Kabbalah

The Zohar — The Book of Splendor

Kabbalah's central and most influential text, a sprawling mystical commentary on the Torah that shaped nearly every later Jewish mystical idea, including most of the concepts on this list.

Written mostly in a distinctive literary Aramaic and structured as a running mystical commentary on the weekly Torah portions, the Zohar surfaced in Castile, Spain, in the 1280s, circulated by the kabbalist Moses de León. Tradition holds that its teachings originate two centuries after the Common Era with Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, composed during the years he and his son hid in a cave from Roman persecution — a story the Zohar itself narrates as its own frame. Modern critical scholarship, most influentially Gershom Scholem's philological analysis in the twentieth century, concluded that Moses de León was substantially the Zohar's actual author or principal compiler, working from older esoteric traditions and pseudepigraphically attributing the whole to bar Yochai for authority. Whichever account one accepts, the Zohar's influence is not in question: it did more than any other text to fix the vocabulary — Sefirot, Shekhinah, the interplay of light and vessel — that later Kabbalists, including Isaac Luria three centuries afterward, took as their starting point.

Gershom Scholem's early-20th-century philological work remains the benchmark for dating and authorship debates about the Zohar, though some contemporary scholars argue for a more layered, multi-author composition process.

Zohar