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- Title
The Earliest Sefer ha-Zohar in Jerusalem: Early Manuscripts o f Zoharic Texts and an Unknown Fragment from Midrash ha-Ne lam [?].
- Authors
Bar-Asher, Avishai
- Abstract
The present article discusses a unique collection o f Kabbalistic works which was copied several times in Jerusalem in the late fourteenth century, before its arrival in Venice and distribution in Northern Italy. W hile the majority o f works in this collection date back to the second half o f the thirteenth century, this group o f manuscripts serves as the earliest attestation o f most o f these texts (and fragments). Thus, for instance, these valuable manuscripts - all copied within a small circle o f Jews of different origins who settled in Mamluk Jerusalem - are the earliest documents from outside Spain to contain texts w hich were later identified and circulated as parts o f Sefer ha-Zohar. Yet not all o f this material found its way into the printed editions o f Sefer ha-Zohar. The article focuses in particular on a textual unit o f Kabbalistic ‘m idrashim' - in both Aramaic and Hebrew - on the Yibbum and Halitzah (in levirate marriage law). These midrashim, part of which are identified and edited in this study for the first time, offer a peculiar synthesis o f views from early Catalan Kabbalah, pseudepigraphically attributed to Rabbinic figures. The article examines both the theoretical and the polemic Kabbalistic background to the appearance o f this unknown ‘zoharic' text, discusses its literary categorization, and sheds some light on its authorship.
- Publication
Tarbiz, 2017, Vol 84, Issue 4, pvii
- ISSN
0334-3650
- Publication type
Article