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.

One of the major factors determining the confessionalization of the writing of Jerusalem’s history is a reliance on isolated communal records which reinforce the sense that religious communities lived in a vacuum. In contrast, Ottoman imperial records shift the frame of reference perceptibly, but they have been remarkably understudied in the case of Palestine, notwithstanding recent works on petitions, municipal protocols, and government documents. This paper focuses on another of these rich, virtually untapped sources – the records of the three Ottoman censi (1880s, 1905, 1914) and affiliated population registers. The census registers are indispensable for quantitative analysis of Jerusalem society, at the same time that they leave important textual clues about urban marginality, social hierarchies, and networks. First, this paper analyses several Jerusalem neighborhood census records in depth, sharing insights on migration, profession/occupation, family composition, and urban change over time. Second, the paper maps these census records using GIS, in the process uncovering surprising patterns in mixed neighborhoods. Third, the paper juxtaposes additional archival sources (biographical, press, legal) alongside the quantitative and cartographic sources to flesh out our understanding of the urban landscape. For example, geographers have used GIS to model route-to-work, social networks, and change over time, important considerations that succeed in ‘unfreezing’ census and map and in providing a more dynamic interaction between space, place, and agency. At the same time, we can examine public and semi-public spaces in Jerusalem, such as streets, markets, cafes, gardens, as well as qualify the unwritten ‘confessionalization of space’ that took place, particularly around religious sites and at times of religious festivals. Overall, this paper contributes to better understanding the ordinary inhabitants of late Ottoman Jerusalem, too often left out of histories of the city entirely or overshadowed by non-representative elites. Close neighborhood studies also allow us to weigh the relative importance of ethnicity, religion, and economics in terms of understanding the urban topography. Urban citizenship in Jerusalem was not only an institutional and intellectual project, but also had spatial implications. A multilayered GIS platform can take into account some of the various ways that residents used, claimed, and fought over their shared city.

In the last period of the Ottoman Empire, Jerusalem as other cities of the Arab provinces experimented many reforms and changes that affected the life and habits of the citizens. These transformations can be understood and read in a political and administrative perspective, or in their geopolitical dimensions. We would like to have another perspective on these changes, and try to combine a urban history scrutinity with an attention to intellectual and cultural aspects of the daily life in the city. What we want to propose here is to look carefully at the languages used in the documents concerning the urban life of Jerusalem. We know that the Levantine city of Jerusalem was polyglotte. The local communities were speaking and writing in arabic, greek, ladino, armenian, ethiopian, syriac, french..., the pilgrims were adding their languages to the streets: russian, english, german... Through the study of archival documentation, newspapers and libraries, we want to address the question of the polyglossia and the transformation of the linguistic practices in Jerusalem. The careful attention to the use of languages in different registers and spheres, to the historical evolutions of these practices, helps us deconstruct and desessentialize the relation between communities and languages. Moreover, the connected history of language practices that we aim at paves the way to a history of the Jerusalem localness. This localness has a sound, it constitutes a common ability to share and contest the urban citizenship, or better, what is called citadinité in french. The Tanzimat period and the 1908 revolution shape this citadinité and affect the way languages are spoken, written, understood. This paper will be presenting the changes in the linguistic map of Jerusalem at the turn of the 20th Century. It will look at the use of languages in the archives of the local communities, in the libraries and printing houses, it will pay attention to schools and language teachings, but also to poster campains and advertisements. The analysis of these archival elements and the mapping of scriptural documentation will question the transformation of the local polyglossia from mutual understandings or inter-comprehension to multiple translations, from passive understanding to active translation.

This paper aims to question the concept of « citadinité » through the notion of public knowledge by focusing on practices associated to private libraries and printing press in Jerusalem between 1840 and 1940. It is based on a inquiry conducted at the archives of three printing press : the Franciscan Printing Press of Jerusalem, the first Hebrew Printer and the Armenian Press. It is cross-referenced with a study at the archives of the Khalidi Library and the archives of The Alliance israélite universelle. Through these five case studies, the paper argues that we can clearly see in the Holy city an increase in the flow and exchange of knowledge, in a process of hybridization that helped bring about a shared urbanity in the second half of the 19th century. In the Khalidi Library for instance, we find Koranic exegeses but also classical European Literature and a French-Hebrew and Arabic-Hebrew dictinary, all of which attests to the great diversity of cultural horizons. In the archives of the Franciscan Printing Press of Jerusalem, we find a record of every volume printed since its founding in 1847 (authors, deadlines, runs) and that the first wolume printed in January 1847 is an Arabic alphabet primer followed by an Arabic translation of the catholic catechism. An investigation of these archives completed by the archives of the Armenian Press (founded in 1833) and the first Hebrew Printer, founded in 1841, helps to understand what reading practices and inter-linguistic exchanges are at play. Finally, studying the enrollment lists contained in the archives of religious schools allows to notice that contrary to what one might beleive, even in Jerusalem, families often placed their children in schools outside their own faith. The Alliance israélite universelle is a case in point because it was attended by many Christian and Muslim students. Religious schools, libraries and printing press are used here as essential areas of research to grasp the concrete practices of a shared knowledge in the Holy city in the second half of the 19th century.