geniza logo

youTube  facebook

univ logo

About

The Cairo Genizah, includes approximately 300,000 fragments of manuscripts and documents retrieved from an old synagogue in Cairo.This huge corpus holds a treasure of literary and religious texts in a wide variety of fields and provides a glimpse into a millennium of daily life history in the Mediterranean basin and other areas (from north-west Europe to the Arabian Peninsula). The range and variety of the content is makes it an invaluable educational tool as well as a fascinating study for anyone interested in Jewish studies or Medieval history.

During the last decade the corpus of manuscripts from the Genizah has been digitized. The fragments that are scattered in dozens of libraries and private collections around the globe are now available for the academic community in a scholarly oriented website. In addition to the digitized images, the website contains a platform for available and future scholarly knowledge about the texts (i.e: descriptions, transcriptions, translations). However while the Friedberg site is an invaluable aid to researchers the documents are not easily assessable or comprehensible to the general public. One of the goals of the Centre is to help increase awareness of the Genizah and project its relevance into the public sphere by increasing its accessibility and availability. In co-operation with researchers and experts in the computer sciences, information processing and digital humanities, the centre hopes to create tools that will enable easy access to processed linked data, adjusted to educational, museum oriented and other public needs.  Currently proposals have been submitted and projects have been undertaken, towards this end.