November 24, 2008
MSU to Make Sacred Israelite Samaritan Documents Available Online
A team of faculty and students at Michigan State University has begun a pilot project that will provide online access to some of the world’s rarest religious documents, including three Israelite Samaritan Pentateuch scrolls dating from the 15th century.
The goal: to bring together religious studies scholars and members of the Israelite Samaritan community – two groups that have a significant stake in the cultural and scholarly value of the university’s Samaritan archive – through an online environment in which they can view and interpret the Samaritan texts, interact with members of their own communities, and interact with one another.
Written more than 500 years ago in Egypt and Syria, the three Pentateuchs that will be digitized belong to MSU’s Chamberlain Warren Samaritan Collection, the largest set of Samaritan material outside the Near East.
The team will supplement digital versions of the documents with a unique set of Web 2.0 tools, including social networking, tagging, social bookmarking, shared annotations, and multilingual support.
“We’re reimagining the archive as a location for community engagement,” says William Hart-Davidson, co-director of MSU’s Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) research center, which is leading the project, called “Archive 2.0.”
"The traditional model of an archive as a place of restricted access open only to a select group of scholars is no longer appropriate in light of new digital-age technologies. Instead, we see the web as a tool that can help those with a personal connection to archival material engage directly with that material as part of a thriving social network.”
The project was recently awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that will underwrite development and testing of the online archive as well as a campus visit by representatives of the Israelite Samaritan community in November.
The Chamberlain Warren collection includes a variety of religious and liturgical material used by Samaritans, including Passover prayers, prayers and hymns for the Day of Atonement, parts of the Defter, and liturgy and instructions for the Festival of Booths,” says Robert T. Anderson, professor emeritus of religious studies and the author of Tradition Kept: The Literature of the Samaritans (2005) and The Keepers: An Introduction to the History and Culture of the Samaritans (2002).
It also features a piece of marble with a Samaritan inscription dating from the 3rd to 6th centuries and a brass scroll case inlaid with silver dating from the 16th century (images below).
The collection was donated to MSU in 1950 by E. K. Warren, a wealthy businessman from Three Oaks, Michigan, who first met the Samaritans during a visit to Ottoman Palestine in 1901.
Archive 2.0 team members include Jim Ridolfo, PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Writing and WIDE research assistant; Michael McLeod, head software developer for WIDE; and a seven-member advisory group that includes religious studies scholars, librarians, archivists, and members of the Israelite Samaritan community.
Ridolfo conceived and developed the project with the support of Hart-Davidson.
Samaritans claim descent from the Northern Tribes of Israel, whose political autonomy ended with the invasion of the Assyrians in 722 BC. Often in tension with the Jews of the Southern Kingdom of Judah, they nevertheless shared with the Jews an acceptance of the sacredness of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) and a celebration of common festivals. By the first century BC, the schism between the two groups had become fixed and each community preserved independent scriptural and ritual traditions.
Once numbering in the tens of thousands, today only several hundred Samaritans live in the West Bank and Israel, most in Nablus and Holon.
The project is supported by Benyamim Tsedaka, director of the A.B. Samaritan Institute in Holon, Israel, and includes the local assistance of Sharon Sullivan Dufour of Brighton, Mich., the institute’s North American representative.
MSU's Chamberlain Warren Samaritan Collection includes this piece of marble dating from before the sixth century. It bears an inscription from Exodus and may have been part of a synagogue doorway.
Detail of a brass scroll case inlaid with silver dating from the 16th century.