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11000份中世纪希伯来语、阿拉姆语、犹太-阿拉伯语和其他犹太语言的手稿碎片，这些手稿起源于19世纪90年代在旧开罗的本以斯拉犹太教堂（Fustat）发现的一个储藏室（一个Genizah）。这些碎片的范围从日常文件，如儿童的学校作业，到一些最伟大的犹太神学和法律著作的副本（在少数情况下是作者的笔迹！），包括迄今为止未知的文本，是来自同一来源的更大的收藏的一小部分，现在分散在英国，俄罗斯和美国的其他地方的图书馆。同一本书的书页被撕成了碎片，现在散落在不同的大陆上。最大的单一馆藏在剑桥大学图书馆，那里的保存和编目工作非常先进。因为它仍然没有目录，所以学者们不容易接触到莱兰兹的《根尼撒》收藏，也没有对它与其他《根尼撒》收藏的关系进行过彻底的调查。我们建议用现代技术来解决这个问题。我们将在约翰·莱兰兹大学图书馆网站上发布一个可搜索的电子数据库，其中包含所有碎片的图像，并附有一份描述性目录，尽可能准确地确定碎片是什么。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，或对我们的身份提出异议。我们将处理这些信息，并相应地改进我们的描述。我们也会在数据库的基础上，对莱兰兹的《吉尼撒》藏品的性质进行技术分析，以发现它的独特性，以及它与开罗的《吉尼撒》藏品的整体关系，以及它对写作和文学在旧开罗犹太人日常生活中所扮演的角色的影响。

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.