Isaac Luria: Biography from Answers.com Mobile

Isaac ben Solomon Luria

(born 1534, Jerusalem — died Aug. 5, 1572, Safed, Syria) Jewish mystic and founder of a school of Kabbala. He was brought up in Egypt, where he pursued rabbinic studies. He dedicated himself to the study of the Kabbala with messianic fervour, and in 1570 he journeyed to a centre of the movement in Galilee. He died two years later in an epidemic, having written little. The Lurianic Kabbala, a collection of Luria's doctrines recorded after his death by a pupil, had great influence on later Jewish mysticism and on Hasidism. It propounds a theory of the creation and later degeneration of the world and calls for restoration of the original harmony through ritual meditation and secret combinations of words.

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