[ 
Introduction |
Romanization: the Alphabet |
The Hebrew Language |
The Yiddish Language |
Religious Classics |
Description |
Dates, Numbers, Pagings |
Holdings, Items, and Processing |
Table of Contents (Special Formats) | Table of Contents (Top)]
The Hebrew alphabet is used for works in several languages.
Most works in the Hebrew alphabet acquired at Queen's can be grouped into one of three types.
Cataloguing materials printed in the Hebrew alphabet is a specialty skill. This document includes some useful hints and guidelines, which may help someone without knowledge of the alphabet or languages to search for and assess copy, and possibly to catalogue certain types of works in Hebrew and Yiddish.
Personal note by D. Rutherford: In the early 1990s I was called upon to catalogue a large influx of Hebrew gifts and purchases of religious works, more or less classics. The first large gift was from the library of Rabbi Hamburger, who apparently came to North America from Eastern Europe in the late 1930s. It included works published by specialist Hebrew publishers in Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania), Warsaw, Berlin, etc. After that we received a shipment of recently published multi-volume religious classics in showy bindings, without the usual paperwork, only a handwritten list of short titles that had to be matched to the appropriate books. Starting from nothing, I was able to learn enough to cope more or less adequately with this material, though my work certainly did not meet specialist standards and should not be taken as a good model. I could have used a guide as basic as this document at that time!
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The Hebrew alphabet is a distant ancestor through the Greek alphabet of the familiar Roman. Some of the letters come in the same order and a few of them even have similar shapes. Beware of "artistic" lettering which is sometimes impossible to identify!
The first thing you need is a romanization (or transliteration) table. Various tables exist, but the one you should use is the ALA/LC Hebraica Romanization table, available in print in ALA/LC Romanization Tables (P226.A4 1991 on the CTS reference shelves), and online at ALA/LC Romanization Tables (click on Hebrew and Yiddish). For more detail, you may also wish to consult Hebraica Cataloging (CTS reference Z695.1.J48 M33 1987t).
If you study the Consonants part of the romanization table you will note that some letters have different shapes if they come at the end of a word. (Compare 
and 
; both are romanized as N.) Some are listed with two different romanizations (the first one listed is likely to be at the beginning of a word, the second in the middle). In some cases two different shapes have the same romanization, distinguished only by a dot underneath (important to enable transliteration back the other way). Note the similarities and differences among the groups of easily confused letters listed below.
The romanized forms of the characters called aleph 
and ayin 
are not letters in the Roman alphabet. They can be found in the Voyager Diacritic Entry screen, respectively above and below the Greek "alpha" character. The other common diacritic used in romanization, a dot below a character, is at the middle of the second column from the right.
Vowels: You will notice in the romanization table that there are different lists of vowels for Hebrew and for Yiddish. For more about Hebrew vowels see The Hebrew Language; for Yiddish vowels see The Yiddish Language.
Another complication is that the Hebrew alphabet (whatever language) is written from right to left instead of from left to right as in Roman, Greek, and Cyrillic. When doing transliteration from the tables, it is wise to start on another sheet of paper and write the romanized characters from left to right.
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Hebrew, as an ancient Semitic language, is based on root words, each with three consonants, which are given added meanings by prefixes, suffixes, and other changes not always represented in writing. The written form did not bother with written vowels at all, since meaning depended on the consonants alone, and any speaker of the language would always know the proper vowel sound.
During the Middle Ages, Hebrew scholars (called masoretes), concerned that the proper pronunciation of the sacred works might be lost, added tiny marks called vowel points under the consonants to produce the "masoretic text". Today, some works are printed with vowel points, but many are not. It is helpful to have a dictionary that gives vowel points and pronunciations, like The Meridian Hebrew/English English/Hebrew dictionary, but this is not as reliable as vowel points in the text because the vowels are different in different parts of speech.
Some of the "consonants", , 
, 
, , are sometimes transliterated as vowels, but doing this accurately requires some knowledge of the language. The character is sometimes added to a root word for sound without changing the meaning (which complicates dictionary look-up).
Prefixes and plurals: Certain characters at the beginning or the end of the word have meanings of their own. Ignore these when looking for words in the dictionary (but remember that sometimes they are part of the root word after all).
| beginning of word |  | be- | in, by, at, during |
| beginning of word |  | ha- | the |
| beginning of word | | u- or ve- | and |
| beginning of word |  | le- | to, by, for, of, as |
| beginning of word |  | mi- | from, of, more than, since |
| end of word | 
| -ot | plural |
| end of word |  | -im | plural |
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Yiddish, being based on German, needs real vowels. In the written language, certain Hebrew characters are used as vowels, often in combinations and doubles. The easiest way for a non-reader to distinguish Yiddish from Hebrew is to look for these combinations, which rarely if ever occur in Hebrew.
Anyone with some knowledge of German will quickly begin to recognize German words in the romanization of Yiddish, though they are usually spelled differently (i.e. using a different phonetic system). German "von", for instance, appears in Yiddish as "fun". This is the second way to distinguish Yiddish from Hebrew.
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If available information, including transliteration, indicates that a work is a Jewish religious classic, it should be possible to find copy for some edition of the work even if it is not the one in hand.
A reference source such as The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia (CTS reference shelves, DS102.8.S73 1992), or if necessary the comprehensive Encyclopaedia Judaica (Stauffer Reference DS102.8.E496) can be very helpful in finding out about classic religious works.
Short outline: The basic work is the Torah (also called the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, the Written Law), which reached its present form several centuries B.C.E. Other books were added over time to form the "Old Testament" of the Christian Bible. By the 2nd century C.E. (or A.D.) scholars had produced a written formulation of the Oral Law called the Mishnah. In the next few centuries they compiled a long commentary on the Mishnah called the Talmud (in two versions, Talmud Bavli or Babylonian Talmud, and Talmud Yerushalmi or Jerusalem Talmud). Most later religious works are commentaries on some aspect of the Torah, the Mishnah, or the Talmud. Some deal with Jewish law, halakhah. Others are in the form of wisdom literature, and may be called midrash.
The best known commentators are often known by acronyms. For example:
=R or =Rb as part of a personal name or acronym usually means Rabbi.
LC authority records are extremely helpful in identifying Hebrew and Yiddish authors from various forms of their names. The 670 fields sometimes give useful romanizations or other information about the work as well.
Often printed editions of religious classics are designed to look like medieval manuscripts, with the basic text in the middle, surrounded by comments in a smaller typeface.
See A Page from the Babylonian Talmud for reproductions of typical pages and much more about the classic texts.
Books of the Old Testament: The Old Testament books not only have different names in Hebrew, they come in a somewhat different order in the Hebrew Bible.
| TORAH | = Pentateuch: | Bereshit | = Genesis |
| Shemot | = Exodus | ||
| .Va-yi.kra (Va-yikra) | = Leviticus | ||
| Ba-midbar | = Numbers | ||
| Devarim | = Deuteronomy | ||
| NEVI'IM | = Prophets: | Yehoshuah | = Joshua |
| Shoftim | = Judges | ||
| Shemu'el | = Samuel | ||
| Melakhim | = Kings | ||
| Later Prophets: | Yeshayahu | = Isaiah | |
| Yirmeyahu | = Jeremiah | ||
| Yehezkel | = Ezekiel | ||
| Tere asar | = Minor Prophets (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi: the titles are similar) | ||
| KETHUBIM | = Hagiographa: | Tehilim | = Psalms |
| Mishle | = Proverbs | ||
| [Megilot] | = Five Scrolls: | Rut | = Ruth |
| Shir ha-shirim | = Song of Songs | ||
| Ekhah | = Lamentations | ||
| Kehelet | = Ecclesiastes | ||
| Ester | = Esther | ||
| other books: | Daniyel | = Daniel | |
| Esra | = Ezra & Nehemiah | ||
| Divre ha-yamin | = Chronicles |
The Hebrew texts of Old Testament and other works are published and studied by both Jewish and Christian scholars. Except for a very few cooperative projects, it is usually easy to distinguish the two by looking at the notes. This matters for cataloguing if you have to choose between two standard subject subdivisions which can be used under sacred works:
|x Criticism, interpretation, etc. |x Criticism, interpretation, etc., Jewish.
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As in any book, the chief source of information is the title page. If a text is part Hebrew script and part in a left-to-right language, judge which is preponderant when deciding which is the title page, noting the pagination in each direction, and proceed accordingly. If there is a title in a left-to-right language anywhere on the book, be sure to make an entry for it.
If the main title page is in Hebrew characters and the title is long, do not spend time trying to transliterate beyond the first few words. If necessary, the statement of responsibility can be omitted. If a statement of responsibility in another language is found on the verso or an added title page, put it in a note.
If the title starts with "Sefer", make a 130 or 240 uniform title or a 246 without "Sefer".
Add a 546 note for the language if it is not clear from the title (for instance if the title is quite short), or if more than one language appears. (It is not necessary to add notes such as "In Hebrew characters", as a Hebrew-language text in any other characters would be the exception.) Add appropriate 041 fields if more than one language appears or if a translation is involved.
Dates: The Hebrew calendar numbers years since the supposed date of the creation of the world, calculated as 3760 BCE. The year 5000 began Sept. 1, 1239. It is customary to omit the thousands, however. Thus the year that began in Sept. 1939 was called 700. Since the New Year is in a different month from that on the Common Era or Christian calendar, each Hebrew year has two CE equivalents. If you find a CE date anywhere on the publication, use it. If there is only a date such as 749, transcribe it in the 260 of a catalogue record as
|c 749 [1988 or 1989]Use the first of these dates in the Date 1 subfield in the 008.
Numbers: Older and sacred works are sometimes published with no indication of date except a Hebrew number on the title page. Sometimes the page numbers or volume numbers too are in Hebrew characters. The following table shows how these numbers work, and which are most likely to appear as the centuries in dates. (It's an ancient system, less efficient than Roman numerals, but it does work as long as the numbers don't get too huge.)
Examples of year dates:
Pagination: Transcribe any Hebrew numbers as Arabic numbers in the 300 field, showing separate sequences of paging if necessary.
300 |a 26, 535, 424, xiv p.when there is an introduction in Hebrew with Arabic page numbers, a main text with Hebrew page numbers, a translation in another language with Arabic numbers going the opposite way, and an introduction in the other language paged in Roman numerals.
Some publications number leaves rather than pages. Some have Hebrew texts and a translation in another language on facing pages with identical page numbers.
300 |a 410 [i.e. 820] p. 546 |a Hebrew and German on facing pages with repeated numbering.If there are both Hebrew and Arabic numbers on the same pages, ignore the Hebrew.
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Holdings and Item records are done in the normal way in the catalogue.
However, the physical handling of a book with a main title page in Hebrew should be done as appropriate for a book printed in reverse to the usual arrangement. Barcodes, bookplates, and labels (if not on the spine) go at the opposite end from the usual.
Be sure you have it right side up! Running titles are normally at the top of the page. Most of the characters look different upside down, for instance and 
.
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Created May 31, 2004 by D. Rutherford
Page maintained by Elizabeth A. Read, readel@queensu.ca. Updated: 25-May-2004 10:30 AM