Who Wrote the Zohar? The Secret History of Kabbalah

What is Kabbalah? The answer begins with a word that simply means “that which is received.” For centuries, qabbalah meant inherited tradition. Then, in medieval southern France and Spain, Jewish mystics gave the word a new meaning: a hidden account of God, creation, language, the soul, and the repair of a broken world. This is the secret history of how that tradition took shape. It begins with the Bahir, a mysterious book that surfaced in Provence around 1180. It moves to Gerona, where Jewish thinkers developed the Sefirot: the ten emanations through which the infinite Ein Sof becomes knowable in the world. Then comes the Zohar. Written in deliberately archaic Aramaic and attributed to the second-century sage Shimon bar Yochai, it became the central text of Kabbalah. But who wrote it? According to Isaac of Acre’s later report, when he asked whether Moses de Leon had copied the Zohar from an ancient manuscript, de Leon’s widow said that her husband had written it himself. Scholars still debate what that report proves. In late-13th-century Castile, the Zohar emerged in a milieu closely associated with Moses de Leon. Its exact authorship remains disputed. Gershom Scholem argued that de Leon was its principal author; Yehuda Liebes argued for a circle of writers around him. Both place the Zohar in medieval Castile, not Roman-era Galilee. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, kabbalists from Iberia dispersed across the Mediterranean, and Safed became a major center of kabbalistic life. Scholars disagree over whether the expulsion created a decisive rupture or accelerated developments already under way. In Safed, Isaac Luria built one of Judaism’s most influential mythologies: tsimtsum, the contraction of the infinite; shevirat ha-kelim, the shattering of the vessels; and tiqqun, the repair of a fractured cosmos through human action. How far Lurianic ideas spread beyond elite circles, and how quickly, remains disputed. Kabbalah is not simply a chain of ancient secrets passed down unchanged. It is also a history of new texts written in ancient voices, teachings shaped in small circles, and systems reinterpreted across generations. Sources discussed in the video include Gershom Scholem, Moshe Idel, Yehuda Liebes, and Lawrence Fine.