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In this episode of Hebrew Voices #191 - The Cairo Genizah: Part 3, Nehemia continues to discuss with the head of the Cambridge Genizah Research Unit how fragments from 1,000 years ago now scattered in libraries throughout the globe are reunited using technology and scholarly elbow grease. They also talk about the coming AI revolution that will change the face of Hebrew scholarship.

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Ben: And he really got seduced by the intimacy that comes from reading documents that were not intended for posterity. The letters were only ever intended to be read by one or two people, perhaps to be read out in the synagogue.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: But not more than that. And yet here you are a thousand years later, and you’re reading about, “Why won’t you come home? Your daughter is pregnant. And everyone’s saying, ‘Where’s her father?’”

Nehemia: Wow. That’s pretty cool.

Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon, welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Ben Outhwaite, who is the head of the Genizah Research Unit at the University of Cambridge. He got his PhD here at the University of Cambridge. Thank you for joining the program.

Ben: Thanks very much for having me.

Nehemia: Alright, so, Solomon Schechter brings these boxes and shiploads of stuff back here to Cambridge, and he then has to catalog it.

Ben: Yes. So, that’s in 1898 that he settled down to start working on it, and that’s when the photos were taken. He starts, really, just randomly pulling stuff out. He’s not really cataloging, he’s looking for stuff, and he’s publishing it in the JQR (Jewish Quarterly Review).

Nehemia: Okay. Can we say something about the JQR? This blows my mind, that we have a journal that’s around today that goes back to the 19th century. That’s incredible!

Ben: It was the leading… the Jewish Quarterly Review was the leading English language… I don’t know, was it a product of the Wissenschaft des Judentums Movement?

Nehemia: I mean, wasn’t it in the United States? Am I wrong about that, that the JQR started in the U.S.?

Ben: I don’t know.

Nehemia: So, in Hebrew literature of the early 20th century they referred to the “English journal” and the “French journal”, by which they mean the Jewish Quarterly Review and the Revue des Études Juives, which both go back to the 19th century, and both are around today.

Ben: Well, the JQR is fantastic. I’m not sure that the JQR has quite the same excitement they had in the early days, because there are so many journals…

Nehemia: Right.

Ben: But in the early days, every issue would have had an article by Schechter. Every issue would then have an article with rebuttal by Margoliouth or something like that. But there would also be Neubauer…

Nehemia: Even Neubauer, which is the rivalry between Cambridge and Oxford.

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: I never realized that! Oh!

Ben: Yeah. And then later on, what’s his name… Solomon Zeitlin. He was very skeptical about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Nehemia: So, tell us about that. That’s an amazing story!

Ben: Well, I don’t know that much about it. I know because he launched attacks on the Dead Sea Scrolls and often referred to the sort of scurrilous and spurious nature of the Ben Sira discoveries, and so on. He regarded the Dead Sea discoveries that Schechter made as being part and parcel of the same…

Nehemia: So, he thought that the Dead Sea Scrolls were from the Middle Ages.

Ben: Middle Ages, yeah.

Nehemia: Just like the Cairo Genizah.

Ben: Yeah. And