Medieval Texts Provide Glimpse Into 11th Century Jewish Society Living
On exhibit now at the Cambridge University Library are medieval documents that were thought to be discarded history but contain a treasure-trove of information on how 11th-century Jews lived in Egypt. The manuscripts on display are only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of fragmented texts.
The literary treasures came from the Genizah storeroom in the Old Cairo synagogue where the community stored different kinds of records for 800 years in fulfillment of a rabbinic prohibition against the destruction of sacred texts. The records grew until it became the world's largest and most important collection of documents that chronicled the Jews' social history in Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus and elsewhere.
The first of the collection that arrived in England was in 1897, according to the Guardian. Since then, the collection had been dispersed among a number of libraries that bought the manuscripts like Oxford University, which acquired 25,000 documents, and the University of Manchester.
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The biggest bulk of the collection consisting of 200,000 documents has been housed in Cambridge for more than a century. The volumes of papers included wills, marriage contracts, butcher's bills, private letters and agreements, down to a child's early attempts at writing a Hebrew script and a spell to fight a scorpion sting.
"The first scholars to study the papers were only interested in the Biblical material, but what is extraordinary about the collection and was almost ignored for many decades is that it covers the whole range of human life," said co-curator Benjamin Outhwaite, who is part of the team that translated some of the papers.
Some of the translated texts displayed in the exhibit that will run until Oct. 18 tell of stories about an errant son-in-law, a wife threatening to do a one-day hunger strike to protest her husband's behavior, a Jewish woman in love with a Christian doctor, and a wealthy woman who was excommunicated for adultery.
