ZOHAR [...] HADASH (MATERIAL NOT INCLUDED IN PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED ZOHAR EDITIONS), ATTRIBUTED TO RABBI SIMEON BAR YOHAI, SALONIKA: JOSEPH ABRAHAM BEN MATTATHIAS BASEVI, 1597

The first edition of an important collection of supplementary zoharic material.

From the time that the first Zohar manuscripts began to circulate in the thirteenth century, their contents seem to have varied widely. Indeed, modern scholarship has demonstrated that the zoharic corpus was only stabilized when the first editions were printed in Cremona and Mantua in the late 1550s (see lots 31, 32). Realizing that a significant amount of material remained unpublished, Rabbi Abraham ben Eliezer ha-Levi Berukhim (ca. 1515-1593), a Moroccan kabbalist who had immigrated to Safed probably before 1565, expended enormous effort to locate and collate additional manuscripts, eventually compiling an early version of the present work. Berukhim’s book was later reedited by two other Safed scholars, Rabbis Solomon ben Isaac ha-Kohen Ashkenazi and Naphtali ben Joseph, and brought to press by the former in Salonika in 1597. In later printings (e.g., Krakow, 1603), the book would be called simply Zohar hadash (The New Zohar) to emphasize the novelty of the text included herein.