Reconstructing the Medical “Book Shelf” Based on the Cairo Geniza
About
What medical knowledge was accessible to medieval Jewish physicians in Cairo? Did they have the most advanced medical knowledge of their time? Were they aware of the medicine that had developed in near and far areas? These are some of the key questions about medieval medicine.
The aim of our project is to reconstruct the Medical Medieval Books Shelf. We looked for similarities between more than 1,000 medical genizah fragments and medical corpus in Arabic. Thus, understanding the knowledge acquired by the physicians in the Jewish community over the years.
The method we used during the work on the project included some digital components. We created an extensive corpus of medical literature in Arabic. We transcripted samples from hundreds of medical genizah passages. And, we used various text matching algorithms. Through a combination of these parts, we tried to uncover the relationships between the genizah passages and the Arabic medical corpus.
The aim of our project is to reconstruct the Medical Medieval Books Shelf. We looked for similarities between more than 1,000 medical genizah fragments and medical corpus in Arabic. Thus, understanding the knowledge acquired by the physicians in the Jewish community over the years.
The method we used during the work on the project included some digital components. We created an extensive corpus of medical literature in Arabic. We transcripted samples from hundreds of medical genizah passages. And, we used various text matching algorithms. Through a combination of these parts, we tried to uncover the relationships between the genizah passages and the Arabic medical corpus.
Our Team
Prof. Efraim Lev - Head Of Project
Full professor in the Department of Israeli Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Haifa.
His training as a historian, biologist and his archaeological background assisted him in his research on the herbal nutrition of ancient man in our region, the medicinal substances used in the Middle Ages, and the history of medicine and pharmacy in the Middle East from the Middle Ages to the early modern period.
Prof. Lev makes extensive use of the Cairo Genizah and the Arab historical sources in his research and is a partner and facilitator of several research projects in the digital humanities carried out at Eliyahu Lab.
Yanir Marmor - Research Assistant
Student of Computer Science and Talmud at Tel Aviv University.
Yanir deals with data science and algorithm development.
Uri Gueron - Research Assistant
Uri Giron is a research assistant in the project of restoring the medical library of Prof. Ephraim Lev. In addition, Uri works
At the University of Haifa, the students' deanate as a teacher and practitioner, as well as a book cataloger and sorter
In Arabic and Persian in the Younes and Suraya Nazarian Library. Today he is also studying Persian
At the University of Haifa and certificate studies in Hebrew language editing at Tel Aviv University. he is working
Also as a librarian at the Hebrew Real School in Haifa.