Editing Zohar (section)

===Initial view===
Authorship of the ''Zohar'' was questioned from the outset, due to the claim that it was discovered by one person and referred to historical events of the post-[[Rabbinic period|Talmudic period]] while purporting to be from an earlier date.<ref name="jewcyclo">{{cite encyclopedia |title=Zohar |encyclopedia=Jewish Encyclopedia |publisher=Funk & Wagnalls Company |url=http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=142&letter=Z#406 |last=Jacobs |first=Joseph |author2=Broydé, Isaac}}</ref> [[Abraham Zacuto]]'s 1504 work ''Sefer Yuhasin'' (first printed 1566) quotes from the Kabbalist [[Isaac ben Samuel of Acre]]'s 13th century memoir ''Divre hayYamim'' (lost), which claims that the widow and daughter of de León revealed that he had written it himself and only ascribed the authorship to Simeon ben Yochai for personal profit:
{{blockquote|And [Isaac] went to Spain, to investigate how it happened in his time that the Book of the Zohar was found, which Simeon ben Yochai and [[Eleazar ben Simeon|his son Elazar]] had made in the cave . . . and some say that [de Leon] forged it among his forgeries,{{efn|For discussion of de Leon's other forgeries, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Hai Gaon’s Letter and Commentary on Aleynu: Further Evidence of Moses de León’s Pseudepigraphic Activity,” JQR 81 (1991), pp. 365-409; and the sources cited by Shmuel Glick, Eshnav le-Sifrut ha-Teshuvot (New York, 2012), pp. 237-238.}} but [Isaac later] said that the [[Western Aramaic languages|Palestinian Aramaic]]{{efn|Modern scholars have shown that the ''Zohar'' contains no Palestinian Aramaic at all, instead relying on [[Jewish Babylonian Aramaic|Babylonian sources]] for its grammar and vocabulary.}} sections were genuinely written by Simeon b. Yochai{{efn|In his ''Otzar haChayyim''. Ed. Yehuda Ohad Turgeman (2019). p. 230.}} . . . And [Isaac] wrote:
:Because I had seen that these words were wonderous, that they ran from a well high above which is beyond those uninitiated into the secrets of the divine, I chased after it and I asked the scholars . . . and some said it had fallen into the hand of the sage Moses de Leon, whom they call Moses of Guadalajara, and some said Simeon ben Yochai had never written this book, but that Moses had written these wonderous words and falsely ascribed them to Simeon ben Yochai and his son Elazar in order to sell them for huge sums of money. And I went to Spain, to the capital city of Valladolid, and presented myself to Moses, and was received favorably, and he swore to me by the Lord that the ancient book of Simeon ben Yochai was that day in his house in Ávila, and that he would show it to me when I visited him, and Moses parted from me to return home, but he sickened in [[Arévalo]] on the way, and he died there, and when I heard of this I was mortally pained, and I took to the road, and I came to Ávila, and I found a great old sage there named David de [[Pancorbo]],{{efn|In MSS and printings corrupted to "Defan Corpo" and first read this way by [[Yitzhak Baer]]; cf. Scholem, "Did Moses de Leon write the Zohar?" [Hebrew] (1926)}} and he received me favorably, and I demanded he explain to me the secrets of the Book of the Zohar, about which men were disputing, and about which Moses himself had sworn beyond doubt until his death, but about which I did not know upon whom to rely or whom to trust,  and he told me, "Know in truth that it is clear to me beyond doubt that it never came to the hand of this Moses, and that there is no Book of the Zohar except that of which Moses himself wrote every word. Know that this Moses was a great spendthrift; one day his house was filled with treasures that the wealthy mystics had given him in exchange for excerpts, and the next his wife and children were starving naked in the street. So when we heard that he had died in Arévalo, I went to the house of the richest man in the city, Joseph de Ávila,{{efn|"Don Jucaf de Ávila" is mentioned in period Spanish documents according to [[Yitzhak Baer]]; see Scholem, ''Did Moses de Leon write the Zohar?'' [Hebrew] (1926), p. 18 n. 8.}} and said to him, 'Now the time has come for you to earn the priceless Zohar if you will do what I advise', and he followed my advice, and he sent his wife to the house of Moses' widow, and she said to her, 'Know that my wish is to marry your daughter to my son, and I ask nothing from you except the Book of the Zohar from which your husband excerpted for many people,' and Moses' widow swore to Joseph's wife, 'By the Lord, my husband never had such a book except in his mind, and everything he wrote came from his own intellect. When I saw him writing, I asked him why he claimed to be excerpting from a book I knew he did not have, and he told me that it was because, while for his own words they would not give a penny, for the divinely inspired work of Simeon ben Yochai they will pay in blood.' And Moses' daughter said exactly the same." Can you ask for better proof than this?}}

Isaac goes on to say that he obtained mixed evidence of Zohar's authenticity from other Spanish Kabbalists, but the fragment ends abruptly, mid-sentence, without any conclusion. Though Isaac is willing to quote it in his ''Otzar haChayyim''<ref name=":1" /> and his ''Meirat Einayim'',<ref name=":5" />  he does so rarely.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Huss |first=Boaz |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZHJvEAAAQBAJ |title=The Zohar: Reception and Impact |date=2016-05-12 |publisher=Liverpool University Press |isbn=978-1-78962-486-1 |language=en}}</ref> Isaac's testimony was censored from the second edition (1580)<ref>[http://hebrewbooks.org/5900 ''The Complete Yuchsin Book'', third edition (5723)], p. [http://hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=5900&pgnum=29 XXII] "ובדף קל"ג השמיט המוציא לאור את המאמר על דבר ספר הזהר." (English: "And on page 133 the publisher erased the essay concerning the matter of the book of the Zohar.")</ref> and remained absent from all editions thereafter until its restoration nearly 300 years later in the 1857 edition.<ref>Available at [http://hebrewbooks.org/46738 HebrewBooks.org: ספר יוחסין השלם], p. [http://hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=46738&st=&pgnum=92 88]-[http://hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=46738&st=&pgnum=93 89] / [http://hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=46738&pgnum=99 95]-[http://hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=46738&st=&pgnum=100 96] (Hebrew).</ref><ref>Dan Rabinowitz in ''Hakirah, The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought'', [http://www.hakirah.org/Volume%202.htm volume 2 (fall 2015)], ''Nekkudot: The Dots that Connect Us'', p. [https://web.archive.org/web/20060108140004/http://www.hakirah.org/Vol%202%20Rabinowitz.pdf#page%3D16 64].</ref> In 1243 a different Jew had reportedly found a different ancient mystical book in a cave near [[Toledo, Spain|Toledo]], which may have been de Leon's inspiration.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Wolff |first=Johannes Christoph |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sDTEDybHAlkC |title=Bibliotheca Hebraea |date=1721 |publisher=Felgineri Viduam |pages=1121 |language=la}}</ref><ref name=":4">{{Cite web |last=Penkower |first=Jordan S. |title=S.D. Luzzatto, vowels and accents, and the date of the Zohar |url=https://www.nli.org.il/en/articles/RAMBI990004236870705171/NLI |access-date=2023-11-14 |website=www.nli.org.il |language=en}}</ref>

Within fifty years of its appearance in Spain it was quoted by Kabbalists, including the [[Italian people|Italian]] mystical writer [[Menahem Recanati]] and [[Todros ben Joseph Abulafia]]. However, [[Joseph ben Waqar]] harshly attacked the ''Zohar'',<ref>{{Cite book |last=ה-14. |first=אבן וקאר, יוסף בן אברהם, המאה |url=http://worldcat.org/oclc/58404406 |title=ספר שרשי הקבלה |date=2004 |publisher=Hotsaʼat Keruv |isbn=0-9747505-6-5 |oclc=58404406}}</ref> which he considered inauthentic,<ref>Moritz Steinschneider, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, Berlin, 1925, p. 171</ref> and some Jewish communities, such as the [[Dor Daim]] from Yemen, [[Andalusia]]n (Western Sefardic or [[Spanish and Portuguese Jews]]), and some Italian communities, never accepted it as authentic.<ref name="jewcyclo" /> Other early Kabbalists, such as [[David ben Judah the Pious|David b. Judah the Pious]] (fl. c. 1300), [[Abraham ben Isaac of Granada|Abraham b. Isaac of Granada]], (fl. c. 1300), and [[David ben Amram Adani|David b. Amram of Aden]] (fl. c. 1350), so readily imitate its pseudepigraphy by ascribing contemporaries' statements to Zoharic sages that it is obvious they understood its nature.<ref name=":7">{{Cite book |last=Tishby |first=Isaiah |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VG1vEAAAQBAJ |title=The Wisdom of the Zohar: Anthology of Texts |date=1989-09-01 |publisher=Liverpool University Press |isbn=978-1-909821-82-8 |pages= |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Schechter |first=Solomon |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=68U2AQAAMAAJ |title=מדרש הגדול: על המשה חומשי תורה, ספר בראשית,הוצא לאור... |date=1902 |publisher=at the University Press |pages=XIII |language=he}}</ref> The manuscripts of the ''Zohar'' are from the 14th-16th centuries.<ref>{{Cite book|title=The Zohar, volume 1, by Daniel C. Matt|quote=[...] but upon examining many of the original manuscripts of the ''Zohar'' dating from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries [...]}}</ref>