The History of the Jewish Book in the Islamicate World
Lead Research Organisation:
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Department Name: Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Abstract
The medieval Islamicate world encompassed the world's most bookish societies. Hand-copied books were produced in unprecedented numbers, new book materials and techniques emerged, calligraphy and collecting became marks of intellectual refinement and Muslim rulers founded libraries. Book culture in the Islamicate world flourished not only among Muslims, but also among those religious minorities that the Quran so aptly defines as ahl al-kitab "the people of the book". Jews (like Christians) partook in the bookish revolution and produced a multitude of manuscripts, and these constitute the primary sources for historical and philological research on Jewish intellectual life of the time. Scholars decipher, contextualise and edit the manuscripts. However, despite their scholarly importance, we often know too little of the modes of their production, their makers, when and where they were produced, their cultural and aesthetic models and the economic and social interactions that led to their making and distribution.
To fill this gap, the proposed project undertakes for the first time a comprehensive and multifaceted study of Jewish books of the Islamicate world. It draws on a large corpus of carefully selected dated and datable manuscripts produced in Egypt and the Near East in the 9th-13th centuries: codices, scrolls and rotuli kept in major world libraries, as well as fragments from the Cairo Genizah and the Firkovitch collections. The project's overall aim is to examine these manuscripts in terms of their making, including materials, scripts and handwriting; their context of production; and practices of reading. We will investigate to what extent Muslim book production affected the book culture of the Jews, making it depart drastically from antique and late-antique models. We will analyse the impact both on the materiality and aesthetics of Jewish books, as well as on connected intellectual and social aspects, such as the spread of literacy, changing modes of interaction between oral and written transmission, the growth of professional book production, its economic basis and the foundation of Jewish libraries and institutions of learning. The approach is that of the History of the Book, with its multidisciplinary focus on books as objects and as essential actors in the transmission of texts, practices and ideas.
By bringing together the unique expertise of the two PIs in the field of minority book making under Islamic hegemony, this project will not only fundamentally add to our understanding of the history of the Jewish book in one of its most formative periods, but also counteract the prevailing concentration of book historians on pre-modern and modern European contexts. It will produce two innovative publications, a palaeographical guide to Oriental Hebrew script and a Handbook on the History of the Jewish Book in the Islamicate World, which will be linked with an online open-access digital repository of relevant direct and indirect sources.
To fill this gap, the proposed project undertakes for the first time a comprehensive and multifaceted study of Jewish books of the Islamicate world. It draws on a large corpus of carefully selected dated and datable manuscripts produced in Egypt and the Near East in the 9th-13th centuries: codices, scrolls and rotuli kept in major world libraries, as well as fragments from the Cairo Genizah and the Firkovitch collections. The project's overall aim is to examine these manuscripts in terms of their making, including materials, scripts and handwriting; their context of production; and practices of reading. We will investigate to what extent Muslim book production affected the book culture of the Jews, making it depart drastically from antique and late-antique models. We will analyse the impact both on the materiality and aesthetics of Jewish books, as well as on connected intellectual and social aspects, such as the spread of literacy, changing modes of interaction between oral and written transmission, the growth of professional book production, its economic basis and the foundation of Jewish libraries and institutions of learning. The approach is that of the History of the Book, with its multidisciplinary focus on books as objects and as essential actors in the transmission of texts, practices and ideas.
By bringing together the unique expertise of the two PIs in the field of minority book making under Islamic hegemony, this project will not only fundamentally add to our understanding of the history of the Jewish book in one of its most formative periods, but also counteract the prevailing concentration of book historians on pre-modern and modern European contexts. It will produce two innovative publications, a palaeographical guide to Oriental Hebrew script and a Handbook on the History of the Jewish Book in the Islamicate World, which will be linked with an online open-access digital repository of relevant direct and indirect sources.
Publications
Guillot, L.
(2024)
Unearthing the Genizah of the Jewish Community in Figuig
in Philological Encounters
Ioppolo, F.
(2024)
A New Book List from the Firkovich Collection (blog post)
O'Hara J
(2023)
HebrewPal Consistency Guide (November 2023 update)
| Title | "Writing like Maimonides" |
| Description | Jennifer Taylor, scribe of ritual Torah scrolls, historian and palaeographer, created this documentary film in collaboration with and exclusively for our project HJBIW. This film reconstructs the gestures needed to trace the letters of the cursive Sephardi script, using the autograph manuscripts of Moses Maimonides found in the Cairo Genizah. This documents our experimental palaeography research. |
| Type Of Art | Film/Video/Animation |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Impact | This film is openly accessible on the HebrewPal website under Help. This visual resource reconstructs the way of writing of a famous author. It can be used for teaching palaeography and as a source of information for interested members of the broader public. |
| URL | https://www.hebrewpalaeography.com/help/4/ |
| Title | Between reeds and quills |
| Description | Created by Jennifer Taylor, scribe of ritual Torah scrolls, historian and palaeographer, in collaboration with and for our project HJBIW, this documentary film reconstructs the writing movements of medieval scribes of Sephardi square script. |
| Type Of Art | Film/Video/Animation |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Impact | Placed on the HebrewPal website under Help, it is open to the broader public for instruction. It is also used in teaching palaeography. |
| URL | https://www.hebrewpalaeography.com/help/2/ |
| Title | Quills for Fishtails script |
| Description | Jennifer Taylor, scribe of ritual Torah scrolls, historian and palaeographer, created this documentary film in collaboration with and for our project HJBIW to illustrate the complex technique and preparation of the writing implement to create specific decorative bifurcation effect on the letters of the square Hebrew script of the Ashkenazi type. |
| Type Of Art | Film/Video/Animation |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Impact | The film is freely accessible on HebrewPal website under Help. It can be viewed by the members of the broader public for instruction. It can be used for teaching palaeography. |
| URL | https://www.hebrewpalaeography.com/help/5/ |
| Title | Speed of writing Leningrad Codex |
| Description | This documentary film created by Jennifer Taylor, scribe of ritual Torah scrolls, historian and palaeographer, in collaboration with and for HJBIW, reconstructs the writing gestures of the scribe of one of the most famous Bibles in the world, the Leningrad Codex (St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, MS EVR I B 19a, written in 1008 in Fustat by Samuel ben Jacob). It answers the question of how much time is needed by a calligrapher to create an ornate book in square Oriental Hebrew script. |
| Type Of Art | Film/Video/Animation |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Impact | This documentary film is freely accessible on the HebrewPal website under Help. It can be used for research and teaching of palaeography. |
| URL | https://www.hebrewpalaeography.com/help/7/ |
| Title | Writing Rashi script |
| Description | Created by Jennifer Taylor, scribe of ritual Torah scrolls, historian and palaeographer, in collaboration with and for our project HJBIW, this documentary film explains how medieval scribes traced letters of non-square Sephardi script, misleadingly designated in publications as 'Rashi script'. |
| Type Of Art | Film/Video/Animation |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Impact | This film is freely available on the website of HebrewPal under Help. It can be viewed by the members of the broader public for instruction and is used for teaching palaeography. |
| URL | https://www.hebrewpalaeography.com/help/3/ |
| Description | The project 'Jewish Book Culture in the Islamicate World' has identified several hundred documents concerning the creation of books, book trade, private book collecting, and public libraries, as well as the work of Jewish scribes in the ninth to thirteenth centuries in the Islamicate world. Most of these documents were preserved in the Cairo Genizah, while others were inscribed in the books themselves and inform about when, where, and by whom these volumes were copied, decorated, or proofread, and/or when, where, and by whom they were owned, sold, inherited, or dedicated. The members of the project studied these documents and used them to reconstruct the history of Jewish Book Culture among the eastern Jewish communities. The images, editions, and descriptions of these sources are shared openly online through the JBC (Jewish Book Culture) database created by the project. In addition, these documents were used to create a Handbook of Jewish Book Culture in the Islamicate World, still in preparation. The JBC project has also created the first comprehensive guide for the study of medieval Hebrew scripts. It takes the form of an online palaeographical album (HebrewPal) containing high resolution images of manuscripts and their detailed palaeographical annotations according to hundreds of features and parameters defined by our project. HebrewPal is a fully searchable database already openly accessible online, which at term will include 6000 samples of manuscripts, documents and epigraphic inscriptions. Created originally for the Hebrew scripts from the Muslim world, HebrewPal has now been expanded to include and describe manuscripts, documents, inscriptions and even decorations from across the medieval Jewish diaspora. The samples contained in HebrewPal can be used as a comparative yardstick for dating and localising thousands of Hebrew manuscripts which do not contain a mention of when and where they were written. The tangible results of this award include: 1. Individual publications related to the theme of the grant by the members of the project. 2. A collective publication (in preparation) of the Handbook of Jewish Book Culture in the Islamicate World: an alphabetic and encyclopedic, richly-illustrated volume of detailed studies concerning book making techniques, materials, script styles, specific manuscripts, collections and collectors, textual history and manuscript transmission of specific major works of Judaism. This handbook will be published as an open source digital publication in 2024-2025. 3. Online database: Jewish Book Culture in the Islamicate World 4. Online database: HebrewPal (Digital Album of Hebrew Palaeography) 5. Organisation and presentation of a JBC session at the 12th Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies (20 July 2023, Frankfurt am Main). The papers included: 'A Secret Book Historian at Heart? - Pierre Bourdieu and his Literary Field Analysis', by Anna Busa (Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich); 'Jewish Books and their Physical Shape as Reconstructed from Medieval Book Lists from the Cairo Genizah' by Ronny Vollandt (Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich); 'The Worth of Books' by Fabio Ioppolo (Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich); 'Digitising Dedications: Haqdashot in the Jewish Book Culture Database' by Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (École Pratique des Hautes Études / Oxford University). In addition, HebrewPal was presented in another session of this main Jewish Studies event in Europe by Joseph O'Hara (Oxford University). 6. Organisation of a workshop on the Hebrew Palaeography of the manuscripts of the Karaite academy of Jerusalem of the 10th and 11th centuries, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, 16 June 2022. 7. Individual lectures and key note lectures by the project members on the topics of the HJBIW. |
| Exploitation Route | The databases we create can be used by scholars and students of Jewish history and literature, specialists of book culture, and the interested general public. The results are freely available online, and further descriptions are planned to be implemented after the end of the project. Both the JBC and HebrewPal databases have been created with the possibility of expanding our original methods to writings in Hebrew scripts from other geo-cultural areas. HebrewPal has already joined other programmes, such as ERC-Synargy MiDRASH, which will allow the continued expansion, development, and improvement of this unique Hebrew palaeography digital tool for six years to come. Regarding the JBC database, the two PIs of the project plan to elaborate a new project to include manuscripts produced in the medieval Maghreb and Iberian Peninsula in the JBC database. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Education Culture Heritage Museums and Collections |
| URL | https://www.jewishbookculture.com/ |
| Description | Horizon ERC Synergy project MiDRASH no 101071829 PI Schlanger HebrewPal |
| Amount | € 10,000,000 (EUR) |
| Funding ID | 101071829 |
| Organisation | European Research Council (ERC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | Belgium |
| Start | 09/2023 |
| End | 09/2029 |
| Title | Hebrew Palaeography Handbook: HebrewPal - Digital Album of Hebrew Palaeography |
| Description | To create a handbook of Hebrew palaeography, HJBIW has opted for the digital medium of a searchable database. HebrewPal is built as an online database freely open to the public. It is a pioneering project and the only digital Hebrew palaeography tool of its kind. Its structure and menus were conceived by PI (J. Schlanger) on the basis of many years of researching and teaching medieval Hebrew palaeography. It was developed by Michael Allaway (AHR Software) in collaboration with the HJBIW project. It is an open source model which can be used and applied to other palaeographical disciplines. It contains high resolution images annotated and tagged according to dozens of palaeographical parameters. Every sample is described from the point of view of its materiality and text, and provided with bibliography. The analysis of the script is carried out from the global view of the script sample, through the study of individual words and letters to the details of the components of every letter. In addition to the letters, other graphic elements are included and can be tagged by the preset menus. They include vowels, abbreviations, magical characters, modified letters, numerals, scribal symbols and space fillers. HebrewPal contains a unique detailed annotation menu for the stylistic features of illuminated manuscripts as well as an option to annotate and edit documents and epigraphic inscriptions. The database is fully searchable through keywords and through a set of filters which can be combined for more precise results. In addition to the database itself, the HebrewPal website contains a set of useful tools placed under the 'Help' section. They include: a/ Glossary of Palaeographical Concepts - a guide to the use of the database and a brief introduction to the palaeographical method (by Judith Schlanger) b/ five documentary films created for the project by Jennifer Taylor who is a scribe of ritual Torah scrolls as well as an historian and palaeographer. These films record our project's involvement in experimental palaeography. They are an attempt to reconstruct not only the writing materials and shapes of the letters as attested in medieval manuscripts but also the gestures of the scribes of the past, the precise ductus, the way the letters were traced as well as time needed to write manuscripts. The films include: "Between reeds and quills: Sephardi square script", "Quills for fishtail script" (explaining the techniques and ductus of special bifurcation in Ashkenazi calligraphic scripts), "Speed of writing Leningrad Codex" and "Writing like Maimonides" and "Writing Rashi Script". They are a precious resource for palaeographers and students. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | This is the unique Album of Hebrew Palaeography available to students, researchers and interested public in an accessible and searchable online format. Its aim is to allow scholars of Jewish history, literature and Manuscript Studies to benefit from a comparative tool for dating and localizing manuscripts, documents, and inscriptions which do not contain an explicit mention of their date and place of creation. Conceived as a set of hierarchically organised menus, HebrewPal is also a perfect training tool for future palaeographers as it guides their observation and description of the samples through a systematic and very detailed checklist of well-defined pertinent, diagnostic features of the samples. HebrewPal has already been used as a digital teaching support in the framework of the online course Hebrew Manuscripts in the Digital Age (2022-2025, a weekly course throughout the academic year) and at the Summer Workshop in Hebrew Manuscript Studies at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, organised every year by the Bodleian and PI Judith Schlanger. In 2023 and 2024, the teaching of the use of HebrewPal for learning palaeography skills is provided by HJBIW's postdoctoral researcher, Joseph O'Hara. |
| URL | https://www.hebrewpalaeography.com/ |
| Title | JBC Jewish Book Culture in the Islamicate World database |
| Description | The Jewish Book Culture database was developed by AHR Software (Michael Allaway) on the basis of extensive research questionnaires created by JBC project members. Jewish Book Culture offers a comprehensive searchable corpus of sources for the history of the Hebrew book in the Islamicate world. It contains descriptions of manuscripts, editions and translations of documents concerning books, and quotations about books in literature. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | JBC Database: Collecting, presenting, describing, and translating Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic texts on the production of books in the Middle Ages in the Islamicate World. Some 600 items have been described, and are in the process of online publication. The documents in the database include: - 294 manuscripts identified and recorded and 268 pictures added (183 entries have a full bibliography). - 45 letters and contracts, most fragments from the Cairo Genizah, fully transcribed, translated with all codicological data. - 114 book lists previously published (gathered in N. Allony [edited by H. Ben Shammai, M. Frenkel and M. Sokolov], The Jewish Library [Hebrew], 2006), with their shelfmarks corrected, texts transcribed and corrected and party translated into English. - 29 additional book lists discovered by our project, now transcribed in JBC database. - 40 colophons edited and translated into English for the first time. - 4 ownership statements edited and translated into English for the first time. - 52 haqdashot (dedicatory inscriptions) identified, edited, and translated into English for the first time. |
| URL | https://www.jewishbookculture.com/ |
| Title | HebrewPal |
| Description | The outcome originally intended as a more modest output of the JBC project (namely, a 'Handbook of Oriental Scripts') developed into a fully-fledged online tool: the HebrewPal database. The aim of the digital Hebrew Palaeography Album is to create a corpus of manuscript images and descriptions with a 'gallery' of images of specific palaeographical features. These carefully-selected items are chosen to be comparative samples which can be used to facilitate the typological definition and thus dating, locating, and identification of the scribes and scribal practices of manuscripts which are not provided with explicit contextual information. HebrewPal combines traditional Hebrew palaeography with new developments in digital technology. It follows an original palaeographical approach created by PI (J. Schlanger) which she has used in research and palaeography teaching for many years. JBC has provided the unique opportunity to translate this traditional Hebrew Palaeography method into a searchable digital tool open to users worldwide. The database includes books written in Hebrew characters (codices, scrolls, rotuli), documents (contracts, letters, registers, notes, and other pragmatic writings), and epigraphy (carved inscriptions on stone and other hard surfaces, mosaics, and ink writing on pottery, such as Babylonian incantation bowls). Each item is described in detail from its textual and material point of view, historical context, history of research, and bibliography. For items of documentary nature, a diplomatic definition as well as the edition and translation of the text is included. Each item is illustrated with one or more high quality image(s). This image is provided with annotations by the team of trained palaeographers. These annotations are based on an extensive checklist developed for HebrewPal, which is presented as pre-defined menus. These detailed menus include hundreds of possible features of specific components of various graphic elements. The graphic elements analysed in the database are, of course, Letters (which, for Hebrew, means consonants), but also Vowels, Cantillation Signs, Ligatures, Abbreviations, Numerals, Graphic Symbols for the name of God, Justifications (graphic devices used to justify the margins), Magical Characters, and Modified Letters (used in ritual writings). A new addition (implemented at the end of 2023) is a detailed menu of iconographic, material, and stylistic features to describe manuscripts' decoration. The analysis of the script is carried out from the global view of the script sample, through the study of individual words and letters to the details of the components of every letter. Every component can be tagged with several features, which describe its shape, relationship and juncture with other elements of the same letter, the relationship in respect of the line of writing and the presence of additional elements (bifurcation, serif, foot, head, roof). The database is searchable through both multiple filter search and free text search. It offers historians, textual scholars, manuscript students, and the general learned public accessible tools for the study of Hebrew scripts and handwritings, as well as other graphic elements of Jewish writing from the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. The database is already accessible by the public on a live website where all the data published by the team of researchers is made available. The website also allows registered users to work privately on their own research, and there are already more than 50 researchers and students using it for this purpose. The long term storage of the database is assured by its inclusion in TGIR HumaNum. Furthermore, the underlying code will be preserved for longevity and access via Github. The data contained in HebrewPal may be downloaded as API to enable its use in computational and statistical processing. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | HebrewPal is a reference tool for Hebrew Palaeography used by students and researchers as an aid to dating and localising the manuscript sources of their study. As the annotations of the graphic elements follow a hierarchically-organised checklist and thus act as a guide for the user, HebrewPal is used for the teaching of Hebrew Palaeography, notably on the online course 'Hebrew Manuscripts in the Digital Age', EPHE, PSL/Oxford University. The pedagogical aspect of HebrewPal is being further experimented with and developed in the framework of the next project (November 2023-July 2024) - a postdoctoral research in the framework of DiSc (Digital Scholarship @ Oxford). |
| URL | https://www.hebrewpalaeography.com/ |
| Title | HebrewPal - Graphic Elements Components and Features |
| Description | Judith Schlanger (PI) has identified an original set of 1448 graphic features necessary for the complete description of Hebrew letterforms. This dataset is presented in user-friendly format on the HebrewPal website and has been rigorously tested and expanded by the team during production. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The dataset has become an important pedagogical resource for the field of Hebrew palaeography, having already been used on teaching courses in the UK and internationally. More than 1000 Hebrew manuscript samples have been added to the database so far. |
| URL | http://www.hebrewpalaeography.com |
| Title | Jewish Book Culture - Haqdashot and incodicated documents |
| Description | Joseph O'Hara (postdoctoral researcher) incorporated 59 haqdashot (inscriptions indicating a pious bequest) and other paratextual elements into the Jewish Book Culture database with original translations. They are being published when the photographs are made available to us. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | These documents have not been published before, and this dataset includes new finds from Saint Petersburg identified from microfilms. |
| URL | http://www.jewishbookculture.com |
| Title | Jewish Book Culture - Manuscript Books and Colophons |
| Description | Joseph O'Hara (postdoctoral researcher) incorporated 78 codicological descriptions of dated manuscripts into the Jewish Book Culture database along with original translations of their colophons from Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic. They are being published when the photographs are made available to us. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The colophons have not been made translated into English before. |
| URL | http://www.jewishbookculture.com |
| Title | Jewish Book Culture: Sources and Documents |
| Description | The JBC database offers a comprehensive searchable corpus of sources for the history of the Hebrew book in the Islamicate world. It brings together the widest possible range of texts, documents, and sources for the study of Jewish books, their makers, and their readers in the medieval eastern Mediterranean. The sources explored in the project are the extant codices crafted by the Jewish communities of the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, and especially fragments of manuscripts discovered since the nineteenth century in the 'genizah' (a place of rest of discarded books and writings which are out of use but which should not be destroyed by human agency because of the fear of profaning the name of God) of the synagogue of Ben Ezra in Old Cairo (Fustat). The chronological scope of the project is the ninth to thirteenth centuries, a time of major transformations in Jewish written culture. While Bible scrolls have long been at the centre of Jewish liturgy, and pragmatic documents have accompanied legal transactions since antiquity, the time following the Muslim conquest saw the creation of new genres, the adoption of new book formats and writing materials, and new modes of books production and trade. The database consists of three parts: 1. Manuscripts: descriptions of Oriental Hebrew manuscripts, the aim of which is to research material characteristics and book making techniques. JBC has updated existing descriptions of many of these manuscripts with additional or more accurate data, as well as publishing codicological descriptions of some manuscripts for the first time. 2. Documents [this is the major part of the database]: digital reproductions, transcriptions, and translations of documents concerning books. These historical documents are of three main types: 2a. Booklists from the Cairo Genizah: 116 such booklists have been identified and published in previous research (mostly by N. Allony, whose articles were gathered in a collective volume, 'The Jewish Library' [in Hebrew], edited by H. Ben-Shammai, M. Frenkel, and M. Sokolov [Ben Zvi Institute, Jerusalem, 2006]). Many of the transcriptions and interpretations of the booklists published in this pioneering work needed revision. In particular, the mention of book prices in several of the lists which were noted in zimam numerals were not included in the publication. Our project offers a new edition of these documents, with special attention paid to their unprecedented significance for the study of book economy. In addition, JBC was able to identify more than thirty further booklists in the Cairo Genizah collections and study them for the first time. 2b. Contracts: the Documents section also includes legal contracts (of sale, donation, redeeming, bequest, testament, etc.) concerning books, as well as letters of merchants and other professionals mentioning books and book materials (e.g. trade in paper or parchment). 2c. Incodicated documents: a large subgroup within the Documents section consists of inscriptions of a historical nature which are 'incodicated', i.e. written in the blank spaces of the books themselves. JBC has searched systematically for colophons (of the scribes, vocalisers, and proofreaders), ownership marks, and collation certificates, as well as acts of sale, donation, and bequest to family members or public institutions. 3. Quotations: the third part of JBC contains quotations about books and bookmaking extracted from medieval literary and legal sources in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. More than 600 items have been described in the database. A part of these descriptions have been checked and are already published online. The website makes it possible to consult - for the first time in one place and with relevant search functionality - the digital images, detailed codicological descriptions, tagged historical information, and transcriptions of documents concerning Jewish books and their production and readership in the Islamicate World in the 9th-13th centuries. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2022 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | This database, once fully implemented, will offer a unique resource for the study of the history of medieval books in Hebrew and other Judeo- languages produced in the Islamicate world. The fully searchable corpus of documents of various kinds provides researchers with a unique basis for the study of the intellectual history of the Jews. An additional advantage of this open source database is it adaptability to other types of Jewish (and other) book histories. It has been intentionally designed to be expanded in scope in future phases, to be able to include book lists and documents concerning books, book making, and book trade in other parts of the medieval Jewish world (Spain, Northern Europe, and Italy). |
| URL | https://www.jewishbookculture.com/ |
| Description | ERC Synergy MiDRASH, Migrations of Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script |
| Organisation | European Research Council (ERC) |
| Country | Belgium |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | The creation of HebrewPal (the digital Hebrew Palaeography Album) is one of the outcomes of the JBC project. This is a digital handbook intended for the study of medieval Hebrew palaeography. The JBC project's PI (Judith Schlanger) created the structure and extensive menus of this online tool, developed by Michael Allaway, Oxford. The PI and the postdoctoral researcher, Joseph O'Hara, started implementing the entries of the Album. Within the current AHRC/DFG project, this complex structure started to be implemented: images and annotations of some thirty Oriental manuscript samples have been added. To continue and further develop this large database, HebrewPal joined a leading project in digital humanities and AI applied to Hebrew manuscripts. During 2023-2029, HebrewPal (created by our AHRC/DFG project) will contribute to the project MiDRASH funded by ERC-Synergy and hosted by the École Pratique des Hautes Études. This large ERC-Synergy grant enables the further development the Hebrew Palaeography Album and the implementation of 5000 new palaeographical samples and their detailed annotations. Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (Oxford University and EPHE, PSL) is one of the PIs of this ERC-Synergy grant. The data generated by the palaeographers working on HebrewPal will be further used for developing new computational approaches to medieval Hebrew scripts. |
| Collaborator Contribution | ERC-Synergy project MiDRASH allows HebrewPal (MiDRASH 2): a/ to hire 2 full time postdoctoral researchers/year for 6 years; b/ to offer two doctoral studentships in the field of Hebrew palaeography; c/ to acquire digital images and copyrights of Hebrew manuscripts to be included in HebrewPal; d/ to use digital data and methods developed by HebrewPal to collaborate with the other PIs and parts of MiDRASH working on AI and automatic script recognition and analysis (especially Nachum Dershowitz and his MiDRASH team at Tel Aviv University). |
| Impact | Database of Hebrew palaeography - in progress. Some 400 manuscripts have been included in the database so far. The database is already accessible online. At term, the database will contain some 5000 items. |
| Start Year | 2023 |
| Description | Oxford University, DiSc [Digital Scholarship @ Oxford] |
| Organisation | University of Oxford |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | One of the outputs of the Jewish Book Culture project, HebrewPal (Hebrew Palaeography Album) was recognised as outstanding by DiSc (Digital Scholarship @ Oxford) and awarded a fellowship for Research and Development. HebrewPal contributes to the portfolio of digital tools and methods of Digital Humanities, University of Oxford. HebrewPal contributes to DiSc's mission to elaborate digital teaching tools, specifically in partnership with other Oxford institutions (in this case, our collaboration with the Bodleian Libraries) and to promote interdisciplinary practice (in our case, fruitful new research avenues with our colleagues in Arabic palaeography). |
| Collaborator Contribution | The DiSc programme of the University of Oxford provides funding for the employment of one postdoctoral researcher (Joseph O'Hara) for the period between November 2023 and July 2024. |
| Impact | Implementation of the HebrewPal database. A lecture on 14 December 2023 at the Collège de France, Paris, in the framework of the Groupe de Recherche Transversale en Paléographie (Collège de France, EPHS, Ecole Nationale des Chartes) - presentation of the HebrewPal database to an international group of researchers in other palaeographical disciplines. |
| Start Year | 2023 |
| Description | Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe |
| Organisation | Rothschild Foundation |
| Department | Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | The RFHE has awarded a total grant of £480000 for 4 years (2022-2025) for a consortium (run by the École Pratique des Hautes Études, PSL University, Paris) called 'Hebrew Manuscripts in the Digital Age'. The Hebrew Palaeography Album (HebrewPal) benefits from half of this funding (240000/4 years). The contribution consists of: 1. Implementation of the HebrewPal database beyond the Oriental manuscripts (which was the purview of the AHRC/DFG project); 2. Creating an online course in Hebrew Manuscript Studies: 3 hours a week during term time: 1. Hebrew Codicology, 2. Hebrew Palaeography, 3. Computer generated transcription and edition of Hebrew manuscripts (e-scriptorium). PI (J Schlanger) teaches part 2: Hebrew Palaeography. Postdoctoral researcher Joseph O'Hara contributes with the teaching of HebrewPal. HebrewPal contributes to the teaching of Hebrew palaeography through digital tools and to research on the Hebrew script and its development in the Middle Ages. |
| Collaborator Contribution | RFHE provides funding for 1. One full-time postdoctoral researcher working on implementation of HebrewPal descriptions; 2. Funding for occasional students' contribution to HebrewPal on a per hour basis. |
| Impact | 1. Implementation of over 100 items descriptions/year in the HebrewPal database; 2. Online teaching of traditional and digital Hebrew Palaeography and Manuscript Studies to 25-30 students /year from across the world. |
| Start Year | 2022 |
| Description | Lecture at Princeton University |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | PI Ronny Vollandt gave a lecture, "The Jewish Bookshelf in Medieval Cairo: Book Lists from the Cairo Genizah," at Princeton University. (10th October 2023) |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://judaic.princeton.edu/events/mytelka-memorial-seminar---jewish-bookshelf-medieval-cairo-book-... |
| Description | Lecture at a conference in Hamburg University |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | PI Ronny Vollandt gave a lecture, "Terminology Pertaining to Book Production and Trade as Found in the Book Lists of the Cairo Genizah," at the conference ''On Parchment, with Wooden Boards': Hebrew and Non-Hebrew Terms Applied to Jewish Books in Historical Perspective', Hamburg University. (26th July 2021) |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
| URL | https://www.vk.uni-hamburg.de/uploads/event/pdf_de/65058/21-07-26-27_WS_On_Parchment__with_Wooden_Bo... |
| Description | Lecture at the Collège de France |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (PI) and Joseph O'Hara (postdoctoral researcher) gave a public lecture at the Collège de France on 14 December 2023: 'HebrewPal : un outil numérique pour l'étude des écritures hébraïques'. This was an opportunity for the team to publicise the HebrewPal project and discuss research methodologies with an international cohort of specialist researchers in palaeography. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Lecture at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Joseph O'Hara (postdoctoral researcher) was invited to give a lecture '"And it will come out wondrous and strange": Reflections on writing practices from the Cairo Genizah' based on his research on inks for the Jewish Book Culture project. The lecture on 26 October 2023 was part of the prestigious series of David Patterson Lectures at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Medieval Hebrew Reading Group |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (PI) and Joseph O'Hara (postdoctoral researcher) convened a medieval Hebrew reading group at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. The texts were colophons from the JBC project corpus and were used to teach medieval Hebrew language and palaeography to researchers and postgraduate students both in Oxford and internationally thanks to a hybrid format. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023,2024 |
| Description | Panel at 12th Annual Congress of the European Association of Jewish Studies |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The team were invited to run a panel 'Jewish Book Culture in the Islamicate World' at the 12th Annual Congress of the European Association of Jewish Studies in Frankfurt-am-Main in July 23. Team members Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (PI), Ronny Vollandt (PI), Anna Busa and Fabio Ioppolo presented on the panel. In addition, Joseph O'Hara (postdoctoral researcher) represented the project on the panel 'Hebrew palaeography: digital perspectives'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Paper at the 'Journée d'étude doctorale en paléographie et diplomatique hébraïques' annual conference |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Doctoral candidate and project member Fabio Ioppolo gave a presentation, "Author, Scribe and Commissioner. A difficult relationship?", at the XVe Journée d'étude doctorale en paléographie et diplomatique hébraïques "Authenticité, validité et falsifications intentionnelles dans la production écrite juive à l'époque médiévale" 2023, Paris, France. (13th November 2023) |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.ephe.psl.eu/sites/default/files/2023-10/15-JED-paleo-hebraique-programme.pdf |
| Description | Participation of a PI (J Schlanger) in a training programme for Christian and Jewish religious leaders: Vatican Study Programme: Hebrew Manuscripts |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Study participants or study members |
| Results and Impact | Online introduction to Hebrew palaeography, with the presentation of the HebrewPal database taught to the Vatican Study Programme (a group for interreligious dialogue). A group of 20 participants were involved, including several rabbis, some Christian priests (Anglican, Orthodox and Catholic), and one Catholic nun. Countries represented: USA, Chile, Israel, Poland, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Kenya, Argentina, Spain, Hungary, and Costa Rica. Some participants work in universities but also have an active pastoral and interreligious experience in communities. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.anglicancentreinrome.org/news/the-vatican-launches-a-specialised-programme-on-hebrew-man... |
| Description | Presentation at a Diversity4Research event |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Doctoral candidate and project member Fabio Ioppolo gave a presentation entitled 'Kulturelle Diversität im Nahen Osten: Jüdische Gemeinschaften unter muslimischer Herrschaft im Rahmen' as part of the Diversity4Research@LMU: Sensitive.Innovative.Excellent. initiative organised by the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Munich, Germany. (30th June 2022) |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Presentation at a Doctoral Colloquium (LMU-Munich) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Doctoral candidate and project member Fabio Ioppolo gave a presentation, "Materials and Labour in Book Production", at the Doctoral Colloquium of the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies of the LMU, Munich, Germany. (11th July 2023) |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Presentation at a Doctoral Colloquium (LMU-Munich) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Doctoral candidate and project member Fabio Ioppolo gave a presentation, "Sources of Book trading", at the Doctoral Colloquium of the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies of the LMU, Munich, Germany. (13th December 2022) |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| Description | Presentation at a Doctoral Colloquium (LMU-Munich) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Doctoral candidate and project member Fabio Ioppolo gave a presentation, "Prices of Books", at the Doctoral Colloquium of the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies of the LMU, Munich, Germany. (5th December 2023) |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |