Regardless of whether one views the Zohar as being written or revealed in the 13th century by R.Moses de Leon, the fact remains, something changed at this time. Knowledge that was believed to be concealed and hidden, esoteric, and elite, became revealed and publicized to a much larger audience. Why did this change take place? What forces both internal and external could possibly explain this revolutionary change.
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The fact that traditions which were traditionally oral were recorded could have many reasons. The belief that when something was at risk at being lost in the oral tradition due to whatever circumstances usually political forces, is when these texts emerged. As we see with the Zohar they were still very obscure as we saw with the Bahir and Safir Yetzirah before. There is hidden meaning in the text simply in the various interpretations one can take as well as in the secret forms of reading the texts. Perhaps fear of Jewish assimilation into secular culture pressured Moses de Leon to produce the work, perhaps the mystics believed that the philosophers were screwing things up and in order to maintain the tradition they needed to incite more interest. Whatever their reasons the work of the Zohar from what I have read is quite interesting, I wonder what information was never recorded and as such has either been lost or is still passed down orally.
Although there are many facets of Judaism that could not exist today without being passed orally through the generations, the concept of oral tradition is not flawless in nature. Take into consideration the game "telephone" - a message is whispered down a line of kids until it reaches the end of the line, with the goal to have final message identical to the original. Playing with kids or adults, it is rare that the two messages are the will be identical. The same could have potentially happened with these mystical oral traditions (does that explain some of the obscurities?). To prevent this, Moses de León could have recorded everything that he knew before the generations of the future could alter the beliefs as they are passed on. It is possible that the version that he was taught (or chose to record) may have strayed from the original mystical teachings. At this point in Spanish history, the Muslims occupied Spain and actually coexisted peacefully with the Jews, so there would be little political pressure in that sense. Finally, being that the oldest manuscripts written in a form of Spanish date back to the 12th century, Moses de León could have easily gotten caught up in the craze of producing manuscripts (even though the Zohar was written in a form of Hebrew.. I think).
thinking about the historical context of this time period - life was difficult, especially for the jews. i can only imagine living in such a situation where one is not even a citizen of one's own nation . ok, so maybe this was not exactly the right decade but the jews had been exiled many times before and in the next century or so would be exiled again... so i would think that the exposition for formerly elite and esoteric concepts to the masses might have been for two reasons (1) out of fear that these traditions would be lost forever and (2) in order to strengthen the jewish community and comfort those who were afriad and suffering.
I think that the reason the Zohar was put into text was because oral traditions were not a relaible form of communicating information. I think that it was important to keep these traditions; and in order to make the traditions widespread and reach out to others, it was necessary to put the information into text. By putting the traditions into text, the information cannot be lost, which guarantees its existance in the future. I think that Moses de Leon recognized the importance of maintaining the traditions, and as a result he wrote the Zohar.
I have not read anything posted already, so I hope that my post is not repetitive or redundant. From the reading, I have gathered that Jewish mysticism became popularized in the late 13th century as a response to Jewish Philosophy. Laenan goes into a lot of detail comparing and contrasting the two, and Green actually makes the point that the mystics came out of their esoteric groups to make mysticism public in order to combat Jewish Philosophy.
As society changed towards a shift in record-keeping, especially as a result of the invention of the printing press, oral traditions and knowledge was suddenly abound in books. Because of this, the intimate and "elite" cirles of mystical study were expanded to the general population. Commentaries to mystical thought could then also be written and read by others- thus allowing different aspects of mystical thought to flow through Jewish society and maintain the traditions that were being threatened by secular society.
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