Moses de León

Moses ben Shem Tov de León was born around 1240, probably in León, in Castile, and lived for many years in Guadalajara and later in Ávila. He studied philosophy, including Maimonides’ Guide, before turning to Kabbalah, and belonged to a circle of Castilian Kabbalists that included Joseph Gikatilla. He died in 1305 at Arévalo.

From around 1280 he circulated, in manuscript, portions of a work in Aramaic that he presented as the teaching of the second-century sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai and his companions, discovered in an ancient book. This was the Zohar, the Book of Radiance. In his own name he wrote a number of Hebrew works of Kabbalah, among them The Book of the Pomegranate, which share the ideas and phrasing of the Zohar.

A fourteenth-century report tells of the Kabbalist Isaac of Acre, who sought out the original manuscript and heard conflicting accounts of it after Moses de León’s death. In the twentieth century Gershom Scholem argued that Moses de León was its author; later scholars have described it as the work of a circle, with Moses de León at its centre. Traditional Judaism holds to the ancient attribution.