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About the project

MiDRASH is an international project that aims to reconstruct Medieval Jewish book culture by making all Medieval Hebrew Texts accessible and searchable.

The project seeks to provide annotated automatic transcriptions of 30,000 medieval manuscripts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Arabic, as well as cutting-edge tools for manuscript research.

These tools will be based on digital paleography, NLP and deep learning technologies for the enrichment, analysis and re-use detection of the Jewish Medieval texts.

The results of this project — data as well as algorithms — will be made available to the public.

École Pratique des Hautes Études – PSL (France),
Tel Aviv University (Israel),
Bar Ilan University (Israel),

In partnership with

The National Library of Israel (Israel)
The University of Haifa (Israel)

Daniel STOEKL BEN EZRA

cPI

AOrOc (UMR 8546), EPHE–PSL University (France)

Judith OLSZOWY-SCHLANGER

Funded by

The European Union (ERC, MiDRASH, Project No. 101071829)

Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency.
Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

News & Events View all

4-5 May 2026

Events

Call for papers : Colloquium Methodology of Hebrew Palaeography. Expertise, art or science ?

Organized by ERC-Synergy MiDRASH, EPHE – PSL From an outsider’s perspective, the work of Hebrew palaeographers can appear mysterious. How do they know that a manuscript was indeed written by Maimonides? What evidence supports claims of provenance and authorship? What implicit assumptions underpin palaeographical conclusions? The growing use of computational methods may create the impression […]

24-27 November 2025

Events

Secrets of the Cairo Geniza to Be Revealed

A groundbreaking project based on the National Library of Israel’s digital database of Hebrew manuscripts has enabled automatic transcription of the entire Cairo Geniza, making it searchable and accessible worldwide. On Monday, November 24, 10:00-11:00, MiDRASH team leaders Professor Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, Professor Nachum Dershowitz, Dr. Avi Shmidman, will present their work their work […]

8-10 DEC 2025

Conference

Tradition, Innovation and Migration: Digital Palaeography in Search of Wandering Scribes and Books

Conference of the ERC-Synergy project MiDRASH 8-10 December 2025, INHA (2, rue Vivienne, 75002) and Campus Condorcet, Centre des Colloques In the Middle Ages, Hebrew Manuscripts were produced across the vast Jewish diaspora from France and Portugal in the west to the borders of China in the East, from England in the north to Yemen […]

Publications View all

No publications found.