Chapter One Amass: Knowledge in the Making of a Nation

Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (also known by the acronym Netzi″v; Mir, 1816 – Warsaw, 1893) was a meticulous scholar of the Bible and rabbinic literature who demanded a similar degree of rigor and erudition from his many disciples. As the dean of the Volozhin Yeshiva, he was renowned for promoting significant changes in the teaching methods and curricula of Lithuanian yeshivas and was also a staunch critic of Jewish Enlightenment’s thought known as Haskalah. However, in his later years as the head of the yeshiva, the state demanded that Berlin expose his students to general knowledge and bestow them with Russian language skills. “If the state will require them to pursue secular studies,” he wrote, “The studies will be conducted under the supervision of the Rabbi and other leaders in Israel, to ensure that they are conducted with a reverence for God.”1 Berlin ensured that his students would engage with general studies only after they had fulfilled their other weekly requirements because “It's difficult to achieve greatness in Torah when one's attention is divided among other pursuits.” By forbidding his students to read academic books and books of philosophy and popular science, the rabbi, in fact, followed the religious imperative to set a distinction between the holy and the secular. That is, spatial separation between sacred knowledge and secular writings through a physical distinction of separated libraries and sometimes the use of different languages. Berlin applied the religious imperative to monitor the content to which the students were exposed and to prevent direct exposure to what he perceived as abhorred literary works. However, a posthumous account of the rabbi claimed that among the many Haskalah books, there was only one book he considered legitimate and deserved to be read by his students. “This is a good book,” the Lithuanian rabbi is purported to have told followers and even claimed that he “learned a great deal from it.”2 The book that the Rabbi praised so enthusiastically was ha-Eshkol, the first modern Hebrew encyclopedia, published in Warsaw in 1888.

This statement seems, however, to be fabricated by a maskilic writer for the daily newspaper ha-Tsfira. It seems unlikely that Berlin, who fought bitterly with maskilic intellectuals over the curriculum of his yeshiva, would warmly approve an all-inclusive encyclopedia that did not maintain a clear distinction between the sacred and the profane. Publicizing such a statement in a popular daily newspaper was meant to illustrate that students of the prestigious yeshiva could share a common ground with maskilim and that a fragmented Jewish society could be reunited through the literary genre of the Hebrew encyclopedia, a genre that had so far been absent from the Jewish book market. The first attempt to publish a Hebrew encyclopedia—the one which Rabbi Berlin allegedly praised—was indeed intended to revive the idea of a common “Jewish bookshelf,” which would be physical proof of the feasibility of a collective Jewish identity. The idea, as we shall see in this chapter, was to use the encyclopedia as an instrument in the creation of a new Jewish collective identity that would be based on knowledge, as the political, theological, and geographical separation of the various Jewish communities will be consolidated through a single book that addressed all the different shades of Judaism. To enable an inclusive identity and allow many to enter through this melting pot of knowledge, the publishers of ha-Eshkol aspired to produce an encyclopedia accessible to all Jews, provided they could read Hebrew.

By designing ha-Eshkol as an affordable and accessible publication, the publishers hoped that it would be distributed throughout the continent and, eventually, become a powerful instrument in the making of Jewish cultural autonomy. Disappointed with the idea of ​​emancipation but at the same time seeking social, commercial, and political contacts with the state and their non-Jewish neighbors, the publishers sought to present two distinctly different bodies of knowledge in the encyclopedia. First, knowledge about Jews and Judaism aimed to introduce readers to an ideal reflection of a new Jewish collective self. This introspective gaze was intended to fortify an autonomous Jewish identity by blurring content concerning the differences between Jewish communities while highlighting content related to historical Jewish unity. Second, universal knowledge was intended to equip the Hebrew reader with a basic understanding of scientific terms and knowledge of the world through numerous entries in geography. The publishers believed that this type of knowledge could enhance the social status of their readers by improving their prospects of being accepted into reputable educational institutions and facilitating their integration into the labor market. The publishers and editors of ha-Eshkol, therefore, aspired to produce a new hybrid Jewish persona that seeks to strengthen its particular characteristics while breaking through the ghetto walls to become a citizen of the world. Like Janus, the two-faced Roman god, the ideal Jew of the encyclopedia simultaneously gazes inward and observes the world around, preserves the customs of the traditional world and anticipates the changes brought by science and technology, and immerses itself in its past while facing the future.

The publishers knew that issuing a project of this size required enormous financial efforts. Due to their small Hebrew readership, they had little hope of creating profits or stirring public attention beyond their small republic of letters. Up to this point in time, non-religious Hebrew books, such as booklets of popular science and books of belles-lettres, targeted small readerships of a few thousand Eastern European maskilim at most. Nevertheless,‏ ‎they were determined to issue ha-Eshkol because they perceived the encyclopedia as a first step in creating a new national culture. This chapter will describe the history of the first modern Hebrew encyclopedia and explain the reasons that brought Hebraists to develop this new literary genre. The chapter will also explore the debate that accompanied the early days of Hebrew encyclopedias between those who stressed the need to produce “Jewish knowledge” encyclopedias and those who advocated for “general knowledge” encyclopedias. The often-fuzzy definitions of these puzzling categories were the basis of bitter debates between rival encyclopedists that reflected different political positions over the role of Jews in the general society and the character of a collective Jewish identity.

The Redemptive Science

In the summer of 1888, Isaac Goldman3 (Jasinowka 181‏3‎ – Warsaw 1888), a Jewish printmaker from Warsaw, decided to publish a multi-volume Hebrew encyclopedia. The 75-year-old Goldman knew the project, which he gave a mixed Hebrew-Yiddish title “Ha-Eshkol Allgemeine Encyclopedia” [The Cluster General Encyclopedia], had no precedent in Hebrew literature in its intellectual scope or its cost. He declared that ha-Eshkol would be an essential milestone for the national resurrection as it would “significantly broaden our language and demonstrate to all that our tongue is not prevented from expressing all reason and all knowledge.”4 Goldman, therefore, did not only want to create a referential compendium but to infuse epistemological and semantic forms of realism into the Hebrew language. In practice, this meant that the encyclopedia would expand the ability of Hebrew to represent the objective world (mimesis) by providing it with popular registers, enriching its lexis, and simplifying its grammar and syntax. For Goldman, the language of the encyclopedia was not only a mediating tool for the distribution of knowledge but also an end goal. He claimed that in ha-Eshkol, Hebrew would no longer be a liturgic language or a code language of a small maskilic elite but a language accessible for a broad stratum of readers that would constitute a new national movement.

Goldman adopted the title from Sefer ha-Eshkol [Book of the Cluster], a halakhic book attributed to the Medieval Rabbi Avraham ben Isaac of Narbonne (also known as Raavad II; Montpelier c. 1110 – Narbonne 1179). In 1867, Zvi Benjamin Auerbach (Neuwied, 1808- Halberstadt, 1872), a prominent German Rabbi, claimed to prepare Sefer ha-Eshkol out of a manuscript he found, and it quickly became an authority of Halakah (until the book was described as a work of forgery at the beginning of the twentieth century). The scholarly interest in Sefer ha-Eshkol centered on its innovative organization of Halakahic knowledge in subject-matter sections that preceded Maimonides’ organization of knowledge in the seminal work Mishneh Torah.5 Goldman hoped that his ha-Eshkol would similarly improve the accessibility of both Jewish and general knowledge in Hebrew and be “a useful tool and ‘a book of books’ to our nation.”6 Moreover, the literary meaning of the encyclopedia’s title, “cluster,” marked the publisher’s ambitious goal of assembling all knowledge into a single publication. Like a cluster, he claimed, the encyclopedia would hold together “all the educational, practical and academic pearls of wisdom with all the scientific knowledge and discoveries and all the things and matters that ever occurred in this...