A shopping list from the Middle Ages
The Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, old Cairo, had a geniza: a storeroom for writing that may not be destroyed, because the name of God might appear in it. For centuries people put there not only sacred texts but nearly any written paper — contracts, business letters, medical prescriptions, amulets, marriage and divorce deeds. And shopping lists.
That is the part that is hard to stop thinking about. Hundreds of thousands of fragments survived — the digital project that gathers them counts more than 400,000 images — and among them are notes somebody wrote before going to the market, and then forgot to throw away.
What was on them
The National Library of Israel published one of them in full. Each entry carries a weight in dirhams — about 3.125 grams — and this is what was on it: sumac, tahini, olive and sesame oil, salt, sesame oil again, and wood for fuel. A list you can read today without any explanation at all.
Cambridge University Library's account of its Genizah collection mentions another in the same spirit: an order of payment in Arabic for firewood, cheese, green beans and a fat chicken. Cambridge also notes that Genizah documents are written in Judaeo-Arabic — Arabic in Hebrew characters.
One thing about them is especially familiar. According to the National Library of Israel, Geniza shopping lists tend to be written in the order a recipe calls for its ingredients. Not by department, not alphabetically — by what is being cooked.
The note written on a divorce deed
The National Library of Israel has written about one of these lists. It is held in Cambridge today, and the side nobody expected carries a divorce deed, torn in half. There is no drama in it. A divorce deed is torn under Jewish law so that it cannot be used again, which left someone holding half a blank sheet; reusing written paper was ordinary, and the empty side was simply the next available surface. Someone turned over a document that had finished its job and wrote down what needed buying.
That carelessness is exactly what preserved it. Had it been an important list, it would never have reached us.
From the Middle Ages to now, the same note
You can read economic history in this — what people ate, what things cost, what was imported from where. But what these lists really show is smaller than that: one household, in one week, with somebody who has to remember the cheese.
Centuries on, the note has not changed much. It moved to a phone, it is shared now between several people in the house, and a price sits next to it that updates by itself. But it is still a list of what is needed — and still, as in the Geniza, easier to arrange by what you are cooking.
Sources
- National Library of Israel — on a shopping list written on a divorce deed
- University of Cambridge — treasures of the Cairo Genizah — its text is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence; quoted here on those terms
- Friedberg Geniza Project — the project and the size of its archive
- Smarthistory — the Cairo Geniza: preservation and reuse
