Abraham Abulafia: Prophetic Kabbalah and Letter Meditation

Abraham Abulafia (1240–after 1291) was a Spanish Jewish mystic who founded what he called "prophetic Kabbalah" and modern scholars call ecstatic Kabbalah: a path of meditation on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the names of God intended to bring the practitioner to prophecy and union with the divine intellect. A wanderer who tried to meet the pope and announced himself as a messianic figure, he was condemned by leading rabbis in his lifetime, yet his techniques shaped later Jewish mysticism, Christian Cabala and modern Jewish meditation.

Life of Abraham Abulafia: From Saragossa to Comino§

Abulafia was born in Saragossa, in the kingdom of Aragon, in 1240, and grew up in Tudela in Navarre, where his father taught him Bible and Talmud. His father died when he was eighteen, and two years later, in 1260, he set out for the Land of Israel, hoping to find the legendary river Sambatyon beyond which the lost tribes were said to live. He got no further than Acre, where war between the Mongols and the Mamluks forced him to turn back.

He then spent years in Greece, where he married, and in Italy, where in Capua he studied Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed with Hillel of Verona. Returning to Spain around 1270, he studied commentaries on the Sefer Yetzirah in Barcelona and, by his own account, received a prophetic awakening in 1271. He began teaching in Castile, where his students included the young Joseph Gikatilla, and in Greece and Italy, writing a stream of handbooks and prophetic works.

The meeting with the pope (1280)§

In 1280 Abulafia announced that he would go to Pope Nicholas III to speak with him about Judaism, apparently in connection with messianic expectations. The pope, then at his summer residence in Soriano near Viterbo, reportedly ordered that Abulafia be burned if he arrived. Abulafia went regardless, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, and learned on arrival that the pope had died suddenly the night before. He was held for some four weeks by the Franciscans in Rome and then released. He interpreted the episode as divine confirmation of his mission.

Messina, the Rashba and exile§

From around 1280 Abulafia lived in Sicily, mostly in Messina, where he gathered disciples and made prophetic and messianic claims, foreseeing the redemption around 1290. Members of the Palermo community wrote to Solomon ibn Adret (the Rashba) of Barcelona, the leading rabbinic authority of the day, who condemned Abulafia as a charlatan and dangerous. Abulafia replied with spirited letters but was forced to leave, spending his last known years on the small island of Comino near Malta, where he continued to write; prophetic books such as Sefer ha-Ot and the handbook Imrei Shefer date from these final years. He is last heard of in 1291.

Prophetic Kabbalah and the Science of Letter Combination§

Abulafia distinguished two kinds of Kabbalah. The first, the "Kabbalah of the sefirot", taught the ten divine attributes described in the Tree of Life. The second, which he considered higher, was the "Kabbalah of the names", whose aim was prophecy. Its central discipline was hokhmat ha-tseruf, the science of combining letters.

Abulafia's starting point was the Sefer Yetzirah's teaching that God created the world through the twenty-two letters and their combinations, together with the rabbinic idea that the Torah is woven entirely of divine names. If language is the substance of creation, then mastering the permutations of the letters, especially those of the divine names, is a way of rising to the source of creation. He treated gematria, notarikon and letter substitution as tools for discovering hidden equivalences, but the deepest work was not interpretation: it was the dissolution of ordinary meaning in a stream of pure letters.

The Technique: Writing, Breath and the Divine Names§

Abulafia's handbooks, such as Hayyei ha-Olam ha-Ba ("Life of the World to Come"), Or ha-Sekhel ("Light of the Intellect") and the later Imrei Shefer, describe the practice in detail. The practitioner was to withdraw to a secluded room, preferably at night, dressed in clean white garments, with candles lit, after purification. He would then write the letters of a divine name, combining each with the others and with the vowel signs in ordered sequences, sometimes arranged in circles. The combinations were then pronounced aloud, with each letter accompanied by a breath and by movements of the head in the direction indicated by its vowel, and finally contemplated in the mind alone.

The goal was to "untie the knots" that bind the soul to the senses and to open it to the Active Intellect, the cosmic intelligence of medieval Aristotelian philosophy. Abulafia described experiences of fear and trembling, warmth, a flow of oil-like anointing, visions of light and of the letters themselves, and sometimes the appearance of a figure speaking to the practitioner, which he understood as the practitioner's own perfected intellect. He warned that the method was dangerous for the unprepared and that progress should be gradual under a teacher. Modern readers have compared these techniques with yoga and Sufi dhikr, a comparison that should be made with care.

Abulafia, Maimonides and the Critique of the Sefirot§

What distinguishes Abulafia from most kabbalists of his century is his devotion to Maimonides. He wrote three commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed and read it as an esoteric book whose true subject was prophecy. For Maimonides, prophecy was the overflow of the Active Intellect onto a perfected human mind; Abulafia accepted this and offered a practical method to achieve it.

The same commitment made him critical of the theosophical Kabbalah developing at the time in Castile and Catalonia. In a letter to a certain Judah Salmon he wrote that some kabbalists who spoke of ten sefirot were in a sense worse than Christians, who believe in three persons, because they had made God into ten. Moshe Idel, whose The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia and Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah (both 1988) reshaped the field, used Abulafia to define a distinction between "ecstatic" Kabbalah, oriented to the mystic's experience, and "theosophical-theurgical" Kabbalah, oriented to the inner life of God and the effect of human action on it.

Messianism, Names and Numbers§

Abulafia used gematria to understand his own identity. His name, Abraham, has the numerical value 248, the same as the angelic name Raziel, which he adopted as a pen name, and also equal to Zechariahu, another name he used. He believed that the hidden meaning of names revealed a person's spiritual mission, and he presented himself as a prophet and in some writings as a messianic figure, though he understood the Messiah largely as the human intellect redeemed from the bonds of matter.

This messianism, together with his visits to Christian authorities, alarmed his contemporaries. Harvey Hames, in Like Angels on Jacob's Ladder (2007), placed Abulafia's mission in the context of Christian Joachite and Franciscan expectations of a new age around the same years, suggesting that his visit to the pope addressed a shared apocalyptic climate.

Influence: Safed, Hasidism, Pico and Modern Meditation§

Because of the Rashba's ban, Abulafia's books were rarely printed, but they circulated in manuscript, especially in Italy and the Ottoman Empire. Disciples and successors such as the author of Sha'arei Tsedeq and Isaac of Acre continued his methods, and in sixteenth-century Safed Moses Cordovero quoted him, while material derived from his techniques appears in the meditative manual Sha'arei Kedushah attributed to Hayyim Vital. Idel has argued that Abulafian ideas of union with God also reached the Hasidic movement.

In Renaissance Italy, Flavius Mithridates translated works by Abulafia into Latin for Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, whose Kabbalistic theses, available here as Pico's 900 Theses, reflect Abulafian ideas of the "art of combination". Through Pico they entered Christian Cabala. In the twentieth century Gershom Scholem devoted a chapter of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism to Abulafia, and Aryeh Kaplan's Meditation and Kabbalah (1982) brought his methods to a wide Jewish readership. Abulafia's letter mysticism also stands behind later traditions about the 72 names of God and, more distantly, the meditative readings of the golem ritual.

Frequently asked questions§

What is ecstatic Kabbalah?§

Ecstatic Kabbalah is the modern scholarly name for the "prophetic Kabbalah" of Abraham Abulafia and his successors. It focuses on techniques, especially combining and pronouncing the letters of divine names, intended to bring the mystic to prophetic experience and union with the divine intellect, rather than on the structure of the sefirot.

Did Abraham Abulafia meet the pope?§

He tried to. In 1280 he travelled to meet Pope Nicholas III near Viterbo, but the pope died the night before he arrived. Abulafia was briefly imprisoned by the Franciscans in Rome and then released.

Why was Abulafia condemned?§

His prophetic and messianic claims and his unconventional methods alarmed rabbinic leaders. Solomon ibn Adret of Barcelona denounced him, and Abulafia was forced to leave Sicily. His works were long kept out of print in many communities.

Is Abulafia's letter meditation still practised?§

Some modern teachers of Jewish meditation draw on his techniques, often through Aryeh Kaplan's presentation. Abulafia himself stressed preparation, gradual practice and guidance, and his historical texts are not a self-help manual.

Sources and further reading§

• The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia — Moshe Idel, 1988
• Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah — Moshe Idel, 1988
• Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia — Moshe Idel, 1989
• Abraham Abulafia—Kabbalist and Prophet: Hermeneutics, Theosophy, and Theurgy — Elliot R. Wolfson, 2000
• Like Angels on Jacob's Ladder: Abraham Abulafia, the Franciscans, and Joachimism — Harvey J. Hames, 2007
• Meditation and Kabbalah — Aryeh Kaplan, 1982
• Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism — Gershom Scholem, 1941