Abraham Abulafia - Early Life and Travels

Early Life and Travels

Very early in life he was taken by his parents to Tudela, Navarre, where his aged father Samuel Abulafia instructed him in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud. In 1258 when he was eighteen years old his father died, and two years later Abraham began a life of ceaseless wandering. His first journey in 1260 was to the Land of Israel, where he intended to begin a search for the legendary river Sambation and the lost Ten Tribes. He got no further than Akko, however, because of the desolation and lawlessness in the Holy Land stemming from the chaos following the last Crusades; the war that year between the Mongols and Mamluks 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 of the Moreh Nebhukhin (Guide for the Perplexed) of Maimonides, under the tutelage of a philosopher and physician named Hillel — probably the well-known Hillel ben Samuel ben Eliezer 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, 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, at 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 ("Book of Creation") and its numerous commentaries, which explain the creation of the world and man as based on Hebrew letter combinations. This book, and particularly the commentary and method of the German Jewish mystic, Eleazar of Worms, exercised a deep influence upon him, and had the effect of greatly increasing his mystical bent. Letters of the alphabet, numerals, vowel-points, all became symbols of existence to him, and their combinations and permutations, supplementing and explaining one another, possessed for him an illumining power most effectively to be disclosed in a deeper study of the divine names, and especially of the consonants of the Tetragrammaton. With such auxiliaries, and with the observance of certain rites and ascetic practises, men, he says, may attain to 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 R. Moses of Burgos and his most important disciple, R. Joseph Gikatilla. Some time around 1275 he taught the Guide of the Perplexed and his Kabbalah in a few cities in Greece. He wrote the first of his prophetic books, Sefer ha-Yashar ("Book of the Upright/Righteous") in Patras in 1279. That same year he made his way through Trani back to Capua, where he taught four young students.