from the Cairo genizah Many of the fragments found in the Cairo Genizah may be dated to the early centuries of the second millennium CE, and there are a fair number of earlier items as well as a number of nineteenth-century pieces. The manuscripts in the Genizah include sacred and religious materials as well as great deal of secular writings. The Genizah materials include a wide range of content. Among the literary fragments, the most popular categories are liturgical texts, Biblical and related texts, and Rabbinic literature. There are also materials with philosophical, scientific, mystical, and linguistic writings. Among the non-literary items there are legal documents and private letters. Also found were school exercises and merchants' account books, as well as communal records of various sorts. The normal practice for genizot (pl. of genizah) was to remove the contents periodically and bury them in a cemetery. Many of these documents were written in the
Aramaic language using the
Hebrew alphabet. As the Jews considered
Hebrew to be the language of God, and the Hebrew script to be the literal writing of God, the texts could not be destroyed even long after they had served their purpose. The Jews who wrote the materials in the Genizah were familiar with the culture and language of their contemporary society. The documents are invaluable as evidence for how colloquial
Arabic of this period was spoken and understood. They also demonstrate that the Jewish creators of the documents were part of their contemporary society: they practiced the same trades as their
Muslim and
Christian neighbors, including farming; they bought, sold, and rented properties. , the son of
Maimonides The importance of these materials for reconstructing the social and economic history for the period between 950 and 1250 cannot be overemphasized. Judaic scholar
Shelomo Dov Goitein created an index for this time period which covers about 35,000 individuals. This included about 350 "prominent people," among them
Maimonides and his son
Abraham, 200 "better known families", and mentions of 450 professions and 450 goods. He identified material from Egypt,
Palestine,
Lebanon,
Syria (but surprisingly, not
Damascus or
Aleppo),
Tunisia,
Sicily, and even covering trade with
India. Cities mentioned range from
Samarkand in Central Asia to
Seville and
Sijilmasa,
Morocco to the west; from
Aden north to
Constantinople; Europe not only is represented by the Mediterranean port cities of
Narbonne,
Marseille,
Genoa and
Venice, but even
Kyiv and
Rouen are occasionally mentioned. In particular, the various records of payments to labourers for building maintenance and the like form by far the largest collection of records of day wages in the Islamic world for the early medieval period, despite difficulties in interpreting the currency units cited and other aspects of the data. Many of the items in the Cairo Genizah are not complete manuscripts, but are instead fragments consisting of one or two leaves, many of which are damaged themselves. Similarly, the pages of a single manuscript often became separated. It is not uncommon to find the pages of one manuscript housed in three or four different modern libraries. On the other hand, non-literary writings often lost their value with the passage of time, and were left in the Genizah while still more or less intact. Of particular interest to biblical scholars are several incomplete manuscripts of the original Hebrew version of
Sirach. Solomon Schechter also found two fragments of the
Damascus Document, other fragments of which were later found among the
Dead Sea Scrolls at
Qumran. The Cairo Genizah has preserved over 2,500 fragments related to medicine, including
Judeo-Arabic translations of Greek and Arabic medical treatises, original compositions, prescriptions, druggists' notes, and physicians' personal notebooks. These documents provide rare insight into practical aspects of
Jewish medicine, covering topics such as
eye diseases,
skin conditions,
oral hygiene,
gynecology, and seasonal illnesses. One such fragment includes a version of Jonah ibn Biklārish's
Kitāb al-Mustaʿīnī, a drug manual written for the
Hūd court in
Zaragoza. The number of documents added to the Genizah changed throughout the years. For example, the number of documents added were fewer between 1266 and circa 1500, when most of the Jewish community had moved north to the city of Cairo proper, and saw a rise around 1500 when the local community was increased by
refugees from Spain. It was they who brought to Cairo several documents that shed a new light on the history of
Khazaria and
Kievan Rus', namely, the
Khazar Correspondence, the
Schechter Letter, and the
Kievian Letter. An 11th-century
Afghan Geniza was found in 2011. The Cairo Genizah fragments were extensively studied, cataloged and translated by
Paul E. Kahle. His book,
The Cairo Geniza was published by Blackwell in 1958, with a second edition in 1959.
Accounting Jewish bankers in Old Cairo used a
double-entry bookkeeping system which predated any known usage of such a form in Italy, and whose records remain from the 11th century AD, found amongst the Cairo Geniza. == Research ==