The major tradition of Jewish mysticism, devoted to the hidden inner life of God. From medieval Iberia and Provence it produced the Zohar and a map of divine emanation called the sefirot, then was transformed at Safed by Isaac Luria into a cosmic drama of contraction, shattering, and repair. It shaped later Judaism deeply, flowered into Hasidism, and survives today both as living tradition and as a stripped commercial product sold far from any synagogue.
A book appeared in Castile in the late 1200s, written in an old and difficult Aramaic. It claimed to record the teachings of a sage who had lived a thousand years before. Readers received it as an ancient secret finally surfacing. Much later, a scholar named Gershom Scholem argued that its true author was a man living right there in Spain, in his own century. The gap between what a sacred book says about itself and what the evidence shows runs straight through the heart of this tradition.