Online Resources for Scholarly Jewish Study – 2026 291 resources · 35 new in 2026 · built 2026-10-09

Guide to Online Resources for Scholarly Jewish Study and Research – 2026

Draft of the 2026 edition. The 2023 introduction follows below, unchanged.

What is new in this edition

  • Link audit. Every link from the 2023 edition was checked in October 2026. Dead links are struck through, with a pointer to an archived copy in the Wayback Machine where one exists. Links whose resource moved now point to the new address. Two domains had been taken over by spam sites. One of those resources was found at a new address, and the other link is removed.
  • A new section on Artificial Intelligence. AI study and research assistants, text processing (vocalization, abbreviations, translation), handwritten-text recognition, and developer resources (APIs, MCP servers, models and datasets).
  • New projects from the Powered by Sefaria showcase and the AI and Judaism resource library, selected by the scope rules of this guide (below). They are marked New in 2026.
  • A new format. The guide is now a searchable, filterable table, and the full annotated text is also available, section by section. The data is also available as a CSV file.

The scope is the same as in 2023: resources for the scholarly study of the rabbinic era (about 100–1850 CE), mostly in English and Hebrew, for a reader who is curious but not necessarily a specialist.

Guide to Online Resources for Scholarly Jewish Study and Research - 2023

Ezra Brand

v6 - 4-Dec-20231

Intro

It’s an exciting time to be a reader of scholarship, and to be engaged with the field. The dramatic shift to "remote" and “virtual” over the past two years may be on par with the shifts to writing and the codex around the 9th century) and the printing press in the 15th.2

Digital publishing has become more and more mainstream. As defined by Wikipedia (in entry “Electronic publishing”):

“Electronic publishing (also referred to as publishing, digital publishing, or online publishing) includes the digital publication of e-books, digital magazines, and the development of digital libraries and catalogs. It also includes the editing of books, journals and magazines to be posted on a screen (computer, e-reader, tablet, or smartphone).”

Regarding Hebrew books specifically, and for recent data, Israeli National Library annual statistics for 2020 state (Hebrew, my translation):

“In 2020, digital publishing was significantly expanded. Not all the digital books have been processed [by the library] yet, but already 799 digital books have been registered in the National Library, from publishers, research institutions, private individuals and more [...]

For many in the past year, digital publication has become the primary mode of distribution, as opposed to paper. Notable in this area is the relatively small amount of children's books (8%) compared to the high number of digital reference literature (69%).

The share of [books put out by] associations (43%) is particularly high, especially for reference books in the field of Israeli society and Jewish studies. [The share of books put out by] [p]rivate publishers (37%) include[s] many biographies, rabbinic literature and a few children's books that have come out. Commercial publishers released most of the digital prose books.”

Specifically regarding rabbinic literature, one scholar pointed out already in 2016: “Searching for ancient original Jewish sources online, it is astonishing how diverse and numerous are the websites that are available.”3

At the same time as the trend towards digital publishing and distribution is occurring, there is also a movement towards “open access”. In this context, “open access” means an academic resource, whether databases, journals, or other tools, with no paywalls or subscriptions required to access content.

Over the first few decades of electronic resources, most of the resources were proprietary. They were generally available on a CD, which had to be bought. With the shift to the internet, many of these resources became available online, but required a subscription.

The movement towards freely available scholarship has continued to gain steam, making a huge amount of cutting edge scholarly publications available for free, and for all. In addition, there are a huge amount of grassroots initiatives to make available primary sources for study.

Open-access can be financially sustained in one of the following major ways:

  1. Volunteer work
  2. Funding by institution (esp. non-profit, university, or government) or individual donation
  3. Advertising

The open-source resources in this guide are mostly supported in one of the first two ways.

Besides for full open-access, another model is called “freemium”. Freemium, as I use it in this context, means that some very basic part is provided for free, with the hope that the main product will be bought.

Electronic vs. physical - pros and cons

Electronic material has a lot of advantages, though there are some disadvantages.

For the intellectually curious, the relative ease of access is honestly astonishing, and it's truly a wonderful time to be a book lover (not to mention the higher level of book typesetting).

Of course, physical books have certain advantages, tangible and intangible, that people get roused up about, especially traditionalists. And of course Orthodox Jews don't use electronic sources on Shabbat and holidays. But electronic sources have their own massive advantages:

  1. Instantly accessible
  2. Searchable
  3. Easily shared and saved via copy-paste and screenshots
  4. Easily highlighted and annotated
  5. Text size can be customized
  6. Takes up far less physical space
  7. Last but not least, allows for new forms of scholarship4

I personally have switched over to electronic texts wherever possible.

Of course, traditional physical books and internet-based resources aren’t mutually exclusive. One can have the best of both worlds. In Modern Orthodox yeshivot it’s been a common sight already for many years for people to have a laptop before them. Admittedly, the main use of the laptop is for notetaking, but it can also act as a portal to a world of supplemental books.

Existing Guides

There are many guides to electronic resources for Jewish scholarship, such as that of university library guides, as well as other websites. However, many of these guides are meant for students and researchers, and less for the general educated reader with an interest in these topics. In addition, many previous guides are from ten years ago or longer, and many of the links no longer work.

Here are some guides that I found especially useful:

(The two lists, “Guides by librarians” and “Other Guides”, are in data/sections/00-existing-guides.json.)

This Guide

This guide is designed for enthusiasts and those intellectually curious, who may not be specialists in the field. It focuses on easily accessible and user-friendly resources found on contemporary websites. The guide primarily covers what can be termed the "middle", the "rabbinic", or (perhaps Zionistically) the "Diaspora" era of Jewish history, spanning from post-Destruction to pre-late modern (approx. 100 CE to 1850 CE).5 A key theme emphasized is the increasing democratization of knowledge and opportunities for contribution. The goal is to help readers find new and valuable resources where they can consume and even contribute to scholarship.

As for scope: This guide will mostly cover resources related to the topics from circa 100 CE to 1850 BCE. So will not cover:

  1. Primary sources and studies of Tanach/Bible, Dead Sea Scrolls, Pseudepigrapha (=“Seforim Hitzonim”), Philo, Josephus, and early Christianity. In other words, works up to the period of Chazal, circa 100 CE. So for example, I didn’t include Bar Ilan University’s Mikra'ot Gedolot Haketer (מקראות גדולות הכתר - see on this project Wikipedia here (English) and here (Hebrew)) or their weekly Parshat Hashavua sheet.
  2. At the opposite end, the Late Modern period (circa 1850-2000). So it won’t cover resources related to modern Hebrew literature, Haskalah, Zionism, the modern State of Israel, Holocaust, contemporary Jewish thought and hashkafa, or more contemporary books (such as R’ Ashlag’s commentary on Zohar, and those of his descendants). Also will not cover the topic of Yiddish literature, even though it begins before 1850.6 Also will not cover Jewish art.7

There are a number of resources that are geared towards beginner students, such as Gemara Brura and The People's Talmud.8 These will not be covered here.

I have also not included links and descriptions to websites of collections and catalogs of individual libraries. Rather, I’ve focused on websites that aggregate information across collections.9

Should also add my focus is on resources with a substantial focus on academic/scholarly topics and style. So especially in the section on blogs, won’t include blogs that don’t have a more academic perspective.

I have also mostly limited the guide to resources in English and Hebrew. There are relevant resources in French and German, but a) I don’t read those, b) I’m assuming that my readers are less likely to read them, and c) in any case, there are only a few, marginal such resources.

A large part of my annotations are taken from the descriptions provided by the maintainers of the project, as well as from Wikipedia. Many of these descriptions are in Hebrew. All translations from Hebrew are my own, unless noted otherwise. My translation is sometimes loose, and I did not always fact-check. The info in this guide should definitely be double-checked if used for anything more scholarly.

In general, my main intention is to raise awareness and point readers to some of the incredible resources currently available to anyone with an internet connection.

Note: The website of the resource is hyperlinked in the name. In cases where only a part of a website is relevant to the resources under discussion, I try to link to the page on the website that best acts as a portal to the resources.

Another note: It’s quite incredible how much is now available on the internet. At the same time, projects become outdated and links become broken very rapidly. I hope to be able to update this guide every once in a while, but unfortunately the rapid changes in the layout of the internet is one of the blessings and the curses that come with this new medium (victims of the unfortunate phenomenon of “link rot”). While researching this guide, I constantly found new resources that I was not aware of, and I’m certain (and hoping, in a good way) that this guide will rapidly become more and more outdated as more resources come online, and (negatively) as links break.

After writing this guide, I created this Template on Wikipedia: תבנית:ספריות דיגיטליות בנושאי יהדות – ויקיפדיה

Primary Texts

A huge amount of primary texts have been transcribed and scanned, and are readily available.10

Shai Secunda writes:11

“[...] [W]hile philology is a conservative undertaking by nature, talmudic philology has also seen development of its own, thanks in no small part to the digital revolution, which has inaugurated new, computerized, modes of textual analysis, and novel types of digitally driven visualizations.”

Moshe Koppel and Avi Shmidman, after discussing a wide variety of digital humanities projects related to Jewish Studies, write:12

“All of the above tasks have either been completed or will be completed in the next few years. But note that all these tools are merely efficient ways of providing that which has already been done manually. The difference is one of scale. Projects that have taken lifetimes or have built on the efforts of teams of skilled editors might be scaled to the entirety of Jewish literature in relatively rapid fashion. Once a viable algorithm is designed and developed, its application to the corpus as a whole is just a matter of raw computing power.

Thus, if until now, the trend of creating accessible versions – vocalized, punctuated, and with expanded abbreviations – has been applied to a very limited set of texts, automated methods could facilitate the production of accessible versions of virtually any text in the near future. The same is true regarding the scholarly world and the production of scholarly editions of Rabbinic texts. Until now, the painstaking work required to produce critical editions has resulted in a situation where only a small portion of the corpus has been properly edited. Only selected chapters of the Talmud, Midrash, and some other canonical works have ever been published in critical editions. Automated methods for the creation of critical editions of almost any book could be available in several years.”

  1. This Guide is a revised and expanded version of a series of blogposts that originally appeared in three parts at the Seforim Blog March-July 2022 (with intro and appendix, not included in this version), with the title “Guide and Review of Online Resources – 2022”: Part I ; Part II ; Part III.

    I’d like to thank Eliezer Brodt, Sholom Licht, and my father and brother for looking over a previous draft of this piece, and providing very helpful comments and feedback. Of course, the final product is mine, for better or for worse.

    After publishing in Seforim Blog, I made a few changes and updates in this version. The revisions are mostly additions based on additional resources that I hadn’t been aware of, that were pointed out to me in emails and in comments to the blogposts. I later gave a presentation at a workshop based on this Guide, the slides are available at my Academia.edu page: “Presentation slides: A Selective Overview of Digital Resources for the Scholarly Study of Rabbinic Texts”, and the presentation itself is available on YouTube. (The workshop was organized by Prof. Menachem Katz, and took place at University of Haifa.)

    I’d like to thank all the people who gave feedback on that post, both those who commented directly, as well as those who reached out over email. I’d like to especially thank A. Berman for pointing out numerous additional resources, via email.

    Feedback is welcome. ↩

  2. Jewish culture is stereotypically one of the book. There is understandably a huge literature on of books in Jewish history. For one example, on the material aspect of books in Jewish history, see Malachi Beit-Arié’s monumental 700-page book, Hebrew Codicology (2022), recently finalized, and available for free online here and here. Somewhat contrary to the stereotype of “People of the Book”, Yaakov Zussman and others have convincingly argued that Torah Sheba’al Peh was written down only in the post-talmudic era, besides for midrashim in Eretz Yisrael. For the Jewish shift to using the codex, see Malachi Beit-Arie, ibid., pp. 39ff. For the influence of the printing press on the Jewish community, see Zeev Gries (2007), The Book in the Jewish World, 1700–1900. ↩

  3. Apolline Thromas, “12 Digital Resources of the Rabbinic Literature: Radical Change with a Click of the Mouse", in: Ancient Worlds in Digital Culture (2016). ↩

  4. See at length Moshe Koppel and Avi Shmidman, “Torah Study and the Digital Revolution: A Glimpse of the Future”, The Lehrhaus (2020). ↩

  5. On the starting date of the rabbinic period, see recently Adiel Schremer: עדיאל שרמר, "עולמם של החכמים בחברה היהודית בארץ־ישראל בתקופת המשנה: תורה, יוקרה ומעמד ציבורי", ספרות חז"ל הארץ־ישראלית א, תשע"ח, עמ' 558, והביבליוגרפיה המצויינית שם. ↩

  6. For example, texts at the website of In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. ↩

  7. For example, the index of works at the website of The Bezalel Narkiss Index of Jewish Art, Center for Jewish Art, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. ↩

  8. See more at R’ Josh Waxman’s blogpost, “Some excellent Talmud projects out there” (March 5, 2020). ↩

  9. For links and descriptions to websites of collections and catalogs of individual libraries, see Adiel Breuer’s רשימת אתרים ואשכולות לסריקות כת"י וספרי דפוס עתיקים on the Otzar HaHochma forum. I discuss Breuer’s guide in further detail in footnotes later. ↩

  10. For a general list of digital library projects, see the Wikipedia entry “List of digital library projects”. ↩

  11. Shai Secunda, “Resources for the Critical Study of Rabbinic Literature in the Twenty-First Century” in Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum (CRINT) 16, Christine Hayes (ed.), (2022), p. 621.

    On the genre of electronic scholarly editions, see Kenneth M. Price, "Electronic Scholarly Editions", in: Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens (Eds.), A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2008); Greta Franzini et. al., “A Catalogue of Digital Editions”, in Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices, pp.161-182; Menachem Katz et. al., “Talmud Yerushalmi Digital Critical Edition - IRCDL 2022” (2022). (See Katz’s abstract there: “This is the first full digital critical edition of any Talmudic text; the existing digital editions in this field to date are either not critical or incomplete, and the critical editions are not digital.”) ↩

  12. Moshe Koppel and Avi Shmidman, “Torah Study and the Digital Revolution: A Glimpse of the Future”, The Lehrhaus (2020). ↩

Intro

Existing Guides

Guides by librarians

There are many guides to electronic resources for Jewish scholarship, such as that of university library guides, as well as other websites. However, many of these guides are meant for students and researchers, and less for the general educated reader with an interest in these topics. In addition, many previous guides are from ten years ago or longer, and many of the links no longer work.

Here are some guides that I found especially useful:

  1. See here for “a list of guides prepared by university librarians worldwide to help students taking courses in Jewish studies” by Diane Romm, published no later than 2018. See the About page. Thanks to A. Berman for pointing out this guide. Unfortunately many of the links are now broken. For a relevant university syllabus, see Prof. Aaron Ahrend’s syllabus to his course “Research Guidance in Bibliography and Writing”. I took this course many years ago as part of my MA in Talmud at Bar-Ilan. The course and course packet went over many digital tools, however the syllabus available online only gives topic headings, and bibliography of published articles.

Other Guides

Useful Links (Maane Lashon) קישורים שימושיים Open access dead link

By Uriel Frank.

  1. Thanks to A. Fredj for pointing out this list.

Primary Texts

Books - text format - popular editions

Open-access

Popular editions, as opposed to scholarly/critical editions. See next section for scholarly editions.

Sefaria ספריא Open access

Large number of texts, as well as English translations.

  • Wikipedia - English: “Sefaria has a vast library of Jewish text, including Tanakh, Talmud, and Jewish prayers alongside sources in philosophy, mysticism, Jewish law, and newer works. Some works, such as Tanakh and Talmud, feature English translations. These are either crowdsourced, provided by publishers, or in the public domain. Contains a complete English translation of Rashi's commentary on the Torah, the William Davidson Talmud translation,19 and a complete translation of Ibn Ezra's Torah commentaries, one of the only resources to have a complete translation of these works in English. Many works are linked with their respective commentaries. For example, clicking on a verse in Tanakh will open a window on the side, allowing the user to open a commentary on that verse.”
  • Some of the texts available, all highly credible works, and that I’ve personally used in Sefaria for study (all with hyper-linked table of contents, transcribed, searchable, downloadable, ability to make text larger, and many other features):
  1. 18 See, now, many experiments of things that can be done with Talmud via Sefaria API, discussed in a number of pieces on my blog: “Cataloging My Blogposts: An Organized Breakdown by Theme” (July 28, 2023), section “Digital Layout of the Talmud and other Rabbinic Texts”.
  2. 19 In the About page there: “includes Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz’s complete Modern Hebrew and English translations of the Talmud”.
Al-Hatorah על-התורה Open access
  1. 20 See, now, my full review at my blog: “Evaluating Al-Hatorah's Digital Repository: Exploring Its Excellent Tanakh and Talmud Commentaries, and More” (June 9, 2023). A Wikipedia entry on Al-Hatorah was a desideratum when this piece was first written (beginning of 2022), there is now an entry: על התורה – ויקיפדיה.
  2. 21 See discussion started by R’ Adiel Breuer at this Otzar HaHochma forum, dated 25-Jan-2016.
  3. 22 From the intro there: “The reconstructed interpretations of Rashbam presented on these pages are a preliminary version from 2015 of the analysis conducted by Hillel Novetsky of material which he discovered in various manuscripts. An updated version of these texts based on his dissertation (2020) can be accessed at https://mg.alhatorah.org [...].”
  4. 23 See interview with Chwat on this edition on Seforim Chatter podcast: “With Dr. Ezra Chwat discussing the Rif (Rav Yitzchak Alfasi, 1013 – 1103) and his new critical edition”, #97, October 10, 2021.
  5. 24 Full list here. Many of the linked pages only have headers, with no content.
  6. 25 Footnote 1 there: “1 This section incorporates information from M. Kahana, "The Halakhic Midrashim" in The Literature of the Sages Part II, ed. Safrai et al. (Assen, 2006): 3-105 (hereafter: Kahana), and G. Stemberger and H. Strack, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (1996, hereafter: Stemberger and Strack).”
Wikisource - Hebrew ויקיטקסט Open access
  • Wikisource is a "sister-project" of Wikipedia, under the auspices of the Wikimedia Foundation.
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “In May 2009, the Hebrew Wikisource (ויקיטקסט) reached 25,000 text units upon completion of uploading all of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah.”
  • Due to the fact that it’s a crowd-sourced project, it very much has the feel of a “work-in-progress”, with lots of individual chapters missing transcriptions, and of uneven editorship.
  • Despite this, it's a great resource, and one that many other websites draw on.
  • For example of an interesting sefer found there, see R’ Aharon Heiman’s Toldot Tana’im VeAmora’im. I recently used Wikisource’s transcription to do various analyses of the entire corpus of names of rabbis found in Chazal.26
  1. 26 Seth (Avi) Kadish, personal communication: “One of the most amazing [resources], which I think should get more recognition, is Dr. Ronen Ahituv's commentary on the Mishnah, Tosefta, and the halakhic midrashim e.g. Sifrei Devarim (with interlinks and references between them). It needs better formatting, but the actual content is priceless. Also see the vocalized, formatted and annotated version of the Mishnah, first edited by R’ Dan Be'eri and then highly improved for many tractates (ongoing) by Dr. Simhah Gershon Borer.”
An Invitation to Piyut הזמנה לפיוט Open access link updated
  • Tremendous database of piyyutim, with a huge number of piyyutim transcribed.
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “A cultural-educational project that works to preserve and revive the traditions of piyyut and prayer of the Jewish people, through a website, publishing, conservation activities, community education and cultural events. The site has about 1,000 columns and articles, including personal columns, memoirs, introductory passages, and reviews. Among the authors of the site are Prof. Ephraim Hazan, Dr. Meir Buzaglo, Prof. Haviva Pedia, Prof. Edwin Seroussi, Rabbi Dr. Benny Lau and many others.”
Grimoar Open access
  • Focuses on kabbalistic texts.
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “A database collecting a large amount of Kabbalah books and books of Jewish thought typed and open for use.”
  • Unfortunately, the website contains no bibliographical information whatsoever, such as on what edition or manuscript the text is based on. In general it’s unclear who hosts the website (the website domain is Czech, and so are the book descriptions on the website).
Kodesh.Snunit סנונית - מאגר ספרות הקודש Open access

Basic rabbinic texts.

Mamre Institute מכון ממרא Open access
  • Wikipedia: “The Mamre Institute is an Israeli research institute aimed at providing accessible and accurate texts for the Hebrew Bible, Mishnah, Tosefta, Babylonian Talmud, Jerusalem Talmud, Mishneh Torah and Targum Onkelos.”
Tashma - Jewish Office תא שמע - אופיס יהודי Free, registration link updated
  • Requires registration. Interesting UX/UI, dark mode by default. Works contain no indication of which edition is used. Full list of books in the database here.
  1. 28 This resource was pointed out by the commenter “Sam” to pt. 2 blogpost.
Zemirot Database אוצר זמירות Open access
  • From FAQ page:
    • “This is an editable online database for zemirot, liturgy, and other Jewish songs.”
    • Contains original text, translation, bibliographic info, history, and recordings.
Chabad Library ספריית חב"ד ליובאוויטש Open access
  • Works of Chabad Chasidut transcribed.
Ramhal.net קהילת הרמח"ל Open access
  • Works of the Ramhal transcribed.
  • From the About page: “The community was founded in 2002 with the aim of making Ramchal's teachings accessible to the general public.”

Requires subscription or purchase

Bar Ilan Responsa Project Subscription

Massive number of texts, with very high level of accuracy. Requires subscription.

  • Wikipedia - English: “The database consists of one of the world's largest electronic collections of Jewish texts in Hebrew. It includes numerous works from the Responsa Literature. The database also includes the Bible and the Talmud (with commentaries); articles about Jewish law and customs; Maimonides' Mishneh Torah and the Shulchan Aruch with main commentaries; Zohar, Midrashim, and the Talmudic Encyclopedia.”

New in 2026

Bekiut Open access New in 2026

Disclosure: the author's own project. Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Covers all 37 tractates of the Bavli in Hebrew/Aramaic and English, using Sefaria's texts; breaks clauses onto separate lines and suggests well-known passages.
  • Formerly called ChavrutAI (chavrutai.com). Despite the old name it is not mainly an AI tool.
  • Listed both on Powered by Sefaria and on jewishai.me.

Books - text format - scholarly editions

Ma'agarim - Historical Dictionary Project of the Hebrew Language מאגרים - המילון ההיסטורי ללשון העברית Open access
  • Not especially user-friendly, meant for rigorous research.29
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “Includes a database of all the major works of the Hebrew language in antiquity. As of 2012, more than 7,900 works have been typed into the database, which include more than nine million words, and contain more than 36,000 entries. Work on the database continues consistently, both because of the need to update the database according to updated research, as well as due to the discovery of additional ancient works.”
  1. 29 I used this resource as one of the sources for word counts of major Jewish works. See my “Words of Wisdom: Word Counts of Classical Jewish Works”.
Vayikra Rabba - synoptic edition ויקרא רבה - מהדורה סינופטית Open access
  • A website presenting a complete synopsis of the versions preserved in manuscripts of Vayikra Rabba, hosted by Bar-Ilan University.
Aramaic Texts of The Zohar Open access

As of 31-May-2023, only the unified PDF link worked.

  • From the edition prepared by Prof. Daniel Matt.
  • “This website contains the Aramaic text of the first five volumes of [the Pritzker] edition of the Zohar. The Versions include regular text, underlined text showing emendations, and “user-friendly,” which includes page numbers that correspond to this printed edition, Italics for the Biblical verses, and citations for the verses with verse and chapter number.”31
  • As of 31-May-23, the only link that works is the button labeled as follows: “Unified PDF of the Aramaic of all volumes (large file)”.
  1. 31 https://huc.edu/libraries/free-online-resources/?table=Bible/Early%20Resources > “Zohar Pritzker edition”.
Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine Open access

“[A] Brown University site directed by Michael Satlow. This website presents transcriptions, images, and bibliographic data of a growing number of inscriptions of relevance to rabbinics research, including epigraphical references to ‘rabbis’.”32 From the About page: “The Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project seeks to collect and make freely accessible all of the previously published inscriptions (and their English translations) of Israel/Palestine from the Persian period through the Islamic conquest (ca. 500 BCE - 640 CE).”

  • “Your search for display status:approved AND dates after 100 CE AND dates before 600 CE AND religion:jewish AND language:he yielded 119 results”.
  1. 32 Secunda, ibid., p. 626.

Books - PDF format

Open-access

Mostly searchable via OCR, and in PDF format.

HebrewBooks Open access
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “Free online digital library for Torah literature. The site contains about 61,000 scanned Torah books and journals, from the beginning of printing to contemporary authors, most of them in Hebrew. The books can be viewed, downloaded and textually searched for in the book's content. The site is accessible in Hebrew and English.”
  • HebrewBooks is likely well-known to most readers. However, something that might be less well-known is that HebrewBooks has a new search page, officially in beta: https://beta.hebrewbooks.org/#gsc.tab=0. It’s a much more powerful search engine, with many new, modern features (bringing it closer to the Otzar HaChochma experience).33
  1. 33 Thanks to Eliezer Brodt for bringing this new tool to my attention.
National Library of Israel הספרייה הלאומית Open access

The guide notes that many outside links to the site are broken after website changes.

  • Links to books accessed via search or direct link, no way to browse. However, the “Halacha Brura” index (see later, under section “Index”) often links to it.
  • Unfortunately, due to many changes and updates to the National Library website over the years, many of the links to the website found at outside websites are now broken.
  • Presumably, the best way to find the work is to as follows:
    • Search the name of the work in the National Library website search box (“Merhav”).
    • Filter for “Available online” AND “Books”
    • Click on “Online access”
  • URLs of open-access works appear to following template: “https://www.nli.org.il/he/books/NNL_ALEPH00XXXXXXX/NLI”. For example, Ohev Yisra’el: https://www.nli.org.il/he/books/NNL_ALEPH001091556/NLI
Center for Jewish History Open access
  • Links to books accessed via search or direct link, no way to browse. Has many primary texts available. Couldn’t find a simple way to search for books. However, the “Halacha Brura” index (see later, under section “Index”) often links to it. For example, the sefer Derech Yeshara.
Open Library Open access
  • Part of the Internet Archive family of projects. Has thousands of relevant scanned books. Can be searched by subject.
Abuelafia.blogspot Open access
  • A number of books by the medieval kabbalist R’ Avraham Abulafia, published recently by R’ Amnon Gros. This is R’ Gros’s website.34
  1. 34 See Boaz Hus, שאלת קיומה של מיסטיקה יהודית, 2016, pp. 146-147, for a discussion of these editions. (Book available in Kotar here.)
Google Books Open access
  • No way to browse, only search.35 But relevant works can be found using Halacha Brura’s index,36 see the webpage indexing Tanach and Hazal. Has a few hundred scanned manuscripts and early printed works.
  1. 35 Searching on Google Books can be aided greatly by their Advanced Google Books search: https://books.google.com/advanced_book_search (thanks to A. Berman for pointing this out). See short overview of the source of seforim on Google books, as well as a guide for how to search for seforim there, at Otzar HaHochma forum.
  2. 36 See my discussion later of this index.
Israel613 Open access
  • An eccentric website, mostly dedicated to contemporary haredi works and polemics. However, there are some PDFs of interest, of historical hasidic works. No real browsing capabilities on the website, but can be found using Halacha Brura’s index (as in previous item).
Google Drive Open access

Sometimes individuals upload scans of books, and share the links. For example, the full set of R’ Moshe Cordevero’s Or Yakar is currently hosted by an unknown host on Google Drive (see Halacha Brura > Kabbala > “אור יקר, ר' משה קורדוברו, פרוש על הזהר, ירושלים תשכ"ב”.)

Epidat Open access
  • See description at the website of European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS): “Epidat, short for epigraphic database, is a research platform for Jewish funerary epigraphy. Currently, Epidat contains transcriptions, translations, descriptions, and iconographic documentation of 43,838 headstones (with 79,972 digital images) from 233 historical Jewish cemeteries, spanning a period of 900 years (1040-1952) and covering six European countries (Germany, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Latvia and Czechia).”
Machberet Menachamiyot מחברות מנחמיות Open access

Requires subscription or purchase

Otzar HaHochma אוצר החכמה Subscription

The guide notes a temporary period of free access (from Oct-2021), which a commenter said was soon ending.

  • Generally requires subscription. However, interestingly enough, as of this writing (23-Jan-2022), it appears that the entire basic Otzar HaHochma is open-access, and has been for three months already! As per the pop-up notification on the website, and the banner at the top while browsing: “בס"ד 19/10/2021. Dear users, the system is undergoing upgrades at this time, some users may experience technical difficulties, therefore we are giving free access to the beta site: beta.otzar.org. This service will be free of charge until further notice. Please note the printing option as well as the add-on packages are available for purchase only on the old website.”37
  • Add-ons include books from the following publishers (in order of price): Oz VeHodor, Mossad HaRav Kook, Mechon Yerushalayim, Mechon Ahavat Shalom, Mechon Ofek, Mechon Hochmat Shelomo.
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “Otzar HaHochma is a database containing over 110,000 Torah and academic books scanned in the same format as the original printing pages that have undergone optical character recognition, which allows information to be retrieved using a search engine embedded in the system. In version 19.0 (summer 2021) of the database there are 112,749 titles. The update rate of the database is about 5,000 books annually. The database allows the books to be divided into categories, such as: Bible and its commentators; Mishnah and its commentaries; Babylonian Talmud and its commentaries; Jerusalem Talmud and its commentaries; Kabbalah; Mussar; Hasidut; history; disputes (פולמוסים); journals; community books (ספרי קהילות), jubilee books (ספרי יובל), memorial books (ספרי זיכרון), manuscripts and first editions.”
  1. 37 A commenter on the blogpost noted: “Unfortunately they have updated the notice on Otzar [HaHochma], they will be ending the free access ‘in a few days’ ”.
Siddurim Database מאגר הסידורים הממוחשב Unknown
  • Distributed by R’ Aharon Gabbai. See the Otzar Hahochma post, published Apr 3, 2017.
  • From the post:
    • “A computerized database containing more than a thousand siddurim and machzorim, both manuscript and printed editions. Collected from all over the internet (including hundreds of items that were previously downloadable and can not be downloaded today) and from other rare sources. The database is over a hundred gigabytes in size.”

Manuscripts - General

Open-access

Some with transcription.

Ktiv כתיב Open access link updated
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “The Ktiv project, launched with the 17th World Congress of Jewish Studies in August 2017, is the next stage in the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts’s life, designed to make photographs of all Hebrew manuscripts in the world accessible to the public on the Internet. Upon its launch, four years after the digitization project began, Ktiv had full scans with an excellent resolution of 45,000 manuscripts (out of 90,000) that together hold 4.37 million pages available to the public.38 The project was organized in collaboration with the National Library of France (BnF), the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), the Palatine Library, the British Library, the National Library of Austria, the Bavarian State Library, the Rosenthaliana Library, Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the Vatican Library, Hebrew Union College, The State Library in Berlin, the National Library of Russia, the National Library of Florence, and more.”39
  • See also “Moreshet B’reshetdead link” of the National Library of Israel. From the page: “This page focuses on webpages set up by the National Library over the years. Although these webpages are not updated, they preserve valuable items and information for future generations. Therefore, these sites are maintained and made accessible.”
  • For example, see the webpage for searching for images of Talmudic manuscripts (עיון בכתבי היד).
  1. 38 A. Berman pointed out (private communication): “You may want to note that some printed seforim can be found on the Ktiv website, when there are handwritten notes in the sefer.”
  2. 39 For a full list of library website portals of their Hebrew manuscript collections, see Adiel Breuer’s 2015 Otzar HaHochma forum post (mentioned also above in section “Existing guides”, in footnote). There he lists (with some short descriptions) around 40 such library websites in alphabetical order. Subsequent commenters add additional links.

    Breuer there also has subsections for links to library websites with PDF scans of:

    1. Cairo geniza manuscripts (6 websites),
    2. “European genizah” manuscripts (3 websites).
    3. Books (around 13 such websites). Relevant to earlier section “Books - PDF format”.
    4. Catalogs of around 20 libraries and other collections, in alphabetical order. Relevant to later sections “Bibliographic info” and “Indexes”.

    For a general extensive list of digitized library collections, see the bottom of this page: https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/source/british-library.

    There’s an interesting analogue to Breur’s work, a German-language Wikisource page listing websites of “digital collections that make at least one public domain German-language printed book available in the form of a scan (digital copy), i.e. that can be considered as a source for Wikisource” (translation from Google Translate. This list pointed out to me by A. Berman). A potentially interesting idea would be to have all the websites in Breuer’s post and ensuing comments compiled and maintained in a Hebrew-language Wikisource page.

Hebrew Manuscripts : Free Texts Open access

Hosted on archive.org. From the About section: “Hebrew and Judaica manuscripts from Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library.” Currently shows 334 manuscripts.

Digitized Items: Hebrew Manuscripts Open access

From the About page: “[t]his project will make 1.5 million digitized pages freely available over the next three years. Portions of the Bodleian and Vatican Libraries’ collections of Hebrew manuscripts [...] have been selected for digitization by a team of scholars and curators from around the world.”

  • Based on my count, links to 773 Bodleian manuscripts, and 641 Vatican manuscripts.
  • See also here: Hebrew Manuscripts and Printed Books, wide range of ways to browse 806 Bodleian manuscripts.

Manuscripts - by Topic

Friedberg projects Free, registration

Friedberg projects. Each will have its own entry below. See YouTube video for recent discussion of some of these projects (uploaded 2-Feb-2022). All require registration (free). The first two projects appear to be the ones most actively used and developed: Hachi Garsinan and Genizah Project.

Hachi Garsinan - The Friedberg Project for Talmud Bavli Variants הכי גרסינן Free, registration link updated
  • Requires registration (free).
  • From the webpage:
    • “The Hachi Garsinan site displays all variant-readings of the Talmud Bavli, including images and transcriptions, with sophisticated comparison tools between the variants.
    • The "Hachi Garsinan" site is meant to serve the wide range of all Bavli learners and researchers: from academic researchers, through Yeshiva communities and Torah students, as well as anyone interested in exploring the variations of the Talmud Bavli and its transformations throughout the ages.
    • The site contains high quality digital images of all original textual witnesses that exist for the Talmud Bavli (manuscripts, early printings, Genizah fragments, binding fragments and other fragments), accompanied by precise transcriptions of the text in the image. The site integrates additional functions, including full text search, Sussmann catalog, Dikdukei Sofrim, and also save, copy and print options.
  • Also includes the following foundational works, open-access and user-friendly:
    • Jacob Sussman, Otzar Kitvey Yad Talmudiyyim (יעקב זוסמן, אוצר כתבי-היד התלמודיים)
    • R’ Raphael Nathan Nata Rabbinovicz, Dikdukei Sofrim (ר' רפאל נתן נטע ראבינאוויטץ, דקדוקי סופרים)
    • Many relevant articles (“Ref. Materials > Introductions”).
  1. 40 See the reviews: Amit Gvaryahu: ““We Read Thus”: On Hachi Garsinan and Learning Talmud in the 21st century | The Talmud Blog” (June 19, 2016) ; Menachem Katz, Assael Shmeltzer, Hillel Gershuni, Sara Preis, "The Hachi Garsinan Project as a Critical Edition of the Talmud Bavli", (September 2017) ; Secunda, pg. 627.
Friedberg Genizah Project Free, registration
  • Requires registration (free).
  • From the homepage:
    • “The Friedberg Genizah Project (FGP) presents a real revolution in the study and research of the field of Cairo Genizah and Jewish Studies in general. Its main task is to computerize the entire corpus of Genizah manuscripts and Genizah-related materials: images, identifications, catalogs, metadata, transcriptions, translations and bibliographical references. In the course of this project a full digitization of the entire Genizah collections has been done, together with a huge database which is accessible to every scholar and student. The project also introduces new designated tools for Genizah research which are based on advanced technologies of image processing.
    • The Site was developed by Genazim Digital, headed by Professor Yaacov Choueka. Currently it is supported by the Association for the Study of Jewish Manuscripts.”
Mahadura - the Friedberg Site for Transcriptions and Synopsis מהדורא Free, registration link updated

2023: author got many errors when browsing existing projects.

  • I tried browsing existing projects, got a lot of errors.
  • From the homepage:
    • “The Mahadura site is designed to create, preserve and share transcriptions and synopses of manuscripts and early printings. The site is meant for Academics, Biblical and Religious Scholars, anyone who is interested in publishing new transcriptions of ancient Jewish texts and preparation of critical revisions. Currently the site allows the user to create new projects in any area of Jewish studies, including uploading of images and texts and to create new transcriptions of manuscripts and prints in a simple painless way, and to view images and transcriptions, and to try the transcription tools in the existing projects. The creator of each project will be able to define a closed group of colleagues to work together on a project, and then decide when it will be publically available. In the future you will be able to create variant synopsis comparisons, using specialized algorithms.
    • The Amuta was established as a joint venture of the "Friedberg Genizah Project" (FGP) and the "Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society"(FJMS).”
Yad Harambam יד הרמב”ם - פרוייקט פרידברג לשינויי נוסחאות ברמב”ם Free, registration link updated
  • Requires registration (free).
  • From the webpage:
    • “The "Yad HaRambam" site was established for the purpose of presenting all versions of the Rambam's Mishneh Torah ("haYad haHazaka"). It includes images, transcriptions and a sophisticated synopsis (comparison) system between versions.
    • The site is meant to serve all who want to study the Mishneh Torah; academic researchers, Torah students in Yeshivot, everyone who is interested in historical versions of The Mishneh Torah and its changing unfolding versions through the ages.
    • The site includes high resolution digital images of early versions of the Mishneh Torah including manuscripts and early printings. Each image is supplemented by an accurate transcription.
    • The site also integrates additional functions, including full text search on all Rambam textual witnesses, the ability to save, copy and print, personal workspaces, and more.
    • The Amuta was established as a joint venture of the "Friedberg Genizah Project" (FGP) and the "Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society"(FJMS). The textual witness' transcriptions, as well as the software for connecting the image and its transcriptions, are prepared by the Amuta Transcription Team.”
The Nahum Collection of Yemenite Manuscripts אוסף נחום לכתבי יד תימניים Free, registration
  • Requires registration (free).
  • From the webpage:
    • “The aim of this website is to present efficient research tools for researchers interested in the Nahum Collection of Yemenite Manuscripts. The website contains about 80,000 high-quality digital images of the (mostly) handwritten fragments and volumes in this collection. The site also contains short (1-2 lines) identifications of these manuscripts, whenever available, as well as scanned images of the corresponding entries from the relevant catalogs The site is under continuous development, and we hope to include in it more information in the future. The shelfmarks of the various manuscripts were primordially determined by the existing shelfmarks as marked on the manuscripts and in the catalogs, and when these were missing, new serially shelfmarks were given. In addition, there is a correspondence table in the website that enables direct access to the available information according to the entry-number in the above-mentioned catalogs. Viewing entire volumes can be efficiently browsed using special software that simulates the manual flipping of pages as in a real book. This Site was initially developed by Genazim Digital, headed by Professor Yaacov Choueka and is now supported by the Association for the Study of Jewish Manuscripts.”
The Friedberg Judeo-Arabic Project פרויקט פרידברג לערבית יהודית Free, registration link updated
  • Requires registration (free).
  • From the webpage:
    • “This site is designed to assist researchers of the Judeo-Arabic gain a comprehensive and fundamental knowledge of this language, especially in the lexicon, semantics, idiomatic expressions, and word-related areas. This is done by establishing an extensive computerized corpus of titles and advanced software that can search for words and phrases and display their instances in the corpus (or selected parts thereof) with suitable context and various statistics.
    • For every page of every work in the corpus, a good quality image is available and can be viewed with its transcription, for testing and comparison. In the first stage, the site will contain Judeo-Arabic titles that have already appeared in print, focusing on titles that were written up to the 16th century. With time, the corpus will be expanded, hopefully encompassing all Judeo-Arabic titles in the mentioned group.
    • When the corpus will be sufficiently broad, advanced tools of computational linguistics and natural language processing will be developed and will reveal interesting structures and linguistic connections that can be discovered only with the help of a computerized system. This Site was initially developed by Genazim Digital, headed by Professor Yaacov Choueka and is now supported by the Association for the Study of Jewish Manuscripts.”
  • Includes foundational works, open-access:
Princeton Geniza Lab Open access
  • From About page: “The Princeton Geniza Project is a database of more than 30,000 records and 4,600 transcriptions of documentary geniza texts. Since 1986, the PGP has been dedicated to discovering and describing unpublished documents; maintaining a full-text retrieval database of geniza documents; and creating new transcriptions and translations.”
  • Project Directors (“PIs”): Nachum Dershowitz, Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, Avi Shmidman, Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra.
Princeton University Sefer Hasidim Database Open access

Peter Schäfer – Project Director. From the About page: “The database includes fourteen manuscripts containing different versions of Sefer Hasidim and its fragments.”41

  1. 41 Thanks to M.Honig for pointing out this project to me.
Qerovot-of-18 from the Cairo Genizah Open access

Qerovot-of-18 from the Cairo Genizah.42

  • Project of Prof. Avi Shmidman of Bar-Ilan University.
  • He writes (Hebrew):43 “The Palestinian paytanim, who operated from the fifth century CE to the eleventh century, composed thousands of piyutim for the prayer cycle. While most of the piyutim were written in honor of Shabbat and the holidays of the year, the paytanim also composed works for the Amidah prayer of the holy days, that is, the series of blessings said every day at Shacharit, Mincha and Aravit. These works are called 'Kerovot Shemonah Esreh.' The purpose of the research was to decipher these manuscripts and make the secrets they contain accessible to researchers and the general public. The research included deciphering hundreds of worn and damaged Geniza pieces, and in the process, if possible, restoring the original works [...]
  • You can view and search the piyutim, or alternatively download them all with one click. The digital texts have been transferred to the public domain, and anyone can download and use them as they wish. The piyutim are coded on According to a method called TEI ("Text Encoding Initiative"). Among the advantages of this method, it should be noted that it paves the way for a site that is used by both the researchers and the general public. Researchers need access to the original text as it appears in the manuscript, including archaic forms and even corrupted forms; also, in order to serve the audience of researchers, markings are required throughout the text to indicate letters added between the lines, unclear letters, and the like. On the other hand, editions of piyutim intended for the general public always strive to present the reader with a legible text, free of forms, obvious oddities and disruptions, and without unnecessary markings. TEI's format allows encoding of all these configurations, side by side; both the original text according to the manuscript, with all the provided letters (which are in doubt), etc., and also the normalized and corrected forms. The encoding used on the current website allows the user to choose the appropriate display form: whether to view the original text or the normalized text; whether to leave visible disruptions or correct them; if to mark text added between the sheets; if to mark provided letters; And another priest and priest. The current corpus is the first significant corpus in the Hebrew language to be coded into the TEI format. In recent years, interest in digital humanities in general and TEI in particular has been increasing. But until now researchers have not had even one example of Hebrew text encoding in TEI. The current corpus fills this void and serves as an example for researchers seeking to carry out similar projects involving the digitization of Hebrew corpora in the TEI format.”
  1. 42 Thanks to Gila Prebor for pointing out this resource in a presentation.
  2. 43 פיוטים לתפילת העמידה מפי פייטני ארץ ישראל
The Ilanot Project מפעל האילנות Open access
  • From the homepage: “Welcome to the “Proof of Concept” Preview of “Maps of God” - The Ilanot Portal [...] “Maps of God” (MoG) is the flagship digital humanities initiative of the Ilanot Project, dedicated to the research of Jewish kabbalistic diagrams known as ilanot (“trees,” being intricately inscribed parchment scrolls dedicated to mapping the divine realm). The MoG platform presents scientific editions of the great ilanot using an innovative linked-data approach to enable scholars and laypeople to explore these fascinating artifacts for the first time.”

Requires subscription or purchase

The Sol and Evelyn Henkind Talmud Text Databank; Primary Textual Witnesses to Tannaitic Literature Subscription
  • From the home page:
    • “Welcome to our new integrated website: Cooperative Development Initiative – Created by CDI Systems in partnership with the Saul Lieberman Institute of Talmudic Research of the Jewish Theological Seminary and Bar Ilan University’s Institute for Computerization in Jewish Life.
    • This new resource upgrades and integrates the three Judaic studies databases developed by these institutions:
      1. The Sol and Evelyn Henkind Talmud Text Databank.
      2. The Index of References Dealing with Talmudic Literature, offering pinpointed citations from hundreds of classic and modern scholarly works directly related to the specific selected passage within Talmudic literature.
      3. Primary Textual Witnesses to Tannaitic Literature.”
  • See under section “Bibliographic info” for “The Index of References Dealing with Talmudic Literature”.

Tools for Navigating Primary Texts

Search and Related Tools

Open-access

There are some very powerful tools for researching primary and secondary sources. Gone are the days when one is completely at the mercy of memory, concordance, index, or colleagues. Many of the websites in the previous section (“Primary texts”) have good hyperlinked navigation pages. In addition, they have very good search capabilities. In addition to this, there are websites which are dedicated to search and indexes, that provide powerful capabilities that the previously mentioned websites don’t have.

Dicta Open access
  • Search is highly recommended.
  • From the About Us page: “Dicta applies cutting edge machine learning and natural language processing tools to the analysis of Hebrew texts.”
  • Created by Prof. Moshe Koppel of Bar-Ilan University. List of their search and other tools, all very cool and quite user-friendly and hyper-modern UX/UI, in the best way:
    • Tanach search: “Search the Bible intuitively, with no need to worry about alternate spellings, prefixes and suffixes or sorting out multiple meanings of a word. Dicta’s search engine understands what you’re looking for.”
    • Talmud Search: “Search the Talmud and Mishnah for words and phrases intuitively, with no need to worry about alternate spellings and multiple meanings. Dicta’s search engine understands what you’re looking for.”
    • Quick Nakdan: “Automatically add nikud (vocalization) to text as you type.”
    • Citation finder: “Identify exact or approximate quotations of biblical and talmudic sources in a given text.”
    • Rabbinic Abbreviation Expander: “Expand abbreviations in Rabbinic texts. An entered text will be displayed including expanded abbreviations. The automated expansions are editable by the user.”
    • Synopsis Builder: “Align two or more versions of the same (arbitrarily long) text, highlighting differences between versions and matching parallel words, including variant spellings and synonyms.”
    • Stylistic Segmentation: “Partition any selected text into distinct stylistic components. For example, a multi-authored text can be automatically decomposed and displayed so that distinct authorial threads are shown in different colors.”
    • Charuzit: “Find rhymes, assonance, and alliteration for any given Hebrew word. Search results can be filtered by entering semantic words and configuring various grammatical settings.”
    • הסרת ניקוד
Sefaria search Open access

Sefaria’s search function is also quite robust.

New in 2026

Talmud Sidebar Extension Open access New in 2026 link updated

Listing live 9-Oct-2026; last updated 18-Sep-2022, about 235 users.

  • The store listing names dafhachaim.org and daf-yomi.com as supported sites.

Tools for Transcription of manuscripts

Transkribus, Dijest model Freemium
  • Free Public AI Model for Handwritten Text Recognition with Transkribus, for Hebrew script languages:44 https://readcoop.eu/model/hebrew-script-languages/
  • It uses the Dijest model. From the webpage: “Among Transkribus public models you will find the DiJeSt model for Hebrew script languages, which you can apply to your documents. It is good for automatic recognition of several types of printed texts in Yiddish, Hebrew, Judeo Arabic and Ladino.”
  1. 44 I’d like to thank Gila Prebor for pointing out this webpage to me, in personal communication.
Escriptorium Open access
  • From the homepage: “A project providing digital recognition of handwritten documents using machine learning techniques.”45
  • From the Princeton Geniza Lab website: “In February 2021, we began exploring machine learning as a method of transcribing Geniza documents in partnership with Daniel Stökl Ben-Ezra of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) in Paris and the digital paleography framework e-Scriptorium.”
  • ERC Synergy MiDRASH Awarded to EPHE and partner institutions – eScripta: “The European Research Council has awarded an ERC Synergy Grant to the EPHE and its partner institutions in Israel for a six years computational-humanities project on Medieval Hebrew manuscripts starting in 2023 with a budget of over 10 million Euro. eScriptorium and kraken play a central role in it [...] In this project, we aim to achieve the following goals:
    • Convert the writing appearing in the images of a large fraction of those manuscripts into searchable text — including as much as possible of interlinear insertions and marginal comments. This will require significant improvements in the state-of-the-art of computerized page segmentation and handwritten-text recognition.
    • Have the computer compare the multitude of texts to find quotations, paraphrases, borrowings, allusions, and other intertextual relations. These can be made available to people browsing or studying the texts.
    • Train computer algorithms to analyze handwriting so as to determine where and when each manuscript was written — down to the century and the country. This will involve synergetic feedback between human paleographers and modern neural-network machine learning, teaching the computer to detect the features that have been identified by experts throughout the manuscripts, identifying outliers, and explaining machine classifications in human-understandable terms.
    • Train computer algorithms to analyze the texts for linguistic (lexical, morphological, and syntactic) features that can be used in text searches and which can help place literary works in their historical context [...]
  • The results of this project — data as well as algorithms — will be made available to the public.”
  1. 45 For overview, see the recent presentation, available on YouTube: “eScriptorium for Handwritten Text Recognition in Humanities Research” (uploaded Mar 3, 2021. accessed 25-Feb-2022).

    For use on Hebrew manuscripts, there is a gated presentation cited by Katz 2022, footnote 16: D. Stoekl Ben Ezra, “Sofer Mahir: Opening Up Rabbinic Manuscripts Towards Scholarly Editions”. Presentation at the DHJewish conference in Luxembourg, January 2021. URL: https://sofermahir.hypotheses.org/59. See also here: Digital Forum Showcases: eScriptorium and here: DH Tutorials - Goethe-Universität.

    Katz and Gershuni point out: “Unfortunately, the ability to use OCR to read Hebrew or Aramaic manuscripts is not yet sufficiently developed. When textual manuscript-based projects such as Stoekal.'s Sofer Mahir and Tikoun Sofrim will reach a more mature stage, the extension of the edition to the entire Talmud will be far easier to achieve.” (Katz 2022, section 4.1).

Bibliographic Information and Indexes - General

Open-access

Merhav - The National Library מרחב - הספרייה הלאומית של ישראל Open access
  • Recommended. Tremendous bibliographic resource, besides for being a powerful search tool (mentioned also above, under “Search”).
  • Overview at their website here (Hebrew): “The National Library's collection includes about five million items, including books, manuscripts, journals, maps, music and audio-visual and electronic material, in a variety of languages.
Bar-Ilan Catalog Open access

Includes many important Jewish works missing from Merhav. Especially dissertations written in Bar-Ilan University.

Sfardata ספר-דתא Open access
  • Comprehensive data on dated manuscripts, based largely on the life’s work of Prof. Malachi Beit-Arie.
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “The codicological database of the Hebrew Paleography Project. The purpose of the project is to collect data of all Hebrew manuscripts, such as data on ink, codexes, pagination traditions of the text, page and text dimensions and proportions between them, line management [...], and graphic symbols (symbols of emphasis, acronyms and numbers). The total parameters collected are about 900.
  • The database contains about 5,000 Hebrew manuscripts dated either with a colophon or with the author's name, which were examined in 250 libraries and private collections, which constitute about 95% of the existing [Hebrew manuscripts].”
The Bibliography of The Hebrew Book מפעל הביבליוגרפיה העברית Open access

(also here)

  • My understanding is that “The Bibliography of The Hebrew Book” has been incorporated into “Merhav”. See also National Library’s guides here: https://www.nli.org.il/en/research-and-teach/catalogs/bibliographic-databases
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “A body designated for the editing of a bibliography of Jewish printing. The project lists and describes all the books printed in Hebrew characters in the Hebrew language and in the languages of the Jews (Yiddish, Ladino, Judaeo-Arabic, etc.) from the first Hebrew incunabula in the year 1475, until about 1960. The bibliographic database was built on the basis of the collections of the National Library and other collections in Israel and around the world. The bibliography numbers over 141,000 bibliographic and 15,000 biographical entries, and includes: books, journals and individual pages (ephemera). Each publication is reviewed by the project staff, and the description of the books is very broad and comprehensive than their description in the National Library catalog, and includes, for example: book approvals (הסכמות לספרים), introductions written by other authors, and the like. As of 2011, the project recorded and described close to 90% of the world's Jewish books and is online on the National Library website.”
Halacha Brura Institute - Virtual Library מכון הלכה ברורה - ספריה וירטואלית Open access
  • This is an incredible project.
  • From the webpage: “The Halacha Brura Institute centralizes here links to books that are on the Internet at various websites, in full text, some as text and some as images, to save the visit to libraries.”
  • Has a system of symbols to mark the website where the work is found, and the file type.
  • Ironically, Halacha Brura’s own meta-index of its own indexes is unfortunately not very good, there’s no full sitemap available on the website, and the organization of the webpages doesn’t isn’t always the best (for example, Rambam and commentators and Responsa are on the same page). Presumably, this is because webpages were split as they got larger. In any case, to help with this issue, I created my own meta-index of Halacha Brura's indexes (available here).
  • This project appears to be affiliated with the Rambam Library (ספריית הרמב"ם - בית אריאלה) in Tel-Aviv, though it’s not clearly stated on their website.
Thesaurus of Talmudic Manuscripts Free, registration
  • Hosted at the Hachi Garsinan website, mentioned earlier. Requires registration (free).
  • Based on Y. Sussman, Thesaurus of Talmudic Manuscripts, Jerusalem 2012. With Friedberg updates, edited by M. Katz, September 2017.
List of websites and threads for scans of manuscripts and early printed books (Adiel Breuer) רשימת אתרים ואשכולות לסריקות כת"י וספרי דפוס עתיקים Open access

רשימת אתרים ואשכולות לסריקות כת"י וספרי דפוס עתיקים. R’ Adiel Breuer, published July 5, 2015 on the Otzar HaHochma forum. It contains a plethora of links to websites that contain Hebrew manuscripts and books.46 Breuer’s post focuses on providing links to university library website portals for their Hebrew manuscript and rare book collections. It dates from 2015. As he points out there, the database Ktiv [see below] intends to include all Hebrew manuscripts, rendering going to individual library websites much less relevant. See also under section “Manuscripts”, in a footnote, for further discussion of Breuer’s guide.

  1. 46 Pointed out to me by A. Berman, private communication.

Requires subscription or purchase

Bibliographic Information and Indexes - by Topic

Bibliography of works in Judeo-Arabic אתר פרידברג לביבלוגרפיה בערבית יהודית Open access
  • From the webpage:
    • “The aim of this website is to present to all scholars, researchers and, in general, users interested in Judeo-Arabic texts, a comprehensive bibliography of all works in Judeo-Arabic ever printed, in a variety of formats, with some filtering capabilities.
    • The list, with some 1,500 entries, is intended to cover all regions of publications and all periods of the works' writings, up until and including the very early works of the 21st century.”
Introduction - History of the Early Printed Hebrew Book - Guides at Penn Libraries Open access

See description here: “From the University of Pennsylvania comes this guide to the study of the early printed Hebrew book from its beginning around the year 1470 through the seventeenth-century. For every topic, in both the general and the Hebrew sections, you will find a bibliography arranged alphabetically by author, and the availability of the materials in the Penn libraries system, online, or from other academic libraries.”

Databases

Open-access

Parallels in Yerushalmi מקבילות לירושלמי Open access
  • Project of Prof. Leib Moscovitz of Bar-Ilan University.
  • From the About page:
    • “This site contains lists of sources and parallels to the Jerusalem Talmud, from the Bible, the literature of the Tannaim (Mishnah, Tosefta, and the Halachic Midrashim), the Jerusalem Talmud itself, and the classic Aggadic Midrashim of the Land of Israel. For some of the Tractates, parallels from the Babylonian Talmud are also recorded.”
Elyonim veTachtonim Open access
  • Project focused on the supernatural entities of the Hebrew Bible and Babylonian Talmud. The website offers the databases of these entities and a system of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of such traditions.48
  • See the list of Papers and chapters based on this project here.
  1. 48 Personal communication from Wojciech Kosior. I’d like to thank him for pointing out his project to me.
Seforimonline.org Open access dead link
  • Well-organized, publications can be sorted by place of publication, year, etc. There also seem to be works there not found in other websites, especially of manuscripts and early editions of Rabbinic works. (Halacha Brura’s index above sometimes links to Seforimonline.org.)
Judaica Archival Project Open access

Available only as an archived (Wayback Machine) list.

  • Wikipedia: “The Judaica Archival Project was founded in 1987 as a non-profit preservation and access program for Rabbinics. From 1988 to 1999 the Project operated a microfilm lab at the Jewish National and University Library (JNUL) of the Hebrew University. The Project was supported by private foundations, book lovers and from the sale of facsimile copies. Over half a million pages were filmed from thousands of rare and out-of-print Hebrew works.”
  • Archived list of thousands of primary texts, with bibliographic info, and archived links to book cover pages, here.
List of works in Bar-Ilan University’s Responsa Project Open access

Available only as an archived (Wayback Machine) list.

List of works in Bar-Ilan University’s Responsa Project (“Global Jewish Database - Responsa Project”). Archived list of primary works, from 2007-2001. List of thousands of primary works, with basic bibliographic info, categorized by genre.

Heichal Menahem היכל מנחם Open access
  • E-commerce website selling books. Can be used as a kind of index of recently published books, with lots of bibliographical info and pictures.

Requires subscription or purchase

Otzar Hadmuyot Subscription

Otzar Hadmuyot.49 From the webpage: “The Bonayich ‘Index of Rabbinic Sages’ is the most up-to-date and scientific database of Tannaim and Amoraim. The data includes identification of every personality mentioned in Rabbinic literature, with all spelling variations of their names, identification of their generation and place of activity, their family and scholarly relationships with other personalities, and all scholarly research written about each figure. The data is presented in a powerful search engine environment enabling sorting and arranging of the personalities as needed.”

  1. 49 Thank you to Menachem Katz for pointing out this resource to me.

New in 2026

Stories of the Zohar: digital edition סיפורי הזוהר Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Sections for manuscripts and research bibliography; motifs include snakes, caves, the child, birds and encounters with strangers.

Visualizations and Data

New in 2026

Eitz HaRabanim Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Filters for Eretz Yisrael and Babylonia and for Zugot, Tannaim and Amoraim; search in English or Hebrew.
  • Data from Sefaria; code on GitHub.
Sefer Similarity Map Open access New in 2026

Page responds (9-Oct-2026); last version dated 2021.

  • Method: word and 2-4 word phrase counts, reduced to two dimensions with UMAP. The authors note it uses raw counts without tf-idf or lemmatization.
  • Version 2.1.0 (2021).
HaMapah Open access New in 2026

Could not verify: the site returned HTTP 403 to an automated check on 9-Oct-2026.

  • Applies quantitative and geospatial methods to responsa metadata.
  • Found via jewishai.me.

Secondary literature

Books

Open-access

There are a nice amount of academic books available online, especially more recent ones.

Daat דעת Open access
  • Has both books as text, as well as scanned PDFs. Includes lots of out-of-copyright books, as well as recent open-access scholarly books, see here, and here.
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “Daat is a Hebrew website whose main content is texts in the fields of Judaism and the humanities that were collected from various printed sources. The site contains learning and teaching materials in various fields: Bible, Torah Sheba’al Peh, Shabbat and festivals, Jewish history, Jewish thought, literature, studies of the Land of Israel, Shemita, medicine and halakhah, education, Hasidism, family studies, Hebrew law, army and war, the Holocaust, and more. The site includes extensive databases containing entire books, full text of articles published in about 30 different journals, photos and maps, illustrations, photographs and presentations.”
Portal HaDaf HaYomi פורטל הדף היומי Open access
Society for the Interpretation of the Talmud האיגוד לפרשנות התלמוד Open access

Scholarly interpretation of Talmud Bavli, written in Modern Hebrew.

  • Recommended. The first seven of their publications are available there (published between 2006 - 2016). Does not include the most recent publications published 2019 - 2021. The level of scholarship is very high.
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “A series of commentaries on the Babylonian Talmud based on scientific research as well as a traditional-religious interpretation. Most of the project’s books are available for public use as PDF files on the Society’s website, along with additional unpublished reference materials. The chairman of the association is its founder, Professor Shama Friedman, and its management consists of Prof. Yeshayahu Gafni, Prof. Gideon Libson and Prof. Shmuel Shilo.”
Asif - Sifriyat Asif אסיף - ספריית אסיף Open access

Dissertations in Hebrew, written by scholars associated with hesder and Religious-Zionist institutions. Also whole books and Torah journals divided neatly and searchable, many of them of potential scholarly interest, well-annotated and sourced (such as R’ David Bruckner’s series Mishnat Tana’im).

P’sik פסיק Open access

Scholarly books in Hebrew, for a more popular audience, mostly on Bible and contemporary religious thought.

JSTOR Open access
  • Many open-access books, see the books marked “open-access”.
  • Especially JSTOR, Brown Judaic Studies. Currently around 65 open-access books. From the “Publisher Description”:
    • “Brown Judaic Studies has been publishing scholarly books in all areas of Judaic studies for forty years. Our books, many of which contain groundbreaking scholarship, were typically printed in small runs and are not easily accessible outside of major research libraries. We are delighted that with the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program, we are now able to make available, in digital, open-access, format, fifty titles from our backlist. Once digitized the volumes will be freely available through ProjectMUSE, JSTOR, ACLS Open Humanities and the Hathi Trust.”

Requires subscription or purchase

Kotar כותר Subscription

Requires subscription.

  • For Hebrew academic books. Fairly user friendly for reading, though not as user-friendly as Kindle (see later). According to results, around 800 titles in Jewish studies. Leans towards newer publications. Subscription for remote access is sometimes available through libraries, such as my library (Tel Aviv library). Should be pointed out that Kotar links are often linked in National Library’s Merhav search results (see earlier under “Search”).51
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “A website that is an online library for subscribers of scholarly books in Hebrew, in collaboration with Israeli publishers. The title library offers hundreds of digital books and online reference on a wide range of topics from the humanities and social sciences, law, natural sciences and exact sciences and more. The publishers involved in the project include about 100 academic, public and private book publishers. The library began operating in January 2006. Kotar offers online access to a large variety of information sources. Kotar offers online browsing of a selection of over 3,000 titles (as of March 2018) of reference and information books and is constantly expanding.”
  • There are a large amount of works put out by the following publishers:
    • Yad Ben-Tzvi
    • Bialik
    • Sifriyat Heileil Ben-Chaim
  • A few of the hundreds of books that are available there (all in Hebrew, as mentioned):
  1. 51 Such as for the series משנת ארץ ישראל. It appears that the entire series is on Kotar, see Merhav search results and Kotar search results.
  2. 52 This book is also available open-access, in a very user-friendly format, at a dedicated website: מבוא למדרשים | מחלקי המים. Thanks to Eliezer Brodt for pointing this out.
Kindle e-books Purchase
  • Requires purchase for full books. Samples of first 10% of book are often available for free.
  • Great for scholarly books in English. Recommend, in my opinion underrated as a resource for scholarly English books. Great advantages of Kindle e-books:
    • Can highlight and annotate, with a special section with your highlights and annotations, which is great for later skimming and refreshing memory.
    • Can hover for dictionary definitions and Wikipedia entry header paragraphs.
    • As well as many of the other advantages mentioned above for electronic resources: instant availability; takes up minimal space, searchable, easily screenshotted, etc.
    • For most books, can download free sample of beginning of book, usually containing front matter, Table of Contents, intro, and first chapter or two.
  • However, it should be pointed out that Kindle editions are not necessarily “cheap”, though they’re generally cheaper than the physical copies. For example, Halivni’s book mentioned below is currently being sold on Amazon for $104, and the Kindle version is $67.53
  • Some of the many scholarly books available on Kindle:
    1. Secunda, The Iranian Talmud (2013)
    2. Halivni, The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud (2013)
    3. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (2014)
    4. Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (2011)
    5. Fonrobert & Jaffee (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (2007)
  1. 53 As of 20-Jan-2022.
Magnes Press Purchase

Hebrew University’s academic press. Around 350 books available as ebooks for purchase, to read on their app. Came across this while researching this guide, have no idea if it’s any good, but looks promising.

Journals

Open-access

There are a lot of academic articles readily available online.54

Journals whose full archives are currently open-access.

Kiryat Sefer קרית ספר Open access

(years available: 1924 - 1998). Scholarly articles written in Modern Hebrew.

  • Recommended. Contains a huge number of articles by the greats of Hebrew bibliography.
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “The journal was published from the founding of the database in 1925 until 2003. It also contains many bibliographic articles.”
Pe’amim פעמים Open access

(years available: 1979 - 2009). Scholarly articles written in Modern Hebrew. After 2009, some articles open-access, but most not.

Jewish Studies, an Internet Journal Open access

(years available: 2002 -). Scholarly articles written in English and Modern Hebrew

  • Started in 2002, have issued 21 issues so far. Editor-in-Chief - Prof. James L. Kugel. Managing Editor - Prof. Leib Moscovitz.
  • From the home page: “JSIJ is a peer-reviewed electronic journal dealing with all fields of Jewish studies, which is distributed free of charge via the Internet. By publishing articles electronically via the Internet, JSIJ seeks to disseminate articles much faster than is possible with paper publication, and to make these articles readily and conveniently accessible to a wide variety of readers at all times. We hope that the use of this new technology will eventually allow JSIJ to develop in ways not available with conventional print journals, including the possibility of computerized full-text searches and the use of hyperlinks to other texts.”
Ginzei Qedem גנזי קדם Open access

(years available: 2005 - ). Scholarly articles written in Modern Hebrew. Journal is published by the Friedberg Genizah Project and the Ben-Zvi Institute.

  • From the About page: “Ginzei Qedem is a peer reviewed annual publication devoted to Genizah texts and studies published by the Friedberg Genizah Project and the Ben-Zvi Institute. Ginzei Qedem uses the term, “Genizah texts and studies” in the widest sense of the term – fragments of literary works and documents from genizot in Cairo and elsewhere – including all the relevant disciplines – history, literature (including piyyut), language, Biblical studies and exegesis, Talmud and Rabbinics, magic etc. The articles are in Hebrew and English. Seven issues have appeared to date.”
  • See further description in Wikipedia Hebrew: גנזי קדם (שנתון) – ויקיפדיה
HaTzofeh LaHochmat Yisra’el הצופה לחכמת ישראל Open access

Available on HebrewBooks. (years available: 1921 - 1931). Scholarly articles written in Hebrew. See description in Wikipedia Hebrew: הצופה מארץ הגר – ויקיפדיה.

Kovetz al Yad קובץ על יד Open access

Available on HebrewBooks. (years available: 1885 - 1946). Publications of works from manuscripts. See description in Wikipedia Hebrew: מקיצי נרדמים.

Hama’ayan המעין Open access

(years available: 1953 - 2009). Scholarly articles written in Modern Hebrew. Journal is currently affiliated with Yeshivat Sha’alvim.

  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “HaMa'ayan is a quarterly publication, published since 1953, ‘which combines a Torah dimension with a scientific-Torah dimension’ and contains various articles on Halacha, hashkafa, Jewish history and scholarly research.”
  • Available here:
Netu’im נטועים Open access link updated

(years available: 1994 -). Scholarly articles written in Modern Hebrew. Focuses on Torah Sheba’al Peh. Journal is affiliated with Yeshivat Alon Shevut and Herzog College.

Al Atar על אתר Open access link updated

(years available: 1996 -). Scholarly articles written in Modern Hebrew. Focuses on Eretz Yisra’el. Journal is affiliated with Yeshivat Alon Shevut and Herzog College.

Dinei Yisra’el דיני ישראל Open access

(years available: 2009 - ). Scholarly articles written in Modern Hebrew. Focuses on Jewish law. Journal is affiliated with Tel-Aviv University.56

  1. 56 Previous issues of Dinei Yisra’el available at Nevo (נבו) with subscription, years available: 1970 -.
Masechet Open access

(years available: 2004 - ). Scholarly articles written in Modern Hebrew. Focuses on topics related to women. Journal is affiliated with Bar-Ilan University.

Tallelei Orot טללי אורות Open access

(years available: 1989 - ). Scholarly articles written in Modern Hebrew. Journal is affiliated with Orot Yisra’el College. Also selected articles at Daat, in text format.

Oreshet אורשת Open access

(years available: 2010 - ). Scholarly articles written in Modern Hebrew. Journal is affiliated with Orot Yisra’el College.

Moreshet Israel מורשת ישראל Open access

(years available: 2018 - ). Scholarly articles written in Modern Hebrew. Journal is affiliated with Ariel University.

Oqimta אוקימתא Open access

(years available: 2013 - ). Scholarly articles written in Modern Hebrew and English. Journal started by Prof. Shamma Friedman of Bar-Ilan University.

Tradition Open access

(years available: 1958 -).

Hakira Open access

(years available: 2004 - ). Scholarly articles written in English.

  • Wikipedia: “Ḥakirah, The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought is a peer-reviewed academic journal in the field of halakha and Jewish thought. Hakirah is a Jewish journal which publishes articles that reflect a wide range of Orthodox beliefs and ideas. Those who submit articles run the gamut from laypeople, to rabbis, doctors and professors. The first volume of Hakirah was published in the fall of 2004. Each volume generally contains about ten English and two Hebrew articles comprising a total of about 250 pages. A new volume appears about every six to seven months.”
Torani journals on HebrewBooks Open access

Many Torani journals are available on HebrewBooks, by searching the title. Many are also linked to by Halacha Brura in their index of journals, and in their respective Wikipedia entries. These are Torani journals, meaning that they are published by Orthodox institutions. They are all written in Modern Hebrew. The articles in these journals are mostly not relevant for this guide; however, they often contain scholarly articles, especially related to publications of manuscripts of rabinnic works of Geonim, Rishonim, or Aharonim. For ideological reasons, the scholarly articles relevant for this guide generally don’t cover topics earlier than the Geonic period, and they are more likely to publish on recent topics than earlier ones.58

The journals listed under this item (21a–21i) are given as separate entries.

  1. 58 See index of Hebrew Wikipedia entries on Torani journals here: קטגוריה:ישראל: כתבי עת תורניים – ויקיפדיה
Tzefunot צפונות Open access

(years available: 1989 - 1993). Focuses on bibliographic topics. See description in Wikipedia: צפונות.

Kovetz Beis Aharon VeYisra’el קובץ בית אהרן וישראל Open access

(years available: 1986 - 2002). Also available on Otzar Hachochma’s forum.

Pe’alim LeTorah פעלים לתורה Open access
Yerushateinu ירושתנו Open access

See description in Wikipedia: ירושתנו.

Asifas Chachomim אסיפת חכמים Open access
Hitzei Giborim חצי גבורים Open access
Min HaGenazim מן הגנזים Open access
  1. 54 See recent list of Jewish Studies journal websites here: Digitized Historical Magazines and Present-Day Academic Journals | Jewish Museum Berlin

Requires subscription or purchase

JSTOR Subscription
  • 58 journals that focus on the subject of Jewish Studies.59
  1. 59 A commenter to the blogpost noted: “I just want to publicize that one can get 100 articles/month free on JSTOR, which could be enough for most part-time researchers.”
Nevo נבו Subscription
  • Israeli law journals, in Modern Hebrew. Journals there with many articles relevant to history of halacha:
    • Dinei Yisra’el available at Nevo (נבו) with subscription, years available: 1970 -.
    • Sh’naton Hamishpat Ha’ivri (שנתון המשפט העברי) (years available: 1974 - 2006). Journal is affiliated with Hebrew University.
    • Mehkerei Mishpat (מחקרי משפט) (years available: 1980 - ). Journal is affiliated with Bar-Ilan University.
Otzar HaHochma אוצר החכמה Subscription
  • See on this resource above.
  • For example, the journal Areshet (ארשת) is available there. (years available: 1958 - 1980). Journal published by Mossad HaRav Kook, focused on Hebrew bibliography. Links at the Wikipedia entry for the journal.
Project MUSE Subscription
  • Some journals on Project MUSE that focus on Jewish Studies: JQR
EBSCO Subscription

Articles

Open-access

Websites with scholarly articles.

Academia.edu Free, registration
  • I follow around 200 academics. Some of them are for deceased scholars whose students have set up a profile for them, and uploaded their work. I get updates of articles in my “feed” about once a day, and the articles are generally a good fit for my interests. (E.g. Elliot Wolfson has 165 articles there.)
  • Wikipedia - English: “Academia.edu is an American for-profit social networking website for academics. It began as a free and open repository of academic journal articles and registered a .edu domain name when this was not limited to educational institutions.”
  1. 60 There are some concerns about Academia.edu as a platform, see for example these articles: here, here, and heredead link. Thanks to Michelle Margolis for pointing these out.
Academy of Hebrew Language האקדמיה ללשון העברית Open access
  • Scholarly articles in Modern Hebrew.
  • From the page on “Articles”: “The Hebrew Language Academy publishes selected articles here from time to time for the benefit and enjoyment of the visitors to the site. The articles are written by linguists - including members of the Academy and its researchers - and are usually taken from the journals of the Academy: Leshonenu (לשוננו), Ha’Ivrit (Leshonenu L’am) (העברית = לשוננו לעם) and Akadem (אקדם). Some of the articles were written specifically for the academy's website.”
  • Appear in both PDF format, as well as text.
Daat דעת Open access
  • See above. Besides for complete texts of primary works, has many scholarly articles from journals, in text format, such as Sinai (סיני), Shma’atin (שמעתין), Mahanayim (מחניים).
Metah מטח Open access link updated
  • Lots of transcribed scholarly articles in Hebrew. See also the section of the website called “Peshita”dead link (פשיטא).
  • From the About page: “The virtual library project of Metah began in 2000. Metah is a non-profit institution and the library project is non-commercial; The library is open and accessible to anyone for free.”
  • Some examples of articles available:
    • 55 Tarbitz (תרביץ) articles, see list.
Ad Henah עד הנה Open access
  • Lots of PDFs of scholarly articles in Hebrew.
  • From the About page: “A study and research institute that studies the Torah work of Galician and Bukovina Jewry, from the sixteenth century to the present time.”
Ptil Tekhelet פתיל תכלת Open access
  • Lots of PDFs of scholarly articles in Hebrew (shows 530 items). Focuses on the topic of tekhelet.
Author academic websites Open access

Author academic websites, generally hosted on the website of the university that they’re affiliated with (e.g. Yehuda Liebes)

Ask the author Open access

Ask the author - generally amenable to sending their own articles and dissertation.

Requires subscription or purchase

Tools for Navigating Secondary Literature

Bibliographic Information and Indexes

Open-access

RAMBI רמב"י Open access
  • My understanding is that “The Bibliography of The Hebrew Book” has been incorporated into “Merhav” (see above).
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “An indexed and cataloged article index (or bibliography) of thousands of academic and other articles in a wide range of fields in the Jewish Studies, the study of the Land of Israel and the State of Israel, and is the largest and most comprehensive database of its kind in the world. The information contained in Rambi was collected from thousands of scientific journals, literary or documentary journals, collections and files of one-time articles on a specific topic, in Hebrew, English, French, German and other languages and in the Judaic languages: Yiddish, Arabic, Ladino and others; most of them found in the National Library of Israel. The criteria for inclusion in Rambi are that the publication be in an academic publication or another recognized and respected stage, or that it be useful for academic research purposes.”
RAMBISH רמבי"ש Open access

Same concept as RAMBI, but for articles appearing in Orthodox journals.

Cotar Project - Collection of Torah Articles Open access

Footnote 61: some functionality requires Internet Explorer and a specific plug-in.

  • A database of Torah journals/periodicals. Has a list of periodicals, and also breakdown by topic.
  1. 61 This resource was pointed out by the commenter “Sam” to the pt. 2 blogpost. Some functionality of “Cotar” doesn’t work on Chrome or other Chromium browsers; it requires Internet Explorer and a specific plug-in, which for technical reasons I was unable to test.
Tiresias: The Ancient Mediterranean Religions Source Database Open access dead link
  • “An aggregation of (currently about 700) back-of-book indices, both subject and text indices. It is by no means limited to Rabbinics, but includes them.”
  1. 62 Private communication from Dr. Moshe Blidstein. He wrote to me further: “you can read a short About section on the site, or a longer description here: https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/1/000651/000651.html. There are a number of options, we can look at a subject - e.g., https://tiresias.haifa.ac.il/?subj=burialdead link. This will give all kinds of things, but certainly include also Rabbinics results (if you scroll down). The search can also be limited chronologically to the relevant centuries if more focus is needed. It is true that in such subjects the main perspective of the site is comparative. You can also look at subjects which are "Jewish", e.g., https://tiresias.haifa.ac.il/?subj=synagoguedead link will of course be more focused. The other way if through texts. the general list is here: https://tiresias.haifa.ac.il/textsdead link b. sanhedrin, for example: https://tiresias.haifa.ac.il/?subj=ezezez:1778dead link. If you click in to one of the pages (preferably one with alot of subjects) you get a list of intertexts, subjects, and of the books discussing this text.”

Requires subscription or purchase

Index of References Dealing with Talmudic Literature (Lieberman Index) Subscription

Requires subscription.

  • From the home page:
    • “The Index of References Dealing with Talmudic Literature, offering pinpointed citations from hundreds of classic and modern scholarly works directly related to the specific selected passage within Talmudic literature.”
Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies Subscription

Requires subscription.

  • From Bar-Ilan University’s library guide: “Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies is an interdisciplinary database encompassing history, religion, philosophy, literature, sociology and political science. Its chronological and geographical range stretches from the Bible to the present, including communities from the Americas to Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, South and East Asia, and Africa. Oxford Bibliographies Jewish Studies offers selected articles that break down subject areas into their component parts and pithy annotations that summarize the main contribution of each citation. The database is one of the components of the Oxford Bibliography, a database that offers an authoritative guide to the current scholarship, containing original commentary and annotations.”

New in 2026

Unified index for Hebrew language research (Ephraim Meiri) מפתח מאוחד ללשון חכמים Open access New in 2026

In development; checked live 9-Oct-2026.

Combines the language indexes of research books on Hebrew and Aramaic of the sources and their interpretation, from the Tannaitic period to the revival of Hebrew (Biblical and Modern Hebrew are left out on purpose). The aim is to fill the gap left by the lack of an up-to-date research dictionary for post-biblical Hebrew.

  • Search entries, words, roots, phrases, patterns (משקלים) and linguistic phenomena; there is a bibliography of the indexed books and an about page.
  • Started in 2025; several authors (among them Menahem Kister and the late Menahem I. Kahana) contributed the indexes of their books. Marked by the site as in development.

Tertiary literature

Encyclopedias

Open-access

Jewish Encyclopedia Open access

In English.

  • Large parts of it have been incorporated into the corresponding English Wikipedia entries.
Wikipedia - Hebrew Open access
  • Great source for Jewish topics. I personally have found Wikipedia to be great sources for, among other topics:
    • Biographies of Jews
    • Jewish communities
    • Jewish Law (halacha)
Hamichlol Open access
  • Wikipedia - Hebrew: “Hamichlol is a wiki-based Haredi encyclopedia. As of 2023, most of the entries in the collection are exact copies of Hebrew Wikipedia entries or filtered versions of them for ultra-Orthodox. Next to them, it has entries that were originally written for Hamichlol. The website was launched in 2015.”
  • The entries original to Hamichlol are especially strong for Jewish topics, especially biographies of rabbis.
Encyclopedia Talmudit - Micropedia האנציקלופדיה התלמודית Open access

In rabbinic/modern Hebrew, on Talmudic topics.

  • From the webpage: “From Micropedia to Encyclopedia: Wikishiva (ויקישיבה) continues its collaboration with the Talmudic Encyclopedia project and now becomes the home of the new Talmudic Encyclopedia entries. Now, beyond the Talmudic Micropedia project, the entries of the Encyclopedia itself will be published here. It is important to note that entries published here are not currently published as books. To date, 251 entries have been written in the Talmudic Encyclopedia project. The Talmudic Encyclopedia: The new Talmudic Encyclopedia entries are already on Wikishiva! You can browse all the entries on the site or search using the search box, select the first letter, or select from the new entries on the site. The Talmudic Micropedia: The Talmudic Micropedia is a concise and up-to-date treasure trove of the entries of the Talmudic Encyclopedia, in a flowing and clear style.”

Requires subscription or purchase

Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd edition Subscription

In English.

  • Second edition published by Gale and available on their website. Requires subscription, many libraries give access through OpenAthens, see for example Bar-Ilan University’s page.
  • The entries (all? some?) of Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd edition, appear to have been incorporated into encyclopedia.com, and fully hyperlinked to other EJ entries. The entries seem to be able to be found only via search, there’s no way to browse list of entries. See google search "Encyclopaedia Judaica site:https://www.encyclopedia.com/".
  • Bar-Ilan University overview: “Provides an overview of Jewish life and knowledge from the Second Temple period to the contemporary State of Israel, from Rabbinic to modern Yiddish literature, from Kabbalah to "Americana" and from Zionism to the contribution of Jews to world cultures.”
Encyclopedias published by Brill Subscription

In English:

  • Encyclopaedia of Judaism Online.
    • From the webpage: “The prize-winning Encyclopaedia of Judaism is now available online. More than 200 entries comprising more than 1,000,000 words. This unique reference tool offers an authoritative, comprehensive, and systematic presentation of the current state of scholarship on fundamental issues of Judaism, both past and present. Comprehensive and up-to-date, it reflects the highest standards in scholarship. Covering a tradition of nearly four thousand years, some of the most distinguished scholars in the field describe the way of life, history, art, theology, philosophy, and the practices and beliefs of the Jewish people.”
  • Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World Online.
    • From the webpage: “[T]he first cohesive and discreet reference work which covers the Jews of Muslim lands particularly in the late medieval, early modern and modern periods. The expanded online version, EJIW Online (started in 2010), is updated twice annually with newly commissioned articles, illustrations, multimedia, and primary source material. Interdisciplinary articles cover a wide range of topics from history, law, music, visual arts, social sciences, philosophy, anthropology and demography.”
  • Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture Online.
    • From the webpage: “From Europe to America to the Middle East, North Africa and other non-European Jewish settlement areas the Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture covers the recent history of the Jews from 1750 until the 1950s. Translated from German into English, approximately 800 keywords present the current state of international research and depict a complex portrait of Jewish life - illustrated by many maps and images. About 40 key articles convey central themes on topics like autonomy, exile, emancipation, literature, liturgy, music or the science of Judaism.”
  • Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics Online.
    • From the webpage: “[A] systematic and comprehensive treatment of all aspects of the history and study of the Hebrew language from its earliest attested form to the present day. The encyclopedia contains overview articles that provide a readable synopsis of current knowledge of the major periods and varieties of the Hebrew language as well as thematically-organized entries which provide further information on individual topics. With over 950 entries and approximately 400 contributing scholars, the Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics is the authoritative reference work for students and researchers in the fields of Hebrew linguistics, general linguistics, Biblical studies, Hebrew and Jewish literature, and related fields.”

Dictionaries

Open-access

Wiktionary - Hebrew Open access

(H). Generally very good entries, with ample primary and secondary sources.

Jastrow’s A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature Open access

Disclosure: the Bekiut edition is the author's own project.

In English:

  • Bekiut: here. Modernized presentation, with expanded abbreviations, search, and browsing by letter. (Added 2026.)
  • Sefaria: here. Transcribed and searchable, with hyperlinked Table of Contents.
  • Wiktionary: here. Transcribed, with hyperlinked Table of Contents.
  • Tyndale House: here. Scanned, with hyperlinked Table of Contents.
Ben-Yehuda Dictionary מילון בן-יהודה - מילון העברית הישנה והחדשה Open access

Transcribed, with hyperlinked Table of Contents.

New in 2026

The Assyrian Dictionary (CAD): digital edition (demo) Open access New in 2026

Demo; checked live 9-Oct-2026.

Demo covering CAD volumes P, R, T, Ṭ and U/W, parsed from the typeset volumes (no OCR), with the page facsimile alongside each article.

  • Search by headword or root, English definition, or full article text; filter by volume, part of speech, and etymology (Sumerian, Hurrian, Aramaic, West Semitic, ...).
  • "Semitic concordance": filters for entries that BDB, HALOT, DCH, CAL (Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon) or Sokoloff cite as Akkadian comparanda, plus computed cognate candidates, which the site itself calls prompts for research, not etymologies.
  • Optional display of the Akkadian forms in Hebrew script with niqqud.
  • Useful for Akkadian loanwords and cognates in Talmudic and Targumic Aramaic.

Artificial Intelligence (new in 2026)

AI study and research assistants

Retrieval with citations

Since the 2023 edition, large language models and related AI tools have become part of how many people read and search Jewish texts. This section gathers tools that are useful for serious study and research, and developer resources for building such tools.

AI tools are good at some tasks: finding passages when one does not know the exact wording, suggesting parallels and later discussions, adding vocalization, expanding abbreviations, giving a first draft of a translation, and turning manuscript images into searchable text. Tools that retrieve passages from a fixed library and link every claim to its source are much more reliable than general chatbots that answer from memory.

The main risk is invented or wrong citations. Models produce sources that do not exist, attach real quotations to the wrong work, and summarize a sugya or responsum with confidence and in error. Treat every AI answer as a lead, not a finding: open the cited source, read it in context, and check the edition and wording before relying on it. Machine transcriptions and translations need the same check against the original.

Tools in this field change quickly. Status notes record what was checked on 9-Oct-2026; several projects found in the source lists were already offline.

Sefaria: AI features and Library Assistant Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026. The sefaria.org URL redirects by language (e.g. to sefaria.org.il).

  • The page sets out where Sefaria uses AI: LLM-based citation linking (also through the Sefaria Linker on outside sites), AI-assisted introductions and source selection on about 1,000 English topic pages, a Pirkei Avot learning guide drafted by AI and reviewed by staff, relevance sorting of user source sheets, and an AI-drafted, human-edited English translation of the Kli Yakar.
  • The Library Assistant, an experimental chatbot built on Claude that answers questions with cited, linked sources, launched in spring 2026.
  • Policy points: AI content is marked (an outline star for AI-assisted content with human review, a filled star for unreviewed AI content); AI output must point back to sources in the library; AI is not used for halakhic rulings or personal advice.
Mekoros Freemium New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Covers Tanakh, both Talmuds, Rishonim, Acharonim, halakha and responsa; built on the Sefaria library.
  • States that each result is checked against the primary text. How this check works is not described, so treat it as a claim and verify quotations yourself.
  • A pricing page exists; the free scope was not confirmed.
Binata בינתא Freemium New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Library: Tanakh and commentaries, Bavli and Yerushalmi, midrash, Rishonim, Shulchan Arukh with commentaries, and responsa; draws on Sefaria. Subscribers can add their own texts.
  • Each quotation is checked against the source; unmatched quotes are flagged as unverified. A "research mode" writes a longer article.
  • Free monthly quota for registered users; premium subscription in shekels. Interface mainly Hebrew, with an English option. Presents itself as a study aid, not a halakhic authority.
Ituria Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Uses a reason-and-act agent design with a local full-text index and the Sefaria API. Built in connection with the Otzaria project.
  • Works with several model providers (Claude, GPT, Gemini) or local open models through Ollama.
  • Code on GitHub; a demo is linked from the README.
Torah Research Board Unknown New in 2026

Site responds (9-Oct-2026); features not verified in detail.

  • A Sefaria "team pick" in the Powered by Sefaria list.
  • The site is a JavaScript app; details of the AI model and its citation handling could not be checked automatically.

Chat and explanation

Yochai Unknown New in 2026

Site responds (9-Oct-2026); described as a "Jewish Learning Companion".

  • Built on a curated library of more than 1,000 primary sources with entity data linked to Sefaria.
  • Developed by Zohar Atkins (per jewishai.me).
PshatGPT Freemium New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026. Page notes a move to a new home and that account sync was not yet configured.

  • Covers the Babylonian Talmud and Tanya (more Hasidic works announced); texts come from Sefaria. Offers several explanation styles and longer "iyun" sessions.
  • Daily free limit; beyond it users can supply their own Anthropic API key.
  • Explanations are model output, not a commentary: check them against Rashi and the standard commentaries.

Text processing: vocalization, abbreviations, translation

Dicta tools (2026 update) דיקטה Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Also listed in the 2023 guide (Dicta entry under Search and Related Tools). Tools most relevant here:
  • Dicta, led by Moshe Koppel, also publishes open language models (see the Dicta Hugging Face entry below).
Sofer.ai Freemium New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Transcripts have timestamped topic outlines and click-to-play audio; a search tool ("Maishiv") answers only from the user's own transcripts and notes.
  • OCR for scanned Hebrew and Rashi script.
  • Free tier (a few transcripts a month) and paid personal and commercial plans.
  • Founded by Zachary Fisch; see the Seforim Chatter interview under Readings.

OCR and handwritten text recognition

MiDRASH (ERC Synergy project) Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Full title: "Migrations of Textual and Scribal Traditions via Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Medieval Manuscripts in Hebrew Script" (ERC grant 101071829). Partners: EPHE-PSL (Paris), Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University, with the National Library of Israel and the University of Haifa.
  • Targets about 30,000 manuscripts and 300,000 fragments in Hebrew, Aramaic and Judeo-Arabic; uses NLI KTIV images and the eScriptorium/kraken toolchain (see Escriptorium in the 2023 guide).
  • First outputs are on Zenodo (next two entries). A conference on computational manuscript studies is planned at Tel Aviv University in December 2026.
MiDRASH automatic transcriptions of the Cairo Geniza Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Released November 2025 (CC BY 4.0), a zipped text file of about 445 MB; made with kraken. Fragments are matched to KTIV by their system number.
  • The publishers call it "very preliminary and imperfect": segmentation and reading errors, some wrong reading order, vertical text mostly skipped, weaker Arabic-script results. Use it to find fragments, not to quote them.
  • Corrected transcriptions are to be added to KTIV.
MiDRASH Geniza HTR model Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Fine-tuned on documentary and literary Geniza texts (including Tannaitic literature and Talmud) on top of a broad Hebrew-script base model. Abbreviations are not expanded.
  • Version 2, February 2026; license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Transkribus: Hebrew and Yiddish models Freemium New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Public models include DiJeSt 3.0 (printed Hebrew and Yiddish; see the 2023 entry on the DiJeSt model), a 15th-century Sephardic semi-cursive model, the Pinkas Brody model for 19th-century communal records, and several Yiddish handwriting models.
  • No general public model for medieval Ashkenazi or Italian hands was found; for such material users usually train their own model (about 50-150 transcribed pages).
  • Free monthly credits; paid plans for larger work.
Tikkoun Sofrim Open access New in 2026

Project blog found via web search 9-Oct-2026; current activity not confirmed.

  • Joint project of the University of Haifa, the National Library of Israel and EPHE (Paris). Manuscripts were first read with kraken; each line is corrected by several volunteers and the best reading is chosen automatically.
  • Reported character error rates of about 3-9% before correction, on manuscripts in Paris, Parma, the Vatican and Geneva.
  • Described in the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (2021). A forerunner of the MiDRASH work.

Developer resources: APIs, MCP servers, models and datasets

APIs, MCP servers and tutorials

Sefaria MCP servers Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Sefaria Texts MCP connects an assistant to the library for text questions with cited answers; Sefaria Developers MCP helps write code against the API.
  • Tools include text retrieval, search, links between texts, dictionary search, bibliographic data and manuscript images.
  • Open source: Sefaria/sefaria-mcp. Docs last updated September 2026.
  • An assistant connected this way can still misread or over-summarize a text; the gain is that its quotes come from the library and can be checked.
Sefaria Linker Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026. The sefaria.org URL redirects by language.

  • Sefaria's AI page describes the Linker as using LLMs to identify citations both inside the library and on outside websites.
  • Sefaria's open citation-recognition models are on its Hugging Face page.
Torah MCP Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Open source (MIT). Sixteen free tools, including Sefaria text search, HebrewBooks search, calendar and gematria.
  • The site itself recommends using it together with Sefaria's official MCP server.
Torah Scholar (agent skill) Freemium New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Commands for search, verse lookup, links and related texts; uses the Sefaria API with no key.
  • Core features free; a paid add-on unlocks extra features.
Ask the Rambam: RAG tutorial Open access New in 2026

Video page responds (9-Oct-2026).

  • A worked example of the main technique behind citation-grounded tools: retrieve passages first, then let the model answer only from them.

Models and datasets

Sefaria on Hugging Face Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Models: Hebrew and English Torah NER, reference and sub-reference recognizers, and a BEREL-based linker model.
  • Datasets: Hebrew and English library dumps, the links graph, Rabbinic Hebrew-English pairs, a gold NER set, and the Rabbinic Embedding Leaderboard (next entry).
Rabbinic Embedding Leaderboard Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • About 3,700 test pairs across Talmud, Mishnah, Midrash Rabbah, halakha and other categories; scores for 32 models (results dated January to September 2026).
  • Useful for anyone choosing an embedding model for semantic search over rabbinic texts. MIT license.
Sefaria Export Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Files are in a public cloud bucket; the repo holds a monthly-updated index (books.json) and download scripts.
  • Licenses vary by text version; check each text's license before reuse.
Dicta on Hugging Face (DictaLM, DictaBERT, BEREL) Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • DictaLM 3.0 (late 2025): open-weight Hebrew-English chat models in 24B, 12B and 1.7B sizes, Apache-2.0.
  • DictaBERT: encoders for segmentation, morphology, syntax, lexical tasks and vocalization.
  • BEREL (BERT Embeddings for Rabbinic-Encoded Language, 2022): a model trained for rabbinic Hebrew; BEREL 3.0 is the newer version.
  • Most are for developers; the Nakdan and other Dicta web tools put them to use for end users.

Directories

Hebrew and Arabic NLP resources (NNLP-IL) Open access New in 2026

Checked live 9-Oct-2026.

  • Mostly modern Hebrew, but includes rabbinic and historical items such as BEREL, the Sefaria export, Project Ben-Yehuda dumps, JPress and the KIMA historical gazetteer.
  • Run by Israel's National NLP Program.