Then two things happened. Goitein had bequeathed his “geniza lab” of 26,000 index cards and thousands of transcriptions, translations and photocopies of fragments to the National Library of Israel (then the Jewish National and University Library). But Mark R. Cohen(link is external) and A. L. Udovitch(link is external) arranged for copies to be made and kept in Princeton. That was the birth of the Princeton Geniza Lab. 

The wealthy Egyptian Jacques Mosseri financed excavations in thevicinity of the Ben Ezra Synagogue and in the Basatin Cemetery at theend of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Hiscollection remained with the Mosseri family and was unavailable forscholars for many years. In 1970, scholars from the National Library ofIsrael were allowed to microfilm the collection, which resulted in the1990 catalog. In 2006, the Mosseri family loaned its collection toCambridge University for a twenty-year period during which thecollection would be conserved, digitized, and studied and then,conditions permitting, deposited in the National Library of Israel. ForMosseri’s account of how he obtained his collection, see his “A NewHoard of Jewish MSS in Cairo,” Jewish Review 4 (1913): 208–16. Formore information on the subsequent history of the collection, see theintroduction to the 1990 catalog; and http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/jmgc.

offers a breakdown of the most useful index cards of the second type.

About twenty thousand of those cards are 3 × 5 inches and seven thousand 5 × 8 inches.

Transcriptions taken from Goitein’s publications were corrected according to handwrittennotes on his private offprints. The nature of Goitein’s “typed texts” is as follows. Goitein tran-scribed Geniza documents by hand from the originals or from photostats. These handwrittentranscriptions were later typed by an assistant and usually corrected by Goitein. When Goiteindied in 1985, the transcriptions were photocopied in Princeton before the originals were sentto the National Library of Israel, where they can be consulted today. During the followingdecades, the contents of most of these photocopies were entered into a computer, and period-ically the files had to be converted to newer digital formats. The outcome of these repeatedprocesses of copying and conversion is that transcription errors and format glitches are to beexpected. As the Princeton Geniza Project website states: “Goitein considered his typed texts‘drafts’ and always restudied the manuscripts and made revisions to his transcriptions beforepublishing them.” See also Goitein, “Involvement in Geniza Research,” 143. It is important tokeep in mind that only the transcriptions that were typed were uploaded to the project website.Therefore, e.g., Goitein’s transcriptions of documents in Arabic scripts are usually not foundthere. The National Library of Israel and the Princeton Geniza Lab also hold many of Goitein’sdraft English translations of Geniza documents, many of which were intended for his plannedanthology of Geniza texts in translation, Mediterranean People.

Recently, images ofGoitein’s index cards and transcriptions have been attached to existing tran-scriptions or to shelf marks without transcription, thus increasing the numberof records to over eighty-three hundred (as of May 2018).

More recent ad-ditions to the website include a “jigsaw puzzle” screen that lets users viewseveral items while playing with them to check whether they are “joins.” An-other useful feature permits the user to split the screen into several panelsand, thus, examine several items simultaneously (useful, e.g., when compar-ing handwriting in several documents). Finally, the “join suggestions” screenprovides the results of a technologically groundbreaking computerized anal-ysis of paleographic and codiocological features that suggests possible joinsor items written by the same scribe or belonging to the same codex. 35

The Friedberg Genizah Project makes excellent digital images of Genizadocuments available to scholars around the world.

The first place to start any search for Geniza documents is A Mediter-ranean Society by S. D. Goitein.

“In the beginning of my engagement with Geniza studies, I innocently supposed that I didnot need to deal with the original of a document already mentioned by another scholar. To-day, it is clear to me that the Geniza scholar must examine the original even for a docu-ment that has been fully published (even by Goitein), not to mention a document only men-tioned.” See S. D. Goitein, “The Struggle between the Synagogue and the Community” (inHebrew), in Hayyim (Jefim) Schrimann: Jubilee Volume, ed. Shraga Abramson and AaronMirsky (Jerusalem, 1970), 69–77, 71 n. 8 (my translation)

Most editions of Geniza documents appear in Hebrew-language publications, andthis means that Hebrew documents are usually left untranslated. It is important to recognizethat this is a problem.

the majority of Geniza documents are found in the Taylor-Schechter (T-S) collection in the Cambridge University Library

Another use-ful work is Shaul Shaked’s Tentative Bibliography of Geniza Documents.

The Princeton Geniza Project(link is external) is a database of more than 30,000 records and 4,600 transcriptions of documentary geniza texts. Since 1986, the PGP has been dedicated to discovering and describing unpublished documents; maintaining a full-text retrieval database of geniza documents; and creating new transcriptions and translations.

But a 1901 article(link is external) by Solomon Schechter hinted at the cache’s potential for social history. 

Theonly surviving manuscripts that were actually made in the ancientworld (before around AD 500) are small fragments of papyri found ona rubbish tip in Egypt and some scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri atHerculaneum.*1

This is the middle branch of Mount Tauris [Tibesti Mountains]. Many Saracens coming from the West pass through this mountain wishing to go to Mecca to see the arch of Mohamed that contains their Law.