POLITICS AND RELIGION IN THE ERA OF RAMOK LLULLJews of the Aragonese lands, and in^1525 the Muslims, were
given the choice of conversion or expulsion.
ABRAHAM ABUlAFIA
Llull's activities have to be understood against a background
of vigorous intellectual activity among the Jews of Spain. This
was the great age of Kabbalah, a Hebrew word that liter-
ally means 'that which is received', 'tradition', but which is
used as a label for a variety of mystical movements current
in Aragon and Castile at this time. Girona was, according to
Gershom Scholem, the base for a group of mystics 'who be-
tween the years 1230 and^1260 did more than any other con-
temporary group to unify and consolidate what was pregnant
and living in the Kabbalism of Spain'.~ls The leading figure
in Girona was none other than Nahmanides, the opponent
of Paul the Christian in the Barcelona debate of 1263. There
are striking similarities between lists of the Divine Attributes
(sejirot) drawn up by Jewish Kabbalists and those provided
by Ramon Llull; contact between Llull and the Jews was a
two-way process, in which he learned from Jews, and perhaps
learned some of that respect shown in his Book of the Gentile. ~^6
Although the most influential work produced by Spanish
Jewish mystics at this time, the £oharor Book ofSplendour, was
written in Castile and purported to be a much more ancient
text, Aragon-Catalonia was itself the birthplace of other
strands of Kabbalistic thought. Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia
(d. c.1291) hailed from Saragossa, though his first great mys-
tical experience occurred in Barcelona, and his activity later
'l-
centred on southern Italy and Sicily;-' he developed a theory
of the soul which argued that the soul is sealed up in the
human body by the distractions of daily life, which turns the- G. Scholem, Major Trends in jewish Mysticism (New York, 1946), p. 173.
36, See H. Hames, 'judaism and Ramon Llull', Cambridge University
PhD thesis, 1995. - Abraham Abulafia has been a favourite of novelists, including James
Joyce in Ulysses and Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum. Eco derives
his knowledge of Abulafia from the works of Moshe Ide!: The mystical
experience in Abraham Abulajia (Albany, NY, 1988); Studies in ecstatic Kab-
balah (Albany, NY, 1988); Language, Torah and Hermeneutics in Abraham
Abulajia (Albany, NY, 1989).