In 1492 the Jews of Spain were expelled by royal decree, and five years later the Jews of Portugal suffered a similar fate. Iberian Judaism had lived in peace with its Muslim and Christian neighbors for hundreds of years. They were the most stable and prosperous Jewish communities since the time of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel.

The Sephardic Jews could not take with them material wealth, but they could take with them the immense treasure of their intellectual achievements. In no field was this more evident than in that of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, that spiritual connection that individuals can develop with the Divine. By the 16th century, the Zohar, the fundamental book of Kabbalah, was already an integral part of Jewish religious thought at the time. As a result, new centers of study of Jewish mysticism were established in Italy, Turkey, and above all in Safed (Tz’fat), in the Land of Israel.

Great scholars settled in Safed. One of them was Moses Cordovero, who at the age of 16 received the “smicha,” the title of rabbi, from his teacher, Rabbi Jacob Berab. In 1542, at the age of twenty, he began to study Kabbalah with Solomon Alkabetz, author of Lecha Dodi, a hymn sung on Shabbat. In 1550 Cordovero founded an academy of Kabbalistic studies in Safed, which he directed until his death in 1570. His main work was Or Yacar (Precious Light), an analysis of the Zohar. It was at his academy that Isaac Luria began his studies of Kabbalah.

Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534-1572) was the scholar who most influenced medieval Jewish mysticism. He is known by the initials “Ari” (the lion). He is considered the father of modern Kabbalah. Luria taught his mystical thought to a dozen students until his death at the age of 38 from an epidemic. His student, Rabbi Hayim Vital, wrote down his ideas and in turn taught them to a select group, in keeping with Luria’s wishes that they not be disseminated to the masses.

Yet by the 17th century, Luria’s ideas and the unique vocabulary in which they were expressed had not only spread throughout Europe but had become a central pillar of traditional Jewish thought, a position they hold to this day. Luria’s great merit is that he made Kabbalah more accessible.

Professor Gershom Scholem of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem said that Luria and his followers developed this religious ideology as a direct response to the afflictions of the Jewish people at the time. The exile of the Iberian Jews was as great a tragedy as the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. An answer was needed to the question of the existence of evil in the world, the kind of evil that had forced thousands of Jews to convert to Christianity, killed thousands more Jews, and eventually sent the Iberian Jews into exile. Kabbalah was that answer.

Prepared by Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Essential Judaism by George Robinson, Encyclopaedia Judaica, and other sources.