Some notes on the early origin of Kabbalah

Research is making progress

Last week, I read two articles about kabbalah. The first is by Ronit Meroz, dating a part of the Zohar back to the 11th century. I’ll be honest that, in my lamentable but really benign chauvinism, I had hitherto confused Ronit Meroz with Melila Hellner Eshed, who is kind of a nut, and never read any of her research. However, the article is actually well organized and argued, and I found the main claim to be persuasive. It isn’t long and I recommend you read it.

Now, it is this article and other research by Ronit Meroz that postmodern Zohar defenders are gesturing at when they say vaguely that some academics think the Zohar goes back earlier than Moshe de Leon. Therefore some observations are in order:

1. The text she identifies, the ‘Midrash of Rabi Yitzhak’, was, she shows, authored no earlier than 1004 CE and no later than 1068 CE. This is, obviously, a very great deal later than Rabbi Shimon, but, more than that, it is also later than the geonic-era editors that more sophisticated Zohar apologists sometimes invoke to explain the abundant evidence of post-talmudic content. And, to be clear, this is the earliest part of the Zohar.

2. This part of the Zohar isn’t kabbalistic! It doesn’t use the distinctive vocabulary of kabbalah, and it doesn’t contain the definitive doctrine, namely the emanation of the sefirot within the internal structure of God ר"ל. The descriptions of the shechina and the sefirot are mutually incompatible with kabbalistic doctrine. So, far from being evidence of early dating for kabbalah, it is further evidence of its late origin since even mystical groups two and half centuries before Moshe de Leon had no inkling of the central concepts of kabbalah.

The obvious question is, if this is not even a kabbalistic text, but a work from an different mystical school, what is it doing in the Zohar in the first place? The answer is something that I have only recently come to understand: the Zohar isn’t just fake, it is fractally fake.

The traditional story is that Moshe de Leon produced a book and we have to decide whether he wrote this book, or whether it was work by some earlier sage that, through a mysterious providential process, came into the possession of a Castilian con artist and compulsive forger. Obviously, if that is the question, the answer is the former, but that is not the question because Moshe de Leon never published any such book. What de Leon did is claim to have a book in his house, occasionally quote from this book, and publish a few excerpts in pamphlet form, but the book did not actually exist. When Isaac of Acco came to Castille to find de Leon’s copy of the Zohar, it wasn’t because he wanted to check out whether it matched his copy, or whether the handwriting looked like it was 1,000 years old. He wanted to read the book, but he couldn’t because it wasn’t there.

Where, then, does the Zohar come from? The answer is that over the next two and half centuries, but with escalating intensity from the 1450s, mystics sought to reconstruct the book by piecing together different mystical compilations that they had in their possession. Some of these works that were incorporated were by Moshe de Leon, others by his circle, some only written after his death, and some preceded him. Over this period, there are barely two single manuscripts of ‘the Zohar’ that match each other in their contents, let alone their order. The text of ‘the Zohar’ was stabilized only in the mid 1500s, when the first commentary was published by Moshe Cordovero, and first editions were produced by the printing houses of Mantua and Cremona, each competing with other to print the most comprehensive edition of the Zohar that is to say the one that included the widest collection of disparate materials.

So, what were the criteria for incorporation into the Zohar? Basically, to get in, a text needed to be freaky deaky, claim to speak of secrets, and make reference to the sefirot. The Midrash of Rabi Yitzhak was a borderline case, full of mumbo jumbo and of dubious monotheism, but with not quite enough mumbo jumbo, and not sufficiently ‘bold’ and ‘daring’ (to use the typical vocabulary of pro-Zohar academia) in its description of the divine to be really zoharic. The solution found was to translate it into Aramaic, which gave it more pizazz and mystique in the eyes of Early Modern Jewry sick and tired of exile, and revving itself up for the Sabbatean explosion a century later.

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The second article is by Avishai Bar Asher on the genesis of Sefer Bahir.¹ It should ideally be read alongside his article reconstructing the original version of the book from manuscript evidence (but, if heavily technical academic Hebrew isn’t your thing, have a cup of coffee first). It consists principally of a systematic demolition of Gershom Scholem’s claims about the Bahir, showing that they are based on drastic overreading of limited evidence except when they are not based on no evidence at all. Bar Asher demonstrates that there is no evidence for the early ‘eastern’ stratum of Sefer Bahir, and that most of the apparently insolvable enigmas of the text that have been attributed to multiple layers of redaction are actually solved simply by reconstructing the chain of manuscript transmission and then rearranging some of the pages. The alleged ancient source of kabbalistic doctrine identified by Scholem (albeit residing in non-Jewish gnostic groups) dissolves into thin air, and the book emerges as a development of Spanish Jewish neo-Platonism.

Religious apologetic for the Zohar typically focuses on criticizing Gershom Scholem. Allegedly, Scholem was biased (if anything, he was biased in favour), Scholem made this or that mistake (usually he didn’t) etc. A few months ago, I listened to this defense of the Zohar on the recommendation of a reader. If you can bear to listen to the end, what you will see is that a lot of orthodox Jews genuinely seem to believe that Zohar deniers believe as they do because they revere Gershom Scholem as an authority, and if it can be demonstrated that he is not worthy of this, then they will change their belief.²

However, if you want to find criticisms of Scholem that are actually good, you’ll find them davka by reading recent academic research, because that’s what academic research does: it builds on and develops the work of earlier researchers through correcting their mistakes. If you read both articles, you will see that the second part of Meroz’s article identifying the Babylonian stratum in Sefer Bahir as a transitional stage between heichalot mysticism and the kabbalah has subsequently had the legs pulled out from under it by Bar Asher’s research. That’s how it is.

To make an analogy, there are different interpretations of the 1688 Glorious Revolution. Some see it as essentially a conservative act, seeking to resist a planned centralization of power along French lines, and preserving the dominance of the Protestant established church. Others see it as a progressive act in which Whig politicians seized power to implement a Dutch style centralization of power to facilitate economic growth and empire building. Both sides have evidence that fits their interpretations better and bits they have to explain away, because history is complicated. However, there are interpretations of the Glorious Revolution that are just wrong, and others that are so wrong they constitute an insult to the dignity of anyone who has to listen to them, like that James II was a space alien and William III was Genghis Khan in a wig. Standard frum Zohar apologetic is in that last category. It has no validity, nothing to contribute; it’s purely a waste of time and it’s time to move on.

1. You need journal access to access the whole article, but if you ask me nicely, I’ll email you a PDF.

2. In fact, when they are not attacking Scholem, they take a bunch of potshots at Heinrich Graetz. I have never read Graetz; I do not know anyone who has read Graetz, and I struggle to think of a reason why anyone would read Graetz unless they were studying 19th century Jewish history.