Safed

Safed's significance rests on a remarkably short period and a small number of people.

Why there, and why then

The Ottoman conquest of the region in the 1510s opened the Galilee to migration, and Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal arrived with capital, trading connections and a textile industry. Safed's Jewish households multiplied several times over between the 1520s and the 1560s, and by 1577 it had the first Hebrew printing press anywhere in Asia. Prosperity is an unromantic explanation for a mystical flowering, but scholars concentrate where they can be supported, and the wool trade paid for it.

The people

• Joseph Karo (1488-1575) composed the Shulhan Arukh here in 1563. It remains the most widely used code of Jewish law in the world, and its author also kept a diary of visitations from a heavenly teacher, which is a useful corrective to any tidy separation between legalists and mystics.
• Moses Cordovero (1522-1570) produced in Pardes Rimmonim the first systematic organisation of Kabbalah into a coherent structure.
• Shlomo Alkabetz wrote Lekha Dodi, sung in synagogues across the world every Friday evening.
• Isaac Luria (c. 1534-1572), known as the Ari.

The Kabbalat Shabbat service that now opens the Sabbath almost everywhere in the Jewish world took shape in sixteenth-century kabbalistic circles of this kind.

Luria

Luria arrived in Safed in early 1570 and died in 1572, at about thirty-eight. He taught for roughly two years. He wrote almost nothing.

What exists is his students' record, gathered principally by Hayyim Vital, who both preserved and shaped it. On that basis rests a cosmology that reorganised Jewish thought:

• Tzimtzum, contraction. For anything other than God to exist, God withdrew from a space to make room for it. Creation begins with an absence.
• Shevirat ha-kelim, the shattering of the vessels. The vessels meant to hold the divine light could not, and broke, scattering sparks that fell and lodged in the material world.
• Tikkun, repair. Gathering those sparks is the purpose of Jewish observance, and every commandment performed correctly lifts one.

The reach of this is hard to overstate. It gave exile a cosmic meaning at a moment when the Jewish world was absorbing the expulsion from Spain; it fed directly into the Sabbatean movement of the following century; it underlies Hasidism; and it survives, thoroughly secularised and largely detached from its source, in the phrase tikkun olam, repairing the world.

Lawrence Fine's study of Luria and his circle, and Gershom Scholem's earlier account, are the standard scholarly treatments.

Afterwards

The town declined as the textile trade did. Earthquakes in 1759 and 1837 destroyed much of it with heavy loss of life, the casualty figures in the sources differ by large multiples and should be treated as unsettled. The Jewish community was attacked in 1834, and again on 29 August 1929, when between eighteen and twenty people were killed.

One of the most widely used books of Jewish law and one of the most influential schools of Jewish mysticism were both produced in Safed within the same few decades, by people who knew each other.

A law code written here

Joseph Karo, working in Safed in the sixteenth century, compiled the Shulchan Aruch, a systematic code of Jewish law that went on to become one of the most widely accepted legal references in subsequent Jewish practice across many different communities, an outsized influence for a text produced in a relatively small hill town.

A mystical system taught here

In the same period, Isaac Luria arrived in Safed and taught a distinctive system of Kabbalistic thought, dying only a few years later; his teachings survive mainly because his student Chaim Vital wrote them down, since Luria himself left little in his own hand. Luria's cosmology, addressing creation, exile and repair, became hugely influential in later Jewish mysticism largely through Vital's transcriptions rather than any text Luria authored directly.

A community reduced by disaster

Safed's Jewish community, which had grown substantially around this concentration of scholars, was devastated by a major earthquake in 1837 that killed a large portion of the population and destroyed much of the town, a disaster from which the community's earlier scale never fully recovered even as the town's mystical legacy continued to draw scholars and visitors long afterward.