The Zohar, First Printings: Kabbalah Goes to Press

In 1553, in Rome and across Italy, copies of the Talmud were heaped up and burned on the orders of the Church. Five years later, in two small Italian cities a short journey apart, presses began to print a book that had until then circulated only in manuscript among a few initiates: the Zohar, the "Book of Radiance", the great text of Kabbalah. In Mantua, two Jewish partners, Meir ben Ephraim of Padua and Jacob ben Naphtali ha-Kohen of Gazzuolo, printed it in three quarto volumes (1558–1560). In Cremona, the Christian printer Vincenzo Conti issued it as a single large folio (1558–1560). Which press put the first sheets out is reported differently; the two editions appeared in rivalry, almost together.

The fight over printing it

Printing the Zohar meant making secret lore public, and some rabbis objected fiercely. Meir Katzenellenbogen of Padua and others argued that Kabbalah should be taught only by master to disciple. The Mantua printers answered with a long responsum by Isaac de Lattes, printed in their first volume, which defended publication and urged the study of the Zohar as a remedy for the corruption of the age. The Mantua text, more carefully edited, became the standard: the page numbering of the Mantua Zohar is still used to cite the book today. The Cremona edition was handsomer but less accurate.

That a Christian press printed it matters too. Christian scholars had been reading Kabbalah since the fifteenth century, and some hoped the Zohar would show Jews the truth of Christianity; the Talmud was burned, and the Zohar was licensed.

The book

• Written mostly in Aramaic, the Zohar is a vast commentary on the Torah told as the wanderings and conversations of Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai, a sage of the second century, and his companions in Galilee.
• It opens: "Rabbi Ḥizkiyah opened: 'Like a rose among thorns'" (Song of Songs 2:2), reading the rose as the Community of Israel and, within God, as the Shekhinah among the other sefirot.
• Its central idea is the ten sefirot, the aspects of God through which the hidden divine, the Ein Sof ("without end"), becomes manifest, and the union of the masculine and feminine within God that Jewish practice helps restore.

Who wrote it?

Tradition attributes the Zohar to Shimon bar Yoḥai. It first appears in Castile in the 1280s, circulated by Moses de León, who said he was copying an ancient manuscript. Gershom Scholem concluded that Moses de León wrote most of it himself; much recent scholarship sees a group of authors and a longer process of composition and editing, completed in large part by the printers of the 1550s. For many religious Jews it remains an ancient revealed text.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The rose. The thirteen petals of the rose in the opening homily are read as the thirteen attributes of mercy (Exodus 34:6–7), and its colours, red and white, as judgment and mercy.

Light. Zohar means "radiance", from Daniel 12:3: "the wise shall shine like the radiance of the firmament".

The sefirot as a body and a tree. The ten sefirot are pictured as the limbs of a primordial human form and as a tree, the diagram that later Christian and Hermetic Kabbalah took up.

Connections

Kabbalah (ch26), with Rabbinic Judaism (ch19) and Theosophy & the Occult Revival (ch37) for the Christian and Hermetic afterlife of Kabbalah. See also the Sefer Yetzirah (V80) and the Aleppo Codex (V38).

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/zohar-mantua.html