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

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Past events

Change of rector in Bavarian

8 August 2025 Press Review

Although the change of rector from Prof. Dr. Werner Arnold to Dr. Andreas Brämer already took place last year, it is remarkable that it was also reported on two pages in the magazine Jüdisches Leben in Bayern in April, which has now been published online.

Click here for the article and the greeting from the President of the Central Council, Dr. Josef Schuster (pdf)

The magazine, which Benno Reicher has been journalistically responsible for since 2012, is published three times a year: for the Jewish New Year Rosh Hashanah in September, Hanukkah in December and Passover in April. It can certainly be seen as the successor to the Bayerische Israelitische Gemeindezeitung.

This in turn was first published in Munich on February 27, 1925 as a newsletter of the Jewish Community of Munich and the Association of Bavarian Jewish Communities, with a circulation of 4,500 copies.
Under the editors Ludwig Feuchtwanger and Eugen Schmidt, the liberal paper developed into a nationally respected voice of Jewish life. It combined articles on tradition and religious customs with articles on culture, society and current affairs. It was supplemented by reports from the synagogue communities, official notices, family news and advertisements.
In December 1937, the Nazi regime banned the newspaper.

Today, Jüdisches Leben in Bayern continues this tradition: The free, advertising-free association magazine of the State Association of Jewish Communities in Bavaria is aimed at members of the Jewish communities in Bavaria - and at an interested public far beyond.

Thankfully, the Goethe University in Frankfurt has archived all issues of the Bayerische Israelitische Gemeindezeitung. These include the penultimate issue from July 1, 1937, which describes a day in Israel: "Vom Leben der Arbeit in Eretz Israel". Click here for the complete issue (pdf)

A certain Dr. Willy Cohn from Breslau writes about a day in Kibbutz Giv'at Brenner, named after Josef Chaim Brenner, who was murdered by Arab civilians during the riots in Jaffa in 1921. Cohn, who alongside Klemperer is considered the most important chronicler of Nazi crimes, was deported with his family and murdered in Lithuania in 1941.