8 - The Recanonization of the Zohar in the Modern Era

Summary

If one turns to the writings of the great kabbalists one seldom fails to be torn between alternate admiration and disgust.

Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 36

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.