Mystical Resistance: How the Zohar Hijacked Christianity to Destroy It
A deep dive on the Jewish mystical text that calls for the destruction of Christendom
Author’s note: This article focuses on the cosmological and polemical framework of pre-Lurianic Kabbalah as understood in modern scholarship. It is not a study of Christian Kabbalah as a tradition in its own right, nor does it claim to represent the full scope of what Renaissance and later Christian thinkers appropriated from Jewish mystical sources or how they interpreted those elements within their own theological systems.
When critics refer to the anti-Christian teachings of Judaism, they often point to the Babylonian Talmud. For centuries, the Talmud was burned, censored, and subjected to public disputations designed to expose its heresies. Yet often overlooked is the foundational mystical text of Jewish Kabbalah known as the Sefer ha-Zohar (“Book of Radiance”).
While the Talmud deals with questions of Jesus’s death and the treatment of gentiles among rabbinic disputes over scriptural interpretation, the Zohar operates on an entirely different plane. Here, in the realm of cosmology and metaphysics, core Christian doctrines are woven into a mythological system where Christendom itself becomes identified with the demonic forces of the universe. And the great irony of Western Christendom is that some of its most influential heterodox thinkers of the late medieval and early modern periods syncretized and transmitted this blatantly anti-Christian text. This transmission has gone virtually unnoticed in the annals of history until it gained more academic attention in the twentieth-century.
The Christian Appropriation of Kabbalah
During the Renaissance, the young Florentine nobleman Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) became convinced that the mystical traditions of the Jews contained proof of Christian doctrines. Unlike Christian Hebraists who studied Hebrew to polemicize against Jews, Pico sought a perennial synthesis of kabbalistic and Neoplatonic-Hermetic texts that would unlock concealed spiritual truths. While Pico was certainly not the first to synthesize Kabbalah with Christian doctrine, his theses established him as the founder of what became known as Christian Kabbalah. With this, the Renaissance quest for prisca theologia was fulfilled in Pico’s foundational thesis that “No science can make us more certain of Christ’s divinity than magic and Cabala.”1
The means by which Kabbalah made its debut into Christian discourse should come as no surprise. Just as Byzantine emigrants had brought Hermetic manuscripts to Italy, baptized Jews (whether sincere or subversive) acted as intermediaries by making Hebrew mystical texts accessible to Latin readers. Many such cases of Jewish intermediaries can be observed throughout the centuries.
The most consequential of these figures during the Renaissance was Flavius Mithridates, a converted Sicilian Jew who rendered 3,500 pages of Hebrew and Aramaic mystical texts into Latin for Pico. Mithridates consistently interpolated Christological elements by inserting non-existent words, altering passages, or omitting content to make the texts appear prophetic of Christianity.2 And since he had learned Hebrew under Mithridates’ tutelage, Pico never gained the proficiency to detect these manipulated interpolations.
This means the very Hebrew texts Pico used to “prove” Christianity with Kabbalah had been fabricated to support that exact presupposition. If Jewish sages secretly knew and concealed Christian truth, why did Mithridates have to forge his translations to reveal it?
Pico’s efforts were carried forward by Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522), whose influential book On the Art of the Kabbalah argued that Jewish mystical texts reflected ancient traditions that supported Christian doctrine. As for both Pico and Reuchlin, they were genuinely moved by the Zohar’s triadic formulations of the divine that seemed to echo the Trinity, a feminine divine presence that reminded them of the Virgin Mary, and messianic imagery that appeared to prefigure Christ.
An Intended Discovery?
It is no coincidence that these parallels with Christian doctrines were found in the Zohar, rather it appears the author strategically appropriated them to construct a counter-mythology to Christianity. This raises the question of the Zohar’s historical legitimacy, which remains one of the most enduring controversies in the history of Jewish esotericism.
Perhaps the most damning evidence against its presumed antiquity is found in the testimony of de León’s widow, who indicated that the book was a forgery falsely ascribed to Shimon bar Yochai for de León’s personal benefit. Furthermore, the seminal research of Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), the pioneer of modern academic study of Kabbalah, established the academic consensus of the Zohar’s pseudepigraphal status, confirming that “the Aramaic language of the Zohar is a purely artificial creation. It is the literary language of an author who derived his knowledge exclusively from documents of Jewish literature and who developed his own style, guided by certain subjective criteria … In all these works, the spirit of medieval Hebrew emerges through the Aramaic façade.”3
I agree with Michael McClaymond’s claim that de León himself might have actually believed he was transmitting ancient wisdom, and that portions of the Zohar could be attributed to the occult practice of automatic writing, as he would “write whatever came to his hand.”4
But the medieval dating of the Zohar raises another serious question that even most historians of Christian Kabbalah have failed to adequately address. Why was the Zohar written in such a precise time and place where Jewish-Christian discourse had reached its most intense moment? With countless forced disputations, mass conversions and burnings of the Talmud, Jewish intellectuals in this milieu couldn’t ignore Christianity even if they wanted to. And the evidence suggests that the Zohar’s author didn’t try to.
Yehudah Liebes, a leading scholar of the Zohar’s composition, argued that “there is no basis to the claims of Christian Kabbalists that the Zohar contains Christian beliefs.” Although he also acknowledges they “did have certain ground for their claims, for the Zohar does contain many formulations of Christian origins.”5 The crucial distinction is that while the Zohar’s author, living in Christian Spain, certainly borrowed and adapted Christian themes, he did so not out of crypto-Christian sympathy but precisely to construct a compelling anti-Christian polemic—one that would, in Arthur Green’s words, “fortify Jews in resisting Christianity.”6
It is widely recognized that the Zohar also frequently describes the Godhead as a threefold unity in various ways that scholars have long recognized as structurally parallel to Christian Trinitarian formulations. To this, Liebes confirms that “the Christian doctrine of the trinity also influenced the threefold formulations in the Zohar, in addition to the very interest demonstrated by the Zohar in tripartite formulations—in itself due to Christian influence.”7
In commenting on the Shema, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One” (Deut. 6:4), the Zohar interprets the three divine names (Adonai, Elohenu, Adonai) as corresponding to three aspects of the divine that nonetheless constitute perfect unity. Daniel Matt, translator of the Zohar, notes that while the text “rejects the Christian formulation of the Trinity, it is strikingly influenced by it, in that certain similarities exist between the Trinity and the sefirot.”8 Even the nineteenth-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz, a critic of mysticism, was “shocked to find that the Zohar even contains utterances which seem favorable to the Christian dogma of the Trinity of the Godhead.”9
Moses de León himself appears to have been perceptive of this problem. In his Shekel ha-Kodesh, written under his own name rather than pseudonymously, de León addresses a fictional questioner who raises precisely the objection that the threefold unity sounds suspiciously Christian: “This matter causes much confusion... the one who understands this, trembles with fright lest he commit a transgression by speaking of it.”10 Liebes further affirms that Christian influence on the text was deliberate and substantial:
One of the outstanding features of the Zohar is its receptiveness to ideas from other sources and its ability to adopt them to its own particular style and way of thought…It therefore should not surprise us that a leading source of such influences on the Zohar was Christianity since, as we know, its author lived in a Christian milieu.” The nature of Christianity as a “daughter-religion (or, rather, a sister-religion) of Judaism, an alternative interpretation of a common scriptural tradition, made it all the easier for the two religions to influence one other and for the Zohar to become an expression of this mutual influence.11
The Demonic Mirror
As it turns out, there is one particular doctrine in the Zohar considered so controversial that even Pico deliberately withheld it from his more public Cabalistic Conclusions because he deemed it a profound secret. What Pico speculatively described as the “evil coordination” (mala coordinatio denaria) “was considered by Castilian kabbalists and by the author of the Zohar to be the most esoteric of all kabbalistic wisdom.”12 But no such secrets will remain concealed in our exploration.
