PEACE project
The funerary culture of the Jewish people, despite vast amounts of evidence available, has yet to benefit from comprehensive analyses. One reason for this state of affairs may lie in the very wealth of data. The sources on Jewish funerary culture (historical, epigraphic, and archaeological) span more than two and a half millennia and—given the antiquity and extent of the Jewish migration movement—cover the entire globe. The only effective way to perform comprehensive analyses on such data would be through the novel computational tools available nowadays. While a great amount of the data is digitized and available online (see below), it is nonetheless largely dispersed on various websites, whose databases are unrelated to, and incompatible with, one another. Consequently, scholars wishing to address research questions in a comprehensive manner, e.g. exploring a funerary concept or phenomenon over a long period of time or across a wide geographical range, cannot do so. PEACE, a Portal of Epigraphy, Archaeology, Conservation and Education on Jewish Funerary Culture, intends to change this, by uniformly structuring large amounts of digital data, currently contained in three different databases, into a single portal, and successively analyzing the data in order to identify linguistic, socio-economic and cultural patterns, ultimately tracking historical change.
Project objectives, Research questions and Methodology
The objectives of this project are two-fold. Primarily, it aims to employ the prism of Jewish funerary culture in order to explore three overarching research topics:
- Identity, diaspora and migration through the centuries
- Patterns of cultural adaptation and transmission among Jews, and between Jews and non-Jews
- Demography and genealogy
These topics will be addressed through six interrelated lenses: commemorative norms, gender studies, onomastics, semiotics, memory studies and the study of emotions. Secondly, the project aims to establish a digital research hub that all future studies involving Jewish funerary culture can build on. These two objectives intersect in the PEACE portal, which is the first outcome to be generated by the project, and the platform that future research will rely on.