This claim is universally rejected by modern scholars, most of whom believe de León, also an infamous forger of Geonic material, wrote the book himself between 1280 and 1286.

Some scholars argue that the Zohar is the work of multiple medieval authors and/or contains a small amount of genuinely antique novel material.

According to Gershom Scholem and other modern scholars, Zoharic Aramaic is an artificial dialect largely based on a linguistic fusion of the Babylonian Talmud and Targum Onkelos, but confused by de León's simple and imperfect grammar, his limited vocabulary, and his reliance on loanwords, including from contemporaneous medieval languages.

[2][3][4] The author further confused his text with occasional strings of Aramaic-seeming gibberish, in order to give the impression of obscure knowledge.

[c] By the time of the first edition (1558) the text was entirely in Aramaic,[6] with the exception of the Midrash haNe'elam, where Hebrew words and phrases are often employed as in the Babylonian Talmud.

"[5] 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-Talmudic period while purporting to be from an earlier date.

and some say that [de Leon] forged it among his forgeries,[d] but [Isaac] said that the Palestinian Aramaic[e] sections were genuinely written by Simeon b. Yochai .

[14][15] Within fifty years of its appearance in Spain it was quoted by Kabbalists, including the Italian mystical writer Menahem Recanati and Todros ben Joseph Abulafia.

In Jacobs' and Broyde's view, they were attracted by its glorification of man, its doctrine of immortality, and its ethical principles, which they saw as more in keeping with the spirit of Talmudic Judaism than are those taught by the philosophers, and which was held in contrast to the view of Maimonides and his followers, who regarded man as a fragment of the universe whose immortality is dependent upon the degree of development of his active intellect.

[7] Conversely, Elia del Medigo (c. 1458 – c. 1493), in his Beḥinat ha-Dat, endeavored to show that the Zohar could not be attributed to Simeon ben Yochai, by a number of arguments.

They found it unsurprising that ben Yochai should have foretold future happenings or made references to historical events of the post-Talmudic period.

"[29] Debate continued over the generations; del Medigo's arguments were echoed by Leon of Modena (d. 1648) in his Ari Nohem, by Jean Morin (d. 1659), and by Jacob Emden (d. 1776).

[30] In the Ashkenazi community of Eastern Europe, religious authorities including Elijah of Vilna (d. 1797) and Shneur Zalman of Liadi (d. 1812) believed in the authenticity of the Zohar, while Ezekiel Landau (d. 1793), in his sefer Derushei HaTzlach (דרושי הצל"ח),[31] argued that the Zohar is to be considered unreliable as it was made public many hundreds of years after Ben Yochai's death and lacks an unbroken tradition of authenticity, among other reasons.

[38] The influence of the Zohar in Yemen contributed to the formation of the Dor Deah movement, led by Yiḥyah Qafiḥ in the later part of the 19th century.

Among its objects was the opposition of the influence of the Zohar, as presented in Qafiḥ's Milhamoth Hashem (Wars of the Lord)[39] and Da'at Elohim.

[6] However, Yechiel Michel Epstein (d. 1908) and Yisrael Meir Kagan (d. 1933) both believed in the authenticity of the Zohar, as did Menachem Mendel Kasher (d. 1983), Aryeh Kaplan (d. 1983),[8] David Luria (d. 1855),[41] and Chaim Kanievsky (d.

[43] Ovadia Yosef (d. 2013) held that Orthodox Jews should accept the Zohar's antiquity in practice based on medieval precedent, but agreed that rejecting it is rational and religiously valid.

[42] Joseph Hertz (d. 1946) called the claim of ben Yochai's authorship "untenable", citing Gershom Scholem's evidence.

[47] Early attempts included M. H. Landauer's Vorläufiger Bericht über meine Entdeckung in Ansehung des Sohar (1845), which fingered Abraham Abulafia as the author, and Samuel David Luzzatto's ויכוח על חכמת הקבלה (1852), but the first systematic and critical academic proof for the authorship of Moses de León was given by Adolf Jellinek in his 1851 monograph "Moses ben Shem-tob de León und sein Verhältnis zum Sohar".

Jellinek's proofs, which combined previous analyses with Isaac of Acre's testimony and comparison of the Zohar to de Leon's Hebrew works, were accepted by every other major scholar in the field, including Heinrich Graetz (History of the Jews, vol.

[48] Adolf Neubauer and Samuel Rolles Driver were convinced by these arguments, but Edward Bouverie Pusey held to a Tannaitic date.

"[50] Gershom Scholem, who was to found modern academic study of Kabbalah, began his career at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1925 with a lecture in which he promised to refute Graetz and Jellinek.

Scholem noted the Zohar's frequent errors in Aramaic grammar, its suspicious traces of Arabic and Spanish words and sentence patterns, and its lack of knowledge of the Land of Israel, among other proofs.

Another influence that Scholem, and scholars like Yehudah Liebes and Ronit Meroz have identified[52] was a circle of Spanish Kabbalists in Castile who dealt with the appearance of an evil side emanating from within the world of the sefirot.

t. Faithful Shepherd (רעיא מהימנא) By far the largest "book" included in the Zohar, this is a Kabbalistic commentary on Moses' teachings revealed to ben Yochai and his friends.

[57] u. Rectifications of the Zohar (תקוני זוהר) Tikunei haZohar, which was printed as a separate book, includes seventy commentaries called Tikunim (lit.

On the one hand, the Zohar was lauded by many rabbis because it opposed religious formalism, stimulated one's imagination and emotions, and for many people helped reinvigorate the experience of prayer.

[7] According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, "On the other hand, the Zohar was censured by many rabbis because it propagated many superstitious beliefs, and produced a host of mystical dreamers, whose overexcited imaginations peopled the world with spirits, demons, and all kinds of good and bad influences.

[7] For example, Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, began to be looked upon as the embodiment of God in temporal life, and every ceremony performed on that day was considered to have an influence upon the superior world.

[7] Thus, in the language of some Jewish poets, the beloved one's curls indicate the mysteries of the Deity; sensuous pleasures, and especially intoxication, typify the highest degree of divine love as ecstatic contemplation; while the wine-room represents merely the state through which the human qualities merge or are exalted into those of God.