Vanderbilt's Central Library also purchases Judaic materials in categories such as the following: Jewish histories, Holocaust studies, Zionism, Middle Eastern studies, sociological studies of Jewish communities outside of the U.S., Syro-Palestinian archaeology. Consequently, choosing the best materials for our collection can be a challenge, since their also exists collection overlap between Judaica and biblical studies held in Divinity. A recognized authority on Judaica taxonomy, Bella Hass Weinberg describes some of the classification challenges encountered by Judaica bibliographers:
The term Judaica is applied in two ways: (1) to cover all material, regardless of language, relating to Jews; and (2) in contrast to Hebraica, to cover material about Jews in languages that do not employ the Hebrew alphabet [1]. (sic) Fürst’s Bibliotheca Judaica exemplifies the former definition [2], while Harvard’s catalog of Judaica illustrates the latter [3]. Hebraica is not necessarily Judaica…. In the United States, many people involved in Jewish studies are not fluent in Hebrew, so a Judaica collection policy may exclude scholarly works in that language, although it is likely to include primary texts in Hebrew and Aramaic.
The majority of older Hebraica deals with Judaism—the Bible, Talmud, Midrashim, commentaries, prayer books, and codes of Jewish law. A great many modern works in Hebrew script, in contrast, deal with secular subjects issued in the Holy Land, only some of which deal with Israel.
While the boundaries of a subject such as Judaism are understandably fuzzy, one would expect that the terms Hebraica and Israeli publications could be unambiguously applied. There are differences in the way they are interpreted by bibliographers, however. Some use Hebraica for a work that contains a substantial amount of text in Hebrew script; others include under that rubric works that have Hebrew text on the title page only. As for a work published in Israel, given recent history of the capture and return of various territories by Israel, it is not easy to define an Israeli publication ("Defining the Scope of Judaica: Complementary Problems in Bibliographic Control and Bibliographic Organization," in Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory 15 (1991) 155-63, p. 156-7).
While our Divinity Library’s procedures of distinguishing between Judaica and divinity shelving are not written in stone nor applied in a rigid fashion, the following sketch represents a few basic criteria by which certain "borderline materials" achieve placement in our Judaica collection. (See the bibliography for a partial list of traditional Judaica categories, e.g., Talmud, Mishna, Responsa, Jewish Mysticism).
Providing a few examples would seem appropriate here. For instance, works authored by either Jews or non-Jews treating Jewish interpretation, Medieval Jewish grammarians, or Jewish–Christian relations warrant Judaica placement. By contrast, a work treating, say, ancient Israelite religion, will make its home among Divinity stacks unless it advocates a distinctive position such as that of the erudite Israeli scholar Yehezkel Kaufman and his "school." ( Cf. John Van Seters survey of pentateuchal approaches in "The Pentateuch : A Social-Science Commentary," Sheffield Academic Press, 1999, where he characterizes Kaufman's position as "Jewish/Israeli"). At times a renowned Jewish scholar’s works, e.g., several of Umberto Cassuto’s writings, will reside among Hebrew Bible (Divinity) stacks because, and as seems to be the case with Cassuto, his Near Eastern scholarship so pervasively informs his exegetical method. It is noteworthy that Cassuto and other Jewish biblical scholars publishing in the main during the first half of the 20th century, e.g., S. Luzzatto, Benno Jacob, Tur-Sinai, inter alia, continue to be cited in recent scholarship.