Ephraim Hart in 1792 was one of the founding members of the New York Stock Exchange. Hebrew Union College, which was founded in Cincinnati in 1875 by Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, is the third oldest modern rabbinical seminary in the world.
The Hatikwah, which has been adopted as the song of the Jewish National Homeland, was composed twenty-five years ago by Naphtali Herz Imber. Jerusalem, capital city of Palestine, is located in the Judean Hills over two thousand feet above sea level. Petroleum was discovered in 1853 by a Galician Jew, Abraham Schreiner, who used it for lighting purposes at Boryslaw, Galicia, where he founded a distillation plant.
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded by Lewis Gompertz. Lorenzo Da Ponte, a librettist for Mozart, brought the first Italian opera company to New York at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Switzerland had a Jewish president, Hermann Arthur Hoffman, during the years 1914-17.
JEWS IN ROME
Daylight saving time was introduced into the United States by Marcus M. Marks. The Jewish settlement in Rome dates back to at least 180 B.C. More than 36,000 Jewish university men belong to sixteen national Jewish college fraternities with 314 chapters on 100 college campuses.
This interesting miscellany of facts is not the exclusive possession of the writer. They are picked at random from the one-volume Encyclopeadia of Jewish Knowledge edited by Jacob de Haas for Behrman’s Jewish Book House ($5). The particular charm of this work is its combination of comprehensiveness and mobility.
The Encyclopedia of Jewish Knowledge is not monumental. It is not twenty handsome volumes for your bookcase and occasional reference; it is a handy, one-volume plethora of facts that very conveniently fits on anyone’s desk. For the interested Jew, it is indispensable. And for children, unaware of their background, it is a gold mine of information.
As Mr. de Haas points out in his preface, the one volume encyclopedia is “designed to meet a recognized want,” to be a “readable guide through the maze of Jewish history, incidents, experiences, persecutions, ideas, cultural efforts, and the lives of great Jews and Jewesses.”
The four thousand years of Jewish history are in this volume compressed into 700,000 words.
“From an index of 100,000 names of persons, places, topics, terms, book titles, and liturgical headings,” says Mr. de Haas, “some 6,000 captions were selected. This selected list involves some 25,000 individual and place-names, book titles, etc., and are representative of the whole field. The selection and the length of treatment of each article was guided by a good journalistic principal, frequency of public interest.”
CROCE’S COMMENT
The great Italian critic, Benedetto Croce, says that an author should be judged by the success achieved based upon his aspirations and the inherent worth of them. Certainly the idea of a one-volume Jewish encyclopedia cannot be challenged and I do not believe that Mr. de Haas’s editorial
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
