Afghan Geniza
Collection of Jewish manuscripts / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Afghan Geniza (or Genizah) is a collection of hundreds of Jewish manuscript fragments found in a genizah in the caves of Afghanistan. The manuscripts include writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian, some of which are 1,000 years old.[1][2]
Before the discovery of these materials, there was only limited documentary evidence that Jews had settled in that area, and little that provided insight on their culture and daily life. Therefore, researchers deem this collection the most important finding of documentary sources since the discovery of the Cairo Geniza more than 100 years prior.[1]
In 2013, the National Library of Israel announced that it had purchased 29 pages from this cache of documents and another 250 or so in 2016.[3] In 2020, they became part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and European Research Council-funded University of Oxford-based research project Invisible East.[4]