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 you see here is a personal letter written in the early 13th century by a traveling merchant to his wife in Egypt. The letter relates details of the merchant’s business transactions and of the death of an important Jewish leader and judge. The long journey to India seems to have taken its toll on both the traveler and his wife. In the letter, he writes: “In your letters you alternatively rebuke or offend me or put me to shame and use harsh words all the time. I have not deserved any of this. I swear by God, I do not believe that the heart of anyone traveling away from his wife has remained like mine… [I am] constantly thinking of your and yearning after you.”