1. On the Zohar as a cultural product, see the scholarship of Boaz Huss. His monograph, Like the Radiance of the Sky: Chapters in the Reception History of the Zohar and the Construction of Its Symbolic Value [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi and Mosad Bialik, 2008) and its English translation, Zohar: Reception and Impact (Oxford: Littman, 2016), provide a comprehensive overview of works and strategies that sought to mediate the Zohar. Other important articles by Huss relevant to my main argument include “A Dictionary to the Foreign Words of the Zohar—A Critical Edition” [in Hebrew], Kabbalah 1 (1996): 167–204; “Sefer ha-Zohar as a Canonical, Sacred, and Holy Text: Changing Perspectives of the Book of Splendor between the Thirteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 7 (1998): 257–307; “The Anthological Interpretation: The Emergence of Anthologies of Zohar Commentaries in the Seventeenth Century,” Prooftexts 19 (1999): 1–19; “Translations of the Zohar” [in Hebrew], Teʿudah 21–22 (2007): 33–110. See also Abrams, Daniel, “The Cultural Reception of the Zohar: An Unknown Lecture by Gershom Scholem from 1940 (Study, Edition, and English Translation),” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 19 (2009): 279–315Google Scholar; Giller, Pinchas, Reading the Zohar: The Sacred Text of Kabbalah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mopsik, Charles, “Le corpus zoharique: Ses tires et ses amplifications,” in La formation des canons scripturaires, ed. Tardieu, Michel (Paris: Cerf, 1993), 75–105Google Scholar.

2. Frow, John, Genre: The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2006), 19Google Scholar.

3. For a preliminary study of ʾImrei binah, see Gondos, Andrea, Kabbalah in Print: The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism in Early Modernity (New York: SUNY Press, 2020), 131–52Google Scholar.

4. I engage Adam Shear's important methodological argument concerning the use of both diachronic and synchronic dimensions in the reception history of texts; see Shear, “Judah Moscato's Sources and Hebrew Printing in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary Survey,” in Rabbi Judah Moscato and the Jewish Intellectual World of Mantua in the 16^th–17th Centuries, ed. Giuseppe Veltri and Gianfranco Miletto (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 121–22.

5. Tishby, Isaiah, Wisdom of the Zohar (Oxford: Littman, 1991), 1:103Google Scholar. See also Yissakhar Baer ben Naftali ha-Kohen from Szczebrzeszyn's index to the Zohar, Mar'eh kohen, where he explicitly states that the words and sayings of the Zohar directly contribute to performance and their reading and comprehension stimulate the reader to actualize them: “It is as if the word [dibur] spoke and declared, ‘do me, my son, make me, interpret me and live’” (Krakow, 1589), fol. 1a. Furthermore, a more modern phenomenon introduced into Kabbalah Centers worldwide, the technique of “scanning” pages of the Zohar, is also based on the inherent correlation between reading the Zohar and affecting one's behavior and spiritual state. For more on the practice of scanning, see Myers, Jody, “The Kabbalah Centre and Contemporary Spirituality,” Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Huss, Like the Radiance of the Sky, viii.

7. Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:20–21. See also Huss, “Anthologies of Zohar Commentaries,” 14n11.

8. It was printed by two Venetian printers, first by Bomberg in 1522–23 and two decades later by Justinian in 1544–45.

9. See Idel, Moshe, “The Translation of R. David ben Judah Hehasid of the Zohar and His Interpretation of the Alfa Beita” [in Hebrew], ʿAlei sefer 8 (1980): 60–73; (1981): 84–98Google Scholar; Matt, Daniel C., The Book of Mirrors (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1986), 13–15, cited in Boaz Huss, “Translations of the Zohar: Historical Contexts and Ideological Frameworks,” Correspondences 4 (2016): 85Google Scholar.

10. On Ricius, see Wilkinson, Robert J., Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 325–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Black, Crofton, “From Kabbalah to Psychology: The Allegorizing of Isagoge of Paulus Ricius, 1509–1541,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 2, no. 2 (2007): 136–73Google Scholar. On Galatino see Severio Campanini, “Quasi post Vindemias Racemos Colligens: Pietro Galatino und seine Verteidigung der christlichen Kabbala,” in Reuchlins Freunde und Gegner: Kommunikative Konstellationen eines frühneuzeitlichen Medienereignisses, ed. Wilhelm Kühlmann, Pforzheimer Reuchlinschriften 12 (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke, 2010), 69–88. On Giustiniani, see Aurelio Cevolotto, Agostino Giustiniani: Un umanista tra bibbia e cabala, Collana Dimensione Europa (Genova: ECIG, 1992).

11. Huss, “Translations of the Zohar,” 86–87. For more works on Postel see Judith Weiss, “Giullaume Postel's Introduction to His First Latin Translation and Commentary on the Book of Zohar” [in Hebrew], in And This Is for Yehuda: Studies Presented to Our Friend, Professor Yehuda Liebes, ed. Maren R. Niehoff, Ronit Meroz, and Jonathan Garb (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2012), 258–59; Meroz, Ronit and Weiss, Judith, “The Source of Guillaume Postel's 1553 Zohar Latin Translation,” Renaissance Studies 28, no. 4 (2014): 1–14Google Scholar; Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Geschichte der christlichen Kabbala (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2012), 582–96; François Secret, Le Zohar chez les les kabbalistes chrétiens de la renaissance (Paris: Mouton, 1964), 23, 51–63; Marion L. Kuntz, Guillaume Postel, Prophet of the Restitution of All Things: His Life and Thought (Hague: Nijhof, 1981), 110, 112–13, 137.

12. Huss, “Translations of the Zohar,” 91.

13. Boaz Huss, “Text and Context of the 1684 Sulzbach Edition of the Zohar,” in Tradition, Heterodoxy and Religious Culture: Judaism and Christianity in the Early Modern Period, ed. Chanita Goodblatt and Howard Kreisel (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion of the Negev Press, 2006), 117–18.

14. Ibid., 121.

15. Andrea Gondos, “New Kabbalistic Genres and Their Readers in Early Modern Europe,” in Connecting Histories: Jews and Their Others in Early Modern Europe, ed. Francesca Bregoli and David Ruderman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 77–79.

16. Yosef Ofer, The Masorah on Scripture and Its Methods (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018); Elvira Martín-Contreras and Lorena Miralles-Maciá, eds., The Text of the Hebrew Bible: From the Rabbis to the Masoretes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014); Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson, eds., A History of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009).

17. Gerrit Bos, “The Creation and Innovation of Medieval Medical Terminology: Shem Tov ben Isaac ‘Sefer ha-Shimmush,’” in Islamic Thought in the Middle Ages: Studies in Text, Transmission and Translation, in Honor of Hans Daiber, ed. Anna Akasoy and Wim Raven (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 195–218; Bos, “Shem Tov ben Isaac, Glossary of Botanical Terms, Nos. 1–18,” Jewish Quarterly Review 92, nos. 1–2 (2001): 21–40; Bos, “A Late Medieval Hebrew-French Glossary of Biblical Animal Names,” Romance Philology 63 (2009): 71–94.

18. Shifra Sznol, “Medieval and Jewish Greek Lexicography: The Arukh of Nathan ben Jehiel,” Erytheia 30 (2009): 107–28.

19. Lawrence Kaplan, “Rationalism and Rabbinic Culture in Sixteenth-Century Eastern Europe: Rabbi Mordecai Jaffe's Levush Pinat Yikrat” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1975), 92.

20. Ibid., 93.

21. Some of the major publications that deal with the question of the authorship of the Zohar are Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1941); Tishby, introduction to Wisdom of the Zohar; Yehuda Liebes, Studies in the Zohar (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993); and Daniel Abrams, Kabbalistic Manuscripts and Textual Theory: Methodologies of Textual Scholarship and Editorial Practice in the Study of Jewish Mysticism (Los Angeles: Cherub, and Jerusalem: Magnes, 2010). More recently, Ronit Meroz has published a major scholarly work dedicated to the comprehensive investigation of the various textual layers of the Zohar in parashat Shemot from a philological, literary, historical, and semantic points of view; see Headwaters of the Zohar: Analysis and Annotated Critical Edition of Parashat Exodus of the Zohar [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2019).

22. Yehuda Liebes, “Hebrew and Aramaic as Languages of the Zohar,” Aramaic Studies 4 (2006): 36.

23. As Scholem confidently stated: “The Aramaic of the Zohar is a purely artificial affair.” See Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 163, and Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 1:64. These sources are quoted in Liebes, “Hebrew and Aramaic,” 36.

24. Charles Mopsik, “Late Judeo-Aramaic: The Language of Theosophic Kabbalah,” Aramaic Studies 4 (2007): 21–33; Ada Rapoport-Albert and Theodore Kwasman, “Late Aramaic: The Literary and Linguistic Context of the Zohar,” Aramaic Studies 4 (2006): 5–19; and Liebes, “Hebrew and Aramaic,” 35–52.

25. Yehuda Liebes, “Zohar and Eros,” ʾAlpayim 9 (1994): 67–119.

26. Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography, and the Making of Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 15.

27. Meir ibn Gabbai, Tolaʿat Yaakov (Jerusalem, 1967), 23, and Menaḥem Azariah da Fano, Kanfei Yonah, part 3, #7. Cited in Liebes, “Hebrew and Aramaic,” 47–48.

28. An indispensable reference tool for understanding the foreign phrases found in the Zohar is Yehuda Liebes's doctoral dissertation, “Sections of the Zohar Lexicon” (PhD diss., Hebrew University, 1976), which in fact utilized and built on Scholem's card catalogue that indexed linguistic and philological material for the preparation of a large and comprehensive lexicon to the Zohar. Scholem's card catalogue has now been digitized, and an expanded version can now be consulted online, http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLI/English/collections/jewish-collection/scholem/scholem-card-catalog/Pages/search.aspx.

29. The Biʾur is related sometimes to the dictionary of R. David ben Judah he-Ḥasid. In one manuscript, Jerusalem 80 °4, R. David's book Sefer ha-gevul is presented together with the Biʾur, and a note in in the manuscript ascribes the authorship of the Biʾur to R. David. It is also of note that while the Biʾur translates and explains the foreign terms of the Zohar, R. David often simply cites them without a translation. See Boaz Huss, “A Dictionary to the Foreign Words in the Zohar,” 167. Huss also cites several other academic sources on the question of R. David as the possible author of the Biʾur, see Scholem, “Chapters from the History of Kabbalistic Literature” [in Hebrew], Kiryat sefer 6 (1929): 325; Liebes, “Sections of the Zohar Lexicon,” 162; Liebes, “How Was the Zohar Written?,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 8 (1989): 58n250.

30. Huss, “A Dictionary to the Foreign Words in the Zohar,” 169–71, provides a complete list of the manuscript variants.

31. Ibid., 167. Huss notes that this text constitutes the first literary attempt written with the explicit aim to facilitate the study of the Zohar.

32. Ibid., 168; Ibn Lavi in Ketem paz and Abraham Azulay in ʾOr ḥamah. Based on MS Cambridge 1244 and one of the printed editions, both of which mention Ibn Lavi's name as author, Huss argues in favor of accepting the authorship of Ibn Lavi for the Biʾur.

33. On this work see also Zeev Gries, Conduct Literature (Regimen Vitae): Its History and Place in the Life of Beshtian Hasidism [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1989), 75n117. See also Huss, Like the Radiance of the Sky, 246n104.

34. Aharon Zeilig in his ʿAmudei sheva includes some exposition of ʾimrei zarot in the Zohar. He explains in his introduction that while he is familiar with Yissakhar Baer's ʾImrei binah, he prefers his teacher's R. Tiktin's Zoharic dictionary, no longer extant today. See Jacob Elbaum, Openness and Insularity: Late Sixteenth-Century Jewish Literature in Poland and Ashkenaz [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1990), 193n39. Daniel Abrams recently printed a new edition of ‘Amudei sheva with an extensive introduction. See Abrams, ‘Amudei sheva (Los Angeles: Cherub, 2016).

35. Huss, “A Dictionary to the Foreign Words in the Zohar,” 167.

36. Sefer ha-yaḥas, ed. Eliezer Rivlin (Jerusalem, 1935). This book contains the genealogical information of the Rivlin, the Gra (Vilna), Elyash, Rosh Yosef, and Lidda families.

37. David Lidda, Sod ha-Shem (Amsterdam, 1680 or 1694), 2 and 4. See Gondos, “New Kabbalistic Genres,” 244, no. 9.

38. Elbaum, Openness and Insularity, 187.

39. Yissakhar Baer clearly states that all his works are based on the Cremona edition of the Zohar, as he deems it more prevalent in “these lands” (Yesh sakhar, Prague 1609, fol. 2a).

40. Yisskahar Baer, ʾImrei binah [in Hebrew] (Prague: Moses ben Beẓalel Katz, 1610), fol. 44b. The passage appears here in my translation.

41. Huss, “Text and Context of the 1684 Sulzbach Edition of the Zohar,” 168.

42. ʾImrei binah, fol. 43a–44b.

43. Ibid., fol. 43b.

44. Mordechai Pachter, “Preaching and Ethical Literature of the Safed Sages in the Sixteenth Century: An Overview of Its Major Concepts” (PhD diss., Hebrew University, 1976); Gries, Conduct Literature; Gries, “Between History and Literature: The Case of Jewish Preaching,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 4 (1994): 113–22; Gries, “Jewish Homiletical Literature: Between Textuality and Orality,” Kabbalah 15 (2006): 169–95; Joseph Dan, Ethical and Homiletical Literature [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1975); Marc Saperstein, Jewish Preaching, 1200–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).

45. Elbaum, Openness and Insularity, 184.

46. Zeev Gries, “Preachers and Preaching,” in the YIVO Encyclopedia: http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Preachers_and_Preaching.

47. Roee Goldschmidt, “ʿArvei Nahal of Rabbi David Shlomo Eybeschütz: Editing of the Sermons and Their Printing as a Means of Editing of Homiletical Literature from the Sixteenth Century and Its Conclusions for the Hasidic Movement from the Foundational Figure of the Besht” [in Hebrew] (PhD diss., Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2016), 112.

48. Mafteaḥ ha-Zohar, fol. 29b. For a recent scholarly treatment of the stories of the Zohar presented in a two-volume edition, see Yehuda Liebes, Jonathan Benarroch, and Melila Hellner-Eshed, eds., The Zoharic Story [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2017).

49. Abraham David, To Come to the Land: Immigration and Settlement in Sixteenth-Century Eretz Yisrael (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 166.

50. His objective as an editor was to deconstruct the Zohar thematically into four sections and provide a focused introduction to its study. The first part of his book includes a locator index that collates passages from the Torah with their corresponding place indicators in the Zohar. The second portion presents a locator index of topics related to Jewish ritual and halakhic life, such as prayer, tefillin, festivals, and their respective treatment in the Zohar. The third chapter enumerates the stories of the Zohar, while the fourth and last section presents a short anonymous commentary on the Torah portion Balak. Galante's reorganization of the Zohar into an index reflects didactic considerations to enhance two basic pillars of Jewish life, Torah study and ritual observance, using novel theological insights gleaned from the Zohar. Working in Safed in the sixteenth century predisposed him to an intellectual environment where Aramaic was read and the Zoharic Aramaic was explained and interpreted by outstanding masters of Kabbalah, like Moses Cordovero. He therefore used only the tool of reorganization, but not translation, in his topical reconceptualization of the Zohar.

51. ʾImrei binah, fol. 1b. On the controlled transmission of mystical content through the vehicle of Zoharic anthologies and reference books, see Huss, Like the Radiance, 208.

52. ʾImrei binah, fol. 1b.

53. Ibid., fol. 2a–2b.

54. Ibid., fol. 2b–4a.

55. A similar tendency is evinced in a manual extant only in manuscript that gives detailed instruction on how to construct a Lurianic tree diagram, or ʾilan. The author of the treatise provides fourteen introductory principles to the proper understanding of Kabbalah before he launches into the technical details of ʾilan construction. This manuscript is extant in several versions: National Library of Israel MS F 11088, F 11128, and F 15580. I thank J. H. Chajes for sharing the transcribed manuscript with me.

56. On Shimon ibn Lavi see Boaz Huss, “Ketem Paz” (PhD diss., Hebrew University, 1992).

57. Elbaum, Openness and Insularity, 189.

58. See Chajes, J. H., “Kabbalah Practices / Practical Kabbalah: The Magic of Kabbalistic Trees,” Aries 19, no. 1 (2019): 112–45Google Scholar.

59. Bracha Sack, “The Mystical Theology of Solomon Alkabeẓ” (PhD diss., Hebrew University, 1977), 184–91. See also Reuven Kimelman, The Mystical Meaning of Lekha Dodi and Kabbalat Shabbat [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2002).

60. MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Opp. 500, fol. 1r. Cited in Penkower, Jordan S., Masorah and Text Criticism in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Moshe ibn Zabara and Menahem de Lonzano (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2014), 70Google Scholar. This poem as well as another he wrote for Shabbat appear in his printed work Shetei yadot, albeit with modification.

61. MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Opp. 500, fol. 2v. See Penkower, Masorah and Text Criticism, 71, esp. nn. 171 and 172.

62. ʾImrei binah, fol. 7a.

63. Ibid., fol. 23a.

64. Both of these works were written by Judah ibn Gabbai in the sixteenth century.

65. ʾImrei binah, fol.10a.

66. Ibid., fol. 5a.

67. This represents a consistent posture throughout his four works, which follow Cordoverean Kabbalah and display no knowledge of Lurianic tenets.

68. Jerusalem National Library 80 *4.

69. Huss, “A Dictionary of Foreign Words in the Zohar,” 175n21.

70. See more in Liebes, “Sections of the Zohar Lexicon,” 163.

71. The manuscript was transcribed by Huss, “A Dictionary of Foreign Words in the Zohar,” 175–76; my translation.

72. Sefer ha-ʿarukh, written by Nathan ben Yeḥiel in the eleventh century as a medieval dictionary and lexicon to the foreign and difficult terms found in rabbinic texts, the Talmud, midrashim, and targumim. See Brisman, Shimeon, A History and Guide to Judaic Dictionaries and Concordances (Hoboken: Ktav, 2000), 16Google Scholar.

73. That is with the spelling of the letter dalet before the resh, as the Biʾur explains above.

74. Isaiah ben Eleazar Ḥayim of Nice, Yesha Yah (Venice: Giovanni Vendramin, 1637), fol. 2a.

75. It is worth citing from the writings of Rabbi Moses Cordovero, one of the most systematic interpreters of the Zohar, who was one of the institutional and spiritual leaders of the Jewish community in Safed, where the sixteenth century witnessed a remarkable revival of Kabbalah along with a mystically informed reorientation of Jewish life.

76. Moses Cordovero, ʾOr yakar (Jerusalem: Aḥuzat Israel, 1942), 1:119. He supports his position by citing the recurring base verse from Psalms, “and he set darkness His hiding-place” (18:12) and adding another line from Job, “and now they do not see the light bright in the heavens” (37:21).

77. Cordovero, Moses, Pardes rimonim (Jerusalem: Yarid ha-Sefarim, 2000)Google Scholar, gate 4, chap. 7, p. 51.

78. Ibid.

79. Cited in Penkower, Masorah and Text Criticism, 119.

80. Ibid., 60.

81. Abrams, Daniel, Kabbalistic Manuscripts; Abrams, “When Was the Introduction to the Zohar Written? and Changes within the Differing Copies of the Mantua Printing” [in Hebrew], ʾAsufot 8 (1994): 211–26Google Scholar.

82. I thank Jordan Penkower for providing me with helpful information regarding this edition.

83. See, for instance, his explanation to the word kutfa: he clarifies that it is derived from the Arabic term burnous. Apparently, it denotes a coarse coat worn like a kaftan, usually made of camel hair and worn especially among the berbers of North Africa. ʾImrei binah, fol. 22b.

84. De Lonzano applies the same critical apparatus to the analysis of the midrashim as he deployed to Zoharic literature, and in the following passage disparages the work of Yissakhar Baer from Szczebrzeszyn, the author of Matenot kehunah, for admitting philological inaccuracies into his reading of the rabbinic texts. This passage further reinforces the idea that traveling and the acquisition of linguistic skills enhanced the correct linguistic analysis of texts, which according to de Lonzano could not be obtained from books or logic: “On my travels … I profited because I learned the languages of the nations, in particular Arabic and Greek, which are the most necessary in order to understand the difficult and foreign words that occur in rabbinic literature and to explain them correctly and not doubtfully, a scientific explanation and not one simply based on reasoning and imagination, because explanations based on reasoning [alone] are all suspect and most are false, as happened to the author of Matenot kehunah [who wrote a commentary on Midrash Rabbah], who thought to explain the language of the sages from his own reasoning, and his emendation was a ruination, and his explanation folly.” Cited in Penkower, Masorah and Text Criticism, 117–18.

85. Penkower, Masorah and Text Criticism, 67–68; and also Yosef Avivi, ʾOhel Shem List of Manuscripts in the Shlomo Mussaieff Collection [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mussaieff, 1992), 135–36; Avivi, Kabbalat ha-Ari [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2008), 253–54.

86. Liebes, “Sections of the Zohar Lexicon,” 2. Liebes underlines that the first lexicographic attempt to incorporate the language of Kabbalah was M. Z. Kadari's book, The Medieval Heritage of Modern Hebrew Usage (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1970).

87. Cited in Liebes, “Sections of the Zohar Lexicon,” 1–2.