Synagogue Ben Ezra

This guide to the Synagogue Ben Ezra in Cairo starts in 1896, when two Scottish sisters brought a bag of old paper scraps bought from a Cairo dealer to a Cambridge scholar named Solomon Schechter. It follows him back to this building, where Jewish law against destroying anything bearing God's name had turned a storeroom into a centuries-deep pile of discarded documents. Along the way it touches the building's own history of demolition and rebuilding under a medieval caliph, and the local tradition tying this ground to the story of a baby found among the reeds.