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Not to be confused with Encyclopaedia Judaica. The Encyclopaedia Judaica is a 26-volume English-language Encyclopedia of the Jewish people and their faith Judaism.

The Jewish Encyclopedia was an encyclopedia originally published between 1901 and 1906 by Funk and Wagnalls. An encyclopedia (or '''encyclopædia''') is a comprehensive written Compendium that contains Information on either all branches of Knowledge Funk & Wagnalls is a Publisher based in New York City known for its reference works including an Encyclopedia, content from which became a part of It contained over 15,000 articles in 12 volumes on the history and then-current state of Judaism and the Jews as of 1901. Judaism (from the Greek Ioudaïsmos, derived from the Hebrew יהודה Yehudah, " Judah " in Hebrew יַהֲדוּת Yahedut PLEASE TAKE NOTE************ It is now a public domain resource. The public domain is a range of abstract materials &ndash commonly referred to as Intellectual property &ndash which are not owned or controlled by anyone

Jenny Mendelsohn, of University of Toronto Libraries, in an online guide to major sources of information about Jews and Judaism says of this work, "Although published in the early 1900s, this was a work highly regarded for its scholarship. This article is about the University of Toronto's St George Campus Much of the material is still of value to researchers in Jewish History. " [1] Reform Jewish rabbi Joshua L. Hi and welcome to Wikipedia! Please understand that this article is frequently subjected to vandalism and the insertion of personal opinions Segal calls it, "a remarkable piece of Jewish scholarship" and adds, "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". [2]

Contents

The Jewish Encyclopedia and Wissenschaft des Judentums

The scholarly style of the Jewish Encyclopedia is very much in the mode of Wissenschaft des Judentums 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 (Levy 2002), anticipating the movement's ultimate dispersion in the 20th century to Jewish Studies departments in the United States and Israel. Wissenschaft des Judentums ("the science of Judaism" in German) refers to a nineteenth-century movement premised on the critical investigation Jewish studies (or Judaic studies) is an academic discipline centered on the study of Jews and Judaism. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Israel topics. The scholarly authorities cited in the Encyclopedia—besides the classical and medieval exegetes—are almost uniformly Wissenschaft personalities such as Leopold Zunz, Moritz Steinschneider, Solomon Schechter, Wilhelm Bacher, J.L. Rapoport, David Zvi Hoffman, Heinrich Graetz, etc. Exegesis (from the Greek 'to lead out' involves an extensive and critical interpretation of an authoritative text, especially of a Holy Leopold Zunz (1794&ndash1886 ( Hebrew / Yiddish: יום טוב ליפמן צונץ &mdash"Yom Tov Lipmann Tzuntz" was the founder of what Moritz Steinschneider ( March 30, 1816, Prostějov (Prossnitz Moravia – 1907 was a Bohemian Bibliographer and Orientalist Solomon Schechter שניאור זלמן שכטר ( December 7, 1847 - November 19[[ 915]] was a Moldavian born Romanian and English Wilhelm Bacher ( January 12, 1850 –1913 was a Hungarian scholar Orientalist, and linguist, born in Liptó-Szent-Miklós Solomon Judah Löb Rapoport ( June 1, 1790 in Lemberg, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Austria – October 16, 1867 For the American documentary filmmaker see David Hoffman David Zvi Hoffmann ( November 24, 1843 &ndash 1921 ( Hebrew Heinrich Graetz ( October 31, 1817 - September 7, 1891) was amongst the first historians to write a comprehensive history of the Jewish 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.

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 scholarship in general in that period. English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. Of the works cited which are not German—usually the more classical works—the large part are either Hebrew or Arabic. Arabic (ar الْعَرَبيّة (informally ar عَرَبيْ) in terms of the number of speakers is the largest living member of the Semitic language The only heavily cited English-language source of contemporary scholarship is Solomon Schechter's publications in the Jewish Quarterly Review. Not to be confused with the Jewish Quarterly. The Jewish Quarterly Review ( JQR) is the oldest English-language journal of 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. Harry Austryn Wolfson ( November 2, 1887 – September 20, 1974) was a scholar philosopher 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

However, the editors and authors of the Jewish Encyclopedia proved quite prescient in their choice of language, since within that same span of 25 years, English rose to become the dominant language of international Jewry and of academic Jewish scholarship. 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. "

Online version

The unedited text of the original can be found at the Jewish Encyclopedia website. The site offers both JPEG facsimiles of the original articles and Unicode transcriptions of all texts. In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's

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. A diacritic ( also called a diacritic or diacritical mark, point, or sign, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation Transliteration is the practice of Transcribing a Word or text written in one Writing system into another writing system or system of rules for such practice Aramaic is a Semitic language with 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". Under the Biblical system of Levirate marriage known as Yibbum, Halizah (or Chalitzah; Hebrew: חליצה 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 (See Listing of Abbreviations).

Jewish Encyclopedia in Russian

The Jewish Encyclopedia was heavily used as a source by the 16-volume Jewish Encyclopedia in Russian, published by Brockhaus and Efron in Saint Petersburg between 1906 and 1913. Russian ( transliteration:,) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages The Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary ( Russian: Энциклопедический словарь Брокгауза и Ефрона (35 volumes small Saint Petersburg ( tr: Sankt-Peterburg,) is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River

Notes

  1. ^ Jenny Mendelsohn, Academic Guide to Jewish History: Encyclopedias and Biographies, University of Toronto Libraries. Last update: August 13, 2006. Accessed October 7, 2006.
  2. ^ Joshua L. Segal, Rabbi's Message: Nov. 2003 - Cheshvan 5764: A Jewish Reference Library at Betenu, Betenu, Volume 21, No. 4: Nov. 2003. Accessed online October 7, 2006.

References

See also

External links

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