ר' אברהם אבולעפיה

Rabbi Avraham ben Shmuel Abulafia (5000/1240 – after 5051/1291) was a mekubal, held to be the leading figure of what he called prophetic kabbalah. He was born at Saragossa in Aragon and taken as a child to Tudela, where he learned Tanach and Gemara from his father until his father was niftar in 1258. In 1260 he set out for Eretz Yisrael to search for the river Sambatyon and the ten tribes, but reached no further than Acco because of the desolation of the land and the fighting in the region, and returned to Europe by way of Greece, where he married.

He came to Capua in Italy and learned philosophy there, and the Moreh Nevuchim of the Rambam in particular, under Rabbi Hillel of Verona. Though he always held the Rambam in the highest esteem and used his words often, he was not satisfied by philosophy alone. Returning to Spain he came in Barcelona to a circle of mekubalim among whom was Rabbi Baruch Togarmi, and there began to learn kabbalah, which until then he had opposed. His learning centered on Sefer Yetzirah, on which he later wrote several commentaries, and on the commentary and method of Rabbi Elazar of Wormaisa. Letters, numbers and the vowel signs took on meaning for him, and their combinations, especially in the divine names, together with certain practices and abstentions, were in his teaching the path by which a person reaches the highest perception.

From 1271 until the end of his life he composed close to fifty works, of which about thirty survive and only a few have been printed. The chief among them are guides to his method — Sefer Chayei HaOlam HaBa, Sefer Or HaSechel, Sefer Imrei Shefer, Sefer HaCheshek and Otzar Eden HaGanuz — and besides these he wrote Sefer HaMafteichot on the Torah, commentaries on Sefer Yetzirah and on the Moreh, letters, poems and Sefer HaOt. He made much use of gematria and notarikon.

Traveling through Europe he gathered small groups of talmidim and taught them, the Moreh in particular by his own method. The best known among them were two of the great mekubalim of Castile: Rabbi Moshe ben Shimon of Burgos, of whom he wrote that he was a great and honored man, and Rabbi Yosef ben Avraham Gikatilla, author of Shaarei Orah, of whom he wrote in Otzar Eden HaGanuz that he had succeeded remarkably in what he learned before him and added from his own strength and understanding. In 1279 he returned to Capua and sought to establish a beit midrash there. In 1280, acting on what he understood as a charge received ten years earlier, he went to Rome to speak with the pope, who refused to see him and, having left the city, sent word that he would be put to death if he followed; he went nonetheless.