"New-Ancient Words" and New-Ancient Worlds

Abstract

Qatpira, qesira, qirta, quspita, qustra?and those are just the 'q's. These strange words, neologisms actually, are sprinkled throughout the Zohar with an intention to perplex the reader, forcing her to read, and read again, to decipher the text's meaning. In undertaking to translate Sefer ha-Zohar? more an anthology of mystical writings than a book proper?Daniel Matt has assumed a heroic task, one that has met with well-deserved accolades. Matt has the necessary poetic and scholarly talents, using traditional and modern commentaries to render the Zohar into an English that reveres the text's mysteries while aiming to clarify them and render them transparent. Over the centuries, Sefer ha-Zohar, the Book of Splendor, has assumed many statuses: canonical, sacred, forgery, and heresy. Whatever its ultimate origins, origins that remain in dispute in both scholarly and traditional cir cles more than 700 years after Moshe de Leon began to circulate pamphlets of a mystical text, the book has had a transformative effect upon Judaism.1 Mainstreaming Kabbalah, by adopting the form of a mystical midrash and the structure of a Bible commentary, its circle(s) of authors fashioned a text that opened up a genre that had been exclusively elitist until the thirteenth century. Kabbalah's popularity, even celebrity, has exploded in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries with the hucksterism and mass