Historically, the term genizah commonly refers to an informal storage area where fragile Jewish documents, considered religiously significant, but ritually unfit, are put away until they are brought to a cemetery for dignified burial. The trove of over 350,000 medieval manuscript fragments once held in the attic genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo, dating from the 9th century CE and spanning over a thousand years, is the most famous and important of the extant collections. Its contents - so-called Cairo genizah fragments, which came to light during the 19th century - subsequently were scattered around the world. Some appeared on and then disappeared from the antiquities market; the largest segment went to Cambridge University, where they became the object of intensive scholarly study.
In the late 1990s, thanks to a significant gift from a Penn alum named Jeffrey Keil, W' 65 and PAR '91, Penn initiated a project, in collaboration with Cambridge University Libraries, to apply digital technologies to discover new intellectual matches among these physically dispersed fragments. Through this initiative we were able to demonstrate how digital technologies may serve as discovery tools to identify matches among a global diaspora of thousands of fragments of medieval manuscripts (see: http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/genizah/index.cfm). This collection of Cairo genizah fragments consists of Penn manuscripts that were part of this project.