There is a rule, in Jewish temples, that any writing containing God’s name cannot be thrown away. So, rabbis have – for a very long time – done what many of us do with stuff that we can’t bring ourselves to thrown away: shove it in the attic. The attic in a temple is called a genizah. The rabbis are supposed to clean out the genizah every so often and ritually bury the manuscripts stored there. But cleaning out attics is a task we all tend to put off.
The only 2 images of genizahs that I could find.
In Cairo, there is a temple that’s been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. At some point, someone finally took a look in the genizah and realized that it hadn’t been cleaned for centuries. In fact, not for about a thousand years. This was a seriously stuffed genizah. There were manuscripts from the middle ages – the largest collection of medieval manuscripts ever found.
Fortunately, a man named Solomon Schechter learned about it, came running and then devoted his life to preserving, translating and dealing with this treasure.
That, in a small nutshell, is the story of the Cairo Genizah.
Naturally, the manuscripts were not in pristine condition. They had been protectively stored, but the materials were falling apart:
Some, like this page from a child's book, are fairly whole:
For this tablet, I took the photo of Solomon Schechter with the manuscripts* and reworked it. I cropped, turned, changed the color tones, increased contrast, and then enlarged the figure of Solomon Schechter. The original is on the left.
*Although I found other photos of the man, this seems to be the only one with the manuscripts.
This is a photo of a temple in Cairo. I think it's the same one where the manuscripts were found, but I'm not completely sure. Sometimes, when researching online, certainty isn't possible.
At any rate, I took the columns and balconies from this photo, and combined them with the Solomon Schechter photo and the manuscript images:
I took some of the text from various photos, reduced it in size, and copied it to make textural patterns. You can see these patterns used to fill in the shadows.