#geniza

(Here’s a link to the website if you want to take a look—it is extremely out of the price range of everyone I know , but the pictures are still really neat: https://facsimile-editions.com/bh/)

What is likely being referred to in this case isn't "requirements to destroy the plates" but rather "requirements regarding the destruction of the plates". Because the plates contained the written name of G-d, they are considered holy, and therefore cannot be disposed of normally. The name of G-d generally cannot be erased, and so any texts or objects containing the name of G-d are buried. Most synagogues have a geniza pile collecting all the old holy objects that periodically gets buried, either in a Jewish cemetery or in the foundation of a new Jewish school or synagogue. Historic geniza piles actually offer a wealth of information for archaeologists, most famously, the Cairo Geniza has yielded so much insight into Jewish medieval life.

So, these printing plates were either destroyed in a way that wouldn't violate the prohibition against the desecration of the name of G-d, or they were buried along with other geniza items.

Further reading:

Proper Disposal of Ritual Objects

Poetry in Translation: The 13th Century ‘My Religion—My Wine’

By Nasir, the Hebrew & Arabic Litterateur Edited and translated by Alan Elbaum Translator’s note: The author of the text translated here — one of the two poems by Nasir that appeared in the FOLK issue of ArabLit Quarterly — is a Jewish poet and popular entertainer named Nasir, who enjoyed local acclaim in Mamluk-era Cairo around the year 1300 CE. After his death, he was forgotten. Many of his…

Oh don’t feel bad at all I love answering Jewish questions (to the best of my ability)! This comes from the idea that God’s real name is too immense/holy/incomprehensible to humans, and when we write our representation of God’s name, we should be very respectful of that fact. I think it’s a very powerful thing to acknowledge that we will never have all the answers to the universe! 

In prayer books and other texts, if you write the holiest name we have for God (the letters that correspond to YHVH in Hebrew), those texts are very special. So special, they are buried in a Geniza like a funeral burial when they are no longer usable, so we never destroy things with God’s name. Of course, not all Jews do this extremely strictly, but it’s to my knowledge why Jews may opt to write even the English name of God G-d or Gd.

After discovering the extensive Rabat Geniza, scholars digitized the archives

By Isabel Fattal|

Document from the Rabat Geniza. (Rabat Genizah Project)

When Oren Kosansky stumbled upon the Rabat Geniza in 2005, it was nothing but a collection of books and papers stashed in a synagogue in Rabat, Morocco. Kosansky, an anthropology professor at Lewis and Clark College doing research in Rabat, had unknowingly entered the synagogue’s geniza, or storeroom for sacred documents—which, according to Jewish tradition, cannot be discarded without a ritual burial—and found documents detailing centuries of Jewish life in Morocco.

While Jewish law says only sacred documents must be collected for burial, communities often stored all kinds of documents together without distinguishing the sacred from the mundane. The Cairo Geniza, discovered in the late 1800s, featured everything from liturgical texts to shipping orders. Kosansky described the Rabat Geniza’s contents as providing “the collective library of the Rabat Jewish community at the end of the 20th century.”

Kosansky got permission from the synagogue to remove some of the documents from the genizah, sorting through the documents and donating those he felt contained historical and cultural relevance to the Jewish Museum of Casablanca, Morocco. The collection at the museum consists of documents both sacred and secular from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries; items range from canonical Jewish texts to community records and public notices.

Something that stood out to Kosansky was the geographical breadth of the documents he found. “We have texts from Vienna, Paris, Jerusalem, Constantine, Algiers, Tunisia,” Kosansky explained. “This collection allows us to better appreciate how much modern Jewish Moroccan history was embedded in global history. There are these important Jewish networks of learning, commerce, travel that linked Jewish Morocco to Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean Basin and all over the world.”

But Kosansky’s work didn’t end with the physical preservation of these documents. Funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Kosansky created a digital archive of this historical collection. The Rabat Genizah Project, which launched online last month and is currently in its preliminary stages, provides images of some the documents found in the Moroccan synagogue.

Kosansky and his team enlisted the help of undergraduate students in French and Hebrew to translate the documents, which are written mainly in Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, and French. Visitors to the website are invited to submit their own transcriptions or translations of the documents.

“The idea has always been to use [the site] as a laboratory to think about what it means to create a digital archive,” Kosansky said. “This was never meant to be just a set of pictures to look at. It was meant to be a collaborative workspace, a place where communities could get together.”