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This I Believe: Documents of American Jewish Life. Edited by Jacob R. Marcus. Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc., 1990. xxi +277 pp.
To Count a People: American Jewish Population Data, 1585-1984. By Jacob R. Marcus. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990. 274 pp.
United States Jewry 1776-1985. Vol. 1: The Sephardic Period. By Jacob R. Marcus. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989. 820 pp.
United States Jewry 1776-1985. Vol. 2: The Germanic Period. By Jacob R. Marcus. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. 419 pp.
United States Jewry 1776-1985. Vol. 3: The Germanic Period, Part 2. By Jacob R. Marcus. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. 925 pp.
United States Jewry 1776-1985. Vol. 4: The East European Period: The Emergence of the American Jew; Epilogue. By Jacob R. Marcus. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. 955 pp.
The Jew in the American World: A Source Book. Edited by Jacob R. Marcus. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. 663 pp.
No historian so fully incarnated an all-consuming self-conscious tradition of scholarship in American Jewish history than did Jacob Rader Marcus (1896-1995). Ever since turning to the teaching of the first required course in American Jewish history in 1942 at the request of the President of the Hebrew Union College, Marcus determined to virtually recreate and retool the field within his parameters. And he did. In 1946 he was designated the Adolph Ochs Professor of American Jewish history at his Cincinnati alma mater and virtual lifelong address ever since enrolling there at the age of fifteen, except for two years in military service during World War I and four more pursuing his doctorate in Germany. In 1947, he founded the American Jewish Archives, followed in 1948 by its semi-annual of the same name, and in 1957, by the American Jewish Periodical Center, with the mandate to microfilm every newspaper and periodical published from 1823 to 1925 (and selectively thereafter) and to make them available with all records at the Archives to scholars wherever they might be. Within that decade, the merger of Marcus the archivist, and Marcus the historian, a key to appreciating the unique persona of Jacob Marcus, was fully consolidated.
For the next half century, the Cincinnati archivist-historian would benevolently collect, organize, catalogue,...