Jewish Encyclopedia

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The Jewish Encyclopedia[n 1] is an English encyclopedia containing over 15,000 articles on the
history, culture, and state of Judaism and the Jews up to the early 20th century.[1] It was
originally published in 12 volumes by Funk and Wagnalls of New York City between 1901 and
1906 and reprinted in the 1960s by KTAV Publishing House. The work's scholarship is still
highly regarded: the American Jewish Archives has called it "the most monumental Jewish
scientific work of modern times"[2] and Rabbi Joshua L. Segal said that, "For events prior to
1900, it is considered to offer a level of scholarship superior to either of the more recent Jewish
Encyclopedias written in English."[3] It is now in the public domain[n 2] and hosted at various sites
around the internet.
The encyclopedia's managing editor was Isidore Singer. The editorial board was chaired
by Isaac K. Funk and Frank H. Vizetelly. The other editors participating in all twelve volumes
were Cyrus Adler, Gotthard Deutsch, Richard Gottheil, Joseph Jacobs, Kaufmann
Kohler, Herman Rosenthal, and Crawford Howell Toy. Morris Jastrow, Jr. and Frederick de
Sola Mendes assisted with volumes I & II; Marcus Jastrow with volumes I, II, & III; Louis
Ginzberg with the first four volumes; Solomon Schechter with volumes IV through VII; Emil G.
Hirsch with volumes IV through XII; and Wilhelm Bacher with volumes VIII through XII. William
Popper served as the assistant revision editor and chief of translation for Vols. IV through XII.
 Contents
[hide]

 1History

o 1.1Singer’s idea

o 1.2Editorial board

 2Content

o 2.1Relation to German scholarship

 3Editions

o 3.1Russian

o 3.2Online

 4See also

 5Notes

 6References

o 6.1Citations

o 6.2Bibliography

 7Further reading

 8External links

History[edit]
Singer’s idea[edit]
Singer conceived of a Jewish encyclopedia in Europe and proposed creating an “Allgemeine
Encyklopädia für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums” in 1891. He envisioned
twelve volumes, published over ten or fifteen years, and costing fifty dollars as a set. They
would contain scientific and unbiased articles on ancient and modern Jewish culture. This
proposal received good press coverage and interest from the Brockhaus publishing company.
However, after the House of Rothschild in Paris, consulted by Zadoc Kahn, offered to back the
project with only 8% of the minimum funds requested by Brockaus, the project was
abandoned. Following the Dreyfus affair and associated unpleasantness Singer emigrated to
New York City.[4]
Initially believing that American Jews could do little more than provide funding for his project,
Singer was impressed by the level of scholarship in the United States. He wrote a new
prospectus, changing the title of his planned encyclopedia to “Encyclopedia of the History and
Mental Evolution of the Jewish Race”. His radical ecumenism and opposition to orthodoxy
upset many of his Jewish readers; nevertheless he attracted the interest of publisher Isaac K.
Funk, a Lutheran minister who also believed in integrating Judaism and Christianity. Funk
agreed to publish the encyclopedia on the condition that it remain unbiased on issues which
might seem unfavorable for Jews. Singer accepted and was established in an office at Funk &
Wagnalls on 2 May 1898.[5]
Publication of the prospectus in 1898 created a severe backlash, including accusations of poor
scholarship and of subservience to Christians. Kaufmann Kohler and Gotthard Deutsch, writing
in American Hebrew, highlighted Singer’s factual errors, and accused him of commercialism
and irreligiosity. Now considering that the project could not succeed with Singer at the helm,
Funk & Wagnalls appointed an editorial board to oversee creation of the encyclopedia. [6]
Editorial board[edit]
Funk & Wagnalls assembled an editorial board between October 1898 and March 1899. Singer
toned down his ideological rhetoric, indicated his desire to collaborate, and changed the work’s
proposed title to “Jewish Encyclopedia”. Despite their reservations about Singer, rabbi Gustav
Gottheil and Cyrus Adler agreed to join the board, followed by Morris Jastrow, then Frederick
de Sola Mendes and two published critics of the project: Kauffmann Kohler and Gotthard
Deutsch. Theologian and Presbyterian minister George Foot Moore was added to the board for
balance. (Soon after work started, Moore withdrew and was replaced by Baptist
minister Crawford Toy.) Last was added the elderly Marcus Jastrow, mostly for his symbolic
imprimatur as America's leading Talmudist. In March 1899 the Central Conference of American
Rabbis, which had been contemplating a competing project, agreed to discuss collaborating
with Funk & Wagnalls—thus securing the position of the Jewish Encyclopedia as the only
major project of its kind.[7][n 3]
The editors plunged into their enormous task and soon identified and solved some
inefficiencies with the project. Article assignments were shuffled around and communication
practices were streamlined. Joseph Jacobs was hired as a coordinator. (He also wrote four
hundred articles and procured many of the encyclopedia's illustrations.) Herman Rosenthal, an
authority on Russia, was added as an editor. Louis Ginzberg joined the project and later
became head of the rabbinical literature department.[8]
The board naturally faced many difficult editorial questions and disagreements. Singer wanted
specific entries for every Jewish community in the world, with detailed information about, for
example, the name and dates of the first Jewish settler in Prague. Conflict also arose over
what types of bible interpretation should be included, with some editors fearing that Morris
Jastrow's involvement in "higher criticism" would lead to unfavorable treatment of scripture. [9]

Content[edit]
Relation to German scholarship[edit]
Jewish Encyclopedia Illustration, most are black and white ink.

Illustration of Jewish grave in France with menorah used for the h in hic and Hebrew characters at the
bottom right.

The scholarly style of the Jewish Encyclopedia is very much in the mode of the Wissenschaft
des Judentums("Jewish studies"), an approach to Jewish scholarship and religion that
flourished in 19th-century Germany; indeed, the Encyclopedia may be regarded as the
culmination of this movement, which sought to modernize scholarly methods in Jewish
research. In the 20th century, the movement's members dispersed to Jewish
Studiesdepartments in the United States and Israel. The scholarly authorities cited in the
Encyclopedia—besides the classical and medieval exegetes—are almost uniformly
Wissenschaft figures, such as Leopold Zunz, Moritz Steinschneider, Solomon
Schechter, Wilhelm Bacher, J.L. Rapoport, David Zvi Hoffman, Heinrich Graetz, etc. This
particular scholarly style can be seen in the Jewish Encyclopedia's almost obsessive attention
to manuscript discovery, manuscript editing and publication, manuscript comparison,
manuscript dating, and so on; these endeavors were among the foremost interests of
Wissenschaft scholarship.[10]
The Jewish Encyclopedia is an English-language work, but the vast majority of the
encyclopedia's contemporary sources are German-language sources, since this was the
mother tongue of the Wissenschaft scholars and the lingua franca of Biblical scholarship in
general in that period. Of the works cited which are not German—usually the more classical
works—the large part are either Hebrew or Arabic. The only heavily cited English-language
source of contemporary scholarship is Solomon Schechter's publications in the Jewish
Quarterly Review. The significance of the work's publication in English rather than German or
Hebrew is captured by Harry Wolfson writing in 1926 (Schwarz 1965):
About twenty-five years ago, there was no greater desert, as far as Jewish life and learning,
than the English-speaking countries, and English of all languages was the least serviceable for
such a Jewish work of reference. To contemporary European reviewers of the Jewish
Encyclopedia, the undertaking seemed then like an effort wasted on half-clad Zulus in South
Africa and Jewish tailors in New York. Those who were then really in need of such a work and
could benefit thereby would have been better served if it were put out in Hebrew, German
or Russian.

— Harry Wolfson

The editors and authors of the Jewish Encyclopedia proved prescient in their choice of
language, since within that same span of 25 years, English rose to become the dominant
language of academic Jewish scholarship and among Jews worldwide. Wolfson continues that
"if a Jewish Encyclopedia in a modern language were planned for the first time [i.e., in 1926],
the choice would undoubtedly have fallen upon English."

Editions[edit]
Russian[edit]
The Jewish Encyclopedia was heavily used as a source by the 16-volume Jewish
Encyclopedia in Russian,[11] published by Brockhaus and Efron in Saint Petersburg between
1906 and 1913.
Online[edit]
The unedited text of the original can be found at the Jewish Encyclopedia website.[12] The site
offers both JPEG facsimiles of the original articles and Unicode transcriptions of all texts.
The search capability is somewhat handicapped by the fact that the search mechanism fails to
take into account the decision to maintain all diacritical marks in
the transliterated Hebrew and Aramaic from the 1901–1906 text, which used a large number of
diacriticals not in common use today. Thus, for example, to successfully search for "Halizah"
(the ceremony by which the widow of a brother who has died childless released her brother-in-
law from the obligation of marrying her), one would have to know that they have transliterated
this as "Ḥaliẓah". The alphabetic index ignores diacriticals so it can be more useful when
searching for an article whose title is known.
The scholarly apparatus of citation is thorough, but can be a bit daunting to contemporary
users. Books that might have been widely known among scholars of Judaism at the time the
encyclopedia was written (but which are quite obscure to a lay reader today) are referred to by
author and title, but with no publication information and often without indication of the language
in which they were written. A list of abbreviations used in the encyclopedia is provided on
the Jewish Encyclopediawebsite.[13]

See also[edit]
  The Encyclopædia Biblica, from which the Jewish
Encyclopedia sometimes quotes verbatim[n 4]

 Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible (1898–1904)

 The Shorter Jewish Encyclopedia

 The Encyclopedia Judaica

 The Catholic Encyclopedia and Encyclopaedia of

Islam & Islamica

 Lists of encyclopedias

 Nahum Goldmann

 Topics from the Jewish Encyclopedia on Wikipedia

Notes[edit]
1. Jump up^ Full name: The Jewish Encyclopedia: A
Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and
Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times to
the Present Day.

2. Jump up^ Note, however, that some websites hosting the text
claim copyright over the digitized images. Public domain scans
are available elsewhere, as at the Internet Archive.

3. Jump up^ Schwartz 1991 (p. 48) describes the payment

scheme arranged at this time as follows:
Members of the local executive committee, exclusive of Singer
and, of course, Funk, would receive one thousand dollars per
annum, while the rest of the department editors would receive
five hundred. All collaborators, editors included, would be paid
five dollars per printed page of about one thousand English
words. If the article was written in a foreign language, payment
would be only $3.50 per page. Singer's compensation was forty
dollars a week (thirty-five plus five for a life insurance premium).
His salary was considered an advance, since Singer alone was
to share with the company in the profits.

4. Jump up^ For example, in its article concerning marriage. [14]

References[edit]
Citations[edit]

1. Jump up^ "The Jewish Encyclopedia". New York Times. 16

August 1902. Retrieved 17 March 2014.
 2. Jump up^ "The Larger Task" (PDF). American Jewish Archives.
Retrieved 17 October 2013..

3. Jump up^ Segal, Joshua L. (November 2003), "Rabbi's

Message: Nov. 2003 - Cheshvan 5764: A Jewish Reference
Library at Betenu", Betenu, Vol. 21, No. 4.

4. Jump up^ Schwartz 1991, pp. 25–27.

5. Jump up^ Schwartz 1991, p. 28–31.

6. Jump up^ Schwartz 1991, pp. 33–36.

7. Jump up^ Schwartz 1991, pp. 37–51.

8. Jump up^ Schwartz 1991, pp. 51–56.

9. Jump up^ Schwartz 1991, pp. 57–59.

10. Jump up^ Schwartz 1991, pp. 2–4.

11. Jump up^ eleven.co.il

12. Jump up^ The Jewish Encyclopedia.

13. Jump up^ "Abbreviations Listings". JewishEncyclopedia.com.

Retrieved 2014-02-26.

14. Jump up^ JE, Vol. VIII 1904, "Marriage".

Bibliography[edit]

 The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. I, New York: Funk & Wagnalls

Co., 1901, LCCN 16014703.

 The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. II, New York: Funk & Wagnalls
Co., 1902, LCCN 16014703.

 The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. III, New York: Funk & Wagnalls
Co., 1902, LCCN 16014703.

 The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. IV, New York: Funk &

Wagnalls Co., 1903, LCCN 16014703.

 The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. V, New York: Funk & Wagnalls

Co., 1903, LCCN 16014703.

 The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vols. VI & VII, New York: Funk &
Wagnalls Co., 1904, LCCN 16014703.
  The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. VIII, New York: Funk &
Wagnalls Co., 1904, LCCN 16014703.

 The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vols. IX, X, & XI, New York: Funk &
Wagnalls Co., 1905, LCCN 16014703.

 The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vols. XII, New York: Funk &

Wagnalls Co., 1906, LCCN 16014703.

 Schwartz, Shuly Rubin. The Emergence of Jewish

Scholarship in America: The Publication of the Jewish
Encyclopedia. Monographs of the Hebrew Union College,
Number 13. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press,
1991. ISBN 0-87820-412-1

 Schwarz, Leo W. (1965), "A bibliographical essay", in

Lieberman, Saul, Harry Austryn Wolfson Jubilee Volume on
the Occasion of His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, Jerusalem:
American Academy for Jewish Research

Further reading[edit]
Internet Archive
KTAV Reprint
Volume From To
Apocalypti
Volume 1 Aach
c
Volume 2 Apocrypha Benash
Volume 3 Bencemero Chazanuth
Volume 4 Chazars Dreyfus
Volume 5 Dreyfus Goat
Volume 6 God Istria
Volume 7 Italy Leon
Volume 8 Leon Moravia
Morawyczy
Volume 9 Philippson
k
Volume 10 Philipson Samoscz
Volume 11 Samson Talmid
Volume 12 Talmud Zweifel

External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has
media related to Jewish
Encyclopedia.
  Media related to Jewish Encyclopedia at Wikimedia
Commons (complete Encyclopedia)

 Works related to Jewish Encyclopedia at Wikisource

(incomplete Encyclopedia)

 JewishEncyclopedia.com (see above), maintained by

the Kopelman Foundation.

 multiple copies at the Internet Archive

 Hathi Trust. Jewish Encyclopedia (fulltext)

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WorldCat Identities

Authority VIAF: 174251723

control LCCN: n90666388

GND: 4318519-8
Categories:
 1901 books
 1906 books
 Encyclopedias of culture and ethnicity
 Encyclopedias of religion
 Jewish encyclopedias
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 Funk & Wagnalls books
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