Abraham Abulafia - Influence

Influence

Abulafia's subterranean influence is evident in the large number of manuscripts of his major meditation manuals that flourished down to the present day until all his works were finally published in Mea Shearim in Jerusalem during the 1990s.

Abulafia’s prophetic and messianic pretensions prompted a sharp reaction on the part of Shelomoh ben Avraham Adret, a famous legal authority who succeeded in annihilating the influence of Abulafia’s ecstatic Qabbalah in Spain.

According to Besserman's The Shambhala Guide to Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism, Abulafia's "prophetic approach to meditation included manipulating the Hebrew letters in a nondenominational context that brought him into conflict with the Jewish establishment and provoked the Inquisition."

In Italy, however, his works were translated into Latin and contributed substantially to the formation of Christian Qabbalah.

In the Middle East, ecstatic Qabbalah was accepted without reservation. Clear traces of Abulafian doctrine are evident in the works of Yitshaq ben Shemuel of Acre, Yehudah Albotini and Chaim Vital. In Israel, Abulafia’s ideas were combined with Sufi elements, apparently stemming from the school of Ibn Arabi; thus Sufi views were introduced into European Qabbalah.

After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Spanish theurgical Qabbalah, which had developed without any significant impact from ecstatic Qabbalah, was integrated with the latter; this combination became, through the book Pardes Rimmonim by Mosheh Cordovero, part of mainstream Qabbalah. Hayyim Vital brought Abulafian views into the fourth unpublished part of his Shaarei Qedushah, and the eighteenth-century qabbalists of the Beit El Academy in Jerusalem perused Abulafia’s mystical manuals. Later on, mystical and psychological conceptions of Qabbalah found their way directly and indirectly to the Polish Hasidic masters. The influence of ecstatic Qabbalah is to be seen in isolated groups today, and traces of it can be found in modern literature (e.g., the poetry of Yvan Goll), mainly since the publication of Gershom Scholem’s researches.