Bayt al-Dhakira wal-Turath (Arabic: بيت الذاكرة والتراث, literally "House of Memory and Heritage") is a Palestinian research, documentation and cultural-heritage center based in Nazareth, Israel. Its fuller name is the Bayt al-Dhakira wal-Turath Center for Research and Documentation ().
The center documents Palestinian social history, collective memory and cultural heritage, with particular emphasis on oral history. Its activities include recording interviews, collecting historical photographs, manuscripts, newspapers and other documentary materials, organizing conferences and public-history events, and publishing studies and collections of oral and folkloric material.
The historian Mustafa Kabha has headed the center since its inception.
History An initiative operating under the name Bayt al-Dhakira wal-Turath was reported in the local Palestinian press by 2013. In June of that year, a group using the name, accompanied by Kabha, conducted historical field visits to depopulated Palestinian villages and their surroundings. One tour included Qaqun and the former villages of Wadi al-Hawarith, while another visited Ayn Ghazal.
The research and documentation center was publicly launched in Nazareth in November 2018. A study day marking the launch was devoted to Palestinian folk song and its role in the formation of collective historical memory. Participants included the writer Muhammad Ali Taha.
By 2021 the center was holding what was described as its fourth annual conference. The conference, held in Nazareth under the title "Oral History and its Role in Shaping the Historical Narrative", focused on the methodological use of oral testimony in historical research. At the meeting, members of the center's administration reviewed its work in research, documentation, publishing and cooperation with other research institutions.
Research and collections The center's documentary work focuses on the collection and preservation of sources relating to Palestinian society and history. Al-Ittihad described its program as encompassing theoretical, applied and documentary research concerning Palestinian collective memory, heritage and history. Its oral-history program records interviews with people who experienced or participated in Palestinian historical events, while its archival work includes the collection of historical photographs, manuscripts, newspapers, documents and material heritage objects.
One example of its oral-history work was presented publicly in 2019 in connection with Rana Abu Hanna's Letters of Love Not from This Era, a collection of correspondence written between 1956 and 1961. At a Nazareth event sponsored by the center, it screened a short documentary constructed from an extended oral-history interview with Julia Azar Abu Hanna. Reporting on the event, Al-Quds Al-Arabi described Kabha's presentation of the center's oral-documentation program and its use of personal correspondence as a source for the social history of Palestinians in the period after 1948.
The center's archival collections have also been used in academic research. A 2019 peer-reviewed study by Maysun Irshid-Shahada on Arab communists in Mandatory Palestine and Israel cited the archive of Bayt al-Dhakira wal-Turath among its documentary repositories. The study described the Nazareth collection as including newspapers and periodicals from Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine as well as Arabic newspapers published in Israel. In a study of the Palestinian folk poet Nuh Ibrahim, Kabha cited documents preserved in the center's numbered folk-literature collection, including material associated with commemorations of Ibrahim.
Conferences and public history Alongside archival collection, Bayt al-Dhakira wal-Turath has organized conferences, seminars and field activities concerned with the relationship between historical scholarship and public memory. The 2018 event accompanying the center's launch examined Palestinian folk singing as a vehicle for historical memory. Its 2021 annual conference was devoted specifically to oral history, including discussion of the evidentiary and methodological problems involved in incorporating oral testimony into historical narratives.
The center has also organized activities centered on family documents, individual testimony and local social history. The 2019 seminar on Letters of Love Not from This Era, held in the historic Fawzi Azar house in Nazareth, discussed Palestinian social life during the 1950s and early 1960s. The event was also noted by the Saudi cultural magazine Al-Faisal in its survey of new publications.
The field excursions reported under the Bayt al-Dhakira wal-Turath name in 2013 concentrated on Palestinian villages depopulated during the 1948 Palestine war. The visits combined site observation with historical explanations of the former communities and their surrounding landscapes.
Publications In 2020 the center issued what the Palestinian news agency WAFA described as its first publication, Fadwa Younis's Hadiyat al-Wadi: Min Mirath al-Aghani al-Sha'biyya lil-Sitt Badriyya Yunis (; "The Singer of the Valley: From the Folk-Song Heritage of al-Sitt Badriyya Younis"). The book documented the repertoire of Badriyya Younis, a blind folk singer from Wadi Ara, and included an introduction by Kabha and musical notation prepared by Muhammad Musa Khalaf.
Al-Eqtisadiah discussed the volume in its books section in 2021, describing it as a record of the songs associated with Badriyya Younis and the folk-song tradition of Wadi Ara. Al-Quds Al-Arabi subsequently discussed the volume in a 2022 profile of Fadwa Younis and her work documenting women's folk songs in Wadi Ara. The book has also been cited in linguistic scholarship on Palestinian Arabic.
Bayt al-Dhakira wal-Turath has also served as a publishing imprint for historical research. A second edition of Mustafa Kabha and Nimr Sirhan's study of Bilad al-Ruha during the British Mandate, using al-Sindiyana as a case study, appeared under the center's imprint in Nazareth in 2023. The edition is cited in a peer-reviewed study of Lajjun published in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.
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