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Kima Goes South: Judeo Arabic sources for a Historical Gazetteer
Abstract
“KIMA - Towards an Open Hebrew Gazetteer” set the grounds for a comprehensive, dynamic and interoperable database of historical place names in languages written in the Hebrew Script. Each entry in this database consists of preferred forms of a toponym (both in Hebrew script and in its English normalized form), Alternate Hebrew script names and their transcriptions, together with their extant historical attestations, a calculated earliest use of each variant, and geographical coordinates where available. An attestation based gazetteer, which aspires to offer not only name variants and coordinates, but also information on any known use of these toponyms through time, can serve not only as tool or reference but as also as a corpus which can be read, albeit with caution. In the first phases of the project, the largest source type for this information in the first stage of the project was library catalogs, which document the place names written on the title page of books. Mapping this corpus reveals patterns in the history of Hebrew letter printing, and it would be wrong to read it as an indicative map of Jewish existence. In order to have a more refined look manuscripts and correspondences should also be incorporated; Finally, an altogether different space will be revealed when toponyms which appear within the texts are included, this time showing not where the Hebrew letter was used but rather what was the conceived, even imagined geography of the world that was described in it. Each source type carries its biases and thus a gazetteer building is a constant amendment of biases in previous sources with the addition of new sources. The current phase of the project, carried in the framework of the project DiJeSt (DIgitizing JEwish STudies), which aims at addressing another bias in the sources: while the overwhelming majority of attestations in the corpus are Hebrew, other languages that have made use in the Hebrew letters are under-represented, and among them Ladino and Judeo Arabic. Assembling a database of attestations for Judeo-Arabic toponyms not only augments and corrects the bias created by Hebrew language gazetteer, it also enables exploring continuities and differences with the Arabic toponymic practices. In order to facilitate such exploration, we incorporate a transliterating tool. The paper will present the Judeo Arabic resulting toponym database and the geo-temporal patterns it displays.
Discipline
Geography
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries