This can only bring benefits to both institutions and provide an exemplar for other purchases and collaborations in the future
- Anne Jarvis
The ‘Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection’ of Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah dates from the 9th–19th century and is an invaluable 1,000-year record of the religious, social, economic and cultural life of the Mediterranean world.
Treasures include the earliest known example of a Jewish engagement deed (dating from 1119), an eyewitness account of Crusader atrocities, and autograph writings by leading Jewish thinkers such as Moses Maimonides.
A genizah is a sacred storeroom, a room set aside inside a synagogue for the interment of old religious writings, which, because they contain names of God or use the sacred Hebrew alphabet, cannot be discarded. For more than 1,000 years, the Jewish community of Fustat (now a suburb of Cairo), deposited all manner of writings – not just sacred texts – into the dusty storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue. Its contents were described by historian Simon Schama as ‘the single most complete archive of a society anywhere in the whole medieval world’.
The fragments purchased by Oxford and Cambridge were brought back from Cairo by intrepid twin sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson in 1896 and deposited at Westminster College where they remained until August 1.
The appeal, launched earlier this year at The British Academy, marked the first time the two universities have joined forces to fundraise. A lead gift of £500,000 from the Polonsky Foundation was followed by a donation of £350,000, arranged through a Director of the Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation.
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Image: Palimpsest of the Jerusalem Talmud (copy from c.10th century) over the top of a 6th-century Christian work in Aramaic
Credit: Cambridge University Library and the Bodleian Libraries Lewis-Gibson Collection
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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