New 22-volume Encyclopaedia Judaica published
It's a 16 million-word reference collection of 'everything Jewish'

Wednesday, December 27, 2006
By Steve Levin, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


Most merely call it "The Judaica."

It is the name of the seminal reference collection Encyclopaedia Judaica, a 16-volume compendium of everything Jewish that was published in 1972.

This month, for the first time in more than three decades, a second edition was released. It is 16 million words in 22 volumes, with 2,200 new entries and substantial reworkings of 12,000 other articles.

In the understated world of print reference books, the release of Encyclopaedia Judaica has created a buzz similar to that preceding other recent releases, such as the third edition of the New Catholic Encyclopaedia in 2002 and the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam in 2005.

"Certain encyclopaedias receive canonical status in the field," said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University and author of "American Judaism."

"Encyclopaedia Judaica achieved that status."

The reason, he said, is its scholarship.

Although the Encyclopaedia Judaica was published in 1972, the process began a half-century earlier in Germany. The rise of Hitler scuttled that German-language project after it was half finished. A new effort during the 1950s sputtered only to begin again in 1966.

After its publication in 1972, the encyclopaedia immediately became the primary source of information about all subjects Jewish. The first edition was full of mini-masterpieces, such as the original 83-page, 120,000-word entry on "Kabbalah," or Jewish mysticism, by Gershom Scholem, and the section on Biblical Archeology, which included the political, national, religious and cultural forms of modern Zionism. The encyclopaedia was called a "changing point in [Jewish] consciousness" by one 1972 reviewer.

The upcoming edition seeks to have a similar impact.

Part of the challenge in assembling the encyclopedia's content, said executive editor Michael Berenbaum, was incorporating the vast changes in the Jewish world in the past 34 years. The Yom Kippur War, the disappearance of small-town Southern Jewry, women's issues, Muslim-Jewish relations, the growth of Orthodox Judaism in the United States, the rise of Jewish publication companies -- "Jewish life has dramatically transformed itself and in ways we would not see day to day," Dr. Berenbaum said.

Along with Fred Skolnick, who was copy editor of the first edition in 1972 and editor-in-chief of the second, Dr. Berenbaum took the list of all existing Encyclopaedia Judaica entries (comprised of the first edition, eight yearbooks and a CD-ROM issued in 1997) and divided it into about 50 divisions.

Editors for each division reviewed the entries and decided on updates, revisions, additions and deletions. Dr. Sarna, for example, edited the American biographies division.

While many of those editors wrote entries themselves -- Dr. Berenbaum, a professor of Judaism and a Holocaust scholar at the University of Judaism, wrote large portions of the Holocaust entry and the additions to the "Pittsburgh" entry -- 1,200 writers were involved in the project.

The original "Pittsburgh" entry was written by the late Lillian A. Friedberg, former executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council. The second edition's 2,000-word addition includes the results of a 2002 United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh population study.

The editorial portion of the second edition took 30 months to complete.

The second edition will be published by Thomson Gale and Keter Publishing House at a cost of "several million dollars," according to publisher Jay Flynn. Sales of the first edition were 50,000 sets; Mr. Flynn said Thomson Gale hopes to equal or exceed that number.

In 1972, the 16-volume sets were sold door to door in Jewish neighborhoods, and full-page ads ran in The New York Times. A complete set cost $495. The new edition will sell for $1,995, about $400 less than its predecessor in 1972 dollars.

"In terms of the library reference world, it's a big event," said Mary Ellen Quinn, editor of Reference Books Bulletin, a section of the American Library Association's Booklist magazine.

"This is a major encyclopedia that every reference librarian is familiar with. It has an aura of authority and even prestige. There is maybe one title of this size every year or every two years."

She expects that nearly every university library and large public library will buy the multi-volume encyclopedia, along with synagogues and some smaller libraries, Jewish secondary schools and individual families.

"It's significant for non-Jews," Dr. Sarna said. "The Encyclopaedia Judaica has been, since its publication in 1972, the basic source people go to for up-to-date information about Jewish subjects."