Egypt

Jewish life in Egypt goes back, one might say, to the very beginning—before the Exodus that ultimately led to the Promised Land. And though the Torah forbids Jews from “returning to Egypt,” Jews made homes there throughout history, from antiquity (think: Philo of Alexandria, the notable first-century Jewish philosopher) to the Middle Ages and beyond. 

One of the high points of Jewish life in Egypt occurred in the high Middle Ages, when Cairo (for Jews, the older part of the city called Fostat) was a “world city,” a populous city to which traders and others came from far and wide. It was at this time that Maimonides himself was its most notable Jewish resident, writing there his great legal and philosophical works.

One of the synagogues in Fostat was the home of the Cairo Genizah. A “genizah” is a storage place where unusable Jewish sacred writings are stored before they are sent for burial. But this particular genizah was unusual in two significant ways: (1) what it stored was never sent for burial, and (2) everything written in Hebrew letters, whether sacred or not, was thrown into it; given that Cairo’s Jews, who spoke Arabic, wrote their Arabic using Hebrew letters, this means that the genizah contained an unimaginably diverse body of writings. When it was discovered by Europeans in the late 19th century, it contained nearly a half a million fragments! 

The Library of JTS has the world’s second largest collection of fragments from the Cairo Genizah (after the library of Cambridge University). Among its Genizah holdings are a letter signed by Maimonides, another letter penned by poet and philosopher Judah Halevi, legal writings, ketubbot (Jewish marriage contracts), and much more.