The Zohar

The Zohar is not a book but a corpus: thousands of pages of stylized Aramaic, broken into dozens of fragments that contradict each other as readily as they explain, and dark on purpose throughout. Within the Kabbalistic tradition its authority stands level with that of the Talmud. Its real history is a dispute between the pious ascription to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai (2nd century) and the philological proof that the text was composed by Moshe de León in Castile in the 1280s. Between those two dates lie eleven hundred years of silence. Pious readers mostly take the early date, scholars mostly the late one, and the Zohar objects to neither: it works in both cases.

A book written as ancient

The Zohar appeared around 1280 in Guadalajara, Castile, where Moshe ben Shem Tov de León (~1240–1305) “circulated” it. De León was a Jewish Kabbalist of modest means and regularly short of money. By his own account he was transcribing, not writing: the ancient manuscript that he copied had been found in the tomb of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a Tannaitic sage of the 2nd century. Bar Yochai had hidden from the Romans in a cave with his son Eleazar for thirteen years, and it was in the course of those years that all the secrets of the Torah were disclosed to him.

The book presents itself as the reproduction of those dialogues, in which Rabbi Shimon goes through verses of the Torah with his disciples. Rashbi is not the 11th-century French Rashi, and the two get confused frequently enough to be worth separating here. The time of action is the 2nd century, the language is Aramaic with an archaizing grammar, and the setting is a Palestinian cave and then the roads of the Galilee.

Already de León's contemporaries had doubts. The chief skeptic was Isaac of Acre, of the school of Nachmanides. By the account that reached us through him (preserved in Zacuto's Sefer ha-Yuḥasin), de León's widow was questioned by the wife of Rabbi Joseph of Ávila: «where is the ancient manuscript?» The widow answered: «there was no manuscript. He was making it up out of his own head.» To the question «why then did he sign it with the name of Rabbi Shimon?» she explained: «he used to say that if he signed it under his own name, no one would buy it.»

Academic opinion now sides with the widow, because the philological analysis of the 20th century (Gershom Scholem, Yehuda Liebes, Daniel Abrams) came down the same way. The stylistic markers leave little room: the vocabulary carries medieval Spanish loanwords, and the Aramaic grammar is a reconstruction, never an inheritance. The concepts, the ten Sephiroth above all, belong to the 13th century and not the 2nd.

None of this makes the Zohar a “forgery” in the modern sense. Pseudepigraphy, the ascription of a composition to an ancient authority, was an acknowledged genre in the medieval Jewish tradition, and what it says is “my revelation goes back to that source”. De León did not make the Zohar up “out of his own head” as a caprice. He believed he was passing on a tradition that had come down through the ages, and he gave it the form in which it could be heard.

Structure of the corpus

What goes under the name of the Zohar is the main Zohar plus several separate treatises that are sometimes called the “daughters of the Zohar”. They differ widely in style, and in places they contradict one another outright.

Principal doctrines

Sephiroth and Partzufim

The Zohar unfolds the ten Sephiroth into a theology that can be taught. Each Sephirah is given a Name of God, an angel, a color, and an organ in the cosmic body of Adam Kadmon. What the book describes is not a static scheme but dynamic Faces of the Divine, called Partzufim in the later Lurianic terminology: Atik Yomin (Ancient of Days), Arikh Anpin (Long-suffering, the Great Face), Abba (Father, Chokmah), Imma (Mother, Binah), Zeir Anpin (the Lesser Face, the six middle Sephiroth), Nukva (Wife, Malkuth).

Sitra Achra — the Other Side

Demonology becomes systematic here for the first time. Before the Zohar, Judaism had scattered mentions of demons; after it there is a parallel structure. To each Sephirah of the holy side there corresponds a “Qlipha”, a shell of impurity on the Other Side (סִטְרָא אַחְרָא, Sitra Achra, Aramaic “other side”). The word “Qliphoth” in its later technical sense is Lurianic and does not appear here, though the idea itself of a structural twin of light and darkness is laid down in these pages.

Lilith and Samael

Here the demonological image of Lilith and Samael is fixed as a pair on the Sitra Achra, the mirror reflection of Tiferet-Malkuth. Lilith is more than “the first wife of Adam”, since that phrase is the late midrash: she is the queen of the night, going about the world and taking what has not been given. Samael is her consort and “the rider of the serpent”, the one who tempted Eve while mounted on the primordial serpent. Their union is catastrophic and their separation a cosmic necessity, because the Shekhinah (Malkuth) can return to Tiferet by no other road.

The structure of the soul

From the Zohar comes the canonical three-part structure of the soul: Nefesh (the lowest, animal), Ruach (the middle, moral), Neshamah (the highest, divine). Chayah and Yechidah were added later, above all in Lurianic Kabbalah, and they are the levels that remain closed to most.

Yichud — Union

The central practice according to the Zohar is Yichud, the mental union of two Names of God. Prayer carried out with the right kavanah (intention) is not a request but an act, because it restores what has been divided within the Divine. Tiferet must unite with Malkuth. The Shekhinah must return to her spouse, and every blessing before a meal, every prayer, is one link in that work.

The Idras — scenes of death and vision

Two parts of the corpus carry the drama: the Idra Rabba and the Idra Zuta. In the first, the ten disciples gather with Rashbi in the mountains of the Galilee, where each of them receives a wound in the heart and the secrets of the “building” (tikkun) of Atik Yomin, the Ancient of Days, are disclosed. Three of the disciples die in the process, their souls departing because they cannot endure the vision. The other seven go home and go on teaching.

Rashbi's last day is the Idra Zuta, and the same disciples gather at his bed. He reveals to them the final secret, the unity of the Partzufim, the undivided Face of God, and at the last word he dies. The house fills with fragrance. Fire in the sky. This is where the corpus ends; everything after it is an addition.

The Idras are not rhetoric. What they codify is the price of vision, and the price is that whoever sees the structure may not come out alive. Take it as a warning and not as a theory.

Later reception

By the 16th century the Zohar has become almost canonical, and in Safed it is read daily, by Joseph Karo, by Moshe Cordovero, and finally by Isaac Luria. Luria takes the Zohar as his foundation and adds the Tzimtzum and Shevirat ha-Kelim to it, which is how Lurianic Kabbalah comes about. A hundred years later that reading is the canonical one.

In the 17th century Knorr von Rosenroth translates the key fragments of the Zohar into Latin in his “Kabbala Denudata” (1677–1684), where Christian Europe meets the text broadly for the first time. A century and a half to two centuries later, Éliphas Lévi, Mathers and Waite work from that Latin, and through them it reaches Crowley, Grant and the whole of 20th-century Western Hermetic Kabbalah.

In Sabbateanism (17th century) and Frankism (18th century) the Zohar is read through the prism of “the holy sin”, where the crossing of prohibitions becomes a way of freeing the sparks. The reading is radical and dangerous. It is also derivable from the same texts, because the Zohar nowhere stipulates that the sparks are freed only through permitted actions.

Where to read

In Hebrew and Aramaic the standard is the Vilna edition in three volumes (Vilna, Romm press, 1882), and the modern megatext with a Hebrew translation and commentary is Matok mi-Dvash (Jerusalem, 1993–2007). In English the academic standard is the full translation The Pritzker Zohar (12 volumes, 2004–2017): Daniel Matt translated the first nine, and Nathan Wolski and Joel Hecker completed the last three.

Traditionally the Zohar is studied with a partner, a chevruta, slowly, one page a day, for years, and in Hebrew without vowel points. The formula is that one does not “read through” the Zohar.