Ben Ezra Synagogue

About Ben Ezra Synagogue

Building in Egypt

The Ben Ezra Synagogue is Egypt's oldest surviving synagogue, located in the Fustat area of Old Cairo within the enclosure of the ancient Babylon Fortress, next to the Coptic churches and the Coptic Museum. It dates to the 9th century and occupies the shell of a 4th-century church, the Church of the Shamayin, which the Orthodox Church sold to the Jewish community when heavy taxation left it in financial difficulty. The synagogue is named after Ezra the Scribe and was also known as the Synagogue of the Levantines; local folklore holds that the infant Moses was found at this spot. It was restored in the 12th century and repeatedly up to the 20th. Its great fame comes from the Cairo Geniza: a storeroom for old documents discovered in 1890 that held some 400,000 manuscripts and fragments in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic and other languages, both sacred and secular, mostly from the 11th to 13th centuries. They are among the most important sources for the social and commercial history of medieval Egypt and the Mediterranean. Most of the collection was taken to the University of Cambridge in England and is now divided among several academic libraries. With the Jewish community in Egypt now very small, the synagogue is no longer used for worship; the Egyptian government has restored and maintained it as a monument and museum, visited by those who want to complete the picture of Old Cairo and its three faiths.

Where:

Cairo, Egypt