After 100 days of continuous action, the Cambridge Encampment for Palestine finally closed on Wednesday. This is a thread documenting the incredible things I witnessed there over the last 3 months, in the hope of demystifying the protest for my many colleagues who remain silent. Cambridge students set up the first tents on the lawn in front of King’s College on May 6th (the same day as Oxford’s camp), inspired by similar camps at other schools. They stayed on King’s Parade in the heart of Cambridge for the next 14 weeks.

1/🧵 Last year I made a thread about a slightly mysterious #archive at @theUL containing the writings of this man, Ernest Worman (). Yesterday was the 114th anniversary of his death, so I trekked across Cambridge to see if I could find his grave.

https://x.com/NPosegay/status/1578069957727948800

2/I have learned a lot about Worman’s life between 1871 and his untimely death in 1909, but it turns out, you can’t research Ernest Worman without learning a lot about #Cambridge too. So here’s a thread about some of the things I saw while taking a walk through his life.

1/Going through the old #Genizah Instagram posts (for a secret project) and noticed something. This is the 'Memorandum for Opticians', a book on eye health written in the 11th century by ʿAlī ibn Īsā. There is a note attached that dates this copy to 1142. #arabic #manuscript 2/This is also the 'Memorandum for Opticians', but this time copied in Hebrew characters for the benefit of Jewish readers. The language is still Arabic, so we refer to the writing system as "Judaeo-Arabic." Both manuscripts came from the same synagogue in Old #Cairo. #hebrew

1/🧵This is Nabia Abbott. She was a groundbreaking scholar of #Arabic manuscripts, the first woman to be a professor at @UChicago’s Oriental Institute, and once sent me on a wild goose chase spanning 3 continents. She deserves a lot more than one thread, but here's a start. 2/Nabīha ʿAbūd (نبيهة عبود), later known as Nabia Abbott, was born in 1897 to a Christian family in Mardin (then the Ottoman Empire, now modern Turkey). Her family moved around a lot, which led to her attending school in India and completing a BA degree in Lucknow in 1919.

1/🧵So there’s this box in the Genizah Research Unit at @theUL. It’s labelled “Worman Archive.” It’s supposed to be full of stuff associated with Ernest James Worman, a librarian who catalogued the #Genizah collection 120 years ago. Yesterday I found out that’s not all true. 2/See, Worman’s story is actually quite tragic. He was born in 1871 to a working-class #Cambridge family. That’s not the tragic part. In 1895, @theUL hired him as a “Library Assistant.” He then taught himself Arabic and Hebrew to catalogue the #Genizah manuscript collection.

1/Centuries before the #printingpress took off in Europe, printers in Egypt employed a type of woodblock printing known as “tarsh” (طرش). Only around 100 of these tarsh prints are known to exist. They are also very cool, so here’s a 🧵on #Arabic block prints in @theUL. #Cambridge 2/“Woodblock printing” is a term historians use to talk about making a big stamp and slapping paper onto it. Block printers would carve wood so the negative space looked like whatever image or text they wanted to print. Then they’d coat it in ink and stamp some paper. Easy.

1/Recently @orietta_darold and I have been investigating European paper preserved in the Cairo #Geniza. So here’s a 🧵on what #watermarks can tell us about how paper moved from Europe to Egypt in the #MiddleAges and #EarlyModern period. Pics taken at @theUL. #WatermarkWednesday 2/Quick refresher: The #Cairo Geniza is a repository of over 300,000 (mostly) Jewish manuscripts preserved by Egyptian Jews between 1000 and 1897. Check out @GenizaLab and @AWormNotAMan to learn more. Most of these MSS are now in #Cambridge: lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/de…

1/I’ve talked about a few Qur’an manuscripts from the Cairo #Genizah before, but here’s a thread to bring together most of what we know on the phenomenon. Because it’s a little weird to find #Quran fragments kept in a synagogue for 800ish years. All images from @theUL. 2/Quick refresher: the “Cairo Genizah” is a corpus of 300k+ manuscript fragments primarily from the “genizah” chamber of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. Cairene Jews deposited old MSS there between ~1100 and 1897. @GenizaLab and can tell you more. lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/de…

A 🧵for #WatermarkWednesday, also about Starbucks

This mermaid watermark is on a Hebrew text from the #Cairo #Geniza. When people see it, I often get the comment that it looks like the Starbucks logo. Can’t really argue with that, but I’ve always dismissed it as a coincidence.
Watermarking was all the rage among historical European papermakers. Our mermaid is similar to other marks used in France in the mid-15th century (Briquet 13855-6), suggesting the paper was made in France around that time.

1/??? A historical 🧵of uncommonly little significance:

There is a rather famous (“niche famous”) letter in @theUL that Solomon Schechter sent to Agnes Lewis in 1896, informing her that a manuscript she purchased was the lost #Hebrew text of Ben Sira. exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/discardedhisto… 2/??? The discovery led Schechter to acquire most of the Cairo #Genizah for Cambridge. This is not important. What is important is that his letter was written on Cambridge University Library stationery, and it has a #watermark: "Partridge & Cooper Vellum Wove Club House Paper"