[4] Given the small population of Egyptian Jews, the synagogue is no longer active and is largely a tourism site and Jewish museum.

[5] The geniza or store room of the synagogue was found in the 19th century to contain a treasure of forgotten, stored-away Hebrew, Aramaic and Judeo-Arabic secular and sacred manuscripts.

[7] The next caliph, al-Zahir li-i'zaz Din Allah, allowed the reconstruction of Christian and Jewish institutions, and the synagogue was rebuilt in the 1025–1040 period.

[9] Historically, synagogues have included a genizah, or repository for abandoned or outdated documents containing the name of God, since Jewish teaching is that such papers had to be stored with reverence, and then eventually buried in a cemetery.

The 11th-century building incorporated an unusually large geniza, "two stories high, more silo than attic – with a rooftop opening accessible from above.

The Islamic vizier Shawar ordered the city burned to prevent it from falling into the hands of an invading Christian Crusader army.

[6] Also in 1168, the Jewish philosopher, physician and astronomer Maimonides settled in Fustat, within a short walk of Ben Ezra Synagogue.

[12] Many of the geniza documents, including some in his own handwriting, discuss his life and work, and are the most important primary biographical sources for him.

He became a rabbi, and in 1859, took a world tour to raise money for the reconstruction of the Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem, which had been destroyed by the Muslim authorities in 1721.

Jewish book collector Elkan Nathan Adler was the first European to enter the geniza in 1888, and he purchased about 25,000 documents.

[7] Egypt's Jewish community is at the end of a dramatic decline, from about 80,000 people in the 1920s to less than a dozen of Egyptian ancestry now residing in Cairo.