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Publisher: Thomson Gale, Detroit, MI, 2007
ISBN: 978 0 02865 928 2. Contact publisher for pricing information, Last visited July 2007, Also available as an e-book (ISBN 978 0 02866 097 4), Review based on electronic version URL: www.encyclopaedicajudaica.com/encyclopaedia-judaica/index.php
Reviewing a work on this scale is like looking at the sky - the scale is almost impossible to put into words. And so I hope readers of this review will be able to infer a desert from a grain of sand. The idea of the Encyclopedia Judaica originated from the time of the new state of Israel in the 1940s, and began in a practical editorial way in the 1960s. The first edition was published in 1972, and a CD-ROM version of this first edition was published in 1997. As the combined US-Israeli editorial team is the first to admit, the world has changed a lot since the 1970s, and knowledge and interpretation of Jewish and Judaic matters have changed with it. The preface to the second edition (which appears in two formats - e-book and print) makes this clear. For long a source of information to scholars and rabbis and every man and woman interested in the field, and found consistently to be dispassionate about the many different stances and ideological positions in it, the encyclopedia and its editorial team rightly identified the need to update a work that was, gradually and inevitably, becoming obsolescent. This, then, however we regard the commercial rationale for publishing, is a major event in encyclopedia publishing and the second edition is a work of magisterial scope and comprehensiveness.
A great deal of information can be located on the publisher's web sites and so any professional library manager can readily investigate whether the work is for them and in what format. The price of the e-book has its usual permutations (chosen collection, institution size, annual exchange rate, and annual hosting fee), and these too can be investigated further by speaking with marketing contacts (the contact for this reviewer, through whom a reviewer trial review period was arranged, was Victoria Newman at the London office of Thomson Learning). The publisher encourages enquiries about such trials. It is clear that a major constituency for the encyclopedia is the American market: the...