Because Jewish law forbids worn out religious texts from being simply thrown out with more mundane garbage like turnip shavings and old soup, such texts have traditionally either been buried or stored away in a synagogue’s genizah — a special library used for this particular purpose. The Cairo Genizah in the loft of the Ben Ezra Synagogue (on the site where the baby Moses was supposedly found) was a library where such old religious texts — among thousands of other historical records, from personal letters to merchant lists to divorce documents — went to “die” between the 9th and 19th century. It constitutes the largest, most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts discovered to date.
Upon the recognition of its significance in the late 19th century by academic Solomon Schechter, the Cairo Genizah’s collection was scattered among the world’s libraries and universities, and now its 350,000 fragments reside in 70 different institutions around the globe. As one might imagine, scholars trying to piece together a cohesive history of this collection haven’t had an easy time of it. But just like the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, the Cairo Genizah may benefit from a 21st century treatment that will bring its pieces together by way of the Internet.
Thanks to a collaboration between the Friedberg Genizah Project and Tel Aviv University, the pieces are being scanned, cataloged, and digitized. Image processing and computer vision tools analyze the results to try and find similarities between the fragments — such as script written from the same hand, for instance — and match them together. In the span of just a few months, 1,000 of these matches were found; to emphasize the scope of this progress, it took human scholars 100 years to match the same amount!
In comparing the Cairo Genizah project with similar technology being applied to the Dead Sea Scrolls, researcher Lior Wolf says: “It’s a more complicated challenge. The fragments are for the most part much smaller, and many of the texts are very unique. These texts shed light on the beginnings of Christianity.”