The Sephardic Past in the Digital Future

This study imagines a Sephardic archive not as a physical site that houses the artifacts, texts, and history of a nation-state or Empire, but one that allows us to access those objects (or exposes their absence) and to bring artifacts from different official archives into dialogue in a different, virtual space, thus creating an additional, but not exclusionary, epistemic home, namely that of Sephardic studies. In it the author explores the potential advantages and practical limitations, as well as existing models of transnational resources—such as the Friedberg Genizah Project and the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts, as well as del Barco and Vegas Montaner’s project of cataloguing the Hebrew manuscripts in Spanish libraries—that could be considered when thinking of what form a Sephardic archive could take. This study also explores how issues of language and identity fare when translated into the metadata used to make digitized information available.