Digest of Public Opinion on Jewish Matters

[The purpose of the Digest is informative Preference is given to papers not generally accessible to our readers. Quotation does not indicate approval.–Editor.]

An extensive comment on the “Jewish Daily Bulletin” Index is contained in the Baltimore “Sun” of Dec. 21, from the pen of Felix Morley, who finds that the Index has the virtues of an encyclopedia without its faults. The article observes:

“The published of the ‘Jewish Daily Bulletin’ are therefore the more heartily to be congratulated on the publication of a bound Index to that New York paper which serves the purpose of an encyclopedia without its failings. An encyclopedia, that is, confined to Jewish events in the year covered by the Index, with each of its 10,000 items compressed to minimum size, yet so cleverly summarized as to make superfluous reference to the news items thus recorded. Judging from its initial volume covering 1925, this Index fulfills the editorial boast that ‘at a moment’s glance anyone interested in contemporary Jewish events will be able to find all data regarding any Jewish subject, which until now he had to spend hours to locate.’

“There publishers have shown herein that brevity is not incompatible with the interest we have already attributed to large encyclopedias. That the world at the present time contains, by closest estimates, only about 15,000,000 Jews is the sort of item that lingers in the mind. This it is pointed out, is about one per cent of the population of the globe. All Russia, we learn, does not exceed its pro rata share nearly as much as Baltimore, the 2,800,000 Jews in Soviet territory being only two per cent of the total population, while the 60,000 of that religion said to live in this city would be seven and one-half per cent. The ‘Baltimore Evening Sun’ is named sponsor for these local figures.

“Equally interesting is the recollection that a German Jew, Prof. Albert Mosse, was co-author of the Japanese Constitution. And with this item one naturally groups the references to that curious Jewish community at Kaifeng, in Central China, whose origin, except as another phase of the ‘Lost Tribes’ legend, seems irrevocably draped by mystery. Wherever they came from, in Honan Province their descendants still remain, a cause of more debate than the issue of whether or not Columbus had Jewish blood, which story the Index chronicles without indorsement.

“So far as this Index is concerned the race has not created but solved ‘problems.’ A more accurate, comprehensive and informative handbook on Jewish life in every land cannot be visualized.”