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I saw that Malbim on Shir HaShirim (1:2) quotes the Zohar with the name מכלתא דרשב״י. Indeed, the words he quotes are in the Zohar here. On the other hand, there is another work called מכילתא דרשב״י, which is a halachic midrash on Shemot (and only on Shemot) — however, it was only relatively recently reconstructed from citations in Midrash HaGadol.

Was it common to refer to the Zohar has מכילתא דרשב״י? Was this Malbim's misidentification of the two, or a known broader phenomenon?

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    If I'm not mistaken, I heard R' Hershel Schachter say that one of the German rabbis -- I think R' Dovid Tzvi Hoffman? -- was citing "Medrish Rashbi" or something like that, as his crowd was allergic to the word "Zohar." So it may have been in the air in the 19th Century.
    – Shalom
    Commented Apr 28 at 19:11
  • Are you sure Malbim added the reference in brackets and not the publisher?
    – Harel13
    Commented Apr 29 at 23:01
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    It's not a misidentification. It's deliberate. His contemporary Rav Yaakov Tzvi Micklenberg, the author of HaKesav VeHaKaballah, does the same throughout his work. See here, where it says he also called Zohar Chadash by Mechilta Chadtah D'Rashbi
    – robev
    Commented Apr 30 at 16:39
  • @Harel13 It's possible that the page number was added by the publisher, but the entire citation of the Zohar is in the same pair of parentheses, and this seems to be his approach to citing the Zohar in this commentary (ie. parenthetically).
    – magicker72
    Commented May 1 at 2:43

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