JWST GU4538 History of Jews in the Islamic World in Modern Times: Primary Sources: Jewish in the Islamic World in Modern Times

The vast digital collection contains searchable text collections from 1914-1932, a detailed interactive timeline, historically-themed exhibitions, over 45,000 photographs, findings aids, educational resources, relevant archives news and more.

Diarna is working to digitally preserve the physical remnants of Jewish history throughout North Africa. The goal of the project is to capture site data and record place-based oral histories before the memories of these communities are lost. Diarna pioneers the synthesis of digital mapping technology, traditional scholarship, and field research, as well as a trove of multimedia documentation.

The CCJM, based at the Brussels Jewish Museum, has posted photographs of clothing, jewelry, texts, individuals, and more, which document Jewish life in Morocco during the first half of the 20th century. (Note that the site is mostly in French)

Joanna Spector was an ethnomusicologist who devoted her life to studying the music of non-Western Jewish communities. Many reels of audio-visual material have been digitized by the Jewish Theological Seminary, and are available online, both on their website and at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Spector%2C+Johanna+L.%2C%22&page=2

JIMENA is an organization whose goal is to preserve the history of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. To that end, they have been compiling oral histories of Jews from the MENA area, many of which are available on their website.

This database highlights materials from all over the Middle Eastern world, in multiple languages, and spanning a millennium. There are a number of manuscripts (mostly historic) in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic, as well as a small amount of materials dealing with Jews in the 20th century.

The Iraqi Jewish Archive was discovered in 2003 in the flooded basement of Iraqi intelligence headquarters by a US Army team. The archive was brought to the United States for preservation, where it was digitized.

The Rabat Genizah consists of community records, photographs, public notices, pedagogical materials, poetic manuscripts, canonical Jewish texts, rabbinical commentaries, liturgical supplements, and a wide range of other published and unpublished materials from the Jewish community of Rabat, Morocco.

Columbia's Judaica manuscript collection is one of the largest in the US, and includes many manuscripts from Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa, dating back to the 10th century. This link is to manuscripts from Morocco, but there are others from Iran, Iraq, Tunisia, Kurdistan, Syria, and more.

This site contains a collection of Jewish newspapers published in various countries, languages, and time periods. The site displays digital versions of each newspaper, making it possible to view the papers in their original layout. Full-text search is also available for all content published over the course of each newspaper’s publication. More content is continuously being added.

Languages included are: Hebrew, Yiddish, French, Hungarian, English, Arabic, Ladino, German