| Jewish Encyclopedia |
Article Index for Jewish |
Website Links For Jewish |
Information AboutJewish Encyclopedia |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA | |
| encyclopedias on culture and ethnicity | |
| encyclopedias on religion | |
| online encyclopedias | |
| reference works in the public domain | |
|
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. Much of the material is still of value to researchers in Jewish History." {Link without Title} Reform Jewish rabbi Joshua L. 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". {Link without Title} ONLINE VERSION The unedited text of the original can be found on the Web at the website listed in the "External links" section of this article. The site offers both excellent JPEG facsimiles of the original articles and very precise Unicode transcriptions of all texts. The search capability is somewhat handicapped by 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. For example, the names of the tractates of the ''; 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. SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|