Moshe de León

Castilian kabbalist who circulated the Aramaic texts that became the Zohar, attributing them to Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai. Tradition holds the Zohar to be ancient; most modern scholars see de León as its main author or editor.

Who was Rabbi Moshe de León?

Rabbi Moshe ben Shem Tov de León was a Castilian kabbalist of the thirteenth century, and the man through whom the Zohar, the central book of Kabbalah, first came into the world. He circulated its Aramaic texts, which present the teachings of the second-century sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and his companions. Tradition holds the Zohar to be the ancient teaching of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai; most modern scholars see Moshe de León as its main author or editor, perhaps within a circle of kabbalists.

Castile

Moshe de León was born around 1240, probably in León, in the kingdom of Castile. Castile in his time was home to a flowering of Kabbalah, and he studied both the mystical traditions of his day and the philosophy of the Rambam. For many years he lived in Guadalajara, and later in Ávila, and he moved among a circle of kabbalists that included Rabbi Yosef Gikatilla.

The Zohar

From the 1280s, Moshe de León began to circulate sections of a book written in Aramaic, which he said he had copied from an ancient manuscript. Written as a commentary on the Torah, the Zohar, “Radiance,” describes Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and his companions walking the roads of the Land of Israel and revealing the secrets of the Torah: the ten sefirot, the inner life of God, the Divine Presence in exile, the soul, and the meaning of the commandments and of prayer.

The question of the Zohar’s origins was raised already in his own lifetime. Rabbi Yitzhak of Acre, who came to Castile to investigate, recorded conflicting testimonies. For most traditional Jews, the Zohar is the holy teaching of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, whether written down by him or transmitted over generations. In the twentieth century, Gershom Scholem argued that Moshe de León was its author; later scholars, such as Yehuda Liebes, have proposed that it was the work of a circle of kabbalists, or that it grew over time.

His Hebrew works

Moshe de León also wrote many kabbalistic books in Hebrew under his own name, among them Sefer HaRimmon, on the reasons for the commandments, Shekel HaKodesh, and HaNefesh HaHakhamah, on the soul. Their ideas and language are closely related to those of the Zohar.

Death

Moshe de León died in 1305 in Arévalo, in Castile, on his way home.

Rabbi Moshe de León’s legacy for Sephardim

Whatever one’s view of its origins, the Zohar became one of the most sacred books of the Jewish people, and nowhere was it more beloved than among Sephardim. The kabbalists of Safed built on it, the Arizal’s teachings flow from it, and in Sephardic communities from Morocco to Baghdad it has been read aloud, studied on holy nights, and recited for its own sake. All of that began in Castile, with Rabbi Moshe de León.

Sephardic connection

Castilian Jewish mystic centrally associated with the composition and circulation of the Zohar