7 - The History of Zohar Criticism

Summary

If you wish to be strangled, suspend yourself from a mighty tree.

Pesaḥim 112a

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:

Some say that R. Shimon never wrote this book but that this R. Moses de León knew the Holy Name and by means of His power wrote these wonderful words and, in order to sell them for a good price and much gold, he suspended himself from a mighty tree and said: ‘From the book that R. Shimon, his son R. Eleazar, and his companions wrote I am copying these words.’