The Special Collections division of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester holds a collection of around 11,000 Genizah manuscript fragments from the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo. The Genizah fragments were acquired by the library in 1954 as part of the Moses Gaster collection. Written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic and other Jewish languages, the fragments date from the tenth to the nineteenth century, and include religious and literary texts, documentary sources, letters, and material relating to grammar, philosophy, medicine, astrology and astronomy. A major primary source for the study of the Middle Ages, they throw light not only on Jews and Judaism but also more broadly on the social, commercial, political, religious and intellectual life of the Levant as a whole.

The Rylands fragments constitute one of the last substantial collections of Cairo Genizah manuscripts not readily accessible to the scholarly community. Scholars have always been welcome to visit the Library in person, and inspect the boxes. A number of Genizah experts over the years have picked through the folders and extracted a few “treasures”, but to date only about fifty fragments in total have been mentioned in publications, and by no means all of these have been fully edited or translated. Since scholars have no way of telling what is in the Library they cannot order images of texts that might interest them, or be relevant to their work.

In a joint effort, the John Rylands University Library and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester decided some years ago to turn the tide and set up the Rylands Genizah Cataloguing Project. A one-day conference, JEWISH HERITAGE AT THE RYLANDS, was held on On 9th June 2002, at which a fundraising drive was announced by the Vice-Chancellor. The Project commenced in October 2003 following generous grants by the Friedberg and Safra Foundations and Mr. Joe Dwek. Its primary objective so far has been to describe the Rylands Genizah fragments and supply the electronic records to the Friedberg Foundation as part of the Library’s contribution to an international initiative to produce a union catalogue for all Genizah collections world-wide.

About halfway the project, the Library acquired the Luna Imaging System for the online display and description of some of its most treasured artifacts such as papyri, printed books and manuscripts. It soon became apparent that this system would not only be a superb tool for displaying the Rylands Genizah fragments, but also fulfil the Project’s cataloguing requirements to the highest standards. A small selection of 214 images can presently be viewed together with their catalogue descriptions on http://rylibweb.man.ac.uk/insight/genizah.htm. In the meantime, work is ongoing behind the scenes to describe all the Rylands Genizah fragments per side of the fragment using Luna Inscribe.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council has recently awarded the Library a grant of over £ 361,000 to digitise and catalogue the Rylands Genizah. This grant will ensure that high resolution images of all the Rylands Genizah fragments will become world-wide accessible through the John Rylands University Library website over the next three years and as part of an online searchable and browseable catalogue.

The advantages of systematic digitisation are of course very considerable. It will ensure the creation and safe storage of a digital archive of images, which is one vital way of preserving the Rylands Genizah collection for the future. Scholars working on Genizah material anywhere in the world will be able to see exactly what is stored in Manchester, discover hitherto unidentified works, and compare the fragments held in Manchester with those held in places like Cambridge and the British Library.

Other libraries too are discovering the benefits of digitising their collections of Genizah fragments. A case in point is the University of Pennsylvania Library in Philadelphia (see http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/genizah/index.cfm). Fragments of the same work have ended up in different libraries, and it has sometimes taken a long time to discover this. However, it is currently possible to compare, for example, Talmudic fragments from the same manuscript by visiting the two above-mentioned sites and viewing the images of respectively Rylands Genizah fragment B 6119 and Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Library, Halper 89. Moreover, the Taylor-Schechter Research Unit of the Cambridge University Library, which houses the largest single collection of Cairo Genizah fragments, has recently received a similarly substantial sum from the AHRC to digitise all their 400,000 fragments.

A notable example the importance of inter-library co-operation was the recent discovery in Cambridge of the upper part of a folio of which we possess the lower part in the form of two joining fragments (B 2597 & B 4094). They represent a page from one of Maimonides' famous autograph versions of his Guide of the Perplexed. The April 2005 issue of the Newsletter of the Taylor-Schechter Research Unit (see http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/GF) contains a short report of this exciting discovery.

The new AHRC grant will facilitate the appointment of staff apart from the fulltime cataloguer already employed, especially a photographer and one or more assistants for clerical work related to the digitisation and cataloguing work. The Library will continue its close collaboration with the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the Jewish National and University Library of Jerusalem. The Institute is adding descriptions of a substantial amount of Rylands Genizah fragments to its Aleph database of manuscripts. We will organise twice yearly seminars in Manchester to which we will invite small groups of specialists to help us deal with specific problems we have identified. In addition, we intend to publish a series of articles on the Rylands Genizah.

The current staff of the project comprise:
Professor Philip Alexander, Principal Investigator: Philip.S.Alexander@manchester.ac.uk
Dr. Renate Smithuis, Cataloguer / Research Fellow: Renate.Smithuis@manchester.ac.uk
Dr. Stella Butler, Head of Special Collections: Stella.V.Butler@man.ac.uk