Zohar

For other uses, see Zohar (disambiguation).

Zohar
Title page of the first printed edition of the Zohar, Mantua, 1558
Information
Religion	Judaism
Author	Moses de León
Language	Aramaic, Medieval Hebrew
Period	High medieval
Full text
Zohar at Hebrew Wikisource
Zohar at English Wikisource

The Zohar (Hebrew: זֹהַר, romanized: Zōhar, lit. 'Splendor' or 'Radiance') is a foundational work of Kabbalistic literature. It is a group of books including commentary on the mystical aspects of the Torah and scriptural interpretations as well as material on mysticism, mythical cosmogony, and mystical psychology. The Zohar contains discussions of the nature of God, the origin and structure of the universe, the nature of souls, redemption, the relationship of ego to darkness and "true self" to "the light of God".

The Zohar was first publicized by Moses de León (c. 1240 – 1305 CE), who claimed it was a Tannaitic work recording the teachings of Shimon ben Yochai (c. 100 CE). This claim is universally rejected by modern scholars, most of whom believe de León, also an infamous forger of Geonic material, wrote the book himself between 1280 and 1286. Some scholars argue that the Zohar is the work of multiple medieval authors and/or contains a small amount of genuinely antique novel material. Later additions to the Zohar, including Tiqqune hazZohar and Ra'ya Meheimna, were composed by a 14th century imitator.

Language

Zoharic Aramaic

According to Gershom Scholem and other modern scholars, Zoharic Aramaic is an artificial dialect largely based on a linguistic fusion of the Babylonian Talmud and Targum Onkelos, but confused by de León's simple and imperfect grammar, his limited vocabulary, and his reliance on loanwords, including from contemporaneous medieval languages. The author further confused his text with occasional strings of Aramaic-seeming gibberish, in order to give the impression of obscure knowledge. While acknowledging that Zoharic Aramaic did not develop organically from any preexisting dialect, some recent scholarship argues that Aramaic was chosen for literary or mystical purposes, not merely to disguise the forgery.

Zoharic Hebrew

The original text of the Zohar, as cited by various early Kabbalists beginning around the 14th century (e.g. Isaac b. Samuel of Acre, David b. Judah the Pious, Israel Alnaqua, Alfonso de Zamora) was partly in Hebrew and partly in Aramaic. By the time of the first edition (1558) the text was entirely in Aramaic, with the exception of the Midrash haNe'elam, where Hebrew words and phrases are often employed as in the Babylonian Talmud. "The Hebrew of the Midrash haNe'elam is similar in its overall form to the language of the early midrashim, but its specific vocabulary, idioms, and stylistic characteristics bear the imprint of medieval Hebrew, and its midrashic manner is clearly that of a later imitation."

Authorship

Initial view

Abraham Zacuto's 1504 work Sefer Yuhasin (first printed 1566) quotes from the Kabbalist Isaac ben Samuel of Acre's 13th-century chronicle Divre hayYamim (lost), which claims that the widow and daughter of de León revealed that he had written it himself and only ascribed the authorship to Shimon ben Yochai for personal profit:

And [Isaac] went to Spain, to investigate how it happened in his time that the Zohar was found, which Shimon ben Yochai and Eleazar ben Shimon his son had made in the cave . . . and some say that [de Leon] forged it among his forgeries, but [Isaac later] said [in his Otzar haChayyim] that the Palestinian Aramaic sections were genuinely written by Shimon ben Yochai . . . And [Isaac] wrote:

Because I had seen that these words were wonderous, that they ran from a well high above which is beyond those uninitiated into the secrets of the divine, I chased after it and I asked the scholars . . . and some said it had fallen into the hand of the sage Moses de Leon, whom they call Moses of Guadalajara, and some said Shimon ben Yochai had never written this book, but that Moses had written these wonderous words and falsely ascribed them to Shimon ben Yochai and his son Elazar in order to sell them for huge sums of money. And I went to Spain, to the capital city of Valladolid, and presented myself to Moses, and was received favorably, and he swore to me by the Lord that the ancient book of Shimon ben Yochai was that day in his house in Ávila, and that he would show it to me when I visited him, and Moses parted from me to return home, but he sickened in Arévalo on the way, and he died there, and when I heard of this I was mortally pained, and I took to the road, and I came to Ávila, and I found a great old sage there named David de Pancorbo, and he received me favorably, and I demanded he explain to me the secrets of the Zohar, about which men were disputing, and about which Moses himself had sworn beyond doubt until his death, but about which I did not know upon whom to rely or whom to trust, and he told me, "Know in truth that it is clear to me beyond doubt that it never came to the hand of this Moses, and that there is no Zohar except that of which Moses himself wrote every word. Know that this Moses was a great spendthrift; one day his house was filled with treasures that the wealthy mystics had given him in exchange for excerpts, and the next his wife and children were starving naked in the street. So when we heard that he had died in Arévalo, I went to the house of the richest man in the city, Joseph de Ávila, and said to him, 'Now the time has come for you to earn the priceless Zohar if you will do what I advise', and he followed my advice, and he sent his wife to the house of Moses' widow, and she said to her, 'Know that my wish is to marry your daughter to my son, and I ask nothing from you except the Zohar from which your husband excerpted for many people,' and Moses' widow swore to Joseph's wife, 'By the Lord, my husband never had such a book except in his mind, and everything he wrote came from his own intellect. When I saw him writing, I asked him why he claimed to be excerpting from a book I knew he did not have, and he told me that it was because, while for his own words they would not give a penny, for the divinely inspired work of Shimon ben Yochai they will pay in blood.' And Moses' daughter said exactly the same." Can you ask for better proof than this?

Isaac goes on to say that he obtained mixed evidence of Zohar's authenticity from other Spanish Kabbalists, but the fragment ends abruptly, mid-sentence, without any conclusion. Though Isaac is willing to quote it in his Otzar haChayyim and his Meirat Einayim, he does so rarely. Isaac's testimony was censored from the second edition (1580) and remained absent from all editions thereafter until its restoration nearly 300 years later in the 1857 edition. In 1243 a different Jew had reportedly found a different ancient mystical book in a cave near Toledo, which may have been de Leon's inspiration.

Within fifty years of its appearance in Spain it was quoted by Kabbalists, including the Italian mystical writer Menahem Recanati and Todros ben Joseph Abulafia. However, Joseph ben Waqar harshly attacked the Zohar, which he considered inauthentic, and some Jewish communities, such as the Dor Daim from Yemen, Andalusian (Western Sefardic or Spanish and Portuguese Jews), and some Italian communities, never accepted it as authentic. Other early Kabbalists, such as David b. Judah the Pious (fl. c. 1300), Abraham b. Isaac of Granada, (fl. c. 1300), and David b. Amram of Aden (fl. c. 1350), so readily imitate its pseudepigraphy by ascribing contemporaries' statements to Zoharic sages that it is obvious they understood its nature. The manuscripts of the Zohar are from the 14th-16th centuries.

Late Middle Ages

By the 15th century, the Zohar's authority in the Iberian Jewish community was such that Joseph ibn Shem-Tov drew arguments from it in his attacks against Maimonides, and even representatives of non-mystical Jewish thought began to assert its sacredness and invoke its authority in the decision of some ritual questions. In Jacobs' and Broyde's view, they were attracted by its glorification of man, its doctrine of immortality, and its ethical principles, which they saw as more in keeping with the spirit of Talmudic Judaism than are those taught by the philosophers, and which was held in contrast to the view of Maimonides and his followers, who regarded man as a fragment of the universe whose immortality is dependent upon the degree of development of his active intellect. The Zohar instead declared Man to be the lord of creation, whose immortality is solely dependent upon his morality.

Conversely, Elia del Medigo (c. 1458 – c. 1493), in his Beḥinat ha-Dat, endeavored to show that the Zohar could not be attributed to Shimon ben Yochai, by a number of arguments. He claims that if it were his work, the Zohar would have been mentioned by the Talmud, as has been the case with other works of the Talmudic period; he claims that had ben Yochai known by divine revelation the hidden meaning of the precepts, his decisions on Jewish law from the Talmudic period would have been adopted by the Talmud, that it would not contain the names of rabbis who lived at a later period than that of ben Yochai; he claims that if the Kabbalah were a revealed doctrine, there would have been no divergence of opinion among the Kabbalists concerning the mystic interpretation of the precepts.

Believers in the authenticity of the Zohar countered that the lack of references to the work in Jewish literature was because ben Yochai did not commit his teachings to writing but transmitted them orally to his disciples over generations until finally the doctrines were embodied in the Zohar. They found it unsurprising that ben Yochai should have foretold future happenings or made references to historical events of the post-Talmudic period.

By the late 16th century, the Zohar was present in one-tenth of all private Jewish libraries in Mantua. The authenticity of the Zohar was accepted by such 16th century Jewish luminaries as Joseph Karo (d. 1575), and Solomon Luria (d. 1574), who wrote nonetheless that Jewish law does not follow the Zohar when it is contradicted by the Babylonian Talmud.

Luria writes that the Zohar cannot even override a minhag. Moses Isserles (d. 1572) writes that he "heard" that the author of the Zohar is ben Yochai. Elijah Levita (d. 1559) did not believe in its antiquity, nor did Joseph Scaliger (d. 1609) or Louis Cappel (d. 1658) or Johannes Drusius (d. 1616). David ibn abi Zimra (d. 1573) held that one can follow the Zohar only when it does not conflict with any other source and records that "You asked me about scribes modifying torah scrolls to accord with the Zohar ... and I was shocked, for how can they consider the Zohar better than the Talmud Bavli, which has come down to us? ... So I went myself to the house of the scribe and I found three scrolls which he had edited, and I fixed them, and I restored the Torah to its proper glory."

Enlightenment Period

Debate continued over the generations; del Medigo's arguments were echoed by Leon of Modena (d. 1648) in his Ari Nohem, by Jean Morin (d. 1659), and by Jacob Emden (d. 1776).

Emden—who may have been familiar with Modena through Morin's arguments—devoted a book to the criticism of the Zohar, called Mitpachas Sefarim (מטפחת ספרים), in an effort against the remaining adherents of the Sabbatean movement (in which Sabbatai Zevi, a Jewish apostate, cited Messianic prophecies from the Zohar as proof of his legitimacy). Emden argued that the book on which Zevi based his doctrines was a forgery, arguing that the Zohar:

• misquotes passages of Scripture
• misunderstands the Talmud
• contains some ritual observances that were ordained by later rabbinical authorities
• mentions the Crusades against Muslims (who did not exist in the 2nd century)
• uses the expression esnoga, a Portuguese term for the synagogue
• gives a mystical explanation of the Hebrew vowel points, which were not introduced until long after the Talmudic period.

Saul Berlin (d. 1794) argued that the presence of an introduction in the Zohar, unknown to the Talmudic literary genre, itself indicates a medieval date.

In the Ashkenazi community of Eastern Europe, religious authorities including Elijah of Vilna (d. 1797) and Shneur Zalman of Liadi (d. 1812) believed in the authenticity of the Zohar, while Ezekiel Landau (d. 1793), in his sefer Derushei HaTzlach (דרושי הצל"ח), argued that the Zohar is to be considered unreliable as it was made public many hundreds of years after Ben Yochai's death and lacks an unbroken tradition of authenticity, among other reasons.

Isaac Satanow accepted Emden's arguments and referred to the Zohar as a forgery, also offering new evidence. By 1813 Samuel David Luzzatto had concluded that "these books [the Zohar and the Tiqqunei Zohar] are utter forgeries," in part because they repeatedly discuss the Hebrew cantillation marks, which were not invented until the 9th century. In 1817 Luzzatto published these arguments, and in 1825 he penned a fuller treatise, giving many reasons why the Zohar could not be ancient. However, he did not publish this until 1852, when he felt it justified by the rise of Hasidism. Moses Landau (d. 1852), Ezekiel's grandson, published the same conclusion in 1822. Isaac Haver (d. 1852) admits the vast majority of content comes from the 13th century but argues that there was a genuine core. Solomon Judah Loeb Rapoport (d. 1867) spoke against the Zohar's antiquity. Eliakim ha-Milzahgi (d. 1854) accepted Emden's arguments.

The influence of the Zohar in Yemen contributed to the formation of the Dor Deah movement, led by Yiḥyah Qafiḥ in the later part of the 19th century. Among its objects was the opposition of the influence of the Zohar, as presented in Qafiḥ's Milhamoth Hashem (Wars of the Lord) and Da'at Elohim.

Shlomo Zalman Geiger (d. 1878), in his book Divrei Kehilot on the liturgical practice of Frankfurt am Main, records that "We do not say brikh shmei in Frankfurt, because its source is in the Zohar, and the sages of Frankfurt refused to accept Qabbalah."

Modern religious views

In 1892, Adolf Neubauer called on the Orthodox rabbinate to reject the Zohar as a forgery and to remove Zoharic prayers from the liturgy. However, Yechiel Michel Epstein (d. 1908) and Yisrael Meir Kagan (d. 1933) both believed in the authenticity of the Zohar, as did Menachem Mendel Kasher (d. 1983), Aryeh Kaplan (d. 1983), David Luria (d. 1855), and Chaim Kanievsky (d. 2022). Aryeh Carmell (d. 2006) did not, and Eliyahu Dessler (d. 1953) accepted the possibility that it was composed in the 13th century. Moshe Feinstein wrote in 1953 that "the Zohar and Tikkunim are the words of the Tannaim". Gedaliah Nadel (d. 2004) was unsure if the Zohar were genuine but was sure that it is acceptable to believe that it is not. Ovadia Yosef (d. 2013) held that Orthodox Jews should accept the Zohar's antiquity in practice based on medieval precedent, but agreed that rejecting it is rational and religiously valid. Joseph Hertz (d. 1946) called the claim of ben Yochai's authorship "untenable", citing Gershom Scholem's evidence. Samuel Belkin (d. 1976) argued that the Mystical Midrash section, specifically, predated de León. Joseph B. Soloveitchik (d. 1993) apparently dismissed the Zohar's antiquity. Moses Gaster (d. 1939) wrote that the claim of ben Yochai's authorship was "untenable" but that Moses de León had compiled earlier material. Meir Mazuz (d. 2025) accepts Emden's arguments. Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote (1990) that "Moses de León composed the Zohar in the 1270s as certainly as Theodor Herzl composed Der Judenstaat in the 1890s ... the Zohar was influential because in every generation the idolatrous influence outpowers the true faith".

Modern critical views

Early attempts included M. H. Landauer's Vorläufiger Bericht über meine Entdeckung in Ansehung des Sohar (1845), which fingered Abraham Abulafia as the author, and Samuel David Luzzatto's ויכוח על חכמת הקבלה (1852), but the first systematic and critical academic proof for the authorship of Moses de León was given by Adolf Jellinek in his 1851 monograph "Moses ben Shem-tob de León und sein Verhältnis zum Sohar". Jellinek's proofs, which combined previous analyses with Isaac of Acre's testimony and comparison of the Zohar to de Leon's Hebrew works, were accepted by every other major scholar in the field, including Heinrich Graetz (History of the Jews, vol. 7), Moritz Steinschneider, Bernhard Beer, Leopold Zunz, and Christian David Ginsburg. Ginsburg summarized Jellinek's, Graetz's, and other scholars' proofs for the English-reading world in 1865, also introducing several novel proofs, including that the Zohar includes a translation of a poem by Solomon ibn Gabirol (d. 1058) and that it includes a mystical explanation of a mezuzah style only introduced in the 13th century. Adolf Neubauer and Samuel Rolles Driver were convinced by these arguments, but Edward Bouverie Pusey held to a Tannaitic date.

By 1913, the critical view had apparently lost some support: Israel Abrahams recalls that "Zunz, like Graetz, had little patience with the Zohar . . . at this date we are much more inclined to treat the Kabbalah with respect."

Gershom Scholem, who was to found modern academic study of Kabbalah, began his career at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1925 with a lecture in which he promised to refute Graetz and Jellinek. However, after years of research, he came to conclusions similar to theirs by 1938, when he argued again that de León was the most likely author. Scholem noted the Zohar's frequent errors in Aramaic grammar, its suspicious traces of Arabic and Spanish words and sentence patterns, and its lack of knowledge of the Land of Israel, among other proofs.

Scholem's views are widely held as accurate among historians of Kabbalah, but they are not uncritically accepted. Scholars who continue to research the background of the Zohar include Yehuda Liebes (who wrote his doctorate thesis for Scholem on the subject, Dictionary of the Vocabulary of the Zohar in 1976), and Daniel C. Matt, a student of Scholem's who has published a critical edition of the Zohar.

Influences

Academic studies of the Zohar show that many of its ideas are based in the Talmud, various works of midrash, and earlier Jewish mystical works. Scholem writes:

The writer had expert knowledge of the early material and he often used it as a foundation for his expositions, putting into it variations of his own. His main sources were the Babylonian Talmud, the complete Midrash Rabbah, the Midrash Tanhuma, and the two Pesiktot (Pesikta De-Rav Kahana or Pesikta Rabbati), the Midrash on Psalms, the Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, and the Targum Onkelos. Generally speaking, they are not quoted exactly, but translated into the peculiar style of the Zohar and summarized. [...]

Less use is made of the halakhic Midrashim, the Jerusalem Talmud, and the other Targums, nor of the Midrashim like the Aggadat Shir ha-Shirim, the Midrash on Proverbs, and the Alfabet de-R. Akiva. It is not clear whether the author used the Yalkut Simeoni, or whether he knew the sources of its aggadah separately. Of the smaller Midrashim he used the Heikhalot Rabbati, the Alfabet de-Ben Sira, the Sefer Zerubabel, the Baraita de-Ma'aseh Bereshit, [and many others] [...]

At the same time, Scholem says, the author "invent[ed] a number of fictitious works that the Zohar supposedly quotes, e.g., the Sifra de-Adam, the Sifra de-Hanokh, the Sifra di-Shelomo Malka, the Sifra de-Rav Hamnuna Sava, the Sifra de-Rav Yeiva Sava, the Sifra de-Aggadeta, the Raza de-Razin and many others."

The Zohar also draws from the Bible commentaries written by medieval rabbis, including