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.

Preserved by Egypt’s dry climate, the trove of documents — the Cairo Geniza — came to the attention of European scholars in 1896. Most of the artifacts were transferred to England in the following years.

“This material is extremely important because 90% of the Jews [in the Middle Ages] lived in Muslim-ruled areas, not in Europe, and yet most of their manuscripts got lost,” Stökl told The Times of Israel in a phone interview. “After the Cairo Geniza was discovered, we got to know lots of new texts, lots of new........

© The Times of Israel