HebrewPal - Hebrew Palaeography Album

Project

HebrewPal combines traditional Hebrew palaeography with new developments in digital technology. Based on a palaeographical method originally devised and taught by Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, the Hebrew Palaeography Album in its present digital format has been developed by an international research team in three institutions: Oxford University, Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, and a research cluster SAPRAT (Savoirs et pratiques du moyen âge à l'époque contemporaine) of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, PSL. Paris, led by Ronny Vollandt and Judith Olszowy-Schlanger. Originally a part of a DFG/AHRC project 'Jewish Book Culture in the Islamicate World', the Album has been expanded to include Hebrew books, documents, and epigraphy from all areas of Jewish diaspora. Launched in 2022, HebrewPal is designed to be broadened to include further research partners and institutions.

Funding

HebrewPal has been funded by the DFG/ Arts and Humanities Research Council bilateral English-German research programme, a grant of the Association Française pour la Promotion des Études Juives and the support of SAPRAT-EPHE.

Our Database Collection

HebrewPal is a partner of the Jewish Book Culture in the Islamicate World project, which is an international collaborative project funded by DFG and AHRC. Its aim is to study Jewish books, their makers and their readers in the medieval eastern Mediterranean.

The HebrewPal and Jewish Book Culture projects have together produced a collection of three thematically related databases:

Hebrew Palaeography Album

HebrewPal is a pioneering Hebrew script database. It follows an original palaeographical approach. The analysis of the script is carried out from the global view of the script sample, through the study of individual words and letters to the details of the components of every letter.

Browse Database

Jewish Book Culture in the Islamicate World

Jewish Book Culture offers a comprehensive searchable corpus of sources for the history of the Hebrew book in the Islamicate world. It consists of three parts: descriptions of manuscripts, editions and translations of documents concerning books and quotations about books in literature.

Browse Database

Handbook of Jewish Book Culture

This is an alphabetic encyclopaedic glossary of Jewish Book Culture in the medieval Islamicate World.

Coming Soon

Related Databases

As well as our database collection, the following are a list of other databases that are related to this project:

Books Within Books

"Books within books: Hebrew Fragments in European Libraries" is a European network of scholars working on fragments of medieval Hebrew books and documents recovered from book bindings and notarial files in various libraries and archives in Europe, Israel and USA.

MultiPal

MultiPal is an online interactive tutorial in palaeography. It helps learning to decipher original manuscripts, documents and inscriptions in a range of ancient and medieval scripts and languages.