Answer-layer measurement · by subject
The Zohar and the sefirot
A handful of reference works carry most of it, with britannica.com the most frequent at 5 of 30 links, and no single source dominating.
Perplexity · captured 2026-09-21 · 30 links · 17 domains
1 of 30 links went to a primary-text library, against 16 to encyclopedias and reference works.
3 of 30 links came from forums, blogs or document uploads.
Hekhal did not surface for any of these questions on this date, although it publishes the primary material listed below. That absence is the measurement working: it is recorded the same way anyone else's would be.
Why this subject looks like this
The Zohar is a thirteenth-century Aramaic work presenting itself as a much older one, and the question of who wrote it is a live scholarly matter rather than a settled fact. The reference layer handles the authorship question competently. Where the answers thin out is the text itself: the Pritzker edition is the scholarly standard and is not open, so a reader who follows an answer toward the actual Aramaic meets either a paywall or a century-old public-domain rendering with no apparatus to say which it is. There is a second reason the answers stay descriptive. The Zohar is long, its Aramaic is deliberately difficult, and it is theologically live for communities who read it devotionally as well as for scholars who read it historically. A source that is safe for one of those audiences often reads as tendentious to the other, so general reference works stay cautious and specialist editions stay closed, which leaves very little in the middle that is both open and careful enough to be worth citing.
The questions, and what each one returned
what is the zohar and who wrote it
15 links · 11 domains · largest single source britannica.com at 27%
britannica.com (4), en.wikipedia.org (2), academic.oup.com, africame.factsanddetails.com, encyclopedia.com, guides.lib.umich.edu, jewishcurrents.org, jtsa.edu, judaism.stackexchange.com, poetry-chaikhana.com, scribd.com.
Composition: encyclopedia or reference work 7, journal, press or university 3, other site 3, forum, blog or upload 2. Absent entirely: primary-text library.
what does sefirot mean in kabbalah
15 links · 11 domains · largest single source jewishencyclopedia.com at 20%
jewishencyclopedia.com (3), encyclopedia.com (2), jewishvirtuallibrary.org (2), academic.oup.com, britannica.com, chabad.org, en.wikipedia.org, neohasid.org, scribd.com, sefaria.org, taggedwiki.zubiaga.org.
Composition: encyclopedia or reference work 9, other site 3, journal, press or university 1, forum, blog or upload 1, primary-text library 1.
The sources that appeared exactly once here
africame.factsanddetails.com, chabad.org, guides.lib.umich.edu, jewishcurrents.org, jtsa.edu, judaism.stackexchange.com, neohasid.org, poetry-chaikhana.com, sefaria.org, taggedwiki.zubiaga.org.
10 of the 17 domains on this subject appeared a single time. On a subject whose primary texts are old, multilingual and largely out of copyright, that is the space an accessible edition is competing for.
Every source that answered
- Encyclopedia or reference work · 16
- Journal, press or university · 4
- Other site · 6
- Forum, blog or upload · 3
- Primary-text library · 1
What Hekhal publishes on this subject
Free to read, openly licensed, and free to assign. Every edition shows the language it was rendered from and names the edition it rests on.
What this does not show
Method and raw data: protocol.json · the capture, both CC-BY 4.0. Run it on an engine we did not and send the file; reruns are published beside this one, not merged into it.