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| Tikunei Zohar, first edition, Mantua 1558 |
This article—based extensively on the research by Dr Assaf Tamari[1]—examines the Zohar’s unusual depiction of the exiled Shechina (the feminine aspect of the Godhead) as a patient requiring urgent treatment.
Note: This literature research by Tamari on the Zohar showing a possible medical context to the thirteenth-century emergence of the Zohar, is brand new and was only published recently in a peer-reviewed journal article. Had I read something like this ten years ago I would have rejected it as absolute nonsense. Now I read it with great interest and fascination.
The intertwining of religion and medicine was not an innovation of the thirteenth century when the Zohar was first published, because the two disciplines had always been interrelated since the earliest of times. Sin was traditionally associated with illness and healing with atonement (Tamari 2025:83, note 1). What was new at that time, though, was a proliferation of Jews and rabbis who had entered the medical field and were practising physicians. The number of Jewish physicians was:
“out of proportion with contemporary demographics and the place of Jews in society” (Shatzmiller 1995:1).[2]
