Jewish treasure trove uncovered by intrepid sisters
A 1000-year-old prenuptial agreement in which the wayward groom commits to abandoning perverseness, buffoons and frivolous jesters is being put on public display - thanks to two adventurous Victorian sisters.
Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson are credited with alerting British academics to the existence of an archive recording a millennium of social history in the Middle East.
An academic from the University of Cambridge subsequently managed to purchase more than 200,000 pieces of writing from the Cairo Genizah.
The Genizah was a storeroom within the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo for texts that, because they contained the name of God, could not be thrown out. The archive also contained the "documents and detritus of everyday life" for Jews living in the Middle East.
Many documents from the collection, now translated into English, will go on display for six months at the Cambridge University Library.
The exhibition includes the earliest known example of a Jewish engagement deed, a child’s doodles of the alphabet from a millennium ago and the oldest medieval Hebrew manuscript, as well as the prenuptial agreement. The document records that a groom named Toviyya has agreed that in order to marry Fa’iza he will "abandon subversion and perverseness . . . will not bring into my house licentiousness, buffoons, frivolous jesters and good-fornothings".
Ben Outhwaite, head of the library’s Genizah research unit and co-curator of the exhibition, said that the manuscripts shed light on people, such as women and children, who rarely appeared in archives. "This colossal haul of writings reveals an intimate portrait of life in a Jewish community that was international in outlook, multicultural in makeup and devout to its core," he said.
The story of the archive’s discovery is as remarkable as the insights it offers. Mrs Lewis and Mrs Gibson, who were raised by their wealthy father in Scotland in the mid-19th century, had had a lifelong interest in biblical studies when they arrived in Cairo in 1892 shortly after both had been widowed. They discovered a series of ancient manuscripts, including a palimpsest of the Gospels written in Syriac and dating from the late 4th century.
After returning to Britain they showed manuscripts to Solomon Schechter, an academic at Cambridge, who recognised one as a lost Hebrew original of the Book of Ecclesiasticus. He then travelled to Egypt, where the country’s chief rabbi allowed him to buy almost 200,000 documents from the Genizah.