Moses de León
About 1240 to 1305
Who was Moses de León, and what is truly known of them?
What is known
Spanish Jewish kabbalist, born about 1240, perhaps at León, who lived at Guadalajara and later at Ávila. In 1264 a copy of the Guide of Maimonides was made for him. From the 1280s he wrote Hebrew works of Kabbalah under his own name and at the same time circulated, booklet by booklet, an Aramaic commentary on the Torah that he said he was copying from an ancient manuscript of the second-century sage Simeon bar Yochai: the Zohar. He died at Arévalo in 1305 on his way home. Most scholars since Gershom Scholem have held that he wrote the main body of the Zohar himself; more recent studies see a circle of Castilian kabbalists at work with him.
The teaching
Taught from the Zohar and the Hebrew books under his own name, the Book of the Pomegranate, The Wise Soul and The Holy Shekel.
The Zohar and his own books
The teaching of the Zohar, its companions on the road, the Holy One and the Shekhinah, the other side and the three levels of the soul, is taught in full on the page of The Zohar and Safed, under The Tree of Life. In the books he put out under his own name Moses de León teaches the same Kabbalah in plain Hebrew, answering the questions of those who came to him, and that teaching follows here.
Nothing and the point
At the summit of the ten stands the highest crown, and he calls it nothing, ayin. It is not empty. It is called nothing because no mind can grasp what it is, and whatever can be named stands below it. From that nothing comes the first point of being, wisdom, the beginning of all things, which the first word of the Torah calls the beginning. Around the point opens the palace of understanding, the mother in whom everything after takes shape, and from her the seven lower powers go out. To make the world from nothing, in this teaching, is to bring it forth from the hidden crown.
The ten are one
The ten powers are not ten gods, nor things set beside God, but the ways in which the one God goes out and is known. They are bound to one another and to their source as a flame is bound to its coal, in the words of the Book of Creation, and each holds the others within it. Whoever separates them, worshipping one apart from the rest or setting the presence below apart from the powers above it, cuts the shoots, as the sages say of the one who went astray in the orchard. Every act of devotion aims at the opposite: to join them.
The pomegranate of the commandments
The Book of the Pomegranate takes its name from the sages' saying that even the emptiest in Israel are as full of commandments as a pomegranate is of seeds. It goes through the commandments one by one and opens their inner meaning. Each has a body, the deed done with the hand, and a soul, the intention that goes with it, and each answers to a place above: the two hundred and forty-eight commands to do answer to the limbs of the body, and the three hundred and sixty-five commands to refrain answer to the days of the solar year. A commandment done below stirs its root above and helps to join the Holy One to the Shekhinah.
He writes against those who, proud of the philosophy of the Greeks, think they can grasp the meaning of the commandments and leave the deeds behind. The soul of a commandment lives only in its body, as a person's soul lives here only in a body, and a meaning without its deed is a breath with nowhere to dwell.
Why the soul comes down
The Wise Soul asks why a soul drawn from on high must enter a body at all. His answer is that it comes down to be perfected. Above, it can know but cannot do; only in a body can it fulfil the commandments, and through them it gathers what it lacked and goes back richer than it came.
The deeds of a life are woven into a garment for the soul. When it leaves the body it is clothed in that garment, made of the commandments it fulfilled, and in it the soul can stand in the garden of Eden and look upon a light that would otherwise be too strong for it. A soul whose deeds were few has a garment with gaps in it, and stands the barer for it. So each day of a life is a thread of the garment, and none is wasted.
Orders and memberships
No order is documented. He worked among the kabbalists of Castile, Joseph Gikatilla among them: a loose circle of scholars, and no society with rules or grades.
The legend
That the Zohar was written by Simeon bar Yochai in a cave in the second century and came to light in Spain. That is the book’s own claim and the belief of many who revere it; its language and its sources point to thirteenth-century Castile. A report by Isaac of Acre has the author’s widow say there was never an old manuscript; it survives only at second hand.
Their works
- The ZoharScripture, from the 1280s
An Aramaic commentary on the Torah set among the second century sage Simeon bar Yochai and his companions, telling of the ten sefirot, the inner life of God and the hidden meaning of the commandments. It became the chief book of the Kabbalah and stands beside the Bible and the Talmud for many Jews.
Most scholars hold it to be his work or that of his circle, not of the ancient sage.
Ask the Oracle about it - Book of the PomegranateBook, 1287
A Hebrew book under his own name on the inner meaning of the commandments, sharing many ideas and phrases with the Zohar. It is one of the chief grounds for the view that he wrote the Zohar.
Ask the Oracle about it - The Wise SoulBook, 1290
A Hebrew book under his own name, also called the Book of the Weighing, on the soul, its parts and its fate after death, answering questions put to him. It too echoes the Zohar.
Ask the Oracle about it - The Holy ShekelBook, 1292
A Hebrew book under his own name on the sefirot, the ten powers of God in the Kabbalah, and on the soul, written at Ávila. It sets out the doctrine of the Zohar in plainer form.
Ask the Oracle about it
How the house tells a life
This life is told from the record, with what is documented, what is legend and what was forged kept apart. A membership in an order is stated only where documents show it. A person’s chart explains none of their deeds.
The arts it feeds
Lives near it in time
Lives and legends
IamblichusZosimos of PanopolisJabir ibn HayyanAbu Ma’sharMichael ScotAbraham AbulafiaArnald of VillanovaJacques de MolayNicolas FlamelJohannes TrithemiusCornelius AgrippaParacelsusThe whole tree
