The Algemeyne Entsiklopedye () is a Yiddish-language encyclopedia published in twelve volumes from 1934 to 1966. It is divided into two subseries: five volumes of the series, covering general knowledge, and six volumes of the series (initially planned as a single supplementary volume) covering Jewish history and culture through a series of essays. The encyclopedia's early volumes emphasize leftist history and politics, although the project shifted in tone in response to Nazi persecution, and became increasingly focused on covering Jewish topics. After the destruction of Jewish communities throughout Europe—the encyclopedia's main audience—in the Holocaust, it transformed from a general-purpose resource into an effort to commemorate what was lost.
After decades of failed attempts to compile a Yiddish general encyclopedia, the Vilna-based Jewish cultural organization YIVO formed the Dubnov Fund (, named for historian Simon Dubnow) in 1930, which organized and fundraised for the encyclopedia. A large group of Jewish scholars centered in Berlin contributed to the project, often part-time alongside other jobs. The socialist politician Raphael Abramovitch served as the project's chief editor for most of its history. A small sample volume (the ) was released in 1932. Its editors fled to Paris upon the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933, delaying the release of the first volume until 1934. There, they published four volumes of the series and two of . The outbreak of World War II again forced the editors to flee, and the project regrouped in New York City. Financed by the postwar Claims Conference, work on the encyclopedia continued into the 1960s; the final volume, , was released three years after Abramovitch's death in 1963. Two additional volumes (one of each series) were planned, but never finished. In the years following the war, a four-volume English-language encyclopedia titled The Jewish People: Past and Present was compiled, largely based on the early volumes of the series.
Press coverage of the and the first volumes of the encyclopedia was very supportive, although it faced some ideological opposition due to its largely anti-Zionist leaning in its early years. The encyclopedia has received limited academic attention, although a book detailing the history of the project by Barry Trachtenberg entitled The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish was published in 2022.
Content Probeheft
The , a 36-page soft-cover sample volume of the Yiddish Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (), was first released in 1932, containing 56 entries and around a dozen images. Ten of the entries are related to Jewish culture, including articles on Hirsh Lekert, Cantonists, and the Khazars. An entry on Jews simply directs readers to the forthcoming volume. Some articles are quite short—an entry on Easter Island is only two sentences long—while others span multiple pages, such as the historian Simon Dubnow's two-page entry on Hasidism. A single color plate is included in the sample volume to illustrate the article on ceramics. Of its ten biographies, one brief article covers a woman, the Italian educator Maria Montessori. Its second edition cut three short entries and added some additional images and two longer articles. The new entries included an article on the Hebrew writer Yosef Haim Brenner, likely made in response to criticism over the lack of material on Hebrew authors in the initial edition.
Normale series The publication consisted of five volumes, which were the following:
Volume One, published in Paris in late December 1934, contains around 1,100 entries, covering topics alphabetically in Yiddish from aleph to Atlantic City. Its contents are similar to other general-purpose encyclopedias of the period, including coverage of technological innovations, the natural world, geography, and a large number of biographies. Topics related to the political left are often written by socialist authors; one of the longest entries in the volume is an article on agrarian socialism by the Menshevik politician . The preface to the volume includes a statement of purpose for the encyclopedia as a whole. Noting that many Yiddish speakers lacked formal education, the editors declared that the encyclopedia needed to serve as an educational tool in its own right.
Relative to the first volume, the 1935 Volume Two (covering from Atlantic Ocean to interference alphabetically in Yiddish) contains relatively few entries on Jewish topics, while those that do exist (such as an entry on the Wandering Jew by poet David Einhorn) are quite short. The last quarter of the volume contains entries on almost a hundred international labor movements and socialist internationals, together presenting a very detailed picture of labor history. Many of these articles were written by head editor Raphael Abramovitch, a former Menshevik leader. The first two volumes are strongly influenced by diaspora nationalism, rebuking both Zionism and the rising antisemitic movements across Europe. The following editions, released in an environment where European Jews were in extreme danger, abandon diaspora nationalism as an ideology.
Volume Three (covering "intra" to antisemitism) was released in December 1936. It largely follows the previous two volumes in content, featuring a heavy emphasis on leftist history and politics (including lengthy entries on anarchism and anarchist movements). The final article, "Antisemitism", is larger than any previous entry in the encyclopedia, stretching fifty columns and five subsections covering the origins, ideology, evolution, and organization of antisemitism, as well as its opposition movement. Unlike other articles, it was written collaboratively. Abramovitch wrote its majority with support from writers Ben-Adir (Avrom Rozin) and Tcherikower.
Volume Four (beginning with antiseptic) was released the following year. Like its predecessor, it ended with a lengthy essay, "" ("Land of Israel"), in collaboration between four authors. Although not overtly Zionist, the essay prioritizes information of Jewish activity in the region; the opening subsection on the demographics and economics of the region almost entirely excludes Arabs.
The fifth volume of the series, released in 1944, finishes the last of the topics which begin with aleph, and moves on to cover most topics under the final letter covered by the encyclopedia, bet (the second letter of the Yiddish alphabet). It begins with an entry on the Roman Emperor Arcadius and ends with an entry on animals and living things. The last edition of the series in-between volumes of , it still features extensive coverage of Jewish topics, including many biographies of Jewish figures such as Ber Borochov and David Ben-Gurion. In comparison, the entries on general knowledge topics (such as Belgium and baseball) are relatively short. Although further volumes of the series were planned, they were never completed.
Many articles within the encyclopedia have bibliographies; some have none, drawing criticism from reviewers. The inclusion threshold for biographical articles is inconsistent throughout the work. While many obscure men are given biographies, only a small portion of the most notable women are featured in the encyclopedia.
Yidn series
The subseries of the encyclopedia focused on Jewish life, culture, history, and religion. , released in 1939 as the first of these volumes, consists mainly of essays introducing various Jewish topics written by experts in the respective fields. Essays within the volume include entries on Jewish anthropology, archaeology, colonization, cooperatives, demography, history (divided into separate ancient, medieval and modern entries), historiography, and statistics. The 1940 follows a similar format, but focuses mainly on Jewish religious and cultural matters, with articles such as a four-part essay on the history of Jewish art by the art historian Rachel Wischnitzer. Compared to and earlier volumes of the series, featured more contributors from outside of Europe, as well as from a greater ideological range.
(1942), initially thought of as the last volume of the series, features essays on Jewish literature and publications, as well as Jewish ideological, labor, and political movements. The largest essay in the volume is a 100-column article by Shmuel Charney entitled "Yiddish Literature from the Mid-eighteenth Century until 1942". The volume also includes one of the last writings from Ben-Adir, "Modern Social and National Currents among Jews", who died shortly after the volume's publication.
, released in 1950 as the first volume composed after World War II, follows the format of previous volumes of . The historian Barry Trachtenberg likened the volume to a Yizkor book—a memorial book on communities destroyed in the Holocaust—as many of the essays in the book focus on Jewish communities and life in Europe prior to the Holocaust. Essays detail Jewish communities in different European countries. The largest essay in the volume, Avrom Menes's 150-column "The Eastern European Age in Jewish History", is a broad overview of Jewish history in Eastern Europe since the medieval period, while the shortest, a history of the Jews in Luxembourg, is only four columns.
(1957) expands 's scope to Jewish communities in the Americas. Over three-quarters of the entries in the volume are focused on the United States, most of which were translated from Jewish People: Past and Present (an English encyclopedia partially based off the Algemeyne Entsikolopedye), likely including essays that were previously translated into English from Yiddish. Beside the United States coverage, features three essays on Jews in Argentina, two essays on Jews in Canada, and three short essays on Jewish history and culture in Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba respectively.
(1964) and (1966), the final two volumes of series (and of the encyclopedia as a whole), consist of a combined twenty-eight essays on topics related to the Holocaust. These essays, written by a variety of influential scholars (many of whom had not previously contributed to the encyclopedia), are generally organized by country. They give a history of the persecution of Jews before and during the war, life under occupation, and details on how Jews survived or engaged in armed resistance. While is well-illustrated with photos and maps, lacks photos entirely, likely due to the financial difficulties of the project during the 1960s.
History and publication
Background
With the rise of national encyclopedias such as the Encyclopædia Britannica in the 18th and 19th centuries, some Jewish intellectuals and scholars proposed the creation of encyclopedias to cover the history and culture of the Jewish people. After several failed projects in the preceding decades, Isidore Singer's English-language Jewish Encyclopedia was the first Jewish encyclopedia, published in 1901–1906. The Russian followed in 1908–1913 and the Hebrew in 1906–1913. Ten volumes of an incomplete German-language Encyclopedia Judaica were published in 1928 to 1934 under the direction of the philosopher Jakob Klatzkin, roughly concurrently to another German encyclopedia, the four-volume (1927–1930).