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Jews have been writing, adding to the pool of Torah knowledge for thousands of years. How many complete or partial works do we have accessible, even by any means today?

Al Berko
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Sam
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  • The national library of Israel has about 5 million volumes – Double AA Oct 08 '18 at 02:57
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    52,020 Classical Hebrew Books for Free Download – Dr. Shmuel Oct 08 '18 at 03:00
  • Welcome to MiYodeya and Sam and thanks for this first intriguing question. Great to have you learn with us! – mbloch Oct 08 '18 at 03:36
  • Hmmm... how would you count various editions (with minor variant readings)? What about translations (and into multiple languages)? And where do you draw the line? (At story books? Chassidish tales? Rabbinical biographies? Authored by Conservative Rabbis? Reform Clergy?) And what is a work? (A 5-foot high street pashkevil like at https://www.palestineposterproject.org/special-collection/pashkevil ? a 10-page diatribe / pseudo-ad for something?) – Danny Schoemann Oct 08 '18 at 07:59
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    @DoubleAA - That includes primary and secondary sources on all aspects of the Islamic religion, from its inception to the present day. Among these are Islamic law, theology, philosophy, mysticism and legal codes; the history and study of Islamic cultures. It also includes "Israeli" things including newspapers, maps, music , audio-visual and electronic material, all in a wide variety of languages and scripts. Not quite part of the pool of Torah knowledge. :-) – Danny Schoemann Oct 08 '18 at 08:04
  • @DannySchoemann the Hebrew word "seforim" is a very vague term to choose. What makes something a sefer in any sense beyond "book"? Is a scientific treatise on animal species in the Torah a sefer? Is a collection of philosophical essays by a rabbi a sefer? – rosends Oct 08 '18 at 10:33
  • @Danny it's just an order of magnitude estimate. there is no precise answer available as you know – Double AA Oct 08 '18 at 11:28
  • Besides various definition (and other) issues, does this question make any sense? There are far more seforim than the books we could read and understand here all combined in our lifetimes... – Kazi bácsi Oct 08 '18 at 12:28
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    And to think that no so long ago that list was finite and documented in שרי האלף - info at https://he.wikisource.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%A8%D7%99_%D7%94%D7%90%D7%9C%D7%A3 – Danny Schoemann Oct 09 '18 at 08:24

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I would divide the answer into 2 periods.

Until about 50 years ago, the list of printed Torah literature was small enough for their bibliographies to fit into a 2-volume book - namely שרי האלף (Sarei Ha'Elef) - Masters of Thousands - referring to the 1,000 year period from the time the Talmud was sealed until the book was printed.

It was printed in 1959 in New York and then again in 1984 with all the recent additions. Since then people have been trying to keep it updated.

I can't find a "total number of books" that it contains, probably since it would depend on how you (want to) count similar editions, making the number meaningless.

More details (in Hebrew) can be found in its WikiText entry.

The second period started "recently" - somewhere before that 21st century began, when publishing became "trivial"; get a laptop, type (or copy/paste) in your spare time and once you have a few hundred pages then for a few hundred bucks you can publish your book.

Since being an author of a Torah-subject book (i.e. Sefer) is considered a prestigious achievement, it seems to have become the goal of many a Kollel-man to join that club.

As a result, there are multiple new Seforim (plural of Sefer) published daily!

And that's in the world of the Sefer, before we get to the grey area of publication appropriate for the religious home like Kosher novels, Chasidishe tales, Kosher Comic Books and similar.

At the moment you can access 90,200 Seforim (as scanned pages of the original, and searchable) if you have Access to Otzar haChochma - and they claim to be adding 5,000 Seforim yearly!

Disclaimer - I have never used Otzar haChochma and am not affiliated with them, I just see their ads occasionally and they are a good example of the scope of what the OP is looking for.

Point being that as you read this, the list grows.

Danny Schoemann
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  • For the record, Otzar Hachochma has a lot of doubles (and triples, and qaudruples, etc.) so the actual number of discrete sefarim available there is significantly lower. – Alex Oct 09 '18 at 09:21
  • @Alex - can you define "doubles" - I'm sure they don't simply scan the identical book twice. – Danny Schoemann Oct 09 '18 at 12:19
  • @DannySchoemann They scan different printings/editions of the same sefer. For example, searching אבודרהם gives 14 hits, almost all of which are different editions of the same thing (in addition to separating a work into its respective volumes). – magicker72 Oct 09 '18 at 14:24
  • @DannySchoemann As magicker72 said, they have multiple editions of many of the sefarim. – Alex Oct 09 '18 at 14:55
  • There are more... – chacham Nisan Oct 09 '18 at 16:57