Josephus and Josippon and More Mixups

We've received queries involving mixups between the following pairs of names, and we'd like to clarify their meanings:

Josephus vs Yosippon

Yosippon [or Josippon] is an anonymous Hebrew book describing Jewish history during the Second Temple period. Written in 10th century southern Italy, it treats the history of ancient Italy and other European nations, but focuses on the Jewish-Roman wars. The author based his work on earlier books (Josephus's works, a Latin translation of the Apocrypha, medieval chronicles, and the Talmud ) intending to compile a summary for the benefit of his readers. Sefer Yosippon was mistakenly attributed to Flavius Josephus and to Joseph ben Gorion, and became well-known, respected, and frequently quoted by medieval gentile writers. Manuscript and early printed editions were significantly changed from the original Sefer Yosippon; it has been translated into Arabic, Ethiopic, Russian, Polish, Czech, Latin, French, Judeo-German and English. Dr. David Flusser has edited a critical edition ספר יוסיפון :... סדור ומוגה על-פי כתבי-יד בלוויית מבוא, ביאורים וחילופי גרסאות (vol. 1 1978, vol. 2 1980) DS122 Y574 1978b in JTS Library.

Josephus [also known as Josephus Flavius]

Josephus was a Hellenistic Jewish historian of the first century CE. He was born into an aristocratic family of priests in Jerusalem, and he became a military leader against the Romans in the Jewish-Roman wars. Later, through shrewd political moves, he became a favorite of the Roman leaders and moved to Rome. He wrote The Jewish War, Jewish Antiquities (historical), The Life (autobiographical), and Against Apion (a defense of Judaism). Although his works are hardly unbiased, they remain eye-witness accounts of first century Judaism in its political mileiu. The standard English translation of his works was published as part of the Loeb Classical Library, located at PA3612 .J6 1926 in the JTS Library.

Two of the many in-depth encyclopedia articles on Joesphus are in the Encyclopedia Judaica (by Abraham Schalit), and The Encyclopedia of Judaism: "Josephus and Judaism" by Steve Mason, and "Josephus, Biblical Figures in" by Louis H. Feldman.

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Kairouan vs Cairo

Cairo, of course, is the capital of Egypt. The Cairo Jewish community was first established appproximately 640 CE, when the old city of Fostat was founded. Fostat is also the site of the Synagogue of Elijah the Prophet which held the famous Cairo Genizah manuscripts. Through the generations, Cairo has been the home of outstanding Jewish scholars, including Maimonides.

Kairouan is a town in Tunisia which was a prominent economic, cultural and halakhic Jewish center during the Middle Ages (8th-11th centuries). We have extensive documentary evidence of the community and its activities from letters found in the Cairo Genizah.

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Philadelphia [ancient city] vs Philadelphia Route

The Philadelphia Route is the buffer area along the Egypt-Gaza Strip border; arms have been smuggled from Egypt into Gaza via tunnels beneath this area.

There were a number of ancient cities called Philadelphia, in Egypt, Turkey, and Jordan. The Jordanian Philadelphia was originally Rabbath-Ammon, capital of the Ammonite kingdom in Biblical times; in the Hellenistic period it was called Philadelphia; today it is Amman, the capital of Jordan.

What is a "genizah"?

Question:
In an anonymous comment to a previous blog post (Wednesday, July 8, 2009 – “Photograph of Elkan Nathan Adler”) the question was raised: “What is “genizah”?”

Answer:
The Encyclopedia Judaica defines ‘genizah” as follows:

"[A] place for storing books or ritual objects which have become unusable. The genizah was usually a room attached to the synagogue where books and ritual objects containing the name of God – which cannot be destroyed according to Jewish law – were buried when they wore out and could no longer be used in the normal ritual. As a result ancient synagogues can preserve books or sections thereof of great antiquity." [Encyclopedia Judaica, 2007 ed., v.7, p.460]

The particular genizah referred to in the blog post about Elkan Nathan Adler was the “Cairo Genizah”. The website of the Friedberg Genizah Project (www.genizah.org), an organization that was started to facilitate research into the Cairo Genizah, explains the history and significance of this genizah thusly:

"The Cairo Genizah, mostly discovered late in the nineteenth century but still resurfacing in our own day, is a collection of over 200,000 fragmentary Jewish texts (which may well equal three times that number of folios). Many of these were stored in the loft of the ancient Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat medieval Cairo [to the south-west of the modern city] between the 11th and 19th centuries ... The dark, sealed, room in the arid Egyptian climate contributed to the preservation of the documents, the earliest of which may go back to the eighth and ninth centuries … These manuscripts outline a 1,000-year continuum of Middle-Eastern history and comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world. The Genizah can be described as one of the greatest Jewish treasures ever found." [Friedberg Genizah Project - http://www.genizah.org/theCairoGenizah.htm]