Researchers in Israel are hoping to make new discoveries about Jewish history by loading a digital database of manuscripts stretching back a thousand years into a new transcription tool that uses artificial intelligence.

The Cairo Geniza, the biggest collection of medieval Jewish documents in the world, has been the object of countless hours of study by scholars for more than a century but only a fraction of its over 400,000 documents have been thoroughly researched.

Although the entire collection has already been digitized and is available online in the form of images, most of its items have not been catalogued, many are disordered fragments from longer documents, and only around a tenth have transcriptions.

By training an AI model to read and transcribe the old texts, researchers will now be able to access and analyze the whole collection far more quickly, cross referencing names or words and assembling fragments into fuller documents.

“We are constantly trying to improve the abilities of the machine to decipher ancient scripts,” said Daniel Stokl Ben Ezra of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, one of the principal researchers in the MiDRASH transcription project.

The project has already made significant progress and could open up the documents – written in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and Yiddish in a wide variety of handwritten scripts – to many different researchers, Stokl Ben Ezra added.

Transcriptions from more difficult manuscripts are reviewed by researchers for accuracy, helping to improve the AI training.

“The modern translation possibilities are incredibly advanced now and interlacing all this becomes much more feasible, much more accessible to the normal and not scientific reader,” he said.

Funded by the European Research Council, the project is based on the National Library of Israel’s digital database of the Cairo Geniza documents and brings together researchers from several universities and other institutes.

ANCIENT STOREROOM

One document transcribed by the project is a 16th century letter in Yiddish from Rachel, a widow from Jerusalem, to her son in Egypt with his reply written in the margins telling of his efforts to survive a plague sweeping through Cairo.

A Geniza is a synagogue’s repository for significant documents that are ultimately intended for ritual burial, and the one found in the Ben Ezra synagogue in historic Cairo had a dry atmosphere ideal for the preservation of old paper.

Cairo surpassed Damascus and Baghdad in the Middle Ages as the greatest city of the Middle East, a center of global trade, learning, and science and home to a thriving Jewish community, later expanded by refugees fleeing newly Christian Spain.

The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who was physician to the family of Saladin, the famous Muslim sultan who ousted the crusaders from Jerusalem, worshipped at the Ben Ezra synagogue while living in Cairo.

As dynasties and empires rose and fell, the community quietly went about its daily life, its religious authorities filling the Geniza with the rabbinical arguments, civic records and other detritus of administrative and intellectual business.

The Geniza’s astonishing haul of records and papers, including some written by Maimonides himself, was discovered by scholars in the late 19th century but, although it has been studied ever since, its enormous size means huge gaps remain.

“The possibility to reconstruct, to make a kind of Facebook of the Middle Ages, is just before our eyes,” Stokl Ben Ezra said.

The British government’s ban on the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas campaign group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization amounted to an authoritarian restriction on protest, lawyers representing a co-founder seeking to overturn the ban argued on Wednesday.

Palestine Action was proscribed in July, putting it on a par with Islamic State or al Qaeda and making it a crime to be a member, which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison. Since then, more than 2,000 people have been arrested for holding signs in support of the group.

The group had increasingly targeted Israel-linked defense companies in Britain with “direct action,” often blocking entrances, or spraying red paint, particularly focusing on Israel’s largest defense firm Elbit Systems.

Britain’s Home Office [interior ministry] argues the group‘s escalating actions, culminating in a June break-in at the RAF Brize Norton air base when activists damaged two planes, amount to terrorism.

But lawyers representing Huda Ammori, who co-founded Palestine Action in 2020, say the move flies in the face of Britain’s long history of direct action protests and is “so extreme as to render the UK an international outlier.”

It was the first time a “direct action, civil disobedience organization that does not advocate for violence” had been proscribed as terrorist, Ammori’s lawyer Raza Husain told London’s High Court.

He compared the response to the group to that of other civil disobedience campaigns, such as Rosa Parks, the late US civil rights figure who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in 1955, and the suffragette movement which campaigned for women’s right to vote in the early 20th century.

GROUP‘S ACTIONS ESCALATED AMID WAR IN GAZA

Lawyers representing the Home Office said in court filings that the right to freedom of expression does not protect “speech and activity in support of a proscribed organization that commits serious property damage.”

Palestine Action has frequently targeted defense companies. It stepped up its actions during the Gaza war, with six members arrested on suspicion of plotting to disrupt the London Stock Exchange in January 2024.

Six people went on trial last week for aggravated burglary, criminal damage, and violent disorder over a raid on Elbit, with one charged with causing grievous bodily harm by hitting a police officer with a sledgehammer. They deny the charges.

Ammori’s lawyers say the ban has led to pro-Palestinian protesters being questioned by police at demonstrations without expressing support for Palestine Action.

The British government argues proscription only prevents support for Palestine Action and has not prevented people from protesting “in favor of the Palestinian people or against Israel’s actions in Gaza.”

The case is due to conclude next week, with a ruling at a later date.

Tucker Carlson has said some ugly things over the years, but even by his standards, last week was a new low.

In a monologue framed as a warning — because demagogues often pretend they’re just “warning” — Carlson delivered one of the most explicit and chilling mainstream threats toward American Jews in decades.

Speaking about people like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, Tucker said:

Give us the money for our preferred little country, or else we’re going to denounce you … Man, those attitudes are incompatible with leadership and in fact with democracy itself. You can’t have a country of 350 million people governed by boutique goals concerns … It doesn’t work. It’s illegitimate. If you keep it up, you’re flirting with real backlash. Like a real one … Not Nick Fuentes. Like a real one. So cool it. Don’t treat people like cattle.”

“Preferred little country.”
“Boutique goals.”
“Backlash.”
“Cool it.”

This was not analysis.
This was menace.

And it came wrapped in projection so brazen it would be funny — if the history behind it weren’t so deadly.

Because while Carlson accuses American Jews of disloyalty, coercion, and anti-democratic behavior, he has spent years whitewashing, rationalizing, or outright promoting the most openly anti-American movements operating on US soil: the anti-Israel campus mobs, the “resistance” celebrations of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the organizations openly seeking the dismantling of the American “empire” itself.

Carlson has nothing to say about movements that literally burn American flags

Let’s start with what Carlson ignores — because the silence is the tell.

Over the past two-plus years, anti-Israel protesters across the country have:

• burned American flags on college campuses and in major US cities,
• praised terrorists who murdered American citizens on Oct. 7,
• chanted “Death to America,” “Glory to our martyrs,” and “Resistance is justified from Gaza to New York,”
• waved Hezbollah, Hamas, IRGC, and even Houthi flags,
• shut down airports, highways, and Federal buildings,
• declared their goal is to “dismantle the US settler colony” (SJP),
• and demanded that America “collapse so a new world can be born.”

Not once — not even once — has Tucker Carlson accused any of these groups of “dual loyalty,” “treason,” “boutique goals,” or “corrupting democracy.”

Not once has he warned them of a coming “backlash.”
Not once has he urged them to “cool it.”

It turns out his concern for “American democracy” applies only to one group: Jews who support America’s democratic ally, Israel.

Meanwhile, the pro-Israel demonstrators Carlson smears wave American flags

Attend any pro-Israel rally in America and you’ll see a sea of US flags.

Mainstream Jewish Americans — whom Carlson now accuses of “treating other Americans like cattle” — regularly:

• thank US soldiers,
• praise America’s democratic traditions,
• and celebrate the shared values between the US and Israel.

The people Carlson calls “disloyal” attend rallies that look like Fourth of July parades.
The people he ignores are waving terror flags and chanting for America’s destruction.

Is this “America First”?

Of course not.

It is not patriotism driving Carlson.
It is obsession.
And obsession of this type always has a name.

What Carlson calls “boutique interests” are simply American Jews participating in American democracy

Carlson’s rant targeting Jewish media figures like Shapiro and Levin — two men whose “crime” is advocating policies Tucker himself embraced until he discovered the profitability of being the chief podcaster of the woke-right — is as familiar as it is poisonous:

• Jews advocating for a strong US–Israel alliance = anti-democratic “boutique interests.”
• Jews engaging in politics = “corrupting democracy.”
• Jews influencing policy (like everyone else) = “flirting with backlash.”

This is indistinguishable from Charles Lindbergh’s 1941 warning that Jews were steering America toward disaster and would deserve the “backlash” that followed.

The “America First” movement Carlson imagines has always carried this rot.
He’s just comfortable saying it out loud.

Carlson accuses Jews of:

• political coercion,
• ideological dominance,
• and treating opponents like “cattle.”

But his movement features:

• Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi Carlson now rehabilitates as a kind of misunderstood populist, who openly calls for stripping Jews of civil rights.
• Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose Christian nationalism rejects pluralistic democracy.
• Pedro Gonzalez, a figure Carlson helped mainstream, was caught pushing overt antisemitic tropes about Jewish “control,” the very rhetoric his movement now feeds on.
• Influencers in Carlson’s orbit who praise Putin, the IRGC, and the Houthis — America’s enemies.

This is the camp lecturing American Jews about “loyalty”?
Carlson’s rant wasn’t just hypocritical.
It was textbook projection.

And then there’s his selective outrage about “foreign influence”

Carlson says American Jews undermine America because they support Israel — America’s only reliable democratic ally in the Middle East.

But here’s what he never mentions:

• Anti-Israel campus groups receive support from networks tied to Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood.
• Iran’s propaganda arms amplify the same talking points as the woke-right.
• Anti-Israel leaders openly praise the IRGC and Hezbollah.
• Many anti-Israel protesters literally call for America’s collapse.

Yet the only “foreign subversion” he sees … is Jews?
He sees “treason” in pro-Israel Americans.
He sees “populism” in pro-Iran activists.

Carlson himself went to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin and give him a puff piece — and then offered the same courtesy to Iran’s “death to America” president.

Again: the silence is the tell.

Why Carlson targets Jews and not America’s real enemies

Because his movement needs a villain — one the far-right and far-left can share. And that villain — once again, as always — is the Jew.

There is no principle behind Carlson’s position. Only narrative:

• When Jews oppose Hamas → they are warmongers.
• When Jews support a strong America and strong US–Israel alliance → they are disloyal.
• When Jews engage politically → they corrupt democracy.
• When Jews defend themselves → they threaten national stability.

It’s the longest-running script in history.
Carlson just updated it for 2025 and put it on primetime.

At a time when genuine anti-American extremism is flourishing — in campus encampments, online propaganda networks, and foreign-backed organizations — Tucker Carlson has chosen to threaten the Americans waving US flags.

He has chosen to smear: Americans committed to democratic values.

He has chosen to accuse of treason: Americans whose “foreign cause” is a US ally under attack by terrorists who also kill Americans. Perhaps Tucker has forgotten how Iran’s proxies have killed literally hundreds of American service members — as they are enemies of both Israel and America.

And he has chosen to threaten a “real backlash” against: the one minority that history shows gets blamed whenever demagogues need a villain.

This is not patriotism.
It is not conservatism.
It is not “America First.”

It is the oldest hatred wearing a new mask.
And the mask isn’t slipping.
It’s off.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.