Cambridge University Library is home to the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection, the world's largest and most important single collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts. For a thousand years, the Jewish community of Fustat (Old Cairo), placed their worn-out books and other writings in a storeroom (genizah) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, and in 1896–97 the Cambridge scholar, Dr Solomon Schechter, with financial help from the Master of St John’s College, Charles Taylor, arrived to examine it. He received permission from the Jewish community of Egypt to take away what he liked (explaining later, ‘I liked it all’), and he brought 193,000 manuscripts back to Cambridge. These manuscripts are in the process of being catalogued by a team of researchers, and descriptions of these along with high-quality images are gradually being made available online.
Cambridge University Library also holds one of the world’s foremost collections of Hebrew manuscripts, on account of the University’s long interest in the literature of Judaism. Chief among them are the famous Nash Papyrus, one of the earliest known artefacts containing the words of the Hebrew Bible, and the Cambridge Mishnah, a complete codex of this work copied in fifteenth-century Byzantium. With 1000 items acquired over more than 500 years, the Collection ranges wide from Samaritan Hebrew Bibles to important compositions of halakha and exegesis, through to manuscripts of philosophical, kabbalistic and scientific works.