10:41 Friday 08 February 2013

Slideshow: Oxbridge coalition in bid to save collection

Written byJennie Baker

 

A £1.2 million fundraising bid has been launched by Cambridge and Oxford universities to keep 1,000 years of Jewish history in the public domain.

The Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection of more than 1,700 fragments of ancient Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts has been housed at Westminster College, a Cambridge theological college, since 1896.

But the manuscripts – dating from the 9th to the 19th century – are in danger of being sold into private collections unless the universities can gather the funds to buy them.

The collection, brought back from Cairo by intrepid twins Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, came from the Cairo Genizah, the sacred storeroom inside the Ben Ezra Synagogue in what is now a Cairo suburb.

It includes the earliest known example of a Jewish engagement deed dating from 1119 and an eyewitness account of crusader atrocities.

The sisters bought them, brought them back to England and later showed them to Solomon Schechter at Cambridge University, and donated them to the University Library.

Anne Jarvis, Cambridge University librarian, said: “In the late 19th century, Oxford’s Bodleian Library and Cambridge University Library were rivals in trying to acquire materials from the Cairo Genizah.

“Today we are taking a different stance, seeking to build on our collections while recognising that there would be a greater benefit to scholarship if we joined together to save the Lewis-Gibson Collection from division and dispersal.”

Documents were put into genizahs because they contained the names of God or the sacred Hebrew alphabet, but they are not all religious writings and amount to an archive covering 1,000 years of Jewish  life.

Cambridge is already home to 200,000 of around 350,000 genizah fragments in public collections.

The campaign was officially launched at the British Academy in London this week and it has already been promised £500,000 by the Polonsky Foundation, which also gave £1.5 million to Cambridge’s Digital Library Project.

Dr Leonard Polonsky, trustee of the foundation, said: “I strongly support collaboration and am delighted to give momentum to the joint venture of these two great universities in acquiring such an important manuscript collection.”

 

< Back
Reddit Facebook Digg Del.icio.us Twitter Bebo

Today's Features
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Education/Universities/Slideshow-Oxbridge-coalition-in-bid-to-save-collection-08022013.htm
www.cambridge-news.co.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-20
56873
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:QHEI5IXYOPVMES7FUAAY532O32REF63C
<urn:uuid:dea44e46-8339-4bc2-914b-6c4f847cd42a>
2013-05-19T08:59:31Z
195.74.108.46
sha1:6IS5YHU5ZZTHESZGXX26XKZV4UL555WC
<urn:uuid:f372f34b-8451-4372-b63f-cc62674403f4>
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Education/Universities/Slideshow-Oxbridge-coalition-in-bid-to-save-collection-08022013.htm
response
<urn:uuid:f9c8e960-c2c8-405e-a0d0-b5bfbebe770e>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-20
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Spring 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf