In the mid-1990s, following other pop stars and celebrities, Madonna (Madonna Louise Ciccone, b. 1958) started to study at the Kabbalah Center, the largest contemporary Kabbalistic movement. The Kabbalah Center was established in the late 1960s by Philip Berg (1927-2013) and some other followers of the teaching of Yehuda Ashlag (1885-1954). Ashlag, who was born in Warsaw, Poland, and immigrated to Palestine in 1922, developed an innovative doctrine of modern Kabbalah (which he termed “altruistic communism”) that integrated concepts and theories of sixteenth-century Lurianic Kabbalah with modern, socialist ideas. According to Ashlag’s Kabbalah, the divine creator is an infinite, altruistic will to bestow on others, while created beings are essentially an egoistic will to receive. Human beings, born with the will to receive, may change their nature into a will to bestow, and thus overcome their egoism and become divine. Such a transformation, according to Ashlag, can only be achieved in a communist community, in which every person is able to give to others, while his own needs are taken care of by his companions. The way to reach the perfect society and the perfection of the individual is, according to Ashlag, the dissemination of Kabbalah.

Philip Berg, who was born to a Jewish Orthodox family in the United States, studied Kabbalah with two of Ashlag's disciples, Yehuda Brandwein (1903-1969) and Levi Krakovski (1891-1966). Berg developed and reinterpreted the teaching of Ashlag in the spirit of the American culture of the later twentieth century. He downplayed the socialist ideas of Ashlag, added doctrines and rituals taken from other Kabbalistic schools, and integrated them with New Age concepts and practices. Developing the universalistic stance of Ashlag's Kabbalah, he opened the Kabbalah Center to non-Jews too. Gradually, the Kabbalah Center became the largest contemporary Kabbalistic movement.

Madonna, the most famous disciple of the Kabbalah Center, integrated Kabbalistic themes and ideas in her songs, performances, video-clips, and children's books. Her song and video-clip “Die Another Day” (2002), which were produced as a promo for the James Bond film of the same title, presented Ashlag's ideas (as interpreted in the Kabbalah Center) concerning the overcoming of one's ego and the conquering of suffering and death through the power of the divine name of 72 letters.

THE TENSION between the wish to reveal and publicize the Zohar, on the one hand, and to conceal its content and limit its accessibility, on the other, has characterized the history of that book's reception from its early circulation until today. As we have seen, the zoharic literature was created as a reaction to conservative, esoteric trends that dominated the kabbalistic production field at the end of the thirteenth century. Throughout its history there have been circles that emphasized the exoteric character of the Zohar and have contributed to its circulation while others viewed it as an esoteric text and did their best to limit its proliferation. At times the two inclinations existed side by side within the same circles.

This tension stems from the economic logic inherent in cultural systems. To sustain the value of a cultural product a fine balance must be maintained between its distribution and control of its availability. In other words, value is preserved by balancing supply and demand. To quote Pierre Bourdieu, ‘all goods offered tend to lose some of their relative scarcity and their distinctive value as the number of consumers both inclined and able to appropriate them grows. Popularization devalues. Déclassé goods no longer give class.’ Therefore, although some circulation was necessary to increase the Zohar's value as a sacred and authoritative text, excessive circulation and uncontrolled access threatened to reduce its cultural worth.

Yet it was the perception of the Zohar as incomprehensible to the average human mind that enabled, to a great extent, its distribution to the general public. As I have shown in the first two chapters, the zoharic literature undermined the esoteric approach of Nahmanides’ school; Moshe Halbertal argues that ‘the Zohar presents a perfect alternative to the concept that the Kabbalah is a closed knowledge’. In the first extant testimony describing the distribution of the Zohar, R. Isaac of Acre recounts his amazement at the exoteric character of that work and at the ‘wondrous secrets, previously transmitted only orally and not meant to be set in writing, [which] are explained in this book so that they can be comprehended by anyone who is able to read a book’.

AS THE ZOHAR lost its status of sanctity and authority within maskilic circles, its positive symbolic value was preserved in the communities that rejected modern European culture (or were exposed to it to a lesser degree). Yet even within these communities, especially in eastern Europe, engagement in kabbalah in general, and study of the Zohar in particular, were restricted. These restrictions stemmed partially from the opposition of earlier scholars to the free dissemination of the Zohar (see Chapter 6), and possibly from the arguments of the maskilim against the work itself (see Chapter 7).

Meanwhile, calls for a positive re-evaluation of the Zohar and kabbalah were sounded in Jewish circles that adopted Romantic, neo-Romantic, and nationalistic ideologies at the turn of the century. The endeavour of these circles to reappraise the Zohar as a literary, philosophical, and ‘mystical’ text, and to grant it a central place in modern Jewish culture, succeeded to a certain extent. The reason they met with limited success was that their recanonization attempt was rooted in a modern perspective that had an ambivalent view of kabbalah, and of traditional Jewish communities which continued to maintain kabbalistic and hasidic traditions. The ambivalent recanonization of the Zohar was fused, as it were, with ‘admiration and disgust’—expressions used by Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem— determining, at least until recently, the attitude towards kabbalah and the Zohar within modern Jewish and Israeli cultures.

As I pointed out in the previous chapter, notwithstanding the fierce criticism of nineteenth-century maskilim several Jewish philosophers and scholars in western Europe related favourably to the kabbalah and the Zohar. A fine example of this sympathetic approach is Adolphe Franck, a French Jewish scholar of law and philosophy, who, in his book La Kabbale, ou la philosophie religieuse des hébreux, dedicates several chapters to the examination of the Zohar's antiquity, description of its hermeneutical system, and analysis of its religious doctrine. Franck argued that the Zohar was, indeed, based on R. Shimon's teachings, which had initially been transmitted orally, then transcribed, and finally redacted in the thirteenth century.

THE OPPOSITION provoked by the first printings of the Zohar intensified in the course the eighteenth century, due partly to the book's growing readership and to the Sabbatian involvement in its dissemination. In addition to those who raised objections to its proliferation, some contested its authority, sanctity, and antiquity, or questioned its attribution to R. Shimon. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these views, which had not garnered much support in their own time, were enthusiastically adopted by the maskilim (adherents of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment) in eastern and western Europe. While basing themselves on these earlier claims against the Zohar, the maskilim employed new methods—satire and historical-philological research.

Criticism of kabbalah in general and of the Zohar in particular played a major role in the maskilic opposition to traditional Judaism, especially hasidism. It was an important tool of their self-definition as representatives of ‘enlightened Jewry’ and distinct from other contemporary Jewish groups. Although more sympathetic approaches also emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Enlightenment viewpoint had a definitive influence on the way kabbalah and the Zohar were perceived by Jewish circles that adopted modern European values.

This chapter explores the evolution of the claims raised against the Zohar, and the mechanism whereby those claims were preserved and reused by scholars in later periods. I start my survey with a look at early Zohar criticism, from the appearance of the first texts to the eighteenth century, and then move on to examine the rejection of the Zohar during the Enlightenment.

The claim that the Zohar was an ancient text written by R. Shimon was challenged as soon as the first zoharic texts began circulating and the concept of Sefer hazohar emerged. This is evident from R. Isaac of Acre's famous statement quoted by Abraham Zacuto in Sefer yuḥasin:

AS I HAVE SHOWN in the previous chapter, in the first half of the sixteenth century the Zohar's authority became evident in the growing frequency with which it was cited in support of theological views or to settle questions of custom and law. Following the formation and printing of the zoharic canon in the second half of the century, this authority was further manifested in the publication of the first comprehensive Zohar commentaries, and these interpretative works soon developed into a principal genre of kabbalistic literature.

Although partial commentaries had been written before the printing of the Zohar, it was not until the mid-sixteenth century that complete commentaries were published and their production became a major kabbalistic practice. This development took place only during the final stages of, and probably in response to, the canonization process. As I have argued in Chapter 3, before the formulation and printing of the zoharic canon the possession, collection, and redaction of zoharic texts, as well as the ability to quote from that holy book, were sources of cultural power controlled by elite circles of the Iberian exiles. However, once the Zohar was canonized, printed, and widely distributed, the ownership of texts lost its cultural significance. New methods were needed to derive authority from the Zohar's symbolic value, and it was at this moment that the emphasis shifted from the possession of texts to the ability to control their meaning.

Zohar interpretation began more or less simultaneously with the appearance of the first manuscripts, and some of the sections that were ultimately canonized included commentaries on earlier segments. For example, commentaries on parts of Midrash hane’elam can be found in the body of the Zohar; Idra raba and Idra zuta include explications of Sifra ditseniuta; and commentaries on earlier zoharic sections form part of Tikunei hazohar and Ra’aya meheimna, which also contain an explicit hermeneutical reference to ḥibura kadma’ah (the early work).

Menahem Recanati was the first kabbalist to quote frequently from the Zohar, often following these quotations with interpretation. In his book Ta’amei hamitsvot, furthermore, Recanati mentioned a commentary he had written on the Zohar.

THE SYMBOLIC VALUE of the Zohar depended, to a great extent, on its perception as an authoritative source—one that contained binding prescriptions both in kabbalistic doctrine and in Jewish custom and law. Indeed, shortly after the earliest zoharic texts (which already proclaimed R. Shimon's supremacy) began to circulate and the idea of the Zohar as a book emerged, some kabbalists began to present it as a work of great influence.

From the end of the fifteenth century on, and especially in the early sixteenth century, the Zohar's growing authority was evident, particularly among Sephardi sages. Following the expulsion, its elevation to a place of prominence played a pivotal role in the struggle of the elite circle of Spanish exiles to assert themselves in their new places of settlement. The Zohar was soon accepted as a supreme source of authority in the communities where they exerted their influence. With the proliferation of printing, Spanish Jewish culture also made a considerable impact in eastern European communities. In what follows I discuss the various manifestations of the supremacy of the Zohar and the historical and social contexts that led to its recognition in most Jewish communities in the early modern period.

Declarations concerning the exalted status of the Zohar's protagonists, mainly of R. Shimon, are found in the zoharic literature itself. The choice of R. Shimon for the leading role, his comparison to Moses, and the proclamation of his superiority granted the secrets he conveyed paramount importance. His power surpassed that of other sages because God had given him permission to reveal those secrets: ‘Come and see—human beings are not permitted to utter hidden words and interpret them, except the holy light, R. Shimon, because the Holy One, blessed be He, gave him permission’ (Zohar iii. 149a).

The emergence of the idea of the Zohar as a book was instantly followed by proclamations of its authority:

AROUND THE TURN of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the writing of zoharic texts became a principal activity among kabbalists of the secondary elite of Iberian Jewish culture, particularly in the region of Castile. The creation of the zoharic literature allowed these scholars to express their kabbalistic ideas and subvert the authority of Nahmanides and his followers. The idea of Sefer hazohar was formulated, as I suggested in the previous chapter, within the framework of this struggle for dominance and as a response to the canonization of Nahmanides’ kabbalistic commentary on the Torah.

The emergence of the Zohar as an imagined book marked a new stage in its reception—the texts were presented, edited, and circulated as segments of a sacred, authoritative, and complete work. This dynamic and complex process began with the assembling of texts and their arrangement into collections, to be promoted by the editors as Sefer hazohar. It is this undertaking of assembly and compilation, which commenced at the beginning of the fourteenth century and was completed (although not fully) with the printing of the first editions of the Zohar in the second half of the sixteenth, that the present chapter discusses.

The two major sources from which the consolidation process of the zoharic literature may be reconstructed are the manuscripts themselves and the many works in which those texts are quoted or their circulation is described. The existence of dozens of manuscripts and thousands of quotations, however, makes their exploration a difficult and arduous task.

We have seen that kabbalists possessed zoharic texts before the idea of Sefer hazohar took shape, which meant that these texts were not identified as parts of a cohesive literary entity (at least they were not presented to readers as such). The perception of the Zohar as a single unit, together with the first pamphlets containing zoharic collections, emerged in the early fourteenth century. As one can learn from the previously quoted testimony of Isaac of Acre, he had seen pamphlets, distributed by Moses de León and circulated among ‘students’, which de León claimed to have copied from the complete Sefer hazohar.

IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER I argued that the choice of R. Shimon as the protagonist of the zoharic literature, his comparison to Moses, and his alleged superiority all reflect the self-perception of the authors of the Zohar and their aspiration to subvert the dominant status of the kabbalistic circles of Nahmanides and R. Solomon ben Adret (Rashba). Initially the compilers of the zoharic literature (excepting Tikunei hazohar and Ra’aya meheimna) did not regard their work as a clearly defined literary unit, use the term Sefer hazohar (Book of the Zohar), or name R. Shimon as the author of the zoharic texts. In addition, early zoharic quotations at the end of the thirteenth century were not presented as part of a book called Zohar; nor did they contain any references to a work of supreme authority and holiness written by R. Shimon. We can assume, therefore, that the name Sefer hazohar (and others, such as ‘R. Shimon's midrash’ and Midrash hane’elam), along with the view that these names denoted an ancient kabbalistic book ascribed to R. Shimon, came into being only after most of the zoharic literature had been created and the first quotations from this literature had appeared.

How was the idea of the Zohar as a book conceived? What was the significance of the change in the way the zoharic literature was presented and distributed? Why did that change occur? In what follows I examine the initial reception of the zoharic literature, the nascence of the term Sefer hazohar, and the idea that it refers to a unified, sacred, and authoritative literary corpus. I further discuss the social forces that brought about the formation of the concept of the Zohar as a book and contributed to its spread.

Originally the zoharic literature did not emerge as a unified and structured literary corpus. In the introduction to his monumental book The Wisdom of the Zohar, Isaiah Tishby argues that the Zohar ‘is not a single unified work, but a great literary anthology consisting of sections from various sources’.

ONE OF THE STRIKING FEATURES of zoharic literature is the frequent comparison between its central protagonist, R. Shimon bar Yohai (Rashbi), and Moses, and the depiction of the mishnaic rabbi as surpassing the biblical prophet. I believe that by means of this comparison the compilers of the Zohar sought to establish a canonical literature which did not only equal the Torah of Moses but which, they claimed, was superior to it. In the chapters that follow I explore the reception of zoharic literature through time; I wish to begin, however, by examining the way in which that literature presented itself to readers through the juxtaposition of R. Shimon and Moses.

The comparison of the two figures reflects the struggle over cultural capital between competing schools of kabbalah on the Iberian peninsula in the thirteenth century. As I show below, this competition was the framework in which the zoharic texts were created and in which their distribution and reception began.

The dominant school of kabbalah at the time was that of the followers of Nahmanides and R. Solomon ben Adret (Rashba). Centred in Catalonia, their school was characterized by an esoteric and conservative stance that opposed the public revelation and dissemination of kabbalistic knowledge. Members of this circle, the disciples of Nahmanides and their students, claimed to have exclusive authority in this field by virtue of the oral tradition that they had received directly from their masters. Nahmanides formu lated the essence of this approach in the introduction to his commentary on the Torah. The only way to understand the secrets of kabbalah, he explained, was ‘through oral transmission from a master transmitter [mekubal] to the ear of a capable recipient [mekabel], and any assumption [regarding these secrets] has no merit and is very harmful’.

Nahmanides and his disciples were part of a social class that Moshe Idel has classified as the ‘primary elite’. They were the spiritual leadership of the Jewish community in Catalonia and were occupied mainly with halakhah.2 During the same period, in Castile, a different school of kabbalists was active, whose members, according to Idel's typology, were part of the ‘secondary elite’.

THIS BOOK is dedicated to the study of the various modes of reception of the Zohar and the impact it has had on Jewish culture over the centuries. Rather than presenting an exhaustive chronological description, it focuses on key aspects of its reception and impact, such as its literary formation and canonization, its dispersal and veneration, as well as criticisms of the Zohar and the polemics surrounding it.

The volume was first published in Hebrew by the Ben-Zvi Institute and the Bialik Institute. This English translation, diligently prepared by Yudith Nave, contains only minor differences from the Hebrew edition: some of the more detailed bibliographical discussions have been omitted, and references to new studies which appeared after the publication of the Hebrew volume have been added.

It is a great honour and pleasure for me to publish the English edition with the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. I am very grateful to Connie Webber, the managing editor of the Littman Library, who accompanied the translation project from its beginning, for her efficiency, patience, and support. I thank Yudith Nave and her team for the efforts they put into translating the text. I would also like to thank Janet Moth for her editorial work. I am especially indebted to Agi Erdos, whose wisdom and knowledge much enhanced the final text.

THE ZOHAR is one of the most sacred, authoritative, and influential books in Jewish culture, and it has also attracted the interest of many non-Jews. It is a collection of texts which were probably written by several Castilian authors in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Soon after their first appearance, these texts came to be perceived as part of a literary work attributed to the tana R. Shimon bar Yohai (Rashbi) and called ‘the Zohar’.

Many scholarly works have been dedicated to the ideas found in the Zohar, to its literary style, and to the question of its authorship. This book focuses on different questions: its purpose is to examine the ways in which the Zohar was received and the impact it had on Jewish culture, from its emergence in the thirteenth century to the present. In the chapters that follow I look at the fluctuations in the Zohar's status and value, and explore the various cultural practices linked to these changes. I also throw light on the fact that those who determined the Zohar's value often did so in an effort to strengthen their own cultural power.

From its earliest appearance, several kabbalistic circles invested the Zohar with a status of authority and holiness. Yet it only became widely accepted as a pre-eminent source of doctrines, laws, and customs after the finalization and printing of the zoharic corpus in the sixteenth century. Numerous commentaries have been written on it since, and Zohar exegesis has become one of the most prevalent genres of kabbalistic literature, if not the most prevalent. Several kabbalistic systems, especially the Lurianic one, were created to a large degree as an interpretation of the Zohar. Since the eighteenth century, customs and practices described in the Zohar, such as the night prayer on Shavuot, inviting ushpizin (guests) to the sukah, and the recitation of the ‘Berikh shemeh’ prayer, have been widely adopted. Zoharic excerpts have been incorporated into the liturgy, and the practice of ritual reading of the Zohar has been established, based on the belief that its text is so sacred that its recital is beneficial even if one does not understand its content. From the sixteenth century on, Christian scholars, too, showed interest in the Zohar, and it was translated first into Latin and later into modern European languages.