Traces the efforts of two women scholars who recovered what has become the most vital cache of Hebrew manuscripts ever discovered, in an account that explains what the findings reveal about Mediterranean Judaism.

Documents the discovery of over 300,000 documents in an attic of a synogoge in Cairo, Egypt, describing why they were amassed, the circumstances surrounding how they were found, and what the documents contain.

This book is based on documents preserved in the Cairo Geniza, which are written in three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew script)-as well as on late ancient and medieval literary texts in these languages. This book considers how ordinary Jewish women fit into the social order of the tenth to thirteenth century Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, both as women and as Jews, and how two institutions central to that social order-kinship...

"This collection of original contributions by an international group of experts summarizes recent developments in Genizah research. It begins with an overview of a century of work on the famous Taylor-Schechter Collection of Hebrew manuscripts at Cambridge University Library. The essays are an introduction to important intellectual, religious and social developments in the Jewish communities of the medieval Islamic world. They appeal to scholars with...