Tag: Mediterranean

Tracing Routes and Memories: The Jews of North Africa and the Middle East in TRAME, a Digital Humanities Project

ABSTRACT This article examines TRAME: Tracing Routes and Memories—Entangled Jewish Experiences across the Mediterranean, a digital humanities project developed by the CDEC Foundation to document and interpret the migration of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East to Italy during the twentieth century. Building on the Edoth oral history fond, TRAME transforms oral testimonies, photographs, and archival materials into an interactive digital environment, offering new tools for research, education, and public engagement. Through digital mapping, story narratives, and thematic essays, the platform visualizes individual trajectories and collective experiences, highlighting how political, social, and personal factors shaped Jewish mobility across the Mediterranean. The project reweaves fragmented memories into a collective narrative, offering insight into the transnational origins of Italian Jewry and contributing to broader reflections on migration, memory, and identity in contemporary Europe.

issue 28 / no. 2 (2025) by Chiara Renzo

Archives of the Sephardi Kitchen

ABSTRACT
Drawing on two distinct bodies of Sephardi food writing—Anglophone cookbooks and the long-running recipe column in the Judeo-Spanish periodical Aki Yerushalayim—this paper explores the role of cuisine as a primary affiliative structure in contemporary Sephardi culture. I argue that these two divergent literary traditions, in their general ignorance of one another, constitute a framework for an archive of Sephardi cooking. In spite of these texts’ common conception of cooking as a female practice of memory and identification as well as their shared interest in the intersection of the culinary and the linguistic, they are at odds with one another as to whether Sephardi culture exists only in the past, or may also be found in the present. Side-by-side consideration of both corpuses requires an understanding of Sephardi culture attentive to persistent continuities in spite of major historical ruptures.

issue 18 / December 2020 by Harry Eli Kashdan