"Boaz Huss, a kabbala scholar at Ben-Gurion University, retraces the manner in which Jewish society has received the Zohar, from the latter stages of the 13th century to the present day. Hearkening to the terminology often employed by the French Marxist sociologist Pierre Bordier, he defines the book as "cultural capital," a subject whose mastery, distribution and interpretation yield benefits often measured in prestige and social standing. In a similar vein, "the advent of a negative symbolism attached to the Zohar and its depiction as a forged, base and amoral text also fulfilled a cultural task during various historical timeframes." He demonstrates a clear correlation between the Zeitgeist and an era's attitude to the Zohar: During a period, like the 16th century, in which Jewish society was rampant with irrational, messianic hopes, belief in the book's sanctity and timelessness was heartfelt among the masses. Conversely, in an era when Judaism embraced a more rational approach, such as the Enlightenment of the 19th century, the cultural elite rejected the book as the "literary fraud of a forger ... that exacerbates the hallucinations and the nonsensical beliefs among the people."
The Zohar is revealed to be a litmus test, and people's attitudes toward it reflect the values they hold dear. This is a unique position for a book to be in, one that has known few recurrences throughout the course of Jewish history: Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, whose acclaim or rejection was a reflection of Jewish values as they pertain to the relationship between faith and science; Yosef Karo's Shulhan Arukh, the response to which was a good indicator of the extent to which rabbinical authority was held in high stead; and Herzl's "Altneuland," which was a reliable acid test of the reader's attitude toward both Zionism and modernity. ....
Huss' work does not deal specifically with the Zohar itself, but rather with people's reaction to it. Those not well-versed in Kabbala will not grasp why excerpts from the Zohar are included in the siddur, the Jewish prayer book; why Christian thinkers see the composition as a treasure overflowing with time-honored scholarship that sheds light on the coming of Jesus; and why famous entertainers today wear it like a talisman. It would thus be impossible not to agree with Prof. Yehuda Liebes that one cannot understand the "fierce reactions" to the Zohar without the Zohar: "The foundation that is in the text itself, the luminance of the Zohar [which means "brightness" or "radiance" in Hebrew], are likely to arouse feelings of amazement, perhaps even disgust, all in accordance with the root of the souls of the Zohar's readers," he said during a gathering to mark the release of the book at Yad Ben Zvi, earlier this year. "
Comment: The truth is that the best argument for the authenticity of Zohar is itself. The great sweep of this work, its clear originality beyond and above any other contemporary body of work, it conceptual independence from all previous philosophy and system of thought, is what marks it as a foundational product of another era and time. To know the Zohar is to trust the Zohar. Even Sholem at first held the opinion that the Zohar contained much ancient material (and I am suspicious of his reasons for reversing this opinion).
This does not mean that this book does not continue material that is later than Rashbi. For more, see here
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