4. MORITZ STEINSCHNEIDER’S NOTION OF ENCYCLOPEDIAS

Arndt Engelhardt

Moritz Steinschneider had the reputation of being decidedly criti- cal of attempts to popularize and he was known to advocate elitist ideals of scholarship. That was the view of the Budapest and scholar (1829–1905), set out in an article on the occasion of Steinschneider’s 80th birthday. There he sketched an impressive portrait of Steinschneider’s scholarly-scientific career. In Kayserling’s analysis, his trajectory was distinguished by having intro- duced “individual disciplines of into modern science,” building upon the foundations of the Wissenschaft des Judentums laid by , and pursuing pathways to link Jewish and general culture.1 But Steinschneider had not been “particularly enamored” of “popular scientific studies,” nor had he written “for the larger mass audience.” Kayserling cites a statement by Steinschneider himself that appears to confirm precisely this elitist attitude on his part: “I write only for readers who have relevant knowledge of the topic, who want to learn and can. [. . .] My bibliographical studies do not belong before a large audience. Nor is it my intention in any way to make things easier for hasty compilers who lack even the rudiments of criticism.”2 Such comments have been repeatedly used to explain why he preferred a dry style and the abundance of facts his dense texts contained. Writing in the Zionist paper Jüdische Rundschau, the German Ori- entalist and librarian Gotthold Weil (1882–1960), in his obituary for Steinschneider, quotes several remarks about the encyclopedic projects of his teacher and mentor. He points out that Steinschneider delib- erately kept his distance from Jewish scientific associations, and had

1 M[oritz Meyer] Kayserling, “Moritz Steinschneider,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 60 (1896), no. 13 [27 March]: 149–151, here p. 150. I am grateful to the organizers of the Moritz Steinschneider Centennial Confer- ence in 2007 for the opportunity to present and discuss this paper. Especially I would like to thank Prof. Gad Freudenthal for his support and patience as editor of this volume. 2 Ibid., p. 151. 110 arndt engelhardt not participated even in the great venture of , published in the early years of the 20th century.3 Weil reports Stein- schneider’s view that scientific work had to be the “fruit of lonely, individual investigation,” wherefore “collecting data in encyclopedias and compendia” could only be “the product of specialist research over many decades.”4 These late-life observations attributed to Steinschneider by his pupils stand in contrast to his early work: He collaborated with others on a number of general encyclopedias, one of which was dedicated specifi- cally to the goal of popularizing science, and was also involved in the project of a decidedly Jewish encyclopedia.5 Also a large number of his scholarly publications followed the goal of being “encyclopedic” in the sense of comprehensive. For example, the monumental work Die hebraeischen Uebersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher of 1893 deals with aspects of the transfer of knowledge by .6 Here he composed his “great encyclopedic presentations of educa- tion in its totality, developed during his extended work of cataloging in Europe’s libraries.”7 He described and systematized these works, noted the sources mentioned by the authors and analyzed the inter- textual relations. He explained his motivation for this by pointing to his experience that there was a serious “lack of sources, more than a mere gap” during work, from 1844 onward, on the article “Jewish Literature” for the Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, edited by (1766–1828) and (1774–1851).8

3 Gotthold Weil, “Moritz Steinschneider [Obituary],” Jüdische Rundschau 12 (1907), no. 6 [8 February]: 53–55, here p. 54f. The article refers to the first modern Jewish encyclopedia: The Jewish Encyclopedia. A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, ed. et al., 12 vols. (New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1901–1906), now accessible online: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/ (accessed 15 Jan. 2010). 4 G. Weil, “Moritz Steinschneider,” p. 55. 5 On the development of modern Jewish encyclopedias, see Shimeon Brisman, A History and Guide to Judaic Encyclopedias and Lexicons (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1987). 6 Moritz Steinschneider, HÜ. An English of the section on encyclope- dias is: Charles Manekin, “Steinschneider on the Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias. An Annotated Translation from ‘Die hebraeischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters,’” in The Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias of Science and Philosophy, ed. Steven Harvey (Dor- drecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 465–519. 7 Steinschneider, HÜ, “Allgemeines,” §1, p. 1. 8 Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber, eds., Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste in alphabetischer Folge von genannten Schriftstellern bearbeitet (, 1818–1889). The encyclopedia was published incomplete, in 167 “parts” (vols.), and