Encyclopaedia Hebraica
Encyclopedia
Encyclopedia
An encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
in the Hebrew language
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
that was published in the latter half of the 20th century.
History
The General Encyclopedia had been successfully printed by Bracha PeliBracha Peli
Bracha Peli was the owner of Massada, a publishing company in Israel, and the driving force behind the publication of The General Encyclopedia and Encyclopaedia Hebraica. She is credited with starting Israel's annual Hebrew Book Week. The Encyclopaedia Hebraica project began using Bracha Peli's...
's printing business under the editorship of Prof. Joseph Klausner
Joseph Klausner
Joseph Gedaliah Klausner , , was a Jewish historian and professor of Hebrew Literature. He was the chief redactor of The Hebrew Encyclopedia...
. Bracha Peli's son, Alexander
Alexander Peli
Alexander Peli was the supervising editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica. The project began using his mother's publishing house in 1946 with Peli supervising. The last volume was published in 1996.-Early life:...
was keen to start a more ambitious encyclopedia in Hebrew.
The idea of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica began to take material form in the summer of 1944. An advisory committee was established to determine the goals of the encyclopedia. Printing of the first volume began in the summer of 1948 with the founding of the State of Israel. The honorary president of the project was the President of Israel
President of Israel
The President of the State of Israel is the head of state of Israel. The position is largely an apolitical ceremonial figurehead role, with the real executive power lying in the hands of the Prime Minister. The current president is Shimon Peres who took office on 15 July 2007...
, Professor Chaim Weizmann
Chaim Weizmann
Chaim Azriel Weizmann, , was a Zionist leader, President of the Zionist Organization, and the first President of the State of Israel. He was elected on 1 February 1949, and served until his death in 1952....
.
The first volume covered the entries Aleph
Aleph
* Aleph or Alef is the first letter of the Semitic abjads descended from Proto-Canaanite, Arabic alphabet, Phoenician alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet-People:*Aleph , an Italo disco artist and alias of Dave Rodgers...
(א) through Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
(אוסטרליה). The first photograph that appears in the volume is a picture of Israel's Declaration of Independence
Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel
The Israeli Declaration of Independence , made on 14 May 1948 , the day before the British Mandate was due to expire, was the announcement by David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization and chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, that the new Jewish state named the...
. The entry concluding the encyclopedia, in volume 32, is Tishrei
Tishrei
Tishrei or Tishri , Tiberian: ; from Akkadian "Beginning", from "To begin") is the first month of the civil year and the seventh month of the ecclesiastical year in the Hebrew calendar. The name of the month is Babylonian. It is an autumn month of 30 days...
(תשרי).
In the publisher's introduction was written:
We have strong faith that we will realize our aspiration to provide exceptional content in a magnificent vessel and to add and enhance from volume to volume, and that we will finish publishing all 16 volumes within five or six years and that the whole project will achieve its purpose.
As it turned out, the writing of the encyclopedia continued for more than thirty years, and only in 1980—a quarter century after the original target date—was the publication completed. In total, the encyclopedia numbered thirty-two volumes when it was completed. During the writing stage, an additional Addendum
Addendum
An addendum, in general, is an addition required to be made to a document by its reader subsequent to its printing or publication. It comes from the Latin verbal phrase addendum est, being the gerundive form of the verb addo, addere, addidi, additum, "to give to, add to", meaning " must be added"...
I volume came out, which updated and supplemented volumes 1 through 16, and after volume 32 was completed an Addendum II volume was published. In 1985, five years after completion of the volumes of the encyclopedia, an index
Index (publishing)
An index is a list of words or phrases and associated pointers to where useful material relating to that heading can be found in a document...
volume was printed, and in 1995 Addendum III came out, which updated data in Addendum II. With it also appeared two volumes containing extensive updates of entries dealing with the State of Israel and land of Israel
Land of Israel
The Land of Israel is the Biblical name for the territory roughly corresponding to the area encompassed by the Southern Levant, also known as Canaan and Palestine, Promised Land and Holy Land. The belief that the area is a God-given homeland of the Jewish people is based on the narrative of the...
.
The many years needed for completion of the encyclopedia meant that its editor
Editing
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete...
s were replaced over the years. The position was held by Joseph Klausner
Joseph Klausner
Joseph Gedaliah Klausner , , was a Jewish historian and professor of Hebrew Literature. He was the chief redactor of The Hebrew Encyclopedia...
, Benzion Netanyahu
Benzion Netanyahu
Benzion Netanyahu is an Israeli historian and a professor emeritus at Cornell University. He is a specialist in the golden age of Jewish History in Spain, and is known for his opus, the Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain...
, Yeshayahu Leibowitz
Yeshayahu Leibowitz
Yeshayahu Leibowitz was an Israeli public intellectual and polymath known for his outspoken opinions on Judaism, ethics, religion and politics.- Biography :...
, Nathan Rotenstreich, Yehoshua Gutman, and Joshua Prawer
Joshua Prawer
Joshua Prawer was a notable Israeli historian and a scholar of the Crusades and Kingdom of Jerusalem.His work often attempted to portray Crusader society as a forerunner to later European colonialist expansion...
. The editorial supervisor throughout all the volumes was Alexander Peli
Alexander Peli
Alexander Peli was the supervising editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica. The project began using his mother's publishing house in 1946 with Peli supervising. The last volume was published in 1996.-Early life:...
. More than 2500 writers participated in the writing of the encyclopedia. Among them the leading Israeli scientists and fifteen Nobel laureates.
During the period of publication, a tremendous significance was associated with the encyclopedia. This was demonstrated by the fact there were people that felt a driving need to be included in the encyclopedia as a sort of stamp of approval of their importance and position. Bracha Plai, publisher of the encyclopedia, later told of an author who approached her one day and threatened to commit suicide if he was not included: "Even though his standing in the Hebrew literature was not of great importance, I did not take any chances and included him as an entry." At times, arguments arose over who would write a given article, arguments that stemmed from academic differences of opinion or from political or emotional factors. Such was the case with the articles on Ben Gurion
Ben Gurion
Ben Gurion can refer to the following persons:* Nicodemus ben Gurion, a Biblical figure, probably a rich Jewish member of the Sanhedrin that felt sympathetic to Jesus Christ...
and on Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
.
The newer volumes of the encyclopedia that were written in the nineties and edited by David Shacham were criticized for allegedly containing a post-Zionist tone.
Within a year of the last volume being published the rights to the encyclopedia had been sold. Schocken Publishing House
Schocken Books
Schocken Books is a publishing company that was established in Berlin with a publishing office in Prague in 1931 by the Schocken Department Store owner Salman Schocken. It published the writings of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka and S. Y...
are said to be working on a new, revised edition
Edition
In printmaking, an edition is a number of prints struck from one plate, usually at the same time. This is the meaning covered by this article...
of the encyclopedia.
Characteristics
The nature of the encyclopedia is reflected in its secondary title: "General, Jewish, and Israeli." The encyclopedia covers all the general topics, but the Jewish-Israeli emphasis is discernible, principally in articles dealing with Judaism, Jews, and Israel, which go beyond their general world discernible. Thus the encyclopedia takes care to emphasize in every biographical article the Jewishness of the person, even when Judaism is of no significance in the person's life (e.g. Boris PasternakBoris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian language poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language...
), as well as the person's impact on Jewish people. The longest biographical article (thirty-two columns) is on Theodor Herzl
Theodor Herzl
Theodor Herzl , born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl was an Ashkenazi Jew Austro-Hungarian journalist and the father of modern political Zionism and in effect the State of Israel.-Early life:...
, and the longest non-Jewish biographical article is on Goethe.
Articles dealing with various countries and cities typically give an account of the place's general history, followed by a separate detailed account of its Jewish history where it has one; in particular, for places which were under Nazi rule a detailed account is given of the fate of its Jewish community during the Holocaust. Similarly, in describing countries and cities with an existing Jewish community, the encyclopedia invariably provided a detailed account of the number of Jews, their professions and main places of habitiation, the structure of the community etc.
Writers of the encyclopedia did not hide their Jewish-nationalistic political views. Thus the Kingdom of Jordan did not warrant an entry since the encyclopedia did not recognize it. Details of this country are included within the article "Land of Israel," and it is stated in the beginning of the article that in the Hebrew language, the phrase includes the "land of Israel" on both sides of the Jordan River. In the second supplementary volume, the entry "Jordan" finally appears, reflecting the change of political attitudes in Israeli society in the passing decades.
The letter Aleph
Aleph
* Aleph or Alef is the first letter of the Semitic abjads descended from Proto-Canaanite, Arabic alphabet, Phoenician alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet-People:*Aleph , an Italo disco artist and alias of Dave Rodgers...
contains the largest number of articles, and six and a half volumes are accorded to it (more than 30% of the anticipated number of volumes). The last article is "Ether
Ether
Ethers are a class of organic compounds that contain an ether group — an oxygen atom connected to two alkyl or aryl groups — of general formula R–O–R'. A typical example is the solvent and anesthetic diethyl ether, commonly referred to simply as "ether"...
s" (אתרים). The longest article starting with aleph is "Land of Israel" (ארץ ישראל), to which an entire volume is dedicated: volume 6. Next in size is "United States of America
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
" (ארצות הברית של אמריקה), which spans 126 columns. The collective size of the aleph articles does not stem from its relative weight in the Hebrew alphabet
Hebrew alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically, the Assyrian script, is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. There have been two...
, but rather reflects the initial enthusiasm with which the editors tried to include the sum of human knowledge. When it became clear that at that rate and depth production of the encyclopedia would never come to an end, it was decided to limit its extent (which, among other things, led to the existence in the first volumes of "see also"'s that in the end pointed to unwritten articles). The smallest letter in the encyclopedia is the letter Tsade
Tsade
' is the eighteenth letter in many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew ' and Arabic ' . Its oldest sound value is probably , although there is a variety of pronunciation in different modern Semitic languages and their dialects...
(צ), which spans 531 pages, less than one volume, and is contained in volume 28.
A famous non-political controversy involved the article on Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
(אפלטון) appearing in volume 5. Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz
Yeshayahu Leibowitz
Yeshayahu Leibowitz was an Israeli public intellectual and polymath known for his outspoken opinions on Judaism, ethics, religion and politics.- Biography :...
, one of the Encyclopaedia's main editors, sharply disagreed with the interpretation given to Plato's ideas. This he expressed by adding in the forward pages of this volume, where he was listed as "Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, editor in Philosophy", a footnote reading "until page 223" (the page where the Plato article appeared).