The New York Review of Books recently devoted a lot of space to a review of “The Sword and the.
It was Moses Shem Tov de Leon of Guadalajara (1240-1305) the author of a mystical book Sefer HaRimon, who claimed to have discovered and who disseminated the Zohar. There is no trace nor record of it before then, despite the claim that it dates back to the second century. The sophisticated Aramaic of the text places it much later than the second century. Did Moses de Leon write it, discover it, or simply compile a series of different documents into one?