Front Matter

Z F HF Z VS
ZOHAR
The
Pritzker Edition
VOLU M E ON E
Translation and Commentary by

Daniel C. Matt
stanford universit y press

stanford, california
2004
The translation and publication of the Zohar is made
possible through the thoughtful and generous support of
the Pritzker Family Philanthropic Fund.
Stanford University Press

Stanford, California
# 2004 by Zohar Education Project, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[CIP to come]
Original Printing 2004

Last ®gure below indicates year of this printing:
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free, archival-quality paper.
Designed by Rob Ehle
Typeset by El Ot, Tel Aviv in 10.5/14 Minion.
To Margot
Contents
Foreword vii
margot pritzker
Translator's Introduction ix
daniel c. matt
Acknowledgments iii
Diagram of the Ten Se®rot iii
Introduction iii
arthur green
ZFHF ZVS \PEYF Haqdamat Sefer ha-Zohar 000

\K[BZC Be-Reshit 000
IR Noah. 000
List of Abbreviations 000

Transliteration of Hebrew and Aramaic 000
Glossary 000
Bibliography 000
Index 000
Academic Committee
for the Translation of the Zohar
Daniel Abrams Ronit Meroz

Bar-Ilan University Tel Aviv University
Joseph Dan Charles Mopsik
Hebrew University Centre National de la
Rachel Elior Recherche Scienti®que
Hebrew University Michal Oron
Asi Farber-Ginat Tel Aviv University
University of Haifa Bracha Sack
Michael Fishbane Ben-Gurion University
University of Chicago H.aviva Pedaya
Pinchas Giller Ben-Gurion University
University of Judaism Elliot R. Wolfson
Amos Goldreich New York University
Tel Aviv University
Moshe Hallamish
Bar-Ilan University Arthur Green
Melila Hellner-Eshed Co-Chair,
Hebrew University Brandeis University
Boaz Huss Rabbi Yehiel Poupko
Ben-Gurion University Co-Chair, Jewish Federation
Moshe Idel of Metropolitan Chicago
Hebrew University Margot Pritzker
Yehuda Liebes Chair, Zohar Education
Hebrew University Project, Inc.
Esther Liebes Daniel C. Matt
Scholem Collection, Jewish National Translator, Zohar Education
and University Library Project, Inc.
Bernard McGinn
University of Chicago
Foreword
S ome years ago, I began to study the Torah. As my facility with the text grew,
I pursued the midrashic literature of the rabbis, and the interpretations of the
classic medieval commentators. Eventually, I began to inquire about mystical
commentaries on the Torah. I turned to the Zohar, seeking an English transla-
tion of its original Aramaic. I soon learned that previous translations not only vii
were incomplete but also had been undertaken in the early twentieth century.
Therefore, they did not re¯ect the enormous advances in scholarship since
made by Gershom Scholem and his students. It was at this point that I realized
how much I wanted to be able to study the Zohar from an English translation
that would draw upon the research and scholarship of the past half-century. I
determined to sponsor such a translation; the book you hold in your hands is
the result.
By its nature and purpose, the Zohar is dif®cult to penetrate. For hundreds
of years it was inaccessible to all but a few. Furthermore, after the Sabbatean
episode of the seventeenth century, the Jewish community became concerned
about the potency of mystical ideas; leaders were anything but eager to pro-
mulgate the Zohar. Even with the rise of Hasidism as a mystically based move-
ment starting in the eighteenth century, the Zohar remained a closed book.
Consequently, bringing the Zohar to the English-reading public wasÐand con-
tinues to beÐa complex, challenging task.
The words that can express my appreciation to Daniel C. Matt are found on
every page of his translation of the Zohar. His scholarship, his artistry, and his
poetry speak for themselves. You, the reader, are in his debt.
The odyssey of the past nine years, which will continue for some years to
come, has been shepherded through a tangle of legal and administrative steps
with the able and devoted skill of Glen Miller.
Professor Arthur Green, who co-chairs the Academic Committee for the
Translation of the Zohar, has been a thoughtful and faithful counselor from the
inception of the project.
My husband Tom, while not a student of the Zohar, recognized the magni-
tude and the importance of this project. He has kept us ever vigilant and
focused with his insightful questions and thoughts and his constant support.
Foreword
From conception through gestation and ®nally to birth, this project would
not have been realized without the wisdom, knowledge, and nurturing of Rabbi
Yehiel Poupko. He is my teacher and my friend, and it is to him that this
edition of the Zohar is dedicated.
It is with a sense of ful®llment and awe for Daniel Matt's remarkable
accomplishment that my family and I now present the Zohar to the English-
reading public, with the hope that the radiance that ¯ows from this great work
and from the Jewish mystical tradition will bring light to those who seek it.
Margot Pritzker
viii
Translator's Introduction
daniel c. matt
S efer ha-Zohar (The Book of Radiance)1 has amazed and overwhelmed readers
ever since it emerged mysteriously in medieval Spain (Castile) toward the end
of the thirteenth century. Written mostly in a unique Aramaic, this masterpiece
of Kabbalah exceeds the dimensions of a normal book; it is virtually a body of
literature, comprising over twenty discrete sections. The bulk of the Zohar con-
sists of a running commentary on the Torah, from Genesis through Deuteron-
omy. This translation begins and focuses thereÐin what are projected to be ix
ten volumes; two subsequent volumes will cover other, shorter sections.2
Arthur Green's introduction to this volume traces the development of
Kabbalah and discusses the historical and literary context of the Zohar, its
style, the complex question of authorship, and the symbolism of the ten se®rot
(various aspects of the divine Self). Here I wish to treat several topics directly
related to this translation and commentary.
Establishing the Text of the Zohar

This edition re¯ects a newly constructed, precise text of the Zohar, based on
original manuscripts. Why was the creation of such a text necessary? All
previous translations of the Zohar are based on the standard printed editions,
which nearly all derive from the Mantua edition (1558±60), supplemented by
variant readings from the Cremona edition (1559±60). At ®rst I intended to
1. The title derives from the word ZFH (zohar) in Daniel 12:3: The enlightened will shine
like the zohar, radiance [or: splendor], of the sky.
2. On the various sections of the Zohar, see Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, 214±19;
Isaiah Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:1±7. All of these sections are written in Aramaic,
except for Midrash ha-Ne'lam, which is written in Hebrew and Aramaic.
The following sections are scheduled to be translated as part of the running commentary
on the Torah, as in the standard editions of the Zohar: Raza de-Razin, Sava de-Mishpatim,
Sifra di-Tsni'uta, Idra Rabba, Idra Zuta, Rav Metivta, and Yanuqa. The two subsequent
volumes will include Midrash ha-Ne'lam, Matnitin, Tosefta, Sitrei Torah, Heikhalot, Sitrei
Otiyyot, ``Vision of Ezekiel,'' Qav ha-Middah, and Zohar to Song of Songs. Two sections
identi®ed as imitations written by a later kabbalist, Tiqqunei ha-Zohar and Ra'aya Meheimna,
are not planned to be included.
follow the same procedure, but upon examining many of the original manu-
scripts of the Zohar dating from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries,
I discovered a signi®cant number of superior readings that had been rejected
or revised by editors of the ®rst printed editions.
Upon further examination, I noticed something more intriguingÐa phe-
nomenon familiar to scholars of medieval texts. Within the manuscripts them-
selves were signs of an editorial process: revision, reformulation, and emenda-
tion.3 After careful analysis, I concluded that certain manuscripts of older
lineage re¯ect an earlier recension of the Zohar, which was then reworked in
manuscripts of later lineage.4
I realized that I could no longer rely on the printed versions of the Zohar,
since these obscured earlier versions. So I took it upon myself to reconstruct a
new-ancient version of the Aramaic text based on the manuscripts, one which
could serve as the foundation for this translation.
If I could have located a complete, reliable manuscript of the Zohar, this
would have provided a starting point. Unfortunately no such manuscript exists
x
anywhere in the world; in all likelihood it never did, since from the start the
Zohar was circulated in sections or booklets. Probably no single complete Book
of the Zohar existed until it was printed nearly three hundred years later in the
sixteenth century, collated from various manuscripts.5
3. See Ernst Goldschmidt, Medieval Texts and Their First Appearance in Print; Malachi
Beit-ArieÂ, ``Transmission of Texts by Scribes and Copyists: Unconscious and Critical Inter-
ferences''; Israel Ta-Shma, ``The Òpen' Book in Medieval Hebrew Literature: The Problem
of Authorized Editions''; Daniel Abrams, introduction to Sefer ha-Bahir, edited by idem, 8±
14; idem, ``Critical and Post-Critical Textual Scholarship of Jewish Mystical Literature.''
4. Among the manuscripts usually re¯ecting an earlier recension are the following:
Cambridge, University Library, MS Add. 1023; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod.
Hebr. 217; New York, Jewish Theological Seminary, MS 1761; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS
1564; Paris, BibliotheÁque nationale, heb. 779 ; Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 2971; Tor-
onto, University of Toronto, MS Friedberg 5-015; Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, ebr. 206,
208. Manuscripts resembling (and perhaps underlying) the Mantua edition include: London,
British Museum, MS 762; Paris, BibliotheÁque nationale, heb. 781; Parma, Perreau 15/A.
A list of eighty-four Zohar manuscripts (assembled by a team working under Rivka
Schatz-Uffenheimer) was published by Zvia Rubin in ``Mif'al ha-Zohar: Mattarot ve-
Hessegim,'' 172±73. Ronit Meroz of Tel Aviv University is conducting a systematic analysis of
over six hundred extant manuscripts and fragments of the Zohar. In her extensive research
she has identi®ed numerous examples of editing and revision. While the discovery noted here
of earlier and later recensions of the Zohar is my own, I have bene®ted from discussions with
her and wish to thank her for sharing her insights with me. See her article ``Zoharic Narratives
and Their Adaptations'' and her other studies listed in the Bibliography.
For further information on the manuscripts of the Zohar, see Tishby, Wisdom of the
Zohar, 1:99±101; Scholem, Kabbalah, 236±37; and the comments of Malachi Beit-ArieÂ, cited by
Ta-Shma, Ha-Nigleh she-ba-Nistar, 103±4.
5. See Abrams, `Èimatai H.ubberah ha-Haqdamah le-Sefer ha-Zohar?''; idem, ``Critical
and Post-Critical Textual Scholarship of Jewish Mystical Literature,'' 61.
This situation left me with two choices. I could select the best manuscript
for each individual Torah portion of the Zohar and produce a ``diplomatic''
text, an exact reproduction of the original. Or, I could fashion a critical text,
selecting from a wide range of variants in different manuscripts.
After consulting with members of our Academic Committee for the Trans-
lation of the Zohar, I chose to compose a critical text, based on a selection and
evaluation of the manuscript readings. The primary reason was simply that
even for individual sections of the Zohar there is no one ``best'' manuscript:
each has its own de®ciencies and scribal errors. Back in the sixteenth century,
the editors in Mantua and Cremona also fashioned critical texts, the former
drawing on ten manuscripts, the latter on six.6
For these ®rst two volumes of the translation, I identi®ed nearly twenty
reliable manuscripts, based on the criteria of provenance, age, lack of scribal
errors, and legibility. The originals are preserved in the libraries of Oxford,
Cambridge, London, Paris, Munich, Rome, the Vatican, Parma, Toronto, and
the Jewish Theological Seminary, while micro®lm copies are available in the
Institute for Micro®lmed Hebrew Manuscripts, in the Jewish National and xi
University Library on the campus of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.7
It is appropriate to describe more fully the methodology used in this
scholarly undertaking. My research assistant meticulously combs through about
half of these manuscripts and prepares a list of variant readings. For particu-
larly dif®cult words or phrases, we check additional manuscripts. In addition
to the manuscripts, my assistant lists variants from the Mantua and Cremona
editions of the Zohar, as well as the edition used by Moses Cordovero in his
sixteenth-century commentary, Or Yaqar.8
My procedure for establishing the Aramaic text is as follows. I begin with
Reuven Margaliot's edition of Sefer ha-Zohar,9 based on the Vilna edition,
which in turn is based on the Mantua edition. This represents a relatively re-
liable starting point. In front of me I have the list of variants prepared by my
research assistant, photocopies of the original manuscripts, and other witnesses
referred to previously.10 I peruse the variants line by line. Some of these are
6. See Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:98. For an enlightening comparison of diplo-
matic and critical editing, see Chaim Milikowsky, ``Further on Editing Rabbinic Texts.''
7. See the list of Zohar manuscripts in the Bibliography, and above, note 4. Bound
copies of nearly all of these manuscripts are housed in the Gershom Scholem Collection,
Jewish National and University Library.
8. I also check readings in other sources including: Menah.em Recanati, Peirush al ha-
Torah; Joseph Angelino, Livnat ha-Sappir; Abraham Galante, in Or ha-H.ammah; Shim'on
Lavi, Ketem Paz; Abraham Azulai, Or ha-Levanah; Joseph H.amiz., ed., Derekh Emet (a list of
emendations to the Mantua edition); Shalom Buzaglo, Miqdash Melekh; Yehudah Ashlag,
Peirush ha-Sullam; and Gershom Scholem's Annotated Zohar. See the Bibliography.
9. Sefer ha-Zohar, ed. Reuven Margaliot.
10. See above, note 8.
simply scribal errors or glosses, but some represent what appear to be better
readings. When I identify an apparently better reading, I check if it is shared
and con®rmed by several reliable manuscripts and witnesses. If it is, I consider
substituting it for the printed text.
Over the centuries, Sefer ha-Zohar has been revised by countless scribes and
editors who tried to smooth away the rough edges of the text by adding an
explanatory phrase, correcting an apparent syntactical mistake, or taming a
wild neologism by substituting a more familiar, bland term. Often, relying on
the variants, I decide to remove these accumulated layers of revision, thereby
restoring a more original text. I seek to recover the Zohar's primal texture and
cryptic ¯avor.
If the early manuscripts preserve unusual, striking wording that is revised
or ``corrected'' by several later manuscripts and the printed editions, I tend to
go with the older reading. Often, according to the more reliable manuscripts, a
Zoharic rabbi creatively paraphrases a Talmudic saying. Some of the later
manuscripts and the printed editions may then restore this saying to its exact
xii
Talmudic form. In such cases I emend the printed text in favor of the Zohar's
original formulationÐoriginal in both senses: older and creative. In the com-
mentary I cite the Talmudic saying on which the paraphrase is based, so that
readers can see the transition and trace the imaginative process.
I do not claim to be fully restoring ``the original text of the Zohar.'' There
may never have been any such thing, since the text probably emerged over
many years, written and distributed piecemeal. However, through painstaking
analysis of the variants, I am able to scrape away some seven hundred years of
accretion and corruption, and at least approach that elusive, hypothetical
original. This revised Aramaic text of the Zohar, the basis of my translation,
will be made available via the Internet and may be downloaded for study and
scholarly examination.11
Translation and Commentary

All translation is inherently inadequate, a well-intentioned betrayal. In the
words of the second-century sage Rabbi Yehudah, `Òne who translates a verse
literally is a liar; one who adds to it is a blasphemer.''12 Furthermore, the Zohar
is notoriously obscureÐperhaps the most dif®cult Jewish classic to translate. It
was composed in Castile mostly in Aramaic, a language no longer spoken in
medieval Spain.13 The author(s) concocted a unique blend of Aramaic out of
traditional sources, especially the Babylonian Talmud and Targum Onqelos (an
11. At the website of Stanford University Press: < www.sup.org >.

12. BT Qiddushin 49a.
13. On the Zohar's Aramaic, see Scholem, Kabbalah, 226±29; Tishby, Wisdom of the
Zohar, 1:64±68.
Aramaic translation of the Torah). This unparalleled neo-Aramaic is peppered

with enigmatic expressions, puns, outlandish constructions, puzzling neolo-
gisms, solecisms, and traces of medieval Hebrew and Castilian.
The Zohar's prose is poetic, over¯owing with multiple connotations, com-
posed in such a way that you often cannot pin down the precise meaning of a
phrase. The language be®ts the subject matter, which is mysterious, elusive,
and ineffable; words can merely suggest and hint. An unfathomable process
may be stated, then immediately denied: `Ìt split and did not split its aura.''14
Occasionally we encounter oxymorons, such as ``new-ancient words,'' alluding
to the dual nature of the Zohar's secrets, recently composed yet ascribed to
ancient sources.15 The ®rst impulse of divine emanation is described as BRKXGC
B\GRKEZYE (botsina de-qardinuta), `à spark of impenetrable darkness,''16 so
intensely bright that it cannot be seen.
Through the centuries, the potency of the Zohar's language has mesmerized
even those who could not plumb its secrets. While kabbalists delved deeply, the
uninitiated chanted the lyrical Aramaic, often unaware of its literal meaning.
In the words of an eighteenth-century mystic, `Èven if one does not under- xiii
stand, the language is suited to the soul.''17
No doubt it is risky to translate the Zohar, but it would be worse to leave
these gems of wisdom buried in their ancient Aramaic vault. So I have plunged
in, seeking to transmit some of the Zohar's magic. The previous English trans-
lation (composed in the 1930s by Harry Sperling, Maurice Simon, and Paul
Levertoff) reads smoothly but often misunderstands the text.18 Its genteel prose
is more a paraphrase than an accurate translationÐavoiding unfamiliar terms,
censoring erotic material, skipping dif®cult passages and even entire sections.
The English ¯ows too ¯uently compared to the original, subduing the unruly
Aramaic, failing to render its untamed vibrancy. Moreover, since the transla-
tion is unaccompanied by a commentary, the symbolism remains impenetrable.
Despite its shortcomings, I have learned much from consulting this transla-
tion, along with others.19 But my approach is signi®cantly different. Though I
wish to make the Zohar accessible, I also want to convey its strangeness,
14. Zohar 1:15a. Citations of the Zohar refer to the standard Aramaic pagination (based
on the Mantua edition of 1558±60), which in The Zohar: Pritzker Edition is indicated in the
running head on each page.
15. See Daniel Matt, ```New-Ancient Words': The Aura of Secrecy in the Zohar.''
16. Zohar 1:15a.
17. Moses H.ayyim Luzzatto, in his preface to Qelah. Pith.ei H.okhmah, cited by Tishby,
Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:29.
18. This ®ve-volume edition is entitled The Zohar (see Bibliography). Scholem remarks
(Kabbalah, 241) that it ``suffers from incomplete or erroneous understanding of many parts
of the kabbalistic exposition.''
19. I have also consulted four different Hebrew translations, by Yehudah Ashlag, Daniel
Frisch, Yehudah Edri, and Yechiel Bar-Lev; Charles Mopsik's French translation, Le Zohar;
potency, and rich ambiguity. Here the commentary is essential. When the
translation cannot adequately express a multifaceted phrase, I unfold the range
of meaning in the commentary. When the translation is as cryptic as the
original Aramaic, the commentary rescues the stranded reader.
My style of translation is literal yet poetic. I am convinced that a literal
rendering of the Zohar is not only the most accurate but also the most colorful
and zestfulÐthe best way to transmit the lyrical energy of the Aramaic. Still, at
times, the multivalent language invites a certain freedom of expression. Let me
cite two related examples. In Zohar 1:83a, Rabbi Shim'on describes the night-
time journey of the soul, soaring skyward from her sleeping body: ``Flying, she
encounters those QKZKFJ QKZPGY (qumrin tehirin) of de®lement.''
What does this bizarre term mean? The Sperling-Simon translation renders
it as ``certain bright but unclean essences.''20 The English translation of Tishby's
Wisdom of the Zohar reads: ``the deceiving lights of uncleanness,''21 while
Tishby's original Hebrew translation reads a bit differently: \GFGDR KZGPKY
(qimmurei negohot)Ðroughly: ``vaulted splendors''Ðthough in his note he ac-
xiv
knowledges that the meaning is ``doubtful.''22 I render the sentence as follows:
``Flying, she encounters those hooded, hunchbacked, dazzling demons of de-
®lement.'' The accompanying commentary explains that these are malevolent
forces who block the ascent of an unworthy soul. Qumrin derives via rabbinic
usage from the Greek qamara, ''arched cover,'' while tehirin is a cognate of the
Aramaic tihara, meaning ``brightness, noon.'' One class of demons is named
tiharei, ``noonday demons.''
The virtuous soul who evades these demons reaches heaven and receives a
divine message. According to another Zoharic passage (1:130a), while descend-
ing back to her sleeping earthbound body, the soul is assailed by QKYKZJ KNKCI
(h.avilei teriqin). The Sperling-Simon translation renders this phrase as ``malig-
nant bands.''23 The English translation of Tishby's Wisdom of the Zohar reads:
`ìll-intentioned destructive powers.''24 I render it as ``ravaging bands of trucu-
lent stingers.'' The commentary explains that h.avilei derives from either h.evel,
``band, group,'' or the verb h.vl, ``to injure, destroy.'' Teriqin derives from the
root trq, ``to sting, bite.''
the Hebrew anthology by Fischel Lachower and Isaiah Tishby, Mishnat ha-Zohar, and its
English version, The Wisdom of the Zohar, trans. David Goldstein; and the recent English
translation edited by Michael Berg, The Zohar by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, which, however,
is based not on the original Aramaic but on Ashlag's Hebrew translation. For details on all
of these, see the Bibliography.
20. The Zohar, trans. Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon, 1:277.
21. Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, trans. Goldstein, 2:818.
22. Idem, Mishnat ha-Zohar, 2:134. He concludes by saying that the phrase may mean:
``delusive lights.''
23. The Zohar, trans. Sperling and Simon, 2:19.
24. Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, trans. Goldstein, 2:813.
Although the Zohar's basic vocabulary is limited, its roots generate a rich
variety of meanings. For example, the root QY\ (tqn) spans the following range:
`èstablish, institute, mend, restore, correct, perfect, prepare, arrange, array,
adorn.'' The root YNS (slq) can mean: ``rise, raise, culminate, attain, surpass,
depart, disappear, die, remove, postpone, reserve, emit (fragrance).'' In normal
Aramaic and Hebrew, the speci®c verbal conjugation determines which mean-
ing of the root applies, but the Zohar ignores or ¯outs rules of grammarÐ
confusing the conjugations, playing with multiple meanings, often leaving the
reader stumped and wondering.
Mysticism strives to penetrate a realm beyond distinctions, but this mystical
masterpiece demands constant decision making, challenging the reader or
translator to navigate between con¯icting meanings and determine the appro-
priate oneÐor sometimes to discover how differing meanings pertain simulta-
neously. The frequent dilemmas of interpretation suggest that in exploring the
Zohar, linguistic search and spiritual search go hand in hand.
Especially puzzling, though charming, are the neologisms strewn through-
out the Zohar, intended to bewilder and astound the reader.25 Some derive xv
from rare Talmudic terms, which the author refashions by intentionally mis-
spelling or by inverting letters; some derive from Greek, Latin, or Castilian;
some appear to be pure inventions. These nonce words often contain the
letters J (tet), S (samekh), V (pe), Y (qof ), and Z (resh) in various combina-
tions: B\KVSGY (quspita), BZKVJY (qatpira), BJZKY (qirta), BZKSY (qesira), BZJSGY
(qustera), BZSVGJ (tufsera). Qustera derives from the Latin word castrum (plural,
castra), ``fortress, castle.'' Qatpira and its variations mean several things, includ-
ing ``knot'' (based on Aramaic BZJY [qitra]) and ``waterskin.''26
One newly-coined noun, BNYKJ (tiqla), is particularly versatile. In various
contexts it can mean ``scale, hollow of the hand, ®st, potter's wheel, and water
clock.'' This last sense refers to a device described in ancient and medieval
scienti®c literature, which in the Zohar functions as an alarm clock, calibrated
to wake kabbalists precisely at midnight for the ritual study of Torah. 27 A
similar device was employed in Christian monasteries to rouse monks for their
vigils. How appropriate to invent a word for an invention!
Often, by pondering the context, comparing Zoharic and rabbinic parallels,
and scouring sundry dictionaries and lexicons, one can decipher or at least
conjecture the meaning of these weird terms, but some remain as perplexing as
originally intended.28
25. See Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:66±67.

26. See Yehuda Liebes, Peraqim be-Millon Sefer ha-Zohar, 349±54.
27. See Zohar 1:92b and my commentary.
28. After wrestling with Zoharic neologisms for years, I no longer share Tishby's view
(Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:66) that `ònly rarely is it possible to determine their meaning from
the context, while for the most part it is dif®cult even to guess what the author had in
In translating biblical citations, I have consulted various translations but

generally composed my own.29 Sometimes, in quoting a verse, the Zohar
intends a meaning different from that conveyed by any known translation. In
such cases I usually translate the verse as the Zohar understands it and then
explain the difference in the commentary.
The main purpose of the commentary is to clarify the dense symbolism and
unique terminology. Here I seek to elicit the meaning of the text, drawing it
forth from the Zohar's own language without being heavy-handedÐwithout
ruining the subtlety and ambiguity of the original. Remember that the Zohar
was not intended to be easily understood but rather to be deciphered. I want
to allow and compel the reader to wrestle with the text. Over the centuries, the
tendency has grown to overinterpret, with commentators often insisting on
assigning se®rotic signi®cance to nearly every image and metaphor. I have
resisted this tendency, while still identifying se®rotic correspondences when
they are called for. Often a phrase or passage implies more than one meaning;
the reader is encouraged to ponder various possibilities.
xvi
To clarify the context, I cite sources and parallels from the Bible, rabbinic
literature, and the Zohar itself, with occasional references to secondary litera-
ture. The aim is not to overwhelm the reader by citing everything conceivable,
but rather to provide what is needed to make sense of this enigmatic work
of art.30
In composing the commentary, I have drawn on numerous traditional and
modern Zohar commentaries, especially those of Moses Cordovero, Shim'on
Lavi, H.ayyim Vital, Abraham Galante, Shalom Buzaglo, Yehudah Ashlag,
Charles Mopsik, and Daniel Frisch.31 Other valuable resources include the
annotations of Reuven Margaliot (Nitsotsei Zohar) in his edition of the Zohar,
Isaiah Tishby's monumental Mishnat ha-Zohar (The Wisdom of the Zohar),
Gershom Scholem's Annotated Zohar, and Yehuda Liebes's eye-opening Peraqim
be-Millon Sefer ha-Zohar (Sections of the Zohar Lexicon).
A glossary, bibliography, and an index of biblical and rabbinic citations are
appended to each volume. A diagram of the ten se®rot appears on page XX of
mind.'' Still, I can appreciate the confession of David Goldstein (translator of Wisdom of the
Zohar), who, after rendering several obscure lines directly from the Aramaic, writes (ibid.,
106, n. 16): ``The English translations given are purely hypothetical.''
29. Translations I have consulted include the King James Version, New International
Version, New Revised Standard Version, the JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, Everett Fox's The
Five Books of Moses, and Richard Elliott Friedman's Commentary on the Torah with a New
English Translation.
30. I have tried to follow the sage advice of Samuel Sandmel, who years ago warned
scholars about the dangers of ``parallelomania.'' See his presidential address of that title de-
livered to the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis and published in Journal of Biblical
Literature 81 (1962): 1±13.
31. See the Bibliography.
this volume. The standard Aramaic pagination of the Zohar is indicated in the
running head on each page (e.g., 1:34b).
How to Read the Zohar

There is no single right way to read and proceed through the Zohar, but I can
point out certain features and suggest several guidelines.
First of all, the Zohar is dynamicÐfull of surprises. Typically we ®nd that
``Rabbi H.iyya and Rabbi Yose were walking on the way,'' wandering through
the hills of Galilee, sharing secrets of TorahÐbut also moving from one
dimension to another, accompanied by Shekhinah, the Divine Presence Herself.
Who knows whom they will encounter on the road? A child amazes them with
wisdom, a beggar enriches them with precious teachings, a cantankerous old
donkey-driver turns out to be a sage in disguise.
You are about to enter an enchanted realm. Still, although the Zohar some-
times reads like a mystical novel, remember that this is fundamentally a biblical
commentary. It's helpful to have a Bible at hand to check the original context, xvii
to see how a particular verse becomes a springboard for the imagination. Every
few pages we read: ``Rabbi H.iyya opened,'' ``Rabbi Yose opened,'' signifying
that he is opening not only his exposition but also the verse: disclosing new
layers of meaning, expanding the range of interpretation. The reader of the
Zohar should be open, tooÐopen to new ways of thinking and imagining. As
the H.avrayya (Companions) continually exclaim, ``Come and see!''
The Zohar is ®rmly rooted in tradition but thrives on discovery. ``This verse
has been discussed, but come and see!'' ``This verse has been established, but
come and see!''32 `Ìnnovations of Torah are required here!''33 Innovation
emerges through scrutinizing the biblical text, so questioning becomes a su-
preme value. After Rabbi H.izkiyah asks Rabbi Abba a challenging question, we
are told that ``Rabbi Abba came and kissed him.''34 Why? Because, as one
commentator notes here, ``The question is half the answer; without a question,
there is no reason for an answer.''35
Even when the meaning of a verse is perfectly clear, the Zohar may question
its structure, sometimes probing so deeply that the reader is stunned. To take
an extreme example, come and see how Rabbi El'azar deals with the concluding
verse in the story of the Garden of Eden, which could hardly be more explicit:
He drove out Adam.36 ``We do not know who divorced whom: if the blessed
32. Zohar 1:56b, 112a, 136a, and frequently.

33. Ibid., 155b.
34. Ibid., 155a.
35. Abraham Galante, in Or ha-H.ammah, ad loc. On questioning in the Zohar, see
Matt, ``New-Ancient Words,'' 198±99.
36. Genesis 3:24. Literally, He drove out the human.
Holy One divorced Adam, or not.''37 As the rabbi demonstrates by exegetical

arti®ce, the mystical meaning is the shocking alternative lurking within that
bland phrase, `òr not'': Adam drove out, divorced Shekhinah, splitting Her from
Her divine partner, Tif'eret, and from himself. Once, as Adam, humanity was
wedded to God. The original sin lies in losing intimacy with the divine, there-
by constricting unbounded awareness. This loss follows inevitably from tasting
the fruit of discursive knowledge; it is the price we pay for maturity and
culture. The spiritual challenge is to search for that lost treasureÐwithout
renouncing the self or the world.
As you read, see how the H.avrayya coax new meaning out of a biblical verse,
phrase, wordÐor even letter. Often, they rely on standard rabbinic techniques
of interpretation, such as verbal analogy: ``Here is written: [such-and-such a
biblical expression], and there is written: [an identical (or nearly identical)
expression],'' implying a close link between the two expressions.
The hermeneutical leap may be long, far from the literal meaning, but
sometimes a verse is read ``hyperliterally,'' ignoring idiomatic usage in favor of
xviii
a radically spiritual sense. For example, when God commands Abraham, LN LN
(Lekh lekha), Go forth, . . . to the land that I will show you (Genesis 12:1), Rabbi
El'azar insists on reading the words more literally than they were intended:
38
Lekh lekha, Go to yourself! Search deep within to discover your true self.
Another startling illustration is the Zohar's reading of the opening words of
the Torah, traditionally rendered: In the beginning God created. Everyone
assumes the verse describes the creation of the world, but for the Zohar it
alludes to a more primal beginning: the emanation of the se®rot from Ein Sof
(`Ìn®nity''). How is this allusion discovered, or invented? By insisting on
reading the Hebrew words in their precise order: OKFNB BZC \K[BZC (Be-
reshit bara Elohim), construed now as With beginning, It created ElohimÐthat
is, by means of H.okhmah (the se®rah of ``Wisdom,'' known as beginning), It
(ineffable Ein Sof ) emanated Binah (the se®rah of `Ùnderstanding,'' known by
the divine name Elohim).39 God, it turns out, is the object of the verse, not the
subject! The ultimate divine reality, Ein Sof, transcends and explodes our com-
fortable conception of ``God.'' The Zohar dares us to confront this reality, as it
transforms the familiar story of Creation into divine biography.
So, as you undertake this adventure, expect to be surprisedÐstay alert. The

Zohar's teachings are profound and intense; one who hopes to enter and
emerge in peace should be careful, persevering, simultaneously receptive and
active. The message is not served to you on a platter; you must engage the text
37. Zohar 1:53b.

38. Ibid., 78a.
39. Ibid., 15a.
and join the search for meaning. Follow the words to what lies beyond and
within; open the gates of imagination.
Above all, don't reduce everything you encounter in these pages to some-
thing you already know. Beware of trying to ®nd ``the essence'' of a particular
teaching. Although usually essence is the goal of mystical search, here essence is
inadequate unless it stimulates you to explore ever deeper layers, to question
your assumptions about tradition, God, and self. In the words of a Zoharic
parable:
There was a man who lived in the mountains. He knew nothing about those who
lived in the city. He sowed wheat and ate the kernels raw. One day he entered the
city. They offered him good bread. The man asked, ``What's this for?''
They replied, `Ìt's bread, to eat!''
He ate, and it tasted very good. He asked, ``What's it made of?''
They answered, ``Wheat.''
Later they offered him thick loaves kneaded with oil. He tasted them, and
asked, `Ànd what are these made of?''
Later they offered him royal pastry kneaded with honey and oil. He asked, xix
`Ànd what are these made of?''

He said, ``Surely I am the master of all of these, since I eat the essence of all of
these: wheat!''
Because of that view, he knew nothing of the delights of the world, which were
lost on him. So it is with one who grasps the principle but is unaware of all those
delectable delights deriving, diverging from that principle.40
40. Zohar 2:176a±b. The wheat and its products (kernels, bread, cake, and pastry)
symbolize four levels of meaning in Torah: simple, homiletical, allegorical, and mystical.
See Matt, The Essential Kabbalah, 207.
Acknowledgments
T o thank all the people who have helped me begin to plumb the Zohar would
burst this book's binding. So here I will briefly trace my path and acknowledge
some of those who have helped me along the way.
My father, of blessed memory, Rabbi Hershel Jonah Matt, taught me that
God is real, and that by studying Torah you can experience Shekhinah, the xxi
Divine Presence. (I have sketched his life and assembled his writings in Walk-
ing Humbly with God.) My mother, Gustine, has always been a fountain of love
and a source of strength; I am grateful for her deep wisdom.
I ®rst ventured into Sefer ha-Zohar in 1970 during my junior year abroad at
Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The thick volumes were simultaneously for-
bidding and alluring; deciphering the Aramaic text was a puzzle, a challenge, a
quest. Soon I fell in love with the Zohar, captivated by its lush imagery and
poetic magic. My teachers that year in Kabbalah included Joseph Dan, Efraim
Gottlieb, and Rivka Schatz-UffenheimerÐand a kabbalist, Rav Toledano. I
thank them all for guiding me into the orchard.
From Jerusalem I returned to Brandeis University, where I completed my
undergraduate degree and then, after some European travel, plunged into grad-
uate study in Jewish mysticism with Alexander Altmann, a superb Wissenschaft
scholar and a gem of a man. He directed my doctoral dissertation, which con-
sisted of a critical edition of The Book of Mirrors, a previously unpublished
fourteenth-century Hebrew commentary on the Torah by David ben Judah he-
H.asid. I chose to edit this text because it included the ®rst extended transla-
tions of the Zohar, from Aramaic to Hebrew. I was encouraged to undertake
this project by Gershom Scholem, while serving as his teaching assistant in the
fall of 1975.
After I completed my dissertation, my friend Arthur Green invited me to
compose an annotated translation of selections from the Zohar for the Paulist
Press, as one volume in their Classics of Western Spirituality. Years earlier, Art
had initiated me into the mystical thought of Hasidism, which stimulated me to
uncover its roots in the Zohar. I am grateful for his insight and guidance over
the years, and for demonstrating how to combine scholarship and spirituality.
Acknowledgments
For two decades, I taught Jewish mysticism in Berkeley at the Graduate

Theological Union (GTU), a school where Jews, Christians, and Buddhists
study side by side, stimulating one another. I learned much there from my
colleagues and students; I want to thank, in particular, David Winston and
David Biale for their friendship and for the depth of their learning.
I had been at the GTU for many years already when, one afternoon in
September 1995, Art Green called me on the phone and told me about a
woman from Chicago named Margot Pritzker. She had been studying the
Zohar with Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, but the dated English translation they were
reading had proved inadequate. Margot had decided to commission a new
translation, said Art, and she was inviting me to undertake the task! I was
astounded, and told my friend that I needed a few days to consider this.
The days turned into weeks, which turned into months, as I kept wrestling
with the thrilling, terrifying offer. I decided to translate a short section of the
Zohar to see how it felt, but I poured myself into the experiment so intensely,
day after day, that I was left drained, exhausted, discouraged. How could I keep
xxii
this up for years and years? I reluctantly resolved to decline the offer, but Art
convinced me to at least meet this woman and her rabbi; so the following May,
the four of us gathered at the O'Hare Hyatt. I expressed my hesitation to them,
and told Margot that the project could take twelve to ®fteen yearsÐto which
she responded, ``You're not scaring me!'' I was won over by her genuine desire
to penetrate the Zohar and make it accessible to English readers. A year or so
later, over Independence Day weekend 1997, the Zohar project formally began
with a two-day conference outside Chicago attended by the leading academic
scholars of Kabbalah. They were invited not just to participate in this con-
ference but to constitute the Academic Committee for the Translation of the
Zohar, which was intended to guide and support this translation. (The mem-
bers of the committee are listed at the front of this volume.) Over the past six
years, I have bene®ted immensely from their feedback and encouragement. I
thank all of them, especially Moshe Idel, Yehuda Liebes, Ronit Meroz, and
Elliot Wolfson. Time and again, Yehuda generously shared insights drawn from
his vast, intimate knowledge of the Zohar. I smile, recalling the many times we
wrestled over the mystifying Aramaic, deepening our understanding of the text
and our friendship.
I spent the second year of the project (1998±99) at the Institute for Ad-
vanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on a program entitled
``Studying the Zohar,'' directed by Yehuda Liebes. Here seven fellows and seven
other visiting scholars (all fourteen of us, members of the Academic Commit-
tee) engaged in research on various aspects of the text. Our weekly seminars
were devoted to a close reading of Zohar passagesÐoften those that I was cur-
rently translating. Here I presented a draft of my translation and bene®ted
from the responses of my colleagues. I am grateful to all of them, as well as to
the staff of the Institute, who provided an ideal setting for our research. When
Acknowledgments
the yearlong program ended in June 1999, the institute graciously allowed me to
retain an of®ce for the following year as well.
In the summer of 2000, it was ®nally time to leave the tranquil environ-
ment of the institute. Fortunately, Rabbi David Hartman provided me an of®ce
at the Shalom Hartman Institute across town, where I spent the following two
years (2000±2002) in an atmosphere simultaneously peaceful and stimulating.
David's enthusiasm for Torah energizes everyone around him, and I thank him
for his support and encouragement, and for his healthy skepticism of mystical
excess. I was enriched by my contact with many of the fellows at the Hartman
Institute, especially Donniel Hartman (co-director), Daniel Abrams, Moshe
Halbertal, Moshe Idel, Israel Knohl, Levi Lauer, Menachem Lorberbaum, Yair
Lorberbaum, Israel Ta-Shma, and Shlomo Naeh. Shlomo was always generous
in sharing with me his immense linguistic knowledge.
As described in the Translator's Introduction, I have based my English ren-
dering on a critical text of the Zohar, which I have constructed by drawing on
variant readings from a wide range of manuscripts. I could not have accom-
plished this task without my indefatigable research assistant, Barry Mark, who xxiii
spent more than ®ve years painstakingly preparing lists of these variants for
the ®rst two volumes of the translation. I thank him immensely for his years of
devotion to this task. Recently, Merav Carmeli has followed in his footsteps,
proving herself a worthy successor, and I am indebted to her as well.
Arthur Green has carefully read large portions of this translation and
offered criticism and suggestions, for which I am truly grateful. As co-chair
of the Academic Committee for the Translation of the Zohar, he has helped
guide the project from its birth.
Numerous libraries offered valuable resources, especially the Gershom Scho-
lem Collection and the Institute of Micro®lmed Hebrew Manuscripts, both
housed in the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem. I want to
thank, in particular, Esther Liebes (head of the Scholem Collection) for her
constant willingness to help, Benjamin Richler (director of the Institute of
Micro®lmed Hebrew Manuscripts) along with his staff, and Adam Verete for
checking obscure references. Other libraries and collections that provided pre-
cious material include: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich; Biblioteca Aposto-
lica, Vatican; Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome; Biblioteca Palatina, Parma; Bib-
liotheÁque nationale, Paris; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the
British Library; Cambridge University Library; the Flora Lamson Hewlett
Library of the Graduate Theological Union; the Friedberg Collection, Univer-
sity of Toronto Library; the Guenzburg Collection of the Russian State Library,
Moscow; and the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
The team at Stanford University Press, led by Geoffrey Burn and Norris
Pope, has been superb to work with and wondrously adept at generating the
®rst, demanding volumes of this complex classic. In addition to Geoffrey and
Norris, I want to thank Lowell Britson, Alan Harvey, Randy Hurst, David
Acknowledgments
Jackson, Patricia Myers, and especially Mariana Raykov and Rob Ehle. Rabbi
David E. S. Stein's expert copyediting polished this Book of Radiance.
As I toiled and exulted over the Zohar, I have received sound advice and
warm encouragement from my far-¯ung siblings: Rabbi Jonathan Matt (Israel),
David Matt (Iowa), and Debbie Erdfarb (New Jersey).
My wife, H.ana, and I have been delving together into the Zohar ever since we
met, discovering and sharing its new-ancient meanings, gazing into each other's
souls through its penetrating lens. Thank you for your compassionate wisdom
and unfailing support. You bring to life the verse: On her tongue, a Torah of love
(Proverbs 31:26). You help me understand the words of Rabbi El'azar (Zohar
1:141a): `Ìsaac embraced faith, seeing Shekhinah dwelling in his wife.''
My angelic children, Michaella and Gavriel, have never lost their sense of
wonder, and I thank them for arousing mine. May this translation touch you
and open up new worlds!
Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, co-chair of the Academic Committee, has excited and
inspired me ever since our ®rst meeting seven years ago. Descended from a
xxiv
famous kabbalist, the Shelah (Isaiah Horowitz), he is intimately bound to the
Zohar and has devoted himself to spreading its light. I thank him for conduct-
ing this project so deftly and passionately.
Glen Miller, vice president of Zohar Education Project, Inc., has vitalized
this adventure through his vision and devotion. On a practical level, he has
navigated the ark of Zohar through countless legal and administrative passage-
ways. I am profoundly grateful.
Thomas J. Pritzker has generously supported and heartened all of us
through this long process. I thank him deeply. And I wonder: Is there a cor-
relation between Tom's passion for exploring caves to discover ancient Asian
art and the fact that, according to tradition (see below, page 571), the Zohar
was composed in a cave?
Finally, Margot. How can I express my gratitude to you? You have enabled
me to devote myself to what I loveÐthat is every scholar's dream. You have
not only sponsored this immense project; you have participated, probing the
translation and commentary, skillfully guiding the entire process. I hope that I
have responded to your bold generosity by opening up the Zohar for you and
for all those who, thanks to you, will be illumined by its rays. To you I dedicate
this translation.
D.C.M.
xxv
*********A diagram of the Ten Se®rot*********
xxvi
Introduction
arthur green
I
The Zohar is the great medieval Jewish compendium of mysticism, myth, and
esoteric teaching. It may be considered the highest expression of Jewish literary
imagination in the Middle Ages. Surely it is one of the most important bodies
of religious text of all times and places. It is also a lush garden of sacred eros, xxvii
®lled to over¯owing with luxurious plantings of love between master and

disciples, among the mystical companions themselves, between the souls of
Israel and ShekhinahÐGod's lovely brideÐbut most of all between the male
and female elements that together make up the Godhead. Revered and cano-
nized by generations of faithful devotees, the Zohar's secret universe serves as
the basis of kabbalistic faith, both within the boundaries of Judaism and be-
yond it, down to our own day, which has seen a signi®cant revival of interest
in Kabbalah and its teachings.
The Zohar is a work of sacred fantasy. To say this about it is by no means
to impugn the truth of its insights or the religious profundity of its teachings.
The Middle Ages are ®lled with fantasy. Angels and demons, heavenly princi-
palities, chambers of heaven and rungs within the soul, secret treasures of the
spirit that could be seen only by the elect, esoteric domains without endÐall
of these were to be found in the writings of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic
authors throughout medieval times. All of them partake of fantasy. It may be
said that all theological elaborations, insofar as they are allowed to become pic-
torial, are fantasy. They depict realities that have not been seen except by the
inner eye of those who describe them, or by their sacred sources.
In the case of Judaism, prohibitions derived from the second of the Ten
Commandments forbade the depiction of such sacred realms in any medium
other than that of words. Perhaps because of this, the literary imagination
became extraordinarily rich. All those creative energies that might in other
contexts have sought to reify sacred myth in painting, sculpture, manuscript
illumination, or stained glass here had to focus on the wordÐespecially on the
timeless Jewish project of commentary and exegesis. In this sense the Zohar
Introduction
may be seen as the greatest work of medieval Jewish `ìconography''Ðone that

exists only in the words of the written page, thence to be distilled in the
imagination of its devoted students.
Written in a lofty combination of Aramaic and Hebrew, the Zohar was ®rst
revealed to the world around the year 1300. Those who distributed it, orally
and in small written fragments, claimed that it was an ancient text they had
recently rediscovered, and that it had been composed in the circle of those
described within its pagesÐRabbi Shim'on son of Yoh.ai and his disciples, who
lived in the land of Israel during the second century of the Common Era. The
obscurity of the Zohar's origins combined with its unique language and its rich
poetic imagination to lend to the work an aura of unfathomable mystery.
While a few of the more critical spirits in each century doubted the Zohar
and questioned its authority, the great majority of readers, and later of Jewry
as a whole, believed in the Zohar and venerated it, considering it a holy
revelation and a sacred scripture that was to be ranked alongside the Bible
and the Talmud as a divinely inspired source of religious truth. Only in
xxviii
modern times, and largely for apologetic reasons, was the Zohar deleted from
the canon of what was considered ``mainstream'' Judaism.
Translation of the Zohar into western languages began as early as the
®fteenth century, when passages were rendered into Latin for use by Christian
devotees of esoteric lore in Renaissance Italy. In the twentieth century, various
translations of the Zohar, or at least of most sections of it, appeared in
German, French, and English. The previous standard English translation is
that of Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon, published in 1931±34 by the Sonci-
no Press.
The present translation and commentary by Daniel Matt re¯ect the high
standards of Zohar scholarship that have been achieved in recent decades.
These are the result of the new attention paid to Kabbalah in academic circles,
largely thanks to the writings of Gershom Scholem (1897±1982) and the cadre
of scholars he and his successors have trained within the Israeli universities.
The ®rst to bring Scholem's approach to kabbalistic studies to North American
shores was Alexander Altmann (1906±1987) at Brandeis University, whose
students include both the translator of these volumes and the author of this
introduction. Further discussion of the translation and the principles under-
lying it may be found in the Translator's Introduction.
The purpose of this introduction is to equip the reader to better appreciate
the Zohar text. The translation before you is one that takes full cognizance of
the poetic spirit in which the Zohar was composed and especially of the
elevated tone achieved by its unique use of language. To appreciate these in
the fullest sense, it must be said, the Zohar needs to be read, indeed studied, in
the original. Like most of the kabbalistic tradition within which it stands, the
Zohar is entranced with the mysteries of language, in both its oral and written
forms. No translation could do justice to the Zohar's rich and creative appro-
Introduction
priation of the nuances of Hebrew and Aramaic speech, its startling transfor-
mation of countless biblical verses, and the frequent subtle rereadings of the
Talmudic/midrashic legacy that together comprise much of the Zohar's charm
and genius. Nevertheless, a great deal can be gained through carefully reading
and studying the Zohar in translation. For this to be possible, however, the
reader needs to be initiated into the symbolic language in which the work was
written.1 Although the Zohar's poesis often transcends the symbolic conven-
tions, they are always present in the background of the writers' imagination. So
too, it was assumed, would they be present in the mind of the reader. The
Zohar was composed in the hope that it would be passed on and studied
within circles of initiates, as indeed it was for many generations.
To appreciate the Zohar, you will also need to know something of the his-
torical and literary context in which it appeared. The Zohar made use of a very
wide selection of Jewish texts that preceded it, ranging from the Torah itself to
legal, mystical, and philosophical works that were written just shortly before its
appearance. It re¯ected on all of these and used them freely as inspiration for
its own unique sort of innovative and sometimes even playful religious crea- xxix
tivity. It is also much concerned with the Jews and their history: that recorded
in Scripture, the present exile, and the dream of messianic redemption. These,
too, form part of the background needed to understand the Zohar.
This introduction will begin by outlining the development of Kabbalah in
the century leading up to the Zohar, considering also the use made in Kabba-
lah of prior Jewish sources. We will then turn to the Zohar itself, discussing in
turn its style of thought and exegesis, its narrative modes, and the question of
the Zohar's appearance and authorship. Because this essay serves as an intro-
duction to the entire Zohar text, we will not quote passages to exemplify the
analysis offered. We hope that the reader will proceed from this introduction
to a careful reading of the text and commentary, ®nding ample passages
throughout the Zohar against which to test the claims offered in this brief
introductory essay.
The ``tall order'' detailed in the preceding paragraphs requires a disclaimer.
Monographs and learned articles have been written on each of the subjects just
mentioned. Some of them have been the subject of entire books. This intro-
duction does not seek to break new ground in most of them. It is rather a
digest of what the writer considers to be the ®nest scholarship and deepest
1. A much expanded version of this introduction to the Zohar is to be found in my
Guide to the Zohar, also available from Stanford University Press. There the symbolic lan-
guage of Kabbalah (i.e., the se®rotic system) is more fully outlined and discussed. The most
comprehensive introduction to the subject is the three-volume Wisdom of the Zohar by Isaiah
Tishby, originally written in Hebrew. The English translation by David Goldstein offers a
thorough historical analysis of many topics covered by the Zohar, followed by selected
passages. Although the Hebrew version was published in 1949±61 and thus predates much
of current Zohar scholarship, Tishby's work remains an invaluable source of knowledge.
Introduction
insights regarding the Zohar that have been written since Scholem began the
era of modern Kabbalah scholarship. While responsibility for any misunder-
standings or omissions in this introduction are entirely my own, I wish to
acknowledge fully that the insights contained within it are those of three or
four generations of scholars who have labored hard as today's meh.atstsedei
. aqla, ``reapers in the ®eld,'' of Zohar scholarship. Many of these are members
h
of the Academic Committee for the Translation of the Zohar, and their names
are listed on page XX. I am grateful to each of them for their contributions to
our collective efforts to understand even `à drop in the sea'' of the Zohar's pro-
found secrets.
II
Jewish mysticism in the Middle Ages is a rereading of earlier Jewish tradition,
including both the Bible and the corpus of rabbinic literature. It has to be
understood in the context of the great project of medieval Jewry as a whole,
xxx the interpretation of a received, authoritative, and essentially complete body of
normative Jewish teaching. This body of teaching, canonized in the Gaonic age
(eighth±tenth centuries), nominally commanded the loyalty of all Jewry, with
the exception of a Karaite minority. But the deeper attachment of Jews to this
tradition had to be re-won constantly, especially in the face of both Christian
and Muslim polemics against Judaism, ever the religious culture of a minority
living in the shadow of one or the other of its giant offspring. Increasingly,
various new intellectual currents that came into fashion among the Jews also
occasioned a need for defense or reinterpretation of the tradition. These
included Mut'azilite Philosophy, Neoplatonism, and Aristotelianism. The clas-
sic form for such reinterpretation of authoritative texts was the commentary,
whether on one or more books of the Bible or on a part of the Talmudic
legacy. Kabbalah, a new sort of mystical-esoteric exegesis ®rst appearing in the
twelfth century, may be seen as another medieval rereading of the received
Jewish canon.
In order to understand the ways in which Kabbalah, and particularly the
Zohar, ®nds its home within the earlier tradition, we need to distinguish ®ve
elements that are present in the legacy that medieval Jews had received from
the Judaism of late antiquity or the Talmudic age. Although these ®ve are not at
all equal either in the amount of text devoted to them or in the degree of
formal authority with which they are accredited, each was to play an impor-
tant role in the new con®guration of Judaism that Kabbalah represents.
First of the ®ve is aggadah, the narrative tradition, contained in the Talmud
and the various works of Midrash. Midrash is a hermeneutical term, renderable
both as `ìnquiry'' and ``homiletics,'' indicating a way of delving into Scripture
that tended toward fanciful and extended rereadings. Much of aggadah is
legendary in content, expanding biblical history and recreating the biblical
Introduction
landscape in the setting of the rabbinic world. But aggadah also includes tales of
the rabbis themselves and teachings of wisdom in many forms: maxims, para-
bles, folk traditions, and so forth.
The kabbalists made great use of the midrashic/aggadic tradition, drawing
on both its methods of interpretation and its contents. The hermeneutical
assumptions of Midrash, including the legitimacy of juxtaposing verses from
anywhere within Scripture without concern for dating or context, the rearran-
ging of words or even occasional substitution of letters, use of numerology and
abbreviation as ways to derive meaning, the endless glori®cation of biblical
heroes and the tarring of villainsÐall of these and others were carried over
from Midrash into Kabbalah. Indeed many of them were used by other sorts of
medieval preachers as well. But the content of the aggadic worldviewÐwith its
mythic picture of God as Creator and divine Ruler who sees everywhere; who
acts in history; who responds to prayer and human virtue, even suspending the
laws of nature to rescue His beloved; who mourns with Israel the destruction
of their shared Temple and suffers with them the pain of exileÐall this too was
faithfully carried over into the kabbalistic imagination. In fact the kabbalists xxxi
were partial to the most highly anthropomorphic and mythic versions of rab-
binic tradition, such as were contained in the eighth-century collection Pirqei
de-Rabbi Eli'ezer. Here they stood in sharp contrast to the prior emerging
intellectual trend of the Middle Ages: Jewish philosophy, which exercised a
degree of critical skepticism with regard to the more fantastic claims of the
aggadah and sought out, whenever possible, those more modest and somewhat
naturalistic viewpoints that could be found among certain of the early rabbis.
Second is the tradition of halakhah, the legal and normative body of Talmu-
dic teaching, the chief subject of study for Jews throughout the era, and thus
the main curriculum upon which most kabbalists themselves were educated.
The early kabbalists lived fully within the bounds of halakhah and created a
meaning system that justi®ed its existence. While later Kabbalah (beginning in
the early fourteenth century) contains some elements that are quite critical of
halakhah, little of this trend is evident in the period before the Zohar. Some
transmitters of KabbalahÐRabbi Moses Nah.manides (see below) is the great
exampleÐwere also active in the realm of halakhic creativity, writing responsa
and commentaries on Talmudic tractates. More common was a certain intel-
lectual specialization, undoubtedly re¯ecting spiritual temperament, spawning
kabbalists who lived faithfully within halakhah and whose writings show its
patterning of their lives, but who devoted their literary efforts chie¯y to the
realm of mystical exegesis, including kabbalistic comments on the command-
ments or re¯ection on aspects of halakhic practice.
A third element of the rabbinic legacy is the liturgical tradition. While
liturgical praxis was codi®ed within halakhah and thus in some ways is a subset
of it, the texts recited in worshipÐincluding a large corpus of liturgical poetry,
or piyyutÐconstitute a literary genre of their own. Medieval writers, including
Introduction
the mystics of both Spain and Ashkenaz, were much concerned with establish-
ing the precise proper wording of each prayer. The text of the prayer book had
been mostly ®xed by compendia dating from the tenth century; in the Middle
Ages, however, it became the object of commentaries, many of which sought to
®nd their authors' own theologies re¯ected in these venerated and widely
known texts by the ancient rabbis. This is especially true of the kabbalists,
who devoted much attention to the kavvanah, or inward meaning, of liturgical
prayer.
The fourth strand of earlier tradition is that of Merkavah mysticism. Merka-
vah designates a form of visionary mystical praxis that reaches back into the
Hellenistic era but was still alive as late as tenth-century Babylonia. Its roots lie
close to Apocalyptic literature, except that here the voyager taken up into the
heavens is usually offered a private encounter with the divine glory, one that
does not involve metahistorical predications. Those who ``went down into the
merkavah'' sought visions that took them before the throne of God, allowing
them to travel through the divine ``palaces'' (heikhalot), realms replete with
xxxii
angels and, at the height of ecstasy, to participate in or even lead the angelic
chorus. The term merkavah (chariot) links this tradition to the opening vision
of the prophet Ezekiel, which was seen as the great paradigm for all such
visionary experiences and accounts. It is also connected to the qedushah for-
mula (``Holy, holy, holy is YHVH of hosts; the whole earth is ®lled with His
glory!'') of Isaiah 6, since it is this refrain that most Merkavah voyagers recount
hearing the angels sing as they stand with them in the heavenly heights.
The Merkavah tradition was known to the medievals in two ways. Treatises
by those who had practiced this form of mysticism, often preserved in frag-
mentary and inchoate form, were copied and brought from the Near East to
western Europe, as we shall see below. But just as important were the refer-
ences to Merkavah practice in the Talmudic literature itself, a fact that lent
legitimacy to the fascination that latter-day mystics clearly felt for this material.
Such great Talmudic sages as Rabbi Akiva and Rabban Yoh.anan son of Zakkai
were associated with Merkavah traditions. Akiva, considered in some aggadic
sources to be a sort of second Moses, is the subject of the most famous of all
rabbinic accounts of such mystical voyages. He alone, unlike the other three of
the ``four who entered the orchard,'' was able to `ènter in peace and leave in
peace.'' While some modern scholars question the historicity of associating the
early rabbinic sages with Merkavah praxis, in the Middle Ages the Talmudic
sources were quite suf®cient to sustain this link. It was the philosophic ques-
tioners of the Merkavah traditions, rather than their mystical supporters, who
were hard-pressed to defend their views. Merkavah traditions also had con-
siderable in¯uence on the rabbinic liturgy, and this association too raised their
esteem in medieval eyes.
The ®fth and ®nal element of this ancient legacy is the hardest to de®ne,
partly because it hangs on the thread of a slim body of text, but also because it
Introduction
contains elements that seem contradictory to one another. I refer to the spec-
ulative/magical tradition that reached medieval Jewry through the little book
called Sefer Yetsirah and various other small texts, mostly magical in content,
that are associated with it. Sefer Yetsirah has been shown to be a very ancient
work, close in spirit to aspects of Greek esotericism that ¯ourished in the late
Hellenistic era. While the practice associated with this school of thought is
magical/theurgic, even including the attempt to make a golem, its chief text
contains the most abstract worldview to be found within the legacy of ancient
Judaism. By contemplating the core meaning of both numbers and letters, it
reaches toward a notion of cosmic unity that underlies diversity, of an abstract
deity that serves as cosmic center, in whom (or perhaps better: `ìn which'') all
being is rooted. The magical praxis is thus a form of imitatio dei, man's
attempt to reignite the creative spark by which the universe has emerged from
within the Godhead. Here we have the roots of a theology more abstract than
anything to be found in the aggadah or the Merkavah tradition, an essentially
speculative and nonvisual mysticism.
Sefer Yetsirah was the subject of a wide variety of commentaries in the xxxiii
Middle Ages, rationalists as well as mystics claiming it as their own. In the
twelfth century, the language and style of thought found in this work became
central to the ®rst generations of kabbalistic writing, as re¯ected by commen-
taries on it and by the penetration of its terminology into other works as well.
Kabbalah must be seen as a dynamic mix of these ®ve elements, sometimes
with one dominating, sometimes adding the mix of another. It was especially
the ®rst and last listed, the aggadic/mythic element and the abstract/specula-
tive/magical tradition that seemed to vie for the leading role in forging the
emerging kabbalistic way of thought.
Jewish esoteric traditions began to reach the small and isolated communities
of western Europe (some of which dated back to Roman times) perhaps as
early as the ninth or tenth century. How these ancient materials ®rst came to
Franco-German Jewry is lost in legend, but it is clear from manuscript evi-
dence that much of the old Merkavah and magical literature was preserved
among the earliest Ashkenazic Jews, along with their devotion to both halakhah
and aggadah. These esoteric sources were studied especially by groups in the
Rhineland, who added to them their own speculations on God, the cosmos,
and the secrets of the Torah. Out of these circles there emerged in the late
twelfth and early thirteenth century a movement known to history as H.asidut
Ashkenaz, a pietistic revivalism based on small communities or brotherhoods of
mystics who committed themselves to high standards of ascetic practice and
contemplative devotion. These groups also played a key role in the preserva-
tion and further development of esoteric traditions.
It was in the area of southern France called Provence, culturally akin in the
High Middle Ages to northern Spain, that a somewhat different sort of esoteric
speculations began to emerge. These came to be called by the name Kabbalah,
Introduction
a term applied to this emerging school of mystical thought in the early thir-
teenth century. The word means ``tradition''; its use in this context indicates
that the kabbalists saw themselves as a conservative element within the Jewish
religious community. Their secretsÐso they claimedÐwere qabbalah, esoteric
teachings received from ancient masters by means of faithful oral transmission
from one generation to the next.
The ProvencËal Jewish community in the twelfth century was one of great
cultural wealth, forming something of a bridge between the spiritual legacy of
Jewish creativity in Spain of Muslim times and the rather separate world of
Jewry in the Ashkenazic or Franco-Rhenish area. It is in this cultural realm that
Kabbalah ®rst appears, about the middle of the twelfth century. The origins of
this spiritual and literary movement are obscure and still much debated. There
are clearly elements of Near Eastern origin in the earliest Kabbalah, materials
related to Merkavah and late midrashic texts that were present in the Holy
Land in the ninth or tenth centuries. There are also strong in¯uences of
elements that were to appear in Rhineland Hasidism as well, indicating that
xxxiv
at some early point these two movements had a common origin. But here in
Provence, a new sort of religious discourse began to emerge in circles of
mystics who combined knowledge of these various traditions. These groups,
which may have been several generations in formation, are known to us as the
editors as one of the strangest and most fascinating documents in the long
history of Hebrew literature. This slim volume is known as Sefer ha-Bahir,
awkwardly renderable as The Book of Clarity. We ®rst ®nd reference to it in
ProvencËal works of the latter twelfth century, and from that time forward it
has a continuous history as a major shaper of Jewish mystical ideas.
The Bahir takes the form of ancient rabbinic Midrash, expounding on
biblical phrases, tying one verse of Scripture to another, and constructing units
of its own thought around what it offers as scriptural exegesis. Like the old
Midrash, it makes frequent use of parables, showing special fondness for those
involving kings and their courts, in which God is repeatedly compared to `à
king of ¯esh and blood.'' In form, then, the Bahir is quite traditional. But as
soon as the reader opens its pages to look at the content, astonishment takes
over. The text simply does not work as Midrash. Questions are asked and not
answered, or answered in a way that only adds mysti®cation. Images are
proposed that in the midrashic context surely refer to God, and then suddenly
things are said that make such a reading theologically impossible (The ``King''
turns out to have an older brother, for example). What sort of questions are
these, and what sort of answers? The scholar is sometimes tempted to emend
the text!
If one comes to the Bahir, on the other hand, bearing some familiarity with
the methods of mystical teachers, particularly in the Orient, the text may seem
less bizarre. Despite its title, the purpose of the book is precisely to mystify
rather than to make anything ``clear'' in the ordinary sense. Here the way to
Introduction
clarity is to discover the mysterious. The reader is being taught to recognize

how much there is that he doesn't know, how ®lled Scripture is with seemingly
impenetrable secrets. ``You think you know the meaning of this verse?'' says the
Bahir to its reader. ``Here is an interpretation that will throw you on your ear
and show you that you understand nothing of it at all.'' Everything in the
Torah, be it a tale of Abraham, a poetic verse, or an obscure point of law, hints
at a reality beyond that which you can obtain by the ordinary dialectics of
either Talmudic or philosophical thinking.
As we read on in the Bahir, it becomes clear that the authors are not simply
advocating obscurantism for its own sake. The text has in mind a notion, often
expressed only vaguely, of a world that lies behind the many hints and mys-
teries of the scriptural word. To say it brie¯y, the Bahir and all kabbalists that
follow it claim that the true subject of Scripture is God Himself, that revela-
tion is essentially an act of divine self-disclosure. Because most people would
not be able to bear the great light that comes with knowing God, the Torah
reveals divinity in secret form. Scripture is strewn with hints as to the true
nature of ``that which is above'' and the mysterious process within divinity that xxxv
led to the creation of this world. Only in the exoteric, public sense is revelation
primarily a matter of divine will, teaching the commandments Israel is to
follow in order to live the good life. The inner, esoteric revelation is rather
one of divine truth, a web of secrets pointing to the innermost nature of God's
own self. That self is disclosed in the garb of a newly emergent symbolic
language, one describing the inner life of the Deity around a series of image-
clusters that will come to be called (in a term derived from Sefer Yetsirah) the
ten se®rot.
The earliest documentary evidence of Kabbalah is found in two very differ-
ent sorts of literary sources. The Bahir constitutes one of these. Alongside it
there is a more theoretical or abstract series of kabbalistic writings. These
appear ®rst in the family and close circle of Rabbi Abraham ben David of
Posquieres, a well-known ProvencËal Talmudic authority. His son, Rabbi Isaac
the Blind (d. ca. 1235), and others linked to his study circle (including family
members) evidence an ongoing tradition of kabbalistic praxis both in their
brief commentaries on prayer and on Sefer Yetsirah, and in their written re¯ec-
tions on names of God. These treatisesÐquite laconic in style when compared
with the mythic lushness of the BahirÐpoint to an already well-de®ned
system of kabbalistic contemplation, suggesting that their appearance after
1150 may re¯ect a decision to reveal in writing that which had been previously
kept secret, rather than an entirely new genre of religious creativity. The sort
of rabbinic circles in which Kabbalah is ®rst found are highly conservative; it is
hard to imagine them inventing this new sort of religious language on their
own. It seems more likely that they saw themselves as guardians and transmit-
ters of a secret tradition, passed down to them from sources unknown, but in
their eyes surely ancient.
Introduction
The context for the publication of kabbalistic secrets is the great spiritual
turmoil that divided ProvencËal Jewry in the second half of the twelfth century:
the controversy over philosophy, and especially over the works of Rabbi Moses
Maimonides (1135±1204). This con¯ict came to a head with the public burning
of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed (by the Dominicans, but possibly with
the tacit approval of anti-Maimonidean Jews) in 1232. The surrounding struggle
engaged the intellectual life of the ProvencËal Jewish elite for several decades. As
the era's great halakhic authority and codi®er of Jewish law, Maimonides'
name commanded tremendous respect. In many writings of the age, he is
simply referred to as ``the Rabbi.'' But his works raised not a few questions
regarding his degree of theological orthodoxy. Did Maimonides go too far in
his insistence that the Bible's ascription of emotions to God, as well as bodily
attributes, was a form of anthropomorphism that needed to be explained
away? Was it right that he derived so much of his wisdom from non-Jewish
sources, the Greek and Islamic philosophical traditions? Was he correct in
identifying the ancient rabbinic references to ``The Account of the Chariot''
xxxvi
and ``The Account of Creation'' with metaphysics and physics as the philoso-
phers taught them? Did he have a right to dismiss certain old Jewish esoteric
speculations as inauthentic nonsense? Still more painful in this law-centered
culture: how could the rabbi have given legal status to his own Aristotelian
philosophic views, seemingly insisting, in the opening section of his Code, that
any Jew who did not share them was either an idolator or a naive fool?
But the heart of the Maimonidean controversy went deeper than all of these
accusations, touching the very heart of the philosophical notion of the God-
head. Philosophy insisted on divine perfectionÐon the unchanging, all-know-
ing, all-capable quality of God. If perfect and unchanging, this God was neces-
sarily self-suf®cient and in no need of human actions of any sort. Why, then,
would such a God care about performance of the commandments? How could
a Torah centered on religious law, including so much of ritual performance,
represent the embodiment of divine will? Maimonides taught that indeed God
had no ``need'' for us to ful®ll the commandments. The chief purpose of reli-
gious observance was educational, a God-given way of cultivating the mind to
turn toward God. But once the lesson had been learned, some suspected, there
would be those who would come to see the form itself as no longer needed.
Moreover it was rumored that in some circles of wealthy Jewry in Muslim
Spain, the abstractions of philosophy had begun to serve as an excuse for a
more lax view of the commandments and the details of their observance.
Some rabbis of Provence were deeply loyal to a more literalist reading of the
Talmudic and midrashic legacy, one that left little room for the radical ratio-
nalization of Judaism proposed by the philosophers. Others had been exposed
to the esoteric traditions of the Rhineland and northern France, which stood in
con¯ict with the new philosophy partly because they seemed to highlightÐ
rather than minimizeÐthe anthropomorphic passages in Scripture and tradi-
Introduction
tion. The Franco-Rhenish tradition also had room for a strong magical com-
ponent to religion. Ancient speculations on secret names of God and the
angels still held currency in these circles. The power of using such names to
affect the divine will, utter blasphemy in the eyes of the Maimonidean, was
taken for granted in early Ashkenaz, as it had been centuries earlier throughout
the Jewish world.
The secrets of Kabbalah were made public in this age as a way to combat
the in¯uence of Maimonidean rationalism. The freedom and implied disinter-
est in human affairs of the philosophers' God frightened the mystics into
coming out of the deep esotericism that had until then restricted them to oral
transmission of their teachings within closed conventicles of initiates. Their
secrets were to serve as an alternative explanation of the Torah, one that saw
Torah and its commandments not only as playing a vital role in the ongoing
spiritual life of Israel, but also as having a cosmos-sustaining role in a view of
the universe that made them absolutely essential. It is no accident that two of
the key subjects discussed in these earliest kabbalistic speculations are the
kavvanot or secret meanings of prayer and ta'amei ha-mitsvot, the reasons for
xxxvii
the commandments. Both of these are interpreted in a way that insists on the
cosmic effects of human actions. The special concentration on divine names
played an essential part in early Kabbalah, setting in course a theme that was to
be developed over many centuries of kabbalistic praxis.
The secret doctrines ®rst taught in Provence were carried across the Pyr-
enees in the early thirteenth century, inspiring small circles of mystics in the
adjacent district of Catalonia. One key center of this activity was the city of
Gerona, well known as the home of two of the most important rabbinic ®gures
of the age, Rabbi Moses ben Nah.man (called Nah.manides) and Rabbi Jonah
Gerondi (c.1200±1263). Nah.manides, perhaps the most widely respected Jewish
intellectual ®gure of the thirteenth century, is the most important personage
associated with the early dissemination of kabbalistic secrets. He was a leading
Talmudic commentator, scriptural interpreter, and legal authority. His Torah
commentary includes numerous passagesÐmost brief and intentionally ob-
scure, but several lengthy and highly developedÐwhere he speaks `ìn the way
of truth,'' referring to secret kabbalistic traditions. Alongside Nah.manides
there emerged a somewhat separate circle of kabbalists including two very
important teachers, Rabbi Ezra ben Solomon and Rabbi Azriel. These ®gures
seem to have been more innovative than Nah.manides in their kabbalistic exe-
gesis and also more open to the Neoplatonic philosophy of Abraham Ibn Ezra
and others that was gaining credence in their day. Nah.manides was essentially
conservative in his kabbalistic readings, insisting that he was only passing
down what he had received from his teachers, and his view of philosophical
thought in general was quite negative. Rabbi Ezra, the author of commentaries
on the Song of Songs and some Talmudic aggadot, and his disciple Rabbi
Azriel, who wrote a larger treatise on the aggadot as well as a widely quoted
Introduction
commentary on the liturgy, combined the legacy of the Bahir with teachings
received from Rabbi Isaac the Blind and his nephew Rabbi Asher ben David.
They read Kabbalah in a Neoplatonic spirit, which is to say that they saw the
se®rot as an ordered series of emanations, increasingly removed from an un-
knowable primal source.
This Catalonian kabbalistic tradition remained fairly close to the original
purpose we have suggested for the publication of kabbalistic secrets. Nah.ma-
nides' inclusion of openly kabbalistic references in his highly popular Torah
commentary complemented his ®erce polemical attacks in that same work on
Maimonides' philosophical interpretation of the Torah. Jacob bar Sheshet,
another key Gerona ®gure, also engaged in the battle against the rationalists.
While neither Rabbi Azriel nor Rabbi Ezra of Gerona is known to have written
anything outside the realm of Kabbalah, their writings re¯ect signi®cant rab-
binic learning and show them to belong to the same traditionalist and anti-
Aristotelian circles. Neoplatonism, they found, was a philosophy more amen-
able to the needs of mystics, thus rediscovering in a Jewish context something
xxxviii
that Christian mystics had come to know many centuries earlier.
Around the middle of the thirteenth century, a new center of kabbalistic
activity became active in Castile, to the west of Catalonia. Soon the writings of
this new group, out of which the Zohar was to emerge, overshadowed those of
the earlier Catalonian circle with regard to both volume and originality of
output. The Castilian kabbalists' writings were not characterized by the highly
conservative rabbinic attitude that had been lent to Kabbalah by such ®gures
as Rabbi Isaac the Blind and Nah.manides. This circle had its roots more
planted in the Bahir tradition than in that of the abstract language of early
ProvencËal/Catalonian Kabbalah. Mythic imagery was richly developed in the
writings of such ®gures as the brothers Rabbi Isaac and Rabbi Jacob ha-Kohen
and their disciple Rabbi Moses of Burgos. Their writings show a special
fascination with the ``left side'' of the divine emanation and the world of the
demonic. Rabbi Isaac ha-Kohen developed a full-blown mythos in which the
forces of evil were presented as near autonomous powers emanated in an act of
purgation from the depths of divinity. Dependent upon both the divine and
the human for their existence, they exist at the liminal outskirts of the se®rotic
realm and the phenomenal universe, at the very borders of chaos and non-
being. There they wait in ambush for the Shekhinah and the worlds that She
creates and nurtures. Thus, to the world picture of divine se®rotic hierarchy
and an emanated cosmos, the Castilians add a parallel but antithetical realm of
the demonic, serving as the source of all that is destructive in the cosmos.
This conception of the ``left-hand emanation'' is founded on a set of sugges-
tive aggadic statements and biblical verses. In particular, the Castilian kabbal-
ists' imagination was sparked by Rabbi Abbahu's famous dictum: ``The blessed
Holy One created and destroyed worlds before He created these, saying: ``These
please me. Those did not please me.'' Out of this and other fragments of
Introduction
aggadic thought, Rabbi Isaac spun an elaborate mythos in which the se®rah
Binah , at the dawn of time, welled forth emanations of pure din, (literally
``judgment,'' but resulting in absolute forces of destruction, whose intensity
doomed them to almost immediate annihilation). From the residue of these
destructive forces rose a hierarchy of powers of unmitigated judgment. Posses-
sing no creative potency of their own, these forces are ontologically dependent
upon divinity and are energized by the power released by human transgression.
Because of their fascination with myths of the demonic realm, this group
was characterized by Gershom Scholem as the ``Gnostic Circle'' of Castilian kab-
balists. Their writings had great in¯uence in the further development of kabba-
listic thought. They are the most immediate predecessors of the circle of kabba-
lists represented in the Zohar. The mythic imagination of the Zohar, reaching
to its greatest heights in depicting the realms of evil, has its roots in this setting.
It is likely that Rabbi Moses de LeoÂn, the central ®gure in both the writing and
the circulation of the Zohar, saw himself as a disciple of these ``Gnostic'' kab-
balists. Rabbi Todros Abula®a, a kabbalist who also served as an important
political leader of Castilian Jewry, is another important link between these two xxxix
groups. Although signi®cant in their own day, the writings of the Gnostic circle
were mostly forgotten by later generations of kabbalists and were not printed
until Scholem himself retrieved them from rare surviving manuscripts.
There is another difference between Catalonian and Castilian circles that is
especially important for understanding the Zohar's place in the history of
Kabbalah. The earliest kabbalists were fascinated with the origin of the se®rotic
world, devoting much of their speculation to the highest se®rot and their re-
lationship to that which lies beyond them. They were also deeply committed to
the full unity of the se®rotic world, even to its circularity, so that the rising of
all the se®rot to be united with the highest one was a frequently articulated goal
of contemplation. Varied patterns of inner connection in the upper worlds
were re¯ected in the kavvanot (mystical directions) of prayers and in under-
standings of ritual commandments, but the ultimate goal of all of these was the
full restoration of the divine unity and the rise of all to the highest rung,
designated as mah.ashavah or haskel (contemplation, intellect). The situation was
quite different in the Castilian writings. Here the emphasis was placed on the
lower part of the se®rotic world, especially on the relationships between ``right''
and ``left'' and ``male'' and ``female.'' The counterbalancing of demonic energies
needed the strengthening of the right-hand power of divine love, and this could
be awakened by human love of God and performance of the commandments.
But as these writings developed, it was fascination with the sexual mysteries,
re¯ected in the joining together of divine male and female, that overwhelmed
all other symbolic interests. The uniting of the male sixth/ninth se®rot with the
female tenth became the chief and in some places almost unique object of
concern and way of explaining the religious life as a whole. This mysterium
coniunctionis or zivvuga qaddisha lies at the very heart of Zoharic teaching.
Introduction
In the divergence between these two tendencies within Kabbalah, we see

mythic and abstractionist elements struggling within the emerging self-articu-
lation of the mystical spirit. In raising all to the very heights of the se®rotic
world, the Catalonians were voting for abstraction, a Kabbalah that led the
mystic to experience a God not entirely removed from the rari®ed transperso-
nal deity of the Jewish philosophers. The Castilians may have incorporated
some aspects of Gerona's Neoplatonism, but their spirit is entirely different.
Perhaps in¯uenced in part by renewed contact with more mythically-oriented
Ashkenazic elements, and in part re¯ecting also the romantic troubadour ethos
of the surrounding culture, they write in a spirit far from that of philosophy.
Here we ®nd a strong emphasis on the theurgic, quasi-magical effect of
kabbalistic activity on the inner state of the Godhead, and its ef®cacy in
bringing about divine unity and thus showering divine blessing upon the lower
world. Their depictions of the upper universe are highly colorful, sometimes
even earthy. The fascination with both the demonic and the sexual that char-
acterizes their work lent to Kabbalah a dangerous and close-to-forbidden edge
xl
that undoubtedly served to make it more attractive, both in its own day and
throughout later generations.2
The last quarter of the thirteenth century was a period of great creative
expansion among the kabbalists of Castile. The se®rotic KabbalahÐas detailed
in the works of such well-known ®gures as Moses de LeoÂn, Todros Abula®a,
Joseph Gikatilla, Isaac Ibn Sahula, Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi, Joseph An-
gelino, and Joseph of Hamadan, all dating from the period between 1280 and
1310Ðconstitutes a considerable and highly varied body of writing, even leav-
ing aside the Zohar itself. It was within this circle that fragments of a more
poetic composition, written mostly in lofty and mysterious Aramaic rather
than Hebrew, ®rst began to circulate. These fragments, composed within one
or two generations but edited over the course of the following century and a
half, are known to the world as the Zohar.
2. The emergence of kabbalistic teaching is more complex and obscure than has been
described in the preceding paragraphs. The relationship between Kabbalah and certain late
forms of midrashic writing is still not entirely clear. The nature and degree of contact
between early kabbalists and the German Hasidic circles, especially as re¯ected in the
writings of Rabbi Eleazar of Worms (ca. 1165±ca. 1230), continues to puzzle scholars. The
group of abstract mystical writings known as Sifrei ha-Iyyun, or Books of Contemplation, ®ts
somewhere into this puzzle, but its precise date and relationship to other parts of the pre-
Zoharic corpus is still debated by scholars. The sources of the highly distinctive school of
``prophetic'' or `ècstatic'' Kabbalah taught by Rabbi Abraham Abula®a (1240±after 1292),
while having little connection to the Zohar, also would require treatment in a full picture of
the emergence of kabbalistic thought. But this very brief treatment of major schools and
themes should suf®ce to set forth the context out of which the Zohar emerged.
Introduction
III
Kabbalah represents a radical departure from any previously known version of
Judaism, especially in the realm of theology. While kabbalists remained loyal
followers of normative Jewish praxis as de®ned by halakhah, the theological
meaning system that underlay their Judaism was reconstructed. The God of the
kabbalists is not primarily the powerful, passionate Leader and Lover of His
people found in the Hebrew Bible, not the wise Judge and loving Father of the
rabbinic aggadah, nor the enthroned King of Merkavah visionaries. The kabb-
alists' God also differs sharply from the increasingly abstract notions of the
deity created by Jewish philosophers in the Middle Ages, beginning in the tenth
century with Saadia Gaon and culminating in the twelfth with MaimonidesÐ
whose work often stands in the background as the object of kabbalistic
polemics. The image of God that ®rst appears in Sefer ha-BahirÐto be elabo-
rated by several generations of kabbalists until it achieved its highest poetic
expression in the ZoharÐis a God of multiple mythic potencies, obscure
entities eluding precise de®nition but described through a remarkable web of
images, parables, and scriptural allusions. Together these entities constitute the xli
divine realm; ``God'' is the collective aggregate of these potencies and their
inner relationship. The dynamic interplay among these forces is the essential
myth of KabbalahÐthe true inner meaning, as far as its devotees are con-
cerned, both of the Torah and of human life itself.
In describing the God of the kabbalists as a ®gure of myth, we mean to say
that the fragmented narratives and scriptural interpretations found in the Bahir
and other early kabbalistic writings refer to a secret inner life of God, lifting
the veil from the ancient Jewish insistence on monotheism and revealing a
complex and multifaceted divine realm. In sharp contrast to the well-known
ancient adage of Ben Sira (``Do not seek out what is too wondrous for you; do
not inquire into that which is concealed from you''), these writings precisely
seek to penetrate the inner divine world and to offer hints to the reader about
the rich and complex life to be found there. Of course, outright polytheism
(like that of the pagan Gnostic groups of late antiquity) is out of the question
here at the heart of a medieval Jewry that de®ned itself through proud and
devoted attachment to the faith in one God. What we seem to discover in the
early Kabbalah are various stages of divine life, elements within the Godhead
that interact with one another. In the Bahir, these potencies relate quite freely
and mysteriously with one another; a ®xed pattern of relationships is somehow
vaguely in the background, but not clearly presented. In the century of devel-
opment following the Bahir's publication (1150±1250), the system comes to be
quite ®rmly ®xed. It is that pattern that lies behind the fanciful and multi-
layered creativity of the Zohar.
What we are speaking of here is the realm of divine entities that are called
se®rot by early kabbalistic sources. The term originates in Sefer Yetsirah, where
Introduction
it refers to the ten primal numbers which, along with the twenty-two letters of
the Hebrew alphabet, comprise the ``thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom'' or
the essential structure of existence. For the kabbalist, it is these forces and the
dynamic interplay among them that constitutes the inner life of the Godhead.
To know God, a necessary condition of proper worship (on this point the
kabbalists agree with the philosophers), one must understand the symbolic
language of the se®rot. To be a kabbalist is to contemplate the ¯ow of energy
among the se®rot and re¯ect upon their ultimate unity.
The non-Bahir writings of early Kabbalah add an important new element to
this picture. Here the term Ein Sof begins to appear as the hidden source from
which the ten se®rot emerge. Originally part of an adverbial phrase meaning
`èndlessly,'' Ein Sof is used in this context in a nominal sense to designate ``the
Endless'' or ``that which is beyond all limits.'' Ein Sof refers to the endless and
unde®nable reservoir of divinity, the ultimate source out of which everything
¯ows. Ein Sof is utterly transcendent in the sense that no words can describe it,
no mind comprehend it. But it is also ever-present in the sense of the old
xlii
rabbinic adage ``He is the place of the world.'' To say that Ein Sof is ``there'' but
not ``here'' would entirely falsify the notion. Nothing can ever exist outside of
Ein Sof. It is thus not quite accurate to say that the se®rot ''emerge'' or ``come
out of'' Ein Sof. Within the hidden reaches of in®nity, in a way that of necessity
eludes human comprehension, there stirs a primal desire, the slightest rippling
in the stillness of cosmic solitude. That desire (not a change, the more philo-
sophically-oriented kabbalist hastens to add, but an aspect of reality that has
been there forever) draws the in®nite well of energy called Ein Sof toward self-
expression: a becoming manifest or a concretization that begins with the
subtlest of steps, moves toward the emergence of ``God'' as divine persona,
manifests its spectrum of energies in the ``fullness'' of the ten se®rot, and then
spills over with plentitude to create all the ``lower'' worlds, includingÐas its
very lowest manifestationÐthe material universe. The se®rot are thus a revela-
tion, a rendering more accessible, of that which has existed in Ein Sof all along.
We are now ready to trace the pattern of the se®rot and the essential
symbols associated with them. The description in the following paragraphs
does not summarize any particular passage in a single kabbalistic text, but at-
tempts to offer a summary understanding of the se®rot as they were portrayed
in the emerging Castilian Kabbalah of the late thirteenth century. (See the
Diagram of the Ten Se®rot, above, page XX.)
The highest se®rah represents the ®rst stirrings of intent within Ein Sof, the
arousal of desire to come forth into the varied life of being. There is no speci®c
``content'' to this se®rah; it is a desire or intentionality, an inner movement of
the spirit, that potentially bears all content, but actually none. It is therefore
often designated by the kabbalists as ``Nothing.'' This is a stage of reality that
lies between being wholly within the One and the ®rst glimmer of separate
existence. Most of the terms used to describe this rather vague realm are
Introduction
apophatic in nature, describing it negatively. ``The air [or: ether] that cannot
be grasped'' is one favorite; ``the hidden light'' is another. The prime pictorial
image assigned to it is that of the crown: Keter, the starting point of the cosmic
process. Sometimes this rung of being is referred to as Keter Elyon, the Supreme
Crown of God. This image is derived partly from a depiction of the ten se®rot
in anthropic form, that is to say, in the image of a human being. Since this
personi®cation is of a royal personage, the highest manifestation of that emer-
ging spiritual ``body'' will be the crown. But we should also recall that the
more primary meaning of the word keter is ``circle''; it is from this that the
notion of the crown is derived. In Sefer Yetsirah we are told that the se®rot are a
great circle, ``their end embedded in their beginning, and their beginning in
their end.'' The circularity of the se®rot will be important to us further along in
our description.
Out of Keter emerges H.okhmah, the ®rst and ®nest point of ``real'' existence.
All things, souls, and moments of time that are ever to be, exist within a
primal point, at once in®nitesimally small and great beyond measure. (Like
mystics everywhere, kabbalists love the language of paradox, a way of showing xliii
how inadequate words really are to describe this reality.) The move from Keter
to H.okhmah, the ®rst step in the primal process, is a transition from nothing-
ness to being, from pure potential to the ®rst point of real existence. The kab-
balists are fond of describing it by their own reading of a verse from Job's
Hymn to Wisdom: ``Wisdom comes from Nothingness'' (Job 28:12). All the
variety of existence is contained within H.okhmah, ready to begin the journey
forward.
But H.okhmah, meaning ``wisdom,'' is also the primordial teaching, the inner
mind of God, the Torah that exists prior to the birth of words and letters. As
being exists here in this ultimately concentrated form, so too does truth or
wisdom. The kabbalists are building on the ancient midrashic identi®cation of
Torah with primordial wisdom and the midrashic reading of `Ìn the begin-
ning'' as ``through Wisdom'' God created the world. Here we begin to see their
insistence that Creation and Revelation are twin processes, existence and
language, the real and the nominal, emerging together from the hidden mind
of God. As the primal point of existence, H.okhmah is symbolized by the letter
yod, smallest of the letters, the ®rst point from which all the other letters will
be written. Here all of Torah, the text and the commentary added to it in every
generationÐindeed all of human wisdomÐis contained within a single yod.
This yod is the ®rst letter of the name of God. The upper tip of the Yod points
toward Keter, itself designated by the alef or the divine name Ehyeh.
This journey from inner divine Nothingness toward the beginning of ex-
istence is one that inevitably arouses duality, even within the inner realms. As
H. okhmah emerges, it brings forth its own mate, called Binah, `ùnderstanding''
or ``contemplation.'' H.okhmah is described as a point of light that seeks out a
grand mirrored palace of re¯ection. The light seen back and forth in those
Introduction
countless mirrored surfaces is all one light, but in®nitely transformed and
magni®ed in the re¯ective process. H.okhmah and Binah are two that are in-
separably linked to one another; either is inconceivable to us without the other.
H. okhmah is too ®ne and subtle to be detected without its re¯ections or rever-
berations in Binah. The mirrored halls of Binah would be dark and unknowable
without the light of H.okhmah. For this reason they are often treated by kabb-
alists as the primal pair, ancestral Abba and Imma, Father and Mother, deepest
polarities of male and female within the divine (and human) Self. The point
and the palace are also primal Male and Female, each transformed and ful®lled
in their union with one another. The energy that radiates from the point of
H. okhmah is described chie¯y in metaphors of ¯owing light and water, verbal
pictures used by the mystics to speak of these most abstract levels of the inner
Mind. But images of sexual union are never far behind these; the ¯ow of light is
also the ¯ow of seed that ®lls the womb of Binah and gives birth to all the
further rungs within the ten-in-one divine structure, the seven ``lower'' se®rot.
This ®rst triad of se®rot together constitutes the most primal and recondite
xliv
level of the inner divine world. It is a reality that the kabbalist regularly claims
is quite obscure and beyond human ken, although the many references to
kavvanah reaching Keter and to the union of all the se®rot with their source
undercut such assertions. But for most passages in the Zohar, Binah stands as
the womb of existence, the jubilee in which all returns to its source, the object
of teshuvah (turning, returning)Ðin short, the highest object of the religious
quest to return to the source. Out of the womb of Binah ¯ow the seven ``lower''
se®rot, constituting seven aspects of the divine persona. Together these com-
prise the God who is the subject of worship and the One whose image is
re¯ected in each human soul. The divine Self, as conceived by Kabbalah, is
an interplay of these seven forces or inner directions. So too is each human
personality, God's image in the world. This ``holy structure'' of the inner life of
God is called the ``Mystery of Faith'' by the Zohar and is re®ned in countless
images by kabbalists through the ages. ``God,'' in other words, is the ®rst Being
to emerge out of the divine womb, the primal `èntity'' to take shape as the
endless energies of Ein Sof begin to coalesce.
These seven se®rot, taken collectively, are represented in the spatial domain
by the six directions around a center (in the tradition of Sefer Yetsirah) and in
the realm of time by the seven days of the week, culminating in the Sabbath.
Under the in¯uence of Neoplatonism, the kabbalists came to describe the
se®rot as emerging in sequence. This sequence does not necessarily have to be
one of time, as the se®rot comprise the inner life of YHVH, where time does not
mean what it does to us. The sequence is rather one of an intrinsic logic, each
stage a response to that which comes ``before'' it. The structure consists of two
dialectical triads (sets of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis) and a ®nal vehicle of
reception that also energizes the entire system from ``below,'' corresponding to
Keter at the `ùpper'' end.
Introduction
First to manifest is H.esed, the grace or love of God. The emergence of God
from hiding is an act ®lled with love, a promise of the endless showering of
blessing and life on all beings, each of whose birth in a sense will continue this
process of emerging from the One. This gift of love is beyond measure and
without limit, the boundless compassion of Keter now transposed into a love
for each speci®c form and creature that is ever to emerge. This channel of
grace is the original divine shefa, the bounteous and unlimited love of God. But
the divine wisdom also understands that love alone is not the way to bring
forth `òther'' beings and to allow them their place. Judaism has always known
God to embody judgment as well as love. The proper balance between these
two, ever the struggle of the rabbis themselves (loving the people as well as the
law), is a struggle that Jewish sources have long seen as existing in God as well.
H. esed therefore emerges linked to its own opposite, described both as Din, the
judgment of God, and Gevurah, the bastion of divine power. This is a force that
measures and limits love, that controls the ¯ow of H.esed in response to the
needs, abilities, and deserts of those who are to receive it.
H. esed represents the God of love, calling forth the response of love in the xlv
human soul as well. Gevurah represents the God we humans fear, the One
before whose power we stand in trembling. The kabbalists saw H.esed as the
faith of Abraham, described by the prophet as `Àbraham My lover'' (Isaiah
41:8). Abraham, the ®rst of God's true earthly followers, stands parallel to
H. esed, the ®rst quality to emerge within God. He is the man of love, the one
who will leave all behind and follow God across the deserts, willing to offer
everything, even to place his beloved son upon the altar, for love of God. Gevu-
rah, on the other hand, is the God called ``Fear of Isaac'' (Genesis 31:42). This is
the divine face Isaac sees when bound to that altar, confronting the God he
believes is about to demand his life. Isaac's piety is of a different quality than
his father's. Trembling obedience, rather than love, marks his path through
life. In the Zohar, the ``Fear of Isaac'' is sometimes depicted as a God of terror.
The linking together of H.esed and Gevurah is an in®nitely delicate balance.
Too much love and there is no judgment, none of the moral demand that is so
essential to the fabric of Judaism. But too much power or judgment is even
worse. The kabbalists see this aspect of the divine and human self as fraught
with danger, the very birthplace of evil. Gevurah represents the ``left'' side of
the divine as the se®rot emerge in humanlike form. The Zohar speaks of a
discontent that arises on this ``left'' side of God. Gevurah becomes impatient
with H.esed, unwilling to see judgment set aside in the name of love. Rather
than permitting love to ¯ow in measured ways, Gevurah seeks for some cosmic
moment to rule alone, to hold back the ¯ow of love. In this ``moment,'' divine
power turns to rage or fury; out of it all the forces of evil are born, darkness
emerging from the light of God, a shadow of the divine universe that continues
to exist throughout history, sustained by the evil wrought by humans below.
Here we have one of the most important moral lessons of Kabbalah. Judgment
Introduction
not tempered by love brings about evil; power obsessed with itself turns
demonic. The force of evil is often referred to by the Zohar as sitra ah.ra, the
`òther side,'' indicating that it represents a parallel emanation to that of the
se®rot. But the origin of that demonic reality that both parallels and mocks the
divine is not in some `òther'' distant force. The demonic is born of an im-
balance within the divine, ¯owing ultimately from the same source as all else,
the single source of being.
The proper balance of H.esed and Gevurah results in the sixth se®rah, the
center of the se®rotic universe. This con®guration represents the personal God
of biblical and rabbinic tradition. This is God seated on the throne, the one to
whom prayer is most centrally addressed. Poised between the ``right'' and ``left''
forces within divinity, the ``blessed Holy One'' is the key ®gure in a central
column of se®rot, positioned directly below Keter, the divine that precedes all
duality. The sixth se®rah is represented by the third patriarch, Jacob, also
called IsraelÐthe perfect integration of the forces of Abraham and Isaac, the
God who unites and balances love and fear.
xlvi
Nonpersonal designations for this sixth se®rah include Tif'eret (Beauty,
Splendor), Rah.amin (Compassion), mishpat (balanced judgment), and emet
(truth). The three consonants of emet represent the ®rst, middle, and last
letters of the alphabet. Truth is stretched forth across the whole of Being,
joining the extremes of right and left, H.esed and Gevurah, into a single inte-
grated personality. Thus is the sixth se®rah also described as the central
``beam'' in God's construction of the universe. Adopting a line from Moses'
Tabernacle (Exodus 26:28), depicted by the rabbis as re¯ecting the cosmic
structure, Jacob or the sixth se®rah is called ``the central beam, reaching from
one end unto the other.''
In Jacob or Tif'eret we reach the synthesis that resolves the original tension
between H.esed and Gevurah, the inner ``right'' and ``left,'' love and judgment.
The ``blessed Holy One'' as a personal God is also the uppermost manifestation
called `Ìsrael,'' thus serving as a model of idealized human personality. Each
member of the house of Israel partakes of this Godhead, who may also be
understood as a totemic representation of His people below. ``Jacob'' is in this
sense the perfect humanÐa new Adam, according to the sagesÐthe radiant-
faced elder extending blessing through the world. This is also the God of
imitatio dei. In balancing their own lives, the people of Israel imitate the God
who stands at the center between right and left, balancing all the cosmic forces.
That God knows them and sees Himself in them, meaning that the struggle to
integrate love and judgment is not only the great human task, but also a
re¯ection of the cosmic struggle. The inner structure of psychic life is the
hidden structure of the universe; it is because of this that we can come to
know God by the path of inward contemplation and true self-knowledge.
The key dialectical triad of H.esed-Gevurah-Tif'eret is followed on the kabba-
listic chart by a second triad, that of the se®rot Netsah., Hod, and Yesod, ar-
Introduction
ranged in the same manner as those above them. Little that is new takes place
on this level of divinity. These se®rot are essentially channels through which the
higher energies pass on their way into the tenth se®rah, Malkhut or Shekhinah,
the source of all life for the lower worlds. The only major function assigned to
Netsah . and Hod in the kabbalistic sources is their serving as the sources of
prophecy. Moses is the single human to rise to the level of Tif'eret, to become
``bridegroom of the Shekhinah.'' Other mortals can experience the se®rotic
universe only as re¯ected in the Shekhinah, the single portal though which they
can enter. (This is the ``formal'' view of the kabbalists, though it is a position
exceeded by a great many passages in the Zohar and elsewhere.) The prophets
other than Moses occupy an intermediate position, receiving their visions and
messages from the seventh and eighth se®rot, making prophecy a matter of
participation in the inner se®rotic life of God.
The ninth se®rah represents the joining together of all the cosmic forces, the
¯ow of all the energies above now united again in a single place. In this sense
the ninth se®rah is parallel to the second: H.okhmah began the ¯ow of these
forces from a single point; now Yesod (Foundation), as the ninth is called, reas- xlvii
sembles them and prepares to direct their ¯ow once again. When gathered in
Yesod, it becomes clear that the life animating the se®rot, often described in
metaphors of either light or water, is chie¯y to be seen as male sexual energy,
speci®cally as semen. Following the Greek physician Galen, medieval medicine
saw semen as originating in the brain (H.okhmah), ¯owing down through the
spinal column (the central column, Tif'eret), into the testicles (Netsah. and Hod ),
and thence into the phallus (Yesod ). The se®rotic process thus leads to the great
union of the nine se®rot above, through Yesod, with the female Shekhinah. She
becomes ®lled and impregnated with the fullness of divine energy and She in
turn gives birth to the lower worlds, including both angelic beings and human
souls.
The biblical personality associated with the ninth se®rah is Joseph, the only
®gure regularly described in rabbinic literature as tsaddiq or ``righteous.'' He is
given this epithet because he rejected the wiles of Potiphar's wife, making him
a symbol of male chastity or sexual purity. The se®rah itself is thus often called
tsaddiq, the place where God is represented as the embodiment of moral right-
eousness. So too is Yesod designated as berit or ``covenant,'' again referring to
sexual purity through the covenant of circumcision.
But there is more than one way to read these symbols. The ninth se®rah
stands for male potency as well as sexual purity. The kabbalists resolutely insist
that these are ideally identical and are not to be separated from one another.
Of course sexual transgression and temptation were well known to them; the
circle of the Zohar was quite extreme in its views on sexual sinÐand on the
great damage it could cause both to soul and cosmos. But the inner world of
the se®rot was completely holy, a place where no sin abided. Here the ¯ow of
male energy represented only fruitfulness and blessing. The ful®llment of the
Introduction
entire se®rotic system, especially as seen in Castile, lay in the union of these
two ®nal se®rot. Yesod is, to be sure, the agent or lower manifestation of
Tif'eret, the true bridegroom of the Song of Songs or the King who weds the
matronitaÐShekhinahÐas the grand lady of the cosmos. But the fascination
with the sexual aspect of this union is very strong, especially in the Zohar, and
that leads to endless symbolic presentations of the union of Yesod and Malkhut,
the feminine tenth se®rah.
By far the richest network of symbolic associations is that connected with
the tenth and ®nal se®rah. As Malkhut (Kingdom), it represents the realm over
which the King (Tif'eret) has dominion, sustaining and protecting her as the
true king takes responsibility for his kingdom. At the same time, it is this
se®rah that is charged with the rule of the lower world; the blessed Holy One's
Malkhut is the lower world's ruler. The biblical personage associated with
Malkhut is David (somewhat surprisingly, given its usual femininity), the sym-
bol of kingship. David is also the psalmist, ever crying out in longing for the
blessings of God to ¯ow from above. While Malkhut receives the ¯ow of all the
xlviii
upper se®rot from Yesod, She has some special af®nity for the left side. For this
reason She is sometimes called ``the gentle aspect of judgment,'' a mitigated
version of Gevurah. Several Zohar passages, however, paint Her in portraits of
seemingly ruthless vengeance in punishing the wicked. A most complicated
picture of femininity appears in the Zohar, ranging from the most highly ro-
manticized to the most frightening and bizarre.
The last se®rah is also called Shekhinah, an ancient rabbinic term for the
indwelling divine presence. In the medieval Jewish imagination, this appella-
tion for God had been transformed into a winged divine being, hovering over
the community of Israel and protecting them from harm. The Shekhinah was
also said to dwell in Israel's midst, to follow them into exile, and to participate
in their suffering. In the latest phases of midrashic literature, there begins to
appear a distinction between God and His Shekhinah, partly a re¯ection of
medieval philosophical attempts to assign the biblical anthropomorphisms to a
being less than the Creator. The kabbalists identify this Shekhinah as the spouse
or divine consort of the blessed Holy One. She is the tenth se®rah, therefore a
part of God included within the divine ten-in-one unity. But She is tragically
exiled, distanced from Her divine Spouse. Sometimes She is seen to be either
seduced or taken captive by the evil hosts of sitra ah.ra; then God and the
righteous below must join forces in order to liberate Her. The great drama of
religious life, according to the kabbalists, is that of protecting Shekhinah from
the forces of evil and joining Her to the holy Bridegroom who ever awaits Her.
Here one can see how medieval Jews adapted the values of chivalryÐthe rescue
of the maiden from the clutches of evilÐto ®t their own spiritual context.
As the female partner within the divine world, the tenth se®rah comes to be
described by a host of symbols, derived both from the natural world and from
the legacy of Judaism, that are classically associated with femininity. She is the
Introduction
moon, dark on her own but receiving and giving off the light of the sun. She is
the sea, into whom all waters ¯ow; the earth, longing to be fructi®ed by the
rain that falls from heaven. She is the heavenly Jerusalem, into whom the King
will enter; She is the throne upon which He is seated, the Temple or Taberna-
cle, dwelling place of His glory. She is also Keneset Yisra'el, the embodied
``Community [or: Assembly] of Israel'' itself, identi®ed with the Jewish people.
The tenth se®rah is a passive/receptive female with regard to the se®rot above
Her, receiving their energies and being ful®lled by their presence within Her.
But She is ruler, source of life, and font of all blessing for the worlds below,
including the human soul. The kabbalist sees himself as a devotee of the
Shekhinah. She may never be worshiped separately from the divine unity.
Indeed, this separation of Shekhinah from the forces above was the terrible sin
of Adam that brought about exile from Eden. Yet it is only through Her that
humans have access to the mysteries beyond. All prayer is channelled through
Her, seeking to energize Her and raise Her up in order to effect the se®rotic
unity. The primary function of the religious life, with all its duties and obliga-
tions, is to rouse the Shekhinah into a state of love. xlix
All realms outside the divine proceed from Shekhinah. She is surrounded
most immediately by a richly pictorialized host. Sometimes these surrounding
beings are seen as angels; at others, they are the maidens who attend the Bride
at Her marriage canopy. They inhabit and rule over variously described realms
or ``palaces'' of light and joy. The Zohar devotes much attention to describing
seven such palaces with names that include ``Palace of Love,'' ``Palace of the
Sapphire Pavement'' (alluding to the vision of God in Exodus 24:10), ``Palace of
Desire,'' and so forth. The ``palaces'' ( heikhalot) of the Zoharic world are
historically derived from the remains of the ancient Merkavah or Heikhalot
mysticism, a tradition that was only dimly remembered by the Zohar's day.
In placing the heikhalot beneath the Shekhinah, the kabbalists mean to say that
the visionary ascent of the Merkavah mystic was a somewhat lesser sort of
religious experience than their own symbolic/contemplative ascent to the
heights of the se®rotic universe, one that ascended with the Shekhinah as She
reached into the highest realms. While the inner logic of the kabbalists'
emanational thinking would seem to indicate that all beings, including the
physical universe, ¯ow forth from Shekhinah, the medieval abhorrence of
associating God with corporeality complicates the picture, leaving Kabbalah
with a complex and somewhat divided attitude toward the material world. The
world in which we live, especially for the Zohar, is a thorough mingling of
divine and demonic elements. Both the holy imprint of the ten se®rot and the
frightening structure of multilayered qelippot, or demonic ``shells,'' are to be
found within it.
Introduction
IV
The Zohar ®rst made its appearance in Castile toward the end of the thirteenth
century. Passages from it are included in works by Castilian and Catalonian
kabbalists writing at about that time. In some cases these are presented as quo-
tations, attributed to ``Yerushalmi'' (usually referring to the Jerusalem Talmud,
but sometimes also to other work originating in the Holy Land) or to Midrash,
particularly ``the Midrash of Rabbi Shim'on son of Yoh.ai.'' Some refer to it as
an ancient work. In other cases, including passages in the writings of well-
known Castilian kabbalist Moses de LeoÂn and the Barcelona author Bah.ya ben
Asher, pieces identical to sections of the Zohar are simply absorbed within
their writings and presented as their own. By the second decade of the four-
teenth century, the Zohar is referred to (by the author of Tiqqunei Zohar) as a
``prior'' or completed document. Large portions of it are by then available to
such authors as David ben Judah he-H.asid, who paraphrases and translates
various sections, and the Italian kabbalist Menah.em Recanati, who quotes
copiously from the Zohar in his own commentary on the Torah. Recanati
l seems to be the ®rst one to regularly refer to this group of sources by the
term Zohar.
The question of the Zohar's origins has puzzled its readers ever since its
®rst appearance, and no simple and unequivocal statement as to the question
of its authorship can be made even in our own day. There is no question that
the work was composed in the decades immediately preceding its appearance.
It responds to literary works and refers to historical events that place it in the
years following 1270. The 1280s seem like the most likely decade for composi-
tion of the main body of the Zohar, probably preceded by the Midrash ha-
Ne'lam and possibly certain other sections. Indeed it is quite possible that the
Zohar was still an ongoing project when texts of it ®rst appeared, and that
parts of it were being written even a decade later. Because the question of the
Zohar's origins has been so hotly debated by readers and scholars over the
centuries, it is important to offer a brief account here of the history of this
discussion.
Debate about the Zohar's origins began in the very decade of its appearance.
Fragments of the Zohar were ®rst distributed by Rabbi Moses de LeoÂn, who
claimed that they were copied from an ancient manuscript in his possession.
This was a classic technique of pseudepigraphy, the attribution of esoteric
teachings to the ancients, to give them the respectability associated with hoary
tradition. While some naive souls seem to have believed quite literally in the
antiquity of the text and the existence of such a manuscript, others, including
some of De LeoÂn's fellow kabbalists, joined with him in the pretense in order
to heighten the prestige of these teachings. While they may have known that
De LeoÂn was the writer, and may even have participated in mystical conversa-
tions that were re¯ected in the emerging written text, they did believe that the
Introduction
content of the Zohar's teachings was indeed ancient and authentic. They prob-
ably saw nothing wrong in the creation of a grand literary ®ction that provided
for these ancient-yet-new teachings an elevated literary setting, one worthy of
their profound truth. There were, however, skeptics and opponents of the
Zohar right from the beginning, who depicted the whole enterprise as one of
literary forgery.
Fascinating evidence of this early controversy is found in an account written
by the kabbalist Isaac of Acre, a wandering mystic who arrived in Castile in
1305. A manuscript version of Isaac's account was known to the sixteenth-
century chronicler Abraham Zacuto and was included in his Sefer Yuh.asin.
Isaac tells us that he had already heard of the Zohar, and came to Castile to
learn more about it and speci®cally to investigate the question of the Zohar's
origins. He managed to meet De LeoÂn shortly before the latter's death. De
LeoÂn assured him that the ancient manuscript was real, and offered to show it
to him. By the time Isaac arrived at Avila, where De LeoÂn had lived in the last
years of his life, he had a chance only to meet the kabbalist's widow. She
denied that the manuscript had ever existed, recounting that her husband had li
told her that he was claiming ancient origins for his own work for pecuniary
advantage. Others, however, while agreeing that there was no ancient manu-
script source, claimed that De LeoÂn had written the Zohar ``through the power
of the Holy Name.'' (This might refer either to some sort of trancelike `àuto-
matic writing'' or to a sense that he saw himself as a reincarnation of Rabbi
Shim'on andÐthrough the NameÐhad access to his teachings.) Various other
players then enter the account in a series of claims and counterclaims, and the
text breaks off just before a disciple of De LeoÂn is able to present what seems
like promising testimony in the Zohar's behalf.
This account has been used by opponents of the Zohar and of Kabbalah in
general in various attempts to dismiss the Zohar as a forgery and Moses de
LeoÂn as a charlatan. Most outspoken among these attempts is that of the
nineteenth-century historian Heinrich Graetz, for whom the Zohar was the
epitome of the most lowly, superstitious element within medieval Judaism.
Graetz and others assumed that the wife was the one who spoke the truth, all
other explanations serving to cover or justify the obvious chicanery of the
author. Wanting to denigrate the ZoharÐwhich did not ®t the early modern
Enlightenment idea of proper JudaismÐGraetz did not consider the possibility
that De LeoÂn might have told his wife such things for reasons other than their
being the simple truth. Sadly, her account may re¯ect the kabbalist's assump-
tion of his wife's inability to appreciate his literary intentions. The claim that
he did it for the sake of selling books has about it the air of an explanation to a
spouse, offered in a dismissive context.
Modern Zohar scholarship begins with the young Gershom Scholem's at-
tempts to refute Graetz. He set out in the late 1920s to show that the picture
was more complex and that indeed there might be earlier layers to the Zohar.
Introduction
Awed by the vastness of the Zohar corpus, he found it hard to believe that all
of it could have been the work of a single author. But in a series of stunningly
convincing essays Scholem reversed himself and came to the conclusion that
the entire Zohar had indeed been written by De LeoÂn. He supported this con-
clusion by careful analysis of the Zohar's language, its knowledge of the geogra-
phy of the land of Israel, its relationship to philosophy and to earlier works of
Kabbalah, and references to speci®c historical events or dates. Most convincing
was Scholem's painstaking philological analysis. Scholem compared the Zohar's
unique (and sometimes ``mistaken'') use of Aramaic linguistic forms to char-
acteristic patterns of language to be found (uniquely, he claimed) in De LeoÂn's
Hebrew works. Here he believed he had found something of a literary ®nger-
print, making it ®nally clear that De LeoÂn was the author. As to the magnitude
of the work and its attribution to a single individual, Scholem was consoled by
historical parallels, particularly that of Jakob Boehme, a seventeenth-century
German shoemaker, originally illiterate, who had composed a vast corpus of
writings under the force of mystical inspiration.
lii
But the matter is by no means ended here. The fact that Scholem agreed
with Graetz on the question of single authorship did not at all mean that he
shared in his lowly opinion of the Zohar or its author. The parallel to Boehme
in fact sounds rather like the writing ``through the power of the Holy Name''
that had been suggested to Isaac of Acre. Assuming that Moses de LeoÂn did
write the entire Zohar, the question became one of understanding how this
might be the case. Two speci®c questions here come to the fore. One concerns
the notable differences between the Zohar's various sections. Could one person
have written the Midrash ha-Ne'lam, with its hesitant, incomplete usage of
se®rotic symbolism; the Idrot, where that symbolism was incorporated and
surpassed; and the obscure Matnitin and Heikhalot, along with the rich narra-
tive and homilies of the main Zohar text? What can account for all these
seeming variations in both literary style and symbolic content?
The other question has to do with the intriguing relationship between a
single author and the many voices that speak forth from within the Zohar's
pages. Is the community of mystics described here entirely a ®gment of the
author's creative imagination? Is there not some real experience of religious
community that is re¯ected in the Zohar's pages? Might it be possible, to take
an extreme view, that each of the speakers represents an actual person, a
member of the Castilian kabbalists' circle, here masked behind the name of
an ancient rabbi? Or is there some other way in which the presence of multiple
authors (or participants in the group's ongoing conversations) can be detected
within the Zohar's pages?
Contemporary scholarship on the Zohar (here we are indebted especially to
the writings of Yehuda Liebes and Ronit Meroz) has parted company with
Scholem on the question of single authorship. While it is tacitly accepted that
De LeoÂn did either write or edit long sections of the Zohar, including the main
Introduction
narrative (homiletical body) of the text, he is not thought to be the only writer
involved. Multiple layers of literary creativity can be discerned within the text.
It may be that the Zohar should be seen as the product of a school of mystical
practitioners and writers, one that may have existed even before 1270 and con-
tinued into the early years of the fourteenth century. Certain texts, including
the Midrash ha-Ne'lam (perhaps an earlier rescension of it than that which has
survived?) belong to the oldest stratum of writing. Then the main part of the
Zohar, including both the epic tale and teachings of Rabbi Shim'on and his dis-
ciples, was indeed composed in the decades claimed by Scholem. Work on the
Zohar did not cease, however, with the turn of the fourteenth century or the
passing of Moses de LeoÂn. In fact, the author of the Tiqqunei Zohar and the
Ra'aya Meheimna, seen by Scholem as ``later'' addenda to the Zohar corpus,
may represent the third ``generation'' of this ongoing school. It would have
been in his day, and perhaps with the cooperation of several editors, that the
fragments of the Zohar as ®rst circulated were linked together into the some-
what larger units found in the surviving fourteenth- and ®fteenth-century
manuscripts. liii
There is no single, utterly convincing piece of evidence that has led scholars
to this revision of Scholem's view. It is rather a combination of factors stem-
ming from close readings of the text and a body of scholarship on it that did
not yet exist in Scholem's day. There is considerable evidence of what might be
called `ìnternal commentary'' within the Zohar text. The ``Secrets of the Torah''
are an expansion of the brief and enigmatic Matnitin, as the Idrot comment
and enlarge upon themes ®rst developed in the Sifra di-Tsni'uta. In the Zohar
narrative, whole or partial stories are told more than onceÐone version see-
mingly an expansion of an earlier rescension. The same is true of certain
homilies, some of which are repeated in part or whole several times within
the text. These expansions and repetitions could be explained as the developing
project of a single author; however, when taken together with other factors (the
differing sections of the Zohar and the multiple ``voices'' that speak within the
text), they point more toward multiple or collective authorship. Historical
evidence has shown that closed schools or societies (h.avurot) for various pur-
poses were a common organizational form within Spanish Jewry. The image of
Rabbi Shim'on and his followers, encountering a series of mysterious teachers
in the course of their wanderings, looks rather like a description of a real such
school, meeting various mystics from outside its ranks who were then accepted
by the school's leader as legitimate teachers of secret Torah.
It is particularly intriguing to compare this ®ctionalized but historically real
school of kabbalists to another that is rather more clearly described in docu-
ments available to us. In neighboring Catalonia, the kabbalistic school of
Nah.manides lastedÐside by side with his halakhic schoolÐfor three genera-
tions. Nah.manides' disciple Solomon ben Adret (ca. 1235±ca. 1310) carried his
master's teachings forward to a group of disciples who then wrote multiple
Introduction
commentaries on the secret aspects of Nah.manides' work. That circle was

signi®cantly more conservative in its views of kabbalistic creativity than was
the Castilian group. But we could easily imagine a parallel school of Castilian
kabbalistsÐbeginning with the ``Gnostics'' of the mid-thirteenth century and
extending forward over the same three generationsÐwhose collective literary
product, much freer and richer in imagination than the Nah.manidean corpus,
included the body of work ®nally edited into what later generations have come
to know as the Zohar. It may indeed be that the competition between these
two schools of mystical thought had some role in advancing the editing process
that ®nally resulted in the Zohar as we know it in its printed version.
V
The Zohar was composed in the Castile of the late thirteenth century, a period
that marked the near completion of the Reconquista and something of a golden
age of enlightenment in the history of Christian Spain. As the wars of conquest
liv ended, the monarchy was able to ground itself and establish central authority
over the semi-independent and often unruly Spanish nobility. This included
responsibility for protection of the Jews, who generally fared better at the
hands of kings than at the arbitrary mercy of local rivals. Alfonso X (1252±
1284) was known as el Sabio or ``the Wise'' because of his interest in the
sciencesÐwhich he was willing to learn from Jews and Muslims when neces-
saryÐas well as history, literature, and art.
Jews retained a high degree of juridical and cultural autonomy, as well as
freedom of religious practice, in the Castile of this period. They constituted a
signi®cant percentage of city and town dwellers, generally choosing to live in
self-enclosed neighborhoods and communities. But Jews were seen by Chris-
tian society as barely tolerated outsiders, and they viewed themselves as humi-
liated and victimized exiles. As an emerging class of Christian burghers came
to see the Jews as rivals, the economic opportunities afforded by the early Re-
conquista years were gradually eroded. Jews were required to wear distinguish-
ing garb, synagogue building was restricted, and various burdens of extra
taxation came to be an expected part of Jewish life.
Most signi®cantly, Jews were under constant pressure to convert to Chris-
tianity in the atmosphere of a church triumphant with the glory of having
vanquished the Moorish armies and standing on the verge of ending the ``stain''
of Islamic incursion into Christian Europe. Alfonso X commissioned transla-
tions of both the Qur'an and the Talmud into Castilian, partly out of scholarly
interest but also as an aid to the ongoing missionary campaign. The success of
the Reconquista itself was trumpeted as great testimony to the validity of
Christian claims. The Christian supersessionist theology, beginning with the
Church Fathers but growing in stridency through the Middle Ages, claimed
tirelessly that Judaism after Christ was an empty shell, a formalist attachment
Introduction
to the past, lacking in true faith. This message was delivered regularly in
polemical writings, in sermons that Jews were forced to hear, and in casual
encounters between Jews and Christians. We should remember that Jews in
Spain spoke the same language as their neighbors and lived with them in the
same towns and cities. Their degree of isolation from their surroundings was
signi®cantly less than that of later Jews in eastern Europe, the lens through
which all Jewish diaspora experience is often mistakenly viewed in our time.
In this context, the Zohar may be viewed as a grand defense of Judaism, a
poetic demonstration of the truth and superiority of Jewish faith. Its authors
knew a great deal about Christianity, mostly from observing it at close hand
but also from reading certain Christian works, including the New Testament,
which Dominicans and other eager seekers of converts were only too happy to
place in the hands of literate and inquisitive Jews. The kabbalists' attitude
toward the religion of their Christian neighbors is a complex one, and it also
has come down to us through a veil of self-censorship. Jews writing in medie-
val Europe, especially those promulgating innovative religious teachings that
were controversial even within the Jewish community, must have been well lv
aware that their works would be read by Christian censors (often themselves
Jewish apostates) who would make them pay dearly for outright insults to the
Christian faith.
The Zohar is ®lled with disdain and sometimes even outright hatred for the
gentile world. Continuing in the old midrashic tradition of repainting the
subtle shadings of biblical narrative in moralistic black and white, the Zohar
pours endless heaps of wrath and malediction on Israel's enemies. In the
context of biblical commentary these are always such ancient ®gures as Esau,
Pharaoh, Amalek, Balaam, and the mixed multitude of runaway slaves who left
Egypt with Israel, a group treated by the Zohar with special venom. All of
these were rather safe objects for attack, but it does not take much imagination
to realize that the true address of this resentment was the oppressor in whose
midst the authors lived. This becomes signi®cantly clearer when we consider
the Zohar's comments on the religion of these ancient enemies. They are
castigated repeatedly as worshipers of the demonic and practitioners of black
magic, enemies of divine unity and therefore dangerous disturbers of the
cosmic balance by which the world survives. Israel, and especially the kabba-
listic ``companions'' who understand this situation, must do all they can to right
the balance and save the Shekhinah from those dark forces and their vast
network of accursed supporters on earth. As Moses had fought off the evil
spells of BalaamÐdarkest of all magiciansÐin his day, so must the disciples of
Rabbi Shim'on ®ght those evil forces that stand opposed to the dawning of the
messianic light that is soon to come.
All of this is said, of course, without a single negative word about Chris-
tianity. But Rabbi Shim'on and his second-century companions lived in a time
when the enemies of biblical Israel had long disappeared from the earth.
Introduction
The same is even more true of the reader in medieval Christian Spain, who is
being ®rmly admonished to join the battle against those who would strengthen
the evil forcesÐwounding or capturing the Shekhinah and thus keeping the
divine light from shining into this world. It does not require a great deal of
imagination to understand who these worshipers of darkness must be. We must
remember, of course, that this was also the era when the Christian image of
the Jew as magician and devil-worshiper was becoming rampant. The Zohar's
unstated but clearly present view of Christianity as sorcery is a mirror re¯ec-
tion of the image of Judaism that was gaining acceptance, with much more
dangerous consequences, throughout the Christian world.
But this is only one side of the picture. As people of deep faith and of great
literary and aesthetic sensibility, the kabbalists also found themselves impressed
by, and perhaps even attracted to, certain aspects of the Christian story and
the religious lives of the large and powerful monastic communities that were
so prominent in Christian Spain. The tale of Jesus and his faithful apostles, the
passion narrative, and the struggles of the early Church were all powerful and
lvi
attractive stories. Aspects of Christian theologyÐincluding both the compli-
cated oneness of the trinitarian God and the passionate and ever present
devotion to a quasi-divine female ®gureÐmade their mark on the kabbalistic
imagination. The monastic orders, and especially their commitment to celibacy
and poverty, must have been impressive to mystics whose own tradition did
not make such demands on them, but who shared the medieval otherworldli-
ness that would have highly esteemed such devotion.
The kabbalists were much disconcerted by the power of Christianity to
attract Jewish converts, an enterprise that was given high priority particularly
by the powerful Dominican order. Much that is to be found in the Zohar was
intended to serve as a counterweight to the potential attractiveness of Chris-
tianity to Jews, and perhaps even to the kabbalists themselves. Of course this
should not be seen as an exclusive way of reading the Zohar, a mystical work
which was not composed chie¯y as a polemical text. Nevertheless, the need to
proudly assert Judaism's spirit in the face of triumphalist Christianity stands in
the background of the Zohar and should not be ignored as we read it.
VI
The Zohar, as the contemporary reader of the original encounters it, is a three-
volume work, constituting some sixteen hundred folio pages, ordered in the
form of a commentary on the Torah. The ®rst volume covers the Zohar on
Genesis, the second volume is Zohar on Exodus, and the third volume com-
pletes the remaining three books of the Torah. The text is divided into
homilies on the weekly Torah portions, taking the form of an ancient midrash.
Within this form, however, are included long digressions and subsections of
the Zohar, some of which have no relation to this midrashic structure and
Introduction
seem to be rather arbitrarily placed in one Torah portion or another. 3 An

addition to the three volumes is Zohar H.adash (New Zohar), a collection of
materials that were omitted from the earliest printed Zohar editions but were
later culled from manuscript sources. Here we ®nd addenda to the Torah por-
tions but also partial commentaries on Ruth, Lamentations, and the Song of
Songs. Another work usually considered part of the Zohar literature is Tiqqunei
Zohar, a kabbalistic commentary on the opening verse of Genesis that expli-
cates it in seventy ways. This workÐalong with the Ra'aya Meheimna or
``Faithful Shepherd'' passages published within the Zohar itself, mostly taking
the form of a commentary on the commandmentsÐis seen by modern scho-
lars to be the work of a slightly later kabbalist, one who wrote perhaps in the
opening decades of the fourteenth century and saw himself as continuing the
Zohar tradition.
As stated, the main body of the Zohar takes the form of midrash: a collec-
tion of homiletical explications of the biblical text. The Zohar enters fully into
the midrashic genre, even though that form of writing was considered anti-
quated in the time and place where the Zohar was composed. Its authors were lvii
especially learned in aggadah and used it ingeniously, often convincingly por-
traying themselves as ancient midrashic masters. But the anachronism of their
style was intentional. The Zohar is an attempt to re-create a form of discourse
that would have seemed appropriate to a work originating with its chief speak-
ers, Rabbi Shim'on son of Yoh.ai and those of his circle, who lived in the land
of Israel eleven hundred years earlier. In fact, this medieval midrash is based
on a thorough knowledge of the entire earlier Jewish tradition, including
rabbinic, philosophical, and esoteric works. Its purpose, as will quickly become
clear to the reader, goes far beyond that of the ancient midrashic model. The
Zohar seeks nothing less than to place the kabbalistic tradition, as it had
developed over the preceding centuries, into the mouths of these much-revered
sages of antiquity and to use them as its mouthpiece for showing the reader
that the entire Torah is alive with kabbalistic secrets and veiled references to
the ``mystery of faith'' as the kabbalists taught it. In this sense, the Zohar may
be seen as an attempt to create a new midrash or, as one scholar has put it, a
renaissance of the midrashic art in the Middle Ages.
The old midrashic homilies were often preceded by a series of `Òpenings,''
introductory proems in which the homilist would demonstrate his skill, pick-
ing his way through a series of biblical associations eventually leading up to
the subject at hand. The Zohar too uses such `Òpenings,'' but with a very dif-
ferent purpose in mind. Here the preacher wants to `òpen'' the scriptural verse
itself, remove its outer shell, and ®nd its secret meaning. In this way, the verse
itself may serve as an opening or a gateway into the `ùpper'' world for the one
3. For a discussion of how these special sections of the Zohar have been handled in
this translation, see the Translator's Introduction.
Introduction
who reads it. This leads us closer to the real purpose of Zoharic exegesis. The
Zohar wants to take the reader inside the divine life. It wants ever to retell the
story of the ¯ow of the se®rot, their longings and union, the arousal of love
above and the way in which that arousal causes blessing to ¯ow throughout the
worlds. This is the essential story of Kabbalah, and the Zohar ®nds it in verse
after verse, portion after portion, of the Torah text. But each retelling offers a
new and often startlingly different perspective. The Zohar is ever enriching the
kabbalistic narrative by means of retelling it from the vantage point of yet
another hermeneutic insight. On each page yet another verse, word, or tale of
the Torah is opened or `ùncovered'' to reveal new insight into the great story
of the Zohar, that which it proffers as the truth of the Torah, of the cosmos,
and of the reader's soul.
In the series of homilies by various speakers around a particular verse or
moment in the scriptural text, the Zohar takes its readers through multiple
layers of understanding, reaching from the surface layer of ``plain'' meaning
into ever more profound revelations. A great love of language is revealed in
lviii
this process; plays on words and subtle shadings of meaning often serve as
ways to a total recon®guration of the Scripture at hand. For this reason, the
Zohar's best readers, both traditional and modern, are those who share its
endless fascination with the mystery of words, including both their aural and
graphic (or ``spoken'' and ``written'') manifestations.
Other kabbalists contemporaneous with the Zohar were offering multile-
veled readings of Scripture as well. Rabbi Bah.ya ben Asher of Barcelona im-
mediately comes to mind. His Torah commentary, written in the 1290s, offers
the best example of the fourfold interpretation of Scripture in its Jewish form:
verse after verse is read ®rst for its plain meaning, then according to ``the way
of Midrash,'' followed by ``the way of intellect'' or philosophical allegory, and
®nally ``the way of Kabbalah.'' Rabbi Bah.ya's work is in fact important as one
of the earliest sources for quotations from the Zohar.
The Zohar offers no such neat classi®cations. Insights offered by a group of
``companions'' discussing a text may bounce back and forth from readings that
could be (and sometimes indeed are) found in earlier midrashic works to ways
of reading that belong wholly to the world of Kabbalah. Kabbalistic interpreta-
tions are sometimes so well ``sewn'' into the midrashic fabric that the reader is
left wondering whether the kabbalistic referent might not indeed be the ``real''
meaning of a given biblical verse or rabbinic passage. In one well-known text,
the Zohar refers to mystical interpretations as the ``soul'' of Torah, distin-
guished from the narrative that forms the outward ``garments'' and the legal
derivations that serve as Torah's ``body'' (playing on the phrase gufei Torah
[``bodies of Torah''], that in rabbinic parlance means `èssential teachings'').
That text also suggests a further level of readings, the `ìnnermost soul'' of
Torah that will not be fully revealed until messianic times. But when encoun-
tering actual passages from the Zohar, it is not easy to determine just where
Introduction
their author stood in the process of undressing the textual bride. Here as
almost everywhere, the poesis of the Zohar over¯ows the banks, thwarting
any attempt at gradation or de®nition. It is mostly within the area of ``soul''
or kabbalistic readings that the assembled sages reveal layer after layer, showing
that this level of reading itself is one that contains inexhaustible riches of the
imagination. There is not a single mystical interpretation of a verse or passage
that is the secret in the eyes of the Zohar. ``Secret'' (sod in Hebrew; raza in
Aramaic) is rather a method, a way of reading that contains endless individual
secrets within it.
The language of se®rotic symbolism offers the Zohar limitless opportunities
for creative interpretations of Scripture. On the one hand, the Zohar's speakers
and authors exult in the newness and originality of this exegesis. Rabbi
Shim'on and his disciples speak glowingly of h.iddushei Torah, novellae in Torah
interpretation, and their great value. God and the angels join in rejoicing over
each new insight. But the Zohar also seeks to deny the newness of kabbalistic
interpretation. Not only is the work itself allegedly an ancient one; the inter-
pretive craft of the Zohar goes to a higher, deeper, and hence also more lix
`àncient'' level of the text. As the highest rung within the Godhead is some-
times called Attiqa, the elder or `àncient one,'' so does profound interpretation
take Torah ``back to its antiquity,'' to its original, pristine, highest state.
The Zohar stands within the long tradition of Jewish devotion to sacred
study as a religious act. The faithful are commanded to ``contemplate it day
and night'' (Joshua 1:8), traditionally taken to mean that the study and elabora-
tion of Torah is ideally the full-time obligation of the entire community of
male Israelites (women were exempted from the obligation to study, and only
rarely were they offered more than a rudimentary education). This community
viewed the Torah as an object of love, and an eros of Torah study is depicted in
many passages in the rabbinic aggadah. Based on biblical images of feminine
wisdom, Torah was described as the daughter and delight of God and as
Israel's bride. Study of Torah, especially the elaboration of its law, was de-
scribed by the sages as courtship and sometimes even as the shy, scholarly
bridegroom's act of love, the consummation of this sacred marriage. The
midrash on the Song of Songs, compiled in the sixth or seventh century,
devotes a large part of its exegesis of that erotic text to discussing the revela-
tion at Sinai and the delights of both God and the sages in the study of Torah.
The Zohar is well aware of these precedents and expands upon them in its
own richer and even more daring version of amor dei intellectualis. The lush
and well-watered gardens of the Song of Songs are the constant dwelling place
of the Zohar, where frequent invocation of the Canticle is the order of the day.
In the kabbalists' literary imagination, the gardens of eros in the Song, the
pardes or `òrchard'' of mystical speculation itself, and the mystical Garden of
EdenÐinto which God wanders each night ``to take delight in the souls of the
righteous''Ðhave been thoroughly linked with one another. The description in
Introduction
Genesis (2:10) of paradiseÐ`à river goes forth from Eden to water the garden,
whence it divides into four streams''Ðand certain key verses of the CanticleÐ
`à spring amid the gardens, a well of living waters, ¯owing from Lebanon''
(4:15) and othersÐare quoted endlessly to invoke the sense that to dwell in
mystical exegesis is to sit in the shade of God's garden. Even more: the mystical
exegete comes to understand that all of these gardens are but re¯ections of the
true inner divine garden, the world of the se®rot, which Sefer ha-Bahir had
already described as lush with trees, springs, and ponds of water.
The Zohar is devoted to the full range of religious obligations that the
Torah places upon the community of Israel. The mysteries of the command-
ments and the rhythms of the sacred year very much occupy its pages, even if
we discount the somewhat later Ra'aya Meheimna (Faithful Shepherd) section,
which is almost wholly devoted to the meaning of the commandments. Both
prayer and the ancient Temple ritual, the classic Jewish forms of devotion, are
given lofty kabbalistic interpretations, and the ®gure of the priest in particular
is very central to the Zoharic imagination. Still, it is fair to say that the central
lx
religious act for the Zohar is the very one in which its heroes are engaged as
described throughout its pages, and that is the act of study and interpretation
of Torah. Again and again Rabbi Shim'on waxes eloquent in praise of those
who study Torah, especially those who do so after midnight. They indeed take
the place of the priests and Levites of old, ``who stand in the house of the Lord
by night.'' Those who awaken nightly to study the secrets of Torah become the
earthly attendants of the divine bride, ushering Her into the chamber where
She will unite at dawn with Her heavenly spouse. This somewhat modest
depiction of the mystic devotee's role in the hieros gamos or sacred marriage
rite that stands at the center of the kabbalistic imagination does not exclude a
level of emotional/mystical reality in which the kabbalist himself is also the
lover of that bride and a full participant in, rather than merely an attendant to,
the act of union.
Torah in the Zohar is not conceived as a text, as an object, or as material,
but as a living divine presence, engaged in a mutual relationship with the
person who studies her. More than that, in the Zoharic consciousness Torah is
compared to a beloved who carries on with her lovers a mutual and dynamic
courtship. The Zohar on the portion Mishpatim contains, within the literary
unit known as Sava de-Mishpatim, a description of a maiden in a palace. Here
the way of the Torah's lover is compared to the way of a man with a maiden.
Arousal within Torah is like an endless courting of the beloved: constant
walking about the gates of her palace, an increasing passion to read her letters,
the desire to see the beloved's face, to reveal her, and to be joined with her. The
beloved in the nexus of this relationship is entirely active. She sends signals of
her interest to her lover, she intensi®es his passionate desire for her by games
of revealing and hiding. She discloses secrets that stir his curiosity. She desires
to be loved. The beloved is disclosed in an erotic progression before her lover
Introduction
out of a desire to reveal secrets that have been forever hidden within her. The
relationship between Torah and her lover, like that of man and maiden in this
parable, is dynamic, romantic, and erotic. This interpretive axiom of the
workÐaccording to which the relationship between student and that studied
is not one of subject and object but of subject and subject, even an erotic
relationship of lover and belovedÐopens a great number of new possibilities. 4
Seeing the act of Torah study as the most highly praised form of devotional
activity places the Zohar squarely within the Talmudic tradition and at the
same time provides a setting in which to go far beyond it. Here, unlike in the
rabbinic sources, the content of the exegesis as well as the process is erotic in
character. Formerly it was the ancient rabbis' intense devotion to the text and
to the process of Torah study that had been so aptly described by the erotic
metaphor. The laws derived in the course of this passionate immersion in the
text were then celebrated as resulting from the embrace of Torah, even when
they dealt with heave-offerings and tithes or ritual de®lement and ablutions.
(The Talmudic rabbi AkivaÐthe greatest hero of the rabbinic romance with
the textÐwas inspired by his great love of Torah to derive ``heaps and heaps of lxi
laws from the crowns on each of the letters.'' That indeed had been the genius
of Rabbi Akiva's school of thought: all of Torah, even the seemingly most
mundane, belonged to the great mystical moment of Sinai, the day when God
gave Torah to Israel and proclaimed His love for her in the Song of Songs.) But
the authors of the Zohar crave more than this. The content as well as the process
has to reveal the great secret of unity, not merely the small secrets of one law
or another. In the Zohar, the true subject matter that the kabbalist ®nds in
every verse is the hieros gamos itself, the mystical union of the divine male and
femaleÐthe eros that underlies and transforms Torah, making it into a sym-
bolic textbook on the inner erotic life of God.
VII
But the Zohar is not only a book of Torah interpretation. It is also very much
the story of a particular group of students of the Torah, a peripatetic band of
disciples gathered around their master Rabbi Shim'on son of Yoh.ai. In the
main body of the Zohar, there appear nine such disciples: Rabbi El'azar (the
son of Rabbi Shim'on), Rabbi Abba, Rabbi Yehudah, Rabbi Yitsh.ak, Rabbi
H.izkiyah, Rabbi H.iyya, Rabbi Yose, Rabbi Yeisa, and Rabbi Ah.a. A very sig-
ni®cant part of the Zohar text is devoted to tales of their wanderings and ad-
ventures, proclamations of their great love for one another, accounts of their
devotion to their master, and echoes of the great pleasure he takes in hearing
their teachings. While on the road, wandering about from place to place in the
4. Melila Hellner-Eshed, ``The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar: The

Zohar through Its Own Eyes'' (in Hebrew) (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 2000), 19.
Introduction
Holy Land, they encounter various other teachers in the form of mysterious
elders, wondrous children, merchants, and donkey-drivers, all of whom are
possessed of secrets that they share with this band of loving and faithful com-
panions. Usually these mysterious ®gures know more than the wanderers had
expected, and Rabbi Shim'on's disciples are often outshone in wisdom by these
most unlikely ®gures. That too is part of the Zohar's story. A contemporary
scholar notes that there are more than three hundred whole and partial stories
of this sort contained within the Zohar text. In some places the narrative shifts
from the earthly setting to one that takes place partly in heaven or ``the Garden
of Eden,'' in which the master is replaced by God Himself, who proclaims His
pleasure at the innovations offered as the kabbalists engage in Torah.
These tales of Rabbi Shim'on and his disciples, wandering about the Galilee
a thousand years before the Zohar was written, are clearly a work of ®ction.
But to say that is by no means to deny the possibility that a very real mystical
brotherhood underlies the Zohar and shapes its spiritual character. Anyone
who reads the Zohar over an extended period of time will come to see that
lxii
the interface among the companions and the close relationship between the
tales of their wanderings and the homilies they occasion are not the result of
®ctional imagination alone. Whoever wrote the work knew very well how
fellow students respond to companionship and support and are inspired by
one another's glowing rendition of a text. He (or they) has felt the warm glow
of a master's praises and the shame of being shown up by a stranger in the face
of one's peers. The ZoharÐleaving aside for now the question of who actually
penned the wordsÐre¯ects the experience of a kabbalistic circle. It is one of a
series of such circles of Jewish mystics, stretching back in time to Qumran,
Jerusalem, Provence, and Gerona, and forward in history to Safed, Padua,
Miedzybozh, Bratslav, and again to Jerusalem. The small circle of initiates
gathered about a master is the way Kabbalah has always happened, and the
Zohar is no exception. In fact, the collective experience of this group around
Rabbi Shim'on son of Yoh.ai as ``recorded'' in the Zohar forms the paradigm for
all later Jewish mystical circles.
The group life re¯ected in the text is that of a band of living kabbalists,
except that they occupied Castile of the thirteenth century rather than the land
of Israel of the second. They lived in Toledo and Guadalajara rather than
Tiberias and Sepphoris. Whether these real kabbalists wandered about in the
Spanish countryside as their ®ctional counterparts did in the Holy Land is hard
to know, but they certainly felt that the most proper setting for study of Torah
was out of doors, especially in a garden or a grove of trees. Occasionally the
companions in the Zohar's pages have conversations indoors, as when the
disciples visit Rabbi Shim'on or they all travel to the home of Rabbi Pinh.as
son of Ya'ir. Interestingly there is no house of study or synagogue that appears
as a setting for any of their encounters. The Zohar very much prefers that they
take place under the shade of a certain tree, at a spring of water, or at some
Introduction
similar place that might call to mind a verse from a psalm or the Song of
Songs, with which a homily might then open.
The very frequent references in the text to the importance of secret Torah
study at night raises the likelihood that this group of Spanish kabbalists shared
for some time, as a regular, ritualized activity, a late-night session for the study
of Kabbalah. If they were anything like their ®ctional counterparts, these
sessions began after midnight and went until dawn, concluding with morning
prayers. These nightly gatherings (of course there is no way to be certain
whether or for how long they did take place on an actual level) were omitted
on the Sabbath, when it was the companion's duty to be at home with his
wife. They reached their annual climax on the eve of Shavu'ot, when the vigil
was in preparation for a new receiving of the Torah. The intense climax of the
Zohar narrative is the tale of two great and highly ritualized meetings of
master and disciples in the Idra, a special chamber of assembly. In the ®rst of
these two assemblies, three of the companions die in the ecstasy of their
mystical devotions. The second, the Idra Zuta or Lesser Assembly, records the
death of Rabbi Shim'on himself and forms the grand conclusion of the Zohar. lxiii
Gershom Scholem once suggested that the Zohar takes the form of a
``mystical novel.'' This suggestion is particularly intriguing because the Zohar
appeared in Spain some three hundred years before Cervantes, who is often
seen as the father of the modern novel. One may see the tales of Rabbi
Shim'on and the companions as a sort of novel in formation, but it is clear
that the form is quite rudimentary. When the Zohar wants to express an idea,
it needs to slip back into the more familiar literary form of textual hermeneu-
tics. The novelist in the classic post-Cervantes sense is one who can develop
ideas or suggest complex thought patterns by means of character development
and plot themselves, rather than by having the characters assemble and make a
series of speeches to one another (though such moments are not entire un-
known in later ®ction). It might be interesting to place the Zohar into the
setting of such works as medieval troubadour romances, Chaucer's fourteenth-
century Canterbury Tales, or the Thousand and One Nights. All of these are
narrative cycles, frameworks of story into which smaller units (in these cases
narrative, in the Zohar's case homiletical) can be ®tted. All of them, too, may
be seen as precursors of the novel.
But the peregrinations of Rabbi Shim'on and his disciples are more than
the ``story'' of the Zohar, whether ®ctional or masking a historical reality. In
the Zohar, everything is indeed more than it appears to be. Master and dis-
ciples represent wandering Israel, both the ancient tribes in the wilderness on
their way to the promised land, and the people of Israel in their present exile.
While the ancient rabbis suggest to the would-be scholar to `èxile yourself to a
place of Torah,'' here exile or wandering is itself that place. The ``place of
Torah'' is indeed wherever the companions happen to be, the home of the
master or the grove of trees. Said in words that they might prefer, the ``garden''
Introduction
of mystical conversation follows them wherever they wander, just as Miriam's

movable well gave drink to Israel throughout their forty-year trek through the
wilderness. The adventures of the companions show their participation in
Israel's greatest suffering, that of exile.
Israel's historic exile, however, is itself symbolic, an earthly representation
of a still greater exile, that of the Shekhinah from Her divine spouse. The
nature and origin of this inner divine `èxile'' is one of the kabbalists' great
mysteries. Some passages, both in the Zohar and in earlier sources, attribute it
to the sin of Adam and Eve. In this sense, Kabbalah may be said to have a true
sense of the ``fall'' or `òriginal sin'' of humans, much more so than the older
rabbinic sources. The world as ®rst created was a true Garden of Eden because
the blessed Holy One and Shekhinah were ``face-to-face,'' joined in constant
embrace like that of the upper se®rot H.okhmah and Binah. Divine blessing thus
coursed through the system without interruption, ¯owing through all of She-
khinah's ``hosts'' and ``palaces'' into an idealized lower world as well. Only
Adam and Eve's sinÐsometimes depicted as that of separating Shekhinah from
lxiv
the upper se®rot to worship Her alone (symbolized by the separation of the
Tree of Knowledge from its roots in the Tree of Life)Ðdisturbed this initial
harmony, which since the expulsion from Eden has been sporadic rather than
constant, dependent upon the balance of human virtue and transgression.
But other passages express a somewhat darker vision of the exile within
God. Here the very existence of the lower worlds is an after-effect of divine
exile and would not have taken place without it. Some of these sources employ
the old Platonic myth of androgyny, embedded in an ancient midrashic de-
scription of Adam and Eve, to explain the cosmic reality. Adam and Eve,
according to the aggadah, were Siamese twins, cojoined back-to-back. This
single being is that described in Genesis 1:27: ``God created the human in His
form; in the divine form He created him, male and female He created them.''
The forming of Eve from Adam's rib (or ``side'') in the following chapter is the
separation of this pair, in which they are ®rst turned face-to-face to one
another, so that they might meet, see one another, and unite to propagate
the species, ful®lling God's ®rst command. The kabbalists claim that in this
sense too humans are made in God's image: the se®rot Tif'eret and Malkhut
were a single entity, back-to-back. They had to be ``sawed'' apart (a rather
violent choice of verb) so that they might be properly united. Only through
this union does the divine life begin to ¯ow outward, giving life to worlds
below. In order for our life to come about, in other words, God has to undergo
a transformative act of great pain, one in which the divine becomes separated
from itself, its future reuni®cation to depend entirely upon the actions of
these creatures below. Here exile and suffering are inherent in the cosmos,
and the balm provided by human goodness is somewhat more super®cial, an
oasis of relief in the wandering that is indeed the necessary human and cosmic
condition.
Introduction
It is this exile that the kabbalists are acting out in their wanderings through
the Galilee of their imagination. In this sense, it may indeed be said that the
Zohar in its entirety is a symbolic work, not just a collection of symbolic inter-
pretations of Scripture, The narratives themselves may be seen as the most
profoundly symbolic and ``kabbalistic'' part of the Zohar's oeuvre, not just a
framework into which the homilies are woven.
VIII
Our discussion to this point leads us now to confront the question of the
Zohar and religious/mystical experience. A ®rst reading of the Zohar might give
one the impression of a work that is more mythical than mystical in content;
i.e., more involved with a narrative of cosmic origins and structures than it is
with inner experience, the soul, or higher states of consciousness. But this view
is partially misleading. To read the Zohar well is to fathom the experiential
dimension of the entire text, including narrative, exegesis, cosmology, and all
the rest. The kabbalist speaking in the se®rotic idiom is laying bare the inner- lxv
most structure of reality as he both understands and experiences it. That same
structure is re¯ected in the cosmos, in Torah, and in the human (or more
precisely: ``Jewish'') soul. The language of se®rotic symbolism provides a new
lens through which to see Torah. But the power of that reading, especially as
practiced in the circle of the Zohar, offers more than a hermeneutic. To open
one's inner eyes to the new reality created by that pattern of thinking is to live
within the realm of the se®rot themselves. The transformations of language and
inner experience go hand in hand with one another; the breakthrough in con-
sciousness to a higher realm of contemplative existence is conveyed through
the vehicle of self-expression in se®rotic terms. Therefore to speak of the
origins of the se®rotic universe, or to interpret the Torah text in terms of
se®rotic symbols, is also to enter into those places within the soul. For the
speakers within the Zohar, as for the ideal kabbalist in any time, to speak of
the se®rot is not only to draw on a body of esoteric knowledge, but is also to
enter the inner universe where se®rotic language is the guide to measured
experience.
The authors of the Zohar do not generally feel the need to tell their readers
that this is the case. In a work written for initiates, the link between the
intellectual and experiential dimensions was taken for granted. It is primarily
the frequent expressions of enthusiasm and ecstasy with which the text is
dotted that serve to indicate how deeply and personally the se®rotic teachings
were felt. The repeated refrain ``Had I come into the world only to hear this, it
would be suf®cient!'' and the kisses showered upon speakers by their grateful
companions make it clear to any but the most obtuse of readers that in the
pages of the Zohar we are witnessing the shared inner life of a vital mystical
circle and not merely a series of exercises in biblical homiletics.
Introduction
The se®rotic universe as a representation of inner religious experience may

be described in more speci®c ways as well, though these are surely not ex-
haustive. The ``descent'' of the se®rot, beginning with Keter, is said to describe
the emergence of God from hiddenness to revelation. Both the creation of the
world and the giving of Torah are this-worldly extensions of that inner divine
process. On a more realistic plane, however, so too is the mystic's own inner
life. Se®rotic symbolism provides a language for describing the mystic's own
return from an experience of absorption in the ``nothingness'' of God and
gradual reintegration into the framework of full human personality, the re-
emergence of conscious selfhood. It should be emphasized that the Zohar never
makes such a claim. In general the kabbalists were loathe to speak too openly
about the experiential aspects of their teaching. Especially when it came to the
highest triad of the se®rotic world, to speak in terms that claimed direct
experience was considered far beyond the bounds of propriety. But one who
reads the kabbalists with an eye to comparative and phenomenological descrip-
tions of mysticism cannot but suspect that such experience underlies the
lxvi
sources. The accounts of a mysterious energy that ¯ows from unde®ned end-
lessness, through a primal arousal of will, into a single point that is the start of
all being, and thence into the womb-palace where the self (divine or human) is
born, sound familiarly like descriptions of the rebirth of personality that
follows the contemplative mystical experience. Even though the Zohar depicts
it chie¯y as the original journey of God, we understand that the mystical life
repeats that divine process. In fact, it is out of their own experience that the
mystics know what they do of the original journey on which theirs is patterned.
Perhaps one can go even a step further to claim that the constant movement
within the se®rotic world, including both the ¯ow of energy ``downward'' from
Keter and the rising up of Malkhut and the lower worlds into the divine heights,
represents the dynamic inner life of the mystic and the spiritual motion that
ever animates his soul. It is these nuances of inner movement that constitute
the ``real'' subject of a very large part of the Zohar and the world it creates. To
most fully appreciate the Zohar as a mystical text is to understand these
movements as reverberations within the mystic's soul of events as they tran-
spire within the se®rotic cosmos that constitutes the divine reality.
When the Zohar does speak of mystical experience, it is largely through use
of the term devequt, `àttachment'' or ``cleaving'' to God, and its Aramaic
cognates. Ever since the early rabbinic discussions of Deuteronomy 4:4 (``You
who cleave to YHVH your God are all alive today'') and 10:20 (``Fear YHVH your
God, cleave to Him and serve Him''), devequt has played a central role in the
devotional life of pious Jews. But the Zohar is also quick to associate this term
with its ®rst biblical usage in Genesis 2:24, where man ``cleaves to his wife and
they become one ¯esh.'' Attachment to God, for the Zohar, is erotic attach-
ment, whether referring to the kabbalist's own attachment to God by means of
Torah, to Shekhinah's link to the upper ``male'' se®rot as God's bride, or in the
Introduction
rare passages where Moses becomes the kabbalistic hero and himself weds
Shekhinah, entering the Godhead in the male role. The contemplative and erotic
aspects of attachment to God are just different ways of depicting the same
reality, quite wholly inseparable from one another.
With the experience of human love and sexuality as its chief metaphor for
intimacy, the Zohar depicts devequt as a temporary and ¯eeting experience.
Scholars have debated for some time the question of whether true unio mystica
is to be found in the Zohar. But this debate may itself hinge on the sexual
analogy. Is there true loss of self or absorption within union to be attained in
sexual climax? How does one begin to answer such a question without inter-
viewing all of the world's great lovers? Whether or not the experience under-
lying countless passages in the Zohar can be described as `ùnion'' lies, I would
submit, beyond our ken. But it is clear that there is no possibility offered of
permanent bliss to those still attached to bodily existence; only in the world to
come will the disembodied spirits of the righteous enjoy the endless delight of
basking in the divine presence. Religious experience in this world is but a
foretaste of that eternal joy. lxvii
As the Zohar seeks to develop a language for what we may call its eros of
poetic creativity, exegesis of the Song of Songs plays a major role. The Zohar
turns with great frequency, especially in its proems or homiletical ``warm-ups,''
to that great font of sacred eros. The Song of Songs, a text in which eros in fact
remains unconsummated, offers poetic language for every other aspect of the
complete drama of courting, including even loss, separation, and longing. All of
these come to the fore in the Zohar's frequent disquisitions on the Song, which
is often most surprisingly linked to verses describing some aspect of the
Tabernacle cult or another seemingly dry detail of biblical law. Those texts
are utterly transformed by association with the Canticle. The Torah text as a
whole, it may be said, is ``washed over'' in an eroticizing bath created by
repeated juxtaposition of Torah texts with verses of the Song of Songs, poeti-
cally enriching the eros of se®rotic symbolization itself.
The Zohar learned from the Neoplatonist milieu within which it existed to
speak of the ¯ow of energy, usually described as light, from one cosmic realm
to the next. The Neoplatonists tended to emphasize the diminution of that
light as it reached ``downward'' toward the material plane. For the kabbalist,
this constantly renewed pouring forth of divine presence could be felt, both in
the daily renewal of nature and in the creative vigor of Torah interpretation.
He sought to align himself with the cosmic ¯ow, in order to receive its bounty,
but also to act in such ways as to stimulate the ¯ow itself. Images of both light
and water abound in the Zohar's pages to describe the shefa, the endless ¯ux of
divine bounty that sustains the universe. In the context of the Zohar, it is clear
that this ¯uid is also the divine seed, that which enters into Shekhinah and
allows for the constant rebirth of life in the realms beneath her.
Introduction
Read this way, the Zohar is very much a mystical, often even an ecstatic,
work, or at least one in which the ecstatic dimension is very highly developed.
One of the strongest expressions of this reality is found in the Zohar's power-
ful and poetic soliloquies around the word ``Zohar'' itself, and on the verse
(Daniel 12:3) from which the work's title is taken: ``The enlightened shall shine
like the radiance [zohar] of the sky, and those who lead multitudes to right-
eousness, like the stars, forever.'' Zohar represents a hidden radiance issuing
forth from the highest se®rotic realms, a showering of sparks lighting up all
that comes in its path. Its inspiration is surely the night sky, the wondrous
event of shooting stars against the background of the Milky Way. But like all
such images in mystical literature, the beacon of light or drop of divine seed is
a pictorial representation of an event that takes place also within the mystic's
heart, the inspiration that ``sparks'' this creative vision.
The inner event of this radiant presence is outwardly manifest in the
shining gaze of the kabbalist's face. ``The enlightened shall shine'' is also
understood in this rather literal way. Here, as frequently in the Zohar, there is
lxviii
an assimilation of the kabbalist to the biblical description of Moses as he
emerged from the Tent of Meeting, his face glowing with the radiant presence
of God. But the kabbalist is also Moses' brother Aaron, the ancient priest
whose face shines with divine presence as he bestows the blessing of God's
own countenance upon the children of Israel. ``May the Lord cause His face to
shine upon you'' (Numbers 6:25) is seen as the Torah's personi®ed way of
calling forth the same light that the kabbalist as Neoplatonist perceives to be
shining forth from one cosmic rung to another. He now seeks to become the
earthly bearer of that light, transmitting it to his community of disciples and
readers. This is the kabbalist (most often personi®ed in the Zohar by Rabbi
Shim'on son of Yoh.ai) in the role of tsaddiq, conveyer of divine light.
A main purpose of the Zohar is to arouse within the reader a constant
longing for such `ènlightenment'' or inspiration. The great religious creativ-
ityÐand even the ecstatic deathsÐof Rabbi Shim'on and his disciples are
meant to induce in the reader a sense that he too, as an initiate into the
Zohar's secrets, may continue in this path. While no generation before the
advent of messiah will fully equal that of Rabbi Shim'on, all those who come
in his wake are encouraged to follow in his path. The Zohar is thus a highly
evocative work, one that seeks to create and sustain a mood of ecstatic devo-
tion. Certain familiar biblical verses, including the ``garden'' passages men-
tioned above, are used as awakenersÐone might almost think of them as
``bells''Ðto regularly restimulate awareness, rousing readers from their daily
torpor and reminding them of the constant vital ¯ow needed to quicken the
cosmos. This reminder is meant to renew and refresh their participation in
Israel's great collective task of rousing Shekhinah. She in turn awakens Her
divine Lover to release the ¯ow of light/water/seed, enveloping Her in His
presence and renewing the universal ¯ow of life.
Introduction
The `Èden'' (or ``Lebanon'') whence that ¯ow is to come is an accessible if

hidden rung within the divine and human self. It is not just an ancient and lost
site of the biblical tale, nor is it only the ``paradise'' to which souls will ascend
after death. Eden is the `ùpper world,'' a recondite and inward aspect of being
that is mirrored in the ``garden,'' the One who needs to be watered by that
¯ow. We creatures of the ``lower world,'' trees growing in the garden, need to
trace back the course of that river to its source, linking the upper and lower
worlds (Binah and Shekhinah, but also Shekhinah and ``this'' world, or Shekhinah
and the soul), so that the ¯ow will never cease.
Re¯ecting on these nature-evoking verses takes us back to the typically
outdoor settings of the companions' conversations, which we have mentioned
earlier. These settings represent the varied topography of the land of Israel as it
existed in the authors' imagination, including deserts and vast, forbidding
mountains as well as fertile oases and springs of water. The lush garden,
especially as evoked in the Song of Songs, is a particularly characteristic setting
to inspire such conversations. This may be connected to the much older desig-
nation of the ``place'' of mystical speculation as pardes or `òrchard.'' But it is lxix
related also to the verses quoted here and to the series of connected gardens in
which the kabbalist sees himself as dwelling. This world is a lower garden,
needing constantly to be watered by sources from above, ultimately by the love
and sustenance that is the gift of Shekhinah. But She too is a garden, nurtured
by the river than comes forth from the hidden Eden, itself also a ``garden'' in
some unknown, mysterious way. Somewhere between this world and Shekhinah
stands the ``Garden of Eden'' that contains the souls of the righteous, both
those who have completed their time on earth and those not yet born. It too is
divided into `ùpper'' and ``lower'' sections, described in various mythic ways.
All of these gardens are linked to one another. The kabbalist sitting and
studying Torah with his companions in an earthly gardenÐphysically in Cas-
tile, but imaginatively in the Holy LandÐis aware that at the same moment the
righteous in the Garden of Eden are also engaged in such study. Their garden
is open from above, because it is taught that God Himself descends into that
Garden to take delight in the souls of the righteous. All of these point still
higher, toward the se®rotic gardens, and all these levels of the imagination
fructify and enrich one another. The sweet aromas rising from these gardens
also play a role in the descriptions of mystical intoxication frequently found in
the Zohar's pages.
IX
The unique genius that ®nds expression in the Zohar has everything to do with
language. Its homiletical style builds upon midrashic sensitivity to the nuances
of biblical language, and often seeks to go beyond it. Underlying every page of
the Zohar's reading of Torah is a rich `èar'' for associative links and plays on
Introduction
words, a constant search for ``hints'' within the text that will allow for an
opening to deeper levels of interpretation. This careful attention to the text is
joined to the Zohar's readiness to apply to it the symbolic language of the
se®rot that we have discussed above. It is the interplay between these two
factors, heightened midrashic sensitivity and the old/new grid of se®rotic
symbols, that creates the unique and powerful poesis of the Zohar.
Another element that plays a key role in the powerful impression the Zohar
has made on its readers throughout the generations is the sonorous and seem-
ingly mysterious Aramaic in which it is written. All the sections of the Zohar,
except for about half of Midrash ha-Ne'lam, are written in Aramaic rather than
Hebrew. While scholars have devoted much attention to the unique gramma-
tical and syntactical features of the Zohar's Aramaic, few have tried to under-
stand why it is that the Zohar is written in Aramaic and what meaning this
surprising choice of language might have had for the work's authors.
Aramaic was the spoken language of Jews, both in the land of Israel and in
Babylonia, from late biblical times (fourth±third century b.c.e.) until after the
lxx
Islamic conquest and its replacement by Arabic (seventh century c.e.) . The
Talmud, in both its Babylonian and Palestinian versions, is composed mostly in
Aramaic, as are portions of Midrash and other rabbinic writings. The Targum,
existing is several versions, is the old Jewish translation of the Bible into
Aramaic.
By the time the Zohar was written, Aramaic was a purely literary language
for all but a tiny group of Jews in the mountains of Kurdistan. Knowledge of it
elsewhere was purely passive, even among rabbinic scholars; only very rarely
was a short treatise or poem still written in Aramaic. The choice to compose
the Zohar in Aramaic gave to the work an archaic cast, and this immediately
set the stage for its mysterious quality.
In Spain of the thirteenth century, unlike Palestine of the second, Aramaic
was a mysterious and only vaguely understood language. Presenting secrets in
Aramaic rather than Hebrew (a method that had been tried, in brief texts,
before the Zohar) shrouded them in an obscuring veil, forcing a slower pace of
reading upon those who delved into its pages. It also permitted a certain gran-
diloquence that might have seemed pretentious in the more familiar vehicle of
medieval Hebrew. Images that might have been seen as trivial in Hebrew,
especially if frequently repeated, maintained a certain mysterious grandeur
when veiled by the obscurity of Aramaic dress.
The Zohar's Aramaic made the text slightly, but not impossibly, more
dif®cult for the educated Jewish reader in its day. This was probably the
precise intent: to offer the reader a sense that he had come to a more pro-
found, and therefore less penetrable, sort of teaching. With some extra effort, it
would reveal to him the secret universe that the Zohar sought to share and pass
on to its elite community of readers. Students of the Zohar come quickly to
understand that the Aramaic of the Zohar is indeed a penetrable veil. The real
Introduction
dif®culty in reading the text is that of mastering the symbolic language and the
subtlety with which it was employed.
It may also be that the Zohar's composition in Aramaic was not entirely a
matter of conscious choice. Perhaps it was something that ``happened,'' either
in the author's psyche or in the community of mystics where Zoharic teachings
were ®rst shared orally. If there was a living community of kabbalists in
Castile in the 1280s, meeting by night in courtyards and gardens to study the
secrets of the Torah, in what language did they share those secrets with one
another? How did the transition take place from discussing the Hebrew text of
Torah in CastilianÐtheir only spoken languageÐback into Hebrew or Ara-
maic, for transcription onto the written page? Could it be that the richly
vocalic sound of AramaicÐwhere each noun ends in a vowelÐbetter re¯ected
the sounds of their own speech than did Hebrew? Were they themselves some-
how ``seduced'' by the mysterious sound of Aramaic to follow it into the
fantasy realm represented by the Zohar?
These speculations may also be applied to the written text itself, especially if
we assume that Rabbi Moses de LeoÂn is the author of large portions of the lxxi
Zohar. Some twenty Hebrew treatises by De LeoÂn have survived, and several of
these have now been published. Compared to the Zohar, they are relatively dull
and uninspired. While the doctrinal content is very much the same, they pos-
sess little of the poetic muse and freedom of expression that so characterize the
Zohar. One has the impression that De LeoÂn stepped into another world when
writing the Zohar, and the transition from Hebrew to Aramaic was one of the
ways he marked that portal. Working in this other, more dimly perceived lan-
guage released his muse, as it were, giving him the freedom to soar to heights
of imagination and literary excess that he would not have dared attempt in
Hebrew. We might almost say that the use of Aramaic was some part of ``the
Holy Name'' by which it was said that De LeoÂn had written the Zohar.
The Aramaic of the Zohar is indeed a unique composite of dialects and fea-
tures drawn from ancient literary sources. Details of Scholem's analysis of the
Zohar's language can be found in his writings and need not be repeated here.
See also the Translator's Introduction to this volume for further discussion of
linguistic questions that have direct bearing on the translation before you.
X
During the last two centuries of Jewish life in Spain, the Zohar continued to be
copied and studied among small groups of devotees. It competed with two
other schools of kabbalistic thought, the Catalonian and the Abula®an, for the
attention of those few interested in mystical pursuits. Some kabbalists seem to
have combined these various approaches, or else to have ``migrated'' in the
course of their own quests from one school of mystical thought to another.
Jewish rationalism was also very much alive in Spain through the ®fteenth
Introduction
century, probably continuing to have a larger following than did Kabbalah.

Manuscripts of the Zohar also reached Italy, the Byzantine lands of the eastern
Mediterranean, and the Holy Land during this period.
It was after the expulsion of Spanish Jewry in 1492 that the in¯uence of
Kabbalah entered a period of rapid growth. Various explanations have been
offered for this increased interest in the mystical tradition. Some have attrib-
uted it to the suffering and despair that visited this once proud group of Jewish
communities in the period between 1391 and 1492. The devastation of the age,
so it is said, caused Jews to seek out deeper resources of consolation than those
offered by the typically optimistic worldview of the philosophers. Others claim
that the growth of Kabbalah came as a response of a different sort to the
Spanish expulsion. Jews throughout the Mediterranean world, including many
Spanish exiles, were shocked and disgraced by the high numbers of Spanish
Jews who converted to Christianity in the course of the ®fteenth century. Once
again the blame was placed partly at the door of philosophy, the intellectual
sophistication of Spanish Jewry having supposedly led to a laxity in religious
lxxii
observance and a relative indifference to the question of religious identity. Yet
another view attributes the growth in Kabbalah's in¯uence to the new home
cultures in which former Iberian Jews found themselves. Ottoman Turkey, with
its closed millet systemÐin which each faith community held fast to exclusive
truth-claims and total denigration of all outside in¯uencesÐwas a hospitable
environment for precisely the closed-minded Zoharic view of the outside
world, rather than the Aristotelian quasi-universalism of the philosophers,
which had served the needs of a very different age.
Whatever the reason (and a combination of the above factors is most
likely), we begin to see new kabbalistic works written and old ones distributed
and explicated in the early sixteenth century. The Zohar and other works of the
Castilian tradition are especially prominent in this period. Perhaps typical is
the ®gure of Rabbi Meir ibn Gabbai, a Turkish kabbalist who tells us that he
was born in Spain in 1481 and left as a child among the exiles. Ibn Gabbai's
magnum opus, Avodat ha-Qodesh (Venice, 1567), is a grand systematization of
Kabbalah and a defense of it against philosophy. Typically of the sixteenth
century, Ibn Gabbai knows a great many earlier texts and seeks to harmonize
them with one another. But the great source of kabbalistic truth is the Zohar,
which he quotes on virtually every page as ``the Midrash of Rabbi Shim'on son
of Yoh.ai.''
The kabbalistic conventicles of Safed, which ¯ourished in the late sixteenth
century, also accorded to the Zohar top place as the authoritative source of
kabbalistic truth. Clearly, the choice of Safed as a place of settlement for Jews
attached to the kabbalistic legacy had much to do with its proximity to Meron,
the supposed burial place of Rabbi Shim'on son of Yoh.ai. His tomb had been a
site of pilgrimage for local Jews long earlier, but with the growth of the Safed
community it became a truly important shrine. Both Rabbi Moses Cordovero
Introduction
(1522±1570), who probably immigrated to Safed from elsewhere in the Ottoman

realm, and Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534±1572), who came from Egypt, chose to live
in Safed because of the nearness of holy graves and the possibility (described
by Cordovero in his Sefer Gerushin) of achieving mystical knowledge through
prostration upon them. Among the sacred dead of the Galilee, Rabbi Shim'on,
now acclaimed as the undisputed author of the Zohar, took a central place.
Luria speci®cally hoped to achieve a true understanding of passages in the
Zohar by visiting what he believed to be the grave of its author.
The ``return'' of Kabbalah to the Galilean landscape of the Zohar's heroes
®red the imagination of Jews throughout the Diaspora. Reports of the holy
men of Safed, especially the mysterious ®gure of Luria, known as ha-ARI ha-
Qadosh (the Holy Lion), were widely copied and printed in several versions. A
vast literature of both kabbalistic writings and ethical or pietistic works in¯u-
enced by Kabbalah poured forth from the printing presses of Venice, Constan-
tinople, and AmsterdamÐto be distributed throughout the Jewish world. It did
not take long until the claim emerged that the soul of the ARI was in fact a
reincarnation of that of Rabbi Shim'on son of Yoh.ai. lxxiii
It was in this period that the Zohar came to be considered not only an
ancient and holy book, but a canonical text, bearing authority comparable to
that of the Bible and the Talmud. The authority of the Zohar as the prime
source of mystical truth had already been considered by fourteenth-century
kabbalists, some of whom came to view its word as superior to that of Nah.-
manides, for example, because of its allegedly greater antiquity. Nah.manides
was portrayed by these as a ``modern'' source, whose word could be set aside
by a contrary quotation from the work of Rabbi Shim'on son of Yoh.ai. But in
the sixteenth century, it was said that Elijah himself had appeared to Rabbi
Shim'on, and the Zohar's authority became that of heaven itself. Meir ibn
Gabbai traced the kabbalistic tradition back to Sinai, claiming that Zoharic
secrets were given to Moses along with the written Torah.
Canonical status, in the context of Judaism, bears with it halakhic authority
as well as mystical prestige. If the Zohar contained the ``true'' meaning of both
written and oral Torah, might it be used as a source of legal authority, es-
pecially in ritual and liturgical matters, as well? This question came up among
halakhic scholars, especially in the few cases in which the Zohar seemed to
contradict the majority opinion of rabbis deciding the law on the basis of
Talmudic precedent and its formulation in responsa and codes. In fact, as
scholars have shown, these cases mostly turn on local customÐthe Zohar re-
¯ecting either Franco-German or old Spanish customs, while the halakhah had
decided in favor of others. A classic example of such halakhic dispute involving
the Zohar concerns the donning of te®llin on the intermediate weekdays of
Pesah. and Sukkot. The Zohar expresses itself most strongly on the issue, con-
sidering the wearing of te®llin on those days an insult to the festival and a
virtual sacrilege. Although the halakhic codes mostly tended otherwise, some
Introduction
halakhic authorities bowed to the Zohar, and the use of te®llin on those days
was rejected throughout the Sephardic (and later Hasidic) communities.
Thanks to the in¯uence of the Safed revival of mystical studies, Kabbalah
became widely known among eastern European Jews in the seventeenth cen-
tury. The works of Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, a Prague kabbalist who later settled
in Jerusalem, carried the teachings of Ibn Gabbai and Cordovero, among
others, to preachers throughout the Ashkenazic communities. Here, too, the
Zohar was very widely quoted. Prayer books with kabbalistic commentaries,
including those by both Cordovero and Horowitz, brought kabbalistic thinking
into the realm of actual synagogue practice. The highly mythical Kabbalah of
Naftali Bacharach, seventeenth-century German author of Emeq ha-Melekh
(Valley of the King), is primarily in¯uenced by the language and imagery of
the Zohar.
Another area of the growing canonicity of the Zohar is re¯ected in its use in
liturgical contexts and its appearance in digests of daily religious practice.
Various kabbalistic Tiqqunim or `Òrders'' were published throughout the seven-
lxxiv
teenth and eighteenth centuries. These include many collections of Zohar pas-
sages to be recited during the vigils of Shavu'ot and Hosha'na Rabbah, at the
Sabbath table, and on various other occasions. It came to be understood in this
period that oral recitation of the Zohar was ef®cacious even for those who did
not understand its meaning. In the nineteenth century, vocalized editions of
the Zohar were printed to allow for this situation, and to assure that the
recitation would nevertheless be performed with some degree of accuracy.
There were also various digests produced for daily study/recitation, especially
in the eighteenth century. The most widespread of these was called H.oq le-
Yisra'el (Cairo, 1740), including passages to be recited each day from the Torah,
Prophets, Hagiographa, Mishnah, Talmud, Zohar, ethical guides, and legal
digests. The H.emdat Yamim , an anonymous compendium of kabbalistic praxis
(Izmir, 1731/32), prescribes readings from the Zohar for nearly every conceiva-
ble occasion in the Jewish liturgical year. In both of these compendia, we see
the Zohar at the apex of its acceptance and integration into the daily regimen
of Jewish spiritual life.
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the messianic move-
ment around Sabbatai Tsevi (1626±1676) swept through the Jewish commu-
nities. In the more radical forms of Sabbateanism, the Zohar carried even
greater weight as the authority of Talmudic law came to be questioned. The
kabbalistic system of Nathan of Gaza (1643/4±1680), the great prophet of
Sabbateanism, is based on the imagery of the Zohar; and devotion to the Zohar
was touted loudly throughout the history of Sabbateanism. Some of the later
Ashkenazic SabbateansÐfollowers of Jacob FrankÐcame to refer to themselves
as ``Zoharites,'' Jews who followed the authority of the Zohar while rejecting
that of the Talmud and the rabbis. This, of course, would be a spurious claim
had the authors of the Zohar been asked their opinion, since they had no
Introduction
intention of rebelling against Talmudic authority. But by this time (and in

these circles), the Zohar was being read through the lenses of such radical
interpreters as the Ra'aya Meheimna, the ®fteenth-century Sefer ha-Qanah,
the anonymous work Galei Razayya, and the writings of Nathan of Gaza.
When seen as the font of this literary tradition, the Zohar could be read as a
very radical work indeed.
The decline of Sabbateanism in the mid-eighteenth century preceded by
only a few decades the beginning of the Enlightenment era in western Europe
and the admission of Jews into a more open and religiously tolerant society. As
large numbers of Jews became eager supporters of what they could only see as
emancipation, readings of Judaism that supported or ®t this new situation
became widespread. One feature of this emerging post-Enlightenment Judaism,
whether in its Reform or Orthodox versions, was either an open rejection or a
quiet setting aside of Kabbalah and the Zohar in particular. Scholem wrote an
essay about several obscure nineteenth-century ®gures whom he designated as
``The Last Kabbalists in Germany.'' We have already spoken of Heinrich
Graetz's negative views of the Zohar, a position that was widely shared by his lxxv
contemporaries. While there were a few scholars in the period of the Wis-
senschaft des Judentums (Adolph Jellinek of Vienna is the most notable) who
studied the Zohar, it was mostly neglected by westernized Jews throughout the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In eastern Europe, the situation was quite different. Hasidism, a popular
religious revival based on Kabbalah, continued to revere the Zohar and believe
in its antiquity. Several signi®cant Zohar commentaries were written within
Hasidic circles, and the authors of Hasidic works often referred to the Zohar.
Rabbi Pinh.as of Korzec, an early Hasidic master, was said to have thanked God
that he was born after the appearance of the Zohar, ``for the Zohar kept me a
Jew.'' Hasidic legend has it that when the Zohar was published by his sons,
who owned the printing-works in Slawuta, they dipped the press in the mikveh
(ritual bath) before printing each volume, so great was the holy task that was
about to come before it! Hasidic masters, because of this legend, went out of
their way to acquire copies of the Slawuta edition of the Zohar and to study
from it. The great opponent of Hasidism, Rabbi Elijah (the ``Gaon'') of Vilna
(1720±1797), was also a kabbalist, and a small group within the circle of his
disciples continued the study of Zohar for several generations.
Among the Sephardic and Mizrah.i Jews, the reputation of the Zohar as a
holy book was particularly strong. Jews in such far-¯ung communities as
Morocco, Turkey, and Iraq studied it avidly. Simple Jews recited the Zohar
much in the way that uneducated eastern European Jews recited the Psalms.
Beginning in the eighteenth century, Jerusalem became known as a center of
kabbalistic studies, and Jews from throughout these communities went there
and studied works that emanated from that center. Outside of Europe, it was
primarily the Lurianic Kabbalah that held sway, and the Zohar, while revered,
Introduction
was generally viewed through the Lurianic prism. Only as Enlightenment ideas
began to spread in the early twentieth century, partly through the arrival of
European Jews in the Colonial era, did the authority of the Zohar come into
question.
The writings of Scholem, Tishby, and the scholars following in their wake
have done much to make the Zohar intelligible to moderns and to renew
interest in its study. Tishby's Wisdom of the Zohar, translating selected passages
from Aramaic into Hebrew, was a highly successful attempt to make the Zohar
more accessible to an educated Israeli readership. The interest aroused among
scholars of religion by Scholem's highly readable and insightful essays, espe-
cially those ®rst presented at the Eranos conferences, served to kindle great
interest in Kabbalah within the broader scholarly community. This interest is
maintained today thanks to the profound and sometimes provocative studies of
Yehuda Liebes and Elliot Wolfson. The important writings of Moshe Idel
continue to bring Kabbalah to the attention of the scholarly and intellectual
world. The availability of English and other translations, including the selec-
lxxvi
tions in Tishby and anthologies by both Scholem and Matt, have also served
the Zohar well in creating readerships outside of Israel. In more recent dec-
ades, this intellectual interest in Kabbalah has spread to wider circles, including
many who are concerned with questions of symbolism, philosophy of lan-
guage, and related issues.
At the same time, two other seemingly unrelated phenomena have come
together to greatly increase the interest in Zohar studies at the turn of the
twenty-®rst century. One is the broad interest throughout the Western world
in works of mysticism and ``spirituality.'' Our age has seen a great turn toward
sources of wisdom neglected by two centuries of modernity, partly in hope of
®nding in them a truth that will serve as a source of guidance for the dif®cult
and complex times in which we live. Recently, an interest in the Zohar and
Kabbalah has emerged as part of this trend. As is true of all the other wisdoms
examined in the course of this broad cultural phenomenon, the interest in
Kabbalah includes both serious and trivial or ``faddist'' elements. This revival of
Kabbalah is a complicated phenomenon within itself, containing expressions of
great hunger for religious experience and personal growth, alongside the
broader quest for wisdom.
This interest has come to be combined with a very different renewal of
Kabbalah, primarily in Israel, after the 1967 and 1973 wars. It is manifest in the
growth of kabbalistic yeshivot or academies, the publication of many new
editions of kabbalistic works, and a campaign of public outreach intended to
spread the teachings of Kabbalah more broadly. This new emphasis on Kabba-
lah is partly due to the reassertion of pride in the Sephardic and Mizrah.i
heritage, where Kabbalah has an important place. It is also in part related to
the dif®cult and trying times through which Israel has lived, resulting in both a
resurgence of messianism and a turn to ``practical Kabbalah''Ða long-standing
Introduction
part of Near Eastern JudaismÐas a source of protection against enemies and

hope of victory over them. The Kabbalah taught in these circles is primarily of
the Lurianic variety, as interpreted through a long chain of Jerusalem-based
teachers. Some versions of what is proffered as ``Kabbalah'' today can only be
described as highly debased versions of the original teachings. But the Zohar,
even if reinterpreted in Lurianic terms, is revered throughout these circles as
the primary font of kabbalistic truth, the ancient teaching of Rabbi Shim'on
son of Yoh.ai.
How this very complex interweaving of forces will affect the future of
interest in Kabbalah is yet to be seen. It is certain, however, that the Zohar
will continue to ®nd a place in the hearts of new readers, some of whom will
turn to the more authentic and profound aspects of its teachings. It is hoped
that these readers will be helped and guided by the present translation and
commentary.
lxxvii

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Z F HF Z VS

Translation and Commentary by

stanford universit y press

Stanford University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Original Printing 2004

ZFHF ZVS \PEYF Haqdamat Sefer ha-Zohar 000

List of Abbreviations 000

Daniel Abrams Ronit Meroz

Establishing the Text of the Zohar

Translation and Commentary

11. At the website of Stanford University Press: < www.sup.org >.

Aramaic translation of the Torah). This unparalleled neo-Aramaic is peppered

25. See Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:66±67.

In translating biblical citations, I have consulted various translations but

How to Read the Zohar

32. Zohar 1:56b, 112a, 136a, and frequently.

Holy One divorced Adam, or not.''37 As the rabbi demonstrates by exegetical

So, as you undertake this adventure, expect to be surprisedÐstay alert. The

37. Zohar 1:53b.

``And what are these made of?''

For two decades, I taught Jewish mysticism in Berkeley at the Graduate

®lled to over¯owing with luxurious plantings of love between master and

may be seen as the greatest work of medieval Jewish ``iconography''Ðone that

clarity is to discover the mysterious. The reader is being taught to recognize

In the divergence between these two tendencies within Kabbalah, we see

commentaries on the secret aspects of Nah.manides' work. That circle was

seem to be rather arbitrarily placed in one Torah portion or another. 3 An

4. Melila Hellner-Eshed, ``The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar: The

of mystical conversation follows them wherever they wander, just as Miriam's

The se®rotic universe as a representation of inner religious experience may

The ``Eden'' (or ``Lebanon'') whence that ¯ow is to come is an accessible if

century, probably continuing to have a larger following than did Kabbalah.

(1522±1570), who probably immigrated to Safed from elsewhere in the Ottoman

intention of rebelling against Talmudic authority. But by this time (and in

part of Near Eastern JudaismÐas a source of protection against enemies and

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