More than a century ago, in 1896, Rabbi Solomon Schechter, the great Jewish educator and founder of Conservative Judaism, traveled to Egypt to begin documenting a trove of Jewish manuscripts held in the attic of Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue. Known today as the Cairo Genizah, the archive is recognized as one of the world’s most significant collections of medieval Jewish writing.
Schechter’s academic descendants are still at work cataloging the Cairo Genizah’s more than 400,000 fragments, but last month they took a leap forward thanks to a very modern tool – artificial intelligence.
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