Sunday, August 13, 2017

Crowdsourcing the Cairo Geniza

GENIZA WATCH: This Amazing Project Invites The Public To Help Unlock Medieval Jewish Documents (Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, The Forward). And be sure and watch the video on the work of Professor Marina Rustow.

It happens that this summer I have been working on material from the Cairo Geniza. I have been deciphering and translating the main Judeo-Arabic manuscript of the Talmudic-era Hebrew magical treatise Sefer HaRazim ("The Book of the Mysteries"). Judeo-Arabic is Arabic written in Hebrew letters. The two alphabets match up very imperfectly, so it is quite a challenge.

This work is contributing to my English translation of Sepher HaRazim for volume two of the More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Project.

A post on the Princeton Geniza Project from some years ago is here. For other and more recent posts on digitizing the Cairo Geniza, start here and follow the links. From this current article, it sounds as though they have made impressive progress.

For many other manuscript digitization projects, start here and here and follow the links.

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