r/JewishKabbalah

Hello, looking for a good community to start studying online. Suggestons? Thank you all!

In 1925, Gershom Scholem z"l wrote a letter to Hayyim Bialik (published in 1976, pp. 59-63) in which he expressed his desire for a dictionary of the Zohar. He began work on such a project, but he never completed it, and to this day no one else has finished the task. But Scholem's card index for his planned Zoharic dictionary has been scanned and digitized for the public by the National Library of Israel, viewable here.

Independent scholar Judith Barrett z"l had been working with the help of Prof. Justin J. Lewis of the University of Manitoba to complete Scholem's dictionary, along with a planned grammar of Zoharic Aramaic to supplement Menaḥem Kaddari's grammar of the Zohar (PhD thesis, published 1976 [in Hebrew]). She passed away in 2022 with her dictionary and grammar still unfinished, but the final edition of her dictionary spans 196 pages, and was apparently near completion. The unfinished drafts of her work, both her dictionary and her grammatical notes, are still preserved here on her WordPress page.

Yehuda Liebes's 1977 dissertation [in Hebrew] on the close study of 20 roots and their meanings and usages in the Zohar is available online here.

Daniel C. Matt, lead translator of the Pritzker Edition of the Zohar, compiled a dictionary of difficult Zoharic terms that he used as a private reference while tranlating. He has helpfully uploaded it for free, available on his website here. Headwords are written in Latin transliteration, rather than in Aramaic script.

Boaz Huss has published a study [in Hebrew] of the Spanish and Arabic loanwords in the Zohar, available here on his academia[.]edu page. This is a critical edition of an old Hebrew text that has been published many times under various titles and attributed to different authors.

Gerrit Bos has published a series of articles titled "Neologisms and Other Difficult Terms in Sefer ha-Zohar: Novel Interprations". Currently he's published 6 entries in this series. All are available to read on his academia.edu page here.

There are some volumes available on hebrewbooks.org, all in Hebrew, written between the 17th and 19th centuries that attempt to describe some of the Zohar's vocabulary. They include: Imrei Binah by R. Isaachar Baer of Krimnetz (1611), Yesha Yah by Isaiah ben Eliezer Hayyim Nizza (1637), VaYe'esof David in addendum to Qadmut Sefer haZohar by David Luria (1837), and Sefer haMa'arikh by Menahem ben Judah de Lonzano (1853).

Andrea Gondos has an article Decoding the Language of the Zohar: Lexicons to Kabbalah in Early Modernity, available here, but requiring a subscription to the AJS Review. She discusses the history of attempts to study the language and vocabulary of the Zohar. In it she mentions a number of additional works which are not mentioned elsewhere in this post.

Some of these resources I had already been aware of, and some were first made known to me by Justin J. Lewis and Judith Barrett z"l, whom I never had the pleasure to meet, in their chapter "A 'Mind-Blowing' Project: Zoharic Aramaic for Beginners" published in Harry Fox, Daniel Maoz and Tirzah Meacham, eds. From Something to Nothing: Jewish Mysticism in Contemporary Canadian Jewish Studies. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, pp. 349-373 (available here). I hope that others here may benefit from and admire Judith's work as I have.