The Zohar

Ancient Voice, Castilian Hand

First attested
the 1280sThe oldest datable quotation is from 1281: Isaac ibn Sahula, living like Moses de León at Guadalajara, quotes a passage of the Midrash ha-Ne'elam at the end of his Meshal ha-Kadmoni, and Todros Abulafia quotes the same work in Otsar ha-Kavod at about the same time. De León's signed Hebrew works, written between 1286 and 1293, quote Zoharic material with steadily growing openness, which Gershom Scholem read as veiled references to his own authorship; Scholem dated the Midrash ha-Ne'elam to 1275–81 and the bulk of the Zohar to 1281–86. The first printed editions are Mantua (1558–60) and Cremona (1559–60).
Claimed
2nd centuryasserted by The Zohar itself, which sets its teaching in the mouth of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his companions in the Galilee of the generation after the Bar Kokhba revolt. The attribution is standard within kabbalistic tradition and remains the reading of many observant readers today.

The claim runs about 1.1 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

Scholem dated the Zohar to Castile in 1281–86 and then defended the act — pseudepigraphy, in his words, "is far removed from forgery" — and the authorship question has stayed open behind him: Liebes's circle of authors in 1993, and Abrams's contested claim in 2013 that no single book stands behind the printed Zohar at all.

The foundational mystical commentary of Kabbalah, exploring the hidden spiritual dimensions and divine emanations of the Torah.

Sefer ha-Zohar presents itself as the teaching of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, walking second-century Galilee with his companions. Its Aramaic was nobody's spoken language: Gershom Scholem called it artificial, a mixture of the Babylonian Talmud and Targum Onkelos with thirteenth-century Hebrew behind it, while Yehuda Liebes accepts the fact and rejects the word — Aramaic was the traditional language of mystery. Scholem dated the bulk of the book to 1281–86, gave it to Moses de León of Castile, who died at Arévalo in 1305, and judged the Ra'aya Meheimna and Tikkunei ha-Zohar a later and clumsier hand around 1300. Liebes argued in 1993 for a circle rather than a man; Daniel Abrams argued in 2013 that no single book stands behind the printed Zohar at all.

Light

Theology carried by story, not system — companions on the road, expounding Torah to each other. Scholem, having dismantled the attribution, still held pseudepigraphy a legitimate form and no fraud. Berikh Shemeh, from its Vayakhel section, is said in many rites as the ark opens.

Shadow

Its authority was contested from within. Leon Modena finished Ari Nohem at Venice in 1639 against the attribution to bar Yochai, unprinted until 1840; Jacob Emden's Mitpaḥat Sefarim (Altona, 1768) catalogued its anachronisms — Emden a kabbalist, arguing the book had been corrupted, not invented.

Sources and verification10 sources · 5 links

Primary source

  • Sefer ha-Zohar, Vayakhel; the Berikh Shemeh passage (Sefaria, Vayakhel 17:225)The book sets its teaching in the mouth of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his companions in Galilee; the Aramaic passage Berikh Shemeh, recited in many rites when the ark is opened and the Torah scroll taken out, stands in its Vayakhel section (Sefaria's addressing, Vayakhel 17:225 — the folio, standardly given as Zohar II 206a, was not checked against a critical edition).
  • Daniel C. Matt, Nathan Wolski and Joel Hecker (trans.), The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, 12 vols, 2017, Stanford University Press, 2004-2017; vols 1-9 Matt, vol. 10 Wolski, vol. 11 Hecker, vol. 12 Wolski and HeckerThe standard English of the Zohar, made from an Aramaic text reconstructed from manuscripts rather than from a printed vulgate; the twelve volumes appeared between 2004 and 2017 and are not all the work of one translator.

Scholarship

  • Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3rd rev. edn, 1954, Fifth Lecture, 'The Zohar I: The Book and Its Author'That the Zohar's Aramaic is an artificial literary language, mixing the dialects of the Babylonian Talmud and Targum Onkelos with the Hebrew of the thirteenth century visible behind it, and could not have been spoken in second-century Palestine; that the oldest datable quotation from the Zohar is the Midrash ha-Ne'elam passage quoted by Isaac ibn Sahula in 1281, with Todros Abulafia quoting the same work at about the same time; that the Midrash ha-Ne'elam dates from 1275-81, the bulk of the Zohar from 1281-86, and the Ra'aya Meheimna and Tikkunim from about 1300 by a weaker imitator; that the author was Moses de Leon, born around 1240 and dead at Arevalo in 1305; and that pseudepigraphy is far removed from forgery and has always been admitted as a legitimate category of religious literature.
  • Yehuda Liebes, Studies in the Zohar, 1993, 'How the Zohar Was Written'; SUNY PressThat the Zohar was not written by a single author but issued from a circle of kabbalists resembling the fellowship the book itself describes.
  • Yehuda Liebes, 'Hebrew and Aramaic as Languages of the Zohar', Aramaic Studies 4.1, 2006, pp. 35-52That the Zohar's Aramaic belongs to no known dialect and was never a spoken language, but that the scholarly label 'artificial' is wrong: Aramaic was traditionally the language of mystical matter, and the choice of it was a natural one.
  • Yaacob Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice, 2011, Princeton University Press; ch. on early modern criticism of the ZoharThat Leon Modena completed Ari Nohem at Venice in 1639, arguing against the Zohar's antiquity and against its attribution to Shimon bar Yochai, and that the work circulated only in manuscript until it was printed in 1840.
  • Daniel Abrams, Kabbalistic Manuscripts and Textual Theory, 2nd rev. edn, 2013, Magnes / Cherub PressThat there is no single book called the Zohar behind the printed editions — the 'book' is a modern construct imposed on a fluid manuscript tradition. Deliberately provocative and not universally accepted; Matt, Liebes and Meroz work with a more book-like Zohar.
  • Boaz Huss (trans. Nave), The Zohar: Reception and Impact, 2016, Littman Library of Jewish CivilizationThat the Zohar's canonisation was gradual and achieved chiefly in the sixteenth century, and that its first printings — Mantua 1558-60 and Cremona 1559-60 — were themselves contested.
  • Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg, 'Mysticism, Rationalism, and Criticism: Rabbi Jacob Emden as an Early Modern Critic and Printer', Harvard Theological Review 115.1, 2022, pp. 110-135That Emden's Mitpahat Sefarim (Altona, 1768) casts doubt on the Zohar's provenance, authorship and age while taking mystical sources seriously — he attributed the text's corruptions to copyists and printers rather than rejecting the book.

Further reading

  • Arthur Green, A Guide to the Zohar, 2004, Stanford University PressOrientation to the Zohar's date, composition, structure and sefirotic symbolism; the standard short introduction, published alongside the Pritzker edition.

Linked entries

  • Set againstSefer YetzirahAttested

    Both hang on an ancient master — Sefer Yetzirah on Abraham, the Zohar on Shimon bar Yochai — and neither turns out to have a single stable original: A. Peter Hayman (2004) shows Sefer Yetzirah survives in distinct recensions, Daniel Abrams (2013) that no one book stands behind the printed Zohar.

  • Transmitted intoTree of LifeAttested

    The sefirotic symbolism the Zohar elaborates is the doctrine the familiar ten-circle diagram renders, but J. H. Chajes (2022) dates such diagrams from the fourteenth century onward and shows their layouts varied widely — the picture is later than the book, and was never fixed.

  • Set againstThe Corpus HermeticumAttested

    Two bodies of teaching whose deep antiquity philology later withdrew: Isaac Casaubon dated the Hermetica to the Christian era in 1614, and Leon Modena in 1639 and Jacob Emden in 1768 made the parallel case against the Zohar's second-century setting.

  • Set againstThe Nag Hammadi LibraryA modern connection

    Philology cuts both ways: it dated the Zohar to thirteenth-century Castile against its claim of second-century authorship, while the Oxyrhynchus fragments printed in 1897 and 1904 as unidentified sayings of Jesus, matched to the Coptic only after 1945, showed a Greek Gospel of Thomas circulating by about 200.

  • Gave rise toShekhinahAttested

    The bride parted from her husband and reunited on the Sabbath is the Zohar's development, in Castile in the 1280s. The Talmud's Shekhinah goes into exile with Israel but has no husband to be exiled from — that separation is a rupture inside God, and it is new.

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