Raza Rabba

A secret book from the geonic period, known by both its Aramaic title,

Raza Rabba (Great Secret), and its equivalent Hebrew title Sod ha-Gadol. It is mentioned in lists of mystical and magical works by the geonim, and it is probably the work mentioned by Petrus Alfonsi in the eleventh century as

a Hebrew work on the Tetragrammaton, the Secreta secretorum (see God,

Names of). Many quotations from Raza Rabba are included in the commentary on the Shiur Qomah by R. Mosheh ben Eliezer ha-Darshan, an Ashkenazi Hasidic writer, who was familiar with the Kabbalah and wrote

at the end of the thirteenth century. Gershom Scholem, who discovered and

analyzed these quotations, demonstrated that the Raza Rabba was one of the main sources of the Sefer ha-Bakir, the earliest work of the

Kabbalah. The work appears to have contained speculations concerning the

structure of the Tetragrammaton, the names of archangels, and some magical

material. The work may have been used by the thirteenth-century esoteric

writer R. Elhanan ben Yaqar of London, in his treatise Sod ha-Sodot.

Joseph Dan