Isaac Luria and the Kabbalah of Exile and Restoration

Isaac Luria (1534–1572), known by the acronym "Ha'ari" ("the Lion," from "Ha-Elohi Rabbi Yitzhak," the divine Rabbi Isaac), was born in Jerusalem, raised largely in Egypt, and spent the final and most influential years of his short life, from around 1569 until his death from plague in 1572, in the town of Safed in the Galilee, then under Ottoman rule. Safed had become, over the 16th century, an extraordinary concentration of Jewish legal and mystical scholarship, home during roughly the same decades to figures such as Joseph Karo, compiler of the authoritative legal code the Shulchan Aruch (1565), and Moses Cordovero (1522–1570), himself a systematic kabbalistic theologian whose circle Luria joined and whose ideas he substantially reworked after Cordovero's death.