The University of Pennsylvania Libraries announces the launch of “Scribes of the Cairo Geniza,” an innovative digital humanities collaboration among the Princeton Geniza Project, the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Cambridge University Libraries, and Zooniverse that brings the Cairo Geniza to a mass audience online.

The Cairo Geniza, a corpus of sacred and everyday texts, was preserved in the attic storage chamber of the Ben Ezra synagogue over the course of a thousand years. Its contents date mostly from the 10th-13th centuries CE and it is widely recognized as the most important documentary source for reconstructing the social, economic, political and religious lives of Jews and other inhabitants of the pre-modern Mediterranean basin.

“Scribes of the Cairo Geniza” is a two-phase project. The first phase involves sorting tens of thousands of Cairo Geniza fragments in order to prepare them for transcription in phase II. Scholars and the general public have the opportunity to benefit from encountering these fragments online and from learning how to sort and eventually transcribe them. Overall, this project provides an avenue for people with shared interests and varying skill levels from around the world to meet in a common endeavor to unlock a vital storage chamber of ancient information.

Will Noel, Director of Penn Libraries’ Kislak Center for Special Collections further explains that "uniting the unique assets of these top-tier institutions in a digital environment is an exciting prospect. To bring the power of the crowd to that digital environment in order successfully to elucidate the meanings of complicated and illegible medieval documents is revolutionary.”

For the Penn Libraries specifically, “Scribes of the Cairo Geniza” represents the culmination of nearly two decades of scholarship, philanthropic support and international institutional partnerships to catalog, digitize, and transcribe hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscript fragments from Cairo which now are scattered around the world. Digital Geniza Studies was pioneered at the Penn Libraries in the early 2000’s in partnership with Cambridge University Library and the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary thanks to a gift from Penn Libraries Board of Overseer Jeffrey Keil. This current project is indebted to Erik Gershwind and the Gershwind-Bennett families for a 2016 start-up gift to create a Judaica Digital Humanities team.  

The work of Judaica Digital Humanities at the Penn Libraries unites many library entities, including Digital Scholarship, Judaica, and Special Collections. Lab Coordinator, Laura Eckstein says that the collaborative, multidisciplinary nature of the lab’s and the newly-formed Digital Scholarship team’s work—and this project specifically—“strengthens Penn’s Digital Humanities infrastructure and broadens how Digital Humanities at the Penn Libraries interacts and connects with the world around us.”