Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, by Adina Hoffman and Peter ColeI had bee
Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, by Adina Hoffman and Peter ColeI had been vaguely aware of the Cairo Geniza, which is why I bought this book when it was on offer. Normally, a geniza is a place in a synagogue where religious texts are stored temporarily before being given appropriate burial in a cemetery. But in one synagogue in Cairo, the congregation not only stored religious texts but a whole host of other documents as well - and never cleared them out. The result was a treasure trove of documents from the 6th to 19th centuries, with many from the medieval period. This book is the story of the discovery of this trove, and discoveries within it, and sorting and cataloging - a process which has been going on for a century and shows no sign of being finished soon. These are two documents which show the range - a child’s handwriting exercise, and a fragment of illumination. The book gives the history of the rediscovery, and as part of that gives some of the interesting bits which were found by different people. There’s some fascinating “you only see what you’re looking for” - different people looking at the same fragments and finding entirely new things. A great read, and leaves me wanting to read more about it. One slightly odd thing is that none of the pictures in the book are labelled, which was unexpectedly annoying. The collection of documents is in various places across the world. To give an idea of the scope, the collection in Cambridge has 193,000 documents, of which they have digitised 18,000. You can keyword search the digitised ones - 353 mention cheese :) -- source link
#non-fiction#history#jewish history#cairo geniza