rabbis in the west (1000– 1500 ce) 347
return to Europe. Travelling via Greece, he stopped off in Italy and
began in Verona to study the kabbalah through commentaries on Sefer
Yetsirah. After a brief return to Spain, where he started to gather around
him a select group of disciples, he returned again to Italy, Sicily or
Greece in 1273 and began to propagate the notion that the great Mai-
monides had, in the Guide for the Perplexed, really been a kabbalist. A
series of short ‘Books of Prophecy’ attracted a group of scholars to
gather round him and in 1280 an inner voice prompted him to travel to
Rome to ask Pope Nicholas III to end the sufferings of the Jews; in
response to his plea he was sentenced to death by burning, which was
averted only because the pope died in August of that year.
By this stage a celebrity, and keenly aware of all he had discovered
since ‘when I was thirty- one, in the city of Barcelona, God awakened me
from my sleep’, Abulafia caused a great stir with an announcement that
the Messiah was to come in the Jewish year 5050, which corresponded
to 1290 of the Common Era, and coincided with his own fiftieth year.
Abulafia’s views on messianism were complex, but it is highly likely that
at times he thought of himself as the Messiah. In any case, the announce-
ment caused uproar, persuading many to prepare to travel to the land of
Israel but also provoking condemnation by the leading halakhist in
Spain, Shlomo b. Avraham Adret of Barcelona (Rashba), who called
Abulafia a charlatan. Reduced to living in exile on the island of Comino
near Malta, Abulafia defended himself vigorously in a series of treatises
aimed at his critics and a number of mystical works, including a com-
mentary on the Torah and a commentary on Sefer Yetsirah.^48
Abulafia picked up from the Hasidei Ashkenaz of the Rhineland the
doctrine of divine emanations, to which (unlike them) he applied the
technical term sefirot (literally ‘enumerations’) (see above, p. 282). He
enlarged on their techniques of combining letters (tseruf ), adding up the
number equiv alent of the letters in words (gematria ) and taking the let-
ters and words as symbolic of sentences (notarikon ) in order to discover
hidden meanings in scriptural texts. But he also believed that the ‘Way of
the Divine Name’ enabled men to commune directly with God through
prophetic power, an enlightened state of consciousness which brought
not just knowledge but redemption and enjoyment in the present world
of the delights of the world to come. This was a form of practical myst-
icism quite distinct from the speculation of the theosophists in
Girona – which Abulafia himself rejected, as they in turn rejected his
teachings. Others, however, adopted his ideas with enthusiasm, as is
clear from the num erous manuscripts of his writings which survive.^49