Isaac Luria

Isaac Luria was born in Jerusalem in 1534. After his father’s death his mother took him to Egypt, where he grew up in the household of a wealthy uncle, studied rabbinic law, and engaged in trade. He is said to have spent years in seclusion on an island in the Nile, studying the Zohar.

Around 1570 he moved to Safed, in Galilee, then the centre of Kabbalah, where Moses Cordovero was the leading teacher. Luria studied briefly with Cordovero, who died that year, and gathered a small circle of disciples. He taught for only about two years before he died in an epidemic in 1572, at the age of thirty-eight. He was known as the Ari, “the Lion”, an acronym of a phrase meaning “the divine Rabbi Isaac”.

Luria wrote very little. His teaching was recorded and arranged by his disciples, above all Ḥayyim Vital, whose Tree of Life became its chief source. Lurianic Kabbalah spread throughout the Jewish world in the seventeenth century, shaped prayer and ritual, fed the messianic movement around Sabbatai Zevi, and was taken up and transformed by Hasidism.