Cairo Geniza - Discovery and Present Locations

Discovery and Present Locations

The first European to note the collection was apparently Simon van Gelderen (an ancestor of Heinrich Heine) who visited the Ben Ezra synagogue and reported about the Genizah in 1752 or 1753. In 1864 the traveler and scholar Jacob Saphir visited the synagogue and explored the genizah for two days; while he did not identify any specific item of significance he suggested that possibly valuable items might be in store. In 1896, English travelers, the twin sisters Agnes S. Lewis and Margaret D. Gibson returned from Egypt with fragments from the genizah they considered to be of interest, and showed them to Solomon Schechter at Cambridge. Schechter, already aware of the Genizah but not of its significance, immediately recognized the importance of the material. He later went to Egypt, acquired many documents, and brought the contents of the Genizah to scholarly and popular attention.

The genizah fragments have now been archived in various libraries around the world. The Taylor-Schechter collection at Cambridge has the largest, by far, single collection, with nearly 193,000 fragments (137,000 shelf-marks); there are a further 31,000 fragments at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Also, the John Rylands University Library in Manchester holds a collection of over 11,000 fragments, which are currently being digitised and uploaded to an online archive.