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Home , Ben Ezra Synagogue, Genizah

IS “THE ” A PROPER NAME OR A GENERIC NOUN? ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE GENIZOT OF THE BEN EZRA AND THE DĀR SIMḤ A

Haggai Ben-Shammai

I feel privileged and honoured to speak at this conference, and I am therefore grateful to the organisers for the opportunity to speak here. This conference is no doubt a tribute to the accomplishments of Stefan Reif in the advancement of Genizah studies. It is also a tribute to scholarship, and especially to scholarly cooperation and friendship. In this context I cannot avoid noting that my presence here together in the United Kingdom with several colleagues from Israel as a tribute to scholarly cooperation and friendship is an appropriate response to the voices, or shall we say noises of unscholarly resentment and hatred, that have been coming from certain quarters in this country. I there- fore thank the organisers for their laudable initiative and hospitality. For over a century now the phrase ‘The Cairo Genizah’ has been widely used to designate Jewish historical documents and fragments of literary contents that had been transferred from the Levant, mainly from the -speaking countries on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, to various libraries in Europe and the United States. While the phrase had been originally used to indicate materials com- ing from the attic of the Ben Ezra in (), the transfer of materials from this particular deposit, most notably to University Library, made such an impact and received such publicity, that materials from similar deposits, and even of uni- dentified provenance, came to be considered as originating from the attic of the . The phrase ‘The Cairo Genizah’ has thus become identical, both in the minds of many scholars and in their publications with the documents, historical or literary, from the Ben Ezra Synagogue. Now, it is almost superfluous to mention here thatgenizot have been a regular feature or architectural element, if you wish, in synagogues everywhere. In arid or semi-arid areas of the eastern Mediterranean the chances of documents deposited in such genizot to survive for long periods had been quite good, provided they were not subject to 44 haggai ben-shammai periodic ceremonial burial. Even when buried in the ground, in such areas they had a good chance of survival.1 In this respect Cairo is not unique. Complete manuscripts or fragments of various sizes that had been acquired over centuries by European collectors (from owners or dealers on the market place) ended up in European libraries, such as the collections called after Pococke (in Oxford), Antonin (in St Petersburg) or Gaster (in London and Manchester) that are known to have originated in such genizot.2 Having made these generalisations, I wish to turn now to another specificgenizah in Cairo, namely the one that was housed in the Karaite synagogue Dār Simḥa.3 This synagogue, situated in the Karaite quarter (Ḥ ārat al-Yahūd al-Qarrāʾīn) in the neighbourhood of al-Gamāliyya in Cairo, not far from Khān al-Khalīlī market, appears in Karaite documents from at least the beginning of the sixteenth century. In documents from the second half of that century it features as the seat of the Karaite court.4 It

1 A famous case that is connected with the Ben Ezra Genizah is the burial of sev- eral thousand fragments in the Jewish cemetery of Basātīn in Cairo. It was excavated between 1910 and 1912, on the initiative of Mr Jacques Mosseri; see J. Mosseri, ‘A New Hoard of Jewish Mss in Cairo’, The Jewish Review 4 (1913–1914), pp. 31–44 (the author refers throughout the entire article to ‘Genizot’ in the plural; as it turns out he has in mind the Ben Ezra Synagogue and the Basātīn cemetery; he does not mention at all the Karaite Genizah); M. Cohen and Y. Stillman, ‘The Cairo Genizah and the Custom of Genizah among Oriental Jewry—An Historical and Ethnographic Study’ (Hebrew), Peʿamim 24 (1985) pp. 3–35 (13–14, 28). This discovery has been known since then as the Mosseri Collection. 2 See the statements of Abraham Firkovich, Avne Zikkaron (Hebrew; Vilno, 1872), p. 2, mentioning the manuscripts which he ‘brought to light’ from the darkness of the genizah of the Karaite synagogue in during his visit there in 1830 (quoted also by Z. Elkin and M. Ben-Sasson, ‘Abraham Firkovich and the Cairo Genizahs in the Light of his Personal Archive’ (Hebrew), Peʿamim 90 (2002), pp. 51–95 (55 n.12)). 3 In recent publications by Karaite and other authors it is called the Rav/Rabbi Simḥa Synagogue; see J. Beinin, ‘The Karaites in Modern ’, in M. Polliack (ed.), Karaite : a Guide to its History and Literary Sources (Leiden, 2003), pp. 418– 423; J. Algamil, ‘Ha-Yehudim ha-Qaraʾim be-Misrayiṃ 1517–1918’, in J. M. Landau (ed.), The Jews in Ottoman Egypt (1517–1914) (Jerusalem, 1988), pp. 513–556 (550ff); Elkin and Ben-Sasson, ‘Abraham Firkovich’, pp. 67–71 (including a map of the Jewish quarter indicating the exact location of the synagogue and a picture of the bima and the ark). 4 See H. Ben-Shammai, ‘New Sources for the History of the Karaites in Sixteenth- Century Egypt (A Preliminary Description)’ (Hebrew), Ginzei Qedem 2 (2006), pp. 9–26 (14); Elkin and Ben-Sasson, ‘Abraham Firkovich’, p. 71; to the sources quoted there in note 62, add E. Ashtor, Toldot ha-Yehudim be-Misrayiṃ ve-Surya taḥat Šiltoṇ ha-Mamlukim (3 vols; Jerusalem, 1944–1970), vol. II, pp. 101–102, and cf. vol. I, pp. 223–245, with references to sources from the Mamluk period (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries).