Report: New, Handwritten Maimonides Texts Discovered At Cambridge University Library

From the University of Cambridge:

A Visiting Researcher to Cambridge has found previously unknown evidence of the legendary Jewish philosopher writing in a Romance dialect in manuscript fragments dating from the 12^th century.

A scrap of 900-year-old paper – part of Cambridge’s Cairo Genizah collection of more than 200,000 fragments of writing chronicling life over 1,000 years in Egypt and the Middle East – has been identified as containing the handwriting of the legendary Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides.

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The Genizah collection is one of the greatest treasures among the world-class collections at Cambridge University Library.

From the 9th to the 19th century, the Jewish community of Fustat (Old Cairo) deposited more than 200,000 unwanted writings in a purpose-built storeroom in the Ben Ezra synagogue.

This sacred storeroom was called the Genizah. A Genizah was a safe place to store away any old or unusable text that, because it contained the name of God, was considered too holy to simply throw out.

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