Rare Hebrew Texts To Become Available Online

One of the oldest surviving Hebrew manuscripts, a Tanach thought to be over 1,000 years old, will soon be available online in a joint project with The British Library in London, the National Library of Israel said this week.

Aviad Stollman, the library’s chief of collections, said the Gaster Bible would go online as part of a project to digitize all of the 3,200 rare Hebrew manuscripts at The British Library.

The National Library of Israel has partnered with the British Library in London to digitize its entire Hebrew manuscript collection, considered one of the largest and most significant in the world.

Most of the manuscripts date back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance era and include rare texts of Hebrew literature, prayer books, bibles, Talmud or biblical commentary, as well as texts on the Kabbalah.

The project is part of the Israeli library’s million-dollar global initiative to digitize and disseminate online tens of thousands of rare Hebrew manuscripts currently dispersed between hundreds of collections worldwide. The library has also partnered with libraries in other countries with significant Hebrew manuscript collections, such as Germany and Russia.

This article appeared in print on page 6 of the August 6th, 2015 edition of Hamodia.