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. 

The page before you, is from a siddur—a Jewish prayer book. It is written clearly but not in a fine hand, on common paper. It was probably written by a person for their own use, therefore, or by a scribe hired to create a simple personal copy. 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 prayer tradition. 

If you are able to read prayer-book Hebrew, you will recognize the right page as the beginning of the Amidah—the silent prayer. If you read through it, you will see that though the prayer begins with words that are identical to what we know, it soon employs different formulae. The same is true of the “healing” prayer on the left page, which emphasized emotional, not physical healing. This is all evidence of the fluidity of canonical prayer in the age before the standardization imposed by print.