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Managing the Open Jerusalem Project : a transnational, collaborative and democratic attempt
Abstract
Jerusalem is the very definition of a transnational city because it has found itself at the center of competing national sovereignties without ever truly merging with them. However, it remains almost exclusively the object of communitarian, national and even nationalist historiographies, which is logical on a geopolitical level, but hardly acceptable on a scientific one. It goes without saying that compartmentalizing national or nationalist historiographies dedicated to the region has caused incalculable damage in the Middle East and around the world. Given these stakes, there have been several attempts within the community of Middle East historians to collectively develop a shared narrative or at least a “relational history” of these disputed territories. Indeed, what is most lacking among the community of historians working on Jerusalem is “common ground”, based on a bottom-up approach : a shared historiographic and archival forum and a democratic tool for exchanging, and especially correlating data, are needed to make a qualitative leap forward. On the practical level, analysis of current conditions at primary Jerusalem-history sources leads us to identify three major obstacles. The first is geopolitical: most researchers who work on Jerusalem cannot physically access the entirety of available sources owing to their nationality, religious identity or political affiliation. The second is linguistic: the city of Jerusalem has always produced archives in a multitude of languages. To access an overview of the history of Jerusalem, one would theoretically have to master all these languages. This global polyglossia, impossible to achieve at an individual level, is today within reach if we build an collaborative international team and summon the digital humanities’ powers of translation, indexing and interconnection. The third obstacle is related to the impenetrability of the collections themselves, which, for reasons related to the current geopolitical climate, only rarely possess an analytical inventory. At best, there is a cursory and ragged description of their holdings written in the dominant language of the collection, which bars access for the majority of researchers de facto. Taking account of these obstacles leads to assert that only a real transnational, collaborative and democratic project may have an opportunity to shift lines and entrenched positions. Starting from the distinction made by Foucault between ‘dialectical’ and ‘strategical’ logic (1978) and refusing deliberately homogeneous narrative temptation, this presentation will underline the distinction between ‘global’ and ‘entrangled’ (‘or connected’) history and will propose concrete avenues for achieving this last objective.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
None