Moses de Leon

Moses de Leon is not a shadowy figure. A substantial body of Hebrew writing survives under his own name, most of it produced in the 1280s and 1290s, and it can be read alongside the Zohar rather than only as background to it. Sefer ha-Rimmon, the Book of the Pomegranate, treats the commandments as a symbolic system reflecting the structure of the divine world. Shekel ha-Kodesh and Or Zarua work over the same material, and a run of shorter treatises and responsa fills out the picture of a working kabbalist writing for an educated Hebrew readership rather than for a coterie.

The evidence for his life is thin but real. He is associated with Guadalajara, where much of the signed output was written, and later with Avila. The record places his death at Arevalo in 1305, on a journey home.

Beyond that the documentary trail runs out, and the colour that fills the gap in later accounts comes from a single much repeated report by Isaac of Acre, who wrote that he had gone looking for the ancient manuscript of the Zohar, and that de Leon's widow told him no such manuscript existed because her husband had written the book himself. Scholars differ on how much weight the story bears, since Isaac's account survives only at second hand in a later compilation and its details do not all hang together. It is not the foundation of the modern case, but it is where the modern question begins.

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.