THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY is celebrating its one hundred and twentieth anniversary:

As It Celebrates, JPS Steps Into the Future
November 13, 2008 - Aaron Passman (Jewish Exponent)

It's an old saying in Judaism: "May you live as long as Moses." Now that the Jewish Publication Society has reached the age of the great Jewish sage and leader, 120 years, it's setting out to do something he was unable to do -- ensure its survival well beyond that.

This august occasion serves as what CEO and Editor in Chief Ellen Frankel called "a culmination and a new beginning" for the organization, as it reflects upon its accomplishments thus far and prepares for the numerous challenges that lie ahead in the world of publishing.

"Our core mission remains the same -- to provide Jewish books in English, but we're moving into the digital age," said Frankel.

One person who certainly recognizes the significance of the milestone is Philadelphia native and Brandeis University professor Jonathan Sarna, who literally wrote the book on JPS -- the historian penned the group's history 20 years ago when it celebrated its centenary. He noted that the organization's longevity was particularly notable, since two early incarnations (in the 1840s and 1870s, respectively) had failed. He said that, among other accomplishments, JPS had helped to create a market for Jewish books in America and helped shape the country as a major center for Jewish culture and learning away from Europe.

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Among their current projects is this particularly interesting one,:

Another major project on the horizon is The Lost Bible, planned for publication shortly after the turn of the decade. Comprised of translations left out of the Jewish Bible, including texts in Latin, Slavonic and Aramaic, Frankel called it "the lost library of second-temple Judaism."

More commonly known as the Apocrypha, the texts that will be included in The Lost Bible will be some of those which were left out of the Five Books of Moses -- known to Christians as The Old Testament -- when it was codified.

Frankel said the trio of editors behind the project has assembled 75 scholars on six continents, who are "either translating or modernizing translations of about 100 texts, and providing a commentary that restores these ancient Jewish texts to their Jewish setting."

The description is a little garbled: the Apocrypha are included but the corpus as a whole is not the Apocrypha. This project has some overlap with the More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Project, but less than you might think. MOTP does not include things like the Old Testament Apocrypha, the works of Philo of Alexandria, and most of the pseudepigrapha in the Charlesworth edition, while it does include quite a few Christian and pagan texts. I don't know for sure how many Jewish texts will overlap.