Now that the year 5769 started I will attempt to restart this blog. The goal is still the same: collect information about books published on English about Kabbalah, with a particular focus on the ones written from a religious Jewish or from an Academic perspective.

Shanah Tova!

On the top of the pages of this site up till now you could see ads served up by Google. These text based advertisements were based on the words found on my website. However the spirit a lot of them represented was not exactly in alignment with the spirit of the site itself. This morning I changed this situation. I replaced the Google ad bar, with my own little creation. I wrote a script to select random books from the database behind the site that it had the cover image stored locally and was sold on Amazon.com. So from now on every time you load a page on the site you will see six different book covers on the top. Clicking on them will take you to the book’s Amazon page, from where you can order them. I know that the covers are small and sometimes hard to read the title. But if your mouse lingers over them it, along with the author’s name should show up.

Over the weekend I imported 43 old entries related to Kabbalah books from my old blog. This note is just a reminder that the entries you see here from before 2008 were originally elsewhere. But I wanted to collect all of my related entries under one umbrella. Some of them were date sensitive, so I did not change their original post date at this new place. This is the reason for the discrepancy between the fact, that this blog started in 2008, but you seen entries as early as 2004 from here. I hope it is not too confusing.

I updated the databse structure and the content of the title field, ensuring that the initial article of book titles is disregarded when the books are sorted by title.

I reformatted the date of publication field in the database, so the list of books could be sorted by date. For books I did not know the exact day, but new the month I used the first day of the month. For books that I knew only the year of publication I used January 1 f the year. I am aware that this kind of usage is incorrect, but the database format required me to come with a specific date and this seemed the most consistent.

I applied basic authority control on the names of the authors. I made sure that the LOC authorized heading is used for (almost) them. The exceptions below list why/how this site is not fully using authority control:

• Instead of providing “see” references to alternative versions of the names I just simply used the authorized versions on this site. In a few cases this resulted in showing a different name than what appears on the title page.
• This is a relatively small site with a specific focus. Therefore it is unlikely that two authors with the same name would show up. Because of this I did not have to use the birthdates of the authors to distinguish them from others with the same name. Some of the authors listed here have a birthday in their authority file at LOC.
• Michel Berg’s authorized name includes the title “Rabbi”. I opted out using this differentiator for the reason above, and because it would not have been fair to the other authors who are also rabbis.
• Some authors did not have an LOC authorized heading: J. Zohara Meyerhoff Hieronimus, David Honigbserg, Michael R. Kellogg, J. Allan Mason, Miss. Persephone, Keichi Saito,
• Some authors’ authorized name would have required me using diacritics that for simplicity’s sake I opted not to do. For example, , Yitzchak Ginsburgh, Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Hayyim Ben Joseph Vital,

This is the blog for the Sefarim.net website, collecting books related to Jewish Kabbalah. It is a continuation and separation of my blog’s Kabbalah books section. It will include updates about the sites, details about new books added to the site, and information about selected Kabbalah related events and sites.