequently Cambridge is now a major center for the study of material from all the Genizah Collections.

[Stefan C. Reif /

Geoffrey Khan /

Stuart E. Rosenberg (2^nd ed.)]

The Friedberg Genizah Project

The Friedberg Genizah Project was conceived and initiated by Albert D. Friedberg of Toronto, Canada, in 1998 and started to operate in 1999. Mr. Friedberg foresaw the possibilities of harnessing modern technology and international scholarly cooperation in order to advance research into the riches of the Cairo Genizah and facilitate the exploitation of these resources within the matrix of both traditional and academic Jewish studies. The Genizah contains hundreds of thousands of pages of treatises and documents of all sorts – texts of the Bible and commentaries, biblical and rabbinic dictionaries, halakhic works, poetry and prayer, philosophical and polemic treatises, deeds, documents, official and personal letters, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic and Arabic, Judeo-Persian and Yiddish, dating from before the eighth century until the 15^th and even later on. The project that resulted from Mr. Friedberg's initiative was made possible by a grant from the Buckingham Foundation of Toronto, Canada.

Specifically, the project's purpose was threefold: (a) to produce a union catalogue of all Cairo Genizah fragments, which will eventually be made available online to all interested scholars; (b) to commission transcriptions of as many of those fragments as practicable; and (c) to encourage scholarship on the Genizah.

The projected union catalogue will for the first time provide a complete accounting of all Genizah fragments from collections all over the world, thus making the rich treasures of the Cairo Genizah accessible to all those interested in the history of Jewish texts and contexts from late antiquity to the early modern period. Included in this database will be a flexible search engine that will enable scholars to collate scattered fragments and conduct research on them, as well as a wide variety of searches in all the languages of the Genizah. While more than 60% of the Genizah has been catalogued in one way or another in the last century, since its discovery and export to libraries all over the world, much remains to be done, and fgp was established in order to bring this task to completion.

Equally important is the effort to produce transcriptions of as many of these fragments as possible. These transcriptions, used in conjunction with the catalogue, will make it possible for those interested in particular subjects to investigate and integrate all relevant texts into their work.

The Project was intended to restore awareness of the importance of the Genizah to the general and Jewish scholarly worlds, and, not least important, to attract junior potential scholars to specialize in or utilize this important source for Jewish and general history.

fgp is involved in the continuous efforts of cataloguing at Cambridge University Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit. All already-published catalogues of cul entries are part of fgp database. fgp has contacted libraries with smaller collections than those at Cambridge or the Jewish Theological Seminary. The John Rylands University Library (jrul), The University of Manchester, and several other libraries have signaled their willingness to cooperate in the accomplishment of fgp's cataloguing goals. Among these are the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg, the Oestereichische Nationalbibliothek, the National Library of Russia, and the aiu collection in Paris. By its end fgp estimates that the cataloguing of over 170,000 fragments will be completed and the results made available in a union catalogue; it is expected that the remaining 43,000 fragments will be catalogued by the libraries housing these fragments, with the encouragement of the fgp.

In pursuance of its second goal, fgp has set up several units to work on specific areas of Genizah transcription, and, when appropriate as in the case of Judeo-Arabic texts, translations. These include units devoted to the entire Talmudic corpus (Mishnah, Tosefta, Babylonian Talmud, Jerusalem Talmud, rif), Midrash Halakhah, Midrash Aggadah, Judeo-Arabic halakhic compendia, Judeo-Arabic grammatical and lexical texts, Judeo-Arabic philosophical and polemic texts, liturgical texts, court and economic documents, Geonic responsa. These units are located at Hebrew University, Makhon Ben Zvi, Ben-Gurion University, Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Princeton University.

fgp also aims at publishing in print the results of its work, catalogues as well as texts. fgp has so far published Professor Menahem Kahana's first volume on The Genizah Fragments of the Halakhic Midrashim (Magnes Press, 2005). fgp also participated in the publication of a volume of Genizah texts of Maimonides' Commentary on the Mishnah by Dr. Simon Hopkins, a volume of book-lists from the Genizah compiled by N. Allony, and further support for other volumes is planned.

The process of transcription has begun to bear substantial fruit and numerous texts have been prepared for eventual distribution, or are in the process of being prepared. Especially significant are important rabbinic fragments and numerous Judeo-Arabic texts that are being transcribed and translated, with the hope of soon being able to make them available to the wider public in a variety of formats. As the Project continues to develop, the scope and significance of this component of its work can be expected to continue to increase, so that a virtual treasure trove of new texts will be available. Coupled with the extensive cataloguing and bibliographical efforts the Project is involved in, we can be assured of opening the Genizah's still unclaimed treasures for academic and religious scholarship.

With all this progress, as well as the opportunity given to many graduate students and others to actually work with Genizah texts, a greater interest on the part of students and scholars in researching these texts can already be detected, and thus the third goal of the Project – the further development of the field by encouraging young scholars to enter it – is on the way to fulfillment.

bibliography and cataloguing

The Project's Unit of Cataloguing and Bibliography, as its name indicates, has two main roles: one is the preparation of a hand-list as stated in the Project's goals; the second role includes systematic combing of published literature since the discovery of the Genizah material, for the purpose of recording the bibliographic references to and cataloguing of fragments from all Genizah collections. The focus around which the references are assembled is a unique fragment identifier, while all its varied, old, and erroneous identities in shelf marks, locations, and catalogue numbers are noted as added alternative fields, so as to eliminate as much as possible the confusion that accompanies a researcher's attempt in locating a desired fragment. The bibliographic recording notes the presence of a facsimile or whether a fragment is mentioned, transcribed, translated or fully described, in which case one also includes in the bibliographic records any physical description and cataloguing information that appear in the publication.

1. The Jewish National and University Library has completed the digitizing of jnulGenizah collection and prepared the hand-list for this collection in electronic version.

2. Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Cataloguing of t-s Collections: The projects currently receiving full or partial support from fgp are as follows: (a) the preparation of catalogues of the Arabic and Judeo-Arabic items in the New Series and Additional Series of the Cambridge Genizah Collections; (b) the compilation of a third volume of bibliography of published items from the Cambridge Genizah Collections, covering the years 1980–97.

ginzei qedem

Ginzei Qedem is an annual publication devoted to Genizah texts and studies. Ginzei Qedem is part of the Friedberg Genizah Project, whose aim is to contribute to increased scholarly discussion of genizot worldwide, in the hope that the fruits of this discussion will eventually enrich both traditional and academic Jewish studies. The purpose of Ginzei Qedem is to provide a specialized venue for scholarly publications in this area. Younger scholars are particularly encouraged to participate alongside their more established colleagues.

In terms of the subject matter to be covered, the rubric "Genizah texts and studies" is to be understood in the broadest possible sense to include publications of fragments of literary works and documents from genizot in Cairo and elsewhere, as well as studies based on such fragments. Articles may deal with any of the relevant disciplines, including but not limited to biblical studies and exegesis, history, literature (including piyyut), Talmud and rabbinics, theology, philosophy, linguistics, science, medicine, and magic.

Contributions may be in Hebrew, English, or other major European languages. Any substantial quotations in a language other than that in which the article is written must be accompanied by a translation.

the center for the study of judeo-arabic culture and literature at the ben-zvi institute (jerusalem)

The Center currently conducts three projects in conjunction with the Friedberg Genizah Project: (1) Judeo-Arabic halakhic literature, (2) Judeo-Arabic biblical exegesis, and (3) Judeo-Arabic philosophical, theological, and polemical works. In addition to these projects, the Friedberg Genizah Project is participating in the institute's ongoing project to catalogue the Judeo-Arabic manuscripts in the Firkovitch Collection.

Judeo-Arabic Halakhic Literature Project. The aim of this project is to reconstruct works relating to halakhic or talmudic topics written in Judeo-Arabic from the geonic period through the 15^th century. After reconstruction, these works will be published with an annotated Hebrew translation and introductions. The books concerned include halakhic monographs, works of talmudic methodology and legal theory, talmudic commentaries, commentaries on Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, Books of Commandments, and so on. While work on specific books is currently based on lists of identification made by various scholars, a systematic re-examination and cataloguing of the relevant Genizah fragments has also begun.

The following books are at present in varying states of preparation: (1) Hai b. Sherira Gaon, Kitāb al-Aymān (Laws of Oaths, known as Mishpetei Shevuot); (2) Hai b. Sherira, Kitabal-Bay' wal-Ashriyah (Laws of Purchase and Sales, known as Mekah u-Mimkar); (3) Samuel b. Hofni Gaon, Kitāb al-Talāq (Laws of Divorce); (4) Samuel b. Hofni, al-Madkhal ila 'Ilm al-Mishnah wal-Talmud (Introduction to the Study of the Mishnah and Talmud); (5) Samuel b. Hofni, Kitāb al-Buyū' (Laws of Sales); (6) Samuel b. Hofni, Kitāb al-Shurūt (Laws of Legal Conditions); (7) Samuel b. Hofni, Kitāb al-Zawjiyah (Laws of Marriage); (8) Samuel b. Hofni, Kitāb Ahkām al-Yibbum (Laws of Levirate Marriage); (9) Samuel b. Hofni, Kitābal-'Iddah (On the period of time a woman must wait between marriages); (10) Samuel b. Hofni, Kitāb al-Nafaqā (On Support Payments); (11) Samuel b. Hofni, Kitāb al-Rahn (On Pawning); (12) David b. Saadya al-Ger, Kitāb al-Hawī (The Comprehensive Work [of Halakhah]); (13) Hananel b. Shemuel, Commentary on the Book of Leviticus; (14) Saadiah b. Joseph Gaon, Sefer Mitzvot (Book of Commandments).

Judeo-Arabic Biblical Exegesis Project. The goal of this project is similar to that of the halakhah project: to reconstruct Judeo-Arabic works of biblical exegesis. In the case of biblical exegesis, however, it has not been possible to begin with a corpus of identified fragments. Further, the number of exegetical fragments is much larger than in the case of the halakhic material. The institute therefore began with a systematic survey of Genizah collections, cataloguing the Judeo-Arabic exegetical fragments, surveying the collections of the Bodleian Library and the British Library, the Mosseri collection, and a large part of the Cambridge collections. It is hoped that a detailed description of each fragment's physical, paleographic, codicological details, as well as its content, will eventually enable one to put together fragments of a single manuscript or composition. An attempt at identification of each fragment is already made at this stage. In addition, a start was made to transcribe and translate selected fragments, which from their paleographical, codicological, or orthographic characteristics appear to be relatively early, perhaps pre-Saadianic. As a pilot publication of a reconstructed text Prof. Ben-Shammai is now working on a critical edition of the Judeo-Arabic commentary of Saadiah Gaon on the first part of Exodus (ch. 1–20), based on a large number of fragments in various collections, with annotated Hebrew translation.

Philosophy, Theology, and Polemics. This project is dedicating renewed, concentrated attention to the philosophical, theological, and polemical material in the Genizah, mostly in Judeo-Arabic. The intention is to identify, catalogue, and publish works belonging to these branches of thought, in all the Genizah collections. Fragments of works that have already been edited are catalogued, and the significant variant readings are noted. These lists will be published independently and used in conjunction with the editions, or will prepare the way for the eventual publication of new, comprehensive critical editions (if the material examined indicates the need for such an undertaking). Fragments that are still unpublished are catalogued, identified, or described in detail in order to facilitate future identification. Several collections have already been catalogued in this way: the Mosseri and aiu collections in Paris, the Kaufman Collection in Budapest, and the collections in Philadelphia and in Oxford, as well as significant parts of the larger collections in the Jewish Theological Seminary (New York) and in Cambridge.

Princeton University Project on Medieval Documents in Judeo-Arabic (Conducted by Prof. Mark Cohen). Under Friedberg funding Princeton will computerize about 4,000 transcriptions of historical documents from the Cairo Genizah documents. These documents, mostly unpublished, were originally transcribed by S.D. Goitein and copies of his transcriptions are found in the "S.D. Goitein Genizah Research Lab at Princeton" (the original "Lab" is located at the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem). The Princeton project keyboards Goitein's typed texts, edits them, and provides them with brief catalogue-headers.

Halakhic Midrashim (Project Conducted by Prof. Menahem Kahana, Hebrew University). The first book published by fgp is Professor Kahana's The Genizah Fragments of the Halakhic Midrashim, Jerusalem (Magnes Press), 2005.

Judeo-Arabic Documents and Response (Project Conducted by Prof. Mordechai A. Friedman, Tel Aviv University). This group has undertaken the decipherment, translation, and brief annotation of the Genizah Judeo-Arabic responsa literature from the geonic period and the classical Genizah period (the manuscripts from the latter period will include a few Hebrew responsa) as well as other legal texts: Judeo-Arabic responsa dealing with commercial law, documents and some responsa associated with engagement and betrothal, responsa of Abraham Maimonides and his contemporaries.

Philological Texts, Primarily in Judeo-Arabic (Project Conducted by Prof. A. Maman, Hebrew University). The group working on philology (grammars, dictionaries, and glossaries) which includes among others Genizah fragments from Radak's Sefer Ha-Shorashim (such as t-s k7/82; t-s as 141.76b), from Ibn Janah's Sefer Ha-Shorashim (Ms. Heb d.33.69; Ms. Heb d.33.70v; ts ar 32.35, ts Ar. 46.36), fragments from Hebrew-Arabic Biblical Glossaries (ts Ar. 5/51; t-s as 141.44d; t-s as 141.68b; t-s k7/45), and fragments from Hebrew-Arabic Mishnaic Glossaries (t-s k7/11).

Genizah Cataloguing at jnul (by Dr. Ezra Chwat, jnul). This group completed an updated catalogue of the Genizah fragments of rabbinic manuscripts in Oxford's Bodleian Library and, for the Oriental Department of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, a catalogue of the David Kaufman collection in Budapest.

Documents from the Late Middle Ages (by Dr. Avraham David, jnul). This group completed Cairo Genizah documents of the Late Middle Ages (from the second half of the 15^th century to the first half of the 17^th century).

Aggadic Midrashim (by Prof. Chaim Milikovsky, Bar-Ilan University). A group focusing on Genizah texts relating to Midrash Aggadah. This group will have two primary goals: (1) the preparation of a database/catalogue of Genizah fragments of Midrash Aggadah; and (2) the transcription of fragments of Midrash Aggadah from all collections of Genizah material.

In the beginning of 2006 an interim estimate displays an order of magnitude. The figures, especially in cataloguing, represent records, not necessarily fragments, because of joints and splits. Cataloging (or identifying) records 68,900. About 25 teams (including individual scholars): 42,300 records, in addition to 10 Cambridge computerized catalogues: 24,400 records and 6 additional computerized catalogs: 2,200 records. 6,800 transcriptions; 800 new translations; 23,000 bibliographical items; 4,000 (in process of adding 20,000 jts) digitized images; 167,000 computerized lists of shelf-marks. These are in the process of being loaded into fist [= fgp Information Storehouse]. fgp has already had an effect on Genizah-related activities, certainly in Israel, but also abroad. The number of researchers, and in particular the number of graduate students (both M.A. and Ph.D. students) involved in Genizah research today, either cataloguing, transcribing, translating, or in general conducting research on specific topics related to the Genizah world is considerably greater than several years ago. Many of these graduate students are now researchers on their own, working in the Genizah field. The various teams of researchers in four universities in Israel as well as in the Jerusalem National and University Library, in the Institute for Manuscript Microfilms, and at the Ben-Zvi Institute have created an awareness and induced a flurry of activity very beneficial in itself to the promotion of Genizah-related research. Some successful examples are the special session on the fgp at the 14^th International Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem (2005), and the publication of the first issue of Ginzei Kedem. The same can be said about the awareness and activities in many Genizah centers such as Cambridge, Manchester, Princeton, Pennsylvania, and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. From this perspective, one of the principal long-term aims of the project is thus being fulfilled.

[Menahem Ben-Sasson (2^nd ed.)]

bibliography:

documents: S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, Vols. i (1967), ii (1971), and iii (1978); idem, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (1973); M.A. Michael, The Archive of Nahray ben Nissim, Businessman and Community Leader in Egypt in the 11^thCentury (Hebrew), Ph.D. thesis, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1967); N.A. Stillman, East-West Relations in the Islamic Mediterranean in the Early Eleventh Century – A Study in the Geniza Correspondenceof the House of Ibn ʿAwkal, Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania (1970); E. Ashtor, Histoire des Prix et des Salaires dans L'Orient Médiéval (1969); H. Rabie, The Financial System of Egypt a.h. 564–741/a.d. 1169–1341 (1972); M.R. Cohen, Jewish Self-Government in Medieval Egypt (1980); G. Weiss, "Legal Documents written by the Court Clerk Halfon Ben Manasse (dated 1100–1138)" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1970); A.L. Motzkin, "The Arabic Correspondence of Judge Elijah and his Family (Papers from the Cairo Geniza)" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1965); M. Gil, Documents of the Jewish Pious Foundations from the Cairo Genizah (1976); M. Friedman, Jewish Marriage in Palestine (1980); Y. Stillman, "Female Attire of Medieval Egypt: According to the Trousseau Lists and Cognate MaterialImmanuel Freiburger from the Cairo Geniza" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1972); J. Sadan, Le Mobilier au Proche Orient Médiéval (1976); S.D. Goitein, Palestinian Jewry in Early Islamic and Crusader Times (Hebrew, 1980); Y. Prawer (ed.), The History of Eretz-Yisrael under Moslem and Crusader Rule (634–1291) (Heb., 1981); M. Gil, The Tustaris: the Family and the Sect (Heb., 1981); S.D. Goitein, The Yemenites (Heb., 1983); N. Golb and O. Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century (1983); E. Ashtor, History of the Jews in Egypt and Syria under the Rule of the Mamluks, vol. 4 (Heb., 1970); idem, A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages (1976); N.A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands (1979). poetry: J. Schirmann, New Hebrew Poems from the Genizah (Heb., 1965); A. Mirsky, The Poems of Yose ben Yose (Heb., 1977); M. Wallenstein, Some Unpublished Piyyutim from the Cairo Genizah (1956); E. Fleischer, The Pizmonim of the Anonymous (Heb., 1974); E. Fleischer, The Poems of Solomon ha-Bavli (Heb., 1975); D. Jarden, The Liturgical Poetry of Rabbi Solomon ibn Gabirol (Heb., 1971); idem, The Liturgical Poetry of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi (Heb., 1978); idem, Divan Samuel ha-Nagid (Heb., 1966); N. Allony and D. Jarden, A Collection of the Secular Poems of Solomon ibn Gabirol (Heb., 1969); H. Brody and J. Schirmann, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Secular Poems (Heb., 1974); I. Levin, The Religious Poems of Abraham ibn Ezra (Heb., 1975); M.H. Schmelzer, Isaacben Abraham ibn Ezra, Poems (1980); D. Pagis, The Poems of Levi ibn al-Tabban (Heb., 1967); Y. David, The Poems of Joseph Bensuli (Heb., 1979); A. Mirsky, The Poems of Isaac Ibn Khalfun (Heb., 1961); Y. David, The Poems of Elya Bar Shemaya (Heb., 1977); D. Jarden, Ẓefunei Shirah (Heb., 1967). MASORAH: I. Yeivin, "The Babylonian Vocalization and the Linguistic Tradition it Reflects" (Heb., Ph.D. thesis, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1968); idem, Geniza Bible Fragments with Babylonian Massorah and Vocalization, 5 vols. (1973); L. Diez Merino, La biblia babilonica (1975); M. Dietrich, Neue Palästinisch Punktierte Bibelfragmente (1968); E.J. Revell, Hebrew Texts with Palestinian Vocalization (1970); idem, Biblical Texts with Palestinian Pointing and Their Accents (1977); B. Chiesa, L'Antico Testamento Ebraico (1978); N. Allony, Geniza Fragments of Rabbinic Literature, Mishna, Talmud and Midrash, with Palestinian Vocalization (1973); H. Diez Macho, Manuscritos hebreos y arameos de la Biblia (1971). grammar: N. Allony, Ha-Egron: Kitāb 'Usūl al-Shiʿr al-ʿibrāni by Rav Saadiah Gaon (Heb., 1969); idem, Jacob ben Eleazar; Kitāb al-Kāmil (Heb., 1977); S. Abramson, R. Judah b. Bal'am's Book of Homonyms (Heb., 1963); A. Dotan, The Dikdukei ha-Teʿamim of Aaron ben Moses ben Asher (Heb., 1967); A.S. Halkin, Moses ben Jacob ibn Ezra, Kitāb al-Muāḍara wal-Mudhākara (Heb., 1975). targum and versions: M. Klein, The Fragment Targums of the Pentateuch According to their Extant Sources (1968); S. Lund and S.A. Foster, Variant Versions of Targumic Traditions within Codex Neofiti I (1977). add. bibliography: general: M.A. Friedman, Cairo Genizah Studies (1980). This work is the first stage in assembling the research on the Genizah in various fields; Talmud, Midrash, poetry, and language. Among the 19 entries are the following: S.D. Goitein: "The Life of our Forefathers as Reflected in the Documents of the Cairo Genizah," Y. Sussmann, "Talmud Fragments in the Cairo Genizah," Z.M. Rabinowitz, "The Importance of the Genizah Fragments for the Study of Talmud and Midrash," E. Fleischer, "The Contribution of the Genizah to the Study of Medieval Hebrew Religious Poetry," Y. Schirmann, "Secular Hebrew Poetry in the Genizah Manuscripts," M. Gil, "Palestine During the First Period of Muslim Occupation (634–1099) in Light of the Cairo Genizah Documents," M. Benayahu, "The Significance of the Genizah Documents of the 16^th–18^th Centuries"; N. Aloni, in: Sinai, 79 (1976), 193–210; Sh. Morag, in: Tarbiz, 42 (1973), 60–78; Ginzei Jerusalem – The Teaching of Gaonim and Earlier Rabbinic Sages as compiled from the Ms. stored in the Genizah in Egypt, i, new edition by A.J. Wertheimer (1981); A. Scheiber, "' Al Ḥeqer Genizat Kaufmann ve-Ḥashivutah," in: Evkonyu (1977/78), 310–28. bible: S. Abramson, in: ks, 52 (1977), 156–72; G. Weiss, in: Beth Mikra, 23 (1978), 341–62. mishnah, talmud, and halakhah: J. Agus, in: jqr, 62 (1971/72), 314–6; N. Friedmann, in: Tarbiz, 40 (1971), 320–59; N. Aloni, in: Sinai, 72 (1973), 11–29; G. Weiss, in: Gratz College Annual of Jewish Studies, 2 (1973), 29–42; idem, in: Mehkarim be-Toldot Am Israel ve-Ereẓ Yisrael, 4 (1978), 161–73; R. Mirkin, in: Sefer Zikkaron to Ḥ. Yalon-Bar Ilan, 2 (1974), 371–84; E.Z. Melamed, ibid., 385–417; Z.M. Rabinowitz, ibid., 499–511; A.I. Katsh, in: jqr, 61 (1970/71), 1–74; 63 (1972/73), 39–47; 66 (1975/76), 129–42; 69 (1978/79), 16–26, 193–207; 71 (1981), 181–84; idem, in: Sefer Shazar, Zer li-Gevurot (1973); S. Abramson, Koveẓ al Yad, N.S. 8 (1976); M. Krupp, Immanuel Freiburger Rundbrief (1976), 172–76; N. Aloni, in: Sefer Ya'akov Gil (1979), 249–55; S. Morag, in: Sefer Zikhronot Baneth (1979), 111–23; M.A. Friedman, in: Mimizraḥ u-mi-Ma'arav, 2 (1980), 19–25. midrash: M.B. Lerner, in: ks, 48 (1973), 543–9; A. Scheiber, in: Acta Orientalia Budapest, 32 (1978), 231–43; Z.M. Rabinowitz, in: Mikhtam le-David (Sefer Zikkaron le-ha-Rav D. Ochs) (1978), 106–19; idem, in: Bar Ilan, 16–17 (1979), 100–111. geonic period: Z.M. Rabinowitz, in: Tarbiz, 41 (1972), 275–305; M.A. Friedman, in: Sinai, 74 (1974), 14–36; ibid., 83 (1978), 250–51; idem, in Michael, 5 (1978), 215–42; A. Hurwitz, in: Hadorom, 46 (1978), 123–227. maimonides: A. Hurwitz, in: Hadorom, 38 (1974), 4–44; ibid., 40 (1975), 57–122; M.A. Friedman, in: Tarbiz, 46 (1977), 145–49. rishonim: in: Hadorom, 42 (1975), 107–56; A. Hurwitz, in Hadorom, 44 (1977), 5–78; ibid., 46 (1978), 4–13; J.H. Lipschitz, in: Moriah, 7 (1978), 5–12; ibid., 8 (1978), 2–12. liturgy: A. Scheiber, in: Tarbiz, 42 (1973), 209; N. Wieder, in: Sinai, 77 (1975), 116–38; ibid., 82 (1978), 197–221; ibid., 78 (1976), 97–122. poetry: Z. Malachi, in: Tarbiz, 42 (1973), 328–36; idem, Yahadut Teman (1976), 321–27; D. Yarden, in: Sinai, 79 (1976), 97–101; Z.M. Rabinowitz, Shai le-Haiman (1977). history: S.D. Goitein, in: jqr, 56 (1975/76), 69–88; idem, in: Sefunot, 11 (1978), 11–33; B.Z. Kedar, in: Tarbiz, 42 (1973), 401–18; D. Baneth, in: Sugyot be-Toldot Ereẓ Yisrael, 4 (1976), 103–21; D. Pingree, in: jnes, 36 (1977), 113–45; 38 (1979), 153–76, 231–56; M.A. Michaeli, in: Michael, 5 (1978), 168–87; Z. Malachi, ibid. 188–91; S. Shaked, in: Studia Orientalia in memory of Baneth (1979), 239–44. aliyah: S. Abramson, in: Sinai, 81 (1977), 181–227. other: M.L. Klein, in: huca, 49 (1978), 73–87; 50 (1979), 149–64; A. Scheiber, 277–87; idem, in: aob, 33 (1979), 113–19; E. Fleischer, in: Sefunot, N.S. 47–25 (1979); idem, in: Kobeẓ al Yad, 9 (19), (1979), 25–127; idem, in: ks, 55 (1980), 183–90; Z. Falk, in: Sinai, 85 (1979), 145–49. miscellaneous: M. Margalioth, Sefer ha-Razim (Heb., 1966); P. Fenton, The Treatise of the Pool: al-Maqāla al-Ḥawḍiyya (1981); H. Dimitrovsky, Seridei Bavli: Fragments from Spanish and Portuguese Incunabula and Sixteenth Century Printings of the Babylonian Talmud and al-Fasi (Heb., 1979); L. Fuks, The Oldest Known Literary Documents of Yiddish Literature (c. 1382) (1957); H.J. Hakkarainen, Studien zumCambridger Codex (1967); S.A. Birnbaum, The Hebrew Scripts (1971); M. Beit-Arié, Hebrew Codicology (1976); D. Sklare (with H. Ben-Shammai) (eds.), Judaeo-Arabic Manuscripts in the Firkovitch Collections: The Works of Yusuf al-Basir, 1997; D. Sklare (with H. Ben-Shammai) (eds.), Center for the Study of Judaeo-Arabic Culture and Literature: Publications (series): Judaeo-Arabic Manuscripts in the Firkovitch Collections: The Commentary on Genesis by Yefet ben `Eli (Heb., 2000); P.B. Fenton, "Leningrad Treasures," in: Genizah Fragments, 10 (1985), 2–3; M. Ben-Sasson, "Firkovich's Second Collection: Remarks on Historical and Halakhic Material," in: Jewish Studies, 31 (1991), 47–67 (Heb.); G. Khan, "Documents support Firkovitch theory," in: Genizah Fragments, 28 (Oct. 1994), 2; G.D. Cohen, "The Reconstruction of Gaonic History: Introduction to Jacob Mann's Texts and Studies," in the reprint of Mann's Texts and Studies, 1, (1972); M. Gil, The Tustaris: The Family and the Sect (Heb., 1981); idem, Palestineduring the First Muslim Period (634–1099), 1–3 (Heb., 1983); M. Ben-Sasson, The Jews of Sicily 825–1068 (1991); E. Bareket, The Jews of Egypt 1007–1055 (1995); M. Ben-Sasson, The Emergence of the Local Jewish Community in the Muslim World – Qayrawan, 800–1057 (Heb., 1996); M. Friedman, J ewish Marriage in Palestine (1980–1981); S.D. Goitein, Jewish Education in Muslim Countries: New Sources from the Geniza (Heb., 1962); S.C. Reif, Published Material from the Cambridge Genizah Collections: A Bibliography (1988), 243; H. Ben-Shammai, "Saadya's Introduction to Isaiah as an Introduction to the Books of the Prophets," in: Tarbiz, 60 (1991), 371–404 (Heb.); S.D. Goitein, Palestinian Jewry in Early Islamic and Crusader Times (Heb., 1980); Y. Yahalom, "The Leningrad treasures and the Study of the Poetry and Life of Yehuda Halevi," in: Pe'amim, 46–47 (1991), 55–74 (Heb.); idem, "Anthology of Ha-Levi poems," in: Genizah Fragments, 30 (October 1995); S. Hopkins, "An unpublished autograph fragment of Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed," in: Bulletin of the School of Asian and African Studies, 50 (1987), 465–69; S. Stroumsa, Dawud ibn Marwan al-Muqammis's Twenty Chapters (1989); M. Zucker, Saadia's Commentary on Genesis (1984); G. Vajda, "Le commentaire kairouanais sur le 'Livre de la Creation'," in: rej, 105 (1940), 132–40; 107 (1946–47), 99–156; 110 (1949–50), 67–92; 112 (1953), 5–33; 113 (1954), 37–61; 119 (1961), 159–61; 122 (1963), 149–62; A.E. Harkavy, Zikhron Rav Shemuel ben Hofni (Studien und Mittheilungen, 31) (1880).