Excerpt from The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine Under the Fa?t?imid Caliphs, Vol. 1: A Contribution to Their Political and Communal History Based Chiefly on Genizah Material Hitherto Unpublished
'The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief corner-stone.' A feeling similar to that of the Psalmist takes hold of one who explores the remarkable literary finds brought to light from the obscurity of the Cairo Genizah. Documents and letters, poems and compositions in Hebrew and Arabic, which the contemporaries preserved for some time after perusal and then regarded as useless, assigning them to the lumber-room of a synagogue only out of sheer piety, become now the foundation upon which the history of the Jews in Egypt and in Palestine, from 950 C. E. and onwards, is to be based. The attempt is made here to reconstruct the life of these Jewries from the beginning of the Fatimid reign in Egypt(969 C. E.) till about the time of Maimonides, who died at the end of the year 1204 C. E. A large number of Genizah fragments, still unpublished, form the basis of this work.
No claim is put forward of having exhausted all the available material. As with the nation of Israel, so with its literature - 'scattered and separated among the peoples'. Thus it came about that the Genizah Mss. found their way into numerous libraries, public and private, on both hemispheres. Even those Genizah Collections to which I have had access - and they were the most important - could not be completely explored. The task of examining the many thousands of fragments and extracting all the historical data they contain, requires many years of labour, and cannot be undertaken by one person. But how appropriate is the saying of the Rabbis: 'The work is not for thee alone to finish; but thou art not free to desist from it.' My chief aim was to produce a skeleton of the contemporary history of the Egyptian and the Palestinian Jewries.
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