Encyclopaedia Judaica1 has a truly magisterial aim. In sixteen large volumes—11,000 pages and more than 11 million words—it sets out to survey the whole of Jewish experience from the most far-off times to the present day, analyzing, expounding, and assessing the religious faith of the Jews, their social and economic life in every part of the world, the ideas they have generated both for themselves and those around them, their sense of kinship as a people, and their endless variety individually. To be coolly factual on all this in a straight work of reference would be hard enough, but the approach also has to embrace elements that transcend facts, above all a sense of wonder and paradox. Here is a people obsessed with material problems, yet full of dreams; avid for change, brilliant at innovation, yet clinging to the past; longing to become unnoticed, yet refusing to disappear; the eternal victim—the eternal survivor. The encyclopedia itself becomes a paradox. Its subject may be a small people, but the canvas is of Western man. The Jews are peripheral but at the heart of things, absorbed in each background yet rising out of it to express the most generalized spiritual problems of humanity. It started in the Bible; it is equally evident today; and it is the hallmark of Jewish experience in many of the ages in between.
All this must somehow emerge from a great Jewish encyclopedia. But there is something else, too, that one expects from such a work, linked to the moment in time at which it appears. At the technical level, the major articles of an encyclopedia must harness the latest products of scholarship in a way which breaks new ground. In some cases the originality will lie in the distilling of a unified presentation from a heterogeneous mass of material familiar to experts but never summarized before in simplified form. In other cases a contributor may be using this occasion to present the fruits of his own study and outlook in a manner never hitherto attempted, so that all future discussion of the subject must take note of it as an independently original statement. In both these approaches (which can overlap of course) Encyclopaedia Judaica frequently scores full marks.
But there is also a psychological side to the breaking of new ground. An encyclopedia acquires a status beyond its character as a reference work if its appearance corresponds to some great turning-point in consciousness. The editors have to feel that they are living in an age of momentous change for which thinkers and scholars must provide a coherent record and a sustaining philosophy. The wide-ranging form of an encyclopedia gives them the means to reevaluate the received ideas on every aspect of their subject, to reexamine the past from a new and “free” point of view, to systematize the experience of their generation not “for reference” but as a step toward establishing a new outlook. The historic example of this approach is the great French encyclopedia of the 18th century. In the field of Jewish experience, something of the same intensity emerges in this new encyclopedia from Israel.
It is therefore as a great concept that one first salutes Encyclopaedia Judaica. In a work on this scale there will undoubtedly be mistakes, inconsistencies, and inadequacies, but to dwell on them in the first instance would be to miss the positive aspects of what is a truly heroic enterprise. Its production standards alone are quite first-rate: printing and binding are outstanding, and there are 8,000 illustrations, a great many in superb color. The original editor-in-chief, Cecil Roth, died in 1970 while the work was still in progress, and to complete it in time must have posed extraordinary problems for his successor, Geoffrey Wigoder, and the large team assembled in Jerusalem. It is a great tribute to Israel that a technical achievement of this quality could be carried through so successfully. But transcending the technical achievement is its spiritual meaning: that there was the will, among those concerned, to meet the needs of world Jewry at this time with a work of this kind.2
For the new encyclopedia, in its broadest aspect, rises to the challenge of documenting for all of us the revolutionary changes in Jewish consciousness through which we are living. The basic elements are familiar enough. At one extreme is the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust, utterly evil in itself but all-powerful too in the reassessment it forces us to make of what was implicit in the earlier story of Jew-hatred. At the other extreme, we have seen the emergence of the Jew, in the State of Israel, as master of his fate, a story of heroism which again carries with it a reevaluation of history. Within the compass of these two dramas alone, the idea of being a Jew seems to need redefinition. But the issue is even more complicated than that. There is no stable or simple position for Jews in the fact that the Holocaust is “over,” and a free homeland in existence. The post-Holocaust Diaspora has thrown up old problems in new forms. In Israel a new people, now almost half native-born, is still bound with indissoluble links to world Jewry and its past, but is at the same time motivated by social, cultural, and political pressures which sit uncomfortably with Diaspora experience. The kinship is still paramount, especially at moments of danger, but the easy answers have disappeared.
For Jews everywhere, then, there is a feeling of living in an era of massive change and there is a thirst for guidance on how to make sense of it all—both the old traditions and the new forms of being a Jew. The sources to draw on are now immense. For the distant past, archeological discovery has opened up a new understanding of Jewish origins. For later periods, scholars have immeasurably deepened traditional Hebrew studies, and created a new approach to the study of Jewish social history. For the Holocaust and its background, the documentation is enormous, almost unassimilable. For the State of Israel, and for the historic issues of Jewish life, philosophers, linguists, historians, political scientists, economists, and sociologists have been laboring in their highly specialized fields. It is a perfect moment in time, and Israel is the perfect place, for the distillation of so much new experience and new knowledge in the form of an encyclopedia.
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One has to turn back seventy years to find a parallel phenomenon, less dramatic outwardly but in fact equally appropriate to its time, and equally inevitable in its place of provenance. In 1901, a great Jewish Encyclopaedia began to be produced in the United States. Publication of its massive twelve volumes was completed by 1906, and in the years since then it has been of incalculable benefit and interest to innumerable readers. With the old JE, as with the new encyclopedia from Israel, the dominant urge was literary and intellectual, but with full realization of an underlying social purpose.
Both old and new encyclopedias struggle to emerge from Jewish history with some sense of optimism, but the terms are very different. In those far-off days at the turn of the century, the idea still persisted that hatred and persecution of the Jews were to a great extent simply a function of ignorance. The Jews had been shut off from the mainstream of Western life, through calumny, superstition, and contempt. The image of the Jew—poor, ignorant, abject, but often at the same time rich, clever, and powerful—could be refashioned through a scientifically accurate account of the positive, healthy aspects of his tradition, which showed how able he was, when “modernized,” to become a natural part of Western life. If this were done, in the background of the liberalism to which the world now seemed committed, the. barriers of hate would finally come down. The truth, in the form of an encyclopedia, would set men free.
It is significant that the prime architect of the old JE, a European journalist now largely forgotten named Isidore Singer, had come to his great conception while working in Paris at the time of the Dreyfus affair. Editor of a news-sheet which tried to rebut anti-Semitism, he saw the solution in terms of reason and argument. Theodor Herzl, as we know, reacted very differently, seeing the Dreyfus eruption as additional proof of his view that the Jews could never have fully normal relations with non-Jews without a homeland of their own. But to Isidore Singer, as he explained in a Preface to the first volume of the JE when it finally appeared, there was a valid and original way to normalize the Diaspora. The new encyclopedia, he said, would illuminate the internal traditions to which the Jews were so attached, but would also set them in a general world context:
In their dispersion [the Jews] are cosmopolitan, both as to their conceptions of world-duty and their participation in the general advancement of mankind. To exhibit both sides of their character has been one of the objects of the Jewish Encyclopaedia.
If one were to put faith, as a Jew, in the power of liberalism, the United States, with its gates open to the hordes of downtrodden immigrants from Czarist Russia, stood out symbolically as the New Jerusalem from which the truth of Jewish life could go forth. But if the New World provided the base, the heart of the matter still lay in Europe. There had been a revolution there in Jewish scholarship, more powerful in some ways than the discoveries hailed in our own time. To open up its results in systematic form to the world at large would not only work wonders on non-Jews; it would generate a new pride among the Jews themselves, giving them normality and self-respect.
It is no denigration of the new encyclopedia from Israel to say that the old JE, supremely successful in expressing this new scholarship, achieved through it a freshness and originality which subsequent publications cannot easily recapture. These qualities were the result of two extraordinary forces coming together with rich effect: on the one side, the fantastic intellectual potential of young Jews trained in the rabbinic tradition, with a vast range of material that they carried virtually in their heads; and on the other, the proximity to them of “German” scholarship, which had opened up dramatically so many fields cognate to their interests—language, law, the ancient world, archeology, folklore, and history. The JE expressed all this: the whole of Jewish experience was translated, as it were, into Western modes of thought.
Encyclopaedia Judaica builds on this process. The fact that it can take the underlying principle for granted leaves it, in some fields, without the sense of breakthrough which came with the first steps in this direction. But there are compensations, as becomes apparent in the contrasting ways in which the two encyclopedias deal with the problems of Bible scholarship.
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Any discussion of Jewish experience has to ground itself on an attitude to the Bible. The JE was very conscious that it had to formulate a new position on the issue. In the foreground were the startling new theories of non-Jewish scholars. The “Higher Critics,” breaking up the Pentateuch into separate documents, were asserting that the Patriarchs were fictional projections of later times. The Psalms were largely “Maccabean.” Everything was “late.” The “holiness” of the Bible was being called into question by parallels in other ancient literatures. Religious ceremonies were being “explained” through anthropology and folklore. How was all this to be handled?
The JE found a satisfactory solution. With every Old Testament book or character, the straight Bible story was told first, followed by a separate section giving a full account of all the legends on the subject, and then by a section summarizing, rather cautiously, the “critical view.” The reader knew exactly where he was. The “straight” part—on Abraham, let us say—was obvious. The legend section was quite original in systematizing so many vaguely remembered stories. But to read the “critical” section was, for a traditionally-educated Jew, almost like eating a ham sandwich:
The biography of Abraham in Genesis is probably to be regarded as legendary. . . . The stories of Lot, Hagar, and Keturah are ethnological myths. . . . Circumcision was not adopted by the Israelites in the way here represented; the story of the attempted sacrifice of Isaac is a product of the regal period. . . .
Even to read it was daring. To believe it, even tentatively, was almost blasphemy. But it opened the mind.
All is very different in the new encyclopedia. Seventy years have passed. Critical theories, familiar now to the most devout, are looked at in a much cooler, less horrified way. Where a Jewish scholar still feels impelled by unshaken faith or vestigial sentiment to hold on to some form of fundamentalism, he is likely in most cases (though not all) to aim at refuting the critics in their own terms, rather than by outright refusal to consider any possible alternatives to the traditional approach. For most serious scholars, however, some position in the middle is assumed, allowing them to accept any conclusion that textual criticism may point to, provided critical techniques are applied without preconceived theories and with full regard to the wealth of information that has become available from other fields. A major factor here is the breakthrough in archeology, as a result of which much that was once obscure in the Bible text can now be seen to be explicable by parallels with other ancient cultures of the Near East. Far from weakening the uniqueness of Israel’s story, the main effect is to give the traditional text a heightened power. And with or without Orthodox theological faith, all Jews in Israel feel the Bible vividly present to them as history, so that they live with the story in daily life rather than in the synagogue.
This shift of ground in the new encyclopedia operates, surprisingly, with a double effect. On the one hand, the numerous articles there on Bible subjects are revolutionary enough to take the critical approach as a starting point; on the other hand, they seem to work their way through to a very strong affirmation of views which sit comfortably with traditionalism (though not with fundamentalism). Their attitude is workmanlike rather than theological. On Abraham, for example, the “legendary” aspect mentioned by the old JE has more or less gone. Abraham as a person may not yet have been identified, but:
The evidence of a sociological and onomastic nature that has been accumulated since the discoveries at Nuzi, Mari, and elsewhere tends to show that the Abrahamic traditions are more likely to be authentic reflexes of a true historic situation than retrojections from a later period.
The full-length article on the Pentateuch as a whole (by Moshe Weinfeld of the Hebrew University) takes this approach much further. Opening with a fully-documented acceptance of the idea that the Pentateuch has to be seen as an amalgam of four “sources” (J, E, P, and D), he establishes to his own satisfaction that the editing (and much of the content) of the first four books reflects the David-Solomon Age, and Deuteronomy the time of Hezekiah-Josiah. He then goes on, however, to take the material further back into history. “The traditions that serve as the basis of the pentateuchal literature began to be crystallized . . . as early as the period of the Judges.” Wellhausen’s view that the Priestly elements (P) are very “late” (Second Temple) are baseless: “the sacral institutions . . . are known to us from early biblical literature.” Indeed, the whole idea of separate “sources” can mislead: “in spite of differences and contradictions . . . a common underlying legal and historical tradition can be observed.” Even more surprisingly, he ends up with Moses giving Israel the Law at Mount Sinai: “the basic premise underlying this tradition, i.e., that Moses was the first legislator and, as such, responsible for the basic legislature of Israel, is undoubtedly true.” To get back to tradition this way is, of course, not enough for the really Orthodox. There is a postscript to the article by Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz emphasizing that the true traditionalist still believes that the entire Pentateuch is “a unitary document, divinely revealed, and entirely written by Moses” (except for the last eight verses recording his death). Yet even with this demurral, one feels that Weinfeld’s article, and others too, on the Bible, opens up a wealth of new study for us, and reflects a significant change in Jewish consciousness since the days of the old Jewish Encyclopaedia.
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In a similar spirit one can salute the great success of the new encyclopedia in marshaling the results of scholarship in our time on Jewish history as a whole, even if occasionally we may still feel a certain nostalgia for the pioneer style of its predecessor in this field. One has to remember that until the closing years of the last century there was virtually nothing, except for Josephus, that offered Jews any systematic account of their past after Bible times. It was therefore immensely gratifying, as Singer had hoped it would be, to read a “modern” account of where the Jews fitted into history in different ages, especially when the account was written in the comfortably relaxed style of older encyclopedias. One can still turn back with pleasure to read, for example, the splendid article in the JE on the great 2nd-century Rabbi Akiba. The author was Louis Ginzberg, whose command of the entire literature was to be shown later in his masterly volumes, Legends of the Jews. In the new encyclopedia, the article on Akiba is one-third the length, and we seem to have heard it all before. In fact it is fair to say that a large proportion of the articles on what are now familiar subjects seem dull and technical.
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But if the new work falls short in this respect, it more than makes up for it by the originality which it introduces into so many other fields. Some of these can be mentioned only briefly here, despite their wide ramifications. If one starts with A for “Archaeology,” it is not only for the biblical spin-off already mentioned, but because the massive treatment of the subject in all its forms (including a 50-page illustrated guide to pottery styles as a Supplement to Volume 1) seems to lift the reader out of so many sad topics—inevitable, alas, in a Jewish encyclopedia—to a level of sheer pleasure and adventure. Perhaps in the same breath one should add A for “Art,” since the reproduction throughout the encyclopedia of many marvelously illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages reflects a wealth of discovery and irradiates in color what were once thought of as the Dark Ages of Jewish life.
Another subject quite transformed in grasp today as a result of massive detailed study is the history of individual communities. This emerges in the new encyclopedia in connection with the intensive effort in the present century to establish a well-founded social history of the Jews and a valid theory of their economic role. All too often in the encyclopedia, as we shall see, the editors break up a subject into small pieces. Here, fortunately, they hand over a very large theme to the outstanding authority in the field, Salo Baron. Under the heading “Economic History of the Jews” (which appears as a Supplement to Volume 16), Professor Baron covers the story from ancient times to the 15th century in an article of some 24,000 words. He brings out the immense variety of Jewish experience and at the same time an underlying unity: not that Jews had a narrow kind of talent which forced them into the same fields, but rather that their distinctive character everywhere encouraged successive societies to cast them into special roles.
For much of the period described by Professor Baron there is no formal material to draw on, so that the picture has to be constructed indirectly, often to amusing effect, out of odd remarks in the Talmud or the rabbinic responsa. We hear of Jews as tanners only because the rabbis ruled that a tanner’s wife could use the awful smell as grounds for divorce. The great success in date-growing in Babylonia is revealed when the Palestinian Rabbi Ulla, arriving there, exclaims: “A whole basket of dates for a zuz, and yet the Babylonians are lax in studying the Torah.” The role of scholars as businessmen comes out when we hear of three famous rabbis of this time amassing great wealth from the brewing of beer. On a broader plane Professor Baron shows us the conditions which made the Jews into merchants. In the early Diaspora, when conversion to Judaism was common, Jewish communities turned into trading centers through contact with Phoenicians and Carthaginians who brought with them the commercial skills for which they were famous. A more dramatic moment came with the rise of Islam. Professor Baron shows in detail how “the new political and socioeconomic revolution for the first time converted a predominantly agricultural Jewish population into a people of merchants, moneylenders, and artisans.” It was through Islam also, we learn, that Jews were first put into their fateful role as tax-farmers. The Koran was interpreted to mean that non-believers could be tolerated if they accepted a special duty to provide “tribute.” In different circumstances the Jews in Christian Europe became “the King’s Treasure” to similar effect. Yet if the Jews were in this way conditioned by others, they retained a vivid sense of independence, with much more freedom (e.g., in owning land) than is often thought, and able to feel that the rules of commercial life had to fit in with their own law (as interpreted by scholars) and their own social rules. To a very great extent—it seems a surprising conclusion—they were free and inner-directed as a people even if as individuals they might feel driven by the pressures of the external world.
Some of the same ideas emerge in the study which follows (by Professor Arcadius Kahan of Chicago) of Jewish economic history from the 16th century to our day. Going beyond the familiar exposition of Jewish migrations and international contacts as a key to their role during the emergence of industrialism and capitalism, the author takes us into the socioeconomic structure of Jewish communities everywhere, giving full play to class motivations and tensions (though without the dogmatic Marxism of Raphael Mahler’s recent History of Modern Jewry) .
These are merely two articles of many which bring together the pioneer work of scholars on the variety and independence of community life as a new approach to understanding Jewish history. The summary article on “Autonomy” alone (by Dr. Isaac Levitats) is an eye-opener. To take a single illustration, one thinks of the Jews in Spain as closely integrated with the world around them (in economic and cultural terms) until the dramatic reversal of policy through which they were finally expelled in 1492. We learn here, however, that “in Christian Spain self-rule achieved heights rivalled only in the Muslim lands and by the Councils of the Lands of Poland-Lithuania.” A separate article on “Judicial Autonomy” shows what wide powers Jewish authorities throughout medieval Europe had, even, in some circumstances, covering capital punishment (mainly for “informers”). One begins to understand the tremendous internal political and social struggles that would be generated in this special kind of existence, but one feels, also, how it explains the cohesion of the Jews and their powers of survival. There was social strength in this background, which gives substance to Ahad Ha’am’s remark that it was a period in which the Jews had “freedom within slavery,” in contrast with Jewish life after emancipation—“slavery within freedom.”
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This is perhaps the implicit underlying theme of what is the most monumental single contribution to the entire work: an article of perhaps 120,000 words—a whole book, in fact—on the Kabbalah, linked to a huge article on Sabbatai Zevi and various other cognate pieces, all from the pen of the acknowledged master in the field of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem. What is there about this esoteric subject that justifies its treatment at such length? In the hands of Scholem, it is the key to understanding the forces that led ultimately to the idea of restoration in the land of Israel. Finding his way with painstaking care through the earlier manifestations of Kabbalah, when it was the inner secret law of the universe, he shows how it became transformed, after the expulsion from Spain, into “man’s journey toward redemption,” with messianic overtones that “even after the break-up of the Sabbatian movement [remained] deeply rooted in the national consciousness.” Among the masses in Eastern Europe, out of which Zionism was to grow, the one unshakable faith that transcended all bitter sectarian struggles was the idea of the Jewish people linked in almost metaphysical terms with the ancient Holy Land. If 20th-century Zionism seemed in outward form a demonstration of the Jewish people reaching out like their neighbors toward a secular nationalism, it derived its inner power from built-in spiritual traditions assumed almost without definition—a sense of veneration that was expressed for some in the Torah, or for others in the holiness of a people that had guarded the Torah.
If Scholem is unique, it is still true to say that in every article in which the contributor is given his head, we are confronted directly with the underlying central issues of Jewish existence, or at the very least hear overtones of these questions. If —impossibile dictu—one were reading Encyclopaedia Judaica from cover to cover (as the learned read through the Talmud, that very first Jewish encyclopedia), one would feel a sense of overlap and repetition. But since in fact one opens the work to look up odd details or to try this or that major subject, the overall impression is, rather, the variety of approaches, signaled at best when the individual contributor feels able to go beyond a factual summary to express his own feelings. An outstanding example is a single article, by Professor Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on the whole of Diaspora history, from the 4th century to the present time. Once again it has the scale of a book—some 70,000 words—though it is only part of the huge entry on “History” which spreads over 106 pages. In contrast with all the older general histories of the Jews (including, it must be said, the works of Cecil Roth), this powerful summary of Jewish experience rises beyond the familiar alternates of suffering and achievement to express the texture and feeling of Jewish life, giving weight also to the new approach already mentioned—the social and economic background in every country and period. It emerges as a story of individuals, confronted as all human beings are with the insoluble problems of attaching a meaning to man’s existence, but coming to terms with life (when life was possible) through family and local affections, the drive to keep going, intellectual and social diversions, and above all the pleasures and frustrations of “the search”: the struggles with conflicting loyalties, the responses to new movements and ways of thought, the feeling of being involved in something beyond oneself.
There is a sense of dignity about it which survives even when the story seems to reach the end of survival—the end of all meaning:
The Holocaust showed the inhumanity which anti-Semitism could bring, not only despite, but in the main through mass culture, mass education, and the use of mass media for propaganda and indoctrination. The executioners were dehumanized beyond recovery in the process. The victims were intended to reach this state but Jewish vitality and spirit, and the demonstration of Jewish brotherhood, quickly brought back most of the survivors to personal integration and proud human stature. The numbers that had been tattooed on their skins in the camps were not obliterated; most of those Jews learned to live with them, and gained a renewed belief in humanity.
“Personal integration.” It is a phrase that one tries to cling to as one hears on almost every page of the encyclopedia some echo—implicit or resounding—of this unspeakable horror. It comes in a thousand contexts, starting with historical descriptions of the poison generated by 19th-century nationalism, and culminating in a massive account by Jacob Robinson of the Holocaust itself in all its unbearable detail. Threaded through the story are photographs, almost all taken, obviously, by the Nazis themselves. Any single one of them would be enough. The text, one might say, is redundant. But there is an unending problem for Jews themselves, not only in how to live with the memory, but how to think of the way in which those who were caught up with the tragedy bore themselves. We have lived through a period of twenty-five years in which the documents have built up. Nothing has diminished the general horror, but we are gradually accepting that among the millions who were trapped, the moral problems for those who had to “cooperate” are probably forever beyond our judgment. Desperately, Robinson tries to “explain”: to show the rationale, to instill some charity in us where we want, somehow, to turn away in grief. He cannot entirely succeed because it is a problem which is ultimately beyond any categories of assessment in “normal” civilized terms.
More poignant in some ways, because they are less complicated, are the brief documentations of the Holocaust in relation to every single town—every village—in Central and Eastern Europe in which Jews lived. The earlier history of each place is given first, and from these thousands of entries alone, appearing everywhere in the alphabet, one gets a vivid picture of the background out of which the great mass of modern Jewry sprang. There are cheerful and sad stories—famous men, ancient conflicts, market days, arts and crafts—a cradle of life. And then, to close each item, “the Holocaust.” In one place after another—the round-up, the ghetto, the shooting in the woods nearby, and ultimately the transportation to death. In our minds we have a postscript—the rescue of survivors, a new life in many lands, and above all the creation of Israel. If any final evaluation is possible, it has to take all this in.
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The new encyclopedia does its best to help us toward such an evaluation. On Israel itself, nothing exists to match Encyclopaedia Judaica’s descriptive range, both in text and illustration; and under “Zionism,” we have an excellent guide to the multi-faceted movements out of which the national experiment took shape and maintains its being. For many readers, this detailed coverage of what is overwhelmingly the most central issue in Jewish life today will take them beyond the need for any further questioning of the raison d’être of Jewish experience. And indeed, when one turns in the encyclopedia for enlightenment on other key issues, nothing so clear-cut emerges.
Some readers, thinking to start with the most fundamental question, may open the work at the entry on “Judaism,” encouraged by its subtitle: “The religion, philosophy, and way of life of the Jews,” and by the name of its author, Rabbi Louis Jacobs. But for once this excellent writer is defeated. The faith of Jews through the ages has included too many disparate elements to yield to simple definition. He brings us closer in some ways to seeing Judaism in action in a separate article on “Theology.” And if we are trying to find out what being a Jew has meant historically, we have also to consider the crucial point raised by Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg in a subtle essay on “Jewish Identity”: that “outside pressure” has defined the Jew as firmly as his own internal feelings.
Many other articles pursue these themes, yet in the end Encyclopaedia Judaica tells us as much by encouraging us to turn the pages at random as by learned definitions. For never was alphabetical serendipity richer. One goes on one page from the movie star Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danilovich) to the great Hasidic leader Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezhivech. One learns next of Dra, a region in South Morocco which is said to have been an independent Jewish state in ancient days, and where Jews farmed land with the help of the descendants of black slaves until modern times. A little lower down, David Dubinsky is followed by the great historian Simon Dubnow, in this case a coming together of two men motivated by common feeling, despite the differences in their lives.
Sometimes there is a parade of history in a single family name, with the passions of the time coming to life in astonishing form. Mordecai Meisel, who lived in Prague in the 16th century, financed the wars of the Emperor Rudolph II, and was the first Jewish capitalist of Europe. He spent a fortune redeeming Jewish captives from pirates, but in the end, in a quarrel over his wealth, his entire family was excommunicated. From the 18th century we meet Moses Meisels, a rabbi who managed miraculously to keep friendly with both sides in the classic struggle between the Vilna Gaon and the Hasidic leader Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady, but came to a sticky end after being accused during the Napoleonic invasion of secret contacts with the French. In the 19th century there is Dov Meisels of Cracow—rabbi, banker (through a rich father-in-law), and ardent Polish patriot, urging his congregants to fight against Austria in successive revolutions, and supplying arms to the rebels. The Jews as Polish patriots! One has to keep remembering how deep these national attachments have been. As if to symbolize the irony, we are led through the same name into the final moment of this story. Maurici Maisel was the last President of the Warsaw Jewish community. When the Nazis invaded in 1939, he fled. For those who remained, the saddest—and most heroic—page in Jewish history was about to be written.
The recreation of the lost Jewish world of Eastern Europe is a uniquely precious aspect of the encyclopedia. By contrast, the detailed treatment given to its successor—American Jewry—is inevitably prosaic, especially as it moves from the colorful immigration period to “success.” The achievement in America is extraordinary, but strangely, the more pictures one sees of distinguished Jewish worthies and resplendent modern synagogues (all apparently built by Percival Goodman), the less one seems to know about what it means and where it is leading. Is this unfair? Perhaps the encyclopedia itself, with its heavy U.S. backing, is evidence that beneath the surface there is an overpowering desire for the sustenance of a more affirmative approach to Jewish life. One felt more confident of this before the reemergence of Jewish self-hate in the New Left (well-treated in an article of the encyclopedia). But even so, there is a new “freedom” in being Jewish which a non-American seems to detect. And this incidentally is the answer to a criticism which some might make of the inclusion in the encyclopedia of all kinds of people with Jewish backgrounds, whether or not they lived, or live, as Jews. It might once have seemed question-begging and undignified to build up long lists of Jewish achievement by roping in every possible name when so often these famous people (running the whole gamut from millionaires to Communists) were so obviously anxious to avoid the tag. To be “non-Jewish Jews” (in Isaac Deutscher’s phrase) was their aim. Today, however, there is a more flexible mood in the air. The Holocaust and Israel are two factors that have brought things out into the open. One can be Jewish strongly or vaguely, en passant or perhaps en revenant. It is even fashionable. And so in a vast work which tries to list everything, let them all be there.
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Yet another virtue can be found in these lists. They lead one to ask whether there is anything identifiably Jewish in fields where, on the face of it, the achievement of Jews seems spectacular. The very long article on medicine traces Jewish achievement in the field back to Talmud times and all through the Middle Ages. Is it brains (not very convincing), social position, or some lofty “Jewish” desire to help the suffering? Certainly medicine has been the field of a high proportion of Jewish Nobel laureates. But then, oddly enough, so has high-energy particle physics. Is one supposed to ascribe this to “Jewish originality” or a powerful Jewish urge “to search for the Ultimate”? It may be gratifying to be lofty in this way. But looking at one long list after another (Jews in architecture, art, chemistry, music, sport, the theater, and so on), one recalls that there have been quite a lot of Jews around in modern times, especially in the dynamic atmosphere of urban centers, and they had to do something.
Perhaps we should be grateful—or complain?—that while the editors thought it right, as it no doubt is, to include a list of Jews in criminology, they do not give us a list of Jews in crime. It is true that we are provided with individual entries for Bugsy Siegel and Lepke Buchalter (perhaps other gangsters too), but in general such discussion as there is of the incidence of crime among Jews is conducted anonymously. To be fair, the encyclopedia is not mealy-mouthed on this subject. Among some disturbing features (often related to the abnormal situation of the Jews), it acknowledges their heavy role some years ago in the white-slave traffic in Argentina (with links to Eastern Europe), showing also the strenuous and successful efforts of Jewish welfare organizations to remove this blot. And it also reports, in predictable fashion, that the variety of crimes in Israel has become as wide there as anywhere. In other words, the Jews are now normal.
Jews in chess provide a good list, though it may surprise some to learn that the Jewish contribution to chess on an appreciable scale dates only from the middle of the 19th century. However, there is one great field which, according to the encyclopedia, can be definitely and almost absolutely identified with the Jewish genius—the movies. Here are all the alleged Jewish characteristics working at full blast—enterprise, imagination, financial acumen, artistry, vulgarity. The list of Jews in the motion-picture industry rolls on for pages, offering pleasant surprises (to one reader at least) in being able now to welcome to the fold Leslie Howard, Erich von Stroheim, Peter Lorre, Walter Matthau, and Anouk Aimée. We may smile at Hollywood, but it is at least more satisfying as an episode in Jewish history than, say, the Jewish contribution to public relations, where the encyclopedia invites us to take in the memorable fact that it was a Jew, Edward Gottlieb, who coined the slogan: “Which twin has the Toni?”
We should not, perhaps, leave these endless lists without a mention of the most striking series of all, if we are looking for an unusual pointer to the changed status of the Jew. At the end of every article on a major country the encyclopedia gives us a roster of Jewish writers there, always with a capsule assessment of each individual, unless the writer is treated separately (under his own initial) elsewhere. For the United States the change is extraordinary. In the old JE there were only a few lines on this subject. Here the roll-call is staggering, preceded by an interesting analysis (by Hillel Halkin) of the way in which writing by Jews in America has come to have significance not only for the writers’ own local and personal involvements but often, also, for the universal contemporary condition.
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In its range, then, in its power as a stimulant, and in its reflection of many of the subtleties of this moment in time, the Encyclopaedia Judaica is to be welcomed wholeheartedly. But one has, alas, to be more guarded in certain other respects. The Preface explains that the aim of completing all 16 volumes within five years and publishing them simultaneously could be realized only by “the principle of maximum subdivision so as to involve the greatest number of editors and contributors.” Maybe; but what of the defects of this method? Even as a straight reference book it suffers, since on many subjects (one can only go by sampling) the material has clearly been extracted from other sources by contributors who lacked real understanding and consequently not only made mistakes from time to time on names and dates (which anyone can do) but got the weight or balance wrong, which is more heinous. The break-up of subjects in many hands makes things choppy. The editors count on the reader using the index, which is huge. But it was composed by a computer which just lists everything, with no sense of weight, and one suffers accordingly.
If one tries, for example, to inform oneself thoroughly on a central subject like marriage, one finds the basic article itself split up among four contributors covering respectively the concept, marriage ceremonies, various customs, and legal aspects. But this is just the beginning. As one reads, one is referred in the course of the text to many additional separate articles. In the index itself there are about 200 references. Perhaps this is what an encyclopedia is for, and in this particular case one has to pay tribute to a really marvelous range of illustration, but one misses, somehow, the long, relaxed, steady read.
To report on another sampling, one would have liked, somehow, to get a long, “classical” article on the entire subject of Christianity, but it does not appear. There is a rather short article (about 3,000 words), by David Flusser, on Jesus, very dry in style. A separate article follows (extracted from the Encyclopaedia Hebraica) on Jesus in the Talmud and Midrash; and elsewhere there is a round-up article on Christianity by Professor R. J. Zwi Werblowsky. Once again there are columns of related references to the subject in the index, but it is tiresome to follow them up.
Even more surprising, perhaps, is the material on the Marranos, where the story is treated very sketchily and without inner feeling. The acknowledged authority on this subject was, of course, Cecil Roth himself, and one might have expected a long personal study from his pen. Perhaps his untimely death prevented this. We are given instead (from an American professor) an entry of about 250 words discussing the possible meanings of the word, and a second article under “Marrano Diaspora” dealing in summary form with their wanderings and activities. Of course there are the cross-references. Yet surely here was a subject which could have benefited from a long ruminative treatment, bringing out the complexities of circumstance that precipitated this strange phenomenon, the emotional overtones, and the socioeconomic context in which the Marranos played out their role in succeeding centuries.
In the same spirit one looks, but in vain, for a relaxed discussion somewhere of what is always thought to be one of the most distinctive qualities of the Jews—their sense of humor. There is, it is true, a fascinating article on “Parody,” which shows how natural wit exploited to the full the Jewish preoccupation with their inherited material—the Talmud, the Haggadah, and so on. But there is nothing (as far as one can see) which brings out the unusual talent which Jews have shown, especially in the United States, for humor in its broader sense.
There are other shortcomings and irritations which may be the price that was paid for speed. It is always a matter of judgment, of course, whether a subject demands a separate entry at the expense of repetition in a more general article, but often the judgment seems to go wrong. If one tries, for example, to get a coherent picture of a remarkable phenomenon of our times—the Lubavicher movement in Hasidism—one can pick up only a few indirect mentions. As for irritations, the use of asterisks throughout the text attached to every word on which, it is thought, the separate entry under this word will expand the meaning, results in an asterisk-studded nightmare. The editors should have followed the practice of other encyclopedias by inserting references to subjects where necessary, rather than relying on a computer to pick out words. The index, to be usable profitably, should have been a third, or a quarter, the length, and could have been if the subject grouping had been better.
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Yet all this is, in the end, marginal. In so many other respects the work fulfills the criteria of a great encyclopedia. Some of the really magisterial articles have already been mentioned, and there are others. The article on Yiddish literature by Professor Chone Shmeruk of the Hebrew University is wonderfully thorough; the study of Hebrew prosody by Professor Benjamin Hrushovski of Tel Aviv University is entirely original, and is bound to become a classical source; the whole of the huge article on Hebrew language (which gets in by the skin of its teeth as a Supplement to Volume 16) is illuminating. And, though the subjects of the article may well be shocked, one welcomes the fact that a woman scholar, Dr. Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, contributed large sections to the splendidly evocative article on Hasidism.
Certainly the encyclopedia is a great tool of reference. It reflects to the full the immense variety of Jewish life; and in its concentration on Israel it documents the most momentous change in Jewish experience since the destruction of the Temple. Some readers might have preferred a more reflective type of encyclopedia in which fewer headings allowed outstanding writers to bring whole subjects together. But that is a matter of taste. At least one can say of the work as a whole what Rabbi Ben Bag-Bag said of the Torah: “Turn it and turn it again, for everything is in it.”
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1 Macmillan, $500.
2 Although originating in Israel, and using some material drawn from an incompleted Encyclopaedia Judaica in German and a more general encyclopedia in Hebrew, this new Encyclopaedia Judaica has been produced solely in the English language.
