The Zohar: Reception and Impact

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist
for the Nahum N. Sarna Memorial Award for Scholarship, 2016.

From its first appearance, the
Zohar has been one of the most sacred, authoritative, and influential books in
Jewish culture. Many scholarly works have been dedicated to its mystical
content, its literary style, and the question of its authorship. This book
focuses on different issues: it examines the various ways in which the Zohar
has been received by its readers and the impact it has had on Jewish culture,
including the fluctuations in its status and value and the
various cultural practices linked to these changes. This dynamic and multi-layered history throws
important new light on many aspects of Jewish cultural history over the last
seven centuries.

Boaz Huss
has broken new ground with this study, which examines of the reception and
canonization of the Zohar as well as its criticism and rejection from its
inception to the present day. His underlying assumption is that the different
values attributed to the Zohar are not inherent qualities of the zoharic texts,
but rather represent the way it has been perceived by its readers in different
cultural contexts. He therefore considers not only the attribution of different
qualities to the Zohar through time but also the people who were engaged in
attributing such qualities and the social and cultural functions associated
with their creation, re-creation, and rejection.

For each historical period from the beginning of Zohar
scholarship to the present, Huss considers the social conditions that stimulated
the veneration of the Zohar as well as the factors that contributed to its
rejection, alongside the cultural functions and consequences of each approach.
Because the multiple modes of the reception of the Zohar have had a decisive
influence on the history of Jewish culture, this highly innovative and
wide-ranging approach to Zohar scholarship will have important repercussions
for many areas of Jewish studies.

Reviews

?Painstakingly tracks the history of attitudes towards the Zohar and the types of arguments used for and against its acceptance . . . very readable. Highly recommended.'
Daniel Schiede, AJL Reviews

'Insightfully argues that the different values posited on the Zohar . . . often reveal much about the theological agendas and the spirit of the age in which these commentators lived. Huss brilliantly addresses not only the text of the Zohar but also the different communities of its disseminators along with their politics and ideological agendas . . . a tour de force, representing some of today's best scholarship. It is recommended for all academic libraries without reservation, but lay readers will also enjoy the thoughtful content.'
D.B. Levy, Choice

FROM REVIEWS OF THE HEBREW EDITION

?Knowing the history of the Zohar and its reception, one can better understand the spiritual and political worlds of Judaism as they have evolved over the past 700 years . . . Huss?s detailed descriptions and his impressive expertise make this a comprehensive account of mysticism as a cultural and economic phenomenon.?
Mor Altshuler, Haaretz