Jerusalem, Fez, Livorno, Vilna… For each place, a memory record that spans twelve periods — written by Claude, corrected and enriched by you.
Jewish memory is also a geography: cities, neighbourhoods and lands where communities lived, prayed, traded and sometimes vanished. The Great Books of places map this presence — from the Land of Israel to the refuges of the diaspora, from the Maghreb to Ashkenazi Europe. Each entry restores the history of a place, its communities, its figures and its traces, so that the map of the People of the Book may not be erased.
Each relevant place (town, village, neighborhood, oasis, island) has a unique memory record, structured chronologically over 12 canonical periods spanning 58 centuries. For each period, a narrative:
| # | Period | Dates | Dominant language of the corpus |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Patriarchal and proto-Israelite era | -1900 à -1200 | — (oral tradition) |
| 2 | Kingdoms of Israel and Judah | -1200 à -586 | Biblical Hebrew |
| 3 | Babylonian exile and return | -586 à -333 | Hebrew, Aramaic |
| 4 | Hellenistic and Hasmonean period | -333 à -63 | Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek |
| 5 | Roman period (up to Bar Kokhba) | -63 à 135 | Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek |
| 6 | Talmudic period | 135 à 600 | Aramaic, Hebrew |
| 7 | Geonic period and Sephardic golden age | 600 à 1200 | Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew |
| 8 | Late Middle Ages | 1200 à 1492 | Hebrew, vernacular languages |
| 9 | Early modern period | 1492 à 1789 | Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic |
| 10 | Emancipation and modernity | 1789 à 1939 | National languages + Hebrew |
| 11 | Shoah and displacements | 1939 à 1948 | — |
| 12 | Contemporary period | 1948 à aujourd'hui | Modern Hebrew + local languages |
300–800 words per period: political context, Jewish presence, notable events.
Internal timeline of the period, with dates and sources.
Rabbis, poets, merchants, printers, kabbalists connected to the place.
Synagogues, yeshivot, batei din, printing houses, cemeteries, mikvaot.
Sourced estimates by benchmark year.
Produced, preserved, or rediscovered on site (links to the manuscripts/artifacts databases).
For periods 9–12, link to the printed_work database.
Documented for this place (link to community_family).
Local dialect of Judeo-Arabic, variant of Ladino, Haketia, etc.
Practices specific to the place.
The user consults or creates a place record.
If the record does not exist, Claude generates a first draft from the internal corpus and a reference bibliography. Status: ai_generated_draft.
Editorial validation by admin@zakhor.ai — moved to published_v1.
Continuous user enrichment: testimony, photo, document, correction. Contribution status: pending_review.
The admin validates; Claude reintegrates and produces a new version of the text. Status: published_vN. The version history is preserved in the Journal of Memories.
The catalogue was assembled according to three criteria: historical density, diasporic representativeness, and articulation with the Livorno–Maghreb axis that structures Zakhor. It now covers all documented places, grouped by cultural area.
Jewish presence undocumented. Livorno appears in history only in the 11th century as a modest port settlement dependent on Pisa. The entry proceeds directly to period 9.
In 1591, then through a strengthened text in 1593, Ferdinand I de' Medici promulgated the edict known as the Livornina: an exceptional text that explicitly invited Sephardic Jews — including Portuguese marranos who had returned to Judaism — to settle in Livorno with guarantees without equivalent: no ghetto, freedom of worship, immunity from prosecution for prior crypto-Judaism, the right to trade, access to the professions.
Livorno quickly became one of the largest Sephardic centres in the West. The community developed the Nazione Ebrea, built its Great Synagogue (Tempio Maggiore) around 1603, and established a beth din recognised far beyond the Tuscan borders. Hebrew printing flourished there considerably in the 18th century, in the service of the Maghrebi communities: this is the famous .
A place-entry is not a fixed notice. Two pitfalls to avoid: opacity (a smooth text that conceals the collective work) and cacophony (a pile of diffs that destroys readability). The solution: three levels suited to three kinds of use.
Flowing text, a discreet badge in the period header ("v3 · 15 April 2026 · 4 contributions integrated"), marginal markers ◇ on hovering over which a tooltip indicates the origin of the enriched sentence. No interruption of reading.
Side drawer accessible from each period: vertical timeline of the syntheses v1 → v2 → v3, Claude's synthesis note for each version, list of integrated contributions (type, contributor, date), button to view an earlier version of the text.
Full diff between two versions, standardised citation export ("ZAKHOR:LIV:P9:v3"), access to the raw content of contributions (original text, scanned documents, high-resolution photographs), query API for scientific uses.
ZAKHOR:LIV:P9:v3) — the record is living, yet every academic citation remains verifiable.Coexistence with Christians and Muslims, legal status (dhimma, Livornina…).
Pogroms, expulsions, Shoah — treated with gravity and precision.
Remains, heritage, residual community.
Specific to the period.
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909 entries still have no verifiable source. Every reference added brings the project closer to trust.