Final Report Summary - OPEN-JERUSALEM (Opening Jerusalem Archives: For a connected History of ‘Citadinité’ in the Holy City (1840-1940))
Jerusalem’s archives are everywhere: the city’s archives – produced, accumulated or arranged by institutions, social groups, religious communities, citizens and travelers – are dispersed across the city but also – extra muros – all around the world: from Istanbul to Moscow, from Rome to Erevan, from Nantes to London, from Athens to Addis Ababa, from Amman to Washington.
For reasons related to limited funding and to the current geopolitical climate, the descriptions of most of Jerusalem’s archival holdings are cursory at best. When they do exist, these catalogs are generally incomplete and written in the dominant language of the collection, which makes them de facto inaccessible to the majority of researchers. If a true historiographical renewal is to be achieved, a process of qualitative description must be undertaken by developing solid and coherent inventories that rely on the best European standards in the field. Open Jerusalem has already embarked on this unprecedented challenge to create a rigorous and detailed catalog of available archives related to the history of late Ottoman and Mandate Jerusalem. Since 2014, the Open Jerusalem project has conducted widescale research on Jerusalem’s archives, both in the city and abroad, in order to identify the sheer richness of sources – written in numerous languages, from Hebrew and Arabic to English, French, Greek, Russian, Ethiopian, Syriac, Latin, Italian, German etc – and to analyze them through the prism of the concept of citadinité. Despite the results already achieved, other archives remain to be identified. Open Jerusalem’s work goes on, ready to discover new traces of Jerusalem’s past, present and future.
The Open Jerusalem Catalog is a tool conceived to explore a selection of archival and bibliographic records on Jerusalem’s late Ottoman and Mandate history, as described by the Open Jerusalem team.
Each item has a reference consisting of a prefix indicating the country where it is physically located, followed by the acronym of the archive it belongs to, then a number indicating its exact place within that collection. The reference will link to a title and description, details of the creator and date (if known).
Where the records have already been object of a large preservation, description and digitization effort by numerous institutions and associations in Jerusalem, the Open Jerusalem catalog acknowledged and highlighted this work through links on the “archival map” on its home page and in the database. This is notably the case of the documentation produced over the centuries by the various Jewish communities in the city.
Open Jerusalem has been disseminating the research carried out by its researchers in different forms, such as books, journal articles, academic blog posts, and interviews. In this respect, and in collaboration with Brill, the project has launched the “Open Jerusalem” series, edited by Vincent Lemire and Angelos Dalachanis.
The Open Jerusalem series at Brill is dedicated to individual or collective works that reveal and connect different archives and sources to investigate the ordinary, entangled history of a global city through the lens of urban citizenship.
The series is not confined to the chronological limits of the project. Our ambition is to cover Jerusalem’s history during the entire 19th and 20th centuries through original monographs and translations based on extensive archival research on Jerusalem. These works are not only published in traditional print form, but also digitally in open access.
The first volume in the Open Jerusalem series is Ordinary Jerusalem, 1840-1940: Opening New Archives, Revisiting a Global City, edited by Angelos Dalachanis and Vincent Lemire (2018): https://brill.com/view/title/36309(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie). Utilizing largely unknown archives, more than 25 scholars (from Israel and Palestine, to Europe and the United States) have revisited the holy city of three religions, which has often been defined solely as an eternal battlefield and studied exclusively through the prism of geopolitics and religion.
For reasons related to limited funding and to the current geopolitical climate, the descriptions of most of Jerusalem’s archival holdings are cursory at best. When they do exist, these catalogs are generally incomplete and written in the dominant language of the collection, which makes them de facto inaccessible to the majority of researchers. If a true historiographical renewal is to be achieved, a process of qualitative description must be undertaken by developing solid and coherent inventories that rely on the best European standards in the field. Open Jerusalem has already embarked on this unprecedented challenge to create a rigorous and detailed catalog of available archives related to the history of late Ottoman and Mandate Jerusalem. Since 2014, the Open Jerusalem project has conducted widescale research on Jerusalem’s archives, both in the city and abroad, in order to identify the sheer richness of sources – written in numerous languages, from Hebrew and Arabic to English, French, Greek, Russian, Ethiopian, Syriac, Latin, Italian, German etc – and to analyze them through the prism of the concept of citadinité. Despite the results already achieved, other archives remain to be identified. Open Jerusalem’s work goes on, ready to discover new traces of Jerusalem’s past, present and future.
The Open Jerusalem Catalog is a tool conceived to explore a selection of archival and bibliographic records on Jerusalem’s late Ottoman and Mandate history, as described by the Open Jerusalem team.
Each item has a reference consisting of a prefix indicating the country where it is physically located, followed by the acronym of the archive it belongs to, then a number indicating its exact place within that collection. The reference will link to a title and description, details of the creator and date (if known).
Where the records have already been object of a large preservation, description and digitization effort by numerous institutions and associations in Jerusalem, the Open Jerusalem catalog acknowledged and highlighted this work through links on the “archival map” on its home page and in the database. This is notably the case of the documentation produced over the centuries by the various Jewish communities in the city.
Open Jerusalem has been disseminating the research carried out by its researchers in different forms, such as books, journal articles, academic blog posts, and interviews. In this respect, and in collaboration with Brill, the project has launched the “Open Jerusalem” series, edited by Vincent Lemire and Angelos Dalachanis.
The Open Jerusalem series at Brill is dedicated to individual or collective works that reveal and connect different archives and sources to investigate the ordinary, entangled history of a global city through the lens of urban citizenship.
The series is not confined to the chronological limits of the project. Our ambition is to cover Jerusalem’s history during the entire 19th and 20th centuries through original monographs and translations based on extensive archival research on Jerusalem. These works are not only published in traditional print form, but also digitally in open access.
The first volume in the Open Jerusalem series is Ordinary Jerusalem, 1840-1940: Opening New Archives, Revisiting a Global City, edited by Angelos Dalachanis and Vincent Lemire (2018): https://brill.com/view/title/36309(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie). Utilizing largely unknown archives, more than 25 scholars (from Israel and Palestine, to Europe and the United States) have revisited the holy city of three religions, which has often been defined solely as an eternal battlefield and studied exclusively through the prism of geopolitics and religion.