Abraham Abulafia


Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia was the founder of the school of "Prophetic Kabbalah". He was born in Zaragoza, Kingdom of Aragon, in 1240, and is assumed to have died sometime after 1291 following a stay on the island of Comino in the Maltese archipelago.

Biography

Early life and travels

Very early in life he was taken by his parents to Tudela, Kingdom of Navarre, where his aged father, Samuel Abulafia, instructed him in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud. In 1258, when Abulafia was eighteen years old, his father died, and Abulafia began a life of ceaseless wandering shortly thereafter. His first journey, in 1260, was to the Land of Israel, where he intended to begin a search for the legendary Sambation and the Ten Lost Tribes. He got no further than port city Akko, however, because of the desolation and lawlessness in the Holy Land stemming from the chaos following the recent Crusade. The battle that year between the Mongol Empire and Mamluk Sultanate forced his return to Europe via Greece. He had determined to go to Rome but stopped short in Capua, where during the early 1260s, he devoted himself with passionate zeal to the study of philosophy and The Guide for the Perplexed of Maimonides under the tutelage of a philosopher and physician named Hillel—probably the well-known Hillel ben Samuel of Verona.
Although he always held Maimonides in the highest esteem, and often made use of sentences from his writings, he was as little satisfied with his philosophy as with any other branch of knowledge which he acquired. He was highly articulate, and able and eager to teach others. He wrote industriously on kabbalistic, philosophical, and grammatical subjects, and succeeded in surrounding himself with numerous pupils to whom he imparted much of his own enthusiasm.
On his return to Spain he became subject to visions, and, at the age of thirty-one, in Barcelona, began to study a particular kind of Kabbalah whose most important representative was Barukh Togarmi, and received a revelation with messianic overtones. He immersed himself in the study of the Sefer Yetzirah, which explained the creation of the world and humankind as based on Hebrew letter combinations, as well as its commentaries. The Sefer, and particularly the commentary and method of the German Jewish mystic Eleazar of Worms, exercised a deep influence upon Abulafia and had the effect of greatly increasing his mystical bent. Letters of the alphabet, numerals, and vowel-points all assumed mystical meaning to him, and their combinations and permutations, supplementing and explaining one another, possessed an illumining power most effectively disclosed in a deep study of the divine names. With such auxiliaries, and with the observance of certain rites and ascetic practices, men, he said, may attain the highest aim of existence and become prophets; not in order to work miracles and signs, but to reach the highest degree of perception and be able to penetrate intuitively into the inscrutable nature of the Deity, the riddles of creation, the problems of human life, the purpose of the precepts, and the deeper meaning of the Torah.
He soon left for Castile, where he disseminated his prophetic Kabbalah among figures like Rabbi Moses of Burgos and his most important disciple, Joseph ben Abraham Gikatilla. However, it bears mention that Abulafia is not mentioned in any of Gikatilla's works.
Some time around 1275; he taught The Guide for the Perplexed and his Kabbalah in a few cities in Greece. He wrote the first of his prophetic books, Sefer haYashar, in Patras in 1279. That same year, he made his way through Trani back to Capua, where he taught four young students.

Journey to Rome

He went to Rome in 1280 in order to convert Pope Nicholas III to Judaism on the day before Rosh Hashanah. The Pope was in Soriano when he heard of it, and he issued orders to "burn the fanatic" as soon as he reached that place. The stake was erected in preparation close to the inner gate; but Abulafia set out for Soriano all the same and reached there August 22. While passing through the outer gate, he heard that the Pope had died from an apoplectic stroke during the preceding night. He returned to Rome, where he was thrown into prison by the Order of Friars Minor but was liberated after four weeks' detention. He was next heard of in Sicily.

Decline and exile to Comino

He remained active in Messina for a decade, presenting himself as a "prophet", "messiah" and "son of God". He had several students there as well as some in Palermo. The local Jewish congregation in Palermo energetically condemned Abulafia's conduct, and around 1285 addressed the issue to Shlomo ben Aderet of Barcelona, who devoted much of his career to calming the various messianic hysteriae of the day. Shlomo ben Aderet subsequently wrote a letter against Abulafia. This controversy was one of the principal reasons for the exclusion of Abulafia’s Kabbalah from the Spanish schools.
Abulafia had to take up the pilgrim's staff anew, and under distressing conditions compiled his Sefer haOt "Book of the Sign" on the little island of Comino, near Malta, between 1285 and 1288. In 1291 he wrote his last, and perhaps his most intelligible work, the meditation manual Imrei Shefer "Words of Beauty"; after this, all trace of him is lost.

Teachings

Writings

Abulafia’s literary activity spans the years 1271–1291 and consists of several books, treatises on grammar, and poems, but amongst which only thirty survive. He wrote many commentaries: three on the Guide of the Perplexed – Sefer ha-Ge’ulah, Sefer Chayei ha-Nefesh, and Sefer Sitrei Torah ; on Sefer Yetzirah: – Otzar Eden Ganuz, Gan Na'ul, and a third untitled; and a commentary on the Pentateuch – Sefer-Maftechot ha-Torah.
More influential are his handbooks, teaching how to achieve the prophectic experience: Chayei ha-Olam ha-Ba, Or ha-Sekhel, Sefer ha-Cheshek, and Imrei Shefer.
Of special importance for understanding his messianology are his "prophetic books" written between 1279 and 1288, in which revelations including apocalyptic imagery and scenes are interpreted as pointing to spiritual processes of inner redemption. The spiritualized understanding of the concepts of messianism and redemption as an intellectual development represents a major contribution of the messianic ideas in Judaism. As part of his messianic propensity, Abulafia become an intense disseminator of his Kabbalah, orally and in written form, trying to convince both Jews and Christians.
In his first treatises, Get ha-Shemot and Maftei’ach ha-Re'ayon, Abulafia describes a linguistic type of Kabbalah similar to the early writings of Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla. In his later writings, the founder of prophetic Kabbalah produces a synthesis between Maimonides' Neoaristotelian understanding of prophecy as the result of the transformation of the intellectual influx into a linguistic message and techniques to reach such experiences by means of combinations of letters and their pronunciation, breathing exercises, contemplation of parts of the body, movements of the head and hands, and concentration exercises. Some of the elements of those techniques stem from commentaries on Sefer Yetzirah of Ashkenazi. He called his Kabbalah "the Kabbalah of names," that is, of divine names, being a way to reach what he called the prophetic experience, or "prophetic Kabbalah," as the ultimate aims of his way: unitive and revelatory experiences. In his writings expressions of what is known as the unio mystica of the human and the supernal intellects may be discerned. Much less concerned with the theosophy of his contemporary kabbalists, who were interested in theories of ten hypostatic sefirot, some of which he described as worse than the Christian belief in the trinity, Abulafia depicted the supernal realm, especially the cosmic Agent Intellect, in linguistic terms, as speech and letters.
In his later books, Abulafia repeatedly elaborated upon a system of seven paths of interpretation, which he used sometimes in his commentary on the Pentateuch, which starts with the plain sense, includes also allegorical interpretation, and culminates in interpretations of the discrete letters, the latter conceived of as the path to prophecy. Abulafia developed a sophisticated theory of language, which assumes that Hebrew represents not so much the language as written or spoken as the principles of all languages, namely the ideal sounds and the combinations between them. Thus, Hebrew as an ideal language encompasses all the other languages. This theory of language might have influenced Dante Alighieri. In his writings Abulafia uses Greek, Latin, Italian, Arabic, Tatar, and Basque words for purpose of gematria.
Abulafia's Kabbalah inspired a series of writings which can be described as part of his prophetic Kabbalah, namely, as striving to attain extreme forms of mystical experiences. The most important among them are the anonymous Sefer ha-Tzeruf, Sefer Ner Elohim, and Sefer Shaarei Tzedek by Rabbi Nathan ben Saadiah Harar, who influenced the Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac of Acre. The impact of Abulafia is evident in an anonymous epistle attributed to Maimonides; Rabbi Reuven Tzarfati, a kabbalist active in 14th century Italy; Abraham Shalom, Yohanan Alemanno, Judah Albotini, and Joseph ibn Zagyah; Moses Cordovero and Chaim Vital's influential Shaarei Kedushah; Sabbatai Zevi, Joseph Hamitz, Pinchas Horowitz, and Menahem Mendel of Shklov.
Extant in many manuscripts, Abulafia's writings were not printed by kabbalists, most of whom banned his brand of Kabbalah, and only by chance introduced in their writings a few short and anonymous fragments. Scholarship started with an analysis of his manuscript writings by M. H. Landauer, who attributed the book of the Zohar to him. Adolf Jellinek refuted this attribution and compiled the first comprehensive list of Abulafia's writings, publishing three of Abulafia's shorter treatises, while Amnon Gross published 13 volumes, which include most of Abulafia's books and those of his students' books. Major contributions to the analysis of Abulafia's thought and that of his school have been made by Gershom Scholem, Chaim Wirszubski, Moshe Idel, and Elliot R. Wolfson. Some of Abulafia's treatises were translated into Latin and Italian in the circle of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, mostly by Flavius Mithridates, and Pico’s vision of Kabbalah was significantly influenced by his views. This is the case also with Francesco Giogio Veneto's De Harmonia Mundi.
Abulafia's life inspired a series of literary works such as poems by Ivan Goll, Moses Feinstein and Nathaniel Tarn; Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum; and a play by George-Elie Bereby; in art, Abraham Pincas' paintings and Bruriah Finkel's sculptures; and several musical pieces.
Abulafia's writings include:
  • Sefer ha-Geulah, a commentary on The Guide for the Perplexed
  • Sefer Chayei ha-Nefesh, a commentary on The Guide for the Perplexed
  • Sefer ha-Yashar
  • Sefer Sitrei Torah, a commentary on The Guide for the Perplexed
  • Chayei ha-Olam ha-Ba
  • Or ha-Sekhel
  • Get ha-Shemot
  • Maftei’ach ha-Re'ayon
  • Gan Na'ul, a commentary on Sefer Yetzirah
  • Otzar Eden Ganuz, another commentary on Sefer Yetzirah
  • Sefer ha-Cheshek
  • Sefer ha-Ot
  • Imrei Shefer
  • ''Ve-Zot Li-Yehuda''