Genizah גניזה

What is written with the Name may not be thrown away or burned. So a worn-out scroll, a torn prayer book, a spoiled leaf must go somewhere—and they are put aside: into a closet by the synagogue, into a niche, under the floor. That is a genizah, from "to hide." When much has accumulated, the contents are buried in the cemetery.

Why everything ended up there. Because there was no one to sort it and no reason to: it is easier to lay aside any leaf with Hebrew letters on it than to decide whether it bears the Name. So beside pages of Talmud lay receipts, letters, children's copybooks, merchants' accounts, marriage contracts and bills of divorce.

What this gives history. Ordinary papers do not usually survive—nobody keeps them. Chronicles and the books of the sages tell what was thought important; a genizah tells what happened every day: what bread cost, what a wife asked in a letter to a husband gone to India, what the marriage contract of a poor family looked like. Historians call it the most honest of sources: it was not trying to tell us anything.

Where they were. Genizahs have been found not only in Cairo: in Yemen, in Italy, in Afghanistan; in Europe leaves of parchment often went into the bindings of other people's books, and are still being taken out of them.