The Genizah as a source for Jewish history

The Cairo Genizah is the name given to a remarkable hoard of fragmentary manuscripts—and, in smaller number, printed texts—removed from a synagogue in Old Cairo, Egypt, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Solomon Schechter had expected to find mainly Bibles, prayer-books, and other religious texts in the Genizah, reverently deposited there once they had come to the end of their useful lives. He was surprised to discover that the synagogue's congregation had interpreted the custom of Genizah more broadly and produced a combination "of sacred lumber-room and secular record office." Prior to the discovery of the Cairo Genizah there were very few historical sources, reliable or not, for the study of the Jews of Islamic lands in the Middle Ages, despite the fact that they comprised the vast majority of the world's Jewish population at that time.