Solomon Schechter was a Moldavian-born British-American rabbi, academic scholar and educator, most famous for his roles as founder and President of the United Synagogue of America, President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and architect of American Conservative Judaism.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, also called the Qumran Caves Scrolls, are a set of ancient Jewish manuscripts from the Second Temple period. They were discovered over a period of 10 years, between 1946 and 1956, at the Qumran Caves near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank, on the northern shore of the Dead Sea. Dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, the Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books later included in the biblical canons, along with extra-biblical and deuterocanonical manuscripts from late Second Temple Judaism. At the same time, they cast new light on the emergence of Christianity and of Rabbinic Judaism. Almost all of the 15,000 scrolls and scroll fragments are held in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, located in the city of Jerusalem. The Israeli government's custody of the Dead Sea Scrolls is disputed by Jordan and the Palestinian Authority on territorial, legal, and humanitarian grounds—they were mostly discovered following the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank and were acquired by Israel after Jordan lost the 1967 Arab–Israeli War—whilst Israel's claims are primarily based on historical and religious grounds, given their significance in Jewish history and in the heritage of Judaism.
A genizah is a storage area in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery designated for the temporary storage of worn-out Hebrew-language books and papers on religious topics prior to proper cemetery burial.
The Elephantine Papyri and Ostraca consist of thousands of documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Aswan, which yielded hundreds of papyri and ostraca in hieratic and demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Koine Greek, Latin and Coptic, spanning a period of 100 years in the 5th to 4th centuries BCE. The documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives, and are thus an invaluable source of knowledge for scholars of varied disciplines such as epistolography, law, society, religion, language and onomastics. The Elephantine documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives: divorce documents, the manumission of slaves, and other business. The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved the documents.
The Cairo Geniza, alternatively spelled Genizah, is a collection of some 400,000 Jewish manuscript fragments and Fatimid administrative documents that were kept in the genizah or storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat or Old Cairo, Egypt. These manuscripts span the entire period of Middle-Eastern, North African, and Andalusian Jewish history between the 6th and 19th centuries CE, and comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world.
Judeo-Arabic dialects are ethnolects formerly spoken by Jews throughout the Arab world. Under the ISO 639 international standard for language codes, Judeo-Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage under the code jrb, encompassing four languages: Judeo-Moroccan Arabic (aju), Judeo-Yemeni Arabic (jye), Judeo-Egyptian Arabic (yhd), and Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic (yud).
The Damascus Document is an ancient Hebrew text known from both the Cairo Geniza and the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is considered one of the foundational documents of the ancient Jewish community of Qumran.
Stefan Clive Reif is professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge. He was born in Edinburgh. He has a PhD from University College London and a Doctor of Literature from Cambridge.
Shelomo Dov Goitein was a German-Jewish ethnographer, historian and Arabist known for his research on Jewish life in the Islamic Middle Ages, and particularly on the Cairo Geniza.
Elkan Nathan Adler was an English author, lawyer, historian, and collector of Jewish books and manuscripts. Adler's father was Nathan Marcus Adler, Chief Rabbi of the British Empire. He traveled extensively and built an enormous library, particularly of old Jewish documents. Adler was among the first to explore the documents stored in the Cairo Genizah, being in fact the first European to enter it. During his visits to Cairo in 1888 and 1895 Adler collected and brought over 25,000 Genizah manuscript fragments back to England.
The Judaean Desert or Judean Desert is a desert in the West Bank and Israel that lies east of the Judaean Mountains, so east of Jerusalem, and descends to the Dead Sea. Under the name El-Bariyah, it has been nominated to the Tentative List of World Heritage Sites in the State of Palestine, particularly for its monastic ruins.
The Ben Ezra Synagogue, sometimes referred to as the El-Geniza Synagogue or the Synagogue of the Levantines (al-Shamiyin), is situated in the Fustat part of Old Cairo, Egypt. According to local folklore, it is located on the site where baby Moses was found.
Obadiah the Proselyte, also known as Johannes of Oppido was an early-12th-century Italian convert to Judaism. He is best known for his memoirs and the oldest surviving notation of Jewish music, both unique survivals.
Dunhuang manuscripts refer to a wide variety of religious and secular documents in Chinese and other languages that were discovered at the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China, during the 20th century. The majority of the surviving texts come from a large cache of documents produced between the late 4th and early 11th centuries which had been sealed in the so-called 'Library Cave' at some point in the early 11th century. The Library Cave was discovered by a Daoist monk called Wang Yuanlu in 1900, and much of the contents of the cave were subsequently taken to England and France by European explorers, such as Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot. Knowing that the Dunhuang manuscripts were priceless treasures, Stein and Pelliot swindled Wang and bought them for very little money. They took the majority of these treasures from China to Europe.
The Palestinian minhag, as opposed to the Babylonian minhag, refers to the minhag of medieval Palestinian Jews concerning the siddur.
The Herculaneum papyri are more than 1,800 papyrus scrolls discovered in the 18th century in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. They had been carbonized when the villa was engulfed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
The AqBurkitt are fragments of a palimpsest containing a portion of the Books of Kings from Aquila's translation of the Hebrew bible from the 6th century, overwritten by some liturgical poems of Yanai dating from the 9–11th century. This Aquila translation was performed approximately in the early or mid-second century C.E. The manuscript is variously dated to the 6th-century CE, or 5th-6th century CE.
Marina Rustow is an American historian and the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University. She is a 2015 MacArthur Fellow. Her work focuses on the study of Judeo-Arabic documents found in the Cairo geniza and the history of Jews in the Fatimid Caliphate.
Efraim Lev is a professor in the Department of Israel Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Haifa. He is the immediate past Head of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research of the Cairo Genizah at the University of Haifa, and the Department of Humanities and Arts at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He also headed the Eshkol Department of Multi-Disciplinary Studies for special programs and undergraduate degrees in the University of Haifa’s Faculty of Humanities (2013-2018). Lev specializes in the history of medicine and pharmacology in the Middle East, in particular from the Middle Ages and the early modern period.
The Friedberg Geniza Project (FGP) is a digital preservation project, one of the primary goals of which is to computerize the entire world of Cairo Genizah manuscripts - images, identifications, catalogs, copies, joins, and bibliographic references.
