Making Sense of the Cairo Geniza’s Arabic Documents

The Cairo Geniza (a repository in a medieval synagogue where books and documents were discarded) contains, scattered among its multitude of Hebrew texts, no small number of materials in Arabic, which until now have received comparatively little attention from scholars. Marina Rustow, the recent recipient of a MacArthur grant, has focused her research on deciphering these texts, often written in obscure dialects and scrawled on the back of Hebrew documents. Among her finds are rare official edicts from the court of the ruling dynasty and the personal correspondence of a prominent 11th-century Jerusalem rabbi. (Interview by Sara Ivry; Audio, 24 minutes.)