Genizah Research Unit

16/09/2026

It's happening again!

Come to Cambridge in January 2027 for Westminster College's fantastic Winter language school (and get a bonus visit to see the Cairo Genizah collection at the University Library)!

11/09/2026

August's Fragment of the Month is worth waiting for, and it shows once again that close reading and specialised knowledge can throw a new light on a published text. Dr Pratima Gopalakrishnan reveals Indic terms in a twelfth-century Jewish trader's letter:

https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/taylor-schechter-genizah-research-unit/fragment-month/fotm-2026/fragment-5

18/08/2026

Due to holidays and heat, we are really late with July's Fragment of the Month, but it's a great India trade one from Alan Elbaum, who brings us a manuscript adding further to our knowledge of Ashū, the wife of Ibn Yijū:

https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/taylor-schechter-genizah-research-unit/fragment-month/fotm-2026/fragment-6

24/06/2026

We've been adding some more imagery to CUDL from our image archives. This includes multi-spectral images of some of the palimpsests (including the Hexapla, T-S 12.82) as well as this great infra-red image that Shamma Friedman used for his article on the Talmud Hullin gevil scroll.
https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-TS-MISC-00026-00053-00017/3
https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-TS-00012-00182/3

Recto: scroll of Babylonian Talmud, Ḥullin (חולין) 101a-105a (101a:13-105a:5). It's unusual to find a scroll of the BT, especially

02/06/2026

New Fragment of the Month for May – Neri Ariel on a heavily used and annotated halakhic fragment from the JTS collection – hybrid vocalisation, Arabic glosses, a text being used and added to over time -- a perfect example of the Genizah as a utilitarian archive.

https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/taylor-schechter-genizah-research-unit/fragment-month/fotm-2026/fragment-4

02/06/2026

In this new blog post, Marc Michaels offers a reconstruction of T-S NS 3.21, an early Torah scroll from the so-called 'silent period'. https://genizahfragments.lib.cam.ac.uk/2026/06/02/whats-my-line-reconstructing-cul-t-s-ns-3-21/

22/05/2026

This is what we have been getting up to this week!

It’s the first day of the festival of Shavuot, and 885 years since the ship carrying Judah ha-Levi raised anchor in Alexandria to take the poet to his final destination. We also looked at som…

15/05/2026

It's only the 15th of May and we've already had more than 150 visitors on show-and-tell Genizah tours this month. Here's what we've been up to this week:

It must be the time of year for booking in Genizah tours in Cambridge, as we’ve hosted more than 150 visitors since the beginning of May.

30/04/2026

The Fragment of the Month for April reveals the detailed itinerary of a new India trader, as he sets off across Egypt for Yemen. This one is written by three Princeton students, Caitlin Buckley, Mohammed Salih Cholakkalakath, and Jesse Noily:

https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/taylor-schechter-genizah-research-unit/fragment-month/fotm-2026/fragment-1