Madad: Indexing the Cairo Geniza at Scale

Research Challenge

With this project, we are exploring how the many-to-many data model for fragments that supports the Princeton Geniza Project can be extended for a larger collection of fragments, and generalized to support varying amounts of detail.

Collaborative Origins

The Princeton Geniza Project (PGP) website, the landmark resource for studying everyday lives in the medieval Middle East, currently includes roughly 40,000 letters, legal deeds, lists, accounts, state documents, and other everyday writings and ephemera from the Cairo Geniza.

Yet those documents represent only a small fraction of the collection. About 90% of the Geniza’s 400,000 fragments are long-form literary works in genres that include liturgy, Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, lexicography, poetry, and more. These fragments are spread across libraries and collections around the world and are cataloged with varying degrees of completeness and consistency.

Madad—meaning “index” in Hebrew and “extension” in Arabic—will extend the many-to-many data model behind the current PGP to a collection ten times larger, and will generalize it to support varying levels of detail.

Collaborative Origins

The Madad project builds on the PGP platform that CDH began designing in 2020 and responds to the evolving needs of digital research. This collaboration with Princeton Geniza Lab Co-Director Eve Krakowski and her team will result in standardized, publicly available metadata, a unified view of the Cairo Geniza’s documentary and literary worlds, and technical infrastructure that can be reused beyond the PGP.