Abraham Abulafia

Abraham Abulafia
Abraham Abulafia's "Light of the Intellect" 1285, Vat. ebr. 597 leaf 113 recto
Occupation	Philosopher and writer
Period	1271–1291

Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia (Hebrew: אברהם בן שמואל אבולעפיה‎), the founder of the school of "Prophetic Kabbalah", was born in Zaragoza, Spain, in 1240, and is assumed to have died sometime after 1291, following a stay on the small and windswept island of Comino, the smallest of the three inhabited islands that make up the Maltese archipelago.

Very early in life he was taken by his parents to Tudela, Navarre, where his aged father Samuel Abulafia instructed him in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud. In 1258, when Abraham was eighteen years old, his father died, and two years later Abraham began a life of ceaseless wandering. His first journey in 1260 was to the Land of Israel, where he intended to begin a search for the legendary river Sambation and the Ten Lost Tribes. He got no further than 'Akko, however, because of the desolation and lawlessness in the Holy Land stemming from the chaos following the last Crusades; the war that year between the Mongol Empire and the Mamluk Sultanate forced his return to Europe, via Greece. He had determined to go to Rome, but stopped short in Capua, where during the early 1260s he devoted himself with passionate zeal to the study of philosophy and of the The Guide for the Perplexed of Maimonides, under the tutelage of a philosopher and physician named Hillel — probably the well-known Hillel ben Samuel of Verona.