This Synagogue Held One of the Oldest Versions of the Bible in Greek

Long forgotten and tucked away in an ancient synagogue in Egypt, a rich cache of documents was waiting to be discovered. But how did they get there?

Following the Arab conquest in the seventh century, a new Egyptian capital was established: al-Fusṭāṭ. This city lay a little to the south of where Cairo would be founded three centuries later. Al-Fusṭāṭ developed around a Roman fortress that had been seized from the Byzantines at the point where the Nile Valley fans out to form the delta. Soon, various ethnic groups settled there, among them a Jewish community.

The oldest preserved synagogue in al-Fusṭāṭ is still standing in the Coptic quarter, at the heart of Old Cairo. The Ben Ezra Synagogue dates back to at least the late ninth century, when a Coptic church dedicated to Saint Michael was sold to the Jewish community and converted into a synagogue. It’s named after Abraham ibn Ezra, a Spanish medieval Jewish scholar. Typically, synagogues incorporate an archive or hidden storeroom, called a genizah, within the building. The genizah is used to keep manuscripts or sacred liturgical texts that are no longer used, but which cannot be destroyed because they mention the name of God. These documents are called shemot (names).

In the case of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, which was rebuilt and renovated over the years, the genizah was located on the upper floor, accessed via a ladder through a high opening in the wall that’s still visible today. Normally, when a genizah becomes full, the contents are carefully buried. But at Ben Ezra, while some scrolls and parchments were removed and buried during renovation work, the majority were left undisturbed, some for as long as a thousand years.

A Legendary Archive

By the mid-19th century, only 12 Jewish families were still living near the synagogue. Most of the community had settled in the Jewish quarter farther north. Although the Ben Ezra Synagogue was never abandoned, the building, including the genizah, did fall into disrepair. By then, some scholars had learned of the Cairo genizah, but none had any idea of the treasure trove housed within it. Local rumors told of how the genizah contained a Torah written by the Prophet Jeremiah himself, and some believed that a catastrophic fate would befall anyone who dared to touch the ancient sacred texts. Tall tales developed of a poisonous serpent that guarded the chamber.

Snakes and curses aside, various European travelers did manage to access the genizah. The German poet and linguist Simon von Geldern visited in 1753, but was unable to examine its contents. In 1864, Jewish researcher Jacob Saphir claimed to have been inside the genizah after bribing some guards, although there are authors who question this claim. Saphir, who recounted this experience in his 1866 memoir, tells how he found dust, rubble, and a jumble of manuscripts gnawed by rodents.

Later, various documents from the genizah began to appear on the antiquities market; they must have been stolen, but how and by whom is as yet unclear.

In 1896, the Scottish philologist twins Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson traveled to Egypt in order to carry out research in the library of St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai. They were on a quest to find the oldest manuscripts of the Bible. During this trip, the sisters acquired a consignment of 1,700 documents that turned out to have been smuggled out of the Ben Ezra genizah.

Upon their return to Britain, the sisters showed their cache of documents to Solomon Schechter, a scholar of Jewish texts at Cambridge University. Schechter was astounded to find that one of the fragments belonged to a Hebrew version of the Book of Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus, a wisdom text written by Ben Sira in Jerusalem during the second century B.C. Although this collection of proverbs and teachings was written in Hebrew, the original had been lost, and had only survived via its translation into Greek in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament).

With the financial backing of Charles Taylor, Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, Schechter immediately organized an expedition to Cairo to explore and catalog the contents of the genizah, which could be further studied at the University.

A Dusty Deposit

Upon arriving in Cairo, Schechter met with the city’s chief rabbi, who opened the doors of the Ben Ezra Synagogue to him. Schechter secured the permission of the local Jewish community to remove all the documents he wanted.

Rifling through and packing up the crumbling manuscripts took weeks and was filthy, even dangerous work, releasing the “dust and dirt of centuries.” In January 1897, Schechter wrote to a friend and colleague, describing the genizah as “dark, dusty, and full of all possible insects.” In a letter to his wife, he wrote: “I am just back from the Genizah and brought two big sacks with fragments. I must have a bath at once. You have no idea of the dirt.”

Eventually, Schechter took 30 sacks full of documents and fragments to Cambridge. Today, they make up the Taylor-Schechter collection, consisting of some 193,000 manuscripts. The Mosseri collection, also in Cambridge, consists of around 7,000 documents, and there are other manuscripts from the genizah scattered around the United States, Canada, France, Russia, and Israel.

A Window Into the Past

The analysis of this vast repository has yielded the identification of an extraordinary range of documents, the oldest of which date from the fifth to sixth centuries, and the most recent from the 19th century. Many reflect the cultural and religious intermingling that took place day to day in Cairo, despite the hegemony of Islam. Some findings have been particularly exciting to researchers: a fragment from one of the oldest versions of the Bible in Greek; part of a Hebrew Bible with Arabic script; and pages of a Quran written in Arabic with Hebrew characters. There are handwriting exercises done by children, marriage contracts, poetry, and personal letters. Not all had been produced locally: Some had been brought to Cairo from Iraq, Iran, and the Iberian Peninsula.

The information provided by these documents has allowed researchers to piece together evidence of the realities of daily life for the Jewish community and those around it. The genizah has turned out to be not only a library of academic interest but also a window into a social reality that has long since disappeared: the bustling streets of Cairo during the Middle Ages.