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Old Sources, New Technology: Princeton University’s Geniza Computer Project

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Mark R. Cohen*
Affiliation:
Princeton University

Extract

Since the inception of the “computer age,” much talk has been heard about applying this relatively new technology for manipulating information to the medieval manuscript fragments from the Cairo Geniza. The uses of the Geniza, particularly its documentary sources, for Middle Eastern history will be well known to many readers of this Bulletin. The thousands of letters, court records, marriage contracts, lists, and other documentary treasures, preserved for centuries in a large discard chamber in what is today the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, and written in Hebrew or Judæo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew letters), with a small number in Arabic language and script, constitute an unmediated source for the reconstruction of what the late Professor S. D. Goitein called the “Mediterranean Society” of Jews, Muslims, and Christians of the high Middle Ages.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 1988

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References

A report on the Princeton Geniza Project was presented by me at the 1986 University Advanced Education Projects Conference in San Diego, California, April 5–8, sponsored by the IBM Corporation’s Academic Information Systems Unit. The theme of the conference was “Tools for Learning,” and its published proceedings include the report describing the status of the project as of Spring 1986.

1 The first chapter of volume 1 of Goitein’s, A Mediterranean Society: The Jews of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1967)Google Scholar still contains the handiest introduction to the subject.