390 A History of Judaism
laughing. Rabbi Eleazar, his son, rose, took his hands and kissed them, and
I licked the dust beneath his feet ... Rabbi Hiyya got to his feet, and said,
‘Up till now the holy light has taken care of us. Now we can do nothing
but attend to his honour.’ Rabbi Eleazar and Rabbi Abba rose, and put
him in a litter. Who has ever seen disarray like that of the companions?
The whole house exuded perfume. They raised him on his bier, and only
Rabbi Eleazar and Rabbi Abba occupied themselves with it. The powerful
and mighty men of the town came and pleaded with them, and the inhabit-
ants of Meiron cried out all together, for they were afraid that he might
not be buried there. When the bier came out of the house, it went up into
the air and fire flared out in front of it. They heard a voice, saying, ‘Come
and assemble for the feast of Rabbi Shimon.’Upper Galilee was thus a locus of mystical longing, filled with the aura
of the sages of the mythical origins of the kabbalah, long before the
small town of Safed, a few miles from Meiron, became the cradle of a
new form of Jewish mysticism in the mid- sixteenth century. We have
already noted Safed as a centre of Jewish learning. It had begun with
sporadic Jewish settlement, attested in documents from the Cairo Gen-
izah from the first half of the eleventh century, but the community had
only really began to grow with the influx of refugees from Spain after
- Ottoman documents reveal over a thousand Jewish households in
1544– 5 in the town, with a sizeable Samaritan population alongside
them.^16
This was the town to which Isaac Luria was drawn in 1570, at the
age of thirty- six. He died there two years later, on 15 July 1572, from
plague, but not before laying the foundations of a whole new form of
kabbalah. Isaac b. Solomon Luria was born in 1534 in Jerusalem to a
father who had emigrated there from Germany or Poland but died in
Isaac’s childhood. His Sephardi mother took the boy to Egypt, where he
learned and wrote about halakhah and began his studies in mysticism.
The profusion of legends which clustered around his life in the recollec-
tions of his followers immediately after his early death make it hard to
reconstruct precisely the intellectual journey that led him to his mystical
insights. A document from the Cairo Genizah in Luria’s handwriting
shows only that he was engaged in some business relating to grain.
Luria’s maternal uncle, in whose care he had been raised in Egypt, was
a rich tax- farmer and owned the island Jazirat al- Rawda on the Nile
near Cairo, and it was said that Luria lived there in seclusion for seven
years, writing the commentary on a short portion of the Zohar which is