The Cairo Genizah: a thousand years of paper from one storeroom

Nearly two hundred thousand leaves came out of it. The dry air of Egypt and the custom of not throwing away writing met in one place: a storeroom above the women's gallery of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat. Things were put there from the eleventh century on and almost never taken out.

How it was opened. The genizah was known of earlier: Jacob Saphir looked into it in 5624, and collectors bought leaves from it. But it became a matter of consequence in 5656, when Solomon Schechter recognised in a leaf brought to him the Hebrew original of the book of Ben Sira. He went to Cairo, obtained the community's consent, and carried the contents to Cambridge.

What was in it. Three things at once. First, texts thought lost: Ben Sira in Hebrew, the Damascus Document, old versions of the prayers and of the Jerusalem Talmud. Second, autographs: drafts and letters in Rambam's hand, poems of Judah Halevi, responsa of the geonim. Third—and this matters most for history—thousands of everyday papers: letters of merchants who sailed by way of Aden to India, marriage contracts, bills of divorce, accounts, complaints, shopping lists.

What it changed. Before the genizah, the medieval community was known through the books of its scholars. After it, through its own papers. It turned out that women ran businesses and went to court, that trade reached Malabar, that a letter from Cairo to India took a year. No chronicle tells this—and none meant to.