After many years of labor, Daniel Matt has completed his oversight of a twelve-volume English translation of the Zohar—the central work of Jewish mysticism. Matt translated and annotated the first nine volumes himself, while his collaborators produced the final three. In his laudatory review, Eitan Fishbane delves into the complex question of the Zohar’s authorship:

While nearly all other kabbalistic works of the [Middle Ages] were written in Hebrew and generally claimed by their authors, the Zohar was pseudepigraphic and written in Aramaic: it represented itself as the product of the 2nd-century Galilean sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai. . . .

For much of the 20th century, [however, the historian] Gershom Scholem’s conclusion that the Zohar was largely the work of a mystic named Rabbi Moses de León in late 13th-century Castile held sway over scholarly opinion. Scholem’s theory was compelling and far from unfounded. As Matt notes in the very first footnote to the opening passage, . . . there is a parallel passage in de León’s Sefer ha-rimmonim, and Scholem and others have noted many parallels of language and doctrine between the Zohar and de León’s works. In testimony quoted in a late 15th-century text, the kabbalist Isaac of Akko is represented as saying that de León’s widow told him that the work was entirely from her husband’s hand.

This consensus has been shattered in recent decades. First came Yehuda Liebes’s pathbreaking theory that a group of Castilian kabbalists including de León, not unlike the imagined circle of disciples around Shimon bar Yoḥai, were responsible for the composition of the Zohar. More recently, scholars have argued that there were likely several groups of authors in successive decades and even generations, each of whom edited and added to what we now know as the Zohar.

Thus, the Zohar in its present form—including Matt’s English edition—does not reflect any single manuscript but is the creation of the Italian publishers who first printed it in the 1550s.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.