Some 2,400 Jewish cemeteries have survived in Germany from the eleventh century onwards. About 590 of these first came into existence between the years 1500 and 1800. Unlike their medieval and their more recent counterparts, these early modern cemeteries have only rarely been documented, let alone thoroughly researched from a variety of methodological perspectives.

This is where the long-term project "Steinerne Zeugen digital: German-Jewish Sepulchral Culture between Middle Ages and Modernity" comes in. Recently accepted into the prestigious funding scheme of the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities, it aims to create a representative, entirely digital corpus of both texts and images, thus offering unprecedented possibilities to analyze funerary inscriptions, gravestone design and the geospatial context of cemeteries in a systematic fashion.