Jerusalem: A major breakthrough in the world of historical research: artificial intelligence has begun to unlock the full potential of one of the greatest troves of medieval Jewish manuscripts ever assembled the Cairo Geniza. For centuries, scholars have known of its immense value: the collection contains more than 400,000 documents, ranging from religious texts to business records and personal letters, preserved in the old synagogue storeroom at Ben Ezra Synagogue in historic Cairo. Yet until now, only a small fraction of those papers had been transcribed or properly catalogued.
Under the banner of the MiDRASH transcription project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) researchers have deployed cutting-edge machine learning tools to read and transcribe manuscripts written in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and Yiddish, among other languages and scripts. This digital transformation turns centuries-old handwritten fragments many unreadable or disordered into searchable text. What previously would have taken scholars lifetimes to decode can now be explored in a matter of minutes.
The move from scanned images to full-text transcriptions is more than a technical achievement: it marks a fundamental shift in access. Researchers, students, and even lay readers worldwide will now have the ability to search across the entire Geniza corpus, cross-reference names, places, dates, and trace networks of trade, family, migration and intellectual exchange that linked Jewish communities across centuries. As one of the project leads put it, the Geniza could now emerge as “a kind of Facebook of the Middle Ages.”
Already, early transcripts have revealed remarkable documents such as a 16th-century Yiddish letter from a widow in Jerusalem to her son living in plague-stricken Cairo, complete with his marginal reply describing his struggle to survive. Stories like this once lost or inaccessible may now come into the light, offering vivid, human glimpses into daily life, trade, religious practice, and community ties in medieval Jewish society.
For historians, the initiative opens the door to re-interpreting large swathes of Middle Eastern and Jewish history. Commercial networks, migration routes, family lineages, cultural exchanges among Jews, Muslims and Christians all could be traced with greater precision, offering a far richer, more nuanced understanding of the past. The MiDRASH project’s success could redefine how scholars engage with medieval manuscripts shifting from fragmented, manual labour to a comprehensive, searchable digital archive that speaks across centuries.