Researchers working on the MiDRASH transcription project are using AI to unlock the vast holdings of the Cairo Geniza, a global archive of medieval Jewish manuscripts numbering over 400,000. Although the full collection has been digitized, only about a tenth of the documents had been transcribed before. Many items remained un-catalogued or existed only as fragmented images in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, or Yiddish. The AI tool is now being trained to read and transcribe those ancient scripts, and to piece together disordered fragments into coherent documents.
The potential impact is enormous: with AI-enabled transcription and reconstruction, scholars can much more easily search, cross-reference and analyze these manuscripts. Already, for example, the project recovered a 16th-century Yiddish letter from a widow in Jerusalem to her son in Egypt, describing life during a plague, something that might have remained hidden without these tools. Ultimately, researchers hope this will allow a reconstruction of social, economic, religious, and intellectual life in medieval Jewish communities.
More information: