Overview
The Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat became associated with the vast manuscript repository now called the Cairo Geniza. Its discarded writings included sacred texts, letters, contracts, court records, accounts, poems, medical works, and school exercises, mostly in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. The collection was not a planned archive and survives unevenly, yet it provides extraordinary evidence about Jewish life under Islamic rule. Its later dispersal to libraries also raises questions about collecting and ownership. The synagogue connects religious practice, documentary preservation, modern scholarship, and the reconstruction of Mediterranean social history.
