58 centuries of Jewish presence mapped — from Ur of the Chaldees to the present day
The history of the Jewish people is inseparable from its geography: anchored in the Land of Israel as a permanent spiritual horizon, unfolded in diaspora as a two-thousand-year historical reality. Each place — from Ur of the Chaldees to Jerusalem, from Baghdad to Córdoba, from Livorno to Mogador, from Vilnius to Thessaloniki — bears within it strata of memory, liturgy, manuscripts, families and languages.
The Geography section of Zakhor has three ambitions:
Overall mapping of the Zakhor corpus with superimposable layers — filters by period, community, type of site, presence densities. 3D / globe view for a planetary perspective.
The flagship feature of the section. A multi-century memory entry for each place, structured in 12 canonical periods, fed by Claude and continuously enriched by contributors. Versioned memory journal.
12 thematic maps (one per canonical period), chronological animation (timelapse), inter-period comparisons to grasp the geographical evolution of the Jewish people.
Sephardim, Ashkenazim, Mizrahim, Romaniotes, Yemenites, Ethiopians, Bene Israel, Cochin. Toshavim / Megorashim in the Maghreb. Grana / Twansa axis (Livorno↔Tunis).
Exodus, Babylonian Exile, Return to Zion. Sephardic dispersion after 1492. The book route Livorno↔Maghreb. Modern and contemporary aliyot. Animated flows (flow maps).
Biblical and talmudic geography. The four holy cities (Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, Tiberias). Holy places of the diaspora (Djerba, Ouezzane, Prague…). Historical pilgrimage itineraries.
Hebrew, Aramaic and Judeo-Arabic place names. Etymology and linguistic transformations. Surnames linked to places (Toledano, Fassi, Sarfati…).
Each manuscript, each object, each family is linked to one or more places. Conversely, each place entry lists the manuscripts produced or preserved, the objects recovered, the families documented, the printed works. Geography becomes the fabric that connects the whole corpus.
