Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A repository in a synagogue where worn-out or desecrated sacred texts or objects are stored.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Among Jews, a sacred object, such as a defective scroll of the law, which has been rendered unfit for liturgical use.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A storeroom located in or by a synagogue where are kept sacred Hebrew books that cannot be used (through damage or heretical teachings), but which cannot be discarded because they contain God's name.
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word genizah.
Examples
-
A genizah is a storage room for discarded books and written materials.
Genizah. 2009
-
A genizah is a storage room where copies of respected texts with scribal errors or physical damage are kept until they can be ritually buried.
SFGate: Don Asmussen: Bad Reporter Gwen Ackerman 2011
-
A genizah is a storage room where copies of respected texts with scribal errors or physical damage are kept until they can be ritually buried.
-
In medieval Cairo, this custom was extended to anything written in Hebrew, but instead of being buried, such items were stored in a genizah in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fostat (Old Cairo), where most of the Jews lived; the arid conditions preserved them.
Genizah. 2009
-
All this is based on the notorious Kherson genizah of Hasidic forgeries, dating no further back than the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but purporting to contain original documents written by the eighteenth-century founders of Hasidism.
Hasidism. 2009
-
A lower compartment, mostly intact, possibly functioned as a genizah, where old or unused scrolls were stored.
-
Add to these, to complete the history of the Hexapla's recovery, the palimpsest fragments of several of the psalms discovered by Mercati in the Ambrosian Library of Milan (1896), and the palimpsest fragment of Ps. xxii recovered from a genizah of Cairo
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 7: Gregory XII-Infallability 1840-1916 1913
-
These fragments, obtained from a Cairo genizah (a box for wornout or cast-off manuscripts), belong to the tenth or eleventh century of our ear.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 9: Laprade-Mass Liturgy 1840-1916 1913
-
+ the Cambridge fragment, seventh century, discovered in a Cairo genizah.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 9: Laprade-Mass Liturgy 1840-1916 1913
-
= = the Babylonian, which is commonly in use, and the Palestinian, which Schechter recently discovered in a Cairo genizah (MSS. -box).
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 14: Simony-Tournon 1840-1916 1913
she commented on the word genizah
Plural: genizot
July 9, 2008