Jewish Studies Research Guide

ESSENTIAL SOURCES FOR JEWISH STUDIES

Here you will find the most basic sources for locating information about Jewish Studies. Click through the tabs to find sources. If you have any questions or want us to add sources, please contact us.

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Jewish Studies Databases

RAMBI: The Index of Articles on Jewish Studies (Interface in English)
A selective bibliography of scholarly articles in Hebrew, Yiddish, and European languages in all fields of Jewish studies and the study of Israel.

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Subject Databases

America History & Life (1964-present) (History)
Works covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to present. Indexes more than 2,000 English-language journals published worldwide. Includes book reviews. Includes different aspects of Jewish history in America.
ATLA Religion Database with ATLA Serials (Religion)
Lists articles on all aspects of religious studies from journals in many disciplines. Includes citations to book chapters and to book reviews. ATLASerials adds the full text of many journals.
Historical Abstracts (History)
Find articles about the history of the world from 1450 to the present, published in over 2,000 journals from many countries. Includes book reviews. Includes articles covering Jewish Studies published in countries other than the United States.
MLA International Bibliography. (Literature & Folklore)
Contains articles and essays published in journals and books on modern languages, literature, linguistics, and folklore which has been compiled by the Modern Language Association since 1926. Articles about Hebrew and Yiddish literature are also included.

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General Databases

Academic Search Complete
A multidisciplinary database that indexes over 10,000 publications, with the complete text of over 5,500 periodicals, including a mix of peer-reviewed journals, magazines, and newspapers.
JSTOR
JSTOR provides access to millions of journal articles, books, images, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. The Archive Journal Collection is included.
ProQuest One Literature.
ProQuest One Literature is for scholars who must engage with an exhaustive and diverse set of scholarly resources around a given literary topic for research and course planning. It contains 3 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, dissertations, and more than 500,000 primary works – including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theater performances, and author readings.
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Alternative Name(s) & Keywords: One Literature, LION, Literature Online
Web of Knowledge
Gives access to multiple databases that reference cross-disciplinary research, which allows for in-depth exploration of specialized sub-fields within an academic or scientific discipline.

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Encyclopedias

Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture Online
From Europe to America to the Middle East, North Africa and other non-European Jewish settlement areas, the Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture covers the recent history of the Jews from 1750 until the 1950s.
Encyclopedia Judaica
Comprehensive encyclopedia with over 21,000 entries on all aspects of Jewish life, culture, history, and religion.

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Important Journals

Jewish Studies Quarterly on JSTOR
Founded in 1993. The Jewish Studies Quarterly publishes studies on all aspects of Jewish history and culture.

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University of Virginia

Virgo
The Online catalog of University of Virginia Library

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General

WorldCat (OCLC)
WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories that participate in the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) global cooperative.
WorldCat.org
Open source catalog for WorldCat (OCLC)

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Israel

Israel Union Catalog (ULI)
The Israel Union Catalog (ULI) contains over 8 million bibliographic records, which are based on the catalogs of the main Israeli research libraries. Searching ULI will allow you to reach the relevant local catalogs and view your item's exact location and availability. The processes of collecting and processing the local catalogs, as well as creating the unified records, are managed by the National Library of Israel (NLI).

Virgo is the UVA Library catalog, giving you access to thousands of books, ebooks, articles, videos, and more.
IMPORTANT!!
You can search Virgo by Author, Title, Keyword, Subject, etc. A very powerful search you can use is searching Virgo by Subject. When every book is catalogued, it is assigned a specific subject that describes the book in question. If you discover your subject, you can find very useful material relevant for research. Examples:
If you need more help with VIRGO consult the following introductory guide: Getting Started with Virgo

Maps -- Jewish Virtual Library
Jewish Virtual Library is a project of American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE).

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Open Access Repositories

BASE
BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines, especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 90 million documents from more than 4,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
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In comparison to commercial search engines, BASE is charcterised by the following features:

Intellectually selected resources
Only document servers that comply with the specific requirements of academic quality and relevance are included
A data resources inventory provides transparency in the searches
Discloses web resources of the "Deep Web", which are ignored by commercial search engines or get lost in the vast quantity of hits
Correction, normalization and enrichment of metadata by means of automated methods
The display of search results includes precise bibliographic data
Display of access and terms of re-use for a document
Several options for sorting the result list
"Refine your search result" options (by author, subject, DDC, year of publication, content provider, language, document type, access and terms of re-use)
Browsing by DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification), document type, access and terms of re-use / licence
CORE
CORE (Connecting Repositories) is a service provided by the Knowledge Media Institute based at The Open University, United Kingdom. The goal of the project is to aggregate all open access content distributed across different systems, such as repositories and open access journals, enrich this content using text mining and data mining, and provide free access to it through a set of services. The CORE project also aims to promote open access to scholarly outputs. CORE works closely with digital libraries and institutional repositories.

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Guides, Pathfinders, and other LibGuides

Center for Jewish History LibGuide
Organized by the Center for Jewish History -- the largest and most comprehensive archive of the modern Jewish experience outside of Israel

Dissertations & Theses Global
Includes citations and full text for dissertations ranging from 1861 to those accepted last semester; those published from 1980 forward include 700-word abstracts. Citations for master-s theses from 1988 forward include 150-word abstracts.
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This database makes nearly every dissertation ever filed in the United States available in PDF format. Not all dissertations are available, however, as authors with dissertations under contract with a press are sometimes encouraged not to make their dissertations freely available. In these cases you can at least read an abstract. Note that you can search by school, department, and adviser.
Dissertations held at University of Virginia
UVA libraries hold more than 150,000 theses.
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1. You need to search Virgo, limiting your search by Format selecting Thesis/Dissertation.
2. Electronic dissertations and masters’ theses have been deposited in the Libra scholarly repository at the University of Virginia since 2012. Libra makes UVA scholarship available to the world and provides safe and secure storage for the scholarly output of the UVA community. To consult UVA Dissertations available online, check Libra Repository results in Virgo.