So for the last year, I’ve been working on a series of tests to determine how well some popular and some less well-known web browsers perform in supporting the technology for displaying Hebrew text. In particular, I’m interested to see which browsers are failing to use a web standard called CSS @font-face to properly display Unicode Hebrew fonts that support the full range of Hebrew diacritics and which contain excellent font logic for diacritical positioning. I’m also keen on seeing which browsers might even be failing at recognizing bidirectional (BIDI) and right-to-left (RTL) text, given that Hebrew is read RTL and it’s not uncommon to find עִבְרִית and other left-to-right (LTR) languages written together with one another.

With these tests I also hoped to find some simple way by which an individual browsing the web could troubleshoot whether the problem is in their browser, their browser’s settings, or in a web page, when they find a web page that is poorly displaying Hebrew. I learned a great deal in the process and so I also made a page for web designer/coders to learn the correct way to craft a web page that will correctly display Hebrew.

Image: "Copyright Khaf" by Aharon Varady (License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

Last Sukkot 5771 (2011), Efraim Feinstein shared the sourcesheet for his late night shiur (lesson) on copyright in Rabbinic Halakhah (Jewish law). Efraim’s research adds a great deal of important perspective to our work here on the Open Siddur Project. It provides relevant historical context for our work advocating the adoption of free culture principles and free-culture licenses to facilitate sharing (tachlis) within the Jewish world.

Efraim’s sourcesheet is shared (along with the TEX formatted source code and content for his sourcesheet) via his account on tumblr. For the sake of redundancy and redistribution, here is a direct link to downloading a PDF of his sourcesheet:

DOWNLOAD: PDF | TEX (source).

It’s called, Freedom. It’s kind of funny because you’d think it’s an add-on module but it’s actually a core part of the game’s storyline. Yes, there’s tension with it, but that’s the beauty of it. Even in the game, Freedom isn’t free. There are costs, dangers to unrestricted creativity.  That’s why there’s a ruleset — to help keep everyone considerate, playing nice. It mandates… discipline. That’s the tricky part. Because discipline is important in helping players gain experience points, really mature as players. But if they’re not using the Freedom that comes with the game, then the game’s reduced to discipline for its own sake. Ouraboros. The snake devours its own tale. All the Freedom to imagine, create, share, and improve is swallowed up in an ocean of elite pedantry.

Image: Pharaoh's Imagination by Aharon Varady (License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

Don’t you remember? The story of our gaming ancestors, slaving under a wicked dungeon master, Pharaoh? Some game masters let it go to their head. Just because they’re the storyteller, they think they’re writing the story. They’re not. The game — it’s a collaborative adventure. The story is all around us… we’re part of the telling. The game is about trying to make it a happily ever after story, after all. Because, you know, that’s not guaranteed. There’s more than one possible ending.

So what happened? A frustrated gamer, Moshe, figures out his fellow players are trapped in a game loop engineered by Pharaoh. This realization frees him but not his fellow players, so he runs. Far. He explores the edge of the gameworld, the place called Midbar. Where speech comes from. Where undeveloped narratives spawn endlessly, a grazing pasture for flocks and imaginations. There, Moshe discovers an anomaly, a fire burning but not consuming a small bush. Is it a bug in the game? He takes a closer look. Then suddenly, the story goes meta. There’s a storyteller narrating the story he’s living, the story Pharaoh thinks he’s telling. The Storyteller reveals to Moshe the key to unlocking the level. It seems risky. Fellow players are skeptical. But the key to breaking the level is… you guessed it: Freedom. Freedom to leave the rules of the wicked, game master Pharaoh behind for just one high-carb, community celebrating weekend of Freedom – a GameCon in the magical Midbar. A change of perspective, a taste of freedom to expand your mind.

And so the story went. Denied Freedom for one weekend, the Storyteller intervenes, helps defeat the boss, break the level. The players are finally free from Pharaoh, but still imprisoned by old, poor gaming habits and player expectations. The players were undisciplined… a mess. They kind of liked the familiar structure of Pharaoh’s simple rules, despite their inability to innovate and improve their game, grow their characters. So, the Storyteller sets Moshe up as a new game master to teach a new way of playing. He explains three new game challenges to refine their player characters and explore their potential with Freedom: Manna, an single person game exercising responsibility in gathering one’s own ephemeral food resources, ethically. Shabbat, a single/multi-player game preparing a castle in Time to rest, reboot, and reflect on one’s creative potential. Mishkan, a multi-player game constructing a castle in Space for everyone to collaborate and share with one another all they were inspired to create with their new-found Freedom.

Freedom. It saves us. It rescues our intentions from being enslaved to someone else’s narrative. It liberates our creative imagination – the oxygen we breathe. Freedom. It saves gaming communities from even the best game’s two worst tendencies: 1) to limit creativity out of a feared loss in overall game quality, correct play, and authentic game experience, and 2) to require such complex obedience that play is limited to elite code mavens and robots.

But nowadays, Freedom in the game has been so diminished by a lack of creative engagement that many players don’t even realize they’re playing a game, even when someone gets hurt. There are those who walk away from the game, and embarrassed they know little besides the game’s rules and its discipline, simply despise it. There are those who loosely identify with the game, but who don’t know or don’t care to play it out of ignorance for its rules. Some fear the game will alienate them from their innate creative selves. Others know the game’s story as observers, cheerleaders, critics, but rarely as participants. Some mistake the game for a meta-game dedicated to the survival of the community of gamers – and have little invested in the game itself. They all enjoy Freedom outside the game, knowing little to nothing of Freedom within it.

And then there are those who are dedicated, serious players. They play the game happily, decorating their play, making their every move a thing of beauty. And some through their passion will choose or craft a different, even esoteric, edition of the game’s rulesets. Tension between gamers playing with forked rulesets is a familiar problem in a lot of games. Usually, serious players have really good perspectives and abilities they’ve honed in each of their particular communities. When players with divergent experiences, priorities, and values develop their own rules for playing together, they usually develop respect for one another and realize with joy they have a lot to learn from one another. They enrich each others game immeasurably. That master gamer, BZ of Mah Rabu, talks about it in his Hilkhot Pluralism. The key is making a space, a Maqom, where gamers are free to share. See? Freedom. It redeems the game from it’s own self-destructive tendencies.

A maqom — a holy space — for sharing? The Open Siddur Project, now, that’s what I’m talking about. Here’s an example of a space for free sharing of inspired creativity, a mishkan built out of inspired creativity, cultivated and maintained over the Internet. Where all your spell books, game maps and modules – in any languages ever used for the game –- can be used with the game. Gamers can adopt, adapt, and redistribute what they’ve modified. Everyone sharing has given their permission to do that upfront. See? Lo tignov –- no stealing. Sharing! Everyone appreciates each others creativity, their desire to contribute. It follows the game rule: Gemilut Ḥassadim — act with loving-kindness.

The Open Siddur Project’s already started sharing via their website. Yeah, their application is pre-Alpha, 0.4.1. But when it hits 1.0 it will be kick-ass! And because the code for their platform and toolkit is open source (with an LGPL license), other gamers can build on their work, and all that creative investment can be reused, recycled. It follows the game rule: bal tashchit — never waste! Never fail to appreciate the hard work invested in another’s craft and creation.

See, there will always be little pharaohs looking to pwn the Game. To lock it down, make it their own, proprietary gold farm. A black box, closed to innovation, perhaps even to inspection. It’s happened before. When the inner workings of the game become so hard to understand that only an elite can game it. When gamers forget they are playing it willingly, you know, to grow, because it’s fun, imaginative, creative.

Theoretically, it should be hard to pwn the Game. It’s a role-playing game –- open ended. There are no winners. But there are surely losers –- if the bar to playing it well is set to high. If players can’t own their experience, engage their innate creative and emotional intelligence in it. You know, what some folks call spirituality. For those who feel that the price of Freedom is the loss of an authentic game experience, then the consequence will be an increasingly oppressive and dangerous game experience. Ultimately, creativity is deadened, imagination defeated. Gamers minds enslaved within the prison of a Pharaoh’s imagination. Their’s is a mentality of mitzrayim – constriction.

Creative Commons By Attribution ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)	Share your work under the condition that all future derivative works correctly credit you and attribute your original work. All derivative works must be shared with this same license. The CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license is an internationally applicable, remix friendly, free/libre compatible, copyleft.
Creative Commons By Attribution (CC BY)	Share your work under the condition that any first generation derivative work correctly credit you and attribute your original work. The CC-BY 3.0 Unported license is internationally applicable and remix friendly with content shared under other free/libre licenses.
Creative Commons Zero (CC0)	Share your work without any conditions. The CC0 is a Public Domain dedication.

The Open Siddur Project and other like minded projects that believe in free-as-in-libre culture, make sure to protect the freedoms of their contributing users. They ask them to preserve their intent to keep their work free for creative reuse by choosing any one of three complementary licenses appropriate to the type of content shared and their desire for credit and correct attribution in derivative works.

For example, an internationally recognized license, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 3.0 Unported license, uses Copyright Law to legally protect a creator’s intention to share their work, ensuring it remains open instead of closed, to keep it free for creative reuse instead of for proprietary exploitation, and to “Share Alike” – requiring all derivative works to properly attribute the original work, and credit the original creator. Significantly, the license allows the work to be used commercially, even as the work remains free for creative reuse. This freedom permits the work to truly be free — unchained — and be disseminated and remixed within the vast ocean of creative work available to human imagination. Another license, the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 3.0 Unported license, requires attribution but permits creators of derivative works to choose their own license. A third license, Creative Commons Zero (CC0) empowers a creator to take their work out of the domain of Copyright and dedicate their work to the Public Domain where anyone can use it in a derivative work however they like with none of the obligations to attribute or “Share Alike.”

To grow and remain healthy, collaborative projects need to be open for inspection and free for creative innovation. Growing, just as symbiotic organisms grow. Healthy, just as non-parasitic organisms sustain themselves – by creating energy and opportunities for others in their ecosystem. In this game, the opportunities we create are the product of our creative engagement. In our creative ecosystem, everything and everyone builds on each others work.

Free/libre licenses are crucial because under Copyright Law, everything created is closed and proprietary by default. In short, the law makes a Pharaoh out of each of us, whether we want to be or not. It makes sense when we need a monopoly over creative work we do not want others to share, modify, and redistribute. But keeping creative work closed and proprietary is counterproductive for collaborative projects: like games, or religions.

Take a work out of the creative cycle today and one almost guarantees its obscurity as an orphaned work. Those not shared with free-as-in-libre licenses must endure two human lifetimes before they can be creatively reused. Under Copyright Law, everything we create is taken out of the cycle for our entire lives plus 70 years (or 95 years for corporations). How does that help make for creative collaboration in a living breathing community? It doesn’t. Those naïve pharaohs who hope their work will be adopted for communal use but who refuse the Freedom of gaming communities and players to adapt it, are deluding themselves. They truly don’t know the Name of the Game. By forgetting to value Freedom, creativity, and collaboration, they undermine the game itself.

What am I saying? Heresy? Heaven forfend. Do I look like a game master? No, I’m a player character, all the way. Not that I find it easy to find a good game master these days. To game well, I read books, manuals, zines, blogs – and try to build good lasting relationships with my fellow gamers. I’ve been finding more and more players who play because they are passionate about the game and not because they’re slaves to it. But I digress. All I’m saying is, we can do this. We can play this game.

Which of the above Creative Commons licensing option conflicts with the entire copyleft and free/libre license ecosystem? (Image by Aharon Varady, licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

The Jewish digital media community is young. Welcome to it! Those of you who are posting and innovating now are the trend-setters for the near-term. In addition, as long as the material you and your “students” produce remains relevant, the length of the copyright term will ensure that licensing restrictions placed on your data now last well beyond your lifetime, The community will learn, and I hope to convince you that the non-commercial (NC) term of use sets a dangerous precedent going forward.

The community is currently undergoing a transition from resources that are simply “free as in beer” (do not cost money to download and use) but place restrictions on what can be done with their content (examples here) to resources that recognize the educational and cultural value of remixing. The educational arguments in favor of remixability are remarkably similar to the philosophy of free culture, although they differ in focus. Our community, however, has not yet fully embraced the values of user freedom, and is subject to the confusion created by the choice offered in the spectrum of rights that Creative Commons licenses offer. The Creative Commons brand is recognized, but the differences in terms between the various licenses are not, leading to unhelpful suggestions like “use a Creative Commons license,” without specification of which one. While Creative Commons uses a logo to distinguish its free licenses from its non-free licenses, the brand name itself is still more recognizable than this logo.

One argument that I have heard promoting the use of the non-commercial term is the fear of a larger bogeyman. The identity of this bogeyman differs depending on who is making the argument. For content developers, the bogeyman is often a large publishing house. The new media entrepreneur worries that a larger publishing house will either take their free data and undercut their price or sell their free data without returning anything to its source.

This argument does not distinguish between two types of relationships with commercial entities: simple “commercial use” and “exploitation.” The free culture community answers the exploitation argument by proposing copyleft, also known as ShareAlike. Under copyleft licenses, any derived works of the original work must be released under the same terms as the original. What was once free remains free. The large publishing house bogeyman who publishes a copylefted work must allow the person who received the work to copy, modify, sell, and create derivative works of your work, just like any other user. Their intellectual improvements to the work can therefore be reincorporated into the original, diluting any advantage of the large publishing house’s version aside from the unique value added by their version (such as the fact that it’s a physical bound copy). In addition to the optional copyleft, all Creative Commons licenses except for the “Creative Commons Zero” (CC0) public domain declaration have anti-DRM clauses that prohibit adding digital rights/restrictions management that disallow users from exercising their rights under the license, so a third party is prevented from Tivo-izing your material.

Further, publishing houses that make use of your data can become your supporters. If your project provides them with useful data now, you will likely be able to provide them with useful data in the future, forming symbiotic relationships between publishers and content creators and aggregators.

Non-commercial use restrictions are particularly dangerous in combination with the ShareAlike term, as is the case in the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) license. The reason is that the ShareAlike term ensures that derivative works are released under the same terms as the original. Overuse of the CC-BY-NC-SA license will result in two copyleft ghettos that cannot be mixed with each other: one that allows commercial use and one that does not. The existence of the non-commercial partially-free ghetto can only lead to duplication of effort and waste, both by commercial and non-commercial entities.

Don't make your copyleft, copywrong. License with a CC-BY-SA license instead of the CC-BY-NC-SA (Image by Aharon Varady, licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported.)

One proposed resolution to the varying interpretations of the NC term is for the creator to spell out what is expected. MIT OpenCourseWare is one such example of a well thought out model. However, even this liberal interpretation of the NC term blocks innovation and remixability by a large class of users for purposes which provide for the social good but involve an exchange of money beyond at-cost.

The real difference between MIT’s model and the model of many free resources in the Jewish community is that, it seems to me, MIT intends not to limit commercial use, but to reserve rights to commercial use. MIT is acting as a distributor for a collective of a relatively small number of copyright holders (the faculty) who themselves may have outside commercial interests in the material. Because only a few are involved and they are easily found, the NC license invites commercial users to obtain a separate licensing agreement for commercial publication. The NC term is creating a permission culture for commercial use of the work that is separate from the (semi-)free culture of its non-commercial use. Many content creators and aggregators in the Jewish community have no commercial interest in the work, which requires a different thought process from an entity that wants to reserve commercial rights.

A community-driven project that uses an NC term is in an even harder position. Not only is it content-incompatible with truly free resources, including Wikipedia, but it is also limited in what it in itself can do with derivative works of its own creation, once it has accepted a contribution from an outside contributor under the NC terms. For community-created works, there is no single author with whom to negotiate.

Further confusion is generated by the equation in many previous “free” resources of “non-profit” with “non-commercial.” With the advent of new business models, the lines between various entities with social purpose are increasingly blurred. This is the era of the “social enterprise.” While traditional non-profits rely on grants and donations to ensure their continued functioning, many social enterprises prefer to ensure their future sustainability by offering products on the market that help their social mission. A no-commercial use copyright term prevents these enterprises from transacting business with your data unless they negotiate separate terms as described above.

Whatever your form of legal incorporation (if any), it is hard to argue that you have envisioned 100% of the uses of your data from now until 70 years after your death. By blocking commercial use of materials, an entire group of social enterprises has been cut off from any use of your data, no matter how innovative.

For the reasons outlined above, I urge you to avoid licenses that restrict commercial use. If you are worried about exploitation, choose a license with a copyleft (ShareAlike) term.

In Pirkei Avot,^[1] Rabi Yehoshua ben Levi teaches that the 48th quality of the 48 qualities defining excellent students is they should correctly attribute the source of their knowledge.^[2] Failing to do so threatens to “dissolve the world.” In the rabbinic understanding of cosmogony, creation itself is the product of exegesis. In Genesis Rabbah, the Creator looked into the Torah to create the world. The process of exegesis, requires attribution, and so without correct attribution by the Creator to the Torah, the product of the exegesis — the universe — dissolves. The importance of attribution doesn’t get any more tachlis (fundamental) than that.

Rabi Yehoshua ben Levi proceeds to exemplify this teaching by attributing the 48th quality to Queen Esther who in the second chapter of the Scroll of Esther, verse 21, foils the coup de tat of Bightan and Teresh — by relaying warning of the coup to King Aḥashverosh in the name of Mordeḥai. Had Mordeḥai not been correctly credited with notifying the king of the murderous plot, he would not have received his belated thanks in chapter 6,^[3] and Haman would not have endured the embarrassment that presages his downfall. A long chain of events connects the seemingly insignificant action of Queen Esther to the salvation of the Jewish people. The implicit lesson is that our everyday actions matter. The explicit message is that it behooves us to act correctly, especially in regards to attribution of credit.

In the world of academic scholarship, correct attribution is a fundamental ethic. Ignoring it would quickly tear apart the tower of intellect upon which the babel of human knowledge ascends to heaven. The need for correct attribution is of course, no less in new and creative Jewish works. Whether you’re making a translation in a source sheet for a lecture or shir, designing a Hebrew font, crafting your very own siddur, or developing software that helps others craft their own siddur, it behooves you to correctly attribute any sources included in your work or from which your work derives.

The need for correct attribution is widespread and that is one important reason why a requirement for correct attribution is now enshrined in a set of legally binding licenses which creators use to share their work in the world and over the Internet. The significance of these licenses is that by enshrining language assuring attribution, they help to promote sharing. And sharing is of fundamental importance to receiving Torah. As the Gerrer Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, teaches in his Sfas Emes in his d’var torah on Parshat Terumah:

The Midrash Tanḥuma quotes: “I have given you good lekaḥ (teaching)” (Proverbs 4:2). [Lekaḥ can also refer to something acquired by purchase.] It then offers a parable of two merchants, one who has silk and the other peppers. Once they exchange their goods, each is again deprived of that which the other has. But if there are two scholars, one who has mastered the Order of Seeds and the other who knows the Order of Festivals, once they teach each other, each has both orders.

The point is that each one of Israel has a particular portion within Torah, yet it is also Torah that joins all our souls together. That is why Torah is called “perfect, restoring the soul” (Psalms 19:8). We become one through the power of Torah; it is “an inheritance of the assembly of Yaakov” (Deuteronomy 33:4). We receive from one another the distinctive viewpoint that belongs to each of us.^[4]

This is an important lesson to learn. However, when a new work is created, the law doesn’t assume that work was intended for sharing with attribution. Instead, that work is immediately protected as private property — not only for the lifetime of the creator, but also for 70 years after their death^[5] — כֹּל זְכוּיוֺת שוֺמְרוֺת, Kol zchuyot shomrot, all rights reserved — to reproduce, distribute, and create derivative works based on it are forbidden, without the explicit written consent of the creator. As stated before here at the Open Siddur Project, this might make sense for creators of new works and music, but it hardly makes sense for cultural projects with communal objectives which rely heavily and assert their authority on the authenticity of works in the Public Domain. The teaching and practice of Judaism is one such communal project. The promise of the Open Siddur Project relies on our sharing creative works and access to the vast corpus of work that we’ve inherited from our creative ancestors. That is why we so heavily depend and advocate for the adoption of open source, free/libre, and copyleft^[6] licenses — so that creative work, protected by default under Copyright law, can nevertheless be shared by creators who give their explicit permission to others to adopt, adapt, study, and attribute their work in new works that are similarly shared and distributed.

To help creators of new works navigate the panoply of free/libre, open source, and copyleft licenses, I made a decision tree flowchart as an image map with clickable links to respective licenses and relevant articles. The tree was inspired by a decision tree by Terry Hancock, which accompanied his article, “Choosing and Using Free Licenses for Software, Hardware, and Aesthetic works.”^[7] Readers of this article are recommended to read Hancock’s follow-up essay, “Confusion and Complexity: High time to prune the Creative Commons licenses?“

The code for this demo is open source. For more information on hacking this code, see our wiki

Copyright protection is provided (without application) under the Israel Copyright Law and Copyright Ordinance for any original literary or dramatic work for the life of the creator plus 70 years (50 years for musical and artistic works). Separate legislation protects moral rights.

Copyright is the sole right to produce or reproduce the protected work in any material form; to perform, or for a lecture, to deliver the work in public; and for an unpublished work, to publish. Copyright includes translation rights, conversion into, or from, a dramatic work and the making of audio recordings and films. Computer programs in all stages are considered literary works. Exemptions from copyright protection include any fair dealings with works for the purposes of private study, research, criticism, review or newspaper summary. Civil remedies for infringement include injunction and damages, and penal sanctions can be applied in certain circumstances.^[3]

Revisions to Israeli copyright made in 2008 do not apply to this song. Coincidentally, 2055 is also the year Banu Ḥoshekh L’Garesh would enter the Public Domain in the U.S.; works first published between 1923 and 1978 outside the U.S. by foreign nationals are protected for 95 years after their publication date.^[4]

Given the song’s popularity it might seem remarkable that this work isn’t in the Public Domain. Translations of Banu Ḥoshekh L’garesh are not uncommon despite the apparent lack of translation rights provided to translators. This all underlines how copyright is regularly ignored in the living practice of creative cultures. And yet, copyright law and the protections it affords are ignored at the peril of a copyrighted work’s remixers, publishers, translators, and other creatives. Both the song and an anonymous English translation are here being provided as an example for this article on copyright under Fair Use.

Each individual contribution to our collective intellectual commons may be small, but together, our contributions will make a tremendous resource for a renewed vibrant living and creative culture. (If you know more about the copyright status of this work or can help us reach out to the surviving descendants of Sara Levi-Tanai to ask there explicit permission to share this work under a Creative Commons By Attribution/ShareAlike license, please contact us).

The oldest complete manuscript of the TaNaKh is the Leningrad Codex (circa 1008 CE) prepared by the school of Aharon Ben Moshe Ben Asher. The grand project of Masoretes during the first millenia was preparing the text of the TaNaKh with their received tradition (masorah) of its annunciation and vocalization. Since these important oral traditions are not transcribed within Torah scrolls, the Masoretes preserved these traditions by writing out the complete text of the TaNaKh with vowels (nikkud) and cantillation marks (trope). The Tiberian system for marking vowels in the Leningrad Codex is the same system used in Hebrew today.

According to modern scholars, Aharon ben Moshe ben Asher followed the Karaite rather than the Rabbinic tradition of Judaism. This may help explain why Aharon ben Asher’s contemporary, Rav Saadia Gaon (892-942 CE) preferred the codexes of another Masoretic school — that of Ben-Naphtali. However, only the codexes of the Ben-Asher school survived, and ultimately, the codexes of the Ben-Asher school were approved by Maimonides (1135-1204 CE). In his Yad ha-Ḥazakah, Maimonides writes:

All relied on it, since it was corrected by Ben-Asher and was worked on and analyzed by him for many years, and was proofread many times in accordance with the masorah, and I based myself on this manuscript in the Sefer Torah that I wrote”.^[5]

This approval is all the more astounding considering Maimonides outstanding objections and disputations with the Karaites of his day.

In the 1830s, Abraham ben Samuel Firkovich, a manuscript collector and ḥakham of the Crimean Karaite Jewish community, visited Constantinople, Jerusalem, and the Cairo Genizah in Egypt. During these travels he received possession of the Leningrad Codex, which was taken to Odessa in 1838 and later transferred to the Imperial Library in St. Petersburg. Used as the sourcetext for the Biblia Hebraica in 1937 and the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia in 1977, the Leningrad Codex was digitized in the 1980s as a collaborative scholarly project organized by the Presbyterian Westminster Theological Seminary‘s J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research.

This text began as an electronic transcription by Richard Whitaker (Princeton Seminary, New Jersey) and H. van Parunak (then at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) of the 1983 printed edition of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS). It was continued with the cooperation of Robert Kraft (University of Pennsylvania) and Emmanuel Tov (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), and completed by Prof. Alan Groves. The transcription was called the Michigan-Claremont-Westminster Electronic Hebrew Bible and was archived at the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) in 1987. It has been variously known as the “CCAT” or “eBHS” text. Since that time, the text has been modified in many hundreds of places to conform to the photo-facsimile of the Leningrad Codex, Firkovich B19A, residing at the Russian National Library, St. Petersburg; hence the change of name. The Groves Center has continued to scrutinize and correct this electronic text as a part of its continuing work of building morphology and syntax databases of the Hebrew Bible, since correct linguistic analysis requires an accurate text.^[6]

The Groves Center decided to share the digital Westminster Leningrad Codex without restriction — a prescient and important decision made prior to the popularization of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Their altruistic decision continues to enable many innovative projects based on the text and study of the TaNaKh. The source of the Westminster Leningrad Codex that we are using for the Open Siddur Project were derived from sources shared by Christopher Kimball at tanach.us. The Internet Sacred Text Archive provides links to the full Westminster Leningrad Codex (with transliteration), here.

This text is derived from the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) of the Westminster Hebrew Institute. Thanks to Christopher V. Kimball, who graciously made the source files for this freely available. This version is based on the October 20th, 2006 WLC release.^[7]

The tragic story of the oldest but unfortunately incomplete Aleppo Codex (circa 10th Century CE) — the codex upon which the Leningrad Codex was first based and corrected against — provides a cautious lesson in contrast. Similar to the Leningrad Codex, the Aleppo Codex was also preserved by Karaite Jews. It was then stolen by Crusaders, ransomed, and later transferred to the Syrian Aleppo community where it was hidden for six centuries and zealously guarded. While the Leningrad Codex was copied and shared at the onset of the Age of Photography, the opportunity to copy and thereby preserve the Aleppo Codex was lost.

…the [Aleppo Jewish] community limited direct observation of the manuscript by outsiders, especially by scholars in modern times. Paul Kahle, when revising the text of the Biblia Hebraica in the 1920s, tried and failed to obtain a photographic copy. This forced him to use the Leningrad Codex instead for the third edition, which appeared in 1937.^[8]

In the immediate aftermath of a deadly riot against Jews and Jewish property in Aleppo in December 1947, much of the five books — the Torah section of the Aleppo Codex — disappeared.

Today, at the onset of the Digital Age, we must preserve the heritage of our culture’s creative inspiration by digitizing our collective work in open standard formats, and sharing the work so its transmission can easily be mirrored and redistributed without difficulty. The Open Siddur Project is committed to preserving the legacy of our diverse communities’ creative inspirations and calls upon all those who love the Torah and earnest spiritual practice to serve their intentions through sharing their intellectual resources.

If you represent an educational institution with copies of work in the public domain, please share digital images or digital transcriptions of this work with public domain declarations such as the Creative Commons Zero Public Domain declaration. For the preservation of our living tradition, the many surviving historic manuscripts witnessing variations of tefillot found in the Siddur, including the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, Dead Sea Scroll fragments, Jewish apocryphal and pseudepigraphal text, Cairo Genizah fragments, and the various girsot of the Talmud, need to be made available, freely for redistribution.