THE ZOHAR is one of the most sacred, authoritative, and influential books in Jewish culture, and it has also attracted the interest of many non-Jews. It is a collection of texts which were probably written by several Castilian authors in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Soon after their first appearance, these texts came to be perceived as part of a literary work attributed to the tana R. Shimon bar Yohai (Rashbi) and called ‘the Zohar’.

Many scholarly works have been dedicated to the ideas found in the Zohar, to its literary style, and to the question of its authorship. This book focuses on different questions: its purpose is to examine the ways in which the Zohar was received and the impact it had on Jewish culture, from its emergence in the thirteenth century to the present. In the chapters that follow I look at the fluctuations in the Zohar's status and value, and explore the various cultural practices linked to these changes. I also throw light on the fact that those who determined the Zohar's value often did so in an effort to strengthen their own cultural power.

From its earliest appearance, several kabbalistic circles invested the Zohar with a status of authority and holiness. Yet it only became widely accepted as a pre-eminent source of doctrines, laws, and customs after the finalization and printing of the zoharic corpus in the sixteenth century. Numerous commentaries have been written on it since, and Zohar exegesis has become one of the most prevalent genres of kabbalistic literature, if not the most prevalent. Several kabbalistic systems, especially the Lurianic one, were created to a large degree as an interpretation of the Zohar. Since the eighteenth century, customs and practices described in the Zohar, such as the night prayer on Shavuot, inviting ushpizin (guests) to the sukah, and the recitation of the ‘Berikh shemeh’ prayer, have been widely adopted. Zoharic excerpts have been incorporated into the liturgy, and the practice of ritual reading of the Zohar has been established, based on the belief that its text is so sacred that its recital is beneficial even if one does not understand its content. From the sixteenth century on, Christian scholars, too, showed interest in the Zohar, and it was translated first into Latin and later into modern European languages.