Project

HebrewPal combines traditional Hebrew palaeography with new developments in digital technology. Based on a palaeographical method originally devised and taught by Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, the Hebrew Palaeography Album in its present digital format was developed by an international research team in three institutions: Oxford University, Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, and the research cluster SAPRAT (Savoirs et pratiques du moyen âge à l'époque contemporaine) of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, PSL, Paris. Launched in 2022 as part of the DFG/AHRC project 'Jewish Book Culture in the Islamicate World’ led by Ronny Vollandt and Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, HebrewPal is designed to be broadened to include further research partners and institutions. In 2023, HebrewPal also became part of the ERC-Synergy project 'MiDRASH – Migrations of Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script’, a computational humanities project aiming to reconstruct Medieval Jewish book culture at host institutions EPHE-PSL, BIU, and TAU. The Album has been developed to include Hebrew books, documents, and epigraphy from all areas of Jewish diaspora and its corpus is being continuously expanded by an international team of researchers.