  abraham ben samuel abulafia (), 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.jewish encyclopedia, abulafia abraham ben samuel, link http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/699-abulafia-abraham-ben-samuel, accessed 08/04/2013 ==biography== ===early life and travels=== 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 he 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 lost ten 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 mongols and mamluks 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 moreh nebhukhim (guide for the perplexed) of maimonides, under the tutelage of a philosopher and physician named hillel â probably the well-known hillel ben samuel ben eliezer of verona. although he always held maimonides in the highest esteem, and often made use of sentences from his writings, he was as little satisfied with his philosophy as with any other branch of knowledge which he acquired. he was highly articulate, able and eager to teach others. he wrote industriously on kabbalistic, philosophical, and grammatical subjects, and succeeded in surrounding himself with numerous pupils, to whom he imparted much of his own enthusiasm. on his return to spain he became subject to visions, and at the age of thirty-one, at barcelona, began to study a particular kind of kabbalah whose most important representative was barukh togarmi, and received a revelation with messianic overtones. he immersed himself in the study of the sefer yetzirah ("book of creation") and its numerous commentaries, which explain the creation of the world and man as based on hebrew letter combinations. this book, and particularly the
1240_births 1290s_deaths Jewish_Messiah_claimants Kabbalists Medieval_Aragonese_Jews People_from_Zaragoza Sephardi_rabbis