Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About American Jews—a Century Ago

Looking for an unusual gift to give that special someone for Hanukkah? Money no object? If so, I have the perfect item for you: a leatherbound, 12-volume set of the Jewish Encyclopedia produced in the early 1900s by the Funk & Wagnalls Company. Currently, eBay has one for sale for a cool $3,000.

When first released, volume by volume over a period of six years between 1901 and 1906, the encyclopedia was hailed as a “masterpiece,” the greatest Jewish literary work since the Talmud. No adjective was too extravagant to wield on its behalf, the words “colossal,” “great,” “stupendous,” and “monumental” commonly pressed into service.

An enormous undertaking, the series reportedly cost a whopping $750,000 (approximately $27 million in today’s dollars) to produce, its expenditure of human resources equally commanding. Advertisements boasted that 600 scholars had a hand in its production, though the actual number was closer to 400. But no matter: By anyone’s count, the Jewish Encyclopedia was a stunning exercise in scholarly collaboration.

Today when information about the Jewish experience, from A to Z, is available at the touch of a fingertip, the Jewish Encyclopedia may strike many of us as old-fashioned, dull and dusty, even irrelevant. Back in the day, though, it was the closest equivalent to the proverbial “anything you wanted to know about the Jews but were afraid to ask,” a wellspring of information about their rituals, ideals, personalities, and experiences, or, as one advertisement would have it, the “only wide open door to the wealth of Jewish literature, science, history, biography, and actual life.”

“Made up of facts, not opinions,” its publishers explained, the series is “absolutely free from color or bias.” No special pleading or advocacy would mar the text. Each volume of anywhere from several hundred to a thousand pages was chockablock with illustrations and detailed entries that ran the gamut from weighty theological accounts of God and the Decalogue to capsule biographies of Jewish notables, from a history of the ghetto to a look at the beard. Both the scholar and the layperson were sure to find something to pique their interest.

The brainchild of Isidore Singer, a Moravian-born Jew with a penchant for ambitious schemes, the venture came into the world freighted with expectations. Not only was his proposed “Encyclopedia of the History and Mental Evolution of the Jewish Race” intended to educate, enlighten, and uplift American Jews, it was also designed to lessen antisemitism. “It will, at last, make the Jew thoroughly understood,” predicted Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, the project’s executive committee chair, at a celebratory banquet given in 1901. Dr. I.K. Funk took things even further, confident that the publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia would bring about “universal brotherhood” at the turn of a page.

For all its noble intentions, the Jewish Encyclopedia had trouble getting off the ground. Securing the necessary funding—a stable base of subscribers and “guarantors”—proved elusive. Securing the imprimatur and participation of the scholarly community, which then, as now, was more apt to compete than collaborate, was equally hard to pin down at first, as Shulie Rubin Schwartz’s 1991 landmark study The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America vividly documents.

Controversy also dogged the project’s early days. Singer’s abrasive personality and reputation for being something of a “nudnik,” coupled with his paltry academic credentials—his Judaic knowledge was said to be of the Sabbath school variety—troubled those in the know who doubted his ability to pull it off. Placing Singer at the helm of this “scientific enterprise” was unthinkable, thundered the scholarly eminence Gotthard Deutsch, a professor of Jewish history at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, as early as 1898 when the idea first made the rounds. It’s not as if Singer was just presiding over a “banquet talk at some congregational dinner,” said Deutsch. Others wondered whether the enterprise might be tainted by commercialism, its intellectual purity rendered suspect by individuals who’d pay a hefty sum to see their names in print.

Eventually, though, the possibilities of a Jewish encyclopedia, especially one published in English and produced in the United States, won over the community’s doubting Thomases. Work on it began in earnest in the spring of 1898, the third floor of Funk & Wagnalls New York headquarters on Lafayette Place transformed into a “mecca” of Judaic scholarship. Amid the clack of typewriters and the hustle and bustle of clerks and stenographers, translators, scholars, and proofreaders, the “acceleration and systematization” of Judaic knowledge, as one awestruck eyewitness put it, unfolded.

The American Jewish press, convinced this was no mere publishing venture or a money-making scheme but a high-stakes gamble designed to burnish American Jewry’s reputation, expended a lot of ink on fanning public interest. It closely followed the process by which the encyclopedia’s team decided what subjects to cover, and selected the illustrations, of which there were 2,700, as well as handpicked the contributors who bore responsibility for compiling entries.

The press also made a point of exposing the “friction,” the fireworks, that routinely took place at editorial board meetings, documenting the heated conversations that arose when potential contributors were screened and vetted for both their scholarly chops and capacity to keep their opinions and beliefs to themselves.

Some newspapers, though, crossed a line. The American Hebrew certainly did by serving as a veritable sales agent for the series, throwing its weight behind the project. Coupons for “special advance acceptance forms” in which, prior to publication, consumers could declare their intention to purchase the series—and at a discounted price—filled its pages, their intent to make it easy for “every cultured Jewish home” to own all 12 volumes. The American Israelite, in turn, advertised for “persons of intelligence and refinement” to make the rounds of America’s Jewish communities touting the merits of the encyclopedia and consummating a sale.

Its support of the Jewish Encyclopedia in full flower, the press also proved to be a hospitable host of public opinion. The American Jewish public didn’t just read all about it; they shaped much of the discussion, too, weighing in on each volume’s merits and demerits, questioning who was included and who was left out. Everyone had either a favorite candidate who was not given the real estate he deserved (typically it was a he, rather than a she), or a candidate given more space than merited.

All in a dither about an entry for “English pugilists” that featured the lives of Abraham and Israel Belasco, Rabbi Louis Wolsey of Little Rock, Arkansas, demanded in 1902 to know “what scientific or religious or sentimental reason can the learned editor have for allowing these edifying biographies to find their ways [sic] into a Jewish Encyclopedia? … On this basis, a Jewish baseball player will have a right” to put in an appearance, he harumphed. (FYI: A later generation of Jewish encyclopedias did just that, featuring articles on Moe Berg, Hank Greenberg, and Sandy Koufax.)

In response, the British historian Israel Abrahams took up the cudgels in defense of his countrymen, writing: “If the Encyclopedia is to fully and truly represent Jewish life, it would be disastrous to ignore or reject some of the most characteristic products of 19th century Judaism.” Rising to the challenge, Abrahams then went on to note that Barney Barnato, another celebrated English prizefighter who made good, was as “truly the outcome of Ghetto life and the emancipation from it as was the school of Moses Mendelssohn … All honor and praise to the editors of the Jewish Encyclopedia.”

The public had a field day, too, when it came to pointing out all the misses—the misspellings, mistranslations, and misinterpretations—that cropped up. Writing letters to the editor, the more erudite of American Jews gleefully compiled lists of missteps, which the newspapers dutifully published. J.D. Eisenstein, a learned Lower East Side businessman whose sideline was that of a perennial gadfly, lamented what he took to be the encyclopedia’s shallow understanding of Talmudic law, while further south, several of his Charleston co-religionists bristled at the depiction of their storied communal history.

For all the hoopla, the Jewish Encyclopedia never lived up to its advance billing. American Jewry at the grassroots faltered in its promise of support, leaving many volumes unsold and compelling the project’s sponsors to travel around the country rustling up subscribers. Nor did its 12 volumes change the world by generating a spirit of brotherhood or, for that matter, by eradicating prejudice. It’d take a lot more than thoughtful, well-researched articles on Jesus and the Bible to accomplish that worthy objective.

Even so, what it did accomplish was to set American Jewish scholarship on a firm foundation, placing “American Judaism on an enviable pedestal of world prominence,” in the words of the American Hebrew. Extending the baton of scholarship from the Old World to the New, the Jewish Encyclopedia advanced the latter’s cultural standing decades before the grim reality of the Shoah set in.

The project’s biggest dividend by far was to enhance American Jewry’s sense of itself as European Jewry’s equal, its poor cousin no longer. Marking the community’s coming of age, the Jewish Encyclopedia was American Jewry’s gift to itself. “Parents can leave no greater heirloom to their children than a copy of the encyclopedia,” declared Menorah magazine upon its debut, adding it’s far “more precious than gold and silver.”