Page of the commentary of Rav Sa'adia Gaon to Isaiah 34, in Judeo Arabic (10th century)
(Afghan Genizah collection at the National Library of Israel)
The Afghan Geniza is a collection of thousands of Jewish manuscript fragments found in caves in Afghanistan. Genizah is Hebrew for storeroom. The manuscripts include writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian, which are written in Hebrew letters. Some of them are 1,000 years old; they were found in caves that had been used as hideouts by Taliban. In 2013, the National Library of Israel announced that it had purchased 29 pages from this cache of document.
