350 A History of Judaism
Who wrote the Zohar? The notion that the text is what it purports to
be, the product of discussions among the tannaim around Shimon bar
Yohai in the second century, is belied by the artificiality of the Aramaic
and the lack of references to the work before the late thirteenth century.
There is now wide acceptance of the hypothesis that the author was in
fact the kabbalist Moshe de Leon, who first published the text claiming
that it had been copied from an old manuscript which he had obtained
from the land of Israel but which no one else ever saw (and which his
widow and daughter asserted, after his death, had never existed). Moshe
spent his life travelling around Castile and became friendly with other
kabbalists, notably Yosef b. Avraham Gikatilla, a follower of the prac-
tical mysticism of Avraham Abulafia (in which guise he wrote mystical
analyses of the Tetragrammaton and the Hebrew alphabet). Gikatilla
moved into a more theosophic form of mystical enquiry in middle age,
producing in his Gates of Light and Gates of Justice particularly clear
accounts of the role of the sefirot in relation to the Godhead. Moshe
himself produced a series of kabbalistic writings in Hebrew, of which a
number were dedicated to discussion of the sefirot, either in parallel to
the composition of the Zohar or to draw attention to it.^52
The impact of the Zohar on mystics throughout the Jewish world
was immediate and it is likely that additions were rapidly made to the
text as it circulated after Moshe’s death. Attached to the mystical com-
mentary on the inner meaning of scripture are sections which portray,
among other matters, the life of Shimon bar Yohai and discussions of
physiognomy and chiromancy, and sections in Hebrew rather than Ara-
maic. Over the course of the next two centuries, kabbalistic circles were
founded in Italy, in Greece and in the land of Israel, and the writings of
Isaiah b. Joseph of Tabriz in Persia in the 1320s, and of Nathan b.
Moses Kilkes in Constantinople in the 1360s, reveal that the kabbalah
had spread to the Jews of the east, just as it was adopted in Germany
by mystics who combined the Zohar with the traditions of Hasidei
Ashkenaz.
In many places in the Jewish world the ideas of the Zohar were
mingled with concepts from earlier mystical writings by rabbinic Jews
earnestly seeking to understand the place of man and God in the uni-
verse and emboldened by the adoption of kabbalistic ideas by many of
the greatest authorities in the study of Talmud and halakhah. Despite
his strong opposition to Avraham Abulafia, the great talmudist Rashba
himself indicated clearly in his writings a great knowledge of kabbalah
(as his teacher Nahmanides had done). The many commentaries