More Than Jewish

It is one of the treasured stories of biblical cunning. In Genesis, the patriarch Jacob outsmarts his parsimonious uncle Laban while tending Laban's flocks. First he tells Laban to cull all spotted sheep and goats out of the flock for safekeeping, then offers to tend the "monochrome" remainder (white sheep, black goats), taking only spotted offspring as his pay. Laban quickly agrees. Jacob sets about having the animals couple in front of peeled branches. They produce large numbers of spotted offspring, and Jacob becomes rich.

A pious legend? Not necessarily, says Israeli Botanist Yehuda Feliks. Writing in a monumental new set of reference books called the Encyclopedia Judaica, Feliks identifies Jacob's secret as a keen perception of the laws of heredity. (The peeled branches were just window dressing.) Jacob apparently knew from a dream that the hybrids (white sheep and black goats that carried recessive genes of "spottedness") matured sexually earlier than the pure monochromes in the flock. He mated the hybrids, and their recessive genes emerged to produce a maximum of spotted offspring in each generation. He set aside the pure monochromes, unbred, as Laban's share.

Feliks' hypothesis, complete with genetic charts showing the results of the crossbreeding, is one of thousands of examples of the learned, the witty and the arcane that fill the Encyclopedia Judaica, published earlier this year by Israel's Keter Publishing House and just now going on sale (at $500 a set through Macmillan) in the U.S. Sixteen volumes and 12,000 pages long, totaling more than 12 million words, it is the first major Jewish encyclopedia in any language in 65 years. The work was begun during the early 1930s in Germany but became one of the first casualties of Hitler's 1933 book burning. In 1966 it was started over from scratch in Israel, this time in English. Bankrolled mainly by loans from the Israeli government and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the $5 million project utilized computer tapes and the brainpower of some 2,500 scholars to produce the encyclopedia in only 5 1/2 years.

Data of Misery. The result shows few signs of haste. Some entries are so exhaustive as to be exhausting: the section on Israel runs to nearly 500,000 words, the length of four good-sized novels. The articles on the Holocaust are numbing in their accumulation of the data of misery. One set of tables ticks off each of the 613 commandments listed by Maimonides, citing biblical references for each.

Disparities and omissions were perhaps inevitable. The treatment of the controversial Arab refugee question understandably highlights Israel's position but is not very successful in its attempt to present the other side. There is a half-page on Colorado (for its Jewish community) but no separate entry on Israel's neighbor, Saudi Arabia. The encyclopedia gamely notes Gambler Arnold Rothstein and Gangster Benjamin ("Bugsy") Siegel with crisp, forthright entries, but there is no treatment of Jewish humor beyond Hebrew parody--because, say the editors, they could not find a suitable author.

Such flaws pale beside the quantity and quality of the material that is included. Historian Arthur Hertzberg's meticulous article on Jewish identity examines every mode of definition, historical, sociological and religious, carefully setting the Orthodox view against others. In practice, concludes Hertzberg, world Jewish concern extends to all who "suffer as Jews." David Flusser of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has written a treatise on Jesus that Christians would do well to read. Gershom Scholem's 83-page article on the kabbalah--that broad stream of Jewish esoterica embracing both lofty mysticism and magical formulas--may well be the most lucid treatment of the complex subject available.

Perhaps the most notable difference between the Encyclopedia Judaica and earlier encyclopedias is its emphasis on Jewish art--a subject virtually ignored until the past half-century. The pages are interleaved with magnificent illuminations from medieval Jewish manuscripts and pictures of mosaics and frescoes from ancient synagogues. The section on art runs to 79 pages. That entry alone should convince many a prospective buyer that the Encyclopedia Judaica is not for Jews alone.

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