Jewish Encyclopedia

The Jewish Encyclopedia is a scholarly opus originally published in New York between 1901 and 1906 by Funk and Wagnalls. It contained over 15,000 articles in 12 volumes on the history and then-current state of Judaism and the Jews in 1901. It is now a public domain resource.

University of Toronto librarian, Jenny Mendelsohn, in an online guide to major sources of information about Jews and Judaism, writes of the Encyclopedia, "Although published in the early 1900s, this was a work highly regarded for its scholarship. Much of the material is still of value to researchers in Jewish History." In 2003 Reform rabbi Joshua L. Segal described it as "a remarkable piece of Jewish scholarship" and added, "For events prior to 1900, it is considered to offer a level of scholarship superior to either of the more recent Jewish Encyclopedias written in English."