Introduction

If the world’s literature holds any book which might truly be described as being sealed with seven seals, that book is the Zohar. What with the difficulties and obscurities clustering round its origin and authorship, what with the baffling obscurities of its language, style, and contents, and what with the problems that must inevitably be presented by a book which is not a homogeneous work but a compilation pieced together at times and under circumstances which are by no means clear, the task of bringing out, for the first time, 1 complete English translation needs not only learning but much moral courage as well.

No one will deny that an English rendering of such a pivotal Hebrew work as the Zohar is long overdue. For the Zohar is the fundamental book of Jewish Cabbalism. It is the premier text-book of medieval Jewish mysticism. If, as Professor Rufus Jones has so finely said, ‘mysticism is religion in its most acute, intense, and living stage’, then it follows that Jewish mysticism as enshrined and taught in the Zohar represents Judaism in its ‘most acute, intense, and living stage’. This is no small prerogative. But how are both Jews and Christians to get to know these quintessential characteristics of the Jewish religion if they are locked up and secreted in a book whose language, style, and contents no one but a deeply accomplished Hebraist can comprehend? As a matter of fact, Jews are not infrequently blamed for what is regarded on their part as some mysterious desire to keep their spiritual and literary treasures all to themselves, stored away in the trappings of a strange language like Rabbinic Hebrew or Aramaic, and hence inaccessible to the average honest seeker after knowledge. This translation will, it is to be hoped, serve to remedy the defect as well as to roll away the implied reproach.

The Zohar is in form a Commentary on the Pentateuch, and its language is partly Aramaic and partly Hebrew. It purports to be a record of discourses carried on between Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, who lived in the second century of the common era, and certain contemporary Jewish mystical exegetes. There is a story in the Talmud that Simeon and his son, in order to escape the fury of the Roman persecution, hid themselves in a cave for thirteen years, during which they gave themselves up to those mystical speculations on God, Torah, and the universe which compose the Zohar. Simeon came thus to be regarded as the author of the Zohar. But scholarship and research have forced us to dismiss this supposition as nothing more than legend. Even the most superficial perusal of any section of the Zohar will convince the reader of the absurdity of this view of its high antiquity. The merest tyro in Rabbinic literature will find in the Zohar in great many Rabbinic comments and observations which belong without question to a period (and periods) later than that in which Simeon ben Yohai lived. A legend of a more elaborate type, and one which modern critics have been much more ready to accept, attributes the Zohar to a thirteenth-century Cabbalistic writer, Moses de Leon, of Granada in Spain, who certainly was the first to make it known to the general public. Moses de Leon published the Zohar as the work of Simeon ben Yohai, professing to have transcribed the copies which he issued from an ancient manuscript which had come into his possession. After his death, however, his widow confessed that her husband possessed no such manuscript, and that he wrote the work himself. When asked why he did not publish the book in his own name but chose that of Simeon ben Yohai, she replied that her husband always said that a book by a miracle-working Rabbi like Simeon ben Yohai would prove more lucrative than a book bearing his own name.

Though the widow’s story bristles with contradictions and absurdities, many Jewish writers and scholars have maintained that de Leon was the sole author of the Zohar. On the other hand, many books have been written, mainly in Hebrew, to show that the Zohar is a work of great antiquity and that its authorship can very properly and suitably be attributed to the ancient Sage, Simeon ben Yohai. But neither of these views can hold water in the light of all the facts as we know them. No student of the Zohar, indeed no competent assessor of literature generally, can believe mat it ever could have emanated from the brain of one man. To call it a book is to misname it. It is a literature—a literature of immense variety and compass. It embraces so many diverse themes, it holds within its folds such a number of views and doctrines which are often mutually irreconcilable, that it cannot possibly be the production of one individual, however gifted. And to credit a Rabbi of the second century with the authorship of a book which describes the sayings and doings of men who lived long after his time, is to adopt a standpoint which no one in these times will seriously countenance.

The Zohar is a congeries of treatises, texts, extracts or fragments of texts, belonging to different periods, but all resembling one another in their method of mystical interpretation of the Torah as well as in the baffling anonymity in which they are shrouded. The ways in which these component parts are pieced together strikes one as arbitrary in the extreme. They often appear to bear little or no relation to that which precedes or follows. The arrangement is all so destitute of design that it might have been done by the printers and publishers of the first edition whenever they felt that it suited their convenience or whenever they happened to come across some anonymous fragments which, in their unlearned opinion, could be suitably interpolated at a certain point in the main text.

From a survey of the whole subject, one is drawn irresistibly to the conclusion that the Zohar, so far from being a homogeneous work, is a compilation of a mass of material drawn from many strata of Jewish and non-Jewish mystical thought and covering numerous centuries. Many of both its fundamental and subsidiary teachings are to be found in the oldest portions of the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, as well as in that large mass of Jewish Apocalyptic literature which was produced in the centuries immediately before and after the destruction of the second Temple. Discussions on Jewish law and Biblical interpretations (which are often almost verbal repetitions of passages to be found in the two recensions of the Talmud), speculations on theology, theosophy, and cosmogony which have their counterpart in Hellenistic literature and which sometimes show resemblances to certain ideas contained in the Zend Avesta—a fact which has induced some scholars to find a good deal of the background of the Zohar in the religion of ancient Zoroastrianism—the allegorical type of exegesis of which Philo is the leading exponent, Gnostic theories concerning the relation between the human and the divine, echoes of medieval beliefs regarding astrology, physiognomy, necromancy, magic, and metempsychosis which are alien to the Jewish spirit, all these elements jostle one another at random in the pages of the Zohar. A veritable storehouse of anachronisms, incongruities and surprises!

And yet, with all its faults, the Zohar appeals to many Jews in a way that makes them regard it as the most sacred of sacred books! For it mirrors Judaism as an intensely vital religion of the spirit. More overpoweringly than any other book or code, more even than the Bible, does it give to the Jew the conviction of an inner, unseen, spiritual universe— an eternal moral order.

The constituent parts of the Zohar are as follows: There is (i) the main portion which bears the general title of ‘Sefer Ha-Zohar’. To this are attached (ii) the ‘Sifra di-Tseniuta’ (‘The Book of the Veiled Mystery’), consisting of five chapters inserted in the Book of Exodus and dealing with the mysteries of creation, the human soul and the relation between spirit and matter, (iii) ‘Sitri Torah’ (‘Secrets of the Torah’), treating largely of Cabbalistic angelology and the mysteries clustering round the Divine Name and the Divine Unity, (iv) ‘Raya Mehemna’ (‘The True Shepherd’, Pastor Fidelis), which, besides dealing with topics similar to the foregoing, lays down definite precepts and rules of conduct, the exegesis being usually introduced with the words “The true shepherd saith’—the true shepherd being Moses, (v) ‘Midrash Ha-ne'lam’ (‘Recondite Exposition’), which contains a great deal of Scriptural exposition by the method of ‘Gematria’, i.e. the permutations and combinations of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Hebrew numerals. It also contains some allegorical exegesis of Scripture reminding one of the methods of Philo, (vi) ‘Tosefta ’ (‘Additions’), some stray fragmentary supplements to the main exegesis of the Zohar in which are contained references to the Sefiroth. (vii) ‘Hekaloth’ (‘halls’ or ‘palaces’), wherein are pictured with a dazzling literality the abodes of paradise and hell, the dwelling-places of the varying grades of the angelic hosts and their dealings with the souls of men. There are also in this section several recondite allusions to astrology and magic. (viii) The Idra Rabba (‘Greater Synod’) and Idra Zuta (‘Lesser Synod’), which are amplifications of (ii). Speaking generally, none of these sections can be said to differ very greatly from any other or from the main body of the Zohar, either in style or contents. There is considerable overlapping. There is also a frequent repetition of the same theme, the same treatment, even the same words.

The first printed edition of the Zohar appeared almost simultaneously in two different places, viz. Mantua and Cremona, in 1588-90. Later editions are those of Lublin, 1623; Amsterdam, 1714 and 1805; Constantinople, 1736; and Venice. The Mantua edition, with a long and elaborate Introduction by Isaac de Lattes, has always had the greatest vogue, nearly all subsequent editions being based upon the Mantua text. An interesting fact is that almost simultaneously with the publication of the first Mantua edition—but to all appearance quite independently of it—there was issued from the same press the Tikkuni Ha-Zohar (‘Emendations to the Zohar’), a book written in Aramaic and with the same kind of subject-matter as the Zohar. Another similar work which has always enjoyed great popularity, and which first saw the light at Salonika in 1597, is the Zohar Hadash (‘The New Zohar ’), which is an independent mystical commentary on the same lines as the Zohar, but embracing, in addition to the Pentateuch, the ‘Five Megillot’ (Scrolls), viz. the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther.

The Zohar humbly professes to be no more than a Commentary on the Pentateuch; and it might hence be interesting to hear its own expressed views on the correct method of Biblical exegesis. It says: ‘Woe unto those who see in the Law nothing but simple narratives and ordinary words! Were this really the case, then could we, even today, compose a Law equally worthy of admiration. But it is all quite otherwise.... Every word of the Law contains an elevated sense and a sublime mystery.... The narratives of the Law are but the raiment in which it is swathed. Woe unto him who mistakes the raiment for the Law itself! It was to avert such a calamity that David prayed, “Open mine eyes that I might behold wondrous things out of thy Law״.’ Another passage states similarly, but even more strikingly: ‘If the Law merely consisted of ordinary words and narratives like the stories of Esau, Hagar, and Laban, or like the words which were spoken by Balaam’s ass or by Balaam himself, why should it have been called the Law of Truth, the perfect Law, the faithful testimony of God?’

These statements may well be regarded as a sort of rationale of the aim and purpose of the Zoharic exegesis; and they summarise the basic characteristics of all schools of Cabbalistic interpretation, both before and after the Zohar. Indeed, herein may be said to lie the undying service which Cabbalism has rendered to Judaism, whether as creed or as life. A too literal interpretation of the words of Scripture giving Judaism the appearance of being nothing more than an ordered legalism, an apotheosis of the ‘letter which killeth’, a formal and petrified system of external commands bereft of all spirit and denying all freedom to the individual—these have been, and are still in some quarters, the blemishes and shortcomings cast in the teeth of Rabbinic Judaism. The supreme rebutter of such taunts and objections is Cabbalah. The arid field of Rabbinism was always kept well watered and fresh by the living streams of Cabbalistic lore. Mystic schools and mystic circles flourished at nearly every important epoch of Jewish history, and the object of their studies was to penetrate to the true meaning hidden beneath the letter of Scripture. Some of the foremost Jewish legalists were also pronounced Cabbalists. And this esoteric study of the Law which is the quintessence of Cabbalah gave to its devotees not a shackled creed comprehended in formulae, but a religion of intense spiritual possibilities, rendering the Jew capable of a vivid sense of the nearness of God and filling him with a constant longing for communion with Him.

Illustrations of the way in which the Zohar penetrates the outer shell of Scripture in order to extract the esoteric kernel within could be quoted, did not space forbid, in great abundance. I will only refer here to some specimens of Zoharic exegesis on the Psalms which are frequently interspersed in the exegesis on the Pentateuchal books. Thus, Psalm 36, 6, says: ‘By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the hosts of them by the breath of his mouth.’ This verse gives the impetus to a whole series of mystic axioms proving that the world rests on Divine spirit. The ‘upper universe’ resembles the Tower universe’, and both find their unity in God. Earth is a copy of Heaven. Heaven is a copy of earth. They are no duality but an absolute unity. Any other view of the universe is irreligious because it makes an alma de peruda (a world of division), an idea which, by the way, is paralleled by Blake’s argument that the universe as we know it, i.e. the sheer material unspiritual universe, is the result of the fall of the one life from unity into division. Again, Psalm 145, 18, declares: ‘The Lord is near unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth.’ What is the meaning of the phrase ‘in truth’, asks the Zohar? And the reply is ‘a knowledge of how to declare the Divine Unity in prayer. For in this knowledge consists the service of the Holy King; and whosoever knows how to declare the Divine Unity is a helper in establishing that one unique nation of whom it is said, “And who is like thy people Israel, one unique nation in the earth?” And when all those who know how to declare the Divine Unity do so in the right way, then are all the walls of darkness cleft in twain. The face of the Heavenly King is revealed. There is light unto all. The “realms above” as well as the “realms below” draw unto themselves blessings without end.’ In these quaintly original remarks on the effects wrought by prayer, there are many points which are of fundamental importance in Jewish mystical teaching of all ages. The declaration of the Divine Unity in prayer does not mean merely the clear and unequivocal pronouncement of the word Echad (One). It goes much deeper. It implies the conviction that all things should be regarded as so many manifestations of the Divine whose vivifying power is never for an instant withdrawn from the world which it animates. To pray is thus, in the last resort, to become absorbed in God; and only in the enjoyment of such an experience does man find light, truth, and bliss, both for himself and for others. This type of theological doctrine comes to the front more particularly in the later Cabbalists, i.e. the Hassidic literature, starting with Israel Baalshem.

The fundamental note in the Zohar’s treatment of the Divine nature is the attempt to combine the transcendent and immanent aspects of the Deity in a single concept. Not that it does this with a strictly scientific consistency. Far from it. God, in the Zohar, is the great Unknowable, the Supreme Incomprehensible. God is exalted above human understanding; the depths of the Divine wisdom are beyond human penetration. To quote the words of the Idra Rabba, God is ‘the most ancient of the ancient, the mystery of mysteries, the unknown of the unknown’. Here we have the doctrine of the Divine Transcendency par excellence. Nevertheless, God in the Zohar is very knowable, very fathomable. The universe as well as man’s heart reveal His infinite power and infinite love. Nay, even the human organs and limbs reflect certain static and dynamic characteristics of Deity. The world is an image of the Divine. There is a constant and conscious interaction between ‘the above’ (the celestial kingdom) and ‘the below’ (the mundane kingdom). Here we have the doctrine of the Divine immanence par excellence. It is the ceaseless interweaving of these two doctrines in the pages of the Zohar that supplies the book with its uncompromisingly spiritual atmosphere. Without this combination, the Zohar would be a false presentation of Judaism. Had it emphasized exclusively a ‘mysterious’ and ‘unknowable’ Deity, it would but have supplied one more weapon to the armoury of the Pauline critics of a ‘legalistic’ Judaism. On the other hand, an unbalanced insistence on the doctrine that the world is but a manifestation or mirror of a Divine life pulsating everywhere would lead men away to a Spinozistic pantheism—a creed which is at out-and-out variance with the postulates of Jewish theism.

The transcendent God of the Cabbalah, called the En Sof (the limitless one), becomes immanent in the cosmos by a species of ‘flowings forth’ or emanations, which in their turn give rise to ‘four universes’, viz. (a) Atsiluth; (b) Beriah; (c) Yetsirah; (d) Asiah, i.e. Emanation, Creation, Formation, and Action, respectively. These ‘four universes’ are apportioned among ‘Ten Sefiroth’ which are named as follows: (a) Kether (The Crown); (b) Hokmah (Wisdom); (c) Binah (Understanding); (d) Hesed (Mercy); (e) Geburah (Force or Severity); (f) Tifereth (Beauty); (g) Nezah (Victory); (h) Hod (Glory); (i) Yesod (Foundation); (j) Malkuth (Kingdom); These names are, on the surface, largely arbitrary and conventional; and as for the way in which these ‘Ten Sefiroth ’ are allocated to the worlds of Cabbalism—this is an extremely complicated theme into the consideration of which it is not possible to enter in the limited space of an Introduction such as this.

The feature in the Jewish Cabbalistic literature which is calculated to recommend it for all time to the admiration of scholars and thinkers is the high place which it accords to the human soul. The Zohar is replete with references to the dominating part played by man’s soul in the furtherance of his own good, as well as in the development of all these ‘universes’ with whose workings man is so intensely and inevitably bound up. Man is man only because of his soul. On this point the Zohar is far more definite and uncompromising than the Bible and the Talmud. A statement like ‘For dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return’ (Genesis 3, 19) would be quite out of keeping with Zoharic theology. And so would the remark of the pessimist Ecclesiastes: ‘And the pre-eminence of man over beast is nought, for all is vanity’ (Eccl. 3, 19). The whole atmosphere cast by the Zohar around these spiritual problems is far warmer and lighter, more cheering and more encouraging. The Mishnah (Aboth 3, 1) declares, ‘Know whence thou earnest: from a putrefying drop; and whither thou art going: to a place of dust, worms, and maggots.’ Man’s origin is envisaged by the Zohar in a far more refined and poetic outlook than this; and as for man’s destiny in the hereafter, it is no mere period of judgement before a Heavenly Tribunal, but a series of progressive spiritual experiences in many forms until at the last there is a union of the soul with the Divine source whence it emanated.

Man, says the Zohar, was ‘created’ on the ‘sixth day’ because he is, in himself, a noble epitome of the cosmos. And he is this by reason of the infinite association of his soul with the Sefiroth. The ‘upper’ and the ‘lower’ world both find their meeting point in him. He is a Shekinta Ta-ta-aa, i.e. a Divine Presence on earth.

The Soul, as a spiritual entity playing the highest of high parts in man’s relations with the Unseen, is well brought to the front in all branches of the medieval Cabbalah. The Zohar warns us against thinking that man is made up solely of flesh and skin, veins and sinews. Man’s skin typifies the firmament, which extends everywhere and covers everything. His flesh typifies the evil side of the universe, i.e. the elements which are purely exterior, of sense. The sinews and veins symbolise the ‘Celestial chariot’ (the Merkabah), being the interior forces of man which are the servitors of God. But all these are merely an outward covering. In the kingdom of man’s soul there are processes going on which are the exact counterpart of those going on in the ‘upper world’. The soul is threefold. There is (i) Neshamah, which is the highest phase of its existence, (ii) Ruah, which is the seat of good and evil, the abode of the moral attributes, (iii) Nefesh, which is the grosser side of spirit and is en rapport with the body and the cause of all the movements and instincts of the physical life. Each of these three constituents of the soul has its source in some one or other of the ten Sefiroth.

The soul enjoyed a heavenly pre-existence. This idea is already found in the Talmud and is deduced from certain passages in the Hebrew Bible. Whether the old Rabbis discovered the idea independently, or whether they merely adapted it from the teaching of Plato is a moot point. Complementary to this doctrine of pre-existence is that of the transmigration of the soul—metempsychosis—which is taught in the Zohar by way of a solution of the eternally vexing problem of why the wicked prosper. The famous post-Zoharic Cabbalist, Isaac Luria (1534-72), was of opinion that all souls were born with Adam, and that every human being received at birth, through Divine intervention, the soul that fitted it. All souls born with Adam constituted originally one and one only great soul. When Adam sinned through disobedience, this one comprehensive soul born with him and of which every future human being was, at birth, to receive a microscopic fragment, became involved in sin. But all these tainted souls possess the potentiality and hence have the duty of cleansing themselves and working themselves up to a high level of destiny. This tenet was widely held by the Cabbalists and suggested to them their many strange theories about the chequered wanderings of the soul. The soul’s dross cannot be cast off in the course of one lifetime. It must pass through many bodies and experience many terrestrial existences, each one higher than the other, before it can reach the pinnacle of perfection—union with God—which is its predestined end.

The Cabbalistic successors of Luria went even further, and said that souls wandered on earth and could sometimes enter the bodily framework of some living person, so as to help him to fulfil certain religious duties which he had neglected.

The soul, says the mystic of all ages and creeds, seeks to enter consciously into the Presence of God. And this idea of the soul’s unquenchable yearning to be united with its Divine source is reiterated under many forms in all parts of the Zohar and lends to it a charm as well as a lightness of touch which serve as a relief to the excessively sombre and solemn tone of most of the book. It is the poetry of the Zohar. Man’s intimacy with God, the soul’s union with Him, are described in sexual terminology. It is the union of the male with the female. The symbolism is sometimes liable to strike the reader as offensively crude in some of its details; and the Zohar has more than once had to suffer for this the cheap sneers of detractors. But this is only the result of shallow knowledge and false perspective. On deeper study and reflection these sexual references will be found to be just as admissible as are the sexual similes and analogies which pervade the writings of the most refined and elegant of poets and romancers. For the Zohar speaks throughout of cosmic union—a coming together, a fusion, of all the manifold universes ‘above’ and ‘below’. The worlds above are ‘married’ to the worlds below. And man, who, mainly by reason of his soul, is a denizen of these multiple worlds, becomes, whilst striving after communion with the Divine, a sharer in these cosmic acts of intercourse. Of course, it will be recollected that the amorous sentiments which find such bold expression in the Old Testament book of the Song of Songs were made to bear a strongly allegoric-mystic interpretation in the old homilies of the Midrashic literature. And there can be little doubt that these pictures of conjugal relations as applied to express man’s consummated longing for the Divine must have largely prepared the way for those numerous and often obscure allusions which constitute what has been called the ‘sex-mystery’ of the Zohar.

That much of the mystic speculation to be found in the Zohar dates back to the early centuries before and after the destruction of the second Temple is a point upon which there is now unanimous agreement amongst scholars. The early Jewish Apocalyptic and magical literature, the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, the huge and variegated crop of Midrashic literature which continued to spring up for many years after the completion of the Talmud—all these monuments of early Jewish interpretative activity scintillate with mystic allusions which found incorporation in many modified forms in the pages of the Zohar. Much of this early speculation was never committed to writing. It was transmitted orally from generation to generation. Herein, by the way, lies the meaning of Cabbalah: oral tradition. And the Zohar was probably the first important book in which these floating traditions were preserved in writing. Schools and circles wherein Cabbalah was meditated upon had started as early as the sixth century in Galilee, and these, after disappearing for some centuries owing to the fluctuating fortunes of the Jews, were revived in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries under the influence of such great Talmudic luminaries as Moses Nahmanides, Solomon ben Adrath, and others. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Isaac Luria, who had learnt Cabbalah in Egypt, founded a new mystical school at Safed, in Galilee, then the centre of Jewish learning. He gathered round him a host of disciples, many of them, like Elijah de Vidas and Joseph Hagiz, being themselves distinguished writers of Cabbalistic works. Luria himself wrote nothing. His utterances were taken down in writing by his most prominent disciple, Hayyim Vital Calabreze, whose book Ets Hayyim shows how Luria developed many of the leading ideas of the Zohar and inaugurated a new mystic system in Judiaism, a system wherein Messianic theology and Messianic expectations held a central place. Luria’s enlarged and elaborated conceptions of Cabbalah found numerous enthusiastic disciples; and the Zohar, as the result of a too extravagant emphasis on certain Messianic comments contained within it, emerged, by an unhappy fate, as the source whence the pseudo-Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi (1626-76), presumed to have drawn the warrant for his dramatically pretentious career.

It goes without saying that the mysticism of the Zohar, emphasizing as it does the efficacy of prayer, must have influenced considerably the Hebrew Prayer Book, as well as the Divine Service of the Synagogue and certain aspects of Jewish ceremonial observance. Much of the extravagant Zoharic angelology came to find a place in the liturgy, as also much Zoharic doctrine concerning the secrets of the supra-mundane universe and the mysteries, both painful and pleasurable, of the life hereafter. Many mystical formulas, mystical names and symbols intermixed with many arithmetical and astrological references, also became interpolated within the pages of the Prayer Book. Most of this highly pictorial type of prayer material has been eliminated from the modern worship of the Synagogue because of its incongruity with the prevailing conceptions of the Deity; but in spite of this weeding-out, it may still be said that our Jewish liturgy of to-day scintillates with many a Zoharic phrase and idea which are a decided gain to the spirituality of Jewish home or synagogue ritual. One is inclined to differ in this respect from Leopold Zunz when he says: ‘Although the more respectable mystics did something for spiritual religion and for devotion as opposed to thoughtless formalism, yet the liturgy lost more than it gained by their influence’ (D. Ritus, p. 24). The ceremony of blowing the Shofar on Rosh Ha-Shanah gains rather than loses in impressiveness by the accompanying Zoharic prayers which ask that ‘the angels emanating from the Shofar may bring the prayers of Israel to the Divine hearing’. Taken literally, the idea jars, of course, on our intelligence. But the Zoharic mysticism, like the mysticism of all other religions and literatures, demands the higher interpretation. And on this basis the blowing of the Shofar, far from being a mere stereotyped act of observance of the letter of the Law, rises to become the outward expression of one more of the many mystical beliefs in the unseen spiritual agencies uniting the human with the Divine—an outstanding Zoharic doctrine. Similarly in the case of the prayer, B’rich Sh’meh Ve’athreh, recited before the Reading of the Law on Sabbaths and Festivals. The Zohar introduces it with these words: ‘When the scroll is taken out in the assembly to read therein, the Gates of the heavens of mercy open and the celestial love awakes.’ The prayer is a truly noble one, teeming with a vivid, sense of the nearness of God, combined with an ever-felt and never-satisfied longing for communion with Him by means of the Torah—a thought which is ubiquitous in the Zohar. A modified and modernised adoption of a little more Zoharic sentiment to the Jewish liturgy of to-day would be a welcome improvement! By thus introducing a tinge of ‘Ecstasy’, of direct intuition of God, into Jewish prayer; by making it less of a merely external religious exercise and more of a means for transcending earthly affairs for a time, there would be restored to prayer something of the position it must have occupied in the days of the Hebrew Psalmist, as well as something of the intensely individual and devotional part which it played in the neo-Hassidic mysticism of the eighteenth century.

Besides influencing the liturgy, the Zohar, as is only to be expected from a book which stimulates the imagination and the feelings, has left numerous traces in the medieval religious poetry outside the synagogue. Its allegorism, its symbolism, its erotic terminology, proved excellent material for portraying the ceaseless yearnings of the human heart for union with the Infinite; and the reader is often startled at the ingenuity with which many simple and innocent Biblical word or phrase is poetically worked up to indicate the physical as well as the spiritual mysteries which surround the Deity and the effort of man to become finally absorbed in Him by means of prayer, Torah study and contemplation.

For some centuries after its first appearance, the Zohar was generally regarded by the Jews as an integral part of the literature of Torah, like the Talmud and the Midrash, and, like them, it was considered one of the subjects of religious study, of talmud torah. It was, in fact, generally known as the ‘Midrash of R. Simeon ben Yohai’. Unlike the Talmud, however, it was what might be called an optional subject in the curriculum of Torah study; a man could be a great Jewish scholar without knowing anything of the Zohar or the Cabbalah. Still, there was a merit in studying them also. A breach, however, arose between the Talmudists and the Cabbalists after the failure of the Messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi in the middle of the seventeenth century. The extravagances of Zevi and his followers were largely inspired by the Zohar, and this work in consequence fell into suspicion and disfavour with a large number of Talmudists. This antipathy to the Zohar found its culmination in a treatise (in Mitpahat Sefarim) written in the middle of the eighteenth century by the great Talmudical scholar, Jacob Emden of Altona, in which it is denounced as being for the most part the work of an impostor. Emden was led to investigate the Zohar through his desire to extirpate the Shabbetaean heresy which still lingered in his day. His examination of the Zohar shows considerable critical acumen, and his conclusions have been adopted by a large number of orthodox Jews.

The place to be assigned to the Zohar in the scheme of Jewish study is also one of the fundamental points at issue between the sect of Hassidim, founded by Israel Baalshem in the eighteenth century, and their opponents in Poland and Lithuania, known as the ‘Mithnagedim’. The controversy between the two sects is interesting not only in itself but also for the light it sheds upon many aspects of the Jewish religious and social life of those times. It was a struggle for supremacy between Rabbinic orthodoxy, based upon the authority of the Talmud, and the mystic-emotional-spiritual Judaism founded upon the Zoharic interpretation of the Torah. It was a contest between two principles in Judaism, the formalism of dogmatic ritual and the direct religious sentiment. Whilst Rabbinical orthodoxy, without rejecting the Zohar, regarded the ideal Jewish life as one of obedience to law founded upon the study of the Talmud and the Codes, Hassidic Judaism based itself upon the Zohar, maintaining that the quintessence of the Jewish religion lay in the cultivation of a sincere love of God, combined with a warm faith and deep belief in the efficacy of prayer. This does not imply that the Hassidim despised Talmudic scholarship or flouted the traditional Rabbinic ordinances. What it does imply is that Hassidism aimed at altering the centre of gravity of the Jewish religious life by introducing into it a new ‘spirituality’. This ‘spirituality’ derived from the Zohar consisted in the conviction that there is an unbroken intercourse between the world of the Deity and the world of humanity; that these worlds have a reciprocal influence upon one another; and that prayer should be an ecstatic communion with God, so as to unite the human life with Him who is ‘the life of all worlds’. It is not given to all men to attain this exalted state. But the man who attains, it is, in the Hassidic sense, the Tsaddik who, as a result, possesses a degree of prophetic insight and a power to work miracles.

The study of the Zohar, as well as of the Cabbalistic writings which succeeded it, attracted a great many noted Christian scholars of the past. William Postel, who translated the Sefer Yetsirah into Latin (Paris, 1552), seems to have been the first Christian to introduce the mysteries of the Cabbalah to the learned circles of Europe. But the first Christian into whose hands the Zohar came was Pico della Mirandola, who wrote short theses in Latin about it. He was, too, the first Christian to declare that the Zohar contains elements which are capable of a Christian construction. He seems to have believed that the doctrines concerning the Trinity, Original Sin, and the Incarnation could be deduced from its pages. John Reuchlin, another ardent student of Jewish occultism, wrote De Arte Cabalistica, which he dedicated to Leo X, and the object of which was to prove from the post-Zoharic writers on Cabbalism that the Messiah had already appeared. Petrius Galatinus, a contemporary of Reuchlin, published, in 1516, De Arcanis Catholicae Veritatis, in which the Zoharic teachings are made to reflect many of the cardinal doctrines of Christianity. The complete list of all the other Christian students would be too long to mention here. Outstanding names are those of Alabaster, Gasparellus, and Athanasius Kircher. But the greatest of all these was Knorr von Rosenroth, whose Kabbalah Denudata, first published at Sulzbach in 1677-8 and translated into English by S. L. Macgregor Mathers (London, 1887), contains much valuable material and has proved particularly useful to Christian scholars unable to read the Hebrew and Aramaic originals. A new French translation of the whole of the Zohar has recently been made by M. Jean de Pauly and published posthumously by M. Emil Lafuma-Giraud (1906). Grateful reference is also due to the many writings on all aspects of the Zohar by the celebrated scholar, Mr. Arthur Edward Waite.

It is unnecessary to mention here that many of the leading Jewish theologians of the nineteenth century have done much in the way of giving an enlightened and objective presentation of the mysterious and uncanny world in which the Zohar lives and moves and has its being. Adolph Franck’s La Kabbale, first published in Paris in 1843, contains long and representative extracts from the Zohar in a beautifully phrased French translation. In German there are numerous monographs and partial translations by Zunz, Jost, Jellinek, Joel, Graetz, and Steinschneider. In Hebrew, Rapaport, Harkavy, and others have made important contributions. During the present century there has been a distinct revival of interest in the literature of the Hassidim from the time of Baalshem, and much has been written by Kahana, Horodetsky, Dubnow, and others, mainly in Hebrew, to show that these devotees of the mystic side of Jewish life and religion were not, as is popularly supposed, half-crazy visionaries living in a universe peopled by the figments of their own degenerate brains, but men of intellect, scholarship, and sound sense - who aimed at bringing back to Jewish organised communal life a breath of that mystic sentiment and emotion which are the aromatic life-essence of religion, and which are indispensable to Judaism if it is to continue to play its predestined part of bringing mankind ‘under the wings of the Shekinah’.

It has been said that every man is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. This means that there is an innate predisposition in every one of us to assimilate certain fixed forms of thought from which we cannot be diverted, no matter what future training, education, or experience we may receive. The Jews during the Middle Ages, both before and after the appearance of the Zohar, were (largely through the influence of Maimonides) amongst the staunchest supporters of Aristotle. Whilst the Aristotelian philosophy stands immortalised in the writings of the leading Jewish theologians of medieval times, the philosophy of Plato finds but a mere handful of exponents, eminent though these be. Hence there has arisen the commonly accepted belief that Jews are by nature rationalists rather than mystics. Is this belief correct? Does it square with the facts? I think not. Judaism is unquestionably and supremely a religion of reason. But, paradoxically enough, it only made its appeal to the Jew and held him tightly in its grip because he was—and is—by nature and inclination a mystic. The Moreh Nebuchim of Maimonides was the great Jewish philosophical exposition in the Middle Ages, of the ‘Supremacy of Reason’ in Judaism. But the Jew in the mass knew it not. It was never a people’s book. But the Zohar was a people’s book. It struck a chord in whose music the Jew heard:

And the impress went down to the roots of his being. However much in accord with reason Judaism may have appeared to the Jew, there were always crises and catastrophes in which he felt that reason failed to solve the tantalising problems involved—problems of pain and suffering, of reward and punishment, of the relation between the human and the Divine, of the life here and the life hereafter. The Jew, as a pure rationalist, would have quailed in the face of these enigmas; and Judaism might by now have been but a pale memory. But the Jew believed and lived not by logic but by love, not by ratiocination but by intuition. It was by these standards that he was led on

In his great book Belief in God, Canon Gore says: ‘It is by feeling or intuition that the supreme artist gains his profound vision of experience and of God.’ The Jew was this supreme artist. For was he not of the spiritual lineage of the Psalmist, who said: ‘My heart and my flesh sing for joy unto the living God. With my whole heart have I sought thee; O let me not err from thy commandments’? Though he could not know God, he nevertheless felt that it was given to him to transcend the crushing weight of earthly affairs, to be raised above the grosser hindrances of sense and to become an organ reflecting the Divine life. Such is the standpoint of the true mystic of all the ages. The Jew had it in overflowing measure. And the Jewish book which first and more than any other crystallised these feelings and gave them their overpowering momentum was the Zohar.

J. ABELSON

September 1931