Scripture
The Damascus Document
There is a small, awkward truth about the Dead Sea Scrolls that the popular literature has smoothed over for half a century: the first one was not found at Qumran. The first…
Archive
Solomon Schechter
Places
The Cairo Geniza and the Taylor-Schechter Collection
For roughly a thousand years a chamber above the women’s gallery of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, in Fustat, the old Egyptian capital that medieval travellers knew as Cairo, acted as a kind…
Scripture
The Damascus Document
A wooden reading lectern is set inside a limestone cave. An oil lamp flickers on a low stone ledge, throwing a circle of warm light across an open parchment. Above the lectern,…
Scripture
The Cairo Genizah
On a January morning in 1897, in the Jewish quarter of Fustat — Old Cairo — a rabbi and a Cambridge scholar climbed a wooden ladder to a small opening in the…