The Jewish Shelf

This is a canon of about a hundred and thirty authors and collective works, not a library. The test for inclusion was historical consequence: did later Jews read it, argue with it, translate it, ban it, or build on it? A great many fine books fail that test and are not here.

The shelf begins earlier than the list it grew from. Ben Sira, the Qumran scrolls, the Septuagint, Philo and Josephus are the literature the rabbis inherited or refused, and the Mishnah is unintelligible without them. It also runs later, through Hasidism, the Haskalah and the founding of modern Jewish scholarship, to the close of the nineteenth century.

The Hebrew Bible itself is deliberately absent. It is the ground on which everything here stands rather than one item among others, and a checkbox beside it would be absurd.

Corrections made along the way

Sefer ha-Hinnukh and Sefer ha-Chinuch are one book, listed once. So are Sefer Hasidim and the "Book of the Pious of Worms." Shenei Luhot ha-Berit is the Shelah — Isaiah Horowitz's book, not his son Shabbetai's. Etz Hayyim is credited to Hayyim Vital, who wrote it; Isaac Luria left almost nothing in his own hand. Manuel Dias Soeiro is Menasseh ben Israel under his Portuguese name. Sefer Toldot Adam and the writings of Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chelm were too thin to justify a place and have been dropped in favour of Alfasi, the Maharal, Ramhal, Gikatilla, Abulafia and others whose absence was harder to defend.