In addition to containing Jewish religious texts such as Biblical, Talmudic, and later Rabbinic works (some in the original hands of the authors), the Genizah gives a detailed picture of the economic and cultural life of the Mediterranean region, especially during the 10th to 13th centuries.

[9][10][11] Modern Cairo Geniza manuscript collections include some old documents that collectors bought in Egypt in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

[12] The first European to note the collection was apparently Simon van Gelderen (a great-uncle of Heinrich Heine), who visited the Ben Ezra synagogue and reported about the Cairo Genizah in 1752 or 1753.

[14] In 1896, the Scottish scholars and twin sisters Agnes S. Lewis and Margaret D. Gibson[15] returned from Egypt with fragments from the Genizah they considered to be of interest, and showed them to Solomon Schechter "their irrepressibly curious rabbinical friend" at Cambridge.

[20] The John Rylands University Library in Manchester holds a collection of over 11,000 fragments, which are currently being digitised and uploaded to an online archive.

[25] They also demonstrate that the Jewish creators of the documents were part of their contemporary society: they practiced the same trades as their Muslim and Christian neighbors, including farming; they bought, sold, and rented properties.

He identified material from Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria (but not Damascus or Aleppo), Tunisia, Sicily, and even covering trade with India.

[23] The materials comprise a vast number of texts, including many parts of Jewish religious writings and even fragments from the Quran.

The non-literary materials, which include court documents, legal writings, and the correspondence of the local Jewish community (such as the Letter of the Karaite elders of Ascalon), are somewhat smaller, but still impressive: Goitein estimated their size at "about 10,000 items of some length, of which 7,000 are self-contained units large enough to be regarded as documents of historical value.

[37] The Cairo Genizah Collections at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary is the subject of a citizen-science project on the website Zooniverse.

[38] The Friedberg Geniza Project is of great importance to research inasmuch as it includes all Genizah fragments and bibliographical data relating to them.

In early 2021, under the leadership of director Marina Rustow and in partnership with Daniel Stoekl Ben Ezra, the Lab began exploring machine learning as a method of transcribing geniza documents, using handwritten text recognition applications.

[40] Indian anthropologist and writer Amitav Ghosh recounts his study of the Genizah fragments related to Jewish merchant Abraham Ben Yiju in the book In an Antique Land.