The Emergence of the Zohar
🧿 With enormous impact on future Jewish culture, Sefer ha-Zohar emerged in the late thirteenth century in Castile and, within a few centuries, became the major text of the Kabbalah.
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The group of Kabbalistic works known as the Zohar (Radiance), which bubbled up in the waning decades of the thirteenth century in Spain, have had an outsized influence upon subsequent Jewish religious life and spiritual expression, especially in the modern era. Perhaps due to this outsized influence, there are particularly numerous, and substantial, open questions that dog the storied texts. I am not, as we say in the beit midrash, coming להכריע—to decide among competing views—but to hopefully be your guide through the questions and their importance, along with a few key early sources.
First, the story of the emergence of the Zohar, as agreed upon by traditionalists and critical scholars alike: at least some texts that would soon be referred to as Sefer ha-Zohar, among other names, had begun to circulate in Castile (central Spain) in the early 1280s. These texts were powerful. They concerned deep secrets of the Torah, as well as reasons behind the commandments, visions of the heavenly realms, elaborations of the afterlife, and messianic hopes. Major sections of the Zohar were written in the form of Midrash, the traditional genre of rabbinic interpretation. They recorded the stories of the profound sage, familiar from rabbinic literature and especially the Talmud, Rabbi Shimon bar (or ben) Yochai, known also by the acronym Rashbi, and his companions, who formed a mystical fellowship. The midrashic narrative that surrounds the esoteric exegesis makes the cast of characters, which include an elderly man (Sabba) who is unfathomably wise and his prodigy of a grandson (Yanuka), a memorable aspect of the experience of reading the text.
Here the agreements largely end, with traditionalists accepting that the Zohar is an ancient text whose core was authored by Rashbi and his students around the second century (with some later additions). Meanwhile, the consensus among academic scholars is that the Zohar was authored in thirteenth-century Castile by a group of mystics led by R. Moshe de León, who was the principal author of the Zohar’s core. In the intervening years, there were also some traditionalists who argued that the Zohar was not an authentic Tannaitic work, with varying implications, but the majority of Jewish authorities accepted its authenticity, some even holding that rejection of such was tantamount to heresy. There are also medial positions among traditionalists, which accept the holiness of the text but do not impute all or most of its textual form to Rashbi.
What do we Mean by “the” Zohar?
Like many other works that we think of as “books”—discrete objects with clear boundaries that we interact with intellectually and also physically—the Zohar was in many respects the creation of early modern printers. This does not mean, of course, that the Zohar didn’t exist prior to the mid-sixteenth century, when the first two editions of it were printed, in Mantua and Cremona (their title pages are pictured above). Rather, the Zohar didn’t exist as a unitary, closed text. Instead it circulated in many manuscripts, containing some two or three dozen texts (depending on how you delineate them), and many variants. The fixed text established by the printers, each of whose editors used multiple, though limited, manuscripts, became, by virtue of mass production, unusually powerful. Its very fixity belies the complex process of disseminating the expansive library of texts that make up “the” Zohar. Already in the early years of its printing, the especial multifariousness of the Zohar texts was recognized by printers and their reading publics alike; thus the later Zohar Chadash was concocted out of manuscripts left out of the first editions. (The two first editions also bore substantial differences between them.) Nevertheless, the perception of having a book called the Zohar helped to canonize it as the central text of further Kabbalistic study and writing.
The core of the Zohar is a mystical midrash on the five books of the Torah (and some Megillot). The very fact that it expresses the depth of the Torah’s secrets in a traditional format stood in contradistinction to medieval rationalist philosophy, which also sought to uncover secrets and expand the meanings behind the commandments, but did so using non-Jewish exegetical techniques and writing genres. However, this central midrash is only one part of the Zoharic corpus. Others return to parts of the Torah, such as the Sifra de-Tzniuta (Book of the Concealed) on Parashat Bereshit or the Midrash ha-Ne’elam (Hidden Midrash) on various parts of the Torah, delving into their matters at greater length. The Zohar has halachic sections, the Matnitin and Tosefta, written in the style of the Mishnah; an exposition of the reasons for the commandments known as Raya Mehemna (The Faithful Shepherd, a reference to Moshe Rabbenu); the special sections known as Idrot (Assemblies) that discuss the death and last words of Rashbi; and many more inventive types of texts.
The language of the Zohar, which lends it a rarified mystery, is largely Aramaic. The choice to compose the work in Aramaic has given rise to many questions, some of them pointed. Western Aramaic was certainly the commonly-spoken language in the time of Rashbi, which is why the Targums, Aramaic translations of Tanach, were so valued at the time. It was also still a spoken language in the time of the Geonim; Arabic took some centuries to make inroads as the lingua franca. Why, then, write an esoteric text in the common language and not the language of elite scholars, which was then Mishnaic Hebrew? It has been pointed out that by the medieval period, Aramaic and not Hebrew was the most elite of Jewish languages, a code cracked by few.
Furthermore, scholarly battles have raged about the nature of Zoharic Aramaic, which is widely considered by academics to be an artificial language rather than a natural variant, rife with awkward locutions, neologisms (newly made-up words), outright errors, and even bits of Castilian, such as the term esnoga for synagogue. Traditional scholars have pushed back on these assertions, countering each as inaccurate, a marginal phenomenon, or explicable as later interpolation. Whatever the reason, Aramaic would become the lyrical language of expression of many Kabbalists, including, especially, the Ari, R. Yitzchak ben Shlomo Luria Ashkenazi (who we’ll meet again in the coming weeks).
The Account of R. Yitzchak de-min Akko
Of singular importance to untangling the question of the Zohar’s mysterious appearance is an early testimony attributed to the Kabbalist R. Yitzchak de-min Akko (of Acre), who lived in the late thirteenth to mid-fourteen centuries, the time of the appearance of the Zohar in Castile. The account, as recorded by R. Yitzchak de-min Akko, was not preserved, but was cited, in truncated form, by R. Avraham Zacuto (1452-c. 1515) in his Sefer Yuchasin, a book about the transmission of the Oral Torah in the genre of the Igeret of R. Sherira Gaon, R. Avraham Ibn Daud’s Sefer ha-Kabbala, and Rambam’s introduction to his Commentary on the Mishnah. The account about the appearance of the Zohar—which R. Avraham Zacuto himself accepted as authentic—is relatively long and tantalizingly detailed. It involves a number of levels of testimony, related as stories-within-stories. It is often quoted in part; here I’ll cite some key parts and fill in the rest (but you should know that it’s longer; you can read the entire story, in Hebrew, here and on the following page—it’s good!).
R. Zacuto begins by relating the circumstances of R. Yitzchak de-min Akko’s coming to Spain due to the Mamluk conquest of Akko in 1291. Previously, R. Yitzchak had studied in the Ashkenazi yeshiva established there earlier in the thirteenth century by French and Provençal rabbis who had come to the Land of Israel; his teacher had been the firebrand R. Shlomo Petit. (Ramban, a pre-Zoharic Kabbalist, was also instrumental in building up the Jewish community of Akko in the later half of the thirteenth century.) R. Zacuto emphasizes that at the time of the Mamluk conquest, the grandsons of Ramban and of Rambam were captured, and that R. Yitzchak was fortunate to survive. R. Yitzchak made his way to Italy and in 1305 he was in Spain, starting out in Toledo; according to R. Zacuto, the express purpose of his traveling to Spain was to understand the whereabouts of Sefer ha-Zohar (והוא הלך לספרד לחקור כיצד נמצא בזמנו ספר הזוהר אשר עשה ר׳ שמעון ור׳ אלעזר׳ בנו במערה).
R. Zacuto then begins copying out the account of R. Yitzchak de-min Akko—until the part where, he says, his source was cut off. The account begins by relating how, astounded by the depths of the secrets he has heard, R. Yitzchak pursued the rabbi in whose hands the esoteric manuscripts lay. He first catches up to the rabbi’s students, whose answers to his questions of provenance, and skepticism about the writing down of such secrets in a book anyone can access, he finds muddled and unsatisfactory. R. Yitzchak, in R. Zacuto’s transcription, relates:
שמעתי אומרים לי על שאלתי כי הרב הנאמן הרמב״ן ז״ל שלח אותו מא״י לקטלוניא לבנו והביאו הרוח לארץ ארגון וי״א לאלקנטי ונפל ביד החכם ר׳ משה די ליאון הוא שאומרים עליו ר׳ משה די ווד אל חנארה וי״א שמעולם לא חבר רשב״י ספר זה, אבל ר׳ משה זה היה יודע שם הכותב ובכחו יכתוב ר׳ משה זה דברים נפלאים אלה
I heard them say to me with regard to my question, that the faithful rabbi, the Ramban of blessed memory, dispatched it [Sefer ha-Zohar] from Eretz Yisrael to Catalunya to his son, but the wind brought it to Aragon, and there are those who say to Alcanati. There it fell into the hand of the scholar R. Moshe de León, he who is also called R. Moshe de Guadalajara. There are those who say that never did Rashbi compose this book, but rather that this R. Moshe de León knew the “name” of the author and through its power R. Moshe was able to write these wondrous things.
Sefer Yuchasin, ed. H. Filipowski, p. 92
He continues to cite reports that R. Moshe did so in order to garner good money for his pseudepigraphic secrets. Who was this R. Moshe? Born around the year 1240 in the town of León and active in Guadalajara, R. Moshe ben Shem Tov immersed himself in the various currents of Kabbala available to him in Spain, particularly the Geronese school, and was apparently interested in philosophy, as a copy of Rambam’s Moreh ha-Nevuchim written for him in 1264 attests. He authored numerous Kabbalistic treatises, including Shekel ha-Kodesh (The Sanctuary Weight), an analysis of the Sefirot; Sefer ha-Rimon (The Book of the Pomegranate), on the meanings of the commandments; and Maskiyot Kesef (Settings of Silver), a commentary on the prayers. And he collected around himself a fellowship of mystics who studied and disseminated the Zohar.
R. Yitzchak pursued the elusive R. Moshe, catching up to him in Valladolid, upon which R. Moshe swore to him that he had the ancient manuscript written by Rashbi in his possession. One wrinkle: it was in his home in the region of Sevilla (Seville), in the town of Ávila, but R. Moshe promised to show it to R. Yitzchak when he met him there. The two parted ways for the time being, after which R. Moshe, unfortunately, died in Arévalo on the way to Ávila.
Heartbroken, R. Yitzchak made his way to Ávila to suss things out as best he could. There he found a stately elder by the name of R. David of Corfu, who related to R. Yitzchak:
ויאמר דע באמת כי נתברר לי בלא ספק שמעולם לא בא לידו של ר׳ משה זה, ואין בעולם ספר זוהר זה רק היה ר׳ משה בעל שם הכותב ובכחו כתב כל מה שכתב בספר הזה, ועתה שמע נא באיזה דרך נתברר לי
He [R. David] said to me [R. Yitchak de-min Akko], ‘Know in truth that it became apparent to me without a doubt that this work never came to the possession of this R. Moshe, and there is no such thing as this book the Zohar, but R. Moshe had the power of the name of the author and by means of its power he wrote all that he wrote in this book, and now, listen to the way this became clear to me!’
Sefer Yuchasin, ed. H. Filipowski, p. 93
The situation described by R. David—we’re now three layers of story deep—is indeed astounding. He describes a situation in which, after gaining great wealth, R. Moshe de León left his wife and daughter in dire poverty. When R. David went to Arévalo to investigate, he found the wealthy R. Yosef de Ávila and hatched a plan to determine the true nature of the Zohar. R. David tells R. Yosef that he can finally get the precious manuscript that had eluded him, if he follows R. David’s plan: R. Yosef is to dispatch his wife to meet the widow of R. Moshe in Ávila to ask for her daughter’s hand in marriage to R. Yosef’s son. Being that R. Yosef is wealthy, the widow and daughter’s bitter financial situation would be forevermore happily resolved. In return, R. Yosef’s wife is to request just one thing from R. Moshe’s wife: the manuscript of the Zohar. She is, moreover, to make the pitch to the widow and the daughter separately, so as to test the alignment of their responses.
The widow swears that the book was indeed in the possession of her late husband, but that “from his head and from his heart and according to his knowledge and intellect he wrote what he wrote” (אם מעולם ס׳ זה היה עם אישי אבל מראשו ולבו מדעתו ושכלו כתב כל מה שכתב). The widow continues, relating a conversation she had had with her husband regarding why he didn’t reveal that he was the author, enhancing his own reputation. He replied that he could not make a good profit that way. The daughter is then addressed separately, and says exactly the same thing, seemingly cementing the story, especially since the daughter and her mother stand to gain so much from the potential deal, meaning they would not have a good reason to lie.
This is often where quotations of the tale end. However, there is more. Floored by the revelations, R. Yitzchak de-min Akko tracks down yet another source, the luminary R. Yosef ha-Levi, son of the esteemed Kabbalist R. Todros (ben Yosef ha-Levi, c. 1220–1298). R. Yosef ha-Levi tells R. Yitzchak that without a doubt R. Moshe had in his possession the ancient manuscript of Rashbi. How does he know? R. Moshe made him copies of several of the notebooks (kuntresim) in which sections of the Zohar were written. Harboring suspicions, R. Yosef ha-Levi hid away one of the notebooks, told R. Moshe he’d misplaced it, and then asked for another copy. R. Moshe, without hesitation, asked him where the text stopped and started back up again, and then went home to produce another copy from his original. When R. Yosef ha-Levi compared the two sections, they were identical, proving in R. Yosef’s mind that R. Moshe was indeed in possession of the manuscript he claimed to own.
However, R. Yitzchak de-min Akko remains unsatisfied and continues to seek more sources and answers. He finds that the opinions are still divided and proofs equivocal: it is pointed out to him that R. Yosef ha-Levi’s proof is inconclusive, since it could merely mean that R. Moshe had a master copy of the book he himself had written, and which he claimed was ancient. He finally finds a noted disciple of R. Moshe de León, one R. Yaakov, who again swears under severe oath that the manuscript of his master belonged to Rashbi. This is where R. Avraham Zacuto breaks in and tells us that alas, he cannot find any more of the document of R. Yitzchak de-min Akko’s account.
Other Early Discussions of Zoharic Authorship
Although a modern source, Shem ha-Gedolim, by the unique bibliophile-scholar, Talmudist, and Kabbalist R. Chaim Yosef David Azulai, better known by the acronym Chida, preserves many earlier sources. In this case, his reports about the Zohar appear to have circulated as an explanatory counter to the report of R. Yitzchak de-min Akko:
ראיתי כתוב מהרב מהר”א רוויגו וז”ל: מצאתי בזוהר כ”י ישן נושן אצל מורי מהר”ם זכות נר”ו, מצאתי כתוב באמת כי ראש המקובלים ר’ נחוניא ן’ הקנה והוא חיבר ס’ הבהיר ואחריו רשב”י עשה ספר הזהר וחיבר בו כמה חבורים כמו התקונים. וכשמת רשב”י ורבי אלעזר וכל הדור ההוא אבדה חכמת הקבלה, עד שהקרה ה’ לפני מלך אחד ממלכי מזרח שלוה לחפור במקום אחד על עסקי ממון, ונמצא שם ארון אחד ובו ס’ הזהר ושלח לחכמי א”ה ומחכמי אדום ולא ידעו ולא יבינו. שלח אחר היהודים באו אצלו וראו הספר וא”ל אדונינו המלך זה הספר עשאו חכם אחד והוא עמוק ואין אנו מבינים אותו. א”ל וכי אין יהודי בעולם מבין אותו, א”ל יש במדינת טוליטולה. והמלך שלח הספרים עם גבוריו לטוליטולא וכשראוהו חכמי טוליטולא שמחו בו שמחה גדולה ושלחו למלך מתנות רבות ומשם נתפרסמה הקבלה בישראל, ע”כ מצאתי כתוב מהרב הנז’. והרב ישר בספר מצרף לחכמה דף כ”ב כתב דשמע מפי מגידי אמת שבשנת ט”פ כשבזזו הספרדים עיר הידילבירגה לקחו מהאקידימיי”א כמה אלפים ספרים וביניהם ספרי קדש על קלף ובכלל ס’ הזהר על כל עשרים וארבע משא סבל ושולחו הספרים לחשמנים ודוכסים ע”ש.
I saw it written by the rabbi, our teacher R. A[vraham] Rovigo [c. 1650–1713] and these are his words: “I found in the Zohar, in an old manuscript that was antique, which was at my teacher’s, Maharam Zacut [R. Moshe ben Mordechai Zacuto, c. 1620–1697], may G-d watch over him, there I found written, in truth, that the master of the Kabbalists, Rabbi Nechunia ben ha-Kana, he who composed [chiber] Sefer ha-Bahir, and following him Rashbi made [asah] Sefer ha-Zohar and composed for it several additional compositions, such as the Tikkunim. When Rashbi died, and also Rabbi Eliezer and all that generation, the knowledge of Kabbala was lost, until G-d made it so that one of the kings among the kings of the east was given to dig in a certain spot for financial reasons. A chest was found there and in it was Sefer ha-Zohar. He sent it to the scholars of that land and the scholars of Chistendom but they did not know or understand. He then summoned Jews, who came to him and saw the book and said to him, ‘Our lord the king, this book was made by a profound scholar and are not able to understand it.’ He said to them: ‘Is there really no Jew in the world that can understand it?’ They replied to him: ‘There is, in the region of Toledo.’ So the king sent the books with his men to Toledo and when the scholars of Toledo saw it, they rejoiced greatly and sent the king myriad gifts. That is how the the Kabbala was spread among all of Israel [i.e., among Jews],” up to here I found written by the aforementioned rabbi. And R. Yashar [R. Yosef Shlomo Rofeh Delmedigo, also know as Yashar of Candia (Crete), 1591–1655] in the book Matzref la-Chochma, page 22, wrote, based on what he heard from the mouths of truth-tellers, that in the year [1622] when the Spanish conquered the city of Heidelberg, they took from the academia thousands of books, among them holy books written on parchment, including Sefer ha-Zohar, in all twenty-four cartloads, and these were sent to cardinals and dukes, see there.
Chida, Shem ha-Gedolim, Sefarim ז 8
This idea, that ancient Kabbalistic knowledge was lost in the generations after Rashbi and was rediscovered and dispatched to Spain, became an important one.
A similar, fairly early theory was encapsulated by the Ketem Paz, a sixteenth-century commentary on the Zohar, explaining how and why the Zohar was lost and found. Commenting on a segment from the Zohar, R. Shimon Lavi (15th-16th cen.) writes:
בהיות האמת הרובור1 הזה מלוקט מלקט שכחה ופאה מהחבור הגדול הראשון אשר שמענו שהיה משא מ' גמלים ובעונותינו שרבו אבדנוהו הוא וספרים רבים כמו ספרא דחנוך ספרא דשלמה ספרא דרב המנונא סבא ויותר מהמה זולתם רבים ונכבדים והיה הסבה בזה אורך הגלות וטלטול ישראל ממקום למקום שזה היה סבה שנתמעטו הלבבות וטח עיניהם של אחרונים מראות מהשכיל לבותם בספרים ההם עד שלא היו נפתחים מראש השנה לראש השנה שהיו בעיניהם כדברי הספר החתום אשר יתנו אותו אל יודע ספר לאמר קרא נא זה ואמר לא אוכל כי חתום הוא והיו מניחים הספרים בזוית בתיהם עד אשר בלו ועש אכלם או דלף טורד נפל עליהם וספו תמו מן בלהות ולולי חסדי יי'…נתן אלקים בלבם לתור ולבקש ללקוט הנשאר מהספרים ההם יתר הפליטה הנשאר זעיר שם זעיר שם ויצברו אותם מפה ומפה ויחברו ענין אל ענין כפי מסת ידיהם ובדרך זה נעשה החבור הזה הנמצא אצלנו היום ואשר לזאת הסבה לפעמים לא תמצא קשור ענין אל ענין כאשר בתחילה ולפעמים לא נמצא תחילת הענין עם סופו ולא סופו עם תחלתו
Truthfully, this statement is collected from a forgotten and marginal assemblage from the massive composition which, we have heard, consisted of forty camel-loads. But due to our many sins we lost it and many other [mystical] books such as the Book of Chanoch (Enoch), the Book of Shlomo, the Book of Rav Hamnuna the Elder, and even more, all of them numerous and noteworthy. The reason for this was the length of the exile and the wandering of Jews from place to place, which was also the reason why the hearts of the latter authorities were constricted and their eyes were blocked from seeing what their hearts could know from those books. For this reason the books would not be opened from one Rosh Hashana to the next, becoming in their eyes like a sealed book that is given over to a knowledgeable person who is told to please read it out, and he says that he cannot because it is sealed. They would then place the books in the corners of their houses, until the books became worn and moth-eaten, or a troublesome trickle fell upon them, and they would have been destroyed completely if not for the compassion of G-d. …For G-d placed in their hearts to seek and assemble what remained from those books, the remainder that was still extant, a bit here and a bit there, and they amassed them from mouth to mouth and composed matter by matter according to their ability. In this way the composition that we have today was composed, and for this reason you will sometimes not be able to find the transitions between subjects at the beginning and other times you will not find the beginning of the matter with its end nor its end with its beginning.
Accounting the Zohar among the myriad of lost works and preserved-by-a-miracle manuscripts, the Ketem Paz suggests that the obscure and difficult subject matter, massive size, oral transmission and re-transmission, plus the vagaries of time contributed to the strange history and textual difficulties encountered in the Zohar. And the intensive deliberations reported already by R. Yitzchak de-min Akko (according to R. Avraham Zacuto) continue on.
Reads and Resources
The Zohar is, by its nature, a difficult text, traditionally recommended to those adept at advanced Torah learning and with the guidance of an initiated expert. However, many tools now exist to make its study more approachable. Sefaria has a digital version of the core parts of the Zohar along with commentaries, including the Sulam (of R. Ashlag), which translates the Zoharic Aramaic into Hebrew before offering interpretation. Scholar Daniel C. Matt has completed a multi-volume English edition of the Zohar. But I’d recommend, as a first taste, Dr. Yeshayahu Tishby’s thematic anthology Mishnat ha-Zohar (either in Hebrew or in English).
In order to make his definitive English translation, Dr. Daniel Matt went back to the manuscripts and first edited a critical text, which he and his publisher have, wonderfully, made available (along with other resources).
This is, it seems to me, a printer’s error for something like דיבור, but I wasn’t able to track down a good answer.
As a staunch traditionalist, the subject of the Zohar's authorship can be quite sensitive for me. So I deeply appreciate how you openly present the facts here with balance and true objectivity. Fascinating stories here, thank you!