The central text of the tradition, the Zohar, surfaced in thirteenth-century Spain through Moses de Leon, who circulated it as a rediscovered ancient work attributed to the second-century sage Shimon bar Yochai, an attribution modern scholarship, beginning with Gershom Scholem's twentieth-century research, treats as pseudepigraphic, arguing de Leon himself was substantially its author working within an older esoteric inheritance rather than merely a copyist of a lost original, a conclusion still disputed by traditionalists who hold the received attribution. Kabbalah reached its most systematic development two centuries later in Safed, a hill town in Ottoman Galilee, where sixteenth-century scholars including Moses Cordovero and, above all, Isaac Luria produced the account of divine emanation, cosmic rupture and repair that shapes traditional study to this day, transmitted initially through Luria's student Hayyim Vital in tightly guarded circles rather than open publication.
The traditional requirement of age, marriage and prior mastery of Talmud before undertaking Kabbalistic study, a restriction stated in classical sources, has been substantially set aside by twentieth and twenty-first century popularisers, most visibly the Kabbalah Centre, which teaches Kabbalah-derived material to students with no Jewish background or textual preparation and has drawn sustained criticism from both academic scholars of Kabbalah and Orthodox rabbinic authorities, who argue the material is presented without the linguistic grounding and traditional guardrails the sources themselves insist on, a dispute that continues alongside the popular movement rather than having settled it.