Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Preserves 2000 Years of History

“There isn’t an area of Jewish learning that the Cairo Genizah material hasn’t revolutionized—and I mean revolutionized.” The speaker is Dr. Stefan Reif, Director of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, talking with a recent visitor to his office in the Cambridge University Library, in Cambridge, England.

Since 1973, the young, enthusiastic Semitics scholar, with the support of the Library authorities, has been creating a quiet revolution of his own, turning the famous—but formerly down-at-the-heels Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection into a revitalized, highly effective research facility in the service of today’s Hebraists.

The scholarly revolution of which Reif speaks began 85 years ago on a spring day in 1897 when the Jewish scholar, Solomon Schechter, sat down to his worktable in the old Cambridge University Library and one by one began examining the great hoard of ancient manuscript fragments he had retrieved from the Cairo Genizah^c 051only weeks before. In the next several decades he and other scholars would utilize these fragments to write whole new chapters of Jewish history and to rewrite many old ones.