Jewish Mysticism, Diaspora, and Modern Practice

Jewish mysticism, broadly known as Kabbalah ("received" or "tradition"), developed distinct literary and conceptual expressions across the medieval period, building on earlier speculative traditions such as those reflected in the early text Sefer Yetzirah ("Book of Formation"). Its most influential work, the Zohar ("Splendor"), a mystical commentary on the Torah largely written in Aramaic, appeared in Castile in the late thirteenth century and is traditionally ascribed to the second-century sage Shimon bar Yochai, though most modern scholars attribute its composition principally to Moses de Leon. Kabbalistic thought describes the interaction between the infinite, unknowable God, termed Ein Sof, and the created world through ten emanations or attributes, the Sefirot, which structure divine and cosmic reality. A later, highly influential systematization emerged in the sixteenth-century circle of Isaac Luria in the city of Safed in the Galilee, whose teachings on cosmic exile and restoration, or tikkun olam, profoundly shaped subsequent Jewish spirituality, including the eighteenth-century Hasidic movement founded by Israel Baal Shem Tov in Eastern Europe.