Cairo Genizah Authors

One of the key questions regarding medicine in the Middle Ages is – what medical knowledge was accessible to doctors of the time and place? Did they know the most advanced medical knowledge of their time? Were they aware of the medicine that developed in the near and far environment in the previous centuries?
In the project to restore the medical library, we are looking for matches between more than 1,000 Geniza sections that deal with medicine and medical literature in Arabic that was created up to that time, thus understanding what the doctors and therapists in the Jewish community knew over the years.
The method we followed during the work on the project included the construction of an extensive corpus of medical literature in Arabic as well as sample transcriptions of hundreds of Geniza passages in this field. Through the use of different text matching algorithms we try to reveal the connections between the Genizah sections and the medical corpus.

Our Team

efraiml
Prof. Efraim Lev - Head Of Project
Full professor in the Department of Israel Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Haifa. His training as a historian, biologist and his archaeological background helped him in his research on the plant-based diet of the ancient man in our regions, 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 beginning of the modern era.
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Yanir Marmor - Research Assistant
Student of Computer Science and Talmud at Tel Aviv University. Yanir deals with data science and algorithm development.
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Uri Gueron - Research Assistant
Uri Giron is a research assistant in the project to restore Prof. Ephraim Lev's medical library. In addition, Uri works At the University of Haifa in the student dean's office as a teacher and practitioner, as well as a cataloger and sorter of books In Arabic and Persian in the Yunus and Soraya Nazarian Library. Today he is also studying the Persian language at Haifa University and certificate studies in Hebrew linguistic editing at Tel Aviv University.