As part of the Yeshiva University Museum’s focus on Sephardic Jewish life this season, the exhibit Threshold to the Sacred: The Ark Door of Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue displays historical treasures from the Cairo Geniza, framed around a decorated wood panel from the Torah ark of the Ben Ezra Synagogue where all these documents were found.
On December 18th, historian Arnold Franklin led a gallery talk discussing the historical significance of the Cairo Geniza discovery and showing how its contents enriched our understanding of medieval Jewish life in the Sephardic world.
Museum director and exhibition curator Jacob Wisse described the exhibit as a doorway into that community – a doorway that Franklin took his audience through, showing how the documents in the Cairo Geniza opened our eyes to the full picture of Jewish society at the time (1000-1250), including the daily realities of regular people. Focusing on individual documents, Franklin demonstrated how each one gave a picture of society, creating a historical narrative that allowed us to reconstruct an entire world.
Dowry letters illustrated what women would typically bring to a new home, which in turn provided valuable information about the international origins of many items and the mercantile world that the Jews participated in, as well as the economic situation of the particular family. Other letters and documents depicted what the relationship between Karaites and traditional Jews was like, presenting a picture altogether different from what we usually assume. If these documents can be trusted as reliable sources for a historical narrative, there was less animosity between the two groups than we imagine, and intermarriage was quite common as indicated by ketubahs that resolve religious differences through compromises.
These precious details were preserved due to the unique practice of the Cairo Jewish community of storing documents in an indoor sacred space as opposed to burying them in the ground as was generally the custom. Additionally, Jews deposited not only sacred documents into the Cairo Geniza but also included letters, receipts, and other miscellaneous documents. Franklin explained that the best theory for this phenomenon was that Jews would clean out their houses and deposit entire stacks of paper in the Geniza instead of spending time sorting what actually had to go in there and what could simply be thrown out, since the assumption is that there was no intent to preserve this material.
Some of the highlights of the exhibit itself and perhaps even the Cairo Geniza in total were handwritten manuscripts by Maimonides from the 12th century. A page of Mishneh Torah and a page of the Guide for the Perplexed rested inconspicuously among the other documents on display in the exhibit. Although for some this might be the main draw of the exhibit, these manuscripts contributed to a greater overall message about the lessons we can learn about a Jewish society that would otherwise have been lost to us.
The community the Cairo Geniza collection depicts consisted of the elite and the non-elite, side by side, as the exhibit so effectively portrays.
This exhibit is open at the Yeshiva University Museum until February 23, 2014. 15 West 16th Street. YU faculty, administration, and students receive free admission with valid ID.