Emden as Maskil

Mitpaḥat Sefarim was seldom republished: once by eighteenth-century maskilim, and once in the mid-1990s by an anonymous publisher. ^{Footnote 16} The work was first published on Emden’s own press, “printed in the home of the author,” as the title page proclaimed. ^{Footnote 17} Its second printing came over a century later, in Lemberg. Michel Wolf, publisher of the second edition, preceded the work with a short biography of Emden, which describes how Emden stood up to save Jews in an era “during which the light of knowledge did not shine upon them, and the members of that sect [Sabbateans] hid their nets in order to trap these souls.” ^{Footnote 18} Wolf was referring to the kabbalistic beliefs of his eighteenth-century predecessors, which made them susceptible to the Sabbatean sects of the time. This narrative conforms to the general rationalist, anti-kabbalistic thrust of works that Wolf published, as is evident from the list appended to some copies of Wolf’s edition of Mitpaḥat Sefarim. ^{Footnote 19}

Like other proponents of the Haskalah, Wolf admired Emden as an ally in the battle against pernicious mysticism. ^{Footnote 20} Wolf and his fellow maskilim devoted themselves to spreading the “light of knowledge” to their fellow Jews in the form of other works included in Wolf’s book list: Mendelssohn’s translation of the Bible into German (transliterated in Hebrew letters); guides to learning German; edifying literary works; Hebrew poetry; Jewish philosophical writings by figures such as religious philosopher Nachman Krochmal; and lighter works that mocked Hasidism, like Joseph Perl’s Megalleh Temirin.Footnote ²¹

In the eyes of these maskilim, Emden had fought a similar unrelenting polemical battle against sects that thrived on ignorance and mysticism. Since Wolf considered Emden a pioneer of their own movement, his introduction fittingly positions Emden as a bridge between two figures: the medieval philosopher and poet Emmanuel of Rome (whose writings Wolf had recently published) and “the sage of our people, the great philosopher, Rabbi Moshe ben Menachem, also known as Mendelssohn,”Footnote ²² father of the Jewish Enlightenment. Wolf presents Emden’s correspondence with Mendelssohn as the capstone in Emden’s biography. Not only maskilim themselves perceived Emden as a harbinger of their own intellectual activities. ^{Footnote 23} Some historians accepted this narrative too, portraying Emden as a precursor of the Jewish Enlightenment. ^{Footnote 24}

This reception of Emden as an intellectual who deployed historical and textual criticism in his fight for the light of reason against the dark forces of esotericism has some legitimacy. Mitpaḥat Sefarim literally means “book-cloth,” and refers to cloths used as wrappings for sacred Torah scrolls.Footnote ²⁵ When Emden had printed Mitpaḥat Sefarim in Altona, he played on this meaning on the book’s title page: “The book | Mitpaḥat Sefarim | part one | which was made so as not to hold a book naked, without knowing the source from where it stems.” ^{Footnote 26} Emden presents his work as a cloth wrapped around the holy work it studies, the Zohar, so as not to leave that book “naked” of context or provenance.

Emden’s “wrapping cloth” aims at dissipating claims that had enshrouded the Zohar’s origins. According to Emden, heretics could easily misuse a “naked” book to reinforce their subversive beliefs and to claim fictitious traditional sources for their heresies. In line with this concern, Emden fills the remainder of the title page with denunciations of heterodox sects that cite the Zohar and its presumed author, the mishnaic sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai, as an authority for their heresies.

Mitpaḥat Sefarim instead sets out to “clothe” the Zohar in its historical context— or more precisely, its several contexts, corresponding to the different textual layers Emden identifies. In so doing, Emden follows in the footsteps of previous critics of the Zohar, such as Elijah Delmedigo (ca.1458–ca.1493) and Leone Modena (1571–1648). The philosopher Delmedigo criticized the kabbalah in Beḥinat ha- Dat (Examination of religion) in the late fifteenth century, but the work was printed only in 1629, when it was published by a younger relative, Joseph Delmedigo of Candia (1591–1655). ^{Footnote 27} The Italian scholar Leone Modena attacked the Zohar in his 1639 book Ari Nohem (The lion roars). That polemic, too, circulated exclusively in manuscript and was first printed only in the mid-nineteenth century. ^{Footnote 28} Modena cites one of the most important external pieces of evidence against the Zohar’s antiquity: the testimony of the early thirteenth-century kabbalist Isaac of Acre, published in Rabbi Abraham Zacuto’s Sefer Yuḥasin (Constantinople, 1566). ^{Footnote 29} Isaac of Acre relates that Moses de Leon, a kabbalist who was his contemporary, claimed to possess the Zohar and would transcribe parts of it for others. De Leon’s wife, however, declared that her husband had authored these so-called excerpts himself. Isaac of Acre did not accuse de Leon of forgery; instead, he suggested that de Leon wrote these excerpts under the influence of divine revelation. Emden mentioned this testimony and noted the fact that later editions of Sefer Yuḥasin no longer contained this piece of evidence. ^{Footnote 30}

Emden raises some objections that had appeared in his predecessors’ critiques: the Zohar goes unmentioned in talmudic literature, for example, and, in fact, contains passages that contradict the Talmud. Yet in the thoroughness of its critique and in the methodical nature of its claims, Emden’s treatise goes well beyond those two earlier works of Zohar criticism. It enumerates hundreds of particular cases of incongruity, itemized in the order in which they appear in the Zohar, as a commentary or gloss would do. Emden points out three kinds of anachronism. First, linguistic anachronism, most famously the Zohar’s description of the house of prayer as esh-noga (glowing fire) on the basis of the Spanish term for synagogue, esnoga. ^{Footnote 31} Second, Emden highlights historical anachronisms, like the Zohar’s references to talmudic sages who succeeded Rabbi Shimon and to the Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. ^{Footnote 32} Third, Emden calls attention to instances of intellectual anachronism, showing that some of the Zohar’s ideas draw on the Jewish medieval philosophical work Kuzari, ^{Footnote 33} as well as on “words from philosophy and from the medical sciences.” ^{Footnote 34} Emden enumerates countless cases in which opinions in the Zohar contradict, conflate, or misattribute Jewish laws and ideas, such as the laws concerning priestly service,Footnote ³⁵ or the religious requirements regarding Jewish slaves. ^{Footnote 36} Emden draws attention to misquoted scriptural passages ^{Footnote 37} and to opinions that are factually wrong, ^{Footnote 38} imprecise, ^{Footnote 39} or theologically unacceptable (such as excessive praise of Rabbi Shimon that in Emden’s opinion borders on idolatry). ^{Footnote 40} Emden considered these errors and problematic statements as proof that the work could not have been authored by Rabbi Shimon and that the work could not possibly be authentic. Concerning one such error, for instance, Emden observes: “This whole statement is entirely distorted, because it mixed two separate issues that are unrelated to one another, and he has thus ‘twisted the scriptures’ on us…. In any case it is clear to the eye that he placed forged additions here, and dressed them in secrets of kabbalah.” ^{Footnote 41}

Emden concludes that some parts of the Zohar are—at the earliest—products of a late talmudic generation (the third-century amoraim, but perhaps as late as the tenth-century geonim), while others were added by a late thirteenth–early fourteenth-century Spanish sage. Still other passages, he contends, are obvious late forgeries. Emden identifies these different layers of the Zohar by their own subtitles and linguistic peculiarities. He writes that while he would have liked to imagine that the most ancient core of the Zohar was indeed authored by Rabbi Shimon, “my heart is divided on this issue, and I cannot entirely believe that even a part of it is from the words of the tanna known by the name of Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai…. Therefore, because I am forced to, and purely as an assumption, I say that the Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai of the Zohar was another man at a later time.”Footnote ⁴²

Emden argues that in two parts of the Zohar, Tikkunei Zohar (Corrections of the Zohar) and Ra’ayah Meheimana (Faithful shepherd), “the author is clearly the same person, as I have shown previously, and their language testifies to this…. [Their author is] much, much later than the first author of the core of the Zohar.”Footnote ⁴³ A third part, called Midrash Hane’elam (Secret midrash), is later even than the other two, Emden writes, and “its fake nature is recognizable from within,” both linguistically and based on “its issues.”Footnote ⁴⁴ “From now on,” Emden concludes, “the sons of the covenant will have a general response” to any heretical claims based on the Zohar:

In exposing foreign additions to the Zohar, Emden’s critique releases readers from “the obligation to believe” in the work the way they would be duty-bound to believe it were it to be a canonical Jewish work. It is for this that maskilim hailed Emden as a hero, as a warrior for reason who used textual and historical criticism to undermine a book filled with dangerous irrationality and superstition. Some elements in this image of Emden as a critical-minded proto-Enlightenment figure, however, fail to add up.

Emden the Mystic

Notwithstanding the maskilic portrayal of Emden as a force against irrational beliefs, he in fact was profoundly engaged in the mystical dimensions of Judaism. In Guide for the Perplexed, the foremost medieval Jewish philosopher, Maimonides, had argued that Ma'aseh Merkava (The work of the chariot), a term associated with esoteric knowledge, ^{Footnote 46} referred to rationalist philosophy. Emden was so offended by this notion that he suggested the Guide to have been falsely attributed to Maimonides. ^{Footnote 47} To take another example, Emden’s Iggeret Bikkoret, a responsum regarding a medical problem, evolved into a heated polemic about the validity of empirical science and medicine. ^{Footnote 48} Yet in that debate, Emden did not take the side of science and reason. On the contrary, he listed a series of mysterious supernatural occurrences to show that reason fails to explain the world and its phenomena. ^{Footnote 49}

Elsewhere, Emden strongly cautions against the reemergence of rationalist philosophy that accompanied the budding Enlightenment and confronts the challenges he felt it posed to tradition. In Iggeret Purim, he writes: “Verily, I am the man that has seen the affliction of his people in my time, when the heresy of philosophy has reasserted itself.” ^{Footnote 50} A parenthetical remark in the abovementioned responsum (Iggeret Bikkoret) occasions an attack on the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides’s halakic code, in which Emden vilifies reason as a treacherous woman:

Emden dismissed the idea that rational inquiry alone could explain everything, insisting on the existence of an esoteric dimension that the intellect was unable to access. His two-volume prayer book is replete with esoteric references. ^{Footnote 52} His writings are not only filled with positive references to mysticism in general but also express admiration for the Zohar in particular. ^{Footnote 53} His conscious and enthusiastic embrace of mysticism in general and the Zohar in particular as a central pillar of Jewish practice is strongly (albeit not most famously) expressed among his halakic writings and responsa.

One such responsum is perhaps more telling of Emden’s true devotion to the Zohar than any of the better-known sources. ^{Footnote 54} Emden’s kabbalistic dictionary, his prayer book, and even Mitpaḥat Sefarim necessitated engagement with mystical sources by virtue of their topics and contents. Responsa, however, belong to the realm of Jewish law, a genre in which the esoteric dimension can typically be avoided without too much effort. The realm of halakah could easily be kept clear of any intrusions by the Zohar. Yet as the responsum below shows, Emden chose not to steer clear of the very work he knew to be so problematic. Indeed, he goes to great lengths to reconcile the law with a mystical reading explicitly associated with the Zohar, against the nonmystical mainstream interpretation. Ecstatic at having succeeded in doing so, he praises the Zohar to the skies. Clearly, Emden was more than simply not opposed or sympathetic to the Zohar. He actively sought to integrate it even in the realm of halakah.

In the course of a responsum printed in his She’ilat Yaveẓ (Questions of Yaveẓ; an acronym for Yacov ben Ẓvi), Emden goes to great lengths to salvage an interpretation drawn from the Zohar. He addresses a puzzling talmudic statement about the correct positioning of one’s bed: “Abba Benjamin says, all my life I took great pains … that my bed should be placed between north and south…. For … he who places his bed between the north and the south will have male children.” ^{Footnote 55} For generations, many understood the issue as one of disrespect to the Temple, such as the interpretation presented by Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yiẓḥaki, 1040–1105) on this passage in the Talmud. ^{Footnote 56} In the traditional interpretation, the preferable position for one’s bed was in the north-south direction, so as not to engage in intercourse facing Jerusalem in the east.Footnote ⁵⁷

A mystical interpretation prescribed the diametrical—or, rather, perpendicular— opposite: the bed should be in the east-west direction, instead of pointing from north to south. ^{Footnote 58} This opinion is related to the Zohar’s interpretation of biblical passages describing the formations in which the Israelites traveled in the desert, which mapped the divine presence onto the different compass points. If God’s left is north and his right is south, pointing one’s bed from east to west was meant to line up with the divine formation. The Dutch brothers who addressed this question to Emden distinctly remembered that when Emden’s father had been the rabbi in Amsterdam, he had positioned his bed in line with the mystical interpretation. Given Hakham Ẓvi’s assertion that in cases of conflict one must follow the halakic tradition over kabbalah, the questioners asked Emden for an explanation. ^{Footnote 59}

After denying any knowledge of the position of his father’s bed, Emden stipulates that in this matter there is no contradiction between mainstream halakah and kabbalah. The Talmud makes no explicit ruling on the matter, after all; it presents only a vague statement by one rabbi that could be interpreted to mean either direction for the bed’s position. This in itself is a surprising contention. Though the Talmud’s intention is less than clear, mainstream halakic tradition clearly prescribed the direction in a way that countered the Zohar. Having denied knowledge of his father’s actions, Emden could simply have cited those sources and left the matter at that. Instead, he reopens a broader question: whether the passage in the Talmud has been correctly interpreted throughout the ages.

At this point, his response takes an even more surprising turn. Not only does Emden point out several problems with Rashi’s interpretation, he enthusiastically advocates positioning one’s bed according to the Zohar. Emden even adduces additional arguments for why such a practice rings true, including the talmudic interpretation of Lev 12:2, “A woman who seeds and gives birth to a male.” ^{Footnote 60} The Talmud takes this to mean that when a woman “seeds” (tazria') first during intercourse, the offspring will be male. ^{Footnote 61} Emden relates this interpretation to the issue of the bed, combining the ideas of east and west with concepts of sexuality, the attributes of God, and the masculine and feminine sides of the divine. Citing the Zohar, Emden discovers this idea hidden in the Song of Songs: “It says, ‘his left is under my head’ [2:6] and then only ‘his right will embrace me’ and so it also says ‘arise in the north and come to the south’ [Song 4:16].” ^{Footnote 62} According to Emden, the fact that the Zohar’s explanation resonates with passages from Scripture proves the truth and authenticity of the Zohar’s take on the issue.

Emden ends the responsum with a triumphant exclamation: “And from here the wise will see how all the words of our sages in the aggadot [the narrative portions of the Talmud] are sweeter than honey and all fitting with one another. They are complete, interrelated, and pointing and hinting to one another.” ^{Footnote 63} The kabbalistic interpretation, in Emden’s view, accords with the rabbinic truth and testifies to the completeness of the tradition. Years later, Emden added a postscript to the responsum, in which he expressed his joy at having discovered a work attributed to Rashi’s students. In that work, Rashi instructs grooms to position their beds in accordance with kabbalistic practice:

More surprising still, Emden accords the Zohar’s opinion (at the very least) equal weight to a minority talmudic opinion, for “it is as though the opinion in the Zohar—which is opposed to the Talmud—was said by Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai, seeing as that sacred work is attributed to him.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In other words, Emden equates the kabbalistic source with a statement by a talmudic sage. Had his predecessors seen the Zohar, Emden claims, they doubtless would have accepted its interpretation.Footnote ⁶⁷ A more emphatic endorsement of the Zohar as the work of Rabbi Shimon would be hard to imagine.

One might suggest that Emden composed this responsum at an early stage in his life, when he still believed in the sacred source of the Zohar, and that he was disabused of this notion later in life. But a comment in his introduction to Mitpaḥat Sefarim suggests otherwise. Emden writes that his skeptical views on the Zohar were “enclosed in the chambers of my heart about forty years.” ^{Footnote 68} The responsum in question is dated to 1728, exactly forty years prior to his printing of Mitpaḥat Sefarim, and the postscript was added much later.

Apparently, then, Emden had entertained doubts concerning the Zohar even as in his halakic writing he enthusiastically endorsed that same work. He emended traditional interpretations of the Talmud in order to make halakic decisions concur with the Zohar and jubilantly adduced evidence in favor of the Zohar’s interpretations. In his halakic responsum, where he could easily have sidestepped the issue, he waxes poetic about the superiority of kabbalah and affirms Rabbi Shimon as the Zohar’s originator. Emden neither compartmentalizes legal thought from mysticism nor cordons off mysticism to an obscure corner of the Jewish faith. None of this, in short, squares with the image of Emden as the maskilim saw him, a figure wary of kabbalah and skeptical of the Zohar.

Emden the Enigma?

The opening sentence of Mitpaḥat Sefarim reads: “The entire essence of the book of the Zohar is as holy as that of the heavens is pure.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Emden intersperses the book with similar praise for the Zohar. He writes, for instance, that “he who denies the tradition [lit. “kabbalah”] of the wisdom of truth is, in my eyes, an absolute heretic.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, the very existence of Mitpaḥat Sefarim attests against the view of Emden as a Zohar opponent. As Isaiah Tishby notes, none of the numerous Zohar skeptics before Emden composed works like Mitpaḥat Sefarim, because “they did not have sufficiently high regard for it to study it and disprove its antiquity.”Footnote ⁷¹ The very decision to engage so closely with the work attests to a certain regard for it.

Earlier anti-Zohar polemics, such as Leone Modena’s critique, featured general attacks against mysticism but were devoid of close readings.Footnote ⁷² Mitpaḥat Sefarim, by contrast, can be read as a serious gloss of the Zohar. Boaz Huss contrasts Emden to “Delmedigo and Modena, who opposed the kabbalistic contents of the Zohar and rejected it from a rationalist anti-kabbalistic point of view.”Footnote ⁷³ Tishby, too, compares Emden to Modena to highlight the complexity of Mitpaḥat Sefarim:

One way of explaining the seeming contradiction in Emden’s position on the Zohar is to dismiss one of its sides as insincere. One might contend that Emden felt compelled to mask his opposition to such a central work of Jewish mysticism. In this view, Emden prefaced Mitpaḥat Sefarim with excessive proclamations of the Zohar’s sanctity while concealing his true opinion—that the Zohar was not a sacred work—between the lines. By the same token, one could just as well claim that Emden sincerely believed in the sanctity of the Zohar but was forced to criticize the work outwardly in response to the dangers of Sabbateanism.

Rabbi Ḥayim Joseph David Azulai (known by his acronym Ḥida), one of the most prolific of eighteenth-century rabbinic authors, takes the latter view. In his bibliography of Jewish books, Shem ha-Gedolim (The names of the great; Livorno, 1774), Azulai portrays Emden as a sincere adherent of the Zohar, who “truly and honestly knew the issue of the Zohar, but in his zealotry against the cursed sect,” he raised doubts about the work’s authenticity. ^{Footnote 75} For Azulai, Emden criticized the Zohar merely as an emergency measure, intended purely for the sake of heaven. Still, the final words in Azulai’s description, “And may God in his mercy judge him favorably,” ^{Footnote 76} suggest disapproval of Emden’s decision to write Mitpaḥat Sefarim, regardless of his good intentions.

The contradictions persist in a broadside Emden printed to promote his writings. ^{Footnote 77} It lists eight folio works, nineteen quarto works, and eight octavo works written by Emden, with a short description of each. Emden describes Mitpaḥat Sefarim as follows: “(Mitpaḥat Sefarim) concerning the book of the Zohar, Ra'aya Meheimana and Tikkunim, in order to purify it and to refine it from distortions and errors that have fallen within them due to unknown copyists…. In the end it mentions some matters about Eibeschützer.” ^{Footnote 78} Mitpaḥat Sefarim appears in this description as a work of scholarship concerned with polemics only as an afterthought.

The formats mentioned on Emden’s list, however, give a very different impression. The works were listed according to their format: octavo, folio, and quarto. The type of work in each of these categories is quite consistent, with each category containing types of texts roughly belonging to the same genre. The choice of format reflected a work’s practical function as well as its standing and level of importance. The prayer books are all printed in octavo, probably with portability and ease of use in mind. The works printed in the larger and more respectable (and expensive) folio format are, without exception, scholarly volumes: a gloss on an important halakic code, a commentary on the Mishnah, and Emden’s collection of responsa. Seventeen out of the nineteen works listed in the more cheaply produced quarto format are wedding speeches, eulogies, sermons, or polemical pamphlets. ^{Footnote 79} The choice of format signifies Emden’s view of the latter as more ephemeral than his weightier rabbinic works.

Emden’s broadside lists Mitpaḥat Sefarim with the other works in quarto format, among the polemical works. Moreover, although Emden’s description in the broadside prioritized the scholarly aspect, with the polemics featuring only as an afterthought, the booklet’s format and its title page characterize the work as aimed against the Sabbatean groups who sought to draw justification from the Zohar. Most of the partially rhymed text on the title page is taken up by vitriolic insults of his opponents that typify Emden’s polemics. ^{Footnote 80} Those of Emden’s contemporaries familiar with his previous works could, at one glance, have classified—and perhaps dismissed—Mitpaḥat Sefarim as another of his polemical pamphlets rather than a serious work of scholarship.

In sum, readers have dismissed the work as either insincere criticism in the service of polemics or as a genuine anti-Zohar work concealed behind polemics. Emden has been portrayed either as a proto-Enlightenment rationalist or as a mystic who merely decided, as Azulai put it, to attack the Zohar as an emergency measure. Yet neither view does Emden full justice. The thoroughness and seriousness of Emden’s critique in Mitpaḥat Sefarim cannot be understood as “mere apologetics” ; as Tishby noted, Emden preempted almost all arguments that modern Zohar critics would advance. ^{Footnote 81} The true nature of Mitpaḥat Sefarim—and of Emden’s attitude to the Zohar—bears a more nuanced reading. It requires understanding Emden not as a conflicted figure caught between modernity and tradition, but as a full-fledged member of the pivotal period in between—the early modern period.

Emden the Printer

The first edition of Mitpaḥat Sefarim was printed, as its title page announces, “in the home of the author” in Altona (then under the authority of the Danish monarchy). In 1743, Emden sought permission from King Christian VI of Denmark to operate a Hebrew printing press. In requesting a royal privilege, Emden mentions the desire to work “without anybody’s interference.” ^{Footnote 82} Despite opposition by local Christian printers, the king granted the privilege. Emden employed an experienced typesetter named Aharon son of Eliyah. ^{Footnote 83} In Emden’s autobiography, Megillat Sefer (Book-scroll), he mentions acquiring cursive type and commissioning expensive new “square letters” and cantillation and vocalization points in Amsterdam. ^{Footnote 84} The first work to come off Emden’s press was his prayer book Amudei Shamayim (Heavenly pillars), which he commenced in 1744. ^{Footnote 85} From then until a year before his death in 1776, Emden’s press continued with only a single interruption: in 1751, his condemnation of Eibeschütz so aggravated local Jewish leaders that they forcibly closed the press.

During those decades, Emden printed only his own works, rather than the usual fare of Bibles, almanacs, and more popular—and profitable—books usually favored by printing houses. Amid the long series of failed business ventures listed in Megillat Sefer, Emden’s press stands out as the one enterprise that he viewed not as an ill-fated attempt at making money, which he tended to describe with some distaste, but as a holy labor blessed by God, which he did not pursue for profit. ^{Footnote 86}

Emden considered print a divine tool for spreading truth and a valuable weapon in his anti-Sabbatean arsenal. He referred to printing as sacred labor and interpreted the successes of his press as signs of divine approval. ^{Footnote 87} Emden regarded his role as a printer as an extension of his rabbinic and scholarly role.

Emden’s role as a printer aids our understanding of Mitpaḥat Sefarim in another way. Historians have remarked upon the importance of print for establishing the credibility and cultural capital of the Zohar. ^{Footnote 88} Beyond broad dissemination, the very process of publishing a work in print rather than manuscript—especially a work as fragmented and heterogeneous as the Zohar—has effects more far-reaching than simply the technical ability to copy texts more efficiently. Printing shapes the basic awareness of what makes a book, what it means to say that a book is authentic or a forgery, and what authorship implies—a notion that consumers of printed books take more literally than those familiar with the world of manuscripts and the mechanics of preparing manuscripts for print. As both a printer and an editor, roles that often intersected in the early modern period, Emden was keenly aware of these processes. In Mitpaḥat Sefarim, he draws on this knowledge in order to criticize the Zohar’s origins while upholding its sanctity.

Emden’s critiques in Mitpaḥat Sefarim often attack the Zohar from the perspective of copyists’ errors and printers’ mistakes. Emden employs the well-used “erring copyist” trope in a very particular way. He opens his work by explaining that he “will organize [his] irrefutable proofs before everyone who knows the ways of books and the law of compositions.” ^{Footnote 89} In the process, Emden explicitly links the Zohar’s errors to the printed book: “in this book that is in print, there is wheat and chaff mixed together.” ^{Footnote 90} The title page draws attention to the transmission of the copyists: the work will inquire “whether those who shook it (who emptied it from one vessel into another) were careful to refrain from the sin of addition and subtraction.” ^{Footnote 91} The broadside describes Mitpaḥat Sefarim as a work “concerning the book of the Zohar … to purify it and refine it from the pitfalls and errors that have fallen within them due to unknown copyists.”Footnote ⁹² Emden refers throughout to “hands of erring copyists” that inserted various mistakes. On encountering a word that clearly does not belong in a certain sentence, Emden explains that “the printer did not understand, and inserted everything inside, within the language[/statement] of the Zohar.” ^{Footnote 93} Rather than cast aspersions on the text itself, he often blames printers and copyists as the culprits for the Zohar’s problematic nature. ^{Footnote 94}

Before the Zohar was printed, kabbalists did not regard it as a unified book. Daniel Abrams and Boaz Huss have shown that amorphous clusters of kabbalistic ideas vaguely related to Rabbi Shimon evolved into zoharic texts attributed to the tanna; only much later did these texts coalesce into “the book of the Zohar,” said to be authored verbatim by Rabbi Shimon. Thus, the idea of Rabbi Shimon as the author of the Zohar evolved in tandem with the idea of the Zohar as a book. Once printed, the Zohar looked like an unproblematic, unified text, especially to readers unfamiliar with the realities of printing from manuscripts. This false impression only increased as time went on; readers forgot its origins and came to think of the Zohar as a printed work, not a manuscript collection that had been recently assembled and printed.

In 1558, the Zohar was printed in two editions, in Cremona and Mantua. While earlier manuscript collections varied widely, the editors in both cities consciously created almost identical printed editions.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Mantua edition contains the following comment before a section titled Zohar Ruth:

Due to this rivalry, both editions were printed to be as inclusive, and therefore as similar, as possible. This despite the fact that the Mantua editors were certain that this section was not part of the Zohar. They based this insight both on linguistic considerations and on the fact that the passages did not appear in the oldest manuscript copy that they consulted, a manuscript from Safed which they held in particular esteem. ^{Footnote 97} The similarity of the editions compounded the perception of the readers of both editions that this printed book represented the “original” Zohar—after all, the work was now one unit, with a title and an author. This notion, tenuous at first, solidified as the book was printed and reprinted, and as translations, summaries, commentaries, and abridgments all treated the Zohar as a book authored by Rabbi Shimon.

The notion of a book as a defined and unified work, rather than a loose and varied collection of excerpts, evokes a much stricter idea of authorship. A loose collection of excerpts that vary from copy to copy seems intuitively closer to traditions that were transmitted orally and occasionally written down by various individuals, but not necessarily written by one author. The more defined, stable, and unified a book, the more one tends to imagine it as having been authored by one person at one point in time and transmitted by means of complete and accurate copies. Printing a book from a fragmented manuscript tradition requires editing, selecting fragments, determining the book’s boundaries, and stabilizing its contents. These actions, in addition to the fact that printing disseminates so many (near) identical copies of the work, have the power to perform a major leap in presenting pieces of writing as a book in this stronger sense. This leap is even greater for a work like the Zohar, which had not circulated as a unified book prior to being printed. The editors set out actively to collect textual excerpts, creating what became known as the book of the Zohar.

A printed book also establishes a markedly different relationship between book and text. Consumers of printed books take the notion that a book is “written by” a certain author more literally than those familiar with the mechanics of preparing a manuscript for print. Anyone familiar with scribal copying was cognizant of scribal error, the fragility of authorship, and the inevitable fluidity of manuscripts, but only those who entered a print shop would be fully aware of the extent to which the book is no less an imperfect product. The printing of the Zohar solidified the notion that the work was authored, and not merely inspired, by Rabbi Shimon—not least by promoting the notion that the Zohar was a book in the first place. The Zohar born on the presses in Mantua and Cremona reinforced both that the Zohar was a book and that Rabbi Shimon was the author in its simplistic sense, thus establishing the authority of all of its contents in an undifferentiated manner.

Emden was acutely familiar with the mechanics of print, especially with regard to first editions of ancient writings that had hitherto circulated only in excerpts, as was the case for so many of the early modern works that humanists studied. Angelo Poliziano (d. 1494) was one of the earliest proponents of using scholarly methods to analyze and recover the original ancient texts behind the corrupted manuscript copies. The Italian printer Aldus Manutius (d. 1515) introduced such ideas to the print shop by collecting various manuscripts and comparing them, so as to prepare printed works that were, as he claimed, more faithful to the ancient original than corrupted medieval manuscript copies. ^{Footnote 98} As Yakov Mayer has recently shown, Venetian printers of Jewish books, such as the editors of Daniel Bomberg’s Hebrew press, shared similar attitudes. ^{Footnote 99} Elchanan Reiner has pointed out that the textual criticism pervading Manutius’s printerly enterprise and reflected among Bomberg’s editors formed the roots of a critical approach to traditional Jewish texts that historians would later (mistakenly) identify as modern and maskilic. ^{Footnote 100} These early modern printing presses were preoccupied with fashioning an ancient book where none had existed before. We can thus say that the sixteenth-century editors and printers of the Zohar were the forgers of the book, in the sense of “forging” that implies both the making of the book and the sense of unity and authorship accompanying it.

Emden’s awareness of what took place behind the scenes of a print shop allowed him to critique the Zohar while preserving its sanctity. Concerning the earlier reception of the Zohar at the time of its first printing, he wrote: “For in the time when the Zohar was printed for the first time, prosecutors stood up against it, to argue and say, who knows who is its author, and who is the master of the book of the Zohar that we must worship him?!” ^{Footnote 101} By the time Emden wrote Mitpaḥat Sefarim, however, the Zohar had for centuries been treated as a book. Its readers had become unaware of the vagaries of copying and the active role of editors in creating editions of ancient texts for publication. As printing became cheaper and more ubiquitous, books were taken for granted, and readers simply assumed that books authentically represent the texts they embody. They assumed that if there is a “book of the Zohar,” it must have existed in this form, and been transmitted in this manner, ever since Rabbi Shimon committed it to paper. In his many comments mentioning printers and copyists, Emden highlights the process of creating the physical object of the printed book, as though he wished to remind his readers that books are highly imperfect creations.

Some have depicted the distinction between text and book as “platonic,” ^{Footnote 102} the book representing the body to the text’s soul, the imperfect physical existence to the text’s pure idealist essence. Emden seems to be making a similar distinction when he writes that “the essence of the Zohar is pure … but in this book that is in print, there is wheat and chaff mixed together.” ^{Footnote 103} By differentiating text from book, Emden was able to fulfill the nuanced tendencies of his attitude toward the Zohar. On the one hand, he affirmed that the wisdom of the Zohar emanated in some way or another from Rabbi Shimon’s teachings. On the other hand, he was disturbed by its more problematic and erroneous contents, as well as its role in legitimizing heresies. By destabilizing the Zohar as a book—by attacking the work (in practice) while maintaining its sanctity (in theory)—he could critique its text and question its authorship without entirely dismantling its authority. By blaming the printed work, Emden could neutralize passages that struck him as dangerous (such as passages contradicting the Talmud) by explaining that “their interpretation is unnecessary, and they exaggerated to ascribe to the Zohar something it never intended.” ^{Footnote 104}

Emden had been preparing his own edition of the Zohar for publication, complete with corrections and emendations. Towards the end of Mitpaḥat Sefarim, he indicates his plans to “publish also glosses and emendations with some commentary on the book of the Zohar.” ^{Footnote 105} Vice versa, in the manuscript notes for that work (which he did not ultimately print) there are frequent references to Mitpaḥat Sefarim. The reciprocity indicates that the intellectual activity behind both works—sharp criticism and sincere commentary—were one and the same. We cannot help but wonder about the format Emden would have used for printing his Zohar. Would it have been printed in folio, the scholarly tome to Mitpaḥat Sefarim’s polemical pamphlet? Whatever the answer, the polemical and the scholarly aspects were clearly fueled by the same conceptualization. Emden could conceive of the book of the Zohar as an imperfect material representation of the true and elusive text. He could attribute problematic elements to the erroneous scribes, copyists, and printers involved in its transmission, while the ideal text remained pristine and unblemished.

Conclusion: Emden as an Early Modern Scholar

How could the very author who wrote arguably the most penetrating critique of the Zohar at the same time enthusiastically endorse that work’s mystical ideas? Viewing Emden as an early modern humanist printer can help.

As I have suggested here, Emden has too often been portrayed as either premodern or modern, either an enthusiastic mystic or an antimystical critic. Yet any attempt to peg Emden as a rationalist critic of kabbalah soon runs aground on contradictory evidence. As a result, some dismissed Emden’s criticism as insincere or merely polemical. In this interpretation, Emden was required to sacrifice the Zohar in order to fight heterodoxy, even though he was not in the least convinced of the Zohar’s falsehood. If his reception history is to be believed, the options are limited: Emden is either a serious critic who pays lip service to the sanctity of the Zohar, an insincere critic who merely attacked the work for polemical reasons, or a torn soul.

Historians, too, have struggled to place Emden. Some describe him as only halfbelonging to the modern era. ^{Footnote 106} Shmuel Feiner disagrees with the characterization of Emden as a precursor of the Haskalah, as Wolf and other maskilim understood him—instead, he suggests the term “early maskil (a Jewish equivalent of Frühaufklärung). This explanation encourages a more nuanced understanding of the Haskalah, the purpose of Feiner’s study. However, the portrayal of Emden remains a disunified and uncertain accumulation of traits, part modern, part traditional. Emden is still portrayed as torn between tradition and Enlightenment, someone who “suppressed his desire for enlightenment,” ashamed of his attraction to the new ideas, rather than receiving a unified depiction. ^{Footnote 107} To truly understand Emden in all his complexity, he has to be placed firmly in the early modern period. The past decades have seen increasing recognition of the intellectual and cultural richness of the early modern period as a separate period in its own right. Jewish history has gradually adopted this frame, with promising results. ^{Footnote 108} It is only by understanding rabbinic history from this time period as equally part of the early modern world that we can accurately appreciate figures such as Emden with the appropriate nuance and specificity. ^{Footnote 109}

If we firmly place Emden in his “early modern” context, we can make sense of his particular combination of sensibilities and can see him not as an outlier, a “precursor” of the Enlightenment, or a medieval figure who still believed in mystical ideas, but as a humanist critic and printer, not unlike Manutius or Poliziano. Early modern humanist scholars and printers considered manuscripts and different editions of books, and used their knowledge of ancient languages, history, geography and chronology to determine the best edition for a text’s publication. Emden, not unlike these humanists, drew upon linguistic and philological learning, historical awareness, geographical knowledge, and context from other manuscripts and printed books, bringing these to bear upon the text he was printing. ^{Footnote 110}

Convinced of the Zohar’s authenticity and sanctity, Emden was simultaneously all too aware of the corruption of the work and the dangers it posed. Placing Emden in the context of early modern humanist scholarship and publishing helps us understand how he dismantles the Zohar’s authority in precisely the manner required by his complex beliefs. Viewing him as an early modern printer sheds light on elements of Emden’s stance—and his reception history—that at first glance appear contradictory. For early modern scholars, a combination of historical criticism and reverence was unproblematic. Modern historians, by contrast, often assume that a critical attitude to sources from the past implies dismantling their sanctity in order to view them objectively. Nineteenth-century scholars of German scientific historical study, or Wissenschaft, propagated the idea that textual criticism and philology are modern products of objective scientific inquiry and could thus not have been held by premodern scholars. These positivist scholars believed that history must be studied objectively, like a science, free of ideology or personal opinion. Even in our day, historians consider critiquing texts from a historical perspective as fundamentally different from earlier scholarship. Anthony Grafton observes:

Long before Wissenschaft, as Grafton has shown, early modern scholars engaged in inquiries not altogether different from those of modern historians: “If one goes back through the dark forests of early modern learning … one discovers that many of the apparently innovative and apparently sophisticated debates over the nature and authorship of forged and pseudepigraphical texts actually reenacted scripts already written.” ^{Footnote 112} Emden’s inquiries into the authenticity of the Zohar can be numbered among these scripts.

However, as Grafton remarks, these earlier generations of critics “were more modest than their own later historians…. They saw themselves as practicing a traditional, not a novel, art.” ^{Footnote 113} Modern scholars have tended to interpret Emden’s work through the lens of nineteenth-century historicism as a work of objective criticism that punctured the halo of a revered work. Yet on his own terms, Emden viewed his enterprise not as an irreverent critique, but as a traditional work of textual scholarship.

If Wissenschaftler saw themselves as objective scientists, humanist scholars admitted their subjective opinions and believed that this very subjectivity, far from deterring scholarship, could in fact nourish it. In the context of early modern textual criticism, the partiality of polemics and the objectivity of criticism need not be opposed. “The earlier critics,” Grafton concludes, “were both, in a sense, doing only what came naturally: attacking a text that contained not only technical flaws that irritated their sensibilities but also heresies that offended their deepest convictions … they assumed these principles, which in turn both inspired and shaped their attacks on texts that violated them.” ^{Footnote 114} Before “proper” historical criticism was understood, by definition, to require the exclusion of religious and philosophical ideas, humanists saw no problem with mixing religious opinions and sectarian polemics with critical historical inquiry. On the contrary, they often served as complementary parts of a single enterprise.

A historian once described Emden as awkwardly positioned between the Middle Ages and the modern period: “one of his feet is placed in the past and his other foot is thrust forward.” ^{Footnote 115} Since the writing of that article, however, a more complex picture of this period between medieval and modern times has freed us of the necessity of classifying him either as a critic whose exoteric polemics concealed esoteric doubts about mysticism, or, conversely, a mystic merely pretending to critique a sacred book. Nor are we required to dismiss him as a “split personality.” Rather, as an early modern scholar with both a critical sensibility and sensitivity for anachronism, Emden was informed by a consciousness of the dynamics of print and was moved by inclinations both scholarly and polemical. Historical context was crucial for scholars in the early modern period. It also helps us, in our present day, to understand these scholars in their full complexity.