A storeroom for worn-out and damaged holy manuscripts and books as well as ritual objects such as Tefillin or Mezuzot. According to Jewish law, such articles cannot be thrown out but must be disposed of in a reverential manner. Generally, this has meant burying them in the local Jewish cemetery. To facilitate the disposal of such articles, many synagogues set aside a special area such as a room or chest as a genizah (literally "storage"), where congregants could leave things for later burial.
Nowadays, the term "the Genizah" is used to refer to the storeroom of the ancient Ben Ezra synagogue in Fostat, a suburb of Cairo. In 1896, two scholarly Scottish ladies, on a visit to Cairo, bought a bundle of fragments of Hebrew manuscripts. The following year, Solomon Schechter, then reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge University, identified one of the pages as part of the Hebrew original of Ecclesiasticus (the Wisdom of Ben Sira) which had only survived in translation. Journeying to the synagogue in 1897, Schechter acquired most of the contents of the Genizah on behalf of Cambridge University. He took back 140,000 fragments, while another 60,000, sold off before his arrival, reached other libraries around the world (especially Leningrad).
Throughout the 20th century, the process of identifying these fragments has continued. As a result, new light has been shed on a variety of aspects of Jewish history hitherto either unknown or vague. The diversity of material of both Palestinian and Babylonian origin is explained by the fact that for centuries Cairo served as a transit point from these countries to the Jewish communities of North Africa and the West. Before being forwarded, the material was copied and stored in the Genizah.
Among the material recovered are significant fragments from an ancient text of the Palestinian Talmud; parts of hitherto unknown Midrashim; numerous geonic Responsa; Karaite writings; liturgy and poetry of the post-talmudic age; large fragments of a halakhic work emanating from the Academy of Tiberias in the sixth or seventh century; manuscript letters by Maimonides; and the earliest written examples of Yiddish.
