Searching for the Last Genizah Fragment in Late Ottoman Cairo: A Material Survey of Egyptian Jewish Literary Culture

Abstract

The Cairo Genizah is well known as a repository for hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Foreign “collectors” acquired most of these manuscripts for European libraries in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the majority arriving at the Cambridge University Library in 1897 under the auspices of Solomon Schechter. Less well known is the fact that hundreds of Genizah fragments were produced in the late nineteenth century, even as European collectors were scouring Cairo for ancient texts. This later corpus includes witnesses to the social and economic history of late Ottoman Cairo and provides copious evidence for the material history of Egyptian Jewish literary activity at that time. Despite this, it remains understudied for both Ottoman and Jewish history. Late Genizah material also raises questions about the integrity of “Cairo Genizah” manuscript collections around the world, as some fragments postdate Schechter's Genizah “discovery,” and others were never in Egypt at all.

For centuries now, scholars of Jewish history have been preoccupied with ancient manuscripts preserved in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo). This preoccupation mainly centers on manuscripts from the famous “Cairo Genizah,” much of which survived in the synagogue's genizah chamber, but it began with a separate Torah scroll in the care of the Ben Ezra community. Known as the “Scroll of Ezra,” the residents of Fustat claimed it was written by the prophet Ezra himself. This scroll made the synagogue a popular destination for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tourists, some of whom believed it was “the oldest Hebrew manuscript in existence.”¹ More likely, this scroll was produced only in the medieval period, but those visitors remained blind to the presence of much older manuscripts just behind the synagogue's walls.² It was not until the Genizah discoveries of the 1890s that anyone—Europeans and Cairenes alike—fully grasped the enormous time depth of Genizah material in Fustat, which spans the entire period between the sixth and nineteenth centuries.

But if the Scroll of Ezra is not the oldest Hebrew manuscript in existence (and it is not), then the question “what is the oldest item in the Cairo Genizah?” is not so easy to answer.³ The response depends on precisely what one means by “oldest” with regard to manuscripts produced and consumed by the Ben Ezra community.⁴ Physically, the most ancient Genizah fragments are a pair of folios comprising Aquila's Greek translation of Kings, dated palaeographically to the fifth or early sixth century. However, this manuscript is a palimpsest, and the Greek undertext was washed away to write Hebrew liturgical poetry around the eleventh century.⁵ A similar palimpsest is a fragmentary section of Augustine's Latin Sermon on the Mount, likely also copied in the sixth century but erased and overwritten with Masoretic lists in the ninth or tenth.⁶ The physically oldest manuscript produced in Hebrew is probably one of two Bible manuscripts, both approximately dated around the seventh or eighth century.⁷ Another contender may be a fragmentary papyrus codex of piyyuṭ (liturgical poetry), the only such codex known to be written in Hebrew characters.⁸ Several different fragments have also been claimed as the earliest dated documents in the Genizah, including a court record supposedly from 750 and a marriage contract from 870/71, though the former is actually from 1050, and many details about the latter's provenance have been called into doubt.⁹ The earliest securely dated manuscript is a Babylonian (i.e., Iraqi) Bible fragment from 903/4.¹⁰ Of course, the material age of a manuscript is not a historian's only concern, and Second Temple scholars may be more interested in the most ancient texts preserved in the Genizah. Among these we may count the Damascus Document, Hebrew Ben Sira, and Aramaic Levi, all first discovered in Genizah copies and now confirmed ancient by the Dead Sea Scrolls.¹¹

These oldest manuscripts shed light on periods of Jewish history when extant written sources are scant at best, but the great value of the Genizah is that it extends both ways, connecting Second Temple Qumran to late Ottoman Cairo. Our next question, then, is one that Genizah scholars rarely ask: “What is the latest item in the Cairo Genizah?”

This article explores that question by examining fifty-seven dated manuscripts and printed texts from the final years of the Cairo Genizah (1864–97) and beyond. It demonstrates that a wide variety of texts are extant in late Genizah fragments, some of which are significant sources for nineteenth-century Egyptian history. Furthermore, taken in aggregate, this corpus offers considerable material evidence of Jewish literary activity in late Ottoman Cairo, showing us what Egyptian Jews were reading and often where they sourced their books. It also raises questions about the usage of the Ben Ezra Synagogue's genizah chamber during this period and the relationship between Cairene Jews and European antiquities “collectors.” Consequently, while these later documents still require further study, historians cannot always interpret them with the same “Genizah context” as medieval manuscripts from the Cairene Jewish community. This analysis joins recent calls for more critical investigations into the history of “the Cairo Genizah” as a monolithic provenance and the composition of “Genizah” manuscript collections around the world.¹²

Cairene Genizot in the Nineteenth Century

The phrase “Cairo Genizah” as it is best known refers to the hidden stores of manuscripts and printed texts that the Cairene Jewish community retired between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries. Most, though not all, of these manuscripts were deposited into the genizah chamber of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat. Through the actions of numerous people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these deposits now reside in archives and libraries around the world. By far the largest portion is in the Cambridge University Library, but New York's Jewish Theological Seminary, Oxford's Bodleian Library, Manchester's John Rylands Library, the British Library, and the national libraries of France and Russia also hold substantial collections. Practically none remain in Egypt. In the context of modern scholarship, “Cairo Genizah” also indicates the corpus of manuscripts in all these “Genizah” collections.¹³

Our inquiry into the latest part of the Cairo Genizah involves two questions that are interwoven with the history of its journey from Egypt to these mainly European library collections. The first relates to Solomon Schechter's “discovery” and acquisition of the Genizah in the winter of 1896–97, as we ask: “What was the last item deposited in a Cairene genizah that Schechter could have acquired before he shipped his crates of manuscripts to Cambridge in 1897?” This question addresses a gap in Genizah studies, namely, we do not know the full extent to which the nineteenth-century Cairene Jewish community used the Ben Ezra Synagogue as an active genizah.¹⁴ Most Cairene Jews lived in Harat al-Yahud (Jewish Quarter)—not Fustat—until at least the 1850s, and with few exceptions they ignored or outright avoided the Ben Ezra genizah chamber until the 1880s.¹⁵ An answer to our question must thus consider all the genizot where Cairo's Jewish community retired their old manuscripts and from which European Genizah collections derive their contents.¹⁶ These genizot include the Ben Ezra Synagogue, the Basatin Cemetery on the edge of Cairo, and an unknown number of excavation sites in Fustat.¹⁷

The second question is this: “What is the latest item held in a modern Genizah collection?” The question is relevant to historians who may utilize late Genizah manuscripts to study Egyptian history, as “Genizah” collections contain some items that postdate 1897, as well as some earlier texts that may never have been stored in genizot at all. Despite this fact, such manuscripts are still implied when contemporary scholars refer to the “Cairo Genizah” corpus. Most material from the Cairene genizot left Egypt with Schechter, either through his direct work in the Ben Ezra genizah chamber or via antiquities dealers who sold manuscripts to him and his associates.¹⁸ European and American collectors acquired many other “Genizah” manuscripts between 1864 and 1909, taking them directly from genizot and purchasing them from manuscript dealers.¹⁹ Jack Mosseri, a member of the well-known Egyptian banking family, then collected much of what remained between 1909 and 1912.²⁰ Due to the diverse circumstances of these acquisitions, there are now many manuscripts which are assumed to come from the Cairene community's genizot, but which cannot be confirmed for certain.²¹ Most of these documents are undoubtedly genuine artifacts of Ottoman Egypt, but their different contexts mean that they cannot be evaluated with the same interpretative framework as earlier Genizah fragments.

The reason for this difference between earlier Genizah manuscripts and those produced after about 1860 is the rising interest of European scholars in medieval Cairene manuscripts. A large part of the historical value of Genizah fragments comes from the inherent context associated with them: regardless of the circumstances of their production, we know that they ended their lives in one of the Cairene genizot. We also know that, by and large, the people who stored manuscripts in these genizot were Cairene Jews, and the manuscripts that they elected to store were chosen due to religious and cultural motivations distilled from the intrinsic influences of their sociohistorical context. However, two foreign scholars—Jacob Sapir and Abraham Firkovich—permanently altered that context. In 1864, the pair persuaded the Cairene Jewish communities to grant them access to their genizot, and so became the first “modern” scholars to enter the Ben Ezra Synagogue's genizah chamber. Sapir spent two days sifting for valuable manuscripts, but his search was hampered by fallen debris from the collapsing synagogue structure, and he reportedly left with only a few folios that he did not consider especially interesting.²² Firkovich took a greater interest in Cairo's Karaite synagogue, removing thousands of manuscripts from its own genizah, but according to his letters, he also entered the Ben Ezra chamber and considered the site worthy of further searches. Exactly what—if anything—he removed from this genizah is unclear, though he does report taking manuscripts from a Cairene Rabbanite cemetery, likely the Basatin.²³

Sapir and Firkovich did not make any more headway digging through the Ben Ezra Synagogue, but the door had been opened, and by the 1880s, European institutions began to purchase a small trickle of Cairene genizot manuscripts via the Egyptian antiquities market.²⁴ These acquisitions accelerated between 1889 and 1892, when the Fustat community dismantled and then restored the Ben Ezra Synagogue. During this period, thousands of manuscripts previously stored in the genizah chamber were left in the synagogue's courtyard or buried around Fustat.²⁵ This exposure allowed manuscript dealers and European collectors easier access to Genizah fragments than in prior years, and the 1890s saw a comparative flurry of “discoveries” that culminated with Schechter's journey to Cairo. The persistent inquiries of foreign manuscript collectors—people like Solomon Aaron Wertheimer, Reverend Greville Chester, Reverend Archibald Henry Sayce, Elkan Nathan Adler, Antonin Kapustin, Agnes Lewis, Margaret Gibson, Count Riamo d'Hulst, Reginald Henriques, and indeed, Solomon Schechter—introduced a new, external motivation for the residents of Cairo to preserve their papers.²⁶ Any scrap that seemed sufficiently ancient could fetch a meaningful sum from the right foreign buyer, which would incentivize the preservation of items that otherwise might have been thrown away.²⁷ Manuscript dealers could mix such materials among the Genizah manuscripts that were already reaching European hands on the antiquities market. In fact, in 1898 (after Schechter departed), d'Hulst reports suspicions of some Cairene Jews carrying additional papers into the Ben Ezra Synagogue, supposedly with the plan to sell them.²⁸

In economic terms, the European money allocated for Genizah acquisitions can be described as a “perverse incentive”—that is, a financial incentive with an undesirable consequence not intended by its designers. The most straightforward type of perverse incentive is known as a “cobra effect,” based on a famous historical anecdote from colonial India where the British government placed a bounty on dead cobras. This policy led to a surge in cobra breeding and ultimately an increase in the cobra population.²⁹ In Ottoman Cairo, no amount of money could create new medieval manuscripts, but the perverse incentive of European payments for such manuscripts may have broadened the scope of what was stored in genizot and dealt on the antiquities market after 1864. The very act of pursuing Genizah manuscripts distorted that essential context that is so vital to earlier Genizah research.

This new situation means that late Genizah fragments must be evaluated with a careful eye to the status of the Ben Ezra Synagogue and the Cairene Jewish community at the time of their production, as well as the time of their possible storage in genizot. The following section surveys dated Genizah manuscripts and printed material from the period after 1864 as potential sources for the history of late Ottoman Cairo and as a corpus of evidence for the material history of Egyptian Jewish literary activity. It concludes with several late texts that do not belong to the “Cairo Genizah” in the traditional sense, despite their current residence in Genizah collections.

Dated Genizah Manuscripts from the Late Ottoman Period

The following is a survey of fifty-seven manuscripts and printed texts dated after 1864, comprising more than one hundred discrete classmarks (i.e., individual fragments or small groups of fragments with a single cataloguing number) from Genizah collections. All these items were produced while European collectors worked to acquire medieval Jewish manuscripts in Cairo, and many were likely sold without ever entering a genizah.

Limited solely to dated items, our corpus contains just a fraction of the Genizah material extant from this period. To some extent, such a corpus cannot be representative of all items produced after 1864, but for each fragment discussed below, there are many other late fragments of the same type that remain undated in Genizah collections. It is not currently possible to survey all of these fragments. Most are still uncatalogued, and even those with descriptions are often scattered almost randomly in folders that otherwise contain medieval manuscripts. Especially neglected are the approximately 12,000 printed classmarks from various Genizah collections, which include numerous post-1864 imprints but are almost completely undescribed.³⁰ This section is thus intended as a guide to help future studies delve more deeply into specific aspects of the late Genizah corpus. As such, it is arranged typologically according to the topic of each fragment (marriage contracts, newspapers, printed religious texts, etc.) to give a sense of what documents are extant from this period, and each item receives only a brief description in its respective group. The fragments appear chronologically in Table 1. The information here comes from the limited descriptions that already exist for some fragments, new descriptions from ongoing efforts to catalogue the Taylor-Schechter Collection, and an independent survey by the author of the 12,000 printed classmarks.

Table 1. Late dated fragments in Cairo Genizah collections (1864–1929)³⁷

The earliest manuscript in our corpus is British Library OR 10653.13, a bill of divorce written in a Yemeni village called al-Malha in 1865 (just a year after Sapir and Firkovich left Cairo). It confirms, with two signed witnesses, the divorce of one Habiba bint Yihya and her husband Daʾud ibn Daʾud.³¹ It is likely at least one of them moved to Egypt between 1865 and 1897, and the bill was probably stored in a genizah upon their death. A similar document is Rylands A 960, another divorce record from 1879 for a Jewish couple in Bombay, one of whom must have traveled to Cairo in subsequent years.³² The happier opposite also appears, with BL OR 10653.1 comprising a Yemeni marriage contract from 1880, again suggesting emigration from Yemen to Cairo prior to the document's interment in a genizah.³³ This movement coincides with several waves of Yemeni Jewish migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.³⁴

Marriage and divorce contracts appear in Genizah manuscripts from all periods, so it is not surprising to find them among the later fragments. They would have been stored in genizot upon the deaths of their owners, but if they died prior to 1889, then it is more likely that the documents were buried in the Basatin than put in the neglected Ben Ezra Synagogue. It is also possible—though more or less impossible to confirm—that manuscript dealers sold these marriage documents directly to European collectors before they ever reached a genizah. BL OR 10653.1 in particular is on parchment and looks uncommonly old for a nineteenth-century document, which matches exactly the type of manuscript that most interested European scholars. It is also notable that all three of these manuscripts (BL OR 10653.1, OR 10653.13, and Rylands A 960) formerly belonged to the library of Moses Gaster (1856–1939) before the John Rylands and British libraries purchased them in the mid-twentieth century.³⁵ Shelomo Goitein remarks that these manuscripts are “a gleaning which remained after the rich harvest, which fell to the earlier collectors of papers from the Cairo Geniza,” and Gaster himself admits that he amassed most of his library via third-party sellers from multiple countries while he was the head of the Sephardic community in London.³⁶ As such, the precise find-spot of these manuscripts cannot be definitively located in the Ben Ezra Synagogue, nor can we be certain that they were in any genizot (or even in Cairo) prior to 1897.

A similar issue arises with Moss. Xa.2.104, a Cairene marriage contract dated to 1890, and Moss. X.112, a bill of divorce copied near Fustat that same year.⁴³ They are part of the “Mosseri Collection,” the corpus of several thousand fragments that Jack Mosseri collected in Cairo between 1909 and 1912.⁴⁴ Many Mosseri fragments are assumed to come from the Ben Ezra genizah chamber, and Schechter did leave some (mainly printed) fragments in the synagogue when he left Egypt.⁴⁵ However, we also recall Riamo d'Hulst's claim that the synagogue's custodians mixed additional papers in among the remnants.⁴⁶ Furthermore, a number of Mosseri's manuscripts came from excavation sites around Fustat, and he mentions (hyperbolically) other manuscripts “formerly scattered in the hundred and one synagogues of the Musky [sic], the Jewish quarter in Cairo.”⁴⁷ In actuality, there were perhaps ten active synagogues in late nineteenth-century Cairo.⁴⁸ Certainly, many fragments now in European “Genizah” collections derive from the excavations of Mosseri (and d'Hulst, among others), but it would not be surprising if manuscripts from these various synagogues also made their way onto the antiquities market in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and have since be attributed to the Ben Ezra Synagogue.

Speaking of marriage and Mosseris, there are three wedding invitations among the latest Genizah fragments. One is Rylands A 1053/B 2699, a French invitation to the Cairo wedding of Moise Mosseri (ca. 1855–1933) and Henriette Nahmias (1868–1943). The extant fragments are from two copies of this invitation printed in highly calligraphic script.⁴⁹ Another French invitation is T-S NS 269.170, printed in Cairo on February 9, 1888, just one week before the marriage of Raphael Lagnado and Bienvenue Eliakim.⁵⁰ The third is T-S NS 266.113, this one printed in Arabic script.⁵¹ It invites the recipient to a ceremony on the afternoon of June 10, 1881, to be followed by a celebration at a house on the street Khan Abu Taqiyya.⁵² That street is almost seven kilometers away from the Ben Ezra Synagogue, but it is just a short walk from the Rabbi Moshe Synagogue in the Jewish al-Muski neighborhood. It is thus unlikely that the newlywed couple lived in Fustat in 1881, so this fragment may have reached Solomon Schechter from the Basatin or another genizah, rather than the Ben Ezra.⁵³

Other prominent members of Middle Eastern Jewish communities also appear in late Genizah material. For example, Moss. Xa.2.24 is an 1875 letter in Ladino addressed to Yom Tov ben Elijah Israel (d. 1890).⁵⁴ Yom Tov succeeded his father as chief rabbi of the Cairo community in 1866, holding that office until 1890 (just as European collectors were taking interest in Cairene genizot).⁵⁵ His successor, Aharon ben Shimʿon (d. 1928), ultimately gave Schechter permission to remove what he liked from the Ben Ezra genizah.⁵⁶ Meanwhile, T-S K10.13 is a painted diagram of important grave sites in the Holy Land, possibly used for pilgrimage travel, which includes the grave of one Rabbi Abraham Ashkenazi. This name most likely refers to Palestine's chief rabbi from 1869 until his death in 1880.⁵⁷ As such, T-S K10.13 must have been produced between 1880 and 1897. Another document is T-S AS 145.108, a Judaeo-Arabic letter sent from Alexandria in 1885 and addressed in French to Brahim Aghion (Fig. 1). Like the Mosseris, the Aghions were a prominent business and banking family who played a major role in establishing Jewish schools in Alexandria.⁵⁸ There are also numerous late letters written by Jewish merchants, including two dated to 1880/87 (T-S 13J15.25) and 1888 (T-S 10J19.25).

Figure 1. T-S AS 145.108, a Judaeo-Arabic letter addressed in French to Brahim Aghion, sent from Alexandria in 1885. Image courtesy of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library.

Other fragments offer insights into the Egyptian education system at the same time when the Aghions were opening their Alexandrian schools, but they raise some suspicions about whether they ever made their way into genizot. Among them are numerous folios from the 1886 edition of Kitab Tariq al-Hijaʾ wa-l-Tamrin ʿala al-Qiraʾa fi al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya (The Book on the Method of Spelling and the Practice of Reading in the Arabic Language), attributed to Egypt's director of education, ʿAli Mubarak Pasha (1823–93).⁵⁹ It is an alphabetic drill book for learning Arabic writing, and the book's owner inscribed his own name on the title page: Malik Shaykh. Another pedagogical item is T-S Ar.41.93, which joins to T-S NS 306.145 and belongs with T-S NS 192.11a, b, and c. They comprise two drafts of a single section of the Qurʾan, seemingly a student's writing exercise, and one leaf contains an ad hoc colophon attributing the work to Madrasat al-Qarabiyya (Qarabiyya School).⁶⁰ This moniker refers to one of two Cairene public schools that operated in the late nineteenth century. The first, a Cairene primary school for boys, was among the earliest public schools founded under ʿAli Mubarak Pasha's educational reforms. The second was a Cairene primary school for girls that operated from 1875 to 1879. The boys’ school operated from 1872 until at least 1915, so this manuscript must have been produced between 1872 and 1897.⁶¹ There is also an undeciphered note in the margin of T-S Ar.41.93 that might include the year 1891 or 1897, but this reading is uncertain.

Neither of these texts—the Arabic drill book and the Qurʾanic exercise—are what most people think of when considering the materials deposited in a Jewish genizah. They may instead have landed in rubbish pits or on the heaps of manuscripts lying outside the Ben Ezra Synagogue during the renovation period between 1889 and 1892. It is also possible that manuscript dealers mixed them in with other more genuine “Genizah” fragments to attract extra money from collectors. On the other hand, there are plenty of Genizah examples of Arabic teaching texts and writing exercises from earlier periods, so perhaps these two are not that irregular after all.⁶² Either way, they are both evidence of day-to-day activity in the early Egyptian public education system.

A large number of late fragments—in fact, a majority of our corpus—come from texts that European and Middle Eastern publishers printed at the end of the nineteenth century. T-S NS 30.176 includes five bifolia from an early printed edition of Sefer ha-Goralot l-Ahitophal (The Book of Lots by Ahitophal), a kabbalistic book of lots originally written in the medieval period.⁶³ The Jerusalem publisher Abraham Rotenberg printed this edition in 1865/66, and it must have made its way to Cairo before 1897. Sometime between 1872 and 1897, another Jerusalem publisher, Isaac Gashtsinni, printed a decorative wall hanging depicting famous sites in Jerusalem, which now survives as T-S AS 198.194 (Fig. 2). T-S Miscellaneous (Misc.) 34.11 is the title page of an edition of the Mishnaic tractate Pirkei Avot, printed (with Ladino translation) by Saʿadi ha-Levi Ashkenazi in Salonika in 1875.⁶⁴ Then there are around two dozen fragments in the Taylor-Schechter Collection from multiple amulets printed by Abraham Zaytuni at the Alexandrian press of Faraj Mizrahi.⁶⁵ Mizrahi's press opened in 1873 as the only Egyptian printer that handled Hebrew type, so these fragments cannot be older than that.⁶⁶ More specifically, T-S NS 85.96 includes two different versions of the title page of a Hebrew drill book (one with a star of David and one without) that Mizrahi printed in 1888. Additionally, a surprising number of late fragments come from Hebrew-script religious texts printed in Europe, including at presses in Trieste, Livorno, Warsaw, and especially Vienna.⁶⁷ Other printed European miscellanea include a French book catalogue from no earlier than 1880 (T-S AS 192.145), an early edition of a French textbook by Pierre Régimbeau (T-S NS 267.60/T-S AS 190.21), an unidentified Yiddish text from Vienna (T-S AS 194.401), a Hebrew book about Russia in the 1870s (T-S NS 30.101/T-S NS 30.209), fragments of Istanbul's El Tiempo Ladino newspaper (T-S AS 195.544-547), a Ladino novel (T-S Misc.34.21), and a Latin book of Psalms produced in London in 1866 (T-S NS 26.172).⁶⁸ Many of these books must have traveled from Europe to Egypt before 1897.

Figure 2. T-S AS 198.194, a decorative wall hanging printed by Isaac Gashtsinni in Jerusalem between 1872 and 1897. Image courtesy of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library.

A bit closer to Fustat are fragments from three Arabic books printed in the 1880s. First, T-S NS 28.85 is the last page of a book printed by Muhammad Abu Zayd in 1883 at Cairo's al-Bahiyya press, and it includes a handwritten note in Hebrew characters. Second, T-S Ar.39.420 is torn from the title and index pages of a book on commerce, printed in the Bulaq district of Cairo in 1888. The leaf was reused for handwritten Arabic notes and accounts.⁶⁹ Bulaq is notable as the location of Egypt's first state-sponsored printing press, founded in 1820, so that may be the source of this fragment.⁷⁰ Third, T-S NS 268.24 is the final folio of a thirty-two-page text printed at the ʿAmira Sharafiyya Press in Cairo in early May 1889. The recto also has several cursive Latin-script jottings in purple ink, with the lower right corner possibly reading “Mousseri.” These 1888 and 1889 dates are significant, being just before the Fustat community dismantled the Ben Ezra Synagogue for renovations. This is also the period when Greville Chester's (and others’) persistent inquiries about the community's manuscripts increased the financial incentive to sell them on the antiquities market, and any of these fragments could have been stored with the intent of bolstering the genizah inventory for sale.⁷¹ It is not entirely clear why else these latter two Arabic books would be in genizot. A similar item is T-S NS 305.55, the title page of an Arabic agricultural magazine founded in September 1894, which likewise seems to have no business in a genizah.⁷²

Other printed material includes fragments of Arabic newspapers produced in the 1880s and 1890s. Arabic newspapers operated in Egypt from the early nineteenth century onward, but most of the dated fragments do not indicate which publications they belong to.⁷³ One is T-S NS 306.197, which joins with T-S NS 306.203 to form part of an anti-revolutionary polemical article. The text is most likely a response to the failed ʿUrabi revolt of 1879–82. It may be noteworthy that the Alexandrian presses of the famous al-Ahram newspaper were destroyed during the revolt, though they resumed printing in 1882.⁷⁴ T-S AS 192.467 is the front page of Cairo's al-Falah (ElFalah/Salvation) newspaper from April 21, 1888, helpfully providing both the AD and AH dates as well as the month Nisan (Fig. 3). T-S NS 297.284-285 is from a different newspaper describing political events in the summer of 1895, smack in the middle of the peak period of genizah acquisitions by the likes of Chester, Adler, Sayce, Lewis, and Gibson.⁷⁵ T-S NS 332.29 then appears to be from a slightly earlier issue of the same newspaper, with the verso including an article that describes a conflict between the British and French near Rangoon, and the recto listing the sale of goods at the court in al-Mahalla al-Kubra.⁷⁶ Located about 100 kilometers north of Cairo, al-Mahalla al-Kubra had a small Jewish community and maintained an active synagogue for at least part of the nineteenth century.⁷⁷

Figure 3. T-S AS 192.467, front page of Cairo's ElFalah newspaper from April 21, 1888. Image courtesy of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library.

These newspaper articles conclude our search, with T-S NS 297.284 being the last fragment with a confirmed date (summer 1895) before Solomon Schechter emptied the Ben Ezra genizah in the winter of 1896/97. Of course, this survey only examined fragments that are specifically dated between 1864 and 1897, and there are many more Genizah fragments from that timeframe which cannot be dated so precisely. All of them are available as potential evidence for the history of late Ottoman Cairo, especially the history of Ottoman Jews and Egyptian Judaism in the context of European colonial control. They also offer a glimpse into the world of printing and manuscript production in Cairo while European collectors were actively seeking manuscripts from Cairene genizot. Once again, for that very reason, we cannot be sure that all these fragments were deliberately retired in genizot, let alone in the Ben Ezra genizah chamber.

The aforementioned fragments were all produced prior to Solomon Schechter's arrival in Cairo, but that is not the case for every folio in so-called Genizah collections. Because of the disparate nature of the Genizah corpus and the complicated compilation histories of library collections, from time to time certain items are mislabeled as “Genizah” when they cannot have been in Cairene genizot before 1897. This situation is troublesome for examining the latest Genizah material, as many of the misattributed fragments are relatively modern productions. One example is Rylands AF 53, which was once among the manuscripts that the John Rylands Library purchased from Moses Gaster's personal library in 1955.⁷⁸ This purchase included thousands of Genizah fragments, but it also encompassed many of the personal papers that Gaster left behind upon his death in 1939.⁷⁹ AF 53 clearly belongs with these papers rather than the Genizah material, as its fifth folio is a Hebrew letter sent to Gaster from one Israel Isbitsky. Isbitsky gives his own London return address, and he refers to Gaster as the ḥakham (wise man, leader) of the London Sephardi community, a position which the latter held from 1887 to 1918.⁸⁰ Despite this British provenance, the University of Manchester Library (as of May 2022) lists AF 53's discovery location as the Ben Ezra Synagogue.⁸¹ The same is true for Gaster Printed Series 181, a Yiddish newspaper printed in London in 1902, which must also have been among Gaster's personal papers.

Another post-Schechter manuscript is Moss. VII.19, a Yemeni marriage contract copied in Sanaa on June 14, 1899. It is actually a replacement contract for a document that the Jewish couple misplaced, and at least one of them probably moved to Cairo between 1899 and 1912.⁸² While there are several Yemeni marriage documents among the latest Genizah fragments (see above), this one postdates Schechter by more than two years. It is most likely from one of the other Cairene synagogues where Mosseri claims to have gathered manuscripts, but could also have been stored in the Ben Ezra Synagogue after Schechter departed.⁸³ This raises questions about other Mosseri fragments that are not explicitly dated—how many of them were produced (or brought to Cairo's synagogues) in the fifteen years after Schechter?

Finally, there are a few more printed “Genizah” texts that highlight the difficulties of accurately tracking the history of library holdings since the 1890s. When Schechter returned from Cairo in February 1897, he set about sorting the Genizah material at the Cambridge University Library. Much to the chagrin of the librarian assisting with the project, his methods were sometimes disorganized and hazardous to the manuscripts’ safety.⁸⁴ It seems that a few not-Genizah fragments were accidentally mixed into the collection during the subsequent half decade. At least six are from the Yiddish newspaper Jewish Express, torn out of an issue printed in Leeds just one week before Schechter finished packing the Cairene manuscripts for shipment to England.⁸⁵ It is probable that other non-Cairene material entered the Taylor-Schechter Collection during its first few years in Cambridge.

Schechter moved to New York in 1902, at which point the monumental project of sorting the Genizah fragments fell to Ernest Worman, but when Worman died prematurely in 1909, less than a quarter of the manuscripts had even been conserved.⁸⁶ The task of shepherding the Taylor-Schechter Collection then officially passed to E. J. Thomas, a specialist in Buddhism who had comparatively little time for Genizah work. Meanwhile, most of Cambridge's Hebrew specialists moved on to other projects that involved somewhat less contact with moldy unsorted heaps.⁸⁷ The last hope that the remaining fragments might be organized was effectively dashed in 1923 with the death of Schechter's long-time ally in the Genizah saga, university librarian Francis Jenkinson. His successor, A. F. Scholfield, did succeed in preventing the destruction of the unsorted material, but he failed to improve its situation. He removed the unsorted crates from the main Genizah research room, and shortly after moving to the modern university library site in 1934, they were relegated to the attic. Those neglected crates contained what would eventually become the Taylor-Schechter New Series and Additional Series—approximately 150,000 fragments in total—but they remained out of sight until Shelomo Goitein's visit to Cambridge in 1955.⁸⁸

The New Series emerged from these crates in the late 1950s and 1960s due to the efforts of Goitein and his students, and it contains what is by far the latest item that I have found in any “Genizah” collection. T-S NS 270.183 consists of several folios from a printed German price list of German, Persian, and Arabic books. Among them are a handful of titles from the 1920s, and beneath the heading “new” is the date January 1929.⁸⁹ This list is not from the Cairo Genizah, yet it is in the Taylor-Schechter Collection and must have been added to Schechter's haul after it arrived in Cambridge. What probably happened with these fragments is that between 1929 and Goitein's “rediscovery” of the unsorted Genizah material, some researcher or librarian used the leftover crates as their own sort of “genizah,” depositing a few loose pages with “oriental” writing that they otherwise would have discarded.⁹⁰ This possibility is not exactly earth-shattering for Genizah studies, but it does raise an intriguing question: Was anything else added to the Cambridge Genizah hoard before it was fully sorted and conserved? If so, what, when, and how often? We cannot say for sure unless more of these post-Schechter fragments turn up. An investigation of these questions might begin by examining Worman's contributions to the Cambridge Genizah collections. It appears that after his death in 1909, the surviving Cambridge library staff added some of his personal papers to the Taylor-Schechter Collection for fear of accidentally discarding genuine Genizah fragments that were at his desk.⁹¹

These “not-Genizah” texts show some of the complications of working with later Genizah material, as the lines between production and acquisition become confused. They all “officially” belong to Genizah collections, with the John Rylands, Mosseri, and Taylor-Schechter collections being three of the most well-known in the field. However, researchers accessing manuscripts via the Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society database or the myriad institutional websites that host images of Genizah fragments could be misled by these classifications, as they appear divorced from the context of their acquisition and archival history.

The Search Continues

The Cairo Genizah is a remarkable resource for tracing Middle Eastern history between the seventh and nineteenth centuries, but many of its latest fragments (ca. 1864–97) remain unidentified and understudied. They include texts directly related to marriage and divorce customs, the history of Middle Eastern printing, Jewish migration patterns, book trade between Europe and Egypt, and the lives of prominent members of the Egyptian Jewish community. Altogether, they show a complex literary landscape in this community, one which drew materials in many languages from around the Mediterranean basin.

In contrast to earlier Genizah material, any manuscript or printed text produced after 1864 also has a confounding factor of European scholarly influence in its life cycle, as collectors and representatives of foreign universities sought to purchase Egyptian manuscripts for European libraries. This new financial incentive may explain why certain late items wound up in Genizah collections despite having no clear reasons to be stored in genizot—items like Arabic newspapers, textbooks, and writing exercises.⁹² It also makes it nearly impossible to say whether many ostensible “Genizah” fragments from the second half of the nineteenth century were ever in fact consigned to Cairene genizot, or whether certain fragments would have been deposited if there had been no financial incentive. There is no doubt that most of these late fragments are artifacts of late Ottoman Cairo, but we cannot be sure that anyone stored (or intended to store) them in a genizah.

Returning to our original inquiry: What is the latest item in the Cairo Genizah? The last dated item produced before Schechter's arrival seems to be T-S NS 297.284, a fragment of an Arabic newspaper from the summer of 1895. Moreover, the latest item held in a Genizah collection is T-S NS 270.183, a German book price list printed in 1929 which never spent a day in a genizah (Fig. 4). The modern usage of the term “Cairo Genizah” to designate a corpus of manuscripts held in “Genizah” collections inevitably includes this not-Genizah text, and if it were not explicitly dated then we could not know whether it was added to the Taylor-Schechter hoard in Cairo or Cambridge. These qualifications are especially salient for the study of late Genizah fragments, as they were produced during a period of great change and colonial influence that complicates their simple attribution to Cairene genizot in the traditional sense.

Figure 4. T-S NS 270.183, a book price list printed in Berlin in 1929. Image courtesy of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library.

These fragments should nevertheless be examined in the study of both Ottoman and Jewish history. However, to utilize them effectively, several steps must be taken. First, preferring to keep the focus on the late nineteenth century, this article has not dealt with any of the so-called new Cairo Genizah discoveries—that is, additional manuscripts excavated by Egyptian archaeologists at the Basatin Cemetery in the late 1980s.⁹³ The evaluation of these fragments alongside our corpus would allow us to map the composition of the late Genizah more accurately and better guide historians seeking to study it further. Second, using the fragments gathered here as a typological guide, institutions that hold late Genizah material must devote resources to the cataloguing and description of late items, including the neglected printed classmarks. Such cataloguing will require assistance from bibliographers and specialists in post-medieval languages, including Ladino and Modern Arabic, among others. Once this data is available, it will also be possible to compare subsets of late fragments with library acquisition records, potentially enabling archivists to detect correlations between manuscript subcollections and the activities of known Genizah collectors. Third, scholars from outside of Jewish and Genizah studies proper, such as Ottomanists, Arabists, and European book historians, can use this information to conduct more targeted studies of late Genizah material. Such studies would put these fragments into proper context with non-Genizah evidence known from nineteenth-century Cairo. They might also include more comprehensive surveys of specific types of late documents or deeper analysis of each fragment's unique features. It will require cooperation from scholars of many adjacent fields, but the late dated items surveyed here—as well as hundreds more undated fragments—merit further investigation that may yet illuminate the history of late Ottoman Egypt.