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Writing History from Very Special Garbage: Research in the Cairo Geniza in the 21st Century

Presented by University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum)

November 12, 2011

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Dr. Jessica Goldberg, New York University, speaks at this program sponsored by the Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE-PA). In the 1890s, more than 300,000 manuscript leaves of paper were removed from a storeroom in the Ben Ezra synagogue of Old Cairo that had served for 900 years as its Geniza; the materials were bought by or donated to dozens of collectors, universities, and libraries.

In this talk, the story of these papers, their dispersal, and the century of scholarship that followed, is examined. How has this dispersal shaped the way these documents have been used in historical scholarship? Dr. Goldberg also looks at the ways Geniza scholarship is currently being transformed by new efforts at cataloguing, imaging, and digitization, and the challenges and riches that lie ahead.