How the Zohar Came to Be His

The Zohar appears in Castile in the 1280s, in sections rather than as a finished book, and de Leon is the man distributing them. He described himself as copying from an ancient manuscript brought out of the land of Israel. The work is in Aramaic and its speakers are Shimon bar Yochai and his companions.

Gershom Scholem's case, set out in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and refined afterwards, rests on internal evidence rather than on the widow's story. The Zohar's Aramaic belongs to no period of the living language but is a construction, built with the help of medieval Hebrew grammar and the Aramaic lexicons then available, and it makes errors an ancient writer could not have made. Its picture of the geography of the land of Israel is the picture of someone who has not been there. And its ideas, its images and at points its phrasing run parallel to de Leon's signed Hebrew books closely enough that one author is the simplest account of it.

Yehuda Liebes accepted all of the dating and none of the singularity. In How the Zohar Was Written he argued that the book carries several hands and grew inside a circle, with de Leon its most visible member rather than its sole author. That reading is now widely held. It is why the atlas records the Zohar's authorship as disputed rather than simply transferring it from the second-century sage to the Castilian, and why the entry for each man carries the other's claim.