In this episode of Hebrew Voices #235 - The Illustrated Cairo Genizah: Part 1, Nehemia interviews renowned expert Dr. Melonie Schmierer-Lee about her latest work. The discussion highlights the diverse range of manuscripts found in the Genizah - from the mundane details of daily life to the sacred preservation of Scripture.

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Hebrew Voices #235 – The Illustrated Cairo Genizah: Part 1

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Dr. Melonie Schmierer-Lee: I almost always show this particular manuscript. It’s a prenuptial contract, a prenup from the 11th century, and it’s… I find it just very funny, because it’s a man, and before he gets married, he’s having to stand up in court and promise to behave himself, that he won’t have anything to do with his drunken, dissolute, idiotic friends. He won’t drink with them in the street. He won’t have anything to do with them. He won’t bring them back to his house. And he also promises that he won’t go off traveling anywhere unless his future wife gives him permission to do that.

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Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I am here today with Dr. Melonie Schmierer-Lee, who serves as the public education officer at the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library. Welcome to the program, Melonie. It’s great to have you.

Melonie: Thank you, Nehemia.

Nehemia: So, I think I was one of the first people to preorder your book, which is entitled The Illustrated Cairo Genizah. I don’t know if I was, but it seems like the day it was announced, I ordered it. And this is the book. You’ve coauthored it with Nick Posegay, who we’ve had on the program. He’s talked about the vowels. And you actually interviewed me once when I was doing work at Cambridge University Library. So, the tables have turned, or, as I think they say, comically, the turns have tabled or something. All right.

So, it’s called The Illustrated Cairo Genizah. And I feel like we’ve done a bunch of programs on the Cairo Genizah. Can you give us, like, the, I don’t know, the two-minute version of, what is the Cairo Genizah from your perspective? Maybe it’s not two minutes, maybe it’s longer. But the audience has heard about the Cairo Genizah many times. Doesn’t mean they know what it is, but just give us, like, the short version.

Melonie: Yes, I’ll try and be short. I can go for a few hours. So, the…

Nehemia: A woman after my own heart. That’s what I do. So, I’ve been nicknamed Short Story Long.

Melonie: So, the Cairo Genizah is a collection of almost 200,000 manuscripts that we have in Cambridge University Library. And they were stored away in a synagogue storeroom in Cairo for hundreds and hundreds of years where they were stashed away because they might have been sacred in some way. And eventually they came to the attention of the Cambridge scholar Solomon Schechter, and he got permission to bring them to Cambridge, and we’ve been working on them here ever since. And they shed enormous light on the daily life of the communities in the Middle Ages, as well as their religious practices and all the sort of religious and sacred texts that were found in this room as well.

Nehemia: When you say the communities, like, let’s be more specific. Which communities are these?

Melonie: Oh, so, I mean, in Egypt, in the Middle Ages, you have Jews, Muslims, Christians, and each of those can be broken down into different subgroups as well. So, for the Jews in medieval Cairo, there was a Jerusalemite community that looked towards the Jerusalem yeshiva for their religious leadership, the Babylonian community that looked towards the Babylonian academies for their guidance, and there’s a community of Karaites as well.

Nehemia: Okay. And so, I didn’t know there were a whole lot of Christian… The Muslim documents, I feel like I’ve seen some fragments of, but, like, what would be the most interesting Christian document that is… and I know it’s a very subjective question. Interesting to you, I guess.

Melonie: Yeah. Okay. So, there are Christian Arabic Bibles in the Genizah, but some of the most interesting ones, references to Christians, are when they’re sort of interacting with the Jewish community. And just one document comes to mind; it’s a record of these two Christian women who wanted to convert.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Melonie: “And we want to convert and become Jewish.” And they were told, “No, you can’t, you can’t, you shouldn’t.” And they kept insisting again and again that they wanted to convert. And then the rabbi said, “Okay, well if you’re going to convert then you’re going to need some husbands.” So, they threw it o...