Dear Friends,
It has been another exciting month working for the Louis Jacobs project!
Compared to February, a relatively small number of new articles were put online. The fallback, however, should enable us to take many more steps forwards. The material added over the last two months prompted us to reconfigure the website layout and make some important changes. As you might have seen, the structure of the “About” section was quite dramatically improved, in order to integrate the dozens of pieces which were recently uploaded. The “Further Readings” menu now contains five categories, in each of which you’ll find several contributions. In “The ‘Jacobs Affair’“, for example, we’ve included some important resources, written by several actors or onlookers in the famous scandal which shook Anglo-Jewry. These all constitute primary sources for anyone who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of the Affair. The “In Memorium” section contains many hespedim, obituaries, dating back to 2006 and Rabbi Louis Jacobs’s passing.
We made similar changes to the “Articles & Reviews” thumbnail, introducing a new section. On top of book reviews written by Louis Jacobs, we will soon be adding many scholarly reviews written about his books. We’ve only uploaded four so far, but rest assured, there will be dozens more coming in the next few months!
We hope that these improvements will help visitors and researchers navigate through the content of the website, which has recently increased quite dramatically! And it’s hardly over. Our mission is to publish as much material as possible written by the late Rabbi Jacobs. In order to achieve this, I spent the last two weeks creating an Excel sheet which listed all the material present in the Bibliography of the scholarly writings of Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs (compiled between 2006 and 2012 by Michael Fischer and the Leopold Muller Library) which we have not yet uploaded.
The Bibliography itself is not exhaustive. It does not contain the hundreds of non-scholarly pieces written by Rabbi Jacobs for such outlets as The Jewish Chronicle, for example. Nor does it include pieces written about him. But it is, by all means, an important resource. And of all the 478 book chapters, journal articles, reviews, encyclopedia entries, and published lectures listed in the Bibliography, . . . 267 are yet to be located and uploaded. This might seem like a huge number (it certainly is), but it also shows how much the Project has already achieved, and it’s a huge encouragement for us. We can now fix our eyes on our next major objective: 267 files to go.
Keep your eyes open for events coming up next month in our regular newsletter: Simon Eder’s study session on “Judaism – A Truth or The Truth?”, Elie Jesner’s fourth Honest Theology session entitled “Can Judaism survive the return to Zion?“, and much more!
Wishing all our Friends a purim sameach!
Ezra