The Memory of History project aims to digitise unpublished Ottoman documents in
Palestine, whether written in Arabic or Ottoman Turkish, and publish them online in
electronic format. By doing so, the project will protect these manuscripts, ensuring
their availability for future generations. The project is particularly timely, since the
150-year-old library of Ottoman archives of the Gaza municipality was bombed by
Israeli forces in Autumn 2023, burning many Ottoman documents.
The project is funded by a European Union Erasmus+ grant and started in January
2023, ending in December 2024. It is a collaborative project between An-Najah National
University in Palestine, Ankara Sosyal Bilimler Vakfı in Turkey, Inercia Digital in Spain,
and the Zentrum für Interkulturelle Bildung und Arbeit in Germany.
In addition to publishing the digitised documents on a bespoke website designed by
Inercia Digital - a Spanish company specialising in education and digital innovation -
the project will produce a documentary film about Ottoman manuscripts in Palestine
titled ‘The Adventure of the Book’.
There are thousands of documents dating to the Ottoman period in Palestine that
relate to land and property ownership by residents of Palestine at that time, including

land and private property ownership certificates. Other documents include birth certifi-
cates, and marriage and divorce contracts.

Palestinians consider Ottoman documents as material evidence of their existence in
Ottoman Palestine. Over time, many of them were scattered due to looting by the
British in 1917 after they ended Ottoman rule in Palestine, as well as being taken by

the State of Israel after the Nakba in 1948, although many of these were subsequently dis-
played in the National Library of Israel. Many documents also ended up in neighboring

countries such as Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and the Gulf states, for example, as Pales-
tinian refugees took their land ownership and birth certificates with them in the hope of

returning to their homes after the events of 1948 and 1967.
The Memory of History project began in July 2023 with a training session focused on
Ottoman documents in Ankara. Meetings of the project’s management body were also

held there in August 2023. Other meetings were held via Zoom, and further training ses-
sions were held in Germany and Spain. A project visit to Palestine scheduled for Autumn

2023 was postponed due to the political situation.

© Palestine Exploration Fund 2024
CONTACT Loay Abu Alsaud [email protected]; Mahmoud Mustafa [email protected]
PALESTINE EXPLORATION QUARTERLY
2024, VOL. 156, NO. 2, 198–199
https://doi.org/10.1080/00310328.2024.2343197

To date, the project team, consisting of Dr. Loay Abu Alsaud, Prof. Mahmoud
Mustafa, Prof. Saed Al-Khayyat and technician Mr. Abdel Hadi Jawabreh, has collected
more than 100 Ottoman documents as part of the project. These were collected from
various sources, including the library of An-Najah National University and the Samaritan
Museum in Nablus, as well as the Devlet Arşivleri Başkanliği in Istanbul, Turkey.
The collected documents were scanned and converted into electronic files in PDF and

JPG format. They were then allocated a pre-designed card in Arabic and English record-
ing each document’s origin, history, content, status, and current location. The digitised

documents were published on a specially designed project website, enabling students and
researchers specialising in the Ottoman period of Palestine to read and use them for their
research. As such, it is hoped that these documents, and the valuable information they
contain, will contribute to preserving the Ottoman history of Palestine.
We would like to thank the European Union for supporting this project through an
Erasmus+ grant. Thanks are also extended to our Turkish, German and Spanish

project partners, who have contributed to promoting joint work and international collab-
oration. It is hoped that this has helped to increase mutual understanding through visits

and exchange between project partners.
Many thanks also go to all those who gave the project access to documents in their
possession. We are most grateful for their permission to digitise them for the benefit
of scientific research and the preservation of Palestinian cultural heritage.
ORCID
Loay Abu Alsaud http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7617-968X
Mahmoud Mustafa http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9292-6262

Title

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/ypeq20

Publisher

Palestine Exploration Quarterly francis Taylor

Publisher Country

United Kingdom

Indexing

Thomson Reuters

Impact Factor

1.0

Publication Type

Online only

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