About Sefarim.net
The purpose of this site is to collect all books published
in English about Jewish Kabbalah. It will only list one edition
for each book. Only a small sample of non-Jewish Kabbalah books will be included.
History:
- 2007
- September 7: content was moved to the new domain and the "suggest a book" and "search Kabbalah sites" features were added.
- August 24: registered the seferim.net domain.
- March 25: the new version of the list went live with
311 books transferred from the previous verison.
- March 17: I bought ReaderWare and
started to move the content of the site into it.
- 2004
- I started to blog about Kabbalah related books. My first entry was
from December 23 . That year I
made 4 entries, in 2005 14, and in 2006 only 9.
- 2000-2002
- I updated the list more or less regularly.
After that I found less time to do so.
- 2000
- The list starts 58 items. The earliest
version from May 20 of that year can be found on archive.org.
Categories
I found useful for my own purposes to create these
categories. I admit though that the categorization is subjective. You may find
that you disagree with me. Also, some books belong to more than one category.
- Academic - Written from an academic perspective. The work
has (at least some) scholarly merits.
- Commercial - This is the best label I found for the books
published by The Kabbalah Center, because their objective is (partially)
commercial. This is one of their distinctive characteristics, compared to the
other categories.
- Fiction - Fictional works, novels, short stories with
strong Kabbalistic themes.
- Meditation - Guides on how to use Jewish Kabbalah for
meditation.
- Popularizer - Written for generic audience with the
explicit purpose of making Kabbalah available to everybody. I include here the
"introduction to Kabbalah" type of books as well.
- Religious - The context for the books in this category is
explicitly religious. Their objective often is to to help to create religious
Jewish experience or put the teachings of the Kabbalah into a religious
perspective. I also included in this category the primary books (Zohar, Bahir,
Sefer Yetzirah…) because they were written from a religious perspective too.
- Qabalah - An umbrella category for all non-Jewish Kabbalah
books, including New Age, Christian, Magick ... This area is not the primary focus
of this website, therefore the coverage will be the furthest from full.
Authority control
- I removed the pre and suffixes from the author's names, including
rabbi, rav, PhD
- I made sure that an author's name appears the same for every book
on the site, even if it is displayed differently on some of his/her books.
Plans for the future (in this order)
- Add books by
- Going through my past blog entries
- Checking new volumes by the most prolific authors
- Checking (and linking) lists of "Listmania" at Amazon
- Checking (and linking) the major publishers' websites
- Add "search books" feature
- Add "detailed (MARC) view" feature
- Add links for each book to Google, Worldcat, Librarything, Barnes
and Nobles …
- Implement full authority control using the Library of Congress
authorities
- Add option for displaying books in proper APA/MLA citation
Copyright © 2000-2007 - Last updated
December 26 2007 16:26:57
- .
