Of the dozens of texts held sacred by the school of Judaic mysticism known as Kabbalah, perhaps the most important is the Sefer Hazohar, (literally the Book of Splendor. Indeed, students of this collection of several lengthy Kabbalistic commentaries on the Torah — most commonly known in the West as the Holy Zohar – often assign it the same stature as Judaism’s two most holy books, the Torah and the Talmud.

Written in an arcane form of Aramaic, the Zohar purports to have been authored by second century rabbi and prominent critic of the Roman government in years following the destruction of the Second Temple, Shimon bar Yochai. Yochai claimed to have received the text from God himself, though most modern day scholars, however, attribute the work to Moses de Leon — a Spanish Kabbalist who lived some eleven hundred years later. Historians do concede, however, that, much like the books of the Bible, the disparate pieces of the Zohar were not all set down at one time. Rather, de Leon merely was the first to recorded several different tracts of the Oral Torah that passed been down from father to son, teacher to student over the course of many generations and that Yochai could have been an initial contributor.

The Kabbalah’s own inborn tradition details its spread. As the Jewish Diaspora spread throughout Europe and Eurasia after the fall of the Temple and, later, the crumbling of the Roman Empire, adepts of the “secret chain of mysteries” that is the Kabbalah brought the sacred knowledge with them, but shared it only with a select few. It would have been in this fashion that the original text of the Zohar was secreted out of the Holy Land and into one of Spain’s many Jewish communities.

And there was good reason for Jewish scholars to keep to the Zohar away from public scrutiny. The book maintains that the Torah and, by extension, all of reality exists on two distinct levels: the exoteric and the esoteric. It further posits that there is no one true interpretation of the Old Testament and that every soul is given – and, more importantly, encouraged — to make its own unique reading of scripture.

This statement alone – which happens to share a fair amount of philosophical overlap with the similarly persecuted Gnostics — would have been viewed as heresy by the religions by Spain’s then Judeo-friendly Catholic Church and citizens.

Consider then the anti-Semitism that swelled throughout the country in the years after Leon’s death. In 1492, all Spanish Jews were forcibly expelled; those that chose to convert in order to remain found themselves facing integration the hands of the Inquisition. And so, formal Kabbalic study was largely eradicated from the Iberian Peninsula – but not before the Zohar had managed become a key text of yet another secretive, albeit quasi-secular, sect: the European alchemists.

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