Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd ed. 22 volumes (2007)
"Provides an exhaustive and organized overview of Jewish life and knowledge from the Second Temple period to the contemporary State of Israel, from Rabbinic to modern Yiddish literature, from Kabbalah to "Americana" and from Zionism to the contribution of Jews to world cultures." A go-to resource to clarify terms and concepts and to learn foundational information about historical events and personalities.
Encyclopedia of Jewish Book Cultures Online is a novel publication by Brill about Jewish book cultures across time and around the world.
Encyclopedia Talmudica: A Digest of Halachic Literature and Jewish Law from the Tanna(it)ic Period to the Present Time
This multivolume book is the English version of the original Hebrew. The translation of the original was adapted for readers unfamiliar with or unable to access the cited sources in Hebrew. It introduced the reader to key concepts in Jewish Law and calls attention to the textual sources that treat them.
This inline resource is part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's website. It is organized thematically and chronologically and searchable in twenty-one languages.
Holocaust Encyclopedia by Israel Gutman
This four-volume publication examines the Holocaust in close to one thousand entries. It is a recognized reference, published in English and Hebrew at the same time.
Jewish Encyclopedia
This is the online version of the 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia, published between 1901-1906. It contains over 15,000 articles and illustrations. Since it has not been updated since its first publication, it reflects Jewish academic scholarship at the time and--naturally--does not contain information about the events and developments of the past century and more.
Jewish Women's Archive (JWA)
"JWA is an international organization dedicated to collecting and promoting the extraordinary stories of Jewish women. JWA explores the past as a framework for understanding the pressing issues of our time; inspires young people with remarkable role models; and uses Jewish women’s stories to excite people to see themselves as agents of change." It is a rich textual and visual resource of Jewish women's experiences around the world.
The Kabbalah Handbook: A Concise Encyclopedia of Terms and Concepts in Jewish Mysticism
A comprehensive reference book that introduces the reader to the main ideas and concepts of Jewish Mysticism.
לקסיקון הקיבוץ Leḳsiḳon ha-ḳibuts
In more than three hundred entries, this book introduces the reader to the world of the Israeli cooperative settlement, in Hebrew the kibbutz (קיבוץ). The lexicon includes a map of the kibbutzim (pl.) in Israel and list of additional readings
לקסיקון הספרות העברית החדשה Lexicon of Modern Hebrew Literature
This Hebrew language bio-bibliographical Lexicon that the noted bibliographer Joseph Galron-Goldschläger at Ohio State University compiled and constantly updates, lists Hebrew literary and scholarly authors, such as Emory Professor of Hebrew Language, Literature and Culture Dr. Ofra Yeglin.
YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe
"The goal of The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe is to recover and represent the civilization of the ancestors of the majority of Jews in the world on the basis of the most up-to-date and objective scholarly research available. This encyclopedia seeks to reflect all aspects of Jewish life in its variety and multiplicity: religious and secular; male and female; urban and rural; Hasidic and Misnagdic; Yiddishist and Hebraist; Zionist and assimilationist; Russian and Polish; Romanian and Ukrainian; Lithuanian and Galician; even Karaite and Rabbinite. The fundamental test for inclusion has been historical and cultural significance. The YIVO Encyclopedia is intended to be an ecumenical work: nondenominational, nonideological, and nonconfessional. ... The YIVO Encyclopedia highlights not only the achievements of high culture in its various forms but also the everyday lives of ordinary Jews and their cultural creations: costume, life-cycle events, reading culture, and folklore."
Yiddishland is YIVO's database of names of places.
To explore databases with Jewish Studies and related materials, please search Emory's database collection by inserting the search term "Jewish" into the search box. As of the end of 2023, such search produces fifty-one finds. The following list also includes databases not included in the Emory collection but freely accessible for any user.
American Jewish Committee Archive
Bibliography of the Hebrew Book (National Library of Israel) is a database of materials in various formats, printed in Hebrew characters in various languages from the beginning of Hebrew printing (around 1460) and through the second half of the twentieth century.
The Jewish History Resource Center is a collection of texts pertaining to Jewish history from the Biblical era until after the Holocaust. It is compiled and maintained by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Dinur Center for Jewish History.
Index to Hebrew Periodicals (English Interfaces) This link opens in a new window
Indexes articles from Hebrew periodicals, collections and some monographs. Has content in Hebrew and English most of which is not indexed in RAMBI.
Index to Jewish Periodicals contains a guide to English-language articles, book reviews, and feature stories from popular and scholarly journals devoted to Jewish affairs.
RAMBI Founded by Issachar Joel in 1966 and hosted by the National Library of Israel, this daily updated index of articles offers a selective bibliography on the various subfields of Jewish Studies, the study of the Land of Israel, and the State of Israel written in Hebrew, Latin, and Cyrillic script.
מפתח חיפה למאמרים indexes academic articles and book chapters as well as articles from dailies in Israel. It is available only in Hebrew, even though it includes work written in other languages as well.
Sephardic Studies is a digital library and database in support for the study of Sephardic heritage, history, and religiosity.
Related
ATLA Religion Database (ATLA RDB) is a monthly updated, scholarship-focused index of articles, reviews, essays, and more related to religion and theology.
America: History and Life This is a database for articles on U.S. and Canadian history published after 1960, thus supporting the study of the Jewish experience and the social and cultural context of Jewish individual and communal life in these two North American countries.
American Bibliography of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Online (ABSEES) The periodicals indexed in this online bibliography are listed here. Among these periodicals, East European Jewish Affairs directly focuses on Jewish histories and cultures.
Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries
BiBIL - Biblical Bibliography of Lausanne, created by the Institut Romand des Sciences Bibliques and made available electronically after 1986, at the University of Lausanne, is a bibliographic index of books and articles in Biblical Studies.
Emory Libraries house Hebrew (both modern and Biblical) and Yiddish, and thematic dictionaries in addition to Hebrew-English dictionaries, Yiddish-English dictionaries (both online and physical copies). A broad range of works pertaining to Christian Hebraism are also available online, such as Critica Hebræa: or, a Hebrew-English dictionary, without points: in which the several derivatives are reduced to their genuine roots. Students of Ladino will find Hebrew-Ladino, English-Ladino, Spanish-Ladino and Ladino dictionaries in the collection. Several items offer help in interpreting texts written in Judeo-Arabic.
The Hebrew Calendar is a hybrid, lunar-solar (lunisolar) calendar. It counts the passing of time since the creation of the word as it is accounted in the Hebrew Bible. The day begins and ends at (around) sunset (there are various ways to define the beginning and end of the day). The new moon marks the beginning of the month or rosh hodesh (ראש חודש -- literarily, the head of the month), and the year begins on the first day of the month of Tishrei (תשרי), which marks the holiday Rosh Hashanah (ראש השנה -- literarily, the head of the year). Jewish holidays are determined by the Hebrew calendar, national holidays in Israel are likewise fixed according to the Hebrew calendar. There are twelve, 29-30 days long months in the Hebrew calendar. Leap months are added in order to correct the discrepancy between the solar and lunar cycles. Hence, the Gregorian and the Hebrew calendars are synchronized to a certain extent and, for example, Rosh Hashanah is always during the fall (September-October). Dates are recorded as day-month-year (usually without the thousand digit). Another important way of marking the passing of time is the recording of the weekly passage (פרשת השבוע) from the Torah studied in the synagogue. To learn more about the Hebrew calendar and how the Hebrew dates convert to dates according to the Gregorian calendar, see Hebcal.com. The Calendar Converter for Near East Historians includes the Hebrew, Muslim, Gregorian, Julian, and Persian calendars.
The so-called Jewish languages written in Hebrew script are transliterated according to certain rules, standards, and conventions. To learn more about how Yiddish is Romanized see, see YIVO's transliteration table or the Library of Congress transliteration tables, which includes Hebrew and Yiddish as well. The publishing house Brill compiled a simple transliteration table for Hebrew.
Hebrew letters are used for their numerical values when recording dates or chapter and verse numbers, page numbers, or other numbers in a series. For example, the first ten letters are ascribed the numbers 1 to 10, according to alphabetical order and the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, 'taf' (ת) has the numerical value of 400. To learn more about the Hebrew letters' numerical values and the way they are used to record dates, see the information on Hebcal.com.