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 (Jewish languages) using Hebrew letters, many types of common documents wound up in the Genizah. 

The page before you is from a Haggadah—the script for the seder ritual on the first nights of Passover. It is written unevenly, by an inexperienced hand, on common paper. It was probably written by a person for their own use, therefore. During the manuscript age (before print), few people had copies of any book, so this is evidence of the great love of the owner of this book for the Jewish tradition. 

The page before you includes, on the top right, part of the text of the “Four Questions.” This copy preserves only two questions though, deriving from the Mishnah’s original three. One of the questions here references the fact that “on all other nights,” we prepare the meat however we please, but “on this night, it is only roasted.” This recalls the time when the Jerusalem Temple was still standing, which at the time of the writing of this Haggadah (circa 1000 CE) had long since passed.