Moses de León

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Moses ben Shem Tov de León (c. 1240–1305) was a Castilian Jewish mystic active in the towns of Guadalajara and Ávila, and the figure most scholarship holds responsible for the Zohar — the central work of Kabbalah, and one of the most influential books in the history of Jewish thought. He presented its Aramaic text not as his own but as an ancient teaching: the recorded discourses of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a sage of second-century Galilee, transmitted in secret down the generations to his own hand.

Little is fixed about his life. He wrote a number of Hebrew works under his own name in the 1280s and 1290s — among them treatises on the soul, on the commandments, and on the divine names — while at the same time the Zohar appeared in fragments and grew into a vast commentary on the Torah, composed in an idiosyncratic, archaizing Aramaic. After his death his widow was said to have admitted, under questioning, that her husband had written the book himself; the report survives in a single later account and is debated. What the Zohar teaches is a hidden architecture within God: ten sefirot, emanations through which the unknowable Infinite, the Ein Sof, unfolds into a knowable divine life, mirrored in turn in the structure of the cosmos and the human soul.

The question of authorship has long divided the matter into two stories. The tradition that received the book held it to be the genuine wisdom of bar Yochai, and revered it as a near-canonical revelation; on that reading de León was a transmitter, not an author. Critical scholarship since the nineteenth century, and decisively the work of Gershom Scholem, has concluded instead that the Zohar is largely the composition of de León and his circle in the late thirteenth century — its Aramaic, its allusions, and its theology all of that period rather than of late antiquity. Later research has complicated the lone-author picture, proposing a small fellowship of writers; the broad attribution to his milieu has held.

The two accounts are not as far apart as they first seem. A pseudepigraphic ascription — placing one’s own teaching in an ancient venerated mouth — was a recognized mode in this literature, not simply a forgery; the device claimed that the doctrine was old even where the text was new. Whether de León believed he was recovering a real tradition or knew himself to be inventing one is past recovering. The book outran the question. Within two centuries the Zohar was treated across the Jewish world as scripture’s hidden companion, and the man who wrote it had nearly vanished behind the sage he named.

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

→ Related: Moses Cordovero · Emanation · Neoplatonism