Abraham Abulafia was a very strange man. He lived in the 13th century but might well have been more at home in the 1960s. He is known as the founder of Ecstatic Kabbalah, a consciousness-raising system which aims to elevate the mind to a mystical union with the divine, using complex meditations and ascetic, physical regimes.
Abulafia was born in Saragossa in Spain, in 1240. It was the year 5000 in the Hebrew calendar, the beginning of the sixth millennium, when some believed that the gift of prophecy would once again return to the world and the Messianic redemption would begin. The significance of the year in which he was born helped to give him a profound sense of his own destiny. As the years went by he became more and more convinced that he was destined to be the Messiah.
Most of what is known about Abulafia comes from his own mystical writings. In one of his books he describes a vision he had at the age of 20. It inspired him to leave home, to set off on a journey in search of the mythical river Sambatyon. It was said that the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel lived on the other side of the river, though no traveller had ever managed to reach them. Even finding the Sambatyon was extremely difficult, nobody was certain of its location. And even if the river could be found, it would be impossible to get across because the torrent was so fierce that it hurled a continual volley of rocks and boulders. You couldn’t even get close enough even to dip a foot in the water. The only time the torrent ceased and the Sambatyon flowed calmly was on the Sabbath. But as it is forbidden to cross water on the holy day, no one had ever managed to get to the other side. With the exception of just one man, who had managed to cross the river 400 years earlier. It was a mystery how he had done it. His name was Eldad the Danite.
Abraham Abulafia set out to replicate Eldad the Danite’s feat of finding and crossing the Sambatyon. He failed. He didn’t even find it. He got as far as Acre, a port in the north of the Land of Israel, where he stumbled into a war zone. He was forced to turn back after finding his path blocked by a battle between the Sultan’s armies and the invading Mongols.
For much of the next 20 years, Abulafia travelled between Israel, Spain, Greece and Italy. He settled for a while in Barcelona, an important centre for Jewish mysticism, where until recently the renowned rabbi, the mystically minded Moshe ben Nahman, or Ramban, had lived. Ramban had set off for Israel some years earlier, but the great man’s students were still in the city and there was much that Abulafia could learn from them.
Barcelona was a vibrant port, a hub for ships coming and going across the Mediterranean. Like many medieval trading and transport centres, it was a place where people from different places and cultures crossed paths, ate and drank together, told each other stories and swapped ideas. Kabbalists and Sufis, the Jewish and Islamic mystics, listened to each other’s tales and discovered they had much in common. An industry sprung up in Barcelona, copying Arabic mystical texts into Hebrew, and vice versa. Abraham Abulafia soaked up all the influences surrounding him. By the time he left Barcelona he had become one of the most influential kabbalists in history and almost certainly the oddest.
In the year 1279 Abulafia set off to achieve his messianic destiny. He was now living in Sicily, where he had come across the apocalyptic teachings of the 12th century abbot, Joachim of Fiore. He discovered that Joachim’s followers shared his belief that the world was on the threshold of a new era, and that the final redemption was at hand. Astonished to find that a Christian group shared the same views as him, he took it as a sign that it was his duty to prepare both the Jews and the Christians for the approaching changes.
Abulafia knew of an ancient Jewish belief that the Messiah would redeem the world by replicating what Moses had done when he redeemed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Moses had gone to Pharaoh, the most powerful man in Egypt, and forced him through plagues and miracles to release the Israelites. Believing that he was the Messiah, Abulafia knew that he would have to behave similarly, he would have to go to the most powerful ruler in the world and force him to prepare for what was about to come. He started off on his travels again, this time to Rome, to confront the Pope, Nicholas III, to inform him that the redemption was at hand and to oblige him to instruct his followers to prepare themselves.
His journey from Sicily to Rome was not easy. His route took him through the coastal city of Trani. When the Jews in the town heard that he was passing though and that he was on his way to seek an audience with the Pope they were petrified. Their lives as Jews in Christian Europe were far from easy and Abulafia already had a reputation as something of a screwball. The last thing they wanted was this strange mystic turning up in Rome, trying to get to see the Pope and making things even worse for the Jews. They asked the city authorities to arrest him.
Somehow, he got away. In one of his books he describes his arrest and says that a miracle happened and that he was freed. It has been conjectured that his Sicilian contacts, the followers of Joachim of Fiore, intervened on his behalf, but it is only a possibility. Maybe it really was a miracle.
Abulafia carried on to Rome. His plan had been to meet the Pope in Rome on the eve of the Jewish New Year, a most propitious time. Unfortunately, when he arrived in Rome he found that the Pope was not there. He had decamped with his entourage to his summer palace in the Central Italian hills of Soriano Nel Cimino. Unfazed, Abulafia followed him. The Pope must have had forewarning of his arrival, for (according to Abulafia) he told his guards that, should he turn up, he should be arrested, taken to the city gate and burnt alive. The pyre that would consume him had already been built, in anticipation of his arrival.
Somehow Abulafia must have been told of all this before he arrived, because he wrote in his book that he knew what the Pope had planned for him, and that he had paid no attention. Instead he had sat and practised meditation, saw visions and wrote another book testifying to his impending rescue. He then continued with his journey to the Pope’s palace.
It turned out that Abulafia had been right to be complacent. He wrote that on his arrival at the palace in Soriano he was told that the Pope had suddenly been smitten by a plague and had died the previous night. This was no figment of his imagination; there are several corroborating Latin sources which confirm that Pope Nicholas III had indeed been stricken by an apoplexy and died suddenly, even before a confessor could be brought.
Because Abulafia’s books are the only source for this story there is no way of knowing whether he really on his way on his way to see the Pope when he suddenly died, or whether he concocted the story as “proof” that his life was protected by miracles. Whichever it was, the Pope did not hear what Abulafia needed to tell him, and Abulafia was not burnt at the stake. His tremulous anticipation in meeting the most powerful man in Christendom came to nothing and his messianic destiny fizzled out into a non-event.
This article is adapted from my book, Kabbalah: Secrecy, Scandal and the Soul, published in 2019.