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ZAKHORIUM
PTEN

The 'Book of Splendor', c. 1290

Date

1290CE

c. 1290approximate date

Around 1290 the Zohar appeared in Castile, a work said to go back to the second century, presenting the Torah as the code of God himself and the ten sefirot as the structure of the divinity.

Religious historyArt and cultureJewish philosophy
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Under the Cross: each bar is an event of the period; this one is in coral.

Sourced narrative

Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.

11 statements

01The Zohar emerges

The Zohar ('Book of Splendor'), Jewish mysticism's most influential single work, emerged around 1290 from this circle of Castilian kabbalists. Moses de León played the leading part in writing and circulating it, a mystical homily on the Pentateuch written in archaic Aramaic. The Castilian kabbalists claimed that the text kept a tradition reaching to the second-century circle of Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai and his students. Although certain critical spirits doubted the work's ancient pedigree, it won broad acceptance across the Jewish world as a source of divinely inspired truth, as authoritative as the Mishnah or the Talmud.

02The hidden Torah

In the kabbalists' view, God's revelation in the Torah was not meant to convey historical knowledge of the world's or the Jewish people's beginnings, nor is its chief aim to teach law. Beneath the text's surface lies a hidden, deeper message: the very essence of God is encoded in the biblical text, and Kabbalah is the key that unlocks the secrets of the divine. The Zohar says, through Rabbi Simeon, that one who sees the Torah merely as a book of stories and everyday matters is lost: the tales are only its 'outer garments', the body of the Torah is its precepts, and the truly wise reach through to the soul, the true Torah, root of all principles.

03Emanation and the sefirot

05

In kabbalistic thought the world arose by way of a process of 'emanation'. The final root of everything that exists is the ein-sof, the 'Infinite', from which layers of emanation spring, described as beams of light or streams of water. The ten sefirot come first among what emanation yields, arranged in a set order of decreasing closeness to the source, forming an intricate structure of ten manifestations of the divine that interact with each other and are all part of the divine realm itself.

06

The sefirot have two sides, left and right, often pictured as the 'male' and 'female' sides of the divinity. Kabbalistic literature uses the image of sexual union to explain how the sefirot of 'wisdom' (hokhmah, right) and 'understanding' (binah, left) join to produce the lower seven sefirot. Ideally the two sides stay in perfect balance; if the side of 'judgment' grows too strong, it empowers the forces of evil.

07

The book's diagram shows the ten sefirot and their relations. Keter is the topmost, a limit the mind cannot pass; the lower seven sefirot arose from the joining of Hokhmah and Binah, God's male and female sides. Mystics believed humans mirrored this structure and so could influence God through their actions, fostering a harmonious relationship among the system's parts.

08

The kabbalist's ultimate task is to restore perfect harmony and bring about the union of the sefirot, which is done through prayer and performing the commandments. Divine energy is channeled from the highest sefirah, keter ('crown'), down to the lowest, malkhut ('kingdom') or shekhinah, where the divine world connects with the lower worlds, those of angels and, at the bottom, the material one inhabited by humans.

04Kabbalah's strength

The strength of this theosophical structure was that it let kabbalists relate to the personal God of revelation. Where philosophers like Maimonides had tried to explain away the Bible's anthropomorphic language, the kabbalists embraced it as a clue to what the divine 'looked' like, which let them experience the divine through mystical practice and believe that prayers and commandments directly affected the structure of the sefirot and the proper working of the cosmos. Philosophical speculation went on among Jews uprooted when Spain expelled them in 1492, but ultimately it was Kabbalah that shaped Jewish culture most deeply and durably over the centuries that followed.

Context

Nahmanides, Jonah Gerondi (died 1263) and others advanced this Kabbalistic lore in Catalonia during the thirteenth century, south of the Pyrenees. Another Kabbalistic school took shape in Castile in the late thirteenth century.

§ 02Museum

Objects and images

Each item states whether it is an ancient object, a modern photograph or a later artistic interpretation.

§ 03Historiography

What scholars debate

Positions shown side by side, unranked, as the source reports them. The source’s own assessment appears separately.

Scholarly debate · 01

Who wrote the Zohar, and when?

2 positions · no single answer · take a seat →

  1. A

    Ancient tradition of Simeon bar Yohai

    The Castilian kabbalists and most of the Jewish world afterward

    The text would preserve second-century teachings, which gave it authority comparable to the Mishnah and the Talmud.

  2. B

    A late thirteenth-century Castilian work

    The authors of the book, with Moses de León as central figure

    The Zohar emerged in the circle of Castilian kabbalists around 1290; some critical spirits already questioned its antiquity.

§ 04Network

Connections

§ 05Bibliography

Further reading

  • Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1941).

    Classic study of Jewish mysticism · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 212

  • Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken Books, 1965).

    The Kabbalah and its symbolism · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 212

  • Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).

    New perspectives on the Kabbalah · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 212

§ 06Apparatus

Sources on this page

  1. 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205inspect
  2. 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205inspect
  3. 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205inspect
  4. 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205inspect
  5. 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205inspect
  6. 06Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 206; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 207inspect
  7. 07Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 206; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 206inspect
  8. 08Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 207; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 207inspect
  9. 09Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 207; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 207inspect
  10. 10Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 207; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 207inspect
  11. 11Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205inspect
  • Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
  • Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
  • Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
  • Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
  • Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.