300,000 manuscript fragments, 70 libraries, 1,000 years of history — the greatest documentary discovery of medieval Judaism.
The Genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo is the greatest documentary treasure of medieval Judaism. For nearly a thousand years (from the 9th to the 19th century), the Jewish community of Cairo deposited there any document bearing the name of God — not only sacred texts, but also personal letters, commercial contracts, medical prescriptions, poems, and shopping lists. The result: an extraordinary snapshot of everyday Jewish life in the Mediterranean.
The Friedberg Genizah Project, founded in 1999 by Albert D. Friedberg, undertook to digitize, index, and reconstitute the entirety of these fragments, scattered across more than 70 libraries throughout the world.
~300 000
Manuscript fragments
70+
Libraries worldwide
1 000
Years of history covered
15+
Languages represented
The largest collection, assembled by Solomon Schechter in 1896–1898. Letters, contracts, liturgical texts, biblical and Talmudic fragments. The holdings span a thousand years of Jewish life in the Mediterranean.
Fragments acquired by the John Rylands Library, including rare liturgical texts and Judeo-Arabic documents.
A collection assembled by Adolf Neubauer and Arthur Cowley, including Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic manuscripts of great value.
The Jewish Theological Seminary preserves fragments acquired by Solomon Schechter after his settlement in the United States.
The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Bibliothèque nationale de France preserve fragments of the Genizah acquired at the turn of the 20th century.
A collection gathered by the archimandrite Antonin Kapustin even before Schechter, including remarkable fragments, among them the text of Ecclesiasticus in Hebrew.
For a thousand years, the Jewish community of Cairo deposited in the genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue any document bearing the name of God, including personal letters and contracts.
The traveler Simon van Geldern mentions the genizah in his travel accounts.
The Lithuanian traveler and scholar Jacob Saphir visits the genizah and brings fragments back to Europe.
The sisters Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson bring a fragment of Ben Sira in Hebrew to Solomon Schechter, who travels to Cairo.
Schechter obtains authorization from the chief rabbi of Cairo and transfers approximately 193,000 fragments to Cambridge.
Generations of scholars catalogue, identify, and publish the fragments. Shlomo Dov Goitein begins his monumental « A Mediterranean Society ».
The Canadian businessman Albert D. Friedberg founds the Friedberg Genizah Project to digitize and index the entirety of the fragments scattered across 70+ libraries.
The algorithms of Prof. Yaacov Choueka make it possible to « reconstitute » complete pages by joining fragments scattered across different collections — a puzzle of 300,000 pieces.
Nearly all of the fragments are accessible online in high resolution. Hebrew optical character recognition (OCR) and artificial intelligence tools open new avenues of research.
Found in the Genizah, this text was known only in Greek and Syriac. The original Hebrew version was an academic earthquake.
Personal and communal correspondence of the Rambam, revealing a man of flesh and blood behind the intellectual giant — his health concerns, his conflicts with the community.
One of the key texts of the Qumran sect, of which medieval copies were found in the Genizah — proof of a continuous transmission over centuries.
Letters from Jewish merchants trading between Egypt, India, and Yemen in the twelfth century, documenting a little-known Jewish trade network.
Hundreds of marriage contracts (ketubot) that reveal family life, dowries, women's rights, and local customs.
Thousands of unknown liturgical poems, composed by paytanim (liturgical poets) of Cairo, Palestine, and Babylon.
The Friedberg project takes the form of two complementary sites, operated jointly with the Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society (Toronto, Canada):
The institutional portal of the project: presentation, history, scope of activity, academic significance, and research domains covered. It also includes the list of the scientific committee — Prof. Yaacov Choueka (scientific director), Prof. Stefan Reif (Cambridge), Prof. Haggai Ben-Shammai (Jerusalem), Prof. Menachem Ben-Sasson, Prof. James Diamond, and Dr. Binyamin Richler — as well as the academic partnerships, supported publications, conferences, and media coverage.
The research platform used by scholars around the world in all fields of Jewish studies: biblical literature, rabbinic literature, prayer and liturgy, Hebrew poetry, philosophy, Kabbalah, legal documents, commercial letters, medicine, and sciences. The high-resolution images (600 DPI) are « better than the originals » thanks to computer-based visual enhancement tools, making it possible to read fragments illegible to the naked eye.
Why two sites? The FGP (pr.genizah.org) is the presentation and governance portal of the project. The FJMS (fjms.genizah.org) is the operational research platform where the fragments can be consulted. The world's greatest university libraries have signed agreements to share their collections with the FGP.
The Zakhor project is part of the continuity of this effort to digitize and democratize Jewish heritage. While the Friedberg Genizah Project makes the fragments accessible to scholars, Zakhor aspires to contextualize them for the general public — by adding accessible articles, narrative pathways, and links to other manuscripts and objects in our database.
Explore the Genizah manuscripts in our library.
