The Yiddish Encyclopedia as a Prescription for the Future

• In Event: Remaking it New: Yiddish Socio-Political Thought

Abstract

When a group of Yiddish-oriented scholars in pre-Nazi Berlin proposed to publish an encyclopedia for the Yiddish-reading public, their stated purpose was to create a “General Encyclopedia” (ALGEMEYNE ENTSIKLOPEDYE), not a Yiddish version of the Jewish encyclopedias previously published in Russian, English, and German. Until the Holocaust reversed their priorities, they projected ten volumes of general knowledge and one for Jewish topics. Only five of the general volumes ultimately appeared (in Paris and New York from 1934 to 1944, covering ALEPH and part of BEYS), but it is these volumes that reveal the editors’ more telling choices.

Expanding on Barry Trachtenberg’s recent history of the Yiddish encyclopedia (Rutgers, 2022), I propose to examine the worldview suggested by the contents of the general volumes. Contrary to popular opinion, encyclopedias are neither “encyclopedic” nor standardized repositories of material to be replicated across languages, but a reflection of fundamental editorial choices. The first is whether to DESCRIBE or PRESCRIBE. For example, the highly descriptive one-volume YIDISHE FOLKS ENTSIKLOPEDYE (Montreal, 1943) tends toward everyday matters likely to be encountered by working-class Jewish immigrants. By contrast, the general volumes of the Yiddish encyclopedia offer a decidedly prescriptive view of the future.

As I will demonstrate, the editors’ choice of topics and allocation of space reveal their desired future to be both progressive and modern — raising the question of whether their editorial decisions derived from non-Jewish examples or their own original (if unstated) aspirations. Comparisons with the leading contemporaneous American, British, French, German, and Soviet encyclopedias reveal the originality of the Yiddish encyclopedia’s many forward-looking choices. (Three hints: their 59 consecutive entries that begin with “Labor-” are without parallel in other encyclopedias — as are the extended wordcount devoted to such emergent topics as “airport” and “alcoholism” and their exactly equal division of space between historical and modern works of architecture.)

The significance of this finding is that, while Yiddishist intellectuals often expressed left-leaning positions on matters of Jewish concern, these volumes provide unique evidence of a unified worldview in support of progressive and modernizing tendencies both within and beyond the Jewish sphere.

Author

• Mark Smith, American Jewish University