The Friedberg Judeo-Arabic Corpus

The Friedberg Judeo-Arabic Corpus

The Friedberg Genizah Project is pleased to announce the launching of a new website: The Friedberg Judeo-Arabic Corpus Website, freely accessible to all through http://www.jewishmanuscripts.org, pending registration (if you already have a user name and a password for the Genizah website, you don't need to register again).

For the purposes of the corpus, "Judeo-Arabic" refers to works written mostly between the eighth and the eighteenth century, both in classical Arabic and in the day-to-day spoken dialect, with Hebrew characters (using diacritical marks for Arabic letters that have no equivalent ones in Hebrew), instead of Arabic ones.

This first version of the site contains 110 works in Judeo-Arabic, among them works of Maimonides, Saadya Gaon, Yehuda Halevi, and many others, totaling almost 4 million words, with a lexicon (list of different words) of more than 280,000 words. The complete list of these works, with the relevant bibliographical details, appear in the site.

The corpus is accompanied by an advanced full-text search system that can search for words and phrases and display their occurrences in the corpus (or in selected parts thereof) with suitable one-line contexts and various statistics.

The contexts can be sorted by the word following or preceding the keyword, and can be enlarged to display an entire logical unit of that text.

For almost every page of every work in the corpus, an image is available that can be viewed side-by-side with its transcription, for comparison purposes. Easy and efficient browsing in all these works is also available.

For more information on all the functions available in the site and their various parameters see the site's Homepage.

In the first stage, the site will contain Judeo-Arabic works that have already appeared in print, focusing on works that were written up to the 16th century.

With time, the corpus will be expanded, hopefully encompassing all Judeo-Arabic titles in the mentioned group.

We wish to thank Haggai ben-Shammai and David Sklare for their help in compiling the nucleus of the list of works to be included in the corpus and for placing at our disposal copies of some rare editions of these works.

The site was developed and is maintained by "Genazim Digital," the Computing Unit of the Friedberg Genizah Project, led by Professor Yaacov Choueka.

הקורפוס לערבית-יהודית Judeo-Arabic Corpus

ביבלי' לערבית-יהודית Judeo-Arabic Biblio.