Ben-Esra-Synagoge

The oldest synagogue in Egypt, according to the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, and the place where a vast medieval archive was found. It stands in Old Cairo, about a hundred metres from the Hanging Church, and is no longer used for worship.

Its fame rests on a room most visitors never think about. Every synagogue keeps a geniza, a store for worn-out writings that bear the name of God and so cannot simply be thrown away. Ben Ezra's was unusually large, and it went on filling for centuries. The question it answers is what a community's everyday paperwork can tell us, if nobody ever throws it out.

The Ministry records that the synagogue's geniza accumulated documents over some 850 years. Europeans came upon this hoard in 1888, and its contents are now held in libraries around the world. The Cairo Geniza, as it is known, includes many rare and previously unknown documents.

The synagogue is named after Abraham ibn Ezra, the Jewish scholar and philosopher. The quarter is layered: under Roman rule a legion was stationed in the fortress of Babylon here. And Egypt's Jewish communities are far older than the synagogue. In the fifth century BC a Jewish garrison on Elephantine, in Aswan, had its own temple, destroyed in 410 BC.

At the centre is the bimah, the platform from which prayers were read. Against the wall that marks the direction of prayer stands the hekhal, decorated in an arabesque style and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with the Ten Commandments inscribed in Hebrew: in the Ministry's words, a merging of artistic traditions. Our suggestion is to see it together with the Hanging Church next door. Within a few minutes you can stand in the remains of a Roman fort, a Coptic church and a medieval synagogue.