Automatic Paleographic Exploration of Genizah Manuscripts

The Cairo Genizah is a collection containing approximately 250,000 hand-written fragments of mainly Jewish texts discovered in the late 19th century. The fragments are today spread out in some 75 libraries and private collections worldwide, and there is an ongoing effort to document and catalogue all extant fragments. Paleographic information plays a key role in the study of the Genizah collection. Script style, and – more specifically – handwriting, can be used to identify fragments that might originate from the same original work. Such matched fragments, commonly referred to as “joins”, are currently identified manually by experts, and presumably only a small fraction of existing joins have been discovered to date. In this work, we show that automatic handwriting matching functions, obtained from non-specific features using a corpus of writing samples, can perform this task quite reliably. In addition, we explore the problem of grouping various Genizah document by script style, without being provided any prior information about the relevant styles. The results show that the automatically obtained grouping agrees, for the most part, with the paleographic taxonomy. In cases where the system fails, it is due to apparent similarities between related scripts.