The mammoth task of bringing under bibliographic control all of pre-twentieth century Judaica Americana -- the vast literature pertaining to Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture published in the American colonies and the United States through 1900 – has occupied Jewish bibliographers for more than a century. In 1918, Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach, perhaps the foremost expert on American rare books and manuscripts of his time, presented to the American Jewish Historical Society “A List of Books and Pamphlets by or relating to Jews Printed in America, from the Establishment of the Press in the Colonies until 1850.” Published in permanent form in 1926 (after what Rosenbach’s biographer, Edwin Wolf II, describes as "much addition and polishing and with considerable bibliographical work by E. D. Coleman and E. Millicent Sowerby”), the bibliography became, almost at once, an indispensable tool to students of early American Jewish history. Many years later, it was still being described as “the best reference book on the subject available.”
Rosenbach was outwardly modest regarding his achievement. “The compiler,” he admitted in his preface, "does not for a moment think that the work is at all complete, and he is fully aware that there are many titles yet to be listed." While he sincerely trusted that his bibliography would "be of value to all students and lovers of Judaica, and to all those interested in the history of the Jews in the United States," he also hoped that it would in time be superseded. He viewed his work as "a stepping stone and incentive to greater things."
Three supplements to Rosenbach were ultimately published: the first by Jacob R. Marcus in 1954, the second by Edwin Wolf II in 1958, and the third by Nathan M. Kaganoff in 1971. In addition, Allan Levine and Leopold Naum Friedman both compiled preliminary bibliographies aimed at carrying Rosenbach's list forward from 1851 to 1875. In addition, Hebraist Ephraim Deinard, in the same year that Rosenbach’s bibliography appeared, published Koheleth America, a catalogue of Hebrew books published in America from 1735-1925 (it was updated and revised in 2006 by Yosef Goldman and Ari Kinsberg’s Hebrew Printing in America). None of these bibliographers, however, went so far as Rosenbach did in attempting to identify all of the libraries where a given work might be found, and none thought to create a cumulative listing of publications. Into the 1980s, a diligent researcher sometimes needed to consult six or seven different (and oft hard-to-find) bibliographies in search of desired information. Even that offered no guarantee of success, for it was widely known that a large number of items remained unrecorded. From a bibliographer’s perspective, the field of Judaica Americana, into the late twentieth century, languished in disarray.
Into this breach stepped Robert Singerman. Already recognized in the late twentieth century as one of America’s leading Jewish bibliographers, Singerman in 1984 took up the challenge that had daunted everyone before him. He undertook to produce a wholly new American Jewish bibliography, incorporating all of the existing supplements to Rosenbach as well as Deinard’s work, adding materials discovered since 1971, listing the major libraries where titles were available, and carrying the bibliography all the way to 1900.
Rather than relying on earlier compilers, Singerman personally examined the vast majority of items he included so as to ensure the accuracy of every citation. He also made provisions for detailed indices to facilitate a wide range of scholarly researches, including subject indexes as well as listings of printers, publishers, and place names. The result – the more than 6500 entries included in the two-volume Judaica Americana: A Bibliography of Publications to 1900 (Greenwood Press, 1990) – won widespread acclaim. Studies in Bibliography and Booklore hailed the volume as “one of the major and basic contributions to American Jewish scholarship in the last half century.”
Singerman understood that his bibliography, for all of the effort that it entailed, could “never hope to be truly ‘definitive’.” An “alarming number of entries,” he lamented, referred to items that could no longer be located. He also anticipated “inevitable corrections,” as well as additions. One reviewer offered what he described as “petulant examples of omission” in the bibliography. As the field of Judaica Americana gained recognition and grew over the years that ensued, other corrections and additions became known as well, many of them discovered by Singerman himself. Meanwhile, with the passage of time, copies of Judaica Americana became increasingly rare and expensive. Couldn’t the bibliography be digitized, scholars and bibliophiles wondered?
Singerman’s Judaica Americana II answers that question in the affirmative. It also adds over 3,000 items to the list of known Judaica Americana through 1900, reflecting both new discoveries and a more expansive definition of the subject, as set forth in the editor’s introduction. The digital format, for the first time, provides vernacular alphabet Hebrew and Yiddish titles and advanced search capabilities of the entire dataset, such as by keyword, boolean, and exact match functions for one or more fields. It allows additional newly discovered items to be added to the digital edition on an ongoing basis. Future plans include linking directly from each bibliographic entry to its corresponding unrestricted full text digital facsimile whenever possible. All of this will greatly democratize research, permitting individuals around the world to examine what was once accessible only to a small number of scholars associated with research institutions. The result should revolutionize the study of pre-twentieth century American Jewish life. Antisemitism, business, communal life, crime, culture, education, immigration, organizations of every sort, philanthropy, poverty, the relationship between Jews and the state, religion, westward migration, Zionism, local and regional history, the history of Jewish books and printers and libraries, Jewish-Christian interactions, the spread of German and Hebrew and Yiddish, the ties between American Jews and world Jewry -- all these and much more will henceforward be researchable in far greater depth than ever before.
Special attention should be paid to Singerman’s “Union List of Nineteenth-Century Jewish Serials Published in the United States,” published as a separate section of his bibliography (and maintained separate in the online version). Not only are there many more such serials than anybody knew, but many of them have apparently never been closely studied. Surely, for example, much could be learned from the “Elite Directory of Hebrews” published in Philadelphia, from the Jewish “Fair” journals published in multiple cities, and from the large number of Jewish fraternal lodge publications that appeared across the United States. Who can even imagine the contents of a turn-of-the-century journal entitled Pi-pi-foks. Pee-Pee-Fox. Illustrated Jewish Bits?
These, of course, by no means exhaust the possibilities opened up by the digital appearance of Judaica American II. Experience suggests, indeed, that it will make possible the answers to research questions beyond anything we can currently fathom. But this much is clear. The publication of Judaica American II marks a turning point in the study of pre-twentieth century American Jewish history. Thanks to Robert Singerman’s thirty-five years of prodigious research, we now have available to us vastly more data concerning publications through 1900 than anyone would once have believed possible. The challenge, looking ahead, is to employ this treasure to better understand the rich legacy that 8896 individual entries and 734 serial publications bequeaths to us.
Jonathan D. Sarna
University Professor and Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History
Brandeis University