Synagogue Ben Ezra
Medieval synagogue whose hidden storeroom preserved four hundred thousand manuscript fragments for centuries.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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