Abraham Abulafia

Abraham Abulafia was born in 1240 in Saragossa, in Aragon. After his father’s death he travelled to the Land of Israel in search of the legendary river Sambatyon, but war turned him back. He studied philosophy in Italy, above all Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, which he read as a mystical work, and around 1270 in Barcelona turned to the Kabbalah of the divine names, experiencing what he understood as prophecy.

He wandered through Spain, Greece, Italy and Sicily, teaching small circles of students. In 1280 he travelled to Rome to meet Pope Nicholas III; the pope died before they could meet, and Abulafia was briefly imprisoned. His claims to prophecy, and perhaps to be the messiah, drew the condemnation of the leading rabbinic authority of Barcelona, Solomon ibn Adret. His last known works date from 1291, in Sicily.

Abulafia called his way “prophetic Kabbalah”. Its practice combined the permutation and combination of the letters of the divine names with controlled breathing, chanting and head movements, to loosen the mind from the forms of the senses and bring it to union with the Active Intellect. Long marginal to the main Kabbalistic tradition, his work was studied by later mystics and by Christian Kabbalists, and was brought to scholarly attention by Gershom Scholem and Moshe Idel.