
The Jewish Publication Society, a 120-year-old organization devoted to publishing ancient and modern texts on Jewish subjects, has begun work on a project to publish the Jewish Bible, or Tanakh, as an electronic, online text, integrating the original Hebrew with JPS’s English translation and selected commentaries. But the most radical part of the project is an ambitious plan to make the text of the Tanakh into an open platform for users of all stripes to collectively erect their own structure of commentary, debate and interpretation, all linked to the text itself. The publishers hope that the project will radically democratize the ancient process of Talmudic disputation by bringing it into cyberspace.
“The Talmud only had a limited amount of space to allow Rashi and Tosafot and the bigwigs of the Jewish world to have their interpretation,” said J.T. Waldman, director of JPS Interactive and the project. “Now we want to allow everybody to have a space at that table.”
The JPS project, nicknamed the “The JPS project would harness the enormous resources of the Internet — and, like Wikipedia, the collective energy of individual users. Those behind it hope to use the Hebrew Bible as a foundation for an online version of the beit midrash, the traditional house of study where Jews study sacred texts through a process of discussion and debate.
“If you’re able to bring to bear better information, to facilitate more questions and more engagement than in a printed text with a document about which we have a lot of information, then you have a chance to achieve a major goal, which is to imprint [the text] more deeply on someone’s mind and heart and to provoke a dialogue,” said Gregory Crane, editor-in-chief of the Perseus Project at Tufts University, a similar online effort with classical Greek and Roman texts, who has consulted with JPS on the Tanakh project. “It starts a chain reaction of inquiry that can pull you in.”The Tagged Tanakh has a long way to go before it sees the light of day. The project, in its current form, was conceived in November of 2007. In July 2008, JPS received a grant of $200,000 from the Ziering Family Foundation to put together a prototype and to work out a business plan.
According to JPS CEO and editor-and-chief Ellen Frankel, by the beginning of June 2009, JPS expects to make the first 20 chapters of the book of Exodus, tagged and with links to established commentaries, available for a limited group of testers. By early 2010, a preliminary version should be available to the public. It will take three to five years to get the Torah — the Bible’s first five books — tagged and online, and another five years to put up the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Frankel estimates the total cost at $2 million to $3 million.
Though JPS has a fairly clear concept of how it wants the project to turn out, there are major obstacles to navigate. JPS must figure out how to link across the original Hebrew and the English translation, how to screen users to ensure that their comments are appropriate, how to integrate existing software tools, and how to create an architecture flexible enough to incorporate new and unexpected functions that may not yet even exist.
The most unpredictable part of the project may be how people will actually use it. Will it be a path to serious engagement or succumb to the lowest-common denominator of discussion prevalent in many Internet forums?
Comment: I wish they consulted some Orthodox scholars to make this usable to Jewry as a whole. I would have advised that the classical commentators are formatted differently than the "comments of a nurse in Milwaukee", and that there be domains dedicated to various methods of commentary, pshat/drush/remez/sod, acedemic etc, as well as a way for readers to pre-view what they are about to see. Withouu attetion payed to ideological and methodological issues I expect this to turn into a Conservative romp-playground and an opportunity lost.
By the way, who are the bigwigs of the Jewish world and who does that mean? Ramban, Rashbam, Netsiv, Ohr HaChaim...? Disrespecting the classics at the very inception of the project is a bad sign.