The Rector's Podium
The Rediscovery of a Thousand Year Old Hebrew Bible in Cairo
You are cordially invited to a lecture by Prof. Yoram Meital from The Department of Middle East Studies.
These lectures serve as a wonderful opportunity to engage with academics from different fields and share the fruits of their research and ideas.
The lecture will take place in the W.A. Minkoff Senate Hall. For those unable to come, you are invited to join via Zoom.
If you wish to attend at the Senate Hall, please RSVP
About the lecture
In late July 2017, I was invited to Cairo by the local Jewish community to participate in a comprehensive survey of the eleven synagogues that still stand in the Egyptian capital. For two millennia, Egypt was home to a prosperous Jewish community. Today, only a few Jews still live in Egypt, a remnant of an ancient community comprised of Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Karaite Jews.
While documenting the library of the Moshe Der'i Karaite synagogue, I opened a cabinet containing several packages wrapped in white paper. I was utterly overwhelmed when, upon unwrapping the dusty covers, I found hundreds of pages. A quick glance left no room for doubt— it was a biblical manuscript containing 569 pages containing all the books included in Ketuvim (the third part of the Hebrew Bible) and 12 more pages including the details of the scribe. At the end of the rare manuscript, the scribe wrote: “I Zechariah the scribe Ben Anan […] I wrote and vocalized with the help of God these Chronicles [הכתובים] […] Successfully completed [סופא טבא] in the year four thousand and seven hundred eighty-eight from the Creation" [i.e., 1028 according to the Gregorian calendar.]
This lecture introduces my recovery of this one thousand-year-old Hebrew Biblical Manuscript in Cairo, its unique features, and the current efforts to preserve Jewish heritage by Egyptians of various religions.
