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New secrets to be revealed after ancient Hebrew texts transcribed for first time
The vast majority of the transcribed pieces have come from the Cairo Geniza collection in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, Egypt
November 26, 2025 14:51
The vast majority of the transcribed pieces have come from the Cairo Geniza collection in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, Egypt
November 26, 2025 14:51New secrets hidden in ancient Hebrew texts will be revealed for the first time after Israeli scholars have digitally transcribed hundreds of thousands of fragments of middle-age Jewish literature.
The success of the research project, which is called MiDRASH, roughly meaning Migrations of Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script, was announced by the National Library of Israel on Monday.
The vast majority of the transcribed pieces were taken from the Cairo Geniza collection in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, Egypt, where the stockpile has grown over the course of more than a millennium.
Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, professor of Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (PSL) in Paris, one of the academics who ran the project, told The Times of Israel: "Our goal is to reconstruct Jewish medieval literary book culture, and we are starting by transcribing the huge collection of virtual manuscripts that has been assembled at the National Library of Israel (NLI).”
He continued: “This material is extremely important because 90 per cent of the Jews [in the Middle Ages] lived in Muslim-ruled areas, not in Europe, and... most of their manuscripts got lost.
"After the Cairo Geniza was discovered, we got to know lots of new texts, lots of new versions of texts we already knew, and we learnt a huge number of things.”
“The transcription is only the beginning of the process,” he said. “We need the transcriptions in order to carry out other analyses. We want to conduct linguistic analysis to identify who is quoting whom, who is paraphrasing whom, and who takes which ideas from whom, so we can trace ideas, motifs, and commentaries throughout the centuries. The main focus of the project comes after the transcription part.”
According to Dr Tsafra Siew, who runs NLI’s research projects, said: "In 1950, David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, initiated the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts.
“The idea was to salvage as many Hebrew manuscripts as possible, and because it was not possible to bring them physically to Jerusalem, the institute started photographing all the manuscripts on microfilm. This is how the first photographed collection started.”
Much of the collection has already been digitalised, meaning images of the ancient writings can be viewed online, however, it is only now they are being transcribed - and therefore, easily translated.
Siew continued: “In 2014, we started to digitise our photographic collection and build a website to allow users to search and view all the digitised manuscripts. It was a breakthrough.”
“The MiDRASH project is the next technological leap."
Due to the writings being in fragments, many stories that have been lost to the passage of time can only be seen when these fragments are put together. This transcription enables that to happen.
Siew said: “This enables us to ask new questions, bigger and deeper. Questions that you can only answer based on the entire view of the Hebrew manuscripts collection.”
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