Ben Ezra Synagogue

It takes fifteen minutes to walk round, and the building is modest: a basilica plan, a carved wooden bimah, geometric marble inlay, and a women's gallery above. What makes it extraordinary is a walled-up room upstairs that nobody opened for eight hundred years.

Why it matters

• Jewish law forbids destroying any paper bearing the name of God, so worn documents were stored rather than thrown away
• Cairo's dry air preserved them, and the community kept using the room until the nineteenth century
• Some 300,000 fragments came out of it: letters, contracts, shopping lists, children's writing exercises, a physician's prescriptions

It sits inside the Coptic Cairo compound, a two-minute walk from the Hanging Church and next door to the Coptic Museum, so it is part of that walk rather than a separate trip. Photography inside is not permitted.

The building stands on ground the Coptic church sold to the Jewish community in the ninth century, reportedly to help pay a tax levied by Ibn Tulun. It was rebuilt in 1892, and it is that rebuilding which exposed the Geniza.

A geniza is a repository, not an archive — the point was storage, not preservation, and no one catalogued anything. Solomon Schechter of Cambridge reached it in 1896 after two Scottish sisters brought him fragments they had bought in Cairo, one of which turned out to be the lost Hebrew original of Ecclesiasticus. He shipped roughly 190,000 pieces to Cambridge.

What they contain is not theology but ordinary life: the business letters of India traders, marriage contracts, a wife's complaint about her husband, the household accounts of Maimonides, who lived and worked a short walk away. It is the reason we know more about eleventh-century Cairo than about most medieval European cities.