ספר "הזוהר" הראשון מירושלים: כתבי יד קדומים של מדרשות "הזוהר" ודרשה בלתי ידועה מן ה"מדרש הנעלם"(?)

The present article discusses a unique collection of Kabbalistic works which was copied several times in Jerusalem in the late fourteenth century, before its arrival in Venice and distribution in Northern Italy. While the majority of works in this collection date back to the second half of the thirteenth century, this group of manuscripts serves as the earliest attestation of most of these texts (and fragments). Thus, for instance, these valuable manuscripts — all copied within a small circle of Jews of different origins who settled in Mamluk Jerusalem — are the earliest documents from outside Spain to contain texts which were later identified and circulated as parts of Sefer ha-Zohar. Yet not all of this material found its way into the printed editions of Sefer ha-Zohar. The article focuses in particular on a textual unit of Kabbalistic 'midrashim' — in both Aramaic and Hebrew — on the Yibbum and Halitzah (in levirate marriage law). These midrashim, part of which are identified and edited in this study for the first time, offer a peculiar synthesis of views from early Catalan Kabbalah, pseudepigraphically attributed to Rabbinic figures. The article examines both the theoretical and the polemic Kabbalistic background to the appearance of this unknown 'zoharic' text, discusses its literary categorization, and sheds some light on its authorship.