The identity, the intellectual foundation, and the operational deployment — building on all that already exists: Great Books, contribution pipeline, Memory/History registers.
To transmit the memory of Jewish lineages — families, places, communities, works, objects, institutions — by uniting in a single gesture family testimony and the archival source, without one ever erasing the other.
France Culture · Les Lundis de l'histoire
An interview devoted to the historian whose work Zakhor (1982) gave its name and its compass to this project — the distinction between living memory and critical history.
The name is not a mere tribute, it is a program. In Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), Yerushalmi establishes a paradoxical observation: modern Jewish historiography was born precisely at the moment when living collective memory was eroding — critical history is not the continuation of memory, it is often its substitute. The biblical injunction zakhor ("remember"), which recurs nearly two hundred times in the Tanakh, never commands the writing of history: it commands transmission.
The founding wager of the collective is to refuse the alternative. Zakhor does not choose between memory (liturgical, familial, identity-grounding) and history (critical, archival, philological): it holds them together, in parity, within a single documentary space. This is exactly the constitutional Memory/History principle already inscribed — the collective now gives it a name, a banner, and an explicit intellectual genealogy (Yerushalmi, extended by Nora's lieux de mémoire for the genealogical dimension).
The application is the collective's primary instrument, not a parallel project. It inherits the GMPL legacy: the six types of Great Books (lineage, place, community, work, object, institution), the four-step contribution pipeline (submission → analysis → review → execution, with only step 4 writing to the heritage tables), the constitutional rule of non-erasure (the deprecated is archived, never deleted, with a single GDPR exception), the Journal of Memories, and the mandatory register marking on each chapter. The lineage Great Book becomes the collective's emblematic object: it is the one that best embodies the mission "to transmit the memory of lineages."
The purpose of this phase is to give the collective a formal existence and an editorial constitution.
Draft the Zakhor Manifesto, a short founding document (two to three pages) that establishes: the Yerushalmi filiation, the Memory/History duality as a non-hierarchical principle, epistemic parity between academic sources and oral/family testimonies, non-erasability, and the mission of transmitting lineages.
Settle the three pending editorial arbitrations — epistemic parity threshold, threshold for creating a new Great Book, deprecation policy for contested theses — which become the first three articles of the collective's editorial regulations.
Formalize the structure: a small editorial council and, where appropriate, a lightweight legal form (an association) to carry institutional partnerships and any future funding.
In keeping with the pilot-first validation principle, this phase brings into public existence a completed exemplar of each type of object before any wide opening.
The Aleppo Codex as a showcase work Great Book; the ZYZEK lineage as a pilot lineage Great Book, demonstrating the complete pipeline from a family genealogical PDF to the six structured sections; the twenty priority places of the seven geographical sets (Eretz Israel, Mesopotamia, the Maghreb, the Livorno–Maghreb axis, Italian and Mediterranean centers, the Ashkenazi world, modern refuges) as the first place Great Books, with the commissioning of the Journal of Memories. The reference catalog is enriched in parallel (Schaerf 1925, Marx 1935, the bibliography of the Livorno–Maghreb axis) with dual-register reception notes.
The collective moves from editing to collection. Public opening of the contribution flow (family archives, records, photographs, recorded oral testimonies), with the editorial guarantee that the family testimony enters the Memory register with the same documentary dignity as the archival source in the History register. A call for contributions targeted by lineages and by places. Deepening of partnerships according to the principle of measured institutional approach: AIU (established relationship, library access), Oxford (existing collaborator), then a prepared approach to the BnF.
Broadening the geographies: the Lorraine iron-ore basin (Piennes, Homécourt, Joudreville, Mont-Bonvillers) as the first Great Book of an under-documented geography of Polish Jewish immigration of the 1920s — an exemplary case of what Zakhor can bring where established historiography is silent and where only family memory survives. Gradual constitution of the Livorno–Maghreb corpus as a signature editorial axis. Full multilingual deployment (ten languages, RTL), a public API for researchers, and ultimately genealogical visualization tools cross-referencing lineages, places, and migrations.
Four invariants run through all phases: the non-hierarchy of the two registers (the zone of intersection is an editorial richness, not a problem to be solved); non-erasability; genealogical rigor (onomastic catalogs guide, but only archival research on a specific lineage establishes); and transmission as the ultimate purpose — each Great Book must be readable by a descendant as much as by a researcher.
Automation provides breadth — the generation of the Great Books, first drafts of translation, the seeding of the catalogue. The collective provides what the machine cannot: verifying, sourcing, gathering living memory and reaching the diaspora. One does not join Zakhor to rewrite what the machine already produces, but to make it true and alive.
Define the editorial standard and the system of registers — established, probable, transmitted — applied systematically. Sort the catalogue to identify the two or three hundred most consulted entries and verify and source them as a priority. Activate the outreach channels already in place: newsletter and applications pipeline.
Target — 100% of the pillars endowed with an exemplary model page; the 300 flagship entries brought to at least two real sources.
Sourcing campaigns by region — local archives, memorials, Pinkas Hakehillot — where onomastic sources are exhausted. "Oral memory" drive: gathering accounts and photographs from the diaspora. Transcription of manuscripts. Five additional languages brought online.
Target — 1,000 verified and sourced entries; 100 testimonies gathered; 8 languages online.
Partnerships with institutions — National Library of Israel and Ktiv, Friedberg Genizah, genealogical societies — for curated document feeds, no longer merely linked. Community contribution at scale: the diaspora proposes, the collective validates. The objective of twenty languages reached on the interface.
Target — Zakhor cited as a reference; more than half of new entries of human origin; complete multilingual coverage.
