The Cairo Genizah: A Thousand Years of Jewish Life

Ben Outhwaite, Head of the Genizah Research Unit in Cambridge University Library, will give a talk at the Earlham Road Synagogue.

The Cairo Genizah is renowned as one of the great, if not the greatest, collections of the medieval Jewish world. Following its discovery by western scholarship in the late nineteenth century, one of the most obscure periods of Jewish history – the experience of the Jews of Egypt and the Holy Land in the High Middle Ages –can now be vibrantly brought to life through the letters, documents and other records of daily life that a pious community consigned to its ‘sacred storeroom’. The Genizah paints a vivid and detailed picture of what life was like in medieval Cairo and Jerusalem, as communities thrived, struggled and squabbled, against a backdrop of tension and tolerance under the Fatimid Islamic government, and despair and resilience in the face of the violence of Saljuq and Crusader invasions.

Admission: £4:00 including refreshments