Behind the Headlines Cambridge University on Verge of Completing Task of Preserving the Famous Cairo

Cambridge University is about to complete the huge task of preserving for posterity the world’s greatest treasure house of Medieval Hebrew manuscripts — the famous Cairo Geniza collection.

The last of the 140,000 fragments and documents, some up to 1,000 years old, are being unravelled, cleaned and sealed in a specially developed plastic casing by experts at Cambridge University library.

Dr. Stefan Reif, the scholar in charge of the priceless collection, says the conservation work begun about 80 years ago when the material came to Cambridge, will be completed in the autumn of 1981.

The parallel task of cataloging the fragments may not be finished until the end of the century, and Reif fears that it will be delayed or even suspended by lack of funds. Nevertheless, the completion of the conservation work will be an important milestone in an archeological epic in some ways as remarkable as the finding of the Dead Sea scrolls.

RECOVERED BY NOTED SCHOLAR

This accumulation of Hebrew manuscript material and Judaica was recovered from the thousand year old Ben Ezra Synagogue of old Cairo in 1896-7 by the noted scholar Dr. Solomon Schechter who later founded the Conservative movement in American Judaism.

The Geniza was the synagogue’s depository for worn-out copies of sacred Jewish writings. Schechter, then reader in Talmudic literature at Cambridge, was sent to Cairo by his friend and patron Dr. Charles Taylor, master of St. John’s College, Cambridge.

In Cairo, Schechter secured the approval of the synagogue authorities to empty the Geniza, and the fragments which he brought back from what is now called the Taylor Schechter Geniza collection.

Over the following 80 years, the Geniza collection has ushered in a new era of Jewish learning. According to Reif “There is hardly an area of Hebrew and Jewish studies that has not been revolutionized by findings that originated in the Geniza. Taken together its fragments make up a literature of the sacred, the heretical and the mundane which reaches back to Biblical times and extends forward to the 19th Century.”

MANY HEBREW BOOKS RECOVERED

Among the many lost Hebrew books recovered from the hoard is the original version of “The Wisdom of Ben Sira,” a work dating from the Second Century BCE. Jewish doubt about its sacredness had led to its exclusion from the Hebrew Bible and eventually the loss of its Hebrew text but the Geniza ensured that it was not lost forever by preserving a 10th Century copy.

No less exciting are the samples of the original handwriting of outstanding figures like Moses Maimonides and Yehuda Halevi and the many detailed accounts of social, economic and religious life among Near East Jews in the 11th and 13th Centuries.

While these discoveries are a tribute to the generations of scholars who have studied the Geniza, the present pace of work on its restoraation goes back only eight years to when Reif, then only 30, was put in charge of it. Of the 140,000 fragments, 100,000 had still not been treated to ensure their preservation. Of these 68,000 had not even been opened when he arrived.

Faced with the huge task, Reif was on the verge of resigning, but he persevered A gifted lecturer he turned to the Jewish community in Britain for funds to help him build a team of conservationists and scholars. These donations, together with money from other countries, supplement the budget provided by the university. Costs in 1981 are expected to reach 70,000 Pounds.

Today, though the shadow of the economic recession hangs over the Geniza collection, its physical preservation is now ensured against the ravages of the damp English climate, but the task of opening its secrets to students of Jewish history is far from finished.