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Vast Trove of Medieval Jewish Records Opened Up by AI
A researcher of MiDRASH, a project dedicated to analyzing the National Library of Israel’s digital database of all known Hebrew manuscripts using Machine Learning, including manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza, holds up a 12th century fragment of a Yom Kippur liturgy in Jerusalem, Nov. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
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.
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Lindsey Graham urges Israel not to strike Iranian oil depots even as he says he helped make war happen
(JTA) — Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has called on Israel to rein in its attacks on Iranian oil infrastructure, marking a rare note of caution from a Republican lawmaker who has said he helped push the United States to join Israel in waging war against Iran.
In a post on X on Sunday, Graham praised Israel for its role in the war before adding that “there will be a day soon that the Iranian people will be in charge of their own fate, not the murderous ayatollah’s regime.”
“In that regard, please be cautious about what targets you select,” continued Graham. “Our goal is to liberate the Iranian people in a fashion that does not cripple their chance to start a new and better life when this regime collapses. The oil economy of Iran will be essential to that endeavor.”
Graham’s post linked to an Axios article that reported that the United States was alarmed by Israeli strikes over the weekend that targeted 30 Iranian fuel depots. On Monday, U.S. gas prices rose to their highest levels since 2024.
The warning from Graham, an ally of President Donald Trump and staunch supporter of Israel, comes days after the Republican hawk told the Wall Street Journal that he had played a key role in urging Trump to strike Iran.
Prior to the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, Graham made several trips to Israel where he met with members of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whom he said he coached on how to lobby Trump to strike Iran.
“They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” Graham told the newspaper.
On Monday, Graham also directed his criticism at Saudi Arabia’s decision to stay on the sidelines of the campaign against Iran.
“It is my understanding the Kingdom refuses to use their capable military as a part of an effort to end the barbaric and terrorist Iranian regime who has terrorized the region and killed 7 Americans,” wrote Graham in a post on X Monday. “Question – why should America do a defense agreement with a country like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that is unwilling to join a fight of mutual interest?”
The post Lindsey Graham urges Israel not to strike Iranian oil depots even as he says he helped make war happen appeared first on The Forward.
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Belgian officials investigating synagogue explosion as possible act of terrorism
(JTA) — Belgian officials are investigating an explosion in front of a synagogue in Liège early Monday as a possible act of terrorism.
The explosion, which took place at 4 a.m., damaged the door of the historic neo-Romanesque synagogue and blew out the windows of multiple buildings across the street. No injuries were reported.
A range of Belgian politicians, including the prime minister and the mayor of Liège, characterized the explosion as act of antisemitism.
“Antisemitism is an attack on our values and our society, and we must fight it unequivocally,” Prime Minister Bart de Wever said in a statement. “We stand in solidarity with the Jewish community in Liege and across the country.”
The explosion comes amid a surge of concern about possible attacks by agents associated with the Iranian regime, against which the United States and Israel launched a war last week. Iran has a long record of supporting attacks on Jewish targets abroad, including two bombings in the 1990s in Argentina that killed more than 100 people at the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community center. Now, with Iran being pummeled at home, watchdogs are warning that it might lash out through its Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, responsible for attacks abroad.
Azerbaijan said Friday that it had foiled multiple terror attacks planned by Iranian agents on Jewish sites. In London, four men were arrested last week for allegedly spying on the Jewish community for Iran, with the intent of planning attacks against the community. And a string of shootings at synagogues in Toronto has ignited concern in Canada, too.
Iranian agents have taken aim at non-Jewish targets, too. On Friday, a Pakistani man who prosecutors said had been directed by Iran’s IRGC was convicted of plotting to assassinate President Donald Trump.
The attack in Liège, in the primarily French-speaking Wallonia province, comes amid a range of recent developments that have unsettled Belgian Jews, who number approximately 30,000. They include antisemitic carnival caricatures in the city of Aalst; a ban on ritual slaughter preventing the local production of kosher meat; and an ongoing row between U.S. and Belgian officials over Jewish circumcision practices. The attack also follows a 2014 shooting in which a gunman associated with the Islamic State, a rival to Iran’s Islamic Republic, shot four people to death at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.
A spokesperson for the Liège police described the effects to the area as “only material damage” to the 1899 building. Rabbi Joshua Nejman told local media that he was hoping that security footage would reveal the perpetrator.
“I’m going to try to calm my heart, because it is beating faster and faster this morning,” said Nejman, who said he had been at the synagogue for 25 years.
“Liege is home to a very small but vibrant Jewish community where I personally grew up,” Eitan Bergman, vice president of the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organisations in Belgium, told Reuters. “Today, the feelings among our community members are a mixture of sadness, worry and profound shock.”
Liege’s mayor, Willy Demeyer, praised the synagogue community to RBTF, Belgium’s French-language national broadcaster. He added, “We cannot allow foreign conflicts to be imported into our city.”
The post Belgian officials investigating synagogue explosion as possible act of terrorism appeared first on The Forward.
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The Top 100 People Positively Influencing Jewish Life, 2025
In honor of The Algemeiner‘s 12th annual gala, we are proud to present our “J100” list — 100 individuals who have positively influenced Jewish life over the past year.