Moses de Leon distributed the Zohar as an ancient text, but scholarship places its composition in medieval Castile.
Imported citation, not independently checked: G. Scholem, Major Trends (1941); Y. Liebes, How the Zohar Was Written
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Who Was Moses de León?
Who Was Moses de León?
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The current answer
The Castilian Kabbalist who put the Zohar into circulation, and the authorship question that a century of scholarship has made less settled, not more.
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The argument that made single authorship the twentieth-century consensus is Gershom Scholem's, and it is linguistic rather than anecdotal.
Imported citation, not independently checked: G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941)
What it establishes most securely is when: the Zohar is a work of late-thirteenth-century Castile, not of second-century Galilee.
Imported citation, not independently checked: G. Scholem, Major Trends; Y. Liebes, Studies in the Zohar
Ronit Meroz's work on the Zohar's textual layers argues that the material accumulated in identifiable strata over an extended period rather than in one composition.
Imported citation, not independently checked: Ronit Meroz, studies of the Zohar's textual layers
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