The Last Crusader Capital, and a Kabbalist's Enquiry

After Jerusalem was lost in 1187 and Acre retaken in 1191, the port became the capital of what remained of the crusader kingdom for a century. The military orders built their headquarters into it, and the vaulted Hospitaller halls and a tunnel cut by the Templars to the harbour survive under the modern town. The Italian maritime cities held their own quarters with their own churches and courts, and their rivalry turned into open street fighting in the 1250s. When the city fell to the Mamluks in 1291 the Latin presence in the Levant ended, and the orders moved to Cyprus and beyond.

Ottoman Acre was rebuilt over the ruins, most visibly by Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, whose mosque of 1781 dominates the old town and holds a relic venerated as a hair of the Prophet's beard, shown to worshippers on the Night of Power.

The city also gave its name to a figure central to one of the great questions of Jewish mysticism. Isaac of Acre left after the fall of the city and, hearing that a book of ancient authority had appeared in Castile, went to find out where it came from. His account, preserved at second hand, reports that he sought out those who had known Moses de Leon, that de Leon promised to show him the old manuscript and died before he could, and that de Leon's widow said there was no manuscript and that her husband had written it himself. That testimony is the hinge of the argument about the authorship of the Zohar and has been read both ways ever since.