The Zohar (Book of Splendor)

This work presents itself as the teaching of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a second-century Galilean sage, recorded by his circle and hidden for a millennium. It appeared in Castile in the 1280s, circulated by Moses de Leon, who said he was copying from an ancient manuscript in his possession.

Gershom Scholem made the case that de Leon wrote it, and made it on internal evidence. The Aramaic is not the Aramaic of second-century Galilee; it is an artificial literary Aramaic constructed by someone whose working language was Hebrew, containing calques and errors that a native writer of the earlier dialect would not produce. The text shows knowledge of medieval Castilian conditions and of philosophical vocabulary that postdates its claimed period by a thousand years. Its geography of the Land of Israel is that of a man who has read about it rather than walked it. And no source before the 1280s quotes it or refers to it, which for a work of that scale and eventual authority is decisive.

There is also the anecdote, preserved by Isaac of Acre, who went looking for the ancient manuscript after de Leon's death and reported being told by the widow that no such manuscript existed and that her husband had written it himself. It is second-hand, transmitted through a chain, and Scholem did not rest the argument on it. It is corroborative rather than load-bearing, and it is the part everyone remembers.

Scholarship since has complicated the conclusion without reversing it. Yehuda Liebes argued that the work is better understood as the product of a circle of mystics around de Leon than of one hand, on the ground that the stylistic and doctrinal variation across its sections is greater than single authorship comfortably explains, and later manuscript scholarship has supported a picture of gradual accretion rather than a single act of composition. What is not seriously argued in the field is the traditional attribution, which the linguistic evidence rules out.

The book's standing in Judaism is not affected by any of it. It became the central text of Kabbalah, was printed as such, was treated by many communities as very nearly canonical, and shaped Jewish practice and theology for centuries. The question of who wrote it in the 1280s and the question of what it has meant since are separate questions, and only the first one has an answer of this kind.

The Zohar is enormous, running to well over a thousand pages in translation, and its outward form is unexpected: it presents itself as a commentary on the Torah, following the weekly portions in order, in the manner of a rabbinic midrash. The mystical content is delivered inside that frame, as conversations between Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his companions while they walk between towns in second century Galilee.

The language is Aramaic, and it is a peculiar Aramaic. It does not match any attested spoken dialect, it draws its vocabulary from written sources, and it contains constructions that read as Hebrew translated word by word. That linguistic evidence is one of the main grounds of the authorship argument treated in the other article on this page.

Within the whole there are distinct sections that circulate almost as separate books, including the Idra Rabba, the Great Assembly, in which the companions gather to expound the configuration of the divine countenance and three of them die of the intensity of it. Those set pieces, rather than the running commentary, are what most readers encounter.

The work also spread very fast for a text of its length and difficulty. Within a century of its appearance it was being cited as ancient authority across the Mediterranean, and by the sixteenth century Christian scholars were reading it in Latin for evidence of doctrines it does not contain.