Rav Emden and the Zohar

Coming clean

To read previous items in the series, go here.

In the last instalment, we looked at the infamous Emden-Eybeschutz controversy which crashed the aura of rabbinic authority for European Jewry. To sum up, it’s obvious that Eybeschutz was a Sabbatean, and also that he believed a whole bunch of super weird things. The most material comes from his youth and it’s possible that he calmed down in later years, perhaps even probable given the sheer degree of graphic sex talk there is in אבוא היום אל העין, something that, in the way of things, usually loses its appeal with age. However, the claim that he was innocent is completely unsustainable.

Eybeschutz’s chief persecutor was R. Yakov Emden (though, in fact, R. Emden ended up getting a lot more persecuted than Eybeschutz did), an interesting figure for many reasons, and, in his breadth of learning and intellectual adventurousness, the rabbi of the period most similar to Eybeschutz himself, except not a crazy heretic. Both academics and normie orthodox defenders of Eybeschutz are wont to say uncomplimentary things about R. Emden in order to attribute his crusade to some kind of personality flaw or disorder. It’s true that R. Emden in his later years became rather a bitter man, and excessively credulous concerning allegations made about the secret practices of Eybeschutz and other Sabbatean rabbis,¹ but it’s also true that he was the subject not only of violence and lawfare, but a full two and a half decades of relentless gaslighting. To state the truth and be rewarded with endless wading through nonsense arguments and evasion will, at best, make you in due course depressed and resentful.

If you want to read more about Emden’s life of travails, then look here, but the important point for our history is that, in his mounting frustration and bewilderment concerning the mixture of indifference and hostility his quest to rid the Jewish people of heresy had met, he saw the terrible truth. Sabbateanism could not be excised because it wasn’t a freak accident or a foreign import. It was, instead, the fruit of the great theological revolution that dated back to the proliferation of the Zoharic corpus in the late 15th century. Since Sabbateanism is Zoharism, and Zoharism was Judaism, its adherents, assuming they possessed a modicum of conscientiousness and wit, could endlessly swerve from motte to bailey and back again without ever being caught. There was no way of decisively defeating them without confronting the source of all their doctrine.

Or was there? R. Emden was an accomplished student of kabbalistic literature, and, over his decades of study, he had noticed one troubling thing in the Zohar after another until a picture emerged in his head, one which eventually he felt he had to share with the world. Now, I can already hear members of Charedi Substack feverishly tapping on the smartphone they have a ‘heter for business purposes’ to use to catch me in a lie. Don’t you know that Rav Emden was a kabbalist and believed in the Zohar? It was only the wicked maskilim and academics who took his words out of context to make him look like a sceptic. Well, yes, indeed. Emden’s intention was not to condemn the Zohar, but to vindicate it from false interpretation, to show, as in the opening line to Mitpachat Sefarim, that ‘the whole essence of the Zohar is holy, and like the essence of the heavens in its purity’. His goal was to detach the Zohar from Sabbateanism, and, more broadly, from the whole complex of popular and elite Zoharism into which Sabbateanism was inextricably tangled up. His way of doing this was to distinguish between the book ‘the Zohar’, which had been first printed at Mantua and Cremona two centuries prior, from the true Zohar, which contains the esoteric truths of the Jewish religion. In other words, in order to vindicate the true Zohar, a thing to be discovered, R. Emden became the first textual critic of ‘the Zohar’, the thing that actually existed.

Based on his encyclopaedic knowledge of the text, and, for his time, strong grasp of historical philology, R. Emden presented the following taxonomy of the zoharic corpus, a taxonomy that, in certain respects, holds up surprisingly well today.

1. The oldest layer of the Zohar contains ‘short statements’ containing the ‘principles of wisdom in a cursory and concealed form’. These principles were received at Sinai and passed down until the time of the amoraim who were the first to write them down. These parts of the Zohar are those introduced by the terms מתניתין, תוספתא or ‘secrets of the Torah’ (3-5% of the total).

2. The second layer, which also counts as being part of the Zohar proper, dates from the period of an otherwise-unknown Babylonian amora called Shimon bar Yohai until the time of the Geonim. This layer is attributed to the tana Rabi Shimon bar Yochai either on the grounds that the doctrines taught date back to him and were passed down by his students, or because the later amoraim were reincarnations of Rabi Shimon and his contemporaries. This section includes the running midrashic commentary on the Torah (guf haZohar in academic terminology), the Idrot, Sifra d’Tzniuta, and the saba and yanuka dialogues (50%)

3. The third layer was written by a Spanish medieval kabbalist, either Moshe de Leon or one of his colleagues, synthesising and explaining material from the ancient layers. This layer includes Tikkunei Zohar and Ra’aya Mehemna (25%).

4. The fourth layer is Midrash Ne’elam, an incompetent medieval forgery, written partly in Hebrew and partly in defective Aramaic. (15%)

5. The fifth layer consists of additions by medieval scribes inserted throughout the first four categories, which are identifiable because they make obvious mistakes, or because they say blasphemous or heretical things. R. Emden identifies 281 such mistakes he has found, though that is an understatement because many of the items include multiple passages that make the same or similar mistakes. He also states that these are only those he has been able to identify in the course of his personal study and a systematic search might identify more (5%?).

R. Emden closes his discussion by calling for the production of an authoritative edition of the Zohar, one that omits fake material and identifies the different strata among the first four categories. That was 265 years ago, and R. Emden’s research programme was clear enough, so there’s been plenty of time to get it done in the meantime. But it doesn’t exist, and it never will exist, for the following reasons:

1. Passages that R. Emden identifies as obvious fakes were relied upon by the authoritative kabbalists. A simple example is no. 45 on his list of fraudulent insertions, where he identifies six [!] places in the Zohar that state that the hilazon from which the techelet dye is produced lives in the Sea of Galilee, a freshwater lake, contradicting the Talmud, which states it is found in the Mediterranean Sea. This is, indeed, a gross mistake, only partially excused by the fact that the authors of these passages lived in Spain and knew nothing at all of Levantine geography. However, Isaac Luria, who had no such excuse, clearly interprets these passages literally and believed them to be true. Thus, even a beginner’s attempt to implement R. Emden’s agenda would explode the whole kabbalistic enterprise by showing that the most elite kabbalists had zero ability to distinguish between fake and real parts of their holy book.

2. Both kabbalists and halachists who quoted the Zohar over the previous two centuries freely attributed it to Rabi Shimon, regardless of what strata they were citing, including the roughly 40% of the Zohar that R. Emden identified as medieval. Often, they underscored the tannaitic attribution in order to give halachic weight to the passage cited. Thus, again, R. Emden’s vindication of the Zohar would, if carried out in anything but the most impressionistic manner, collapse the whole edifice of authority built upon the Zohar and mandate going back and starting from scratch without Cordovero, Luria and the rest of it.

3. R. Emden performed two different types of textual criticism on the Zohar. In order to identify the different strata, he used a form of comparative linguistics. However, to identify the fake passages found within these four layers, he looked at content. If a section of the Zohar mixes up two amoraim, or paraphrases tosefos, or says straight heresy, then it’s fake. However, what happens if you combine these two forms of textual criticism? The answer is that there are no linguistic grounds for separating the real material from the fake. R. Emden’s assumption is that everything in the Zohar is authentic (within the definition of authentic appropriate to each layer) unless it can’t possibly be, but that’s just preposterous. It’s not reasonable at all to assume that every medieval scribe who stuck in some material made some error that exposes him, every time he did it. The only fair way to proceed is to analyse all the clear examples of fakery, look for linguistic commonalities and then see what other parts of the Zohar were written by the same authors. But the answer to that is that all of it was.

To put it simply, it’s certainly true that R. Emden set out to vindicate the ‘true Zohar’, but the true Zohar doesn’t actually exist. If you admit the possibility that some parts of the Zohar are fake and that the tools of reason can be used to identify them, you will in due course come to the conclusion that all of it’s fake because that’s what’s actually true in real life. However, I’m still substantially underselling the instability of Emden’s Zohar vindication, for two reasons:

1. One of the most difficult problems R. Emden had to deal with was the fact that the main body of the Zohar (his second stratum) undeniably postdates the tana Rabi Shimon bar Yohai by many generations for simple and irrefutable reasons. His first answer to the question, which appears at the beginning of Mitpachat Sefarim, is that the compilers of the Zohar were students of his students, and their teachings trace back to him. This is the argument relied on today by Zohar apologists who aren’t just ignoramus buffoons. However, R. Emden knew too much to believe this argument was sufficient because, within the layer of the Zohar that must be much later than Rabi Shimon bar Yohai, Rabi Shimon bar Yohai keeps popping up, speaking, doing things, often in conversation with people who lived long after he died. R. Emden’s true solution to this problem, which he introduces in the fifth chapter, is that there were two Rabi Shimon bar Yohais, the one that appears in the Mishnah and Talmud and a later Babylonian amora that no-one before had ever before heard of or imagined, that appears in the Zohar.
   
   This is a neat solution to the problem, but unfortunately, it’s completely ridiculous. R. Emden tries to soften the blow by speculating that perhaps the second Rabi Shimon was the reincarnation of the first one, but that’s even more ridiculous. This whole line of argument is so patently absurd that, whenever you find anyone discussing Mitpachat Sefarim, whether in the cause of attacking the authority of the Zohar or buttressing it, they almost invariably leave this part of R. Emden’s theory out. However, the truth is that it’s a central pillar of his whole model, and therefore vindication, of the Zohar. If you ignore, as everyone wishes to do, the theory of the phantom Rabi Shimon II, there is only one conclusion left: the reason that Rabi Shimon keeps popping up in the Zohar talking to people who lived after his death, or to people who don’t even exist, or referring to things he could never have known or seen in ways that make the whole thing look like a clumsy forgery by shoddy scholars is because it is. The method by which R. Emden identifies individual passages of the Zohar as fake, if we remove the ridiculous cope, in reality identifies the whole thing as fake (with the hypothetical exception of the small first stratum).
   

2. R. Emden’s goal was to pull the rug from the false, popular kabbalah (and its Sabbatean extension), which was based upon the book ‘the Zohar’, in order to preserve the true esoteric, elite kabbalah. The problem was this esoteric kabbalah never existed or, to put matters more accurately, it existed, but Zoharism came to kill it. The kabbalists of Gerona (Ramban being the most famous example) believed and practiced a rigorous, elitist and esoteric faith of theurgic prayer and ritual. The kabbalists of Castille disagreed with them on a large number of crucial points, but, perhaps most importantly, they disagreed with them on their elitism. The fact that the Zoharic corpus was not widely distributed for the first 150 years after most of it was composed was not for any want of trying on the part of its authors. At every stage in its proliferation, the masters of Zoharic kabbala did their utmost to promote knowledge of the secrets of the Torah, which, since the ‘discovery’ of the Zohar, were no longer secrets. It is true that Luria claimed to have discovered a new, esoteric layer of doctrine within the Zohar and both he and his students wanted that bit kept secret, but that collapsed pretty soon too. In short, R. Emden wanted to recover an authentic Zoharism that never existed, that is precisely what Zoharism is not.

Influence

R. Emden had opened a can of worms. There were only two responses left. The first was to follow his logic into, at a minimum, a drastic downgrading of the authority of the Zohar and its recategorization as an optional work of medieval Jewish philosophy. The second was to retreat into pure obscurantism, to look at the huge burden of evidence R. Emden had presented (and the more that was to come) and to shrug it off. What may be surprising to modern readers is that the brightest stars of the rabbinic establishment leaned towards the former.

The Chasam Sofer

R. Moshe Sofer established what would soon become one of Europe’s most prestigious yeshivot in Bratislava (known to German and Yiddish speakers as Pressburg), and became the generally acknowledged preeminent Rabbi of Hungarian Jewry. He was among the first to see that secularizing trends beginning in his era were qualitatively different from generic laxity and indifference which any religion struggles with over the course of its history and pioneered the slogan ‘anything new is forbidden by the Torah’ (wittily repurposing a talmudic phrase about a different topic). Because the Jews of Hungary and, even more so, Romania,² were much more likely to survive WW2 than anyone else in Eastern Europe except Bulgaria, his influence over Orthodox Jewry today is very great, with Belz, Vizhnitz and Satmar, as well as satellite groups, seeing him as their chief ideological inspiration.

It is relatively well known among interested people that despite (or, perhaps, because of) his uncompromising conservatism, the Chasam Sofer accepted R. Emden’s analysis of the Zohar, and understood that it implied more than R. Emden was willing to admit. He is quoted as saying that if it were possible to distil out of the Zohar only those parts that were really authored by Rabi Shimon that it would only come to a ‘few pages’.³

The Noda biYehuda

R. Yehekzkel Landau rose through the ranks to become Rabbi of Prague and authored probably the most important collections of teshuvot and talmudic chiddushim of the era. We saw him in the last installment as the chief architect of the policy to deal with the Eybeschutz problem by covering it up. This is obviously quite shocking, but the fault lies with Judaism in general, and not the Noda biYehuda, who accurately appraised a disastrous situation. Like the Chasam Sofer, the Noda biYehuda was a fierce opponent of secularising trends and the incipient haskalah movement, and, like the Chasam Sofer, he had read and agreed with R. Emden’s Zohar criticism.

The Noda biYehuda’s views were given their clearest expression in an essay he wrote that was later suppressed in printed versions of his drashot (you can read it here). Though he states that he can only say a fraction of his true beliefs for fear of what the kabbalists will do in response, he does say that the Zohar had no reliable history of transmission, a sine qua non for authority in Judaism, and that no-one can know whether any part of it is real (he also says the papers of Luria’s doctrines taken from Chaim Vital after his death cannot be trusted.⁴ However, the full extent of his views can be found stated by his student and successor R. Elazar Fleckeles who wrote that the Zohar is full of ‘forgeries and distortions’, that ‘one page of the Talmud Bavli … is holier than the entire Zohar’, that it was unknown to the editors of the Talmud and all the Geonim and Rishonim until ‘a certain group [church?] received it from a rabble’, and that ‘anyone with half a brain’ knows that it was written long after Rabi Shimon bar Yochai. He added that ‘from the day the Zohar was introduced many have stumbled’ and heaped praise on ‘our lord Kaiser Joseph II’ who had banned kabbalistic studies in his realms.⁵

A committed apologist will point out, and fairly enough, that none of these rabbis completely rejected the Zohar outright. However, what is really crucial to appreciate here is not where their opinions line up on an absolute spectrum, but the rapid direction of travel. The Chasam Sofer was the student of the eccentric kabbalist R. Nosson Adler; the Noda biYehuda was educated in the Brody Kloiz, the elite center of European kabbalistic study. They came from an intellectual world in which the Zohar was completely authoritative, entirely the work of Rabi Shimon and the epitome of holiness and wisdom. They arrived at the position that either nothing of the Zohar, or close to nothing, could be traced back to any tana, that it was full of clumsy and sometimes heretical forgeries, that it was a superfluous to Jewish religious life, that it was primarily a stumbling block, and that study of it should be prohibited by law.

It took one generation for the consequences of R. Emden’s application of critical reason to the Zohar to percolate through the European rabbinate. We cannot, of course, know exactly how far this process would have proceeded in due course. I like to think that it would have ended up where it should have, namely a serious and frank reckoning with what had happened over the previous three centuries, undoing what needed to be undone. More likely, though, I suppose, is that the Zohar would have drifted progressively into obscurity, its wild escapist fantasy realm of obscenity and narcissistic delirium reduced to traces and memory, just like the high-Aristotelianism of the medieval Spanish elite, the heichalot mysticism or whatever zany trends were current among Jews of the second temple period.

Regardless of internal developments in its religious ethos, the Jewish people were in short order going to have to face a number of challenges: modern science and technology, nationalisms, the opportunity for settlement in Ottoman Palestine, the rise of capital and then the proletariat as political force, the triumph of confidence in mechanistic rationality and its collapse. Thanks to R. Emden, the Jews had the chance to face it like adults, led by their natural leaders, the scholars of the oral law, firmly rooted in tradition, but with two eyes open. However, in the backwoods of the Ukraine, (and, in a different way, the narrow streets of Vilna) a different wind was blowing. The only viable option to preserve faith in Zoharism now was to abandon reasoned thought altogether, but there were some who were willing, eager even, to take the deal. In Mitpachat Sefarim, R. Emden noted that ‘there has arisen a new sect of hasidim in Volhynia, Podolia … whose entire activity is the Zohar and books of kabbalah … and they make strange movements in prayer and clap their hands…’⁶ It was already too late.

1. Apart from the dent this made to his credibility, it was also strategically unwise because it reinforced the idea of a necessary association between Sabbateanism and extreme antinomianism, which became in practice a weapon to acquit any Sabbateans who were not practical antinomians.

2. The Jewish communities of Romania were mostly in places that had been part of Hungary until WW1.

3. See the material in this comprehensive article by Marc Shapiro.

4. Most of the essay is taken up with a condemnation of the practice of having kabbalistic intentions during prayer or the performance of mitzvot. He grants that the descriptions of what happens in the supernal realms is true but argues that this happens automatically and requires no intention to bring about. Worse, he argues, performing such intentions entails fundamental heresy in mixing worship of God with other things, citing Saadya Gaon and the Rambam. On the one hand, this argument affirms the truth of kabbalah in some sense, but, on the other, it both directly contradicts every single kabbalist and effectively categorises the whole kabbalistic movement as heretical. One possible interpretation is that the Noda biYehuda didn’t realise the implications of what he was saying, but that doesn’t seem possible. I am inclined to say that, despite the surface impression of the essay, in fact this is an exoteric and tactical message designed to simply make people stop doing kabbalistic practices, which, in turn, would make them less interested in learning the doctrine.

5. May we live to see the day when the government of the Jewish state will be half as righteous as he.

6. See p. 113 and onwards.