Cairo Geniza

A geniza is a storeroom where a synagogue set aside worn-out or damaged writing bearing God's name rather than destroying it. The Cairo Geniza -- emptied into modern archives and now digitized by the Princeton Geniza Project -- happened to preserve everything else written on the same paper too: personal letters, court records, contracts, and book lists from centuries of ordinary Mediterranean Jewish life.

Because the Geniza kept documents for a religious reason unrelated to their content, it is an unusually unbiased sample of everyday medieval writing, which is why it turns up as evidence for questions well beyond religious history. The paper elasticity of prose and Nilometer to Geniza both use Geniza material as an economic instrument, reading paper costs and Nile flood records against Geniza-recorded prices. Two genizahs, two Jewries compares two different genizah-like preservation communities directly, while The tune is the meter police and Accents follow the trade look at how liturgical melody and pronunciation left traces in how Geniza texts were written down.