The Cairo (Egypt) Genizah is a collection of hundreds of thousands of documents preserved in the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Old Cairo (Fustat). According to Jewish practice, sacred writings that can no longer be used must be buried, and before their burial they are to be stored in a special repository called a “genizah.” For unknown reasons, the materials deposited in the Ben Ezra Genizah were never sent for burial, so the Genizah preserved discarded writings from the time of its original construction in the 9th century to the time of its discovery by Europeans in the 19th century. In addition, many of the documents found in the Genizah were not sacred writings. The community seems to have believed that Hebrew letters themselves are sufficiently sacred to require deposit of writings using these characters in a genizah, and since the Arabic speaking Jews of Cairo wrote their Arabic using Hebrew letters, many types of common documents wound up in the Genizah.

This page from a primer demonstrates how children were taught to recognize the letters of the Hebrew alphabet over a thousand years ago. Scholars suggest that the teacher would outline the form of the letters, and the student would fill them in—a technique still used today. Although one line of text for the Hebrew letter mem is missing, the remaining five letters on this document, yod, kaf, lamed, nun and samech, are easily recognizable.