Reading the Zohar: The Sacred Text of the Kabbalah (review)

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Summer 2004) 545–548 PINCHAS GILLER. Reading the Zohar: The Sacred Text of the Kabbalah. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xviii Ⳮ 246. All religious traditions have a limited number of books that seem inexhaustible —books that continually generate new readings, new perspectives , and new approaches. In such works, each new layer of scholarship, more than just correcting its predecessor, shines new light, wearing away at the opacity of the text without undermining its inherent and creative obscurity. In Judaism, the Zohar is one such text. Over the course of the last century, scores of scholars have poured over this textus classicus of Jewish esotericism, trying to understand it and place it in various historical, literary, and theological contexts. Gershom Scholem and his student Isaiah Tishby brought this text and its worldview to the field of contemporary religious studies through selected translations (a full scholarly translation is still a desideratum), explication, and historical analysis. In the past two decades, a new generation of scholars has devoted its energy and creative thinking to the labyrinthine narrative we call Sefer Ha-Zohar, adding new layers, both critical and constructive, to Scholem and Tishby’s foundational work. One new approach has been to focus less on the Zohar as ‘‘text’’ and more on the reception of the Zohar as intellectual and cultural artifact. Pinchas Giller’s Reading the Zohar is one such exciting new study. A text like the Zohar, partially because of its achieved sacrality, has a life that extends far beyond itself. Its authorial intent (singular or plural), while interesting, is only one part of that history. Its canonical stature (another important topic recently studied by the Israeli scholar Boaz Huss),1 internal claims about its own origin, and its reception among postmedieval kabbalists, particularly from the sixteenth century onward, contribute to an overarching reconstruction of Judaism writ large. Reading the Zohar is dedicated to the latter concern, that is, an exploration into the ways the readers of the Zohar reconstruct Jewish metaphysics and 1. Boaz Huss, ‘‘‘Sefer Ha-Zohar’ as a Canonical, Sacred, and Holy Text,’’ Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 7.2 (1997): 257–307; and ‘‘The Anthological Interpretation: The Emergence of Anthologies of Zohar Commentaries in the Seventeenth Century,’’ Prooftexts 19.1 (1999): 1–19. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Summer 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 546 JQR 94:3 (2004) theology utilizing, interpreting, and sometimes deconstructing the text of the Zohar. Giller focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on the mystical fraternities in Safed in the sixteenth century, particularly the circles of Moses Cordovero and Isaac Luria, and subsequent generations devoted to the Lurianic school. This makes perfect sense given that these two individuals and their disciples, and the small Galilean hamlet where they lived (including smaller circles in Jerusalem and Damascus and later in Italy and Poland), literally rewrote Jewish theology in the course of about eighty years (roughly from 1520 until 1600). After manuscript versions of their teachings began appearing in Europe and North Africa at the turn of the seventeenth century, Cordoverean and Lurianic kabbalah came to dominate Jewish mystical discourse and analysis. Hence, while the title of the book may suggest to the reader that it is about late-medieval Spain (when the Zohar was composed and/or redacted), it is really about sixteenth -century Safed, although, as Giller argues, historical context becomes a bit blurred when one occupies the time-bending world of metaphysics and cosmology. In fact, this is one of the book’s most important claims. Implicit in its structure is the idea that one can and should historicize kabbalistic doctrine—Giller himself weighs in on Scholem’s theory of tsimtsum and the Spanish expulsion (pp. 147–50) and reincarnation (gilgul) as a response to human suffering (pp. 37–41 and especially 68). Still, Giller appropriately draws the reader’s attention away from sociological analysis and considerations of composition, and into the spheres of reception and interpretation. That is, in what ways do these sixteenth-century kabbalists use, manipulate, and...