Who we are

What distinguishes Zakhor from a mere documentary portal is an explicit epistemic ethic, inscribed in a founding manifesto ("version 1.0, submitted for signature by the founding members") and reflected throughout the architecture of the site. The guiding principle could be summed up thus: assist without asserting. The platform mobilizes artificial intelligence — in this case Anthropic's Claude models — to structure, write, and enrich content on a large scale, but it refuses to present conjectures as certainties. Each element is assigned an epistemic status (attested, probable, possible, oral tradition), and sources are systematically cited. When a surname etymology admits several plausible explanations — which is very frequent in Jewish onomastics — the site presents them as such, with nuance, rather than ruling arbitrarily.

This prudence is not a technical detail: it is a moral stance. Working on the memory of a people that has known exile, dispersion, and destruction imposes a particular rigor. Zakhor therefore forbids itself fabrication, fanciful genealogy, the romanticized reconstruction too often found on "mainstream" surname sites. The platform prefers a sober and honest entry to a flattering but unfounded notice. This requirement is found even in the choice of sources: the corpus relies primarily on reusable and verifiable resources — Wikipedia and Wiktionary (CC BY-SA license), the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia (public domain), Wikidata (CC0), as well as duly cited reference works of onomastics, such as Maurice Eisenbeth's dictionary for North Africa, the works of Joseph Toledano, or those of Alexander Beider for the Ashkenazi world. When a precious but copyright-protected database, or one with restrictive terms of use — such as the names database of the ANU – Museum of the Jewish People, or JewishGen — cannot be harvested, Zakhor deliberately chooses to refer to it through a consultation link rather than copy its content. Respect for the rights of institutions and contributors is an integral part of the project's ethic.

The History section unfolds the narrative of the Jewish people through the ages. It offers a historical summary organized into twelve canonical eras — from the patriarchal age to the contemporary period, by way of the biblical period, the Second Temple, the talmudic age, the Middle Ages, the modern era, and the contemporary renaissance. For those who wish to go further, a general history unfolds the narrative "century by century," over nearly fifty-eight centuries, offering a dedicated page for each chronological span. An interactive timeline allows visual navigation through these temporal strata, from Abraham to the present day.

History is not limited to text: it is embodied in historical and ritual objects, in translations and comparative studies, in a reading room and narrative journeys that transform consultation into a path of discovery. A playful quiz allows visitors to test their knowledge at several levels of difficulty. The whole aims to give the visitor a coherent overview — not an accumulation of facts, but an intelligible fabric in which each manuscript, each personality, each place finds its place.

The history of the Jewish people is inseparable from its geography: anchored in the Land of Israel as a permanent spiritual horizon, deployed across the diaspora as a two-thousand-year historical reality. The Geography section restores this spatial dimension. It comprises an interactive world atlas, a historical cartography by period, an exploration of routes and migrations (often dictated by persecutions and expulsions), a section devoted to the Land of Israel and the Holy Places, and a section on toponymy and onomastics — precious, because so many Jewish surnames are in reality place names: Toledano (from Toledo), Hamburger (from Hamburg), Yerushalmi (from Jerusalem), Sarfati (from France/Tsarfat).

Each place — from Ur of the Chaldees to Jerusalem, from Baghdad to Córdoba, from Livorno to Mogador, from Vilnius to Thessaloniki — carries within it strata of memory: communities, synagogues, manuscripts, families, and languages. Zakhor's geography is therefore not a mere backdrop; it is one of the three threads which, woven together, give meaning to the rest of the corpus.

This is undoubtedly the most original and most ambitious section of the site. The directory of lineages references more than five thousand Jewish families — a figure that grows continuously — with, for each, its canonical name, its spelling variants across languages and diasporas, its geographical origin, its etymology when documented, its notable figures, its bibliography, and its cross-references to the manuscripts, places, and personalities attached to it. Each lineage has a dedicated short address (of the form zakhor.ai/name), easy to remember and to share, which leads directly to its entry.

The lineages are classified according to a taxonomy of sixteen categories, both geographical and historical: biblical, priestly (the kohanim and leviim), Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Maghrebi, Italian, Yemenite, Hasidic, Ottoman, English, French, Alsatian, German, Israeli (the Hebraized surnames of the Zionist renaissance), and an "other" category. A specific page, Toshavim & Megorashim, explains the notions proper to North African Judaism — the Toshavim (natives) and the Megorashim (those expelled from Spain in 1492) — as well as the Grana / Twansa axis, illustrating the finesse with which the site approaches communal sub-groups.

To understand how these names are formed, Zakhor offers a remarkable reference page: "Understanding surnames," which reproduces the introduction by Professor Aaron Demsky (Bar-Ilan University), academic advisor of the Memi De-Shalit database. This founding text of Jewish onomastics classifies surnames into large families — patronymics (derived from a masculine given name), metronymics (from a feminine given name), lineage names (priestly, Levitical), toponyms, occupational names, artificial or ornamental names (the Ashkenazi phenomenon of Rosenberg, Grünbaum, Goldstein), names of religious value, names of communal officials, names of character or physical traits, names drawn from nature or time, Hebrew acronyms (Katz, Segal, Schub), and modern Hebraizations (Ben-Gurion, Eshkol, Sharett). This page gives the visitor the interpretive keys to read their own name.

The Lineages section also includes an aggregated view (lineages in condensed form, by name, region, or category), a gallery (photos, videos, music), a Family memory page where each family can deposit narratives, testimonies, and documents, and even a "For children" version to transmit family memory to the youngest, simply and joyfully. A dedicated quiz rounds out the whole.

Zakhor's flagship function is the Great Book. From the structured data of a lineage and the available sources, the platform generates — with the assistance of Claude — a structured, illustrated, and continually enriched multi-century narrative: the book of a family. Where a directory entry gives the raw facts, the Great Book weaves a narrative: origins, migrations, prominent figures, geographical anchorings, contributions to the common heritage. This is not a fixed text: it is designed to be continuously enriched by contributors, complemented by the archives, photographs, and voices that families contribute to the project. The Great Book is thus the point of convergence of the entire system: it draws on genealogy, geography, the documentary corpus, and oral memory to give form and meaning to the history of a lineage.

Around this function, a recent overhaul has broadened the logic of the Great Books beyond families alone. The /great-books portal now offers Great Books of families, places, communities, institutions, and objects — each with its dedicated entries. This generalization reflects an ambition: to make the "Great Book" the canonical narrative form of the site, applicable to any entity bearing memory, whether a surname, a city, a synagogue, or an artifact.

Zakhor rests on a substantial documentary foundation. The Archival Items section assembles manuscripts, texts and printed works — from foundational texts to family registers — with metadata, dating, category (religious, philosophical, juridical, mystical, political, literary, scientific, family) and conservation location. A table of archival items and an index of authors facilitate navigation, and a reading mode by lineage allows you to approach the corpus through the lens of families. The site also references the Friedberg Genizah project, one of the major enterprises for digitizing Hebrew fragments.

The Personalities section offers biographies classified by era as well as an index of the figures who have marked the history of the Jewish people and of humanity — from patriarchs to scholars, from rabbis to artists. The Contributions & Comparisons section constitutes one of Zakhor's distinctive features: it systematically explores the cross-connections between Abrahamic traditions (Judaism → Christianity, Judaism → Islam), comparing founding texts, theological concepts, liturgies, and customs, while marking the fundamental differences. This inter-religious comparative dimension, rare on Jewish heritage sites, inscribes Jewish memory within a broader dialogue with the other civilizations of the Book.

True to its name, Zakhor accords a specific and carefully framed place to the memory of the Shoah. A dedicated tribute page, "In memory of the victims of the Shoah," recalls that among the families whose lineages the platform traces, many were struck — entire communities and branches erased. Rather than copying victim data, Zakhor adopts a posture of respect and referral: the page directs visitors to the institutions that keep the names — Yad Vashem and its Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names, the Arolsen Archives, the USHMM, the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris. Above all, each lineage entry includes an "In memory" block that offers to search the surname directly in the Yad Vashem database, without any nominal data being copied or stored on the site. The principle is affirmed without ambiguity: the names of the victims are not data to be harvested, they are persons. Memory is honored and connected, there where it is legitimately preserved.

Zakhor is not a closed encyclopedia; it is a living archive nourished by its community. A structured contribution pipeline allows anyone to deposit a textual document, a photograph, an engraving, a video, a sound recording, a bibliographic reference, an oral testimony, or a family ritual object. Each contribution passes through clear stages — type, information, files, verification — then is examined by the team before publication, according to an explicit editorial policy. Contributors can follow the status of their contributions, and a genealogy space allows them to consult and enrich their own family data. A network of scholarly experts can be solicited or joined, ensuring the scientific quality of the corpus. This articulation between artificial intelligence (for structuring and large-scale writing) and human validation (for rigor and responsibility) lies at the heart of the model.

Zakhor is read in thirteen languages — French, English, Hebrew, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Yiddish, Dutch, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic —, the interface as well as the contents, with a right-to-left display for Hebrew, Yiddish and Arabic. This choice is not incidental: it situates the project at the crossroads of Jewish Francophonie — strongly marked by the communities of North Africa — of the English-speaking world, and of the State of Israel. The lineage entries thus carry, where the information exists, the canonical name in Latin characters, its Hebrew form and sometimes its Arabic form, as well as its variants — reflecting the reality of a people whose names have traveled across alphabets as much as across borders.

Zakhor does not claim to exist alone. An "Ecosystem & Positioning" page situates the project among the major resources of digital Jewish heritage — the Alliance Israélite Universelle and its library, the European Institute of Sephardic Culture, Morial (memory of the Jews of Algeria), digital libraries, the ANU – Museum of the Jewish People, JewishGen — clearly explaining what Zakhor brings that is specific: a structured base of manuscripts and objects with metadata, the inter-religious comparative dimension, the AI-based technical architecture, and above all the fusion between collective heritage and family genealogy. This transparency regarding the surrounding landscape, and this loyal referral toward partner institutions, attest to a posture of complementarity rather than competition.

The project presents itself as the work of a collective endowed with a manifesto, a mission articulated around identity, intellectual foundation, and operational deployment, and with monitoring bodies (reports, working groups, partnerships). A statistics page makes visible "the state of Memory in figures": number of published lineages, of manuscripts, of categories, distribution by origin. Technical documentation, legal notices, a privacy policy, and a journal (news, newsletter) complete this transparency apparatus. The whole reflects a will to permanence and seriousness: Zakhor does not wish to be an ephemeral project, but a digital institution destined to endure and to be transmitted, in the image of what it preserves.

Technically, zakhor.ai is a modern web application built on Next.js (React, App Router) and deployed on Vercel, backed by a PostgreSQL database managed by Supabase. The content — lineages, manuscripts, artifacts, personalities, Great Books, contributions — is stored in structured tables whose integrity is guaranteed by constraints (for example, a lineage's category is limited to the closed list of sixteen authorized values). Schema changes are versioned through reproducible migrations, and each enrichment of the base is accompanied by a bibliography in structured format, systematically citing the source and its license. Internationalization relies on next-intl; security on a strict header policy (CSP, HSTS, anti-clickjacking); and editorial enrichment on an integration of the Claude models to generate and complete the Great Books and the notices, always under human supervision. The code and the database are kept rigorously synchronized, and the project practices careful repository hygiene (attributed commits, data deduplication, regular consistency checks).

The site addresses several overlapping audiences. First, families in search of their roots: a Sephardi from Tunisia, an Ashkenazi from Poland, a Mizrahi from Iraq, a Jew from Italy, or an Israeli curious about the origin of their Hebraized name will find a structured gateway to their history. Then, the curious and students, who can explore fifty-eight centuries of history, browse manuscripts, understand how names are formed or how the Abrahamic traditions dialogue. Then researchers and genealogists, for whom the directory, the surname variants, the cross-references, and the bibliographic references constitute a documented starting point. Finally, the contributors and the guardians of memory — descendants, associations, scholars — who contribute their archives and their knowledge to the project. Zakhor's wager is that these audiences nourish one another: the family provides the testimony that the researcher contextualizes, and the collective narrative restores to the family the dignity of belonging to a history greater than itself.

At bottom, zakhor.ai responds to an ancient anguish and a contemporary urgency. The anguish: that names will fade, that narratives will be lost with the last witnesses, that dispersion will end by dissolving memory. The urgency: at a time when the generations that knew the worlds of before — the communities of the Maghreb, the shtetls of Eastern Europe, the Jewish quarters of the Levant — are vanishing, capturing and structuring this memory becomes a race against time. Zakhor responds with an unprecedented combination: the scale-power of artificial intelligence to process thousands of lineages and centuries of documents, and the ethical rigor of a project that cites its sources, nuances its assertions, respects rights, and honors the memory of the victims.

The result is a platform at once encyclopedic and intimate, scholarly and accessible, technological and profoundly human. Behind the apparent austerity of a directory, it offers each person an experience of recognition: somewhere in this weave of more than five thousand families, of thousands of names travelling across languages and centuries, there may be yours. And in finding it, one discovers not only where one comes from — one takes one's place in a chain of transmission that, since Abraham, has never ceased to say: Zakhor, remember.