mitted to writing
by a Spanish Jew, Moses de Leon, who, according to Dr. Ginsburg, said he
had discovered and reproduced the original document of Simon ben Jochai;
his wife and daughter, however, declared that he had composed it all
himself.[28] Which is the truth? Jewish opinion is strongly divided on
this question, one body maintaining that the Zohar is the comparatively
modern work of Moses de Leon, the other declaring it to be of extreme
antiquity. M. Vulliaud, who has collated all these views in the course
of some fifty pages, shows that although the name Zohar might have
originated with Moses de Leon, the ideas it embodied were far older than
the thirteenth century. How, he asks pertinently, would it have been
possible for the Rabbis of the Middle Ages to have been deceived into
accepting as an ancient document a work that was of completely modern
origin?[29] Obviously the Zohar was not the composition of Moses de
Leon, but a compilation made by him from various documents dating from
very early times. Moreover, as M. Vulliaud goes on to explain, those who
deny its antiquity are the anti-Cabalists, headed by Graetz, whose
object is to prove the Cabala to be at variance with orthodox Judaism.
Theodore Reinach goes so far as to declare the Cabala to be "a subtle
poison which enters into the veins of Judaism and wholly infests it";
Salomon Reinach calls it "one of the worst aberrations of the human
mind."[30] This view, many a student of the Cabala will hardly dispute,
but to say that it is foreign to Judaism is another matter. The fact is
that the main ideas of the Zohar find confirmation in the Talmud. As the
_Jewish Encyclopaedia_ observes, "the Cabala is not really in opposition
to the Talmud," and "many Talmudic Jews have supported and contributed
to it."[31] Adolphe Franck does not hesitate to describe it as "the
heart and life of Judaism."[32] "The greater number of the most eminent
Rabbis of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed firmly in
the sacredness of the Zohar and the infallibility of its teaching."[33]

The question of the antiquity of the Cabala is therefore in reality
largely a matter of names. That a mystical tradition existed amongst the
Jews from remote antiquity will hardly be denied by anyone[34]; it is
therefore, as M. Vulliaud observes, "only a matter of knowing at what
moment Jewish mysticism took the name of Cabala."[35] Edersheim asserts
that--

It is undeniable that, alrea