Department of Jewish Thought
Subject: Textual Dynamism in Canonical Literature- The Case of 'Sitrei Torah' 'in the Zoharic Corpus.
Supervisor: Dr. Avishai Bar-Asher.
Abstract: The textual history of the well-known ‘Book of the Zohar’- a central Kabbalistic book composed in the Middle ages, is a complicated one to trace. There are hundreds of fragments of Zoharic texts that differ greatly in content and order from the printed version at use today. Such differences can be found in the writings of Kabbalists and early comenntators on the Zohar- differences who point to the complex history of reception of Zoharic texts. Morevover, The Zohar is __divided into sub-divisions that differ greatly in language, literary style and agenda.
In my Thesis, I attempted to attend to these questions through a peculiar text, that belong to a sub-Divison named ‘Sitrei Torah’, a division that is a fruitful case study for the questions asked by Zohar researchers today, and is yet to be fully un-covered. Through a single text from the ‘Sitrei Torah’, I have shown the complexity of the distribution of Zoharic texts. I have traced the text’s appearance in Manuscripts and tracked the changes and errors done in content by the early printers, as well as a relocation of the text in different editions. Moreover, I pointed to the different versions of the text in the writings of early commentators, to show how different versions of the original have spread, and how big of a role the Printing of the Zohar has played in the fixation of a single version of text. In addition, my work included a literary analysis as I compared concepts conveyed in this text to other sub-divisions of the Zohar and to writing of Rabbi Moshe de-Leon, in order to assume possible influences on the composition of the text. This thorough work has surfaced a few interesting hypotheses to which I intend to further address in my Doctoral dissertation.
In my Doctoral dissertation, I intend to address the majority of the texts comprising ‘Sitrei Torah’ (spread out over dozens of pages in the printed version of the Zohar), and to investigate their content and location in both manuscripts and printed editions. ‘Sitrei Torah’ is composed of various texts, that differ in language, style and content, and is considered to be a later addition to the Zoharic corpus. Therefore, I will conduct a comparative literary research in order to assess which texts belong to the original core of this zoharic division, which texts have originally been part of other sub-divisions of the Zohar, and which are to be considered a later addition of Kabbalistic texts composed in parallel to the writing of the Zohar. In this manner, I wish to uncover the source of the ‘Sitrei Torah’ division, discuss textual influences on the composition of these texts, and gain a better understanding of the complex processes which led to the assimilation of these texts into the Zoharic corpus. As such, I hope my research will enrich the current state of knowledge on the forming and editing process of the Zoharic corpus from its’ early stages and up to the final ‘Book of the Zohar’.