Vast trove of medieval Jewish records opened up by AI

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By Hannah Confino

JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Researchers in Israel are hoping to make new discoveries about Jewish history by loading a digital database of manuscripts stretching back a thousand years into a new transcription tool that uses artificial intelligence.

The Cairo Geniza, the biggest collection of medieval Jewish documents in the world, has been the object of countless hours of study by scholars for more than a century but only a fraction of its over 400,000 documents have been thoroughly researched.

Although the entire collection has already been digitized and is available online in the form of images, most of its items have not been catalogued, many are disordered fragments from longer documents, and only around a tenth have transcriptions.

By training an AI model to read and transcribe the old texts, researchers will now be able to access and analyse the whole collection far more quickly, cross referencing names or words and assembling fragments into fuller documents.

“We are constantly trying to improve the abilities of the machine to decipher ancient scripts,” said Daniel Stokl Ben Ezra of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, one of the principal researchers in the MiDRASH transcription project.

The project has already made significant progress and could open up the documents – written in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic and Yiddish in a wide variety of handwritten scripts – to many different researchers, Stokl Ben Ezra added.

Transcriptions from more difficult manuscripts are reviewed by researchers for accuracy, helping to improve the AI training.

“The modern translation possibilities are incredibly advanced now and interlacing all this becomes much more feasible, much more accessible to the normal and not scientific reader,” he said.

Funded by the European Research Council, the project is based on the National Library of Israel’s digital database of the Cairo Geniza documents and brings together researchers from several universities and other institutes.

ANCIENT STOREROOM

One document transcribed by the project is a 16th century letter in Yiddish from Rachel, a widow from Jerusalem, to her son in Egypt with his reply written in the margins telling of his efforts to survive a plague sweeping through Cairo.

A Geniza is a synagogue’s repository for significant documents that are ultimately intended for ritual burial, and the one found in the Ben Ezra synagogue in historic Cairo had a dry atmosphere ideal for the preservation of old paper.

Cairo surpassed Damascus and Baghdad in the Middle Ages as the greatest city of the Middle East, a centre of global trade, learning and science and home to a thriving Jewish community, later expanded by refugees fleeing newly Christian Spain.

The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who was physician to the family of Saladin, the famous Muslim sultan who ousted the crusaders from Jerusalem, worshipped at the Ben Ezra synagogue while living in Cairo.

As dynasties and empires rose and fell, the community quietly went about its daily life, its religious authorities filling the Geniza with the rabbinical arguments, civic records and other detritus of administrative and intellectual business.

The Geniza’s astonishing haul of records and papers, including some written by Maimonides himself, was discovered by scholars in the late 19th century but, although it has been studied ever since, its enormous size means huge gaps remain.

“The possibility to reconstruct, to make a kind of Facebook of the Middle Ages, is just before our eyes,” Stokl Ben Ezra said.

(Reporting by Dedi Hayun and Hannah Confino in Jerusalem; writing by Angus McDowall; editing by Mark Heinrich)