160 r Ronald C. Kiener
himself to Pope Nicholas III as the Messiah, his life was spared, and he
traveled on, spreading throughout the eastern Mediterranean his unique
mystical system, the so-called prophetic Kabbalah. Like the Nagid Abra-
ham Maimuni, Abraham Abulafia imagined himself a devoted disciple of
Moses Maimonides, and over the course of his life Abulafia wrote (all his
writings are in Hebrew) three progressively more detailed full commen-
taries to the Guide of the Perplexed.
As I have described elsewhere,^37 Abraham Abulafia has been a par-
ticularly perplexing figure for modern scholars. Since most of his volu-
minous writings remained in manuscript form until very recently, he was
relatively unknown in learned pious circles, and when the first Wissen-
schaft des Judenthums scholars encountered his writings in the nineteenth
century, there was much excitement and controversy. The first scholar
to encounter Abulafia in the Munich Hebrew manuscript collection of
the Bavarian State Library, Meyer Heinrich Landauer, concluded that
Abulafia was nothing less than the author of the Sefer ha-Zohar, the afore-
mentioned towering work of the so-called Spanish Kabbalah. Needless to
say, this is an attribution that is no longer advanced. Nevertheless, Ger-
shom Scholem devoted an entire chapter of his aforementioned Major
Trends in Jewish Mysticism to Abulafia, ignoring many other key thir-
teenth-century players. Today Moshe Idel has become the leading Abu-
lafia scholar, devoting numerous volumes to the study of this enigmatic
mystic, and has placed emphasis on Islamic influences upon the Abulafian
tradition.^38
Neither a pietist nor a theosophist, Abulafia claimed that his interpre-
tation of Maimonides, and the systematic mystical program it generated,
took over where the merkabah visionaries and the sefirotic topographers
left off. His mysticism was a mysticism of Maimonidean psychology,
where the soul through a particular kind of prescribed meditation is led to
the divine effulgence and to a deathlike experience of utter unity with the
Divine Being. The goal of the mystical path was to untie the knots which
bound the soul to the material world and to thereby achieve a prophetic
ecstasy, at which moment the mystic perceives himself to be one with
God.
From the beginning, modern scholars have noted a Sufi-like tinge to
much of Abulafia’s teachings, and it is clear in his Hebrew writings that
he was at the very least familiar with, if not conversant in, Arabic reli-
gious terminology. Two features immediately point to a Sufi backdrop to