Since 1986, the Princeton Geniza Lab has been studying and digitizing historical documents from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of roughly 400,000 fragments of paper and parchment preserved in a medieval Egyptian synagogue. The Geniza Lab studies the geniza's ephemeral, everyday texts — unique sources for the history of the Middle East and of premodern Jewish communities from Spain to Sumatra. The documents include letters, legal documents, accounts and lists.
Let them Speak is the epigraph of a digital monograph and the name of a collaborative project which aims to document the experiences of Holocaust victims. It makes nearly three thousand oral history interviews with survivors from three US collections (Yale Fortunoff Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) available; it combines data visualization with text and data mining to render the victims’ experience. Readers can use the interactive visualization to browse the testimonies. They can also search the testimonies as a linguistic corpus.
ToRoll: Materialized Holiness is a research project examining the production of Torah scrolls as an extraordinary codicological, theological, and sociological phenomenon of Jewish scribal culture. The project includes the digital edition of selected scribal literature from Antiquity until the modern era on scribal practice, tagin and otiyyot meshunnot. Palaeographical analyses of letters and of materials used in medieval Torah scrolls of European provenance and qualitative interviews with contemporary scribes complement the project.
The project Jüdische Pflegegeschichte / Jewish Nursing History – Biographies and Institutions in Frankfurt am Main is devoted to Jewish nursing history in Frankfurt am Main. The time focus, in view of the vast amount of information, is on the period from 1870, the beginning of modern Jewish nursing in Frankfurt, to the end of National Socialism.
The Amsterdam School of Historical Studies (ASH) currently has a vacant postdoctoral researcher position as part of the project Jewish Urban Cultures, led by Prof. I.E. (Irene) Zwiep and Prof. Bart Wallet (deadline 1 December). The postdoctoral researcher will play an important role in developing a centre of expertise in Jewish Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and help lay the basis for a digital Atlas of Jewish Urban Cultures.
The collection Interwar Jewish press of Galicia, Volhynia and Bukovina is part of Libraria: Ukrainian Online Periodicals Archive. The collection contains more than 25 Jewish newspapers in Polish, German and Yiddish.
