Kabbalah - Mysteries of Kabbalistic Thought

4 Lurianic Kabbalah in the Middle Ages

Following the upheavals and dislocations in the Jewish world as a result of the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the trauma of Anti-Semitism during the Middle Ages, Jews began to search for signs of when the long-awaited Jewish Messiah would come to comfort them in their painful exiles. As part of that "search for meaning" in their lives, Kabbalah received its biggest boost in the Jewish world when the explication of the Kabbalistic teachings of Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534-1572), by his disciple Rabbi Chaim Vital who published the Luria's teachings, gained wide-spread popularity.

It was Luria who popularized and gave credence to the teachings of the Zohar which had until then been a little-known work. The author of the Shulkhan Arukh (the Jewish "Code of Law"), Rabbi Yosef Karo (1488-1575), and Rabbi Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (1522-1570) were also great scholars of Kabbalah and spread its teachings during this era.

Isaac Luria (1534–July 25, 1572) was a Jewish scholar and mystic who was secretly believed by some to be the messiah (Mashiach ben Yossef to be more precise). In many ways he is the founder of Judaism's Kabbalah in its modern form; modern Jewish mysticism is often referred to as Lurianic Kabbalah.

In Hebrew he is called יצחק לוריא, Yitzhak Luria, or, Yitzhak ben Shlomo Ashkenazi, and he is also known as Isaac Ashkenazi, He-Ari or Ari (meaning "The Lion", but also a Hebrew acronym of "Adoneinu Rabbeinu Itzhak", or "Our Master Rabbi Isaac"), Arizal ("zal" being a Hebrew acronym for Zikhrono Livrakha - "of blessed memory" - a common Jewish honorific for the deceased), Ari haKadosh.