Corpus Masoreticum. The Inculturation of Masora into Jewish Law and Lore from the 11th to the 14th Centuries. Digital Reconstruction of a Forgotten Intellectual Culture

Funded by the German Research Foundation

This project began in 2018 and is scheduled to run for 12 years. The aim is to conduct the first philological study of the Western European Masoretic tradition between the 11th and 14th centuries. In the first two funding phases, the richly decorated calligraphic Ashkenazic Bibles, the linear Masora and the micrographic Masora figurata illustrations in various manuscripts were examined philologically. The Masora figurata as well as significant parts of the linear Masora magna from nine medieval manuscripts have been transcribed and made available to the public in open access. So far, groundbreaking results have been achieved with regard to researching the philological quality of the Masora figurata as well as its exegetical and pedagogical function in various manuscripts.

As a digital project, Corpus Masoreticum is supported by a highly scalable digital cloud infrastructure that covers the entire workflow for the management of manuscript holdings, transcriptions, analyses and publications. Its centerpiece, the digital scholarly editing workspace BIMA 2.1, is based on three fundamental concepts: 1. IIIF-compatible manuscript repositories, 2. SVG-TextPath transcriptions, 3. a Neo4j graph database based on a loosely coupled text-as-a-graph data model. To date, BIMA 2. 1 hosts 112 manuscripts and displays over 7,000 (partially or fully transcribed) pages with almost 300,000 transcription lines, of which more than 500 pages have already been published under an Open Access Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 license:

Corpus Masoreticum & BIMA 2.1

The computational toolkits have been enhanced by the implementation of methods and algorithms such as machine text recognition (HTR) and correspondence analysis/seriation of lemma features.

Corpus Masoreticum runs its own publication series: Corpus Masoreticum Working Papers

[Übersetzen nach: English] Isaac ben Simeon ha-Levi’s micrographic decoration opening Genesis. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Urb. ebr. 1, fol. 1r (snapshot from BIMA 2.0: The colours indicate different masoretic lists).

[Übersetzen nach: English] Dr. Ilona Steimann in Genoa, Berio Library.

KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER ACTIVITIES AND OUTREACH:

Multimedia contributions for the Corpus Masoreticum

Dokumentationsvideos

Documentary videos, in which the aims and methods of the project as well as individual artifacts are presented, provide the interested non-specialist public with insights into the fascinating world of Jewish biblical interpretation, the masora figurata and the Hebrew book and knowledge culture of the Middle Ages.

"When Bible meets literature - Yaaqov's and Esaw's unknown pages", series "Madda ba-Bayit" 'Wissenschft zu Hause' of the Central Council of Jews in Germany: https://youtu.be/yOk0ZXdAxuE

Documentary videos from the various projects:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCalER-_CjwOedcaZrGBG0nQ
https://t1p.de/BIMA-Video1
https://t1p.de/BIMA-Video2

Multimedia online exhibition: "Versunkene Schätze: Die hebräische Buchkultur des mittelalterlichen Judentums in Westeuropa"

Visit the online exhibition

The Chair of "Bible and Jewish Biblical Interpretation" took the anniversary of "1700 years of Jewish life in Germany" as an opportunity to present the subject area of the material heritage of Ashkenazi Judaism to a wider public. In this context, an online exhibition was created to present Jewish scholarly culture in a multimedia format using Hebrew medieval manuscripts.

As a means of academic communication, the project has set itself the goal of not only addressing the painful history of Judaism in relation to ecclesiastical power, but also making the positive aspects of cultural and theological synergies visible: The exhibition artistically and aesthetically juxtaposes the antagonism of church and Judaism with the image of a culturally fruitful interdependence between the respective environmental cultures and the Jewish educational society, which has only begun to be recognized and appreciated so far.

Concept and text: Prof. Dr. Hanna Liss; web design, video & audio production: Clemens Liedtke, M.A.

Current events of the Corpus Masoreticum

All Events

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Past events

Research Colloquium Winter Semester 2025/26

3 December 2025 News Announcement

3 Mondays, scholars from all areas of Jewish Studies will present their research - B.A. students will meet Master's students, PhD students, research assistants and professors - interested parties will gain insights into a wide range of topics and have the opportunity to ask questions and participate in discussions.

Everyone is cordially invited to attend one or more sessions!

Program

Monday, December 8, 2025

09.30 - 11.00
Natalia Ivashkevich, M.A.
Heidelberg University for Jewish Studies
Intertextual Connections: Anton Chekhov and Sholem Aleichem

11.30 - 13.00
Nadezhda Bezuevskaia, M.A.
Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies / Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies
The Works of Fiction by Ruth Behar: Jewish Child Migration, Cultural Memory, and Family Lore of Latin American Women Writers

14.00 - 15.30
Patrick Locher, B.A.
Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies / University of Heidelberg
The Tombstone of Meshullam ben Kalonymos. Observations and theses

15.45 - 17.15
Milena Engel, B.A.
University of Heidelberg
Possibilities and limitations of sources on Jewish students at the University of Heidelberg (1933-1938)

17.30 - 19.00
Noah Knodel, B.A.
University of Heidelberg
Colonialism without empire? Zionist self-positioning between emancipation and land appropriation (1921-1935)

Monday January 12, 2026

09.30 - 11.00
Johannes Müller, M.A.
Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies / University of Frankfurt
David Qimchi's commentary on Psalms - genesis, tradition, thematic focus and impact

11.30 - 13.00
David Bindrim, PhD
Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies
Language, Dialect, or Variety? The status of Ugaritic in the Semitic language family

14.00 - 15.30
Timon Wulf, B.A.
University of Heidelberg
Theodor Heuss and Judaism

15.45 - 17.15
David Gilinsky, M.A. (Cantab) / MScR
Heidelberg University for Jewish Studies
Hibatullah Abu'l Barakat al-Baghdadi: His Judeo-Arabic Perush on Kohelet (1143 CE)

17.30 - 19.00
Hannah-Lea Wasserfuhr, PhD
Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies
The production and marketing of Jewish ritual objects between the 1870s and 1930s

Monday February 2, 2026

09.30 - 11.00
Silvia Negri, PhD
Heidelberg University for Jewish Studies
Tracing Intellectual Circulations Between Provence and Italy: First Steps Toward a Cartography of Ideas

11.30 - 13.00
Imen Ben Temelliste, PhD
Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies
Out of the Shadows of History: Jews of Tunisia between 1940-1943

14.00 - 15.30
Sören Gero Bartneck, M.A.
University of Graz
The institutional history of the development of German-language post-war Jewish studies 1945 - 1971

15.45 - 17.15
Yuliana Mosheeva
Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design
Anti-Semitic image patterns in text-to-image models of generative AI

17.30 - 19.00
Prof. Dr. Hanna Liss
Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies
A Jewish vernacular translation? Hebrew-French Bible glossaries and their use in Jewish education