Exploring and Revealing the John Rylands Library’s Hebrew Collections

Philip Alexander (Professor Emeritus of Post-Biblical Jewish Literature, The University of Manchester), Alexander Samely (Professor of Jewish Thought), Renate Smithius (Principal Investigator), Stefania Silvestri (Research Associate), Zsofia Buda (Research Associate), external contributors: Israel Sandman (The British Library), Gal Sofer (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

Our Hebrew collections are internationally renowned and are one of the top four in the UK. The manuscript collections of ca. 300 codices, scrolls and other texts in Hebrew script, plus ca. 15,000 Cairo Genizah fragments, are astonishingly diverse, covering all aspects of Jewish life as lived in the Middle East, Europe and further afield. Though all are in the Hebrew script they are in many different languages -- not only Hebrew, but Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Yiddish, Judeo-Provençal, and so on. They cover a wide range of topics from biblical texts and liturgy to science, and magic. The collection contains many outstanding but yet little-known manuscripts that can further our understanding of Jewish book cultures.

The aim of the project is to catalogue and digitise these valuable objects and make them available for researchers and the general public. With the generous support of several individuals and trusts, we have produced a digital collection, which now contains records of over 200 manuscripts in Hebrew script. In the current phase of the project, we are digitising and cataloguing ca. 250 amulets from the Moses Gaster collection. Further funding is required to complete the project and in particular to repair and digitise the remaining manuscripts and catalogue the amulets written in the Arabic language.