The Zohar

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The Zohar — the “Book of Radiance” — is the central text of theosophical Kabbalah: a sprawling mystical commentary on the Torah that reads the five books of Moses as a coded account of the inner life of God. The name descends from Daniel 12:3 — “the wise shall shine like the radiance [zohar] of the firmament.” It is less a single book than a library: homilies, narrative frames, and dense esoteric tracts gathered under one name, large portions of which circulated separately long before printers bound them between covers.

In its pages Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a Galilean sage of the second century, walks the roads of the land of Israel with his companions, and the Torah opens under their hands. That setting is the book’s own claim about itself. In the documentary record it surfaces in Castile in the 1280s and 1290s, in booklets circulated by the kabbalist Moses de León as copies from an ancient exemplar. The Galilee of the teaching and the Castile of the manuscript have shared the page ever since.

The companions on the road

The Zohar’s world is a traveling academy, and the road keeps testing the companions: in the Sava de-Mishpatim, a seemingly broken-down old donkey-driver proves to carry the deepest secrets of the soul in his mouth. At the center stand the assemblies: in the Idra Rabba the companions expound the hidden countenances of the divine, and three of them die in ecstasy; in the Idra Zuta, the dying Rabbi Shimon delivers his final discourse.

How the Torah must be read, the book teaches in parables about itself. The narratives of scripture are its garments — woe to him who takes the garment for the Torah itself (Zohar iii.152) — and the Torah herself is “a beautiful and stately damsel, who is hidden in a secluded chamber of a palace” (Sava de-Mishpatim, Zohar II:99a), beckoning from her window, unveiling herself by degrees — plain sense, homily, at last the secret — to the lover who keeps returning.

What the book teaches

The Zohar names the unknowable God Ein Sof and, more often, by its own signs — the Holy Ancient One, the concealed of all concealments — and watches the divine life clothe itself downward through ten sefirot, garments woven for the King so that the worlds can bear his light. The doctrine of the ten sefirot maps the architecture in full; the vocabulary reached the Zohar from the Bahir and the schools of Provence and Gerona; the book walks this way of the sefirot, not the ecstatic way of divine names. The Torah’s words, its very letters, are a surface beneath which the relations among these powers are inscribed, so that exegesis traces the structure of the godhead itself, including its male and female aspects. The tenth sefirah, the Shekhinah, the divine presence, is in exile with Israel; her exile is the world’s wound, and every commandment kept, every page studied with right intention, binds it and labors toward her reunion with the Holy One. To study the book rightly is to take part in repairing a fracture within the divine. The soul, too, is layered: nefesh, the vital soul bound to the body; ruaḥ, the moral spirit; neshamah, pure divine light — each rooted among the sefirot and subject to pre-existence and transmigration, the old donkey-driver’s great theme.

A library and its strata

The main body — guf ha-Zohar — is the untitled running commentary on the Torah. Around it cluster named tracts: the Sifra di-Tzeniuta, the Book of Concealment, a few oracular pages on Genesis citing no authorities; the two Idrot that unpack its hints; the Sava and the Yanuka; the Zohar’s own Hekhalot sections, echoing the older ascent literature of pre-Zoharic Jewish mysticism; Sitrei Torah; the Matnitin; and more. The whole is written in an artificial literary Aramaic interwoven with Hebrew — fusing the dialects of the Babylonian Talmud and Targum Onkelos, salted with medieval loanwords — a tongue spoken nowhere, built for this book and part of its majesty. The Midrash ha-Ne’elam is mixed Hebrew and Aramaic, and Ronit Meroz has found units that circulated first in Hebrew and were turned into Aramaic by editors who believed they were restoring Rabbi Shimon’s own tongue.

The strata can be told apart. Scholem took the Midrash ha-Ne’elam, whose themes differ from the main body’s, for the earliest stratum of the medieval composition itself — the author’s first essay of the late 1270s, not a remnant of antiquity. At the other end, the Tikkunei Zohar — seventy commentaries and eleven more, each opening from the Torah’s first word, Bereshit — and the Raya Mehemna, in which Moses expounds the commandments’ mystical meaning, belong to a fourteenth-century continuator: a hand that speaks of the Four Worlds, says “Kabbalah” where the main body says razin, and calls the main body ḥibbura kadma’ah, “the earlier book.” The Zohar Hadash is no third stratum but a printing artifact: leftover material from manuscripts the first printers lacked, printed at Salonika late in the sixteenth century and at Kraków in 1603.

Castile and the question of the author

The standard critical reconstruction has de León composing the main body between roughly 1280 and 1286 and circulating the booklets through the following decades; within fifty years the work was quoted by Menahem Recanati and Todros Abulafia and attacked as inauthentic by Joseph ibn Waqar. The ascription to Rabbi Shimon is pseudepigraphy — in its milieu a recognized, almost expected mode of authority, setting new doctrine in a revered past.

The most famous document must be weighed exactly. Isaac ben Samuel of Acre, a kabbalist who fled the fall of Acre after 1291, investigated the new book; his chronicle Divrei ha-Yamim is lost, and the account survives only as quoted in Abraham Zacuto’s Sefer Yuhasin, compiled in 1504 and first printed in Constantinople in 1566; censors cut the passage from the 1580 second edition and every printing after, until Filipowski’s 1857 edition restored it. In the fragment, Isaac meets de León at Valladolid and hears him swear the ancient exemplar lies at his house in Ávila; de León dies at Arévalo before showing it; and in Ávila Isaac is told, at second hand, that the rich Joseph de Ávila offered the destitute widow a marriage match for the original manuscript, and that she swore her husband never had such a book — “everything he wrote came from his own intellect” — her daughter saying the same; de León, the story ran, had answered that words in his own name would earn nothing, while as Shimon bar Yochai’s they paid richly. The widow’s confession is thus hearsay inside a quotation inside a later chronicle, twice removed from Isaac himself; his fragment breaks off mid-sentence, without a verdict, and in later works Isaac went on citing the Zohar. Doubt persisted all the same — Delmedigo, Leon of Modena, and Jacob Emden, whose Mitpahat Sefarim (1768) cataloged anachronisms: crusades, a Portuguese word for synagogue, vowel-points, rituals unknown to the Talmud.

The war over the press

The first Zoharic text ever printed was the Tikkunei Zohar, Mantua 1557, and it split Italian Jewry. Jacob Israel Finzi of Pesaro led the opposition — print would hand Kabbalah to the young and unworthy, studying without a master, and to Christians who would exploit it — condemning the enterprise again on May 29, 1558, joined now by Moses Basola, who had approved the Tikkunei Zohar on February 21, 1557 and then reversed himself. The defense came in a responsum of Isaac de Lattes (Pesaro, April 19, 1558), printed at the front of the first Mantua volume: as the messianic time approaches, the secrets of the Torah not only may but must be spread — spreading them fosters the coming of the Messiah.

The presses won. At Mantua, Immanuel of Benevento established the text of the Sefer ha-Zohar from ten manuscripts, corrected against an old Safed copy; he died with two volumes done, and Abraham ben Meshulam saw the third through. The three-volume Mantua Zohar of 1558–60 set the foliation still used to cite the book — Zohar III:127a means Mantua volume and folio. Cremona, almost simultaneously, issued the whole work as one enormous folio — the “Large Zohar,” built from six manuscript copies, colophon dated late 1558, corrected printing finished by 1560. The Cremona folio carried a distinct recension and gained its foothold in Ashkenaz; the Mantua text ruled in Italy and Safed. After that there was no calling the secrets home: the book went out from North Africa to Poland, from Antwerp to Safed.

The holy Zohar

The book’s afterlife outran its origins: printed over protest, it became nearly canonical, standing by the late sixteenth century in one of every ten private Jewish libraries in Mantua; in Sephardi and Hasidic usage it is ha-Zohar ha-kadosh, “the holy Zohar,” third in standing after the Bible and the Talmud — a rank conferred by communal practice rather than formal ruling. The clearest sign is liturgical: Berikh Shemei, recited in most rites when the ark is opened for the Torah reading, is taken verbatim from the Zohar on Vayakhel (II:206a) — the rabbis of Frankfurt refused the prayer for precisely that pedigree. Not every community bowed: the Yemenite Dor Daim and some Spanish-Portuguese and Italian congregations never accepted it.

For the Kabbalah of Safed it was the indispensable source — Cordovero built his vast Or Yakar upon it, and Luria’s glosses were printed as Derekh Emet; the Safed re-reading belongs to Lurianic Kabbalah. Hasidism inherited the reverence whole. Its emanation scheme has drawn comparison with Neoplatonist and Gnostic descents of being since its earliest readers, though the book speaks in its own idiom and toward its own ends. When Christian and occult writers reached for “the Kabbalah,” it was very often the Zohar, at one or two removes: the Christian Kabbalah of Pico and Reuchlin drew on it; Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata (1677–84) put the Idrot and Sifra di-Tzeniuta into Latin; Mathers Englished Knorr’s three treatises as The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887), the channel into Hermetic Qabalah. The early English versions were partial and selective — Mathers’s three tracts at two removes from the Aramaic; de Manhar’s serial rendering (1907–13), Genesis through Lekh Lekha under Theosophical glosses; even the Soncino translation (1931–34) omitted passages as obscure or improper — each a fraction of a work whose full extent few of its readers had seen.

The scholarship

The modern attribution argument begins before Scholem. Adolph Jellinek’s Moses ben Schem-Tob de Leon und sein Verhältniss zum Sohar (Leipzig, 1851) gave the first systematic critical proof that de León wrote the Zohar, joining Isaac of Acre’s testimony to parallels with de León’s Hebrew works; the Jewish Encyclopedia’s “Zohar” (Joseph Jacobs and Isaac Broydé, 1901–06) argued the contrary — many authors, many periods. Gershom Scholem opened his Hebrew University career in 1925 with a lecture promising to refute Jellinek and Graetz; by 1938 his own philology — the Aramaic’s grammatical slips, its Spanish and Arabic traces, its ignorance of Galilean geography, its medieval sources, its fictitious library of works like the Sifra de-Adam — had brought him around: lectures five and six of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken, 1941) re-established de León’s authorship of the main body. Isaiah Tishby’s The Wisdom of the Zohar (trans. David Goldstein, 3 vols., Littman/Oxford, 1989) is the great thematic anthology of its teaching. Then the single pen dissolved again. Yehuda Liebes’s Studies in the Zohar (SUNY Press, 1993), with its essay “How the Zohar Was Written,” argued for a circle of Castilian kabbalists around de León; Ronit Meroz’s strata model (“The Archeology of the Zohar,” Daat 82, 2016) reads the texts as written layer upon layer from the eleventh century to the fourteenth, the earliest raw material reworked from the East — so the medieval Spanish setting, secure for the main body, no longer necessarily covers everything the manuscripts call Zohar; and Daniel Abrams (“The Invention of the Zohar as a Book,” Kabbalah 19, 2009; his Mantua-printing study: https://beithazohar.com/en/printing-of-the-zohar-in-mantua/) contests author, circle, and strata alike, holding that “the Zohar” as a book is the sixteenth-century printers’ creation. Two open-access studies at Beit Hazohar document the printing chapter: Giulio Busi on the Mantua edition and the de Lattes defense (https://beithazohar.com/en/the-edition-of-the-zohar-of-mantua-a-great-identity-drawing/), and Jean Baumgarten on the 1558 dispute and the editing at both presses (https://beithazohar.com/en/print-and-edit-the-sefer-ha-zohar-jean-baumgarten/). Boaz Huss’s The Zohar: Reception and Impact (Littman, 2016) traces the canonization and its critics down to the occultist English mediations; Melila Hellner-Eshed’s A River Flows from Eden (trans. Nathan Wolski, Stanford, 2009) reads the companions’ wanderings as a literature of mystical experience; Arthur Green’s A Guide to the Zohar (Stanford, 2004) is the standing introduction. The Pritzker Edition (Stanford University Press, twelve volumes, 2004–2017) — Daniel C. Matt (vols. 1–9), Nathan Wolski and Joel Hecker (vols. 10–12), on a freshly reconstructed Aramaic text — at last gave English readers the whole book; the full Aramaic with an older English is readable at Sefaria.

Wherever the ark opens and Berikh Shemei is sung, a sentence of the Zohar is in the congregation’s mouth; wherever the book is studied as the companions studied it, the roads of Galilee run on under the reader’s feet, and the maiden watches from her window for the one who understands.

→ In the library: The Zohar (de Manhar, partial English — 1914) · Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887)

→ Related: Kabbalah · Moses De Leon · Doctrine Of The Ten Sefirot · Lurianic Kabbalah · Early Kabbalah · Provencal Kabbalah · Christian Kabbalah · Hermetic Qabalah · Hasidism · Emanation · Neoplatonism · Ketuvim