In medieval Cairo, Jews placed worn-out texts like letters, recipes, and everyday notes into a synagogue storeroom known as a geniza. By chance, nearly 40,000 fragments were preserved, offering a rare window into Jewish life a thousand years ago. In this talk, Dr. Goldman explores how historians use these materials to reconstruct daily life, from family and education to poverty and communal responsibility, and concludes with a striking case of Jews bringing an internal dispute over Maimonides to the papal court.

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