The John Rylands Cairo Genizah Project

曼彻斯特约翰莱兰兹大学图书馆收藏了大约11，000件中世纪手稿碎片，这些手稿用希伯来语、阿拉姆语、犹太-阿拉伯语和其他犹太语言写成，起源于19世纪90年代在老开罗本以斯拉犹太教堂（Fustat）发现的一个储藏室（Genizah）。这些碎片，从日常文件，如孩子们的学校练习，到犹太神学和法律的一些最伟大的作品的副本（在少数情况下，在其作者的笔迹！）包括迄今未知的文本，是一个更大的集合的一小部分，从同一来源，现在分散在图书馆在英国其他地方，在俄罗斯和美国。同一本书的几页被撕成了碎片，现在在不同的大陆上。最大的一个收藏在剑桥大学图书馆，那里的保存和编目工作进展顺利。因为它仍然没有目录的赖兰德Genizah集合是不容易获得的学者，也没有它的关系，其他Genizah集合以往任何时候都没有得到彻底的调查。我们建议使用现代技术来解决这个问题。我们将在John Rylands大学图书馆网站上公布一个可搜索的电子数据库，其中载有所有碎片的图像，并附有一份描述性目录，该目录将尽可能准确地确定碎片的内容。数据库将是动态的。它将包含一个对话框，允许世界各地的学者对图像进行评论，识别我们无法识别的图像，或对我们的识别提出异议。我们将处理这些信息并相应地改进我们的描述。我们还将在数据库的基础上，对赖兰兹的Genizah收藏品的性质进行技术分析，以发现它的独特性，以及它与开罗Genizah收藏品的整体关系，以及它对写作和文学在古开罗犹太人日常生活中所扮演的角色的启示。

The John Rylands University Library Manchester houses among its treasures around 11,000 mediaeval manuscript fragments in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic and other Jewish languages that originated in a storeroom (a Genizah) discovered in the 1890s in the Ben Ezra synagogue of Old Cairo (Fustat). These fragments, which range from everyday documents, such as children's school exercises, to copies of some of the greatest works of Jewish theology and law {in a few cases in the handwriting of their authors!) including hitherto unknown texts, are a small part of a much larger collection from the same source now scattered in libraries elsewhere in England, in Russia and in the States. Pages from the same book have got torn apart, and are now on different continents. The largest single holding is in the Cambridge University Library, where work on conserving and cataloguing it is well advanced. Because it has still no catalogue the Rylands Genizah collection is not easily accessible to scholars, nor has its relationship to the other Genizah collections ever been thoroughly investigated. We propose to use modern technology to remedy this. We will publish on the John Rylands University Library website a searchable electronic database containing images of all the fragments, accompanied by a descriptive catalogue which will, wherever possible, identify exactly what the fragments are. The database will be dynamic. It will contain a dialogue box which will allow scholars throughout the world to comment on the images, identify ones we cannot, or dispute our identifications. We will process this information and improve our descriptions accordingly. We will also, on the basis of the database do a technical analysis of the nature of the Rylands Genizah collection, in order to discover how distinctive it is, and how it relates to the Cairo Genizah collection as a whole, and what light it throws on the role that writing and literature played in the everyday lives of the Jews of Old Cairo.