ABSTRACT
Mysticism, it has been said, is a doctrine that attempts to establish an intimate connection between God and man, a break through the world of time and history into one of eternity and timelesness. It has also been defined by F. C, Happold as "a consciousness of the beyond," Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah) flourished in thirteenth-century Spain in reaction, perhaps, to the dryness of Talmudic discussion and the remoteness of rabbis from the community. Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism, studied its various manifestations, from the first Hassidic movement, to the age of the pseudo-Messiah Shabbetai Zevi and onward into the nineteenth century. Scholem is credited for attributing the authorship of the canonical Kabbalist book, The Zohar (first published in three volumes from 1558 to 1560 in Mantua), also known as The Book of Splendor, to the Spanish author Moisés ben Shemtov de León, who lived in Guadalajara, Castile, then went to Ávila, and died in the small town of Arevalo. De León studied the works of Maimonides, then turned to Neoplatonism. The Zohar is an attempt to explain the whole system of the universe through religious consciousness. In Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), Scholem states that "for centuries it stood out as the expression of all that was profoundest and most deeply hidden in the innermost recess of the Jewish soul.
