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Posted on 11/27/2025 2:02:25 PM PST by Twotone
A new research project by Israeli and international scholars has digitally transcribed the texts featured in hundreds of thousands of fragments from the celebrated Cairo Geniza, as well as thousands of additional Hebrew manuscripts, the National Library of Israel announced on Monday.
The project, dubbed MiDRASH (which is meant to loosely correspond to Migrations of Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script), was launched in 2023 after securing a €10 million ($11.5 million) grant over six years from the EU’s European Research Council (ERC).
Virtually all the 400,000 fragments from the geniza have been photographed, and their images digitized, in the past. However, less than 15 percent of them have been transcribed, and many have never been properly read, let alone studied.
“Our goal is to reconstruct Jewish medieval literary book culture, and we are starting by transcribing the huge collection of virtual manuscripts that has been assembled at the National Library of Israel,” said Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, professor of Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (PSL) in Paris, one of the principal academics in the project.
According to Jewish law, it is forbidden to throw away or destroy documents featuring God’s name. For about a millennium, the Jews of Cairo deposited manuscripts, letters, old prayerbooks and more in a room in the city’s Ben Ezra Synagogue, whose original building is believed to have existed since before the 9th century CE.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesofisrael.com ...
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Thanks Twotone.
In the classic post nuclear war novel A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, people in the future tried to understand the meanings found in the note:
“Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels—bring home for Emma.”
This is pretty amazing, a great development for those of us who follow this sort of thing. There are also thousands of ancient Christian manuscripts from the early Church moldering away in monasteries and museum collections with no one to translate them. I hope we can see a similar project in regard to those.
This is pretty amazing...
Yes, I’ve read that imaging technology can now scan rolled up scrolls that are too fragile to lay flat. And with AI aiding the translation, the discoveries should be phenomenal.
Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script), was launched in 2023 after securing a €10 million ($11.5 million) grant over six years
A couple million a year
Good job if you can get it.
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