Princeton Geniza -- Penn/Cambridge Genizah

Combined Geniza Project

About this project

DROPSIE/HALPER
Princeton holds the transcriptions, Penn/Cambridge hold the original documents (scans available online). Combining the power of full-text search from Princeton with the original document representation and bibliographic cataloging from Penn.

Princeton Geniza
The Princeton Geniza Project of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University seeks to extend the methodologies available to Hebrew and Arabic scholars working with the documents found in the Geniza chamber of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo in the late 19th century. The project is dedicated to transcribing documents from film copies to computer files, creating a full text retrieval text-base of transcribed documents, developing new tools such as dictionaries, semantic categories and morphological aids to further the study of Geniza texts. The project is committed to disseminating its materials as widely as possible to the international community of scholars with an interest in the life of the medieval Middle East, as well as to all with an interest in Judaica. It is our hope that by making materials from this very esoteric field widely available that new insights can be gained into the interaction of the peoples of the Middle East in past time. Since inception in 1986, funding has been provided by Princeton University, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and from 2000 to 2005 by the Friedberg Genizah Project.

Notes on the Transcriptions
Transcriptions have been taken from two sources, mainly: (1) volumes and articles containing edited documents, the latter including all the articles published by S.D. Goitein, "updated" according to handwritten corrections in his personal offprints; and (2) texts typed by Goitein ("typed texts") but mostly never published. In all cases, but especially the latter, users are strongly urged to inspect the manuscripts or copies of the manuscripts. Goitein considered his typed texts "drafts" and always restudied the manuscripts and made revisions to his transcriptions before publishing them. Some mistakes represent errors that occurred during the transcription process. Users are encouraged to notify us of errors they find so they can be corrected. Ideally, sometime in the future, it will be possible to access on-screen digitized images of the manuscripts to compare with the transcriptions. For the time being, see the "Princeton-Cambridge Digitization Pilot Project," accessed from the home-page, which presents a limited prototype of such a system.

The vast majority of the documentary texts in the Geniza are written in Judaeo-Arabic, but many are in Hebrew or Hebrew/Aramiac. Users will find all these languages in the transcriptions index.

Users unfamiliar with the nature of Judaeo-Arabic or the Hebrew consonantal equivalents of Arabic may consult Joshua Blau, The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judaeo-Arabic.

For published texts, brief bibliographical data are given in the headers. At a later date, a comprehensive list of bibliography will be added to the Browser and users will be able to "click" to find full information. For the time being, we believe that most users will successfully identify the sourcees. Anyone wishing help should write to us at mrcohen@princeton.edu providing the shelfmark.

The actual descriptions of the contents of documents are necessarily brief. Information has been taken either from the published editions, from Goitein's Mediterranean Society, or from Goitein's unpublished index cards

Documents belonging to Goitein's "India Book" are not available at the present time in the Geniza Browser, as they are being edited for publication by Professor Mordechai A. Friedman of Tel Aviv University. They will be added when available. Some other documents relating to family life that were edited by one of Friedman's students, Amir Ashur, have been incorporated with the editor’s permission.

As of August 2006, the database contains approximately 4000 documents, between 25% and 40% of the "documentary Geniza" (depending on varying estimates of the total).