Christian influences in the Zohar / השפעות נוצריות על ספר הזוהר

The Zohar is a singularly Jewish book but it absorbed foreign influences as well. Its pseudoepigraphic character enabled the author of the Zohar to incorporate these influences. In view of its late thirteenth century Spanish provenance, the most central non-Jewish elements in the Zohar are Christian. This article will elucidate some of them. The article first discusses Trinitarian formulations appearing in the Zohar and then demonstrates that they were developed under the influence of Christianity. The Zohar recognizes the threefold wording of the Shema and Kedushah prayers, and Christian writers had done so earlier. From the language of the Zohar's author, Rabbi Moses de Leon, and from his Hebrew writings, it is also possible to prove that he was conscious of the affinity of his literary motifs to Christian trinitarian themes, and of the consequent danger. Christian sources like these facilitated the task of the Renaissance Christian kabbalists as they attempted to find in the Zohar sanction for their beliefs. Moreover, they were probably in possession of additional Zoharic statements that were even closer to Christian theology, and hence these sections were deleted from the text of the Zohar (while certainly such sections did not in reality encompass Christian dogma). This is the case with the tripartite expression penned by the apostate Paul de Heredia. It can be shown that underlying the Latin translation used by Heredia was indeed a genuine Zoharic substratum. All the constituent parts of his treatise rely upon various sections of the Zohar, although in an allusive rather than explicit manner. Yet there is no reason to assume that this refining tendency involved volitional adulteration of the original content. Among the elements of Heredia's treatise is the impenetrable mystery of the "son", who will reveal himself only in the messianic era. We have also found this type of conception in the Zohar. It portrays similarly the ninth divine emanation or sefirah, Yesod (foundation), which is called in this context "righteous one" and "son". One of the relevant passages is in the Sifra di-Ẓeni'uta, a portion of the Zohar comprising a commentary on Genesis 1, 1, where the "son" is designated as a "concealed saying". Here, too, one may detect a definite correspondence to Christianity. The Talmud had already asserted that the anomalous mem clausum in Isaiah 9:6 signifies a "concealed saying". The Christian exegetes interpreted this strange orthographic form as