Ari Nohem ארי נוהם
Written in 1639 and printed in 1840. For two centuries it circulated in manuscript — and, as Dweck has shown, by the author's own choice, not by anyone's prohibition.
The title is a signature-pun: *aryeh* means lion, in Italian *leone*, which is the author's name.
His arguments are three, and all three are checkable. R. Shimon bar Yohai could not have written the book in a cave with "no paper, nor ink, nor pen." The Zohar contains liturgical customs that arose centuries after him. And there is R. Isaac of Acre's fourteenth-century record that Moses de León's widow said her husband wrote it himself and ascribed it to the ancients "to increase its value."
The book was neither printed nor banned in the author's lifetime: it circulated among a narrow circle of scholars interested in the antiquity of Kabbalah, and appeared only in 1840; a further edition was prepared by Nehemiah Libowitz in 1929. Dweck argues that Modena did not print it himself — for cost, for the certain scandal, and from a wish to choose his own readers.
It is best read not alone but beside R. Joseph Ergas's Shomer Emunim (Amsterdam, 1736): two sides of one Italian argument a century long.
On the timeline
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Ari Nohem, written 1639, printed 1840 — three arguments against the antiquity of the Zohar
- Joseph Ergas, Shomer Emunim, Amsterdam 1736 — the counter-defence of Kabbalah — the other side of the same argument
Scholarship
- Y. Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah, Princeton UP — the book stayed in manuscript by the author's choice, not by prohibition
Basis: documents and evidence.