Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Download MP3
Anchor Jeb Sharp catches up with Rabbi Mark Glickman about his visit to the Cairo Genizah in Old Cairo, Egypt. The Cairo Genizah is one of the great troves of Jewish medieval documents to be discovered in modern times.
Mark Glickman, Gamal Moustafa, Ben Ezra synagogue worker. Photo: Jacob Glickman
Entry to the Cairo Genizah, Ben Ezra Synagogue, Cairo, Egypt. Photo: Jacob Glickman
Rabbi Mark Glickman takes a look into the Cairo Genizah. Photo: Jacob Glickman
Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.
JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp and this is The World. Rabbi Mark Glickman has gone where few Americans have gone before. Two months ago he visited the Cairo Geniza. A geniza is where sacred Jewish documents are stored before they’re buried. The Cairo Geniza is special. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish texts were stored there for centuries and were never disposed of. Jewish scholars rediscovered them in the 1890′s and the documents are now in archives in the U.S., Europe, and Israel. But the geniza chamber itself remains intact an Rabbi Glickman had wanted to see the geniza ever since he first learned about it in Rabbinical school. Two months ago he realized his dream. Rabbi Glickman, and his son traveled to Cairo and worked their way to the Ben Ezra Synagogue.
RABBI MARK GLICKMAN: The geniza is way up high in the synagogue wall. It is above a balcony that overlooks the main floor of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. The caretakers there put a ladder up to the entry way. Turns out the ladder wasn’t high enough, so they had to get a second one that could reach. And while I was waiting I remembered that I had a flashlight in my pocket. So I reached into my pocket, I pulled out the flashlight and I shined it inside. And there I was looking into the Cairo Geniza, the site of the greatest repository of Jewish documents and of medieval an ancient documents of any kind in the world. Now, the Cairo geniza is empty. But looking into that dark room, I was able to imagine page after page after page after page of documents being added over the centuries, until there were about 300,000 of them waiting to be brought to the light of day.
SHARP: And what period are we talking about?
RABBI GLICKMAN: Most of the documents date from the years 969 to 1250. The most recent document in there was placed there in 1899, two years after the document started to be removed from it in great numbers. The earliest document pre-dated the synagogue itself. The geniza was an attic over the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, which was built in the 11th Century. But the earliest documents were a few centuries older than that. So they had sat somewhere else, and were eventually put in the geniza.
SHARP: Now I understand you were the first non-Egyptian to visit the geniza in a very long time. How long?
RABBI GLICKMAN: Well the last reported visit of an outsider to the geniza that I am aware of, was of a man who went in 1911. So my son Jacob, who is almost 16, and I were the first outside visitors that I know of in 99 years.
SHARP: Give us an idea of the range of documents found there and what sort of information they give us.
RABBI GLICKMAN: Well since there are so many documents that were found in the geniza, we haven’t really had time to study them all. Scholars haven’t had time to study them all. But there have been some real highlights. For example, turns out that one of the dead sea scrolls actually made its way into the Cairo geniza. One of the documents that was found in the geniza was an old piece of Jewish sheet music. In fact, it is the oldest known piece of Jewish sheet music in the world. There were court documents, there were letters, there was children’s school books, there were doodlings, there were medical prescriptions. One of the medical prescriptions called for a medication, the first ingredient was a lame, decrepit female hyena. There were long lost books of the Bible. Biblical era books that we knew about, but scholars thought they had been lost to history. They found them in the geniza.
SHARP: What languages occur in these geniza documents?
RABBI GLICKMAN: Well there are lots of languages in the geniza documents. Many of the documents are in Hebrew. There are some that are in Persian or a Jewish dialect of Persian, Judeo-Persian. There is Ladino, which is Judeo-Spanish. There has even been some Yiddish there. But by far, the greatest number of geniza documents are in Arabic, often in Judeo-Arabic which is a Jewish dialect of the language. But what we don’t realize is that really, up until just a few decades ago, the most widely spoken language amongst the Jewish people around the world was Arabic. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of Jews, well millions of Jews, used to speak it. And in the middle ages, Judeo-Arabic culture was a rich and thriving element of Jewish life, of some of the greatest poets and philosophers in Jewish history wrote in the language; Arabic. So in that sense, I think the geniza not only gives us a view of the past, but maybe if we can do it right, it can give us a good view of the future because here we have Jews and Arabs speaking together and interacting together socially and through their businesses and as friends. And if that happened in the middle ages maybe, just maybe it can happen again.
SHARP: Is the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, where the geniza was located, still in use?
RABBI GLICKMAN: The Ben Ezra Synagogue is currently a tourist site. Today, Cairo has fewer than 100 Jews. Only a couple dozen of whom are involved in Jewish life and most of them are quite elderly. Most of the Jewish community in Egypt fled during the late forties and early fifties as life for Jews in Egypt became increasingly difficult and that’s one of the sad parts of the story. This once thriving, rich, very populous society has dwindled to such a small number of Jews who live there today.
SHARP: Rabbi Mark Glickman, thank you so much.
RABBI GLICKMAN: Well thank you Jeb, it was a delight to speak with you.
SHARP: Rabbi Mark Glickman of Seattle is writing a book about the Cairo Geniza. And you can see a photo of him on that ladder looking into the geniza at the world dot org.
Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.
Discussion
5 comments for “Cairo’s Jewish medieval manuscripts”