PREFACE

name Zohar might have originated with Moses de Leon, the ideas it embodied were far older than the thirteenth century. How, he asks pertinently, would it have been possible for the Rabbis of the Middle Ages to have been deceived into accepting as an ancient document a work that was of completely modern origin? Obviously the Zohar was not the composition of Moses de Leon, but a compilation made by him from various documents dating from very early times. Moreover, as M. Vulliaud goes on to explain, those who deny its antiquity are the anti-Cabalists, headed by Graetz, whose object is to prove the Cabala to be at variance with orthodox Judaism. Theodore Reinach goes so far as to declare the Cabala to be "a subtle poison which enters into the veins of Judaism and wholly infests it"; Salomon Reinach calls it "one of the worst aberrations of the human mind." This view, many a student of the Cabala will hardly dispute, but to say that it is foreign to Judaism is another matter. The fact is that the main ideas of the Zohar find confirmation in the Talmud. As the Jewish Encyclopædia observes, "the Cabala is not really in opposition to the Talmud," and "many Talmudic Jews have supported and contributed to it." Adolphe Franck does not hesitate to describe it as "the heart and life of Judaism." "The greater number of the most eminent Rabbis of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed firmly in the sacredness of the Zohar and the infallibility of its teaching."