Cairo Geniza

In fact, they existed in the third century, because we're going to see there was a reference by Rabbi Yochanan in a moment, but probably by about the fourth century, it got lost to history.

And when the texts start coming out, and a record of the texts come out, This prayer, the first reference is only from the 10th century, which we'll come to a moment later, which is found in the Cairo Geniza.

But it dates from the 10th century.

That means that by the time we have a written record of this prayer, the Natsrim had certainly vanished from history and from people's collective memory, which makes studying Natsrim extremely difficult.

Destroy one node, the network roots around it.

The Cairo Geniza is the accidental proof of this.

A Geniza is a storage room where worn-out sacred texts are placed, because you don't destroy a text containing the name of God.

You let it rest.

Most of the corpus isn't yet fully linked, annotated, or machine-readable.

The surface has been scratched.

The Cairo Geniza material alone is only partially digitized.

The commentaries are linked, but not all of them are translated.

Uh, again, uh, we are, we don't have a, a hard evidence for, uh, uh, that we can, we can use as we [laughs] would have liked to in answering such, such a, a basic question.

But we, we can tell according to what we see in the siddurim and, uh, specifically according to what was discovered in the Cairo Geniza.

You know, there's a lot of material that wasn't known until, uh, the discovery of, of, of the Geniza at the late 19th century.

Um, so, uh, I can say that, uh, we can perhaps date it to the middle of the first millennium CE, around the fourth or fifth century.

Yeah.

But they are systematically rhymed, and he also, he also, uh, uh, has his name i- in acrostics in some of his, uh, uh, korot.

Most of pi- his piyyutim, by the way, were discovered-- that we know were discovered in the Cairo Geniza.

They didn't survive outside the Geniza.

But then in the ninth century, they start writing.

Why did they start writing? One of the reasons they said at that first of all, that we could-- We have tons of manuscripts, even in Cairo Geniza, but there's basically nothing before the ninth century, the end of the eighth century, beginning of the ninth century.

And the reason is very simple, because it was not written.

The first copies were there.

There is what seems to be an apocryphal story of, um, a, an important rabbi in Mainz during some, during a period of, of Christian persecution, who was tortured by Christians and, uh, almost to death, and as he was dying, they, like, brought him in on, um, to, uh, like, uh, like, like, on a, on some sort of stretcher to, to the schul, and the, the, his dying words were netaneh tokef, like, who will live and who will die, and all this stuff.

It seems like Unetanneh Tokef was written, well, like they, they've, they've discovered manuscripts of Unetanneh Tokef in the Cairo Genizah from earlier than, uh, than this, than, than when this rabbi lived.

Um, but the, the solemnity is interesting is that in that people, people suggest that it was adopted by Ashkenazim.

Sephardi people don't, don't have this in their, um, high holiday liturgy, but that it was adopted by Ashkenazim during these, like, medieval period of, of, of, uh, of intense Christian persecution because, you know, it's, it's, it's a little more melancholy.

What is not disputed is the third question, the age of the physical manuscripts themselves.

Even the oldest surviving fragments recover from the famous Cairo Geniza, a storeroom of discarded Hebrew and Aramaic writings preserved in an old synagogue in Egypt.

are generally dated by specialists to somewhere around the 11th or 12th century, meaning the pages in front of us today are considerably younger than the traditions written on them.

The first clear outside witness to the story comes from a Christian source, and much earlier than those surviving pages.

And the Beis Yosef writes in Cheshem Mishpat that I saw in Egypt that the year 5271, which is 1511, was accepted as the Shemitah year.

And then you have the Cairo Geniza, which records him being in possession of a valuable diamond, which he was transporting from one city to another, and that is possibly how he made his living at that time.

Now, he lived through the major historical migrations of the Svardim within the Ottoman Empire, which was at the time a large and vibrant area of Jewish life and generally, particularly after 1516.

And he had the rabbinate in several cities.

Um, however, um, most of what he did, we didn't know much about Yannai or what was unique about him, what was special about him.

Until the late nineteenth century, there was a discovery called the Cairo Geniza, and I did a class a couple of months ago about the Cairo Geniza, some of you may remember it, where we discovered in Cairo, in the Ben Ezra Synagogue, um, they discovered, um, they had been, um, keeping all the Geniza, all the holy documents and books, had been sitting in the attic for over a thousand years, just been sitting there.

And so they actually took out all of these, the Cairo Geniza documents, hundreds of thousands of documents, and we now have an opening into a world that we knew almost nothing about, and it revolutionized Jewish history.

I think in many ways, the Cairo Geniza is the most important find in Jewish history.

Um, and it revolutionized what we understood about Jewish life during the medieval period in the Eastern Mediterranean, in Babylon, in North Africa, um, and really gave us a whole different understanding.

Today, there's a lot, lot written on the Cairo Geniza.

We did a class about it.

One of the things that we discovered in the Cairo Geniza was large numbers of poems, and many, many of those poems are written by Yannai.

Okay, thank you for those who've emailed me privately.

David says, I've heard Rabbi Kephet tell the story numerous times, and each time Rabbi Kephet also said that Rabbi Lieberman quoted a manuscript of the Go'onim found in the Cairo Geniza.

So...

The problem is that I was just writing this up.

If you look in what he's writing in the book The Rav, he says that the person he discussed said he told me they discovered a parchment, a megillah, in which it was stated...

And I'm reading from Shama Friedman's... thing here in which then there's three dots.

So it could have said a parchment of Megillah from the Cairo Geniza, but I'm not sure if it says that.

But it's not.