AJHS journals now feature a subject index, which is a new way to discover the vast and valuable journal article collection. Every research article on the site — more than 900 of them, running from the very first issue in 1939 through to the current volume — has now been catalogued with subject terms describing the articles.
Up to now, if you wanted to find articles on, say, rural Jewish communities, or the Great Synagogue, or the postwar refugee years, your options were the author’s name, the title, the abstract, the year, or a full-text search that turned up every passing mention of a word. That works well enough if you already know what you’re looking for. It’s less helpful when you’re trying to get a sense of what the Journal covers on a topic, or when the thing you care about gets described in five different ways across eighty years of writing. The subject terms are meant to fill that gap.
What the terms are
A subject term is a consistent label for a subject the article deals with. The key word is consistent. One article might write about “country communities,” another about “regional Jewry,” another about congregations “in the bush” — but all three now carry the same term, Rural Jewish communities, so you find all three at once. Behind the scenes there’s a single controlled list that every article draws from, rather than free-form keywords that drift over time.
Every term answers one of four questions about an article:
- Where — places, from countries down to states, cities, and small country towns. New South Wales, Ballarat, Jerusalem, Warsaw.
- Who — the organisations and institutions involved: synagogues and congregations, communal bodies, schools, businesses, newspapers, government bodies. The Great Synagogue, Sydney; NSW Jewish Board of Deputies; Australian Bureau of Statistics.
- What — the themes and topics: Synagogue architecture, Zionism, Migrant assimilation, Antisemitism.
- When — the historical period the article is set in. These are grouped by region, so Postwar Australia (1940s–1960s) sits apart from, say, the Israeli or European eras — “postwar” meant something different in each place.
In total, there are around 1,660 terms: roughly 380 places, 720 organisations, 535 themes, and a smaller set of historical periods.
The terms are arranged in a hierarchy
The terms aren’t a flat list. They’re organised from broad to specific, which is what lets you either zoom in or step back. Synagogues & congregations opens up to every individual congregation; Australia opens up to the states, and the states open up to their cities, suburbs and towns. So you can start broad and narrow down, or go straight to the precise term you want.
You’ll see this on any article page. Take Rabbi Israel Porush’s 1975 piece on the 1971 census: its subject terms read Australia > New South Wales, Australia > Victoria, Government, parliamentary & legal bodies > Australian Bureau of Statistics, Jewish law & lifecycle > Divorce and > Gett, Migration & immigration > Jewish demography and > Sephardic diaspora, Rabbinate & religious authority > Beth din, and Refugees & displacement > Jewish refugees from Nazism. In one glance you get a fair picture of what the article covers — and every one of those terms is a link to discover other articles that share the same classification.
Two ways to use them
From an article. Click any subject term on an article page and you’ll get every other article carrying that term. It’s the quickest way to follow a thread — read one piece on a subject, then see what else the Journal has on it.
From the search page. The Journal Article Search now includes a Subject Terms browse tree alongside the usual title, author, and year fields. Open it up, expand the categories, and tick the terms you’re interested in. You can combine them with the other search fields too — every article from the 1960s that touches on a particular congregation, for instance.
A work in progress
The index reaches across the whole run of the Journal, but a subject vocabulary is never quite finished — terms get refined, grouped, and occasionally rethought as the collection grows and as we notice better ways to organise things. If you’re using it and something seems miscatalogued, or you can’t find a term you’d expect to be there, we’d like to hear about it.
Have a look at the Journal article search page, run a query with a term that interests you, follow a few links, and see where the Journal takes you.
