Light is Sown: The Cultivation of Kabbalah in Medieval Castile

In a pioneering monograph-length study of the theological journey of Moses ben Shemtov de León of Guadalajara—self-proclaimed "Light of the West" and presumed writer of the Zohar, the kabbalah's crowning literary achievement—Avishai Bar-Asher and Jeremy Phillip Brown reach bold new conclusions about the kabbalah's prominence in medieval Castile. Through rigorous examinations of fragmentary texts inaccessible to scholars previously, the authors unearth critical insights about de León, specif...