Founding text of the collective for the transmission of the memory of Jewish lineages — version 1.0, submitted for the signature of the founding members.
Our collective is called Zakhor — "remember."
This name is a tribute to the work of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), and it is more than a tribute: it is our program. Yerushalmi established a paradoxical observation that binds us. The injunction zakhor, which recurs nearly one hundred and seventy times in the Hebrew Bible, never commands the writing of history: it commands transmission. And modern Jewish historiography was born precisely at the moment when the living chain of this transmission was breaking — critical history did not come to prolong memory; all too often it came to replace it.
We refuse this substitution. We equally refuse its opposite: a memory that would dispense with the rigor of history. The founding wager of Zakhor is to hold together, in a single gesture and in a single place, memory and history — the family narrative and the act of archiving, liturgical tradition and philological criticism, the name passed down in a whisper and the name retrieved from the registers.
This is why we constitute ourselves as a collective, and this is why we sign this text.
Zakhor's mission is to transmit the memory of Jewish lineages.
By lineages, we mean all that is passed down and forms a chain: families and their genealogies; places and their communities; works and their readers; objects and their keepers; institutions and their heirs. A lineage is not merely a succession of names: it is a thread of transmission, and every thread broken, forgotten, or undocumented is a loss for the whole People of the Book.
Our horizon extends from the patriarchal era to our own day, from the Mediterranean to the Ashkenazi world, from the great centers to forgotten geographies. We pay particular attention to the memories that established historiography has left in the shadows: communities without a monograph, families without public archives, places that only their descendants still remember.
Everything Zakhor publishes is inscribed in one of two registers, or in their intersection, and this inscription is always explicit.
The Memory register receives living tradition: family testimony, the narrative handed down, liturgical practice, commemorative remembrance, that which grounds identity. The History register receives critical work: the archive, the civil-status record, philology, archaeology, dating, the comparison of sources.
These two registers are not ranked one above the other. Neither judges the other in the last instance. A patriarchal genealogy functions as a structuring memory of identity without having to justify itself before empirical history; a notarial deed establishes a fact without having to bear meaning. And when the two registers meet, confirm or contradict each other, this zone of intersection is for us not a problem to be solved: it is the most precious material of our editorial work.
Oral and family testimony enters our collections with the same documentary dignity as the academic source.
A grandmother's account, the photograph annotated on the back, the list of first names copied into a prayer book are documents in their own right — provided they are deposited, attributed, dated, and inscribed in their register. We do not ask testimony to become proof; we ask that it be faithfully gathered. We do not ask the archive to carry a soul; we ask that it be cited exactly.
This parity has a counterpart in rigor: catalogues of names and onomastic repertories guide research, but only archival and genealogical work on a specific lineage establishes a filiation. Zakhor will never manufacture ancestors, will never validate a genealogy by the mere resemblance of a name, and will always distinguish what is established, what is probable, what is transmitted, and what is conjectured.
Nothing that has been entrusted to collective memory is removed from it.
When a content is corrected, contested, or superseded, it is deprecated and versioned — never deleted. The chain of versions is itself an object of memory: to know what one believed, and why one ceased to believe it, is part of what we transmit. A single exception takes precedence over this principle: the right of living persons over their own data, which we honor without reservation.
This principle is not merely an editorial rule: it is inscribed into the very technical architecture of our tools, so that no negligence and no passing will can circumvent it.
The collective publishes an application, Zakhor.ai, which is its principal means of action.
Zakhor.ai gives form to our mission through the Great Books — living books each devoted to a lineage, a place, a community, a work, an object, or an institution — in which each chapter bears its register, its version history, and its log of memories. It welcomes everyone's contributions through a process that strictly separates deposit, analysis, review, and publication, so that nothing enters the patrimony without human validation, and so that nothing ever leaves it.
The tool serves the text, not the reverse. No technique — not even the artificial intelligence that assists us in the analysis, translation, and cross-referencing of documents — substitutes itself for the collective's editorial judgment or for the words of witnesses.
We refuse erasure, in all its forms: the suppression of traces, silent rewriting, oblivion through negligence.
We refuse the hierarchy of memories: there are no minor lineages, no lesser communities, no geographies unworthy of a Great Book.
We refuse fabrication: no false manuscripts, no invented dates, no obliging ancestors, no embellished narratives presented as established.
We refuse appropriation: the memories deposited with us remain those of the families and communities that entrust them; we are their custodians, not their owners.
Finally, we refuse polemic: our comparative work among the traditions of the Book — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — is a work of understanding transmissions and differences, conducted in respect for each.
Zakhor brings together descendants, genealogists, scholars, paleographers, translators, librarians, developers, and witnesses. It is federated by this manifesto and by a shared editorial charter. A small editorial council ensures the coherence of the whole and settles arbitrations.
The collective is open. One enters it through adherence to this text and through a contribution — a deposited document, a documented lineage, an offered skill. One works within it in respect for the institutions that hold the patrimony, which we approach with patience and gratitude, for they have long kept what we undertake to transmit.
We, the signatories of this manifesto, commit:
to faithfully gather what is entrusted to us; to inscribe each thing in its register; never to erase; never to fabricate; always to distinguish the established from the transmitted; to make each Great Book legible to a descendant as much as to a scholar; and to organize from this day forward the endurance of our work, so that it outlives its founders — for such is the very definition of a successful transmission.
The injunction that names us is not addressed to the past. Zakhor is an imperative, and an imperative is conjugated only in the present, for the future.
To sign the manifesto is to join the collective. Membership is open to any member — you simply need an account and to accept the internal rules.
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Remember. We will see to it.
This manifesto is the founding document of the Zakhor collective. It may be modified only by decision of the editorial council, each prior version remaining archived in accordance with Article 4.
