Otsar ha-shemot

Abraham Hayim Rosenberg, 1838–1928

Otsar ha-shemot (Treasury of  Names)

Manuscript on paper

1925

Abraham Hayim Rosenberg was a well-known rabbi and teacher, a proficient writer in Hebrew and Yiddish, and a distinguished lexicographer. A noted figure in the maskilic circles of the Russian Empire and a member of the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews, he was born in Pinsk, Belorussia, and was a descendent of the famous Jaffe family of rabbinical scholars. He served as a chief rabbi of Pinsk (1872–88) and Nikolayev (1888–91) before immigrating to the U.S. in 1891. In New York, he operated a modest printing establishment, primarily to publish his own books. His contributions extended to the encyclopedia Otzar Yisrael (Treasury of Israel) that substantially relied on the reference resources of The New York Public Library’s Jewish Division.

The manuscript of this monumental lexicon of biblical words, which contained definitions, grammatical analyses, and biblical references, was Rosenberg’s signal achievement. The impressive gigantic manuscript volume on display offers a glimpse into this massive multilingual dictionary, a testament to the extraordinary knowledge, effort, and time that went into creating this lexicographic treasure. Every page provides definitions of one word in 10 languages: English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, German, and Russian. Rosenberg’s manuscript metamorphosed into a 10-volume magnum opus,  Otsar ha-shemot asher be-khitve ha-ḳodesh (Treasury of Names in the Holy Scriptures), produced in his printing shop in 1922–23.
In The Spirit of the Ghetto, published in 1902, the author Hutchins Hapgood described Rosenberg as “a man of sixty-two, with the high, bald forehead of a scholar” and summed up his epic undertaking in this way: “All the Ghetto scholars speak of this work with bated breath, as a tremendously learned affair.”