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The Zohar (Hebrew: זֹהַר, lit. “Splendor” or “Radiance”) is a foundational work in the literature of Jewish mystical thought known as Kabbalah.[1] It is a group of books including commentary on the mystical aspects of the Torah (the five books of Moses) 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”. Its scriptural exegesis can be considered an esoteric form of the rabbinic literature known as Midrash, which elaborates on the Torah.
Language
The Zohar is mostly written in what has been described as a cryptic, obscure style of Aramaic.[2] Aramaic, the day-to-day language of Israel in the Second Temple period (539 BCE – 70 CE), was the original language of large sections of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra, and is the main language of the Talmud.[3] However, in the Late Middle Ages, the language was used among Jews exclusively in the study of such earlier texts. Some academic scholars assert that the Aramaic of the Zohar appears to be written by someone who did not know Aramaic as a native language and that words from Andalusi Romance and Galician-Portuguese can be found in the text.[4]
Origin and history
The Zohar first appeared in Spain, then the Kingdom of León, in the 13th century. It was published by a Jewish writer named Moses de León (c. 1240–1305). De León ascribed the work to Shimon bar Yochai (“the Rashbi”), a tanna active after the Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE) and the destruction of the Second Temple during the protracted period known as the Jewish–Roman wars.[5] According to Jewish legend,[6][7] Shimon hid in a cave for thirteen years studying the Torah and was inspired by the Prophet Elijah to write the Zohar. This accords with the traditional claim by adherents that Kabbalah is the concealed part of the Oral Torah.
Acceptance within Judaism
While the traditional majority view in Judaism has been that the teachings of Kabbalah were revealed by God to Biblical figures such as Abraham and Moses and were then transmitted orally from the Biblical era until their redaction by Shimon bar Yochai, modern academic analysis of the Zohar, including that by the 20th century religious historian Gershom Scholem, has theorized that Moses de León was the actual author. Aryeh Kaplan posited a theory that there was an ancient core text of the Zohar which antedated de Léon, but that several strata of text were added over time.
The view of some non-Chasidic Orthodox Jews and Orthodox groups, as well as non-Orthodox Jewish denominations, generally conforms to Scholem’s view, and as such, most such groups have long viewed the Zohar as pseudepigrapha and apocrypha, while sometimes accepting that its contents may have meaning for modern Judaism. The Dor Daim reject the Zohar outright, while the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community removed all Zohar-related content from their siddurs and liturgy in the aftermath of Sabbatai Zevi‘s apostasy to Islam. Selected Zohar-related elements have been restored in several more recent Spanish and Portuguese siddurs, even for communities which have not restored those elements to their liturgy.
Siddurs edited by non-Orthodox Jews may therefore contain excerpts from the Zohar and other kabbalistic works,[8] even if the editors do not literally believe that they are oral traditions from the time of Moses.
Impact outside Judaism
There are people of religions besides Judaism, or even those without religious affiliation, who delve in the Zohar out of curiosity, or as a means of seeking meaningful and practical answers about the meaning of their lives, the purpose of creation and existence and their relationships with the laws of nature,[9][10] and so forth; however from the perspective of traditional, rabbinic Judaism,[11][12] and by the Zohar’s own statements,[13] the purpose of the Zohar is to help the Jewish people through and out of the Exile and to infuse the Torah and mitzvot (Judaic commandments) with the wisdom of Moses de León’s Kabbalah for its Jewish readers.[14]
Etymology
In the Bible, the word “Zohar” appears in the vision of Ezekiel 8:2 and is usually translated as meaning radiance or light. It appears again in Daniel 12:3, “Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens”.
Authorship
Initial view
Representation of the Five Worlds with the 10 Sephirot in each, as successively smaller concentric circles, derived from the light of the Kav after the Tzimtzum
Suspicions aroused by the facts that the Zohar was discovered by one person and that it refers to historical events of the post-Talmudic period while purporting to be from an earlier time, which caused the authorship to be questioned from the outset.[5] Joseph Jacobs and Isaac Broyde, in their article on the Zohar for the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, cite a story involving the Kabbalist Isaac of Acco, who is supposed to have heard directly from the widow of de León that her husband proclaimed authorship by Shimon bar Yochai for profit:
A story tells that after the death of Moses de Leon, a rich man of Avila named Joseph offered Moses’ widow (who had been left without any means of supporting herself) a large sum of money for the original from which her husband had made the copy. She confessed that her husband himself was the author of the work. She had asked him several times, she said, why he had chosen to credit his own teachings to another, and he had always answered that doctrines put into the mouth of the miracle-working Shimon bar Yochai would be a rich source of profit. The story indicates that shortly after its appearance the work was believed by some to have been written by Moses de Leon.[5]
Isaac’s testimony, which appeared in the first edition (1566) of Sefer Yuchasin, was censored from the second edition (1580)[15] and remained absent from all editions thereafter until its restoration nearly 300 years later in the 1857 edition.[16][17]
Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan states that Isaac evidently did not believe her since Isaac wrote that the Zohar was authored by Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai in a manuscript in Kaplan’s possession.[clarification needed] This leads him to hypothesize that Moses de León’s wife sold the original manuscript, as parchment was very valuable, and was embarrassed by the realization of its high ancient worth, leading her to claim it was written by her husband. Kaplan concludes saying this was the probable series of events.[18]
The Zohar spread among the Jews with remarkable swiftness. Scarcely fifty years had passed since its appearance in Spain before it was quoted by many Kabbalists, including the Italian mystical writer Menahem Recanati and by Todros Abulafia. Certain Jewish communities, however, such as the Dor Daim, Andalusian (Western Sefardic or Spanish and Portuguese Jews), and some Italian communities, never accepted it as authentic.[5] The manuscripts of Zohar are from around the 14th and 16th centuries.[19]
Late Middle Ages
By the 15th century, its authority in the Spanish Jewish community was such that Joseph ibn Shem-Tov drew from it arguments 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 the creation, whose immortality is solely dependent upon his morality.[5]
Conversely, Elijah Delmedigo (c.1458 – c.1493), in his Bechinat ha-Dat endeavored to show that the Zohar could not be attributed to Shimon bar 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 bar 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 bar 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.[5][20]
Believers in the authenticity of the Zohar countered that the lack of references to the work in Jewish literature was because bar Yohai 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 bar Yochai should have foretold future happenings or made references to historical events of the post-Talmudic period.[5]
The authenticity of the Zohar was accepted by such 16th century Jewish luminaries as R’ Yosef Karo (d.1575), R’ Moses Isserles (d. 1572), and R’ Solomon Luria (d.1574), who wrote that Jewish law (Halacha) follows the Zohar, except where the Zohar is contradicted by the Babylonian Talmud.[21] However, R’ Luria admits that the Zohar cannot override a minhag.[22]
Enlightenment period
An 1809 edition of the Zohar, printed in Slavuta, as seen in POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Debate continued over the generations; Delmedigo’s arguments were echoed by Leon of Modena (d.1648) in his Ari Nohem, and a work devoted to the criticism of the Zohar, Mitpachas Sefarim, was written by Jacob Emden (d.1776), who, waging war against the remaining adherents of the Sabbatai Zevi movement (in which Zevi, a false messiah and Jewish apostate, cited Messianic prophecies from the Zohar as proof of his legitimacy), endeavored to show that the book on which Zevi based his doctrines was a forgery. Emden argued 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 “synagogue“; and gives a mystical explanation of the Hebrew vowel points, which were not introduced until long after the Talmudic period.[5]
In the Ashkenazi community of Eastern Europe, religious authorities including the Vilna Gaon (d.1797) and Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (d.1812) (The Baal HaTanya) believed in the authenticity of the Zohar. Acceptance was not uniform, however. The Noda Bihudah (d.1793), in his sefer Derushei HaTzlach,[23] argued that the Zohar is to be considered unreliable as it came into our hands many hundreds of years after Rashbi‘s death and it lacks an unbroken mesorah as to its authenticity, among other reasons.[24]
The influence of the Zohar and the Kabbalah in Yemen, where it was introduced in the 17th century, contributed to the formation of the Dor Deah movement, led by Rabbi Yiḥyeh Qafeḥ in the later part of the 19th century, whose adherents believed that the core beliefs of Judaism were rapidly diminishing in favor of the mysticism of the Kabbalah. Among its objects was the opposition of the influence of the Zohar and subsequent developments in modern Kabbalah, which were then pervasive in Yemenite Jewish life, restoration of what they believed to be a rationalistic approach to Judaism rooted in authentic sources, and the safeguarding of the older (“Baladi“) tradition of Yemenite Jewish observance that preceded the Kabbalah. Especially controversial were the views of the Dor Daim on the Zohar, as presented in Milhamoth Hashem (Wars of the Lord),[25] written by Rabbi Qafeḥ. A group of Jerusalem rabbis published an attack on Rabbi Qafeḥ under the title of Emunat Hashem (Faith of the Lord), taking measures to ostracize members of the movement;[26] notwithstanding, not even the Yemenite rabbis who opposed the dardaim heeded this ostracization. Instead, they intermarried, sat together in batei midrash, and continued to sit with Rabbi Qafeḥ in beth din.[27]
Contemporary religious view
Title page of the first printed edition of the Zohar, Mantua, 1558. Library of Congress.
Most of Orthodox Judaism holds that the teachings of Kabbalah were transmitted from teacher to teacher, in a long and continuous chain, from the Biblical era until its redaction by Shimon bar Yochai. Some fully accept the claims that the Kabbalah’s teachings are in essence a revelation from God to the Biblical patriarch Abraham, Moses and other ancient figures, but were never printed and made publicly available until the time of the Zohar’s medieval publication.[citation needed] The greatest acceptance of this sequence of events is held within Haredi Judaism, especially Chasidic groups. R’ Yechiel Michel Epstein (d.1908), and R’ Yisrael Meir Kagan (d.1933) both believed in the authenticity of the Zohar. Rabbis Eliyahu Dessler (d.1953) and Gedaliah Nadel (d.2004) maintained that it is acceptable to believe that the Zohar was not written by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and that it had a late authorship.[28]
Within Orthodox Judaism the traditional view that Shimon bar Yochai was the author is prevalent. R’ Menachem Mendel Kasher in a 1958 article in the periodical Sinai argues against the claims of Gershom Scholem that the Zohar was written in the 13th Century by R’ Moses de León.[29] He writes:
- Many statements in the works of the Rishonim (medieval commentors who preceded de León) refer to Medrashim that we are not aware of. He writes that these are in fact references to the Zohar. This has also been pointed out by R’ David Luria in his work “Kadmus Sefer Ha’Zohar”.
- The Zohar’s major opponent Elijah Delmedigo refers to the Zohar as having existed for “only” 300 years. Even he agrees that it was extant at the time of R’ Moses de León.
- He cites a document from R’ Yitchok M’ Acco who was sent by the Ramban to investigate the Zohar. The document brings witnesses that attest to the existence of the manuscript.
- It is impossible to accept that R’ Moses de León managed to forge a work within the scope of the Zohar (1700 pages) within a period of six years as Scholem claims.
- A comparison between the Zohar and de León’s other works show major stylistic differences. Although he made use of his manuscript of the Zohar, many ideas presented in his works contradict or ignore ideas mentioned in the Zohar. Luria also points this out.
- Many of the Midrashic works achieved their final redaction in the Geonic period. Some of the anachronistic terminologies of the Zohar may date from that time.
- Out of the thousands of words used in the Zohar, Scholem finds two anachronistic terms and nine cases of ungrammatical usage of words. This proves that the majority of the Zohar was written within the accepted time frame and only a small amount was added later (in the Geonic period as mentioned).
- Some hard to understand terms may be attributed to acronyms or codes. He finds corollaries to such a practice in other ancient manuscripts.
- The “borrowings” from medieval commentaries may be explained in a simple manner. It is not unheard of that a note written on the side of a text should on later copying be added to the main part of the text. The Talmud itself has Geonic additions from such a cause. Certainly, this would apply to the Zohar to which there did not exist other manuscripts to compare it with.
- He cites an ancient manuscript that refers to a book Sod Gadol that seems to in fact be the Zohar.
Concerning the Zohar’s lack of knowledge of the land of Israel, Scholem bases this on the many references to a city Kaputkia (Cappadocia) which he states was situated in Turkey, not in Israel.
Another theory as to the authorship of the Zohar is that it was transmitted like the Talmud before it was transcribed: as an oral tradition reapplied to changing conditions and eventually recorded. This view believes that the Zohar was not written by Shimon bar Yochai, but is a holy work because it consisted of his principles.
Belief in the authenticity of the Zohar among Orthodox Jewish movements can be seen in various forms online today. Featured on Chabad.org is the multi-part article, The Zohar’s Mysterious Origins[30] by Moshe Miller, which views the Zohar as the product of multiple generations of scholarship but defends the overall authenticity of the text and argues against many of the textual criticisms from Scholem and Tishby. The Zohar figures prominently in the mysticism of Chabad. Another leading Orthodox online outlet, Aish.com, also shows broad acceptance of the Zohar by referencing it in many of its articles.[original research?]
Jews in non-Orthodox Jewish denominations accept the conclusions of historical academic studies on the Zohar and other kabbalistic texts. As such, most non-Orthodox Jews have long viewed the Zohar as pseudepigraphy and apocrypha. Nonetheless, many accepted that some of its contents had meaning for modern Judaism. Siddurim edited by non-Orthodox Jews often have excerpts from the Zohar and other kabbalistic works, e.g. Siddur Sim Shalom edited by Jules Harlow, even though the editors are not kabbalists.
In recent years there has been a growing willingness of non-Orthodox Jews to study the Zohar, and a growing minority have a position that is similar to the Modern Orthodox position described above. This seems pronounced among Jews who follow the path of Jewish Renewal.[citation needed]
Modern critical views
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” and later adopted by the historian Heinrich Graetz in his “History of the Jews”, vol. 7. The young kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem began his career at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with a famous lecture in which he promised to refute Graetz and Jellinek, but after years of strained research Gershom Scholem contended in 1941 that de León himself was the most likely author of the Zohar. Among other things, Scholem noticed the Zohar’s frequent errors in Aramaic grammar, its suspicious traces of Spanish words and sentence patterns, and its lack of knowledge of the land of Israel.
Other Jewish scholars have also suggested the possibility that the Zohar was written by a group of people, including de León. This theory generally presents de León as having been the leader of a mystical school, whose collective effort resulted in the Zohar.
Even if de León wrote the text, the entire contents of the book may not be fraudulent. Parts of it may be based on older works, and it was a common practice to ascribe the authorship of a document to an ancient rabbi in order to give the document more weight. It is possible that Moses de León considered himself to be channeling the words of Rabbi Shimon.
In the Encyclopaedia Judaica article written by Professor Gershom Scholem of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem there is an extensive discussion of the sources cited in the Zohar. Scholem views the author of the Zohar as having based the Zohar on a wide variety of pre-existing Jewish sources, while at the same time inventing 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.
Scholem’s views are widely held as accurate among historians of the Kabbalah, but like all textual historical investigations, are not uncritically accepted; most of the following conclusions are still accepted as accurate, although academic analysis of the original texts has progressed dramatically since Scholem’s ground-breaking research. 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, also a student of Scholem’s who has reconstructed a critical edition of the Zohar based on original, unpublished manuscripts.
While many original ideas in the Zohar are presented as being from (fictitious) Jewish mystical works, many ancient and clearly rabbinic mystical teachings are presented without their real, identifiable sources’ being named. 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 Shimoni, 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]…
The author of the Zohar drew upon the Bible commentaries written by medieval rabbis, including Rashi, Abraham ibn Ezra, David Kimhi and even authorities as late as Nahmanides and Maimonides. Scholem gives a variety of examples of such borrowings.
The Zohar draws upon early mystical texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah and the Bahir, and the early medieval writings of the Hasidei Ashkenaz.
Another influence on the Zohar that Scholem, and scholars like Yehudah Liebes and Ronit Meroz have identified[2] was a circle of Spanish Kabbalists in Castile who dealt with the appearance of an evil side emanating from within the world of the sephirot. Scholem saw this dualism of good and evil within the Godhead as a kind of “gnostic” inclination within Kabbalah, and as a predecessor of the Sitra Ahra (the other, evil side) in the Zohar. The main text of the Castile circle, the Treatise on the Left Emanation, was written by Jacob ha-Cohen in around 1265.[31]
More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zohar