The Cairo Genizah

For roughly eight hundred years, the Jews of Fustat, the old city of Cairo, placed worn out writings in a storeroom, or genizah, in the Ben Ezra Synagogue. Because writings that might contain the name of God were not thrown away, the community saved nearly everything: Bibles and prayer books, but also business letters, marriage and divorce contracts, shopping lists, prescriptions, and children’s school exercises, about 400,000 fragments in all. Students work as historians with eight real Genizah documents, view the originals online, and build an evidence based picture of Jewish life and of relations among Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the medieval Mediterranean.

Essential Questions

1. What can a community’s everyday papers reveal that the writings of rulers and scholars cannot?
2. What do the Genizah documents show about Jewish life, and about relations among Jews, Muslims, and Christians, in medieval Egypt?
3. Whose voices does an archive preserve, and whose might it leave out?

Students will be able to

• Explain what a genizah is and why the Cairo Genizah preserved so many everyday documents.
• Source a primary document by its type, author, audience, date, and purpose.
• Draw evidence based conclusions about daily life, family, economy, education, and religion in medieval Fustat.
• Analyze what the documents reveal about relations among Jews, Muslims, and Christians.
• Evaluate the strengths and limits of an archive as a historical source.

Curriculum Connections

• Social Studies (C3): D2.His.9.9-12, D2.His.10.9-12, D2.His.16.9-12
• World History: Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt; Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade; religious minorities in the medieval Islamic world
• ELA: RH.9-10.1, RH.11-12.1, RH.11-12.9, WHST.9-10.1
• Jewish Studies (Jewish settings): the custom of genizah; Maimonides; Sephardic and Mizrahi history

Materials

• Projector and speakers; devices for small groups
• Video: The Hidden Treasures of the Cairo Genizah (National Library of Israel, 3.5 minutes)
• Optional: A Brush With History (Cambridge University Library, 10 minutes), on conserving the fragments
• Appendix A: Background Reading and Appendix C: Document Analysis (one each per student)
• Appendix B: Document Cards (one card per group)

At a Glance

Grade and setting: Grades 9 to 12, public, independent, and Jewish schools; adaptable for grades 6 to 8
Time: Two 45 minute class periods, or one 90 minute block
Source: A JIMENA lesson, with manuscripts from Cambridge University Library

Downloads

• Lesson Plan  Full lesson with teacher background, vocabulary, assessment, and differentiation (PDF)
• Appendix A  Background Reading with timeline (PDF)
• Appendix B  Eight Document Cards with links to the original manuscripts (PDF)
• Appendix C  Document Analysis worksheet and paragraph planner (PDF)

Day 1. Introduction (15 minutes)

1. Trash or treasure? (7 min). Students list five things they wrote, received, or threw away this week. Ask: If a historian found only these items a thousand years from now, what would they conclude about your life? What would they get wrong?
2. Introduce the genizah (3 min). Jewish custom holds that writings that may contain the name of God should not be destroyed; worn out books and papers are placed in a storeroom called a genizah. In Fustat, the community rarely emptied its genizah, and it saved far more than sacred texts.
3. Watch (5 min). Show The Hidden Treasures of the Cairo Genizah. What surprised you? Why would ordinary papers end up in a synagogue storeroom?

Day 1. Investigating the Documents (30 minutes)

4. Background reading (12 min). Students read Appendix A and annotate one surprising fact, one new term, and one question. Review the timeline. Why did Solomon Schechter call the Genizah “a battlefield of books”?
5. Document groups (3 min). Eight groups each receive one card from Appendix B and a copy of Appendix C.
6. Analyze (15 min). Groups read their card and open the original on the Cambridge Digital Library. Even without reading Hebrew or Arabic, students study the material, handwriting, size, decoration, corrections, and damage, then complete Part 1.

Day 2. Building the Picture (20 minutes)

7. Share (12 min). Each group presents its document in one minute. The class fills a chart for daily life, family, economy and trade, education, religion and law, and relations with neighbors (Part 2).
8. Discuss (8 min). Which documents show Jews and Muslims working together? Which show risk or danger? Who is well represented, and who is missing or speaks only through others? What can the Genizah not tell us?

Day 2. Write and Reflect (25 minutes)

• Write. Using Part 3 of Appendix C, students answer: What does the Cairo Genizah reveal about Jewish life in the medieval Islamic world? Paragraphs cite at least three documents by name and shelfmark and include one sentence on a limit of the evidence.
• Reflect. If your community kept a genizah today, what would it save, and what would historians in a thousand years learn about us? Exit ticket: one thing you learned from an ordinary document that you could not have learned from a famous one.

Assessment

• Formative: annotations, Part 1 analysis, and group presentations.
• Summative: an evidence based paragraph with a clear claim, specific details from three documents cited by shelfmark, explanation, and at least one limit of the Genizah as a source.

Differentiation

• Middle school students or English learners: use four cards (the alphabet primer, the shopping order, the loan, and the last letter home); preteach vocabulary; sentence frames.
• Students who need support: pair readers; model Part 1 with one card as a class; a claim with two pieces of evidence.
• Advanced learners: find a related document in the Princeton Geniza Project and compare the two.

• A class genizah. Students each contribute one ordinary item that documents their lives, write a catalog card with a “shelfmark,” and discuss what the collection would and would not reveal to a future historian.
• Mapping a merchant’s world. Using David Maimonides’ last letter and the Princeton Geniza Project, students map trade routes linking Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Yemen, and India.
• Two discoveries. Compare the Cairo Genizah with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Both preserved the Wisdom of Ben Sira, and the scroll found at Masada in 1964 confirmed the Hebrew text first recovered from the Genizah.
• From Fustat to the twentieth century. Connect to Jews in the Islamic World and Oral Histories, including Mark Levy’s testimony about Jewish life in Alexandria.