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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, shippi