MiDRASH

Migrations of Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script

Part of the ERC Synergy Grant that takes place from October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2029.

Judith Olszowy-Schlanger

As a director of studies at the EPHE-PSL on the "Hebrew and Medieval Judeo-Arabic Manuscripts" chair, Judith Olszowy-Schlanger is a specialist in paleography, diplomacy and the sciences of manuscripts in Hebrew characters from the Middle Ages.

Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra

He is a director of studies on the "Hebrew and Aramaic Language, Literature, Epigraphy and Paleography (4th century BC – 4th century AD)" chair at the EPHE-PSL and a member of the AOrOC laboratory (UMR 8546, PSL-CNRS).

Partners

PI: Nachum Dershowitz, Tel-Aviv University
PI: Avi Shmidman, Bar Ilan University
National Library of Israël
Haifa University

Project summary

MiDRASH intends to conduct a study of Hebrew manuscripts from the Middle Ages to better understand the various literary and historical facets of a corpus that is still largely unknown, yet has made a major contribution to European culture. The project will thus enable state-of-the-art paleographic, philological and computational analyses of millions of pages of documentation. It will allow us to question the materiality, the textuality, the transmission and the historical contexts of this very vast corpus, whose dimension was previously out of reach. The project will also contribute to the development of new methodologies for the study of other written cultures, bringing a new stone to the edifice of digital humanities, paleography and Jewish studies.

MiDRASH finds its roots in "eScriptorium", the collective and open-source digital infrastructure of the "Scripta PSL" program for the automatic transcription of handwritten or printed documents.