Lectures by Prof. George Brooke (Manchester) and Prof. Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (EPHE)

The Qumran Institute is glad to announce two special lectures to be given in the Court Room of the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies on 9 February 2023. From 11-12:00 Prof. George Brooke will give his final Dirk Smilde lecture on the Dead Sea Scrolls and comparativism. We will be back from 13:30-14:30 with a lecture by Prof. Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra on his new ERC Synergy Grant. Please find the abstract for both lectures below. For questions please contact a.w.aksu rug.nl  

George Brooke - The Scrolls and Comparative Studies: Issues concerning Uniqueness and Multiplicity

This lecture builds on the argument of earlier Smilde lectures that the Dead Sea Scrolls provide a distinctive opportunity for comparative work that could greatly enhance the modern understanding of the late Second Temple period. The Scrolls provide an anchor for one side of any comparative exercise. The lecture focusses in particular on the problems of uniqueness and multiplicity. Developing the insights of Jonathan Z. Smith on the unique as an entirely disposable attribute, the talk considers in detail on the one hand the claims of those scholars who consider the pesharim from the Qumran caves as sui generis and unique and on the other hand a recent monograph on the Damascus Document in which the term 'unique' is used multiple times but with little or no benefit for the reader. The discussion of the multiplicity of textual forms of several compositions from the Qumran caves also attempts to demonstrate that an explanation other than that each form is 'unique' is required in order to provide an adequate analysis of the phenomena.

Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra - ERC SyG MiDRASH - Migrations of Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script

The National Library of Israel has already digitized some 100,000 manuscripts in Hebrew (as well as Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, and other Jewish languages) located in libraries around the globe as part of its Ktiv project. However, making their contents accessible to researchers and laypersons for detailed study remains a monumental challenge.

In this six-year computational-humanities project, funded to the tune of over 10 million Euro by the European Research Council, we aim to achieve the following goals:

• Convert the writing appearing in the images of a large fraction of those manuscripts into searchable text — including as much as possible of interlinear insertions and marginal comments. This will require significant improvements in the state-of-the-art of computerized page segmentation and handwritten-text recognition.
• Have the computer compare the multitude of texts to find quotations, paraphrases, borrowings, allusions, and other intertextual relations. These can be made available to people browsing or studying the texts.
• Train computer algorithms to analyze handwriting so as to determine where and when each manuscript was written — down to the century and the country. This will involve synergetic feedback between human paleographers and modern neural-network machine learning, teaching the computer to detect the features that have been identified by experts throughout the manuscripts, identifying outliers, and explaining machine classifications in human-understandable terms.
• Train computer algorithms to analyze the texts for linguistic (lexical, morphological, and syntactic) features that can be used in text searches and which can help place literary works in their historical context.
• With the above resources in hand, several case studies will be undertaken to map out the migration and evolution of texts and ideas within medieval Jewish communities.

The results of this project — data as well as algorithms — will be made available to the public.

The lecture is open to all. Guests do not need to sign up.
There will also be a livestream via this link.