The Cairo Geniza is a cache of roughly 400,000 pages of manuscript (and some printed) material that accumulated in the worn text repository (Hebrew: geniza) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue

in Cairo between the eleventh century and the late nineteenth. It is now dispersed across more than sixty libraries and private collections. The term “Cairo Geniza” also sometimes includes material from other Jewish sites in Cairo, such as the Dār Simḥa Qaraite synagogue.

Geniza material covers an enormous swath of the globe over more than a millennium of history. The earliest manuscripts it preserved are early Christian texts that were later palimpsested, in addition to a papyrus codex likely from the sixth century. The latest are from 1897. There are texts from every shore of the Mediterranean basin, as well as Saharan Africa, transalpine Europe, Central Asia and many places across the Indian Ocean basin, from Aden to Malacca.

But the densest and most coherent set of texts center on Egypt, especially greater Cairo and the delta.