from pagan rome to islam and medieval christendom 239
disasters is a product of the evidence produced by Jews in commem-
oration and lament, and the history of some Jewish communities is
impossible to reconstruct with any clarity. Something can be gleaned,
for example, about the history of the Jews of Yemen from local inscrip-
tions on stone and from fragmentary texts preserved in Cairo, but these
only occasionally come fully into focus. So, for instance, their leader
Jacob b. Nathanel al- Fayyumi sought guidance in c. 1170 about a local
messianic movement, eliciting from Maimonides in Egypt his Epistle to
Yemen. Much less can be said about life in the Jewish settlements on the
south- west coast of India beyond the fact that they were granted privi-
leges, preserved by the community in Cochin, from the Hindu ruler of
Malabar in the late tenth or early eleventh century ce and are men-
tioned by travellers and geographers from the twelfth century on. Nor
can much be said about the Kaifeng Jews of China who settled in Henan
Province probably in the ninth or tenth century, or about the history of
the Beta Israel in Ethiopia, known to others as Falashas (which means
‘exiles’ in Amharic), who believed themselves descended from Menelik,
the son of King Solomon and the queen of Sheba. Whatever the truth of
these beliefs, it is certain that at least some Jews were settled in Ethiopia
before the conversion to Christianity of the Axum dynasty under the
influence of the Roman empire in the fourth century ce, and that Jewish
captives from Himyar in southern Arabia were settled in Ethiopia in the
sixth century.^13
Much of the evidence for Jewish life in all these varied regions comes
from archaeological remains of synagogues, from funerary inscriptions,
from comments by Christian and Muslim writers, and from the pious
literature of religious Jews themselves preserved in manuscripts from
the eleventh century and after. But a particular bright light is shone on
one corner of this Jewish world by analysis of some 200,000 fragments
discovered in the genizah of the synagogue of Fustat in Cairo. These
writings, deposited in the genizah from c. 882 to the late nineteenth cen-
tury to avoid sacrilege through their destruction if they contained the
divine name, include large numbers of secular documents and letters as
well as biblical and other religious works. They reveal contacts between
the Jews of Egypt and many other parts of the Jewish world throughout
these centuries, and demonstrate how partial our knowledge must be of
those areas of Jewish settlement for which evidence like that in the geni‑
zah does not survive.^14
The geographical dispersion of Jews in itself created variation in the
Judaism of different regions. Jerusalem was lost as a religious centre