Princeton Geniza Lab
At the forefront of DH scholarship on the Cairo Geniza, preserving and providing access to this vast and invaluable collection of historical texts. Director: Marina Rustow
Since 1986, the Princeton Geniza Lab has been studying and digitizing historical documents from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of roughly 400,000 fragments of paper and parchment preserved in a medieval Egyptian synagogue.
PGL studies the geniza's ephemeral, everyday texts — unique sources for the history of the Middle East and of premodern Jewish communities from Spain to Sumatra. The documents include letters, legal documents, accounts, and lists.
The lab’s work consists of research, transcription, and database design. They've built an open-access database called the Princeton Geniza Project to make geniza documents available to researchers and the interested public.
