Hebrew Palaeography Album

Annotated manuscript in HebrewPal; original image © Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.

The Hebrew Palaeography Album (https://www.hebrewpalaeography.com) is a unique digital tool designed in the last year by Prof. Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, with web development by Michael Allaway. 'HebrewPal' offers a sophisticated interface which guides researchers and students to create detailed palaeographical descriptions of the Hebrew manuscripts they are working on. These can be used as exemplars to help situate undated manuscripts in time and space, and additionally provide data for the nascent field of computational Hebrew palaeography. 

The project originally began as a part of the Jewish Book Culture Project, also hosted in the Faculty of AMES. Prof. Olszowy-Schlanger has recently been awarded a Research and Development Fellowship from Digital Scholarship in Oxford (DiSc) to expand and implement HebrewPal as a fully fledged digital resource, which will commence in Michaelmas Term 2023. Thanks to this DiSc fellowship, HebrewPal will have an additional researcher in Oxford, Dr Joseph O'Hara, who will be populating the database with Hebrew manuscripts from all regions and time periods held in the Bodleian collections. HebrewPal is also supported by Saprat (Savoirs et Pratiques du Moyen Âge à l'époque contemporaine, EPHE, PSL Paris).

HebrewPal represents the state of the art in Hebrew digital palaeography. The platform will be used as a learning tool in the upcoming Bodleian summer workshop for Hebrew manuscript studies, and an international workshop to gather leading experts in the field is being planned as part of the project. We are also collaborating with our colleagues from Oxford's Khalili Research Centre to begin developing a version of HebrewPal for Arabic script.