ZOHAR. Sefer ha-zohar (The book of splendor) is the central book in the literature of Jewish mysticism (Qabbalah). It is attributed to Shimʿon bar Yoḥʾai, a second century tanna, but modern scholarship has concluded that it is a compilation dating from thirteenth-century Spain. Quotations from the Zohar first appear in qabbalistic writings after 1280, and analysis of the book's terminology and prose style shows that its real author is Mosheh de León (1240–1305), a Castilian qabbalist.

Written mostly in Aramaic, the Zohar presents an elaborate and comprehensive, though not always coherent, mystical system that employs audacious anthropomorphic and sexual imagery to express a mythical and symbolic perception of divine reality without precedent in medieval Qabbalah. The Zohar was accepted by qabbalists as an authoritative ancient work, and its influence on the later evolution of Jewish mysticism was felt principally through the impact of its mythical conceptions on...