Manuscript sources
All the manuscripts, responsa, poems, deeds and works that mention the lineage or one of its name variants — identified by automatic matching within the Zakhor corpus.
A living work for each family, woven from the ancient manuscripts that mention it and the testimonies its members bring — enriched as memory is shared.
A lineage is not only a name and a geographic origin. It is also a constellation of manuscripts, learned figures, correspondence, photographs, objects and stories handed down by word of mouth. The Great Book gathers all of this into a single work — unique to each family, and endlessly rewritten by those who nourish it.
Unlike a book printed once and for all, the Great Book of a lineage lives: it grows with each new document submitted, each story collected, each variant of a name identified in a medieval manuscript. What yesterday was a family anecdote becomes tomorrow a cited source; what yesterday was a forgotten rabbinic responsum tomorrow sheds light on the path of an ancestor.
All the manuscripts, responsa, poems, deeds and works that mention the lineage or one of its name variants — identified by automatic matching within the Zakhor corpus.
Photographs, ketubbot, letters, ritual objects, family deeds, stories and voice recordings contributed by descendants — each piece signed, dated and attributed by the one who brings it.
Historical note, notable figures, diaspora, name variants, links to related lineages, bibliography — generated, then reviewed and enriched by the collective.
A descendant adds a photograph, a document or a testimony. The text is attributed, dated and signed.
The platform identifies the manuscripts in the corpus that cite the lineage — including through its spelling variants (Hebrew, Arabic, vernacular).
The new piece joins the work, alongside the scholarly sources. The bibliography grows, the links are recalculated, and the editorial entry is submitted for review.
Every member of the lineage may read, cite, correct. Every visitor may discover a family through its texts, its faces and its voices.
The Encaoua lineage (variants: Al-Nakawa, Ankaoua, and twenty-four other recorded spellings) now has a reference Great Book published on encaoua.org. There one follows its passage from Toledo to Tlemcen in the fifteenth century, its scholarly figures — Ephraïm ha-Nakawa, Ménahem ben Yehouda —, its ties to Maimonides and Nahmanides through the poems and responsa of the corpus, and the documents that families have contributed in a personal capacity.
It is this model that we wish to extend to all lineages — 5,200 are already referenced, each can become the subject of its own Great Book.
Search for it among the 5,200 lineages already recorded, or bring the first pieces that will make it possible to write its Great Book.
Italie
Le Grand Livre — Michelstaedter
Ivie → Vilna
Le Grand Livre — Grodzinski
Londres
Le Grand Livre — Sebag (Joseph)
Le Grand Livre — Juifs de la Nação (séfarades d'Amsterdam)