THE ZOHAR TRANSLATION currently underway by Daniel Matt is profiled by the Stanford Review:

Stanford Press revives interest in masterpiece of Kabbalah

BY CYNTHIA HAVEN

It is a teaching that is fabled to drive unprepared readers mad. It is a book of ancient Jewish wisdom. Or is it?

The Zohar—a compendium of enigmas that forms the basis of the Kabbalah—is getting a long-awaited renewal thanks to Stanford University Press's new translation, which Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel calls "masterful." The influential critic Harold Bloom calls it "a superbly fashioned translation and a commentary that opens up the Zohar to the English-speaking world." The series already has received a $10,000 Koret Jewish Book Award for "monumental contribution to the history of Jewish thought"—even though it has produced only four of a projected dozen volumes to date.

"Ultimately, it will be the biggest project Stanford University Press has ever done," press director Geoffrey Burn said. "This project will dwarf anything the press has committed to."

[...]

It's a good summary of the text and the project. I found this bit especially interesting:

Who wrote this masterpiece? Matt estimates that 75 to 80 percent comes from Moses [de León], who died in 1305. The rest may indeed be ancient texts, or perhaps the result of a collaborative effort with other contemporary kabbalists. But the question may be rather like asking whether Shakespeare or Holinshed wrote King Lear.

"You lose a lot if you only see it as an ancient composition," Matt said. Moses subtly and artfully introduces references to the effect of the Crusades on Spain, or the anguish of the Jews in an alien land. Moreover, "there's a constant interaction with earlier sources."

Scholem demonstrated that the Zohar was a medieval work and thought that Moses wrote all of it. More recent scholars have allowed for the possibility of a collaboration that drew on some older sources. I hope Matt will have more to say on this in due course.

Good article. Read it all.