Large-scale AI analysis to explore how centuries of knowledge passed through Jewish communities

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - A new National Endowment for the Humanities grant will enable a Brown University professor to lead a large-scale computational analysis of the ways in which knowledge and ideas were shared across Jewish communities from 200 to 2000 C.E.

Professor of Judaic Studies and Religious Studies Michael Satlow and a team of Israel-based scholars plan to develop advanced AI and natural language processing techniques - adapted for historical Hebrew and Aramaic sources - to analyze more than 130,000 texts spanning 18 centuries.

"Our research will map citation networks and patterns of influence across multiple genres of Jewish literature, different geographic regions and various scholarly traditions, revealing how knowledge and ideas spread, adapted and evolved across different cultural contexts," Satlow said.

Jewish texts - including correspondence, religious and civil law text, and biblical and Talmudic commentary - represent one of the longest continuous traditions of written scholarship in human history, he noted. While previous studies have demonstrated the potential of AI analysis for specific texts, this project has an expanded scope that examines thousands of texts from the Common Era.

The federal grant - awarded through a collaborative research funding program established by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities and the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation - will provide $249,956 to fund the three-year research project, titled "Knowledge Transmission and Cultural Interactions Through the Ages: An AI-Based Analysis of a Jewish Textual Corpus."

The joint grant program was established in 2022 to promote more collaboration in humanities research between American and Israeli scholars, according to the foundation.

Satlow will work with Israeli researchers Binyamin Katzoff, an associate professor at Bar-Ilan University; Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet, a professor at Bar-Ilan University; and Jonathan Schler, a professor at the Holon Institute of Technology.

The researchers intend to develop digital tools that will transform their findings into visualizations that will ultimately help scholars gain new insights into ancient texts, Satlow said.

"There is a set of questions that the tool will answer," Satlow said. "For example, 'Which rabbis are most significant in terms of being cited most?' But also, 'Which individuals are crucial for the network in terms of spreading knowledge from one place to another?' Using a big-data approach to identify those points has never been done before."

Satlow hopes the methodologies established through the research will be applicable to other areas of study within the humanities and social sciences.