Based on a trove of unexamined real estate deeds at the Coptic Patriarchate Archive in Cairo, this project is a micro-history of one neighborhood in late-medieval Cairo (ca. 1470s-1550s). The documents, issued by Islamic courts, relate to properties in various parts of Cairo, but they cluster around two areas traditionally identified as Christian neighborhoods. This talk will discuss a handful of these ostensibly dry deeds related to houses in Hārat al-Rūm as-Suflā [Lower ‘Greek’ Alley] to discuss (a) the nature of neighborhoods; (b) Coptic Christians’ use of qādī courts; (c) the strategies of Coptic families including endowments for churches and monasteries, but also intra-familial negotiations; and (d) the potential of reading the later endowment deeds against the earliest Ottoman court registers.

In a former life, Tamer el-Leithy studied Economics in Cairo and worked as an economist for an oil company. Drudgery ensued. So when he read a historical novel set in 15th-century Cairo, he saw the light and discovered a passion for medieval history. He studied medieval history at AUC (Cairo), Cambridge University, and Princeton. He was a research fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, then taught at NYU’s Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies department, before joining the History department at Johns Hopkins. Tamer has worked on themes like conversion to Islam; the cultural consequences of Arabization in Egypt; pre-Ottoman archives; and intersex and trans bodies in medieval Egypt and Syria.

• Presenter: Tamer el-Leithy
• Moderator and Geniza Lab Live Coordinator: Jessica Parker

The term "the Jewish neighborhood" is often mentioned in historical reconstructions of Jewish life in medieval urban centers, including in writing about "Geniza society" in medieval Egypt. But what does "Jewish neighborhood" mean? How do we as modern scholars identify it, and how was it defined and identified by medieval Jews and their neighbors? 

In this talk, Moshe will try to problematize this term by focusing on the case of medieval Fustāt using Geniza documents, medieval geographic and historiographic compositions, and archaeological finds. He will present information on one small street--Michael street, or zuqāq Michael--in the "Roman fortress" at the ancient heart of Fustāt. Moshe will try to show how these questions can lead us towards a better understanding of inter-religious relations, the place of the Jews in the urban sphere, and daily urban reality.

Moshe Yagur is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an adjunct lecturer at the Jewish History department at Ben Gurion University in the Negev.

• Presenter: Moshe Yagur
• Moderator and Geniza Lab Live Coordinator: Jessica Parker

Abū Saʿīd Ḥalfon b. Menasse Ibn al-Qaṭāʾif served as a clerk of the central Jewish court in Egypt during the years 1100-1138. An extensive dossier of documents related to Ḥalfon has survived in the Cairo Geniza, including hundreds of legal documents, letters from his close family circle, petitions he composed for needy Jews, and fragments of literary works copied in his hand.

As a court scribe, Ḥalfon occupied a pivotal position connecting the Jewish elite, communal institutions, Islamic state, and the Jewish legal tradition to ordinary Jews. As such a middleman, he can serve as an Archimedean point for a study that combines the view from below and the view from above and offers an integrative analysis of law and community of the period.

This project applies Social Network Analysis to the extensive correspondence of Ḥalfon’s circle and legal documents in his hands to visualize and analyze the networks in which he partook. Combining Social Network Analysis with a traditional close reading of letters, quantitative study of court records, and a comparison with other microhistories of Egyptian scribes will offer an unparalleled view of how Jewish law worked in practice and reveal its embeddedness in the social networks of the Jewish community.

Oded Zinger is a PGP aficionado and teaches Jewish history at the Hebrew University.

• Presenter: Oded Zinger
• Moderator and Geniza Lab Live Coordinator: Jessica Parker

Between 650 and 950 CE, Arabic replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca of the Middle East for all but a handful of communities and textual genres. Until 1300 CE, an estimated 90% of Jews worldwide lived in the Islamic world and spoke Arabic. But when they wrote Arabic, they wrote it in Hebrew script. Nineteenth-century European scholars coined the term Judaeo-Arabic to describe this phenomenon. Linguists who study Judaeo-languages tend to think of them as distinct from the ambient languages. But while this is true of the two major Judaeo-languages of the early modern and modern periods—Ladino and Yiddish—it is not true of medieval Judaeo-Arabic in quite the same ways.

In this meeting of Geniza Lab Live, Prof. Rustow will reflect on some of the assumptions embedded in the “Judaeo” prefix, explore how medieval Jews themselves viewed Arabic in Hebrew characters and consider the consequences of code-switching among three semitic languages—Aramaic, Arabic and Hebrew—for Jewish writing. The session is intended both as an orientation for those new to geniza studies and as an invitation to conceptual-level reflection for veterans.

Prof. Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East and Professor of Near Eastern Studies and History at Princeton University.

• Presenter: Marina Rustow
• Moderator and Geniza Lab Live Coordinator: Jessica Parker

The medieval Qaraite calendar was based upon the observation of natural phenomena: months were set by the sighting of the new moon and years were intercalated based on the ripeness of barley crops in Palestine. Unlike the general principle of empiricism, the details of the medieval Qaraite calendar are less well-known.

In this paper, Dr. Nadia Vidro provides an overview of the practicalities of the empirical calendar reckoning from Qaraite literary and documentary sources and discusses calendar diversity within the Qaraite movement and between Rabbanites and Qaraites. She also looks at strategies for converting dates in medieval Qaraite documents to Common Era dates. 

Dr. Nadia Vidro is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. She recently completed the project Qaraite and Rabbanite Calendars: Origins, Interaction, and Polemic, and is currently working on the project Saadya Gaon’s Works on the Jewish Calendar: Near Eastern Sources and Transmission to the West (2021–2023). Both projects are funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and carried out in collaboration with LMU, Munich.

• Presenter: Nadia Vidro
• Moderator: Marina Rustow
• Geniza Lab Live Coordinator: Jessica Parker

The earliest documents found in the Cairo Geniza, which come from the tenth century, are among the earliest medieval Jewish documents we have from anywhere in the world. In this informal talk, Prof. Eve Krakowski discusses her recent work on this group of documents, their relationships to earlier Jewish documents from Egypt and Syria, and what they may be able to tell us about how Judaism developed during the centuries before the Geniza cache begins—one of the most important and least understood periods of Jewish history.

Prof. Eve Krakowski is Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Judaic Studies at Princeton University and co-director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Her book Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Female Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture came out in 2018. 

• Presenter: Eve Krakowski
• Moderator and Geniza Lab Live Coordinator: Jessica Parker

The Princeton Geniza Project database has been expanding access to the global Middle Ages through cutting edge digital tools since 1986. In July 2020, the Princeton Geniza Lab began a complete overhaul of the database in a research partnership with Princeton's Center for Digital Humanities. 

Two years later, the PGP–CDH partnership has successfully redesigned the research experience at both the front and the back ends. The team has restructured the project data and de-siloed the various digital components, enabling a more intuitive user interface for searching across the data and analyzing it holistically. 

At the virtual roundtable discussion with the PGP-CDH partnership team, we celebrated this accomplishment, presented some new features of PGP v. 4, and answered questions about our process and outcome. 

• Moderator: Natalia Ermolaev
• PGP team: Marina Rustow, Rachel Richman, Zohar Berman
• CDH team: Rebecca S. Koeser, Nick Budak, Ben Silverman, Gissoo Doroudian
• Geniza Lab Live Coordinator: Jessica Parker

In this presentation, Prof. Craig Perry provides an overview of the evidence for the slave trade to and within Egypt between the eleventh and mid-thirteenth centuries. When read alongside other medieval sources, Geniza documents illustrate a mode of decentralized slave trading that was embedded in the larger Egyptian and Indian Ocean economy. Prof. Perry argues that knowledge of this “everyday” slave trade suggests how we might re-interpret and contextualize other key evidence for human trafficking in the medieval Middle East and beyond.

Craig Perry is an assistant professor at Emory University in the department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies where he also serves on the faculty for the Islamic Civilizations Studies graduate program. He is a co-editor of The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500 - AD 1420 (2021) and is currently completing a monograph on slavery and the slave trade in medieval Egypt. 

• Presenter: Craig Perry
• Moderator and Geniza Lab Live Coordinator: Jessica Parker

What can we learn from someone’s last wishes? This talk will provide an overview of Rachel Richman's recent dive into nearly fifty wills from the Cairo Geniza and what they can tell us about gender, charity, and family dynamics.

Rachel Richman is a Ph.D. candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Her research uses the Cairo Geniza and Arabic sources to investigate social history in the Medieval Islamic world. Rachel is currently working on women’s labor and property holdings and seeks to bridge material evidence from the fields of Art History and Archaeology with the Geniza documentary texts. Rachel earned her BA in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at the University of Chicago and her MA in Near Eastern Languages & Cultures from the Ohio State University.

• Presenter: Rachel Richman
• Moderator and Geniza Lab Live Coordinator: Jessica Parker

Calligraphic signatures present some of the most daunting paleographical challenges for research within the early modern Cairo Geniza. This talk explores the advantages and hurdles of compiling a database of the signatures with which scribes and witnesses sealed Jewish legal documents.

Matthew Dudley is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Yale University and a research assistant at the Princeton Geniza Lab. In addition to cataloging fragments, he is involved in the development of material culture and numismatics glossaries for the Lab. Matthew's dissertation is tentatively titled: "Into the Anti-Archive: Jewish Law, Family, and Ottoman Imperial Administration in the Early Modern Cairo Geniza."

• Moderator: Marina Rustow
• Presenter: Matthew Dudley 
• Geniza Lab Live Coordinator: Jessica Parker

The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. From astrophysicists looking for galaxies to botanists understanding climate change, these project teams result in new discoveries and datasets. What are the unexpected commonalities and differences in these projects? How does working with volunteers sustain and grow the heart of the research question? 

• Moderator: Samantha Blickhan, Zooniverse/Adler Planetarium
• Tom Blake, Anti-Slavery Manuscript Projects
• Emily Esten, Scribes of the Cairo Geniza
• Brooke Simmons, Galaxy Zoo & the Planetary Response Network
• Jenna Stacy-Dawes, Wildwatch Kenya

Project sustainability connects to the tools, resources, and opportunities for use and reuse of data. In this conversation, we hear from scholars in the communities that form around crowdsourced data. How can research projects use crowdsourced transcription data to suit their needs? How are scholars reusing data from open-access projects to create new and exciting ways of interacting with knowledge?

• Moderator: Will Noel, Princeton University Library
• Ryan Cordell, Viral Texts
• Daniel Stoekl Ben-Ezra, eScriptorium
• Victoria Van Hyning, The David C. Driskell Papers Project
• Marina Rustow, Princeton University/Princeton Geniza Lab

Processes and deliverables for digital projects must meet the needs of both researchers and audiences. In this conversation, we talk with developers, designers, and technical leads on crowdsourcing projects. The more resources go into a project, and the more it speaks to a particular set of research questions, does it become more difficult to sustain? Where is the sweet spot between specificity and sustainability?

• Moderator: Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University
• Samantha Blickhan, Zooniverse/Adler Planetarium
• Ben Brumfield, FromThePage
• Will Granger, LogicGate
• Shaun Noordin, Zooniverse/Oxford University
• Becky Rother, Zooniverse/Adler Planetarium

Crowdsourcing projects have the ability to engage everyday citizens with humanities and science research in order to create a more active and informed public. How have people engaged in crowdsourcing within our project, the Zooniverse platform, and on similar platforms? There are so many platforms for engaging the public in making collections accessible. How do different crowdsourcing platforms approach project planning, development, and community engagement? 

• Moderator: Natalia Ermolaev, Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University
• Jim Casey, Courtney Murray, and Justin Smith, Colored Conventions Project and Douglas Day at the Penn State Center for Black Digital Research
• Emily Esten, Scribes of the Cairo Geniza
• Caitlin Haynes, Smithsonian Transcription Center 
• Mia Ridge, Living with Machines 

Letting the public ask and take charge of questions can inspire new avenues for conversation. It has been one of our favorite parts about Scribes of the Cairo Geniza. When falling into Geniza fragments, these volunteers found a passion for this work. What did they learn? What do we learn from the experience of working with people in research?

• Moderator: Marina Rustow, Princeton University/Princeton Geniza Lab
• Matthew Dudley (PhD student, Yale University)
• Abigail Glickman (Undergraduate, Princeton University)
• Grace Masback (Undergraduate, Princeton University)
• Steffy Reader (Zooniverse volunteer)
• Rachel Richman (PhD student, Princeton University, and Project Manager, Princeton Geniza Project)

Over four years of project planning and development, Scribes of the Cairo Geniza has grown from an idea into an ongoing initiative. In this session, the PIs and project managers talk about how the Scribes team developed to support the project. What were its initial goals? How did they change? What worked and what didn’t? What were the unexpected takeaways?

Moderator: Jim Casey, Penn State University
Laurie Allen, Library of Congress
Samantha Blickhan, Zooniverse/Adler Planetarium
Laura Newman Eckstein, University of Pennsylvania
Emily Esten, University of Pennsylvania Libraries
Marina Rustow, Princeton University/Princeton Geniza Lab

Kerning Cultures Podcast (2020)

Skilliter Centre Seminars on the Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic, University of Cambridge (2021)

Jewish History Matters (2020)

New Books Network (2020)

Ottoman History Podcast (2020)

HARIF UK Association of MENA Jews (2020)

Seforimchatter (2020)

Stanford University Libraries (2020)

Columbia University (2020)

Bodleian Libraries (2020)

Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford (2019)

Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan (2019)

Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (2018)

Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, University of Pennsylvania Library (2018)

Hebrew University of Jerusalem Buber Fellows (2018)

UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies Avverroes Lecture Series (2017)

University of Haifa (2017)

Scribes of the Cairo Geniza (2017)

Mellon Sawyer Seminar Eurasian Manuscripts University of Iowa (2017)

Cambridge University Library (2017)

Cambridge University Library (2017)

National Archives and Research Libraries UK Conference "Discovering Collections Discovering Communities" DCDC16 (2017)

9th Annual Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age, University of Pennsylvania Library's Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts (2016)

Michelle Paymar, director (2016)

8th Annual Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age, University of Pennsylvania Library's Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts (2015)

NYU Abu Dhabi (2015)

All Things Considered (National Public Radio) (2015)

MacArthur Foundation (2015)

Bar Ilan University (2015)

Ancient Jew Review (2015)

Tel Aviv Review (2014)

BBC Radio 3: The Essay (2014)

Conservation Conversations at the Bard Graduate Center (2014)