LONDON â€" In an unlikely partnership the rival universities Oxford and Cambridge will work together to purchase an ancient archive spanning 1,000 years of Jewish history.
The universities, which once fought to obtain related documents, started the joint fund-raising campaign, the first of its kind, on Friday. They will need $1.9 million to purchase the Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection, which may be sold piecemeal if the current owner, Westminster College in Cambridge, does not find a buyer. A donation of $790,000 has already been made toward the goal, according to a news release.
The collection â€" part of a fragmented, history-shaping hodgepodge of documents and manuscripts originally discovered in a Cairo synagogue â€" contains more than 1,700 Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts dating from the 9th to the 19th century. It includes an eyewitness account of Crusaders and the earliest-known example of a Jewish engagement deed, according to the rlease.
The documents were found in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. There, a cache called a genizah, intended for the storage of religious texts, amassed centuries of ephemera â€" an “accidental assembly of everything that could be written down,†said Ben Outhwaite, the head of genizah research at Cambridge, in an interview. The documents were stored haphazardly in a hidden two-story chamber now widely known as the Cairo Genizah.
“There was a hole in the wall and they just dropped manuscripts in, like a postbox,†Mr. Outhwaite said. The discovery revolutionized both Jewish and Middle Eastern histories, he said, and is the world’s most richly varied medieval collection. Both universities currently own collections from the Cairo Genizah, according to the release, though the Cambridge collection is by far the world’s largest.
