Nick Posegay

Archives • Manuscripts • Interfaith History

About This Site

Thank you to me for making this site. Thank you to academia./edu for forcing my hand by making their own site unsuitable for hosting academic materials. Most of all, thank you to you, dear reader, for finding this weird sidebar.

The Illustrated Cairo Genizah (2024)

Almost one thousand years ago, the Jews of Old Cairo began to place their worn-out books and scrolls into a hidden storage room – a genizah – of their synagogue. Over the years, they added all sorts of writings to the pile, sacred and secular texts alike. When the chamber was emptied at the end

Ernest James Worman and the Victorian Genizah: A Salt-Miner’s Tale of Romance, Tax Evasion, and Sudden Death (2024)

Ernest Worman was the first scholar to experience what many of us have come to recognise as the ‘salt-mine’ of the Genizah. Already seven decades before the founding of the Genizah Research Unit (GRU), he toiled away in the depths of Cambridge University Library (CUL), documenting fragment after fragment that, for the most part, did

From the Battlefield of Books: Essays Celebrating 50 Years of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research unit (2024)

This collection of essays celebrates 50 years since the founding of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library. Three generations of scholars contributed their research and memories from their time at the GRU, stretching back to 1974. Their work comprises 18 articles on medieval Jewish History, Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts, archival history, and

Five Qur’anic Papyri from the Michaelides Collection at the Cambridge University Library (2024)

The Michaelides manuscript collection at the Cambridge University Library contains approximately 700 papyrus fragments collected by George Michaelides in Egypt in the middle of the twentieth century. While a preliminary handlist exists for this collection, most of the papyri have not been fully described. Among them are five Qur’anic papyri that have thus far evaded

Searching for the Last Genizah Fragment in Late Ottoman Cairo: A Material Survey of Egyptian Jewish Literary Culture (2022)

The Cairo Genizah is well known as a repository for hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Foreign “collectors” acquired most of these manuscripts for European libraries in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the majority arriving at the Cambridge