ר' עזריאל מגירונה

Rabbi Azriel of Gerona (active c. 4950–4990/1190–1230) was among the first and greatest of the mekubalim of Catalonia, a founder of the famed circle of Gerona from which the kabbalah spread into Spain. He was a talmid in the hidden wisdom of Rabbi Yitzchak Sagi Nahor, son of the Raavad, and worked beside Rabbi Ezra of Gerona — the two are mourned together in the kinah of their talmid, the poet Rabbi Meshulam DaPiera. He wrote of himself that he was by nature a seeker of wisdom who searched the philosophies of his day and found the truth he sought in the received tradition of the mekubalim.

His writings gave the early kabbalah some of its enduring forms: Shaar HaShoel, an explanation of the doctrine of the ten sefirot in question-and-answer form; a commentary on Sefer Yetzirah; a commentary on the aggadot of Chazal, in which he labored to show the hidden wisdom resting within the words of the sages; and a commentary on the tefillot. He wrote deliberately in a terse and guarded style, understandable only to one who had already received the foundations of the wisdom from a teacher — and indeed his own rebbe, Rabbi Yitzchak Sagi Nahor, cautioned against spreading these matters too openly.

In his teaching, the Ein Sof is beyond every attribute and description, and the world comes forth through the gradations of the ten sefirot — formulations through which the doctrine of the sefirot reached the later mekubalim. The circle he helped found in Gerona prepared the ground for the flowering of kabbalah in Spain in the generations that followed.