A POPULAR BOOK ON THE CAIRO GENIZA:

Rabbi tells story of Hebrew texts found in Cairo

Kathleen Lavey • klavey@lsj.com • October 29, 2010 (LSJ)

Rabbi Mark Glickman first heard about the Cairo Genizah in 1985, while he was in rabbinical school.

The story of a trove of ancient documents found in a 1,000-year-old Egyptian synagogue doesn’t get the same amount of ink as tales of the gold and jewels from the nearby tombs of Egyptian rulers.

But Glickman thinks maybe the crumbling documents should, because of the details they offer about life in the Middle East in the Middle Ages, when Arabic-speaking Jews were part of the fabric of the Islam-dominated society around them.

“The picture is of a Jewish culture that lives in peace and harmony and happiness, for the most part,” Glickman said. “It not only paints a beautiful picture of the past, it paints a very hopeful picture of the future.”

Glickman, who leads two small congregations near Seattle, is visiting Michigan and will discuss his new book, “Sacred Treasure: The Cairo Genizah” in two appearances: 7 p.m. Sunday at Congregation Kehillat Israel in Lansing, and at 7 p.m. Monday at Michigan State University.

[...]

To research the book – a snappy, fast-moving history written for the non-academic crowd – Glickman and his teenage son, Jacob, traveled to Cairo, where they got a glimpse inside the now-empty genizah, and Cambridge, where they looked over many documents.

A non-specialist treatment sounds like a good idea to me.

UPDATE (1 November): More here.

(Via Jim Davila at paleojudaica.blogspot.com)

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April DeConick (On her Forbidden Gospels blog:

Gospel of Judas Update: Published news about the OHIO fragments

I just received offprints of an article published in the first volume of Mohr Siebeck’s new journal Early Christianity(link HERE). The article is a preliminary report written by Herbert Krosney, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst about the status of the OHIO fragments of the Gospel of Judas. In the first part of the article, Krosney explains the court battle over the OHIO fragments and their photographs which were analyzed by Gregor Wurst who recognized that they contained the balance of the Gospel of Judas, allowing us to read 90-95% of it.

According to Krosney’s account, the fragments have made their way to Egypt in April 2010 and are under the care of Dr. Zahi Hawass who did not want the fragments to go to Switzerland for conservation first. The rest of the Tchacos Codex remains in Switzerland in the hands of the Maecenas Foundation who is now in a financial battle with Mrs. Frieda Nussberger.

The rest of the article is a sketch of the contents of the fragments and a preliminary transcription and translation based on photographs of the fragments possessed by Nussberger. There has been no distribution of the photographs to scholars other than Meyer and Wurst as far as I know. There is mention that Wurst and Meyer are consulting with the administration in Egypt in order to discover how to proceed in the critical publication of the fragments.