Vast trove of medieval Jewish records opened up by AI

By Hannah Confino

JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Researchers in Israel are hoping to make new discoveries about Jewish history by loading a digital database of manuscripts stretching back a thousand years into a new transcription tool that uses artificial intelligence.

The Cairo Geniza, the biggest collection of medieval Jewish documents in the world, has been the object of countless hours of study by scholars for more than a century but only a fraction of its over 400,000 documents have been thoroughly researched.

Although the entire collection has already been digitized and is available online in the form of images, most of its items have not been catalogued, many are disordered fragments from longer documents, and only around a tenth have transcriptions.

By training an AI model to read and tr