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Apr. 29, 2021 6:55 PM
In 1970, Israel Adler, then the director of Israel’s Jewish National and University Library, visited the Paris home of Rachel Mosseri, a Jewish exile from Nasser’s Egypt. Adler had a big mission, and limited time to carry it out – just 10 days to catalog and photograph the roughly 7,000 documents from the Cairo Genizah that constituted the collection assembled by Mosseri’s late husband, Jacques Mosseri, some six decades earlier.
From other caches, most notably that assembled by Solomon Schechter, the world of Jewish scholarship already recognized the long-concealed storage space of Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue as an incomparable source of Jewish books, documents and fragments that dated back at least 1,000 years. Not all of them were sacred texts; some were just “sacred trash,” as Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole titled their superb 2011 book about the genizah: letters, contracts, shipping manifests, even shopping lists that could not be destroyed because they contained the name of God – and they were written in a number of different languages, and not only Hebrew. It was in fact the diversity of the material found in and around the medieval-era synagogue (which in its first incarnation, in the 9th century, was constructed on a site that local Jewish lore said was where Pharaoh’s daughter found Baby Moses) that made it such a valuable source for understanding the lives – and not just the texts – of Jews in the medieval Islamic world. In the case of Jacques Mosseri’s collection, both its whereabouts and an inventory of its precise contents had been lost after his family left their native Egypt for Paris in the 1950s.