The Cairo Geniza in the Digital Age: A Webinar with Marina Rustow
Channel: Stanford University Libraries
Date: 2020-05-21

Princeton Professor Marina Rustow offers an introduction to the Cairo Geniza and digitization efforts to support study and access.



Sponsored by Stanford Text Technologies, Stanford University Libraries



The Cairo Geniza is one of the largest and most coherent caches of fragmentary manuscripts ever discovered: 400,000 items discarded by the Egyptian Jewish community over a period of 900 years. Digitization efforts began at Princeton as early as 1985, with Penn, Cambridge and a privately funded foundation entering the fray over the decades. The geniza is an excellent case-study in what digitization can and cannot accomplish. This illustrated lecture will present the main digital partners and their databases, take stock of what is transferrable to other caches, and brainstorm ideas for the future. 



Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Professor of History at Princeton University, Director of the Princeton Geniza Lab and Director of the Near Eastern Studies Program. She is the author of Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (2008) and of The Lost Archive: Finding a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (2020).