3 - The Formation of the Zoharic Canon

Summary

I have found more from the book of the Zohar, gleanings after gleanings.

Recanati, Perush hatorah

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.