About the Atlas
The Atlas puts the entities of JudaicaLink on a map. Choose a time window and an area, and the map shows where people lived and where organisations and publications were, and how they were connected.
What is on the map
- People
- 77,859 people with a year of birth or death and at least one place with coordinates. A person is shown at all their places (birth, activity, exile, death, burial) for the whole life, from the year of birth to the year of death. When only one of the two years is known, the life is taken to last 70 years (marked as estimated); a life of more than 110 years is taken as an error in the data, and the year of birth is not used. With “births and deaths in their year”, the places of birth, death and burial count only in that year.
- Organisations
- 311 organisations with a seat and a year of establishment or termination (from the GND). Without a year of termination an organisation is shown only in the year of its establishment.
- Publications
- 395 books of the Library of Haskala (the place and year of printing, and of later editions) and 278 periodicals of Compact Memory (the place and the years of publication), and 6,417 imprints of Footprints (the place and year of printing, and 14,196 places and years where a copy was: owners, sellers, censors, libraries).
- Connections
- 9,922 connections between entities on the map: 6,386 family relations (GND, Epidat, Gidal Image Archive), 395 acquaintances and friendships and 279 professional relations (GND), 2,862 authors, translators, printers and other producers of books (Library of Haskala, Footprints). A line joins the main places of the two entities: for a person the first place of activity, else the place of death, burial or birth.
- Places
- 7,208 places: the entity pages of places with coordinates, and places that only an authority record with coordinates names. Areas are present-day countries (Natural Earth); the map shows no historical borders.
What is not on the map yet
An entity is on the map only when the data give it a time and a place with coordinates. Many places in the data are named by an identifier that has no coordinates in JudaicaLink yet, among them the cemeteries of Epidat (Getty TGN) and places of the GND, Wikidata and the Library of Congress outside the selections of GND and GeoNames. These are gaps in the data, to be filled there, not in this showcase.
| Count | Number |
|---|---|
| birth places without coordinates (or a country or region) | 15,198 |
| burial places without coordinates (or a country or region) | 18,650 |
| creator connections not on the map | 9,127 |
| death places without coordinates (or a country or region) | 5,997 |
| family connections not on the map | 33,265 |
| friendship connections not on the map | 1,860 |
| people on the map | 77,859 |
| people with a life of more than 110 years (year of birth not used) | 88 |
| people with death before birth (left out) | 98 |
| people with places but no years | 4,109 |
| people without a place with coordinates | 209,041 |
| periodicals on the map | 278 |
| periodicals without years or a matched place | 58 |
| place pages of countries and regions (left out) | 154 |
| place pages with coordinates | 5,967 |
| place pages without coordinates | 7,728 |
| places without a place page | 1,241 |
| professional connections not on the map | 911 |
The data
The Atlas is built from the stable versions of these JudaicaLink datasets (on 2026-10-26); every entity links to its view in the knowledge graph.
| Dataset | Version | Licence | What the Atlas takes |
|---|---|---|---|
| cm-entities | 2026-10-12 | CC0 1.0 | coordinates |
| compact-memory | 2026-10-12 | CC0 1.0 | periodicals: place and years of publication |
| ep | 2026-10-26-2 | CC0 1.0 | the entities: names, years and places of birth, death and burial |
| epidat | 2026-10-18 | CC BY 4.0 | family relations of the people buried in Jewish cemeteries |
| footprints | 2026-10-26-2 | CC BY-SA 4.0 | imprints: place and year of printing, the places and years of the footprints of their copies, their authors, editors, printers and publishers; coordinates |
| gba | 2026-10-18 | CC BY 4.0 | relatives of the people of the Gidal Image Archive |
| geo-coordinates | 2026-10-12 | CC0 1.0 | coordinates |
| geonames | 2026-10-26 | CC BY 4.0 | coordinates |
| gnd | 2026-10-26 | CC0 1.0 | places of activity and exile, seats and years of organisations, relations between people, coordinates |
| haskala | 2026-10-12 | CC BY 4.0 | books: place and year of printing, editions, producers, translators and preface writers; coordinates |
| hhkeydocs | 2026-10-16 | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ | coordinates |
| wikidata | 2026-10-26 | CC0 1.0 | GeoNames identifiers of places |
The base map is made from Natural Earth 1:50m (public domain) and is part of this site; no map tiles or other resources are loaded from elsewhere. All data of the map: atlas.json.
Using the map
- Drag the timeline or type the years; Play moves the window forward.
- Choose a country, or Draw area and drag a rectangle on the map. The timeline then counts only the area.
- Select a place for the list of its entities in the time window, and an entity for its places and connections.
- The address of the page keeps the selection, so it can be shared.
/atlas/?iri=…opens the map at an entity page of JudaicaLink.