AVRAHAM ABULAFIA

(1240–c. 1291)

AVRAHAM ABULAFIA is known as one of the major figures in the history of the Hebrew mystical tradition. Born in Saragossa in 1240, and raised in Tudela, he was orphaned at the age of eighteen and two years later began a life of wandering that would take him to Palestine, Greece, mainland Italy, and Sicily. His first trip was to the Land of Israel, when he was twenty, in search of the ten lost tribes and the mythical river Sambatyon, beyond which, legend had it, large parts of these tribes had been exiled by the Assyrian king Shalmanaser. Abulafia believed that finding them would help us her in the Messianic age. He made it no farther than the port town of Acre, however, and headed home, passing through Greece and Italy, where he spent some ten years. In 1271, in Barcelona, a mystical experience led him to believe that he had attained prophetic inspiration, and he began preaching his sometimes Christian-seeming doctrine to a select circle of disciples in Spain, some of whom converted to Catholicism. Three years later he left his native country once again, returning to Greece and Italy. In 1280, he experienced another mystical vision and set out for Rome, where he planned to take Pope Nicholas III to task for Christianity’s treatment of the Jews in their exile and then persuade the pontiff to convert to Judaism. This foolish adventure nearly cost Abulafia his life; he was condemned to hang, and only because of the pope’s sudden death was the poet spared. After a month in prison, he was released and returned to Sicily. His troubles continued, however, and he was attacked within the Jewish community for his messianic speculation. When in the midst of that controversy the most influential rabbinic authority of the time called him a “charlatan,” Abulafia was forced to flee to the desolate island of Comino (near Malta). There, in 1288, he wrote the apocalyptic—even hallucinatory—fourteen-hundred line Sefer Ha’Ot. (The Book of the Letter—or Sign), the only surviving example of several prophetic works he composed late in his life. Abulafia also wrote many language-centered mystical texts and manuals of ecstatic meditation, whose aim was, as he put it, “to unseal the soul, to untie the knots which bind it.”

While much of the excerpt from Sefer Ha’Ot translated here involves the esoteric use of numerology (on which, see the notes to the poem at the back of this volume), the prophetic thrust of the work is self-evident. Blood and ink in Abu-lafia’s thought stand, respectively, for imagination (soul) and intellect (spirit), and the ongoing battle between them involves an effort to raise imagination to the power of the Active Intellect, which is the conduit to eternal life and the divine. This transformation is brought about through—among other things—manipulation of the letters of the divine name. The poet likens their combination to the combination of sounds in music. Abulafia’s prophetic vision involves a synthesis of these and other often-conflicting forces through a kind of psy-chomachia, or war for the soul, wherein the inner processes are externalized through imaginative vision and its figures. In another work, Gan Na‘ul (A Garden Enclosed), Abulafia writes: “When the Name, whose secret is in blood and ink, began to move within him . . . it began to move him from potentiality to actuality.” While the lines of Sefer Ha’Ot are neither metrical nor rhymed, the cadence throughout is pronounced, and the poem’s various sections at times make use of regularized stanzas and a generally consistent number of words per line. Both in style and form the poem is unique in the literature.

Curiously, Abulafia’s Sefer Ha’Ot is one of the few strong, explicitly qabbalistic works in the canon of medieval Hebrew poetry from Spain. There are of course other powerful poems by qabbalists (Nahmanides’ poem on the soul, for example), and many first-rate mystical poems (by Ibn Gabirol and others); and there are poems about The Zohar or the Qabbala in general (by Todros Abulafia and Meshullam); in almost all cases, however, there is considerable controversy over the extent to which these works are, at root, “qabbalistic.” With Avraham Abu-lafia, there is no doubt.

From THE BOOK OF THE LETTER