Endnote 3 – Glossary

A genizah is a storage site for sacred Jewish books which are no longer fit for liturgical usage. A very important genizah was rediscovered at the end of the last century in the Old Jewish Synagogue in Fostat, or Old Cairo. The documents that it contains are an invaluable source for the study of medieval Jewry and traditional Jewish texts. According to one estimate, it contains scraps of several thousand biblical manuscripts.