Manchester Contributes to the Friedberg Genizah Project

The John Rylands Library has recently agreed to contribute high quality images and metadata of its Genizah Collection to the Friedberg Genizah Project – as reported by The Ancient World Online (AWOL) blog: The Friedberg Genizah Project Updates. The Friedberg Genizah Project seeks to digitally unite Genizah fragments from around the world, using image analysis to highlight potential “joins” between separated fragments of the same original manuscript.

We hold nearly 15,000 fragments, mostly written in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic, from the Genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, purchased from the estate of Dr Moses Gaster in 1954. About 90% of the items are on paper, the remainder on parchment. The vast majority are very small fragments. They date from the 10th to the 19th century AD and include religious and literary texts, documentary sources, letters, and material relating to grammar, philosophy, medicine, astrology and astronomy. High resolution images and searchable catalogue data are available via the University of Manchester Library’s Image Collections.