Elazar Azikri lived and worked in Safed, in the Galilee, during the sixteenth century flowering that made the town the single most influential center of Jewish mysticism in the early modern world, home in the same generation to Moses Cordovero, whose systematic kabbalistic theology dominated the town's teaching before Azikri's own lifetime closed, and to Isaac Luria, whose reworking of kabbalistic cosmology would go on to reshape Jewish mysticism for centuries after.
Azikri's own major work, Sefer Charedim, Book of the Reverent, organizes its teaching around the full range of biblical and rabbinic commandments, distinguishing those still practically observable from those tied to the Temple or the land of Israel specifically, and framing observance throughout as an expression of love and reverence for God rather than mere legal obligation.
Gershom Scholem's foundational history of the kabbalah situates Azikri within Safed's broader culture of intense personal piety, in which mystics kept private devotional diaries, practiced regular self examination against their own stated spiritual goals, and treated everyday ethical conduct as inseparable from mystical attainment rather than a lesser, merely practical concern standing apart from it. That combination, rigorous legal scholarship fused with an intensely personal, love centered spirituality, is what distinguishes Azikri's voice within the wider Safed circle and what carried directly into the composition for which he is remembered far more widely than for Sefer Charedim itself.