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Is the new Judaica really worth £1,000?
22/06/2007
Rabbi Professor Marc Saperstein reviews the second edition of the encyclopaedia
Encyclopaedia Judaica, Second edition. 22 vols.
Edited by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik
Thomson Gales Macmillan Reference USA, $1,995
An encyclopaedia represents the collective work of a large cadre of
scholars, specialists in their respective fields, whose contributions
reflect in ensemble the consensus of current knowledge.
The 1904 Jewish Encyclopedia summarised the achievements of several
generations associated with the nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des
Judentums. The 16-volume 1972 Encyclopaedia Judaica, though edited
by Cecil Roth and Geoffrey Wigoder, was to a considerable extent the
product of two generations of European-trained scholars who had
emigrated to Palestine and established the Hebrew University as the
pre-eminent centre of Jewish Studies. Twelve supplementary volumes
were produced with updated material; an online version appeared in
the mid-1990s.
A revised edition of the EJ has recently been published in 22
volumes. Chief editors are Michael Berenbaum (former project director
of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington) and Fred Skolnik
(a co-editor of the first edition). The following review is based on
a sample survey of the e-book version of the text which is
available to institutions .
Publicity for the edition states that it has been completely updated
for todays students and researchers. Some articles, however, remain
totally unrevised. Others were left unchanged but with updated
bibliographies, while in some cases both articles and the
bibliographies were revised. Plus, 2,600 new articles were commissioned.
Many of the new articles are quite fine, including major new
treatments of liturgy and the Cairo Genizah. The area of modern
Jewish religious thought seems especially well-served, with extensive
new or significantly revised articles on Eliezer Berkovits, Eugene
Borowitz, Martin Buber, Emil Fackenheim, Abraham Joshua Heschel,
Mordecai Kaplan, Franz Rosenzweig, Joseph Soloveitchik. In
literature, there are new articles on Elie Wiesel, Amos Oz, A B
Yehoshua, David Grossman, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip
Roth, and an updated article on Bashevis Singer.
Some of the editorial decisions, however, seem rather arbitrary, in a
few cases questionable. The 1972 EJ was the first Jewish
encyclopaedia to devote massive space to the Jewish mystical
tradition, with the monumental contributions of Gershom Scholem
testimony to his magisterial research career. The revised edition
retains these articles unchanged, and supplements them with new
entries. Scholems original 90-page article on Kabbalah is
supplemented with 15 pages of new articles. (By comparison, the new
article on Jewish philosophy, covering the period from antiquity to
the present, encompasses 48 pages; the unrevised article on halachah
is nine pages; the new article on haggadah is 11 pages.)
In 1972, the towering personality of Scholem and the need to redress
the slighting of the Jewish mystical tradition in earlier
encyclopaedias perhaps justified the extensive treatment. Today, the
reprinting of all his contributions on Jewish mysticism seems
unjustified and excessive.
There is a surprising lack of consistency and some noticeable gaps. I
will focus on the British material. The unrevised article on Louis
Jacobs shows embarrassing neglect. It is two paragraphs long,
focusing on the controversy with Chief Rabbi Brodie in the 1960s and
a listing of Jacobss works, with the latest book dated 1968. The
only addition to the 1972 article was to add the year 2006 as the
date of his death.
A quirky new article on Jonathan Sacks is three paragraphs long; the
latest of his books listed was published in 1992, and the final
paragraph highlights decisions that were dismaying to liberal
opinion and overshadowed his achievements a judgment of
questionable appropriateness for an encyclopaedia.
There are good new articles on Immanuel Jakobovits and on Martin
Gilbert, as well as brief treatments by William D Rubenstein (the
divisional editor for England) of such British academics as Eric
Hobsbawm, Simon Schama, Geoffrey Alderman, Jonathan Israel, David
Katz, and Aubrey Newman. But Raphael Loewe, who contributed 29
articles to the EJ, and Nicholas de Lange, who holds a major academic
position at Cambridge University and is one of most important and
successful translators of modern Hebrew literature, have no entry.
There is no article on David Woolf Marks, the pioneering British
Reform religious leader for more than half a century (one passing
reference in an article on his son!) or the West London Synagogue.
The search engine reveals no reference to John Rayner or the Liberal
Jewish Synagogue, to Tony Bayfield, Albert Friedlander, David
Goldberg, Jonathan Magonet, or Julia Neuberger. (American rabbis of
no greater distinction and French rabbis of lesser distinction have
been given entries.)
There is no mention of Limmud, or of the Littman Library of Jewish
Civilisation, no article on the Leo Baeck College, no indication that
Jews College is no longer functioning as a rabbinical seminary (the
last date in the article is 1995).
One advantage of the e-book Encyclopaedia is that each article
contains key words (many of them proper names), for which articles
can be accessed simply by clicking on the link. This opens up the
possibility of a continuing process of discovery, in which each
article leads immediately to many others. Some quirks in the system
remain, however.
Clicking the name of Abraham Joshua Heschel in the article on Eliezer
Berkovits produces only the 19th-century Chasidic rebbe, not the
20th-century theologian. A search for haskalah yields 175 names
associated with this movement of Jewish Enlightenment, but not the
main article.
Despite such minor (and easily correctable) problems with the search
engine for the e-book version, the ease of finding material makes it
seem preferable as a research tool to the printed volumes. While
there is no substitute for holding the actual volumes with their
maps, tables, illustrations and photographs, some might conclude that
it would have been a wiser decision to publish this new edition only
in a readily updateable and correctable e-book or on-line edition.
Rabbi Saperstein is principal of the Leo Baeck College
Shmuel Ben-Gad,
Gelman Library,
George Washington University.
Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author
and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL)
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