Podcast

María Teresa Ortega Monasterio recounts in this podcast the challenges of obtaining permission and traveling to Cairo, as well as the unique conditions under which the team worked with the Codex of the Prophets of Cairo inside the synagogue

Source: Hebraist Women. Women of Sepharad.

Transcription of the audio

This photo was taken in May 1978, and I am working with the Cairo Codex of the Prophets, one of the four oldest surviving texts of the Bible. Dr. Fernández Tejero and I made this trip after many vicissitudes to obtain permission to see the manuscript. The permission was obtained thanks to the intervention of the Spanish consul in Egypt. It should be noted that at that time Egypt did not have diplomatic relations with Israel, and we were travelling with a lot of documentation in Hebrew. In addition, the Codex was kept in a small Karaite community in the old city, inside their synagogue. In this context and at that time, it was very difficult for them to understand that two women, and moreover non-Jewish women, could devote themselves to the study of the Hebrew Bible. We were able to work for a month with a schedule that changed every day, depending on the convenience of whoever was in the synagogue, and we always had someone watching us. They never left us alone with the codex. We had to be barefoot and wear a kippah that they provided us with, which was of dubious cleanliness, and they would not let us wear our own, which we had brought with us just in case.

The manuscript was kept in a kind of safe and was taken out every day for us, who worked at a very small and rather uncomfortable table. In any case, we were able to resolve all the doubts we had about the text and its masorahs, everything that was not clear in the ones we had worked with in Madrid. The result of this work was the publication of the volumes corresponding to the Minor Prophets and Joshua Judges in the first edition of the Cairo Codex.