The period of Safed’s intellectual renaissance began in 1524, with the arrival of R. Jacob Berab, one of the leading Spanish scholars of his generation. Berab, a man of great boldness and energy, sought to reinstate the ancient practice of rabbinic ordination known as semicha, and through this to enable the reestablishment of the ancient Jewish legislative-judicial body, the Sanhedrin. These efforts were of a plainly messianic character. The reestablishment of the Sanhedrin was universally accepted as a major step in the messianic process, since it represented the most concrete expression of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel; however, a requirement for membership in the Sanhedrin was ordination by semicha, which had been handed down through the generations of rabbinic leaders until around the fifth century C.E., at which time the chain of transmission was broken, and the tradition was lost. Berab’s efforts to reinstate semicha were thus aimed at eventually reestablishing Judaism’s sovereign legislative house, in preparation for the messianic era.⁶⁶ In 1538, in the presence of twenty-five of the greatest rabbis in Safed, Berab was ordained—creating the first link in what was meant to be a renewed chain of ordination. But the leading rabbi of Jerusalem, R. Levi ibn Habib, objected that the ordination did not satisfy one of the conditions stipulated by Maimonides without which the semicha could not be reinstated—namely, the agreement of all the sages in the land of Israel—and as a result had no halachic validity. The controversy between the two sides grew increasingly heated, to the point that Berab’s opponents apparently reported on him to the authorities for disloyalty. Fearing imprisonment, Berab was forced to flee the country—but not before he had hurriedly ordained four of the great scholars of the generation living in the city, including R. Joseph Karo.

Following Berab’s departure, Karo assumed leadership of the community in Safed. Karo was born in Portugal; because of the persecutions and expulsion there he emigrated, together with many other refugees, to Egypt, which was part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1536 he came to Palestine along with a group of kabalists headed by R. Solomon Alkabetz, and settled in Safed. The kabalists had an explicitly mystical motivation for moving to Palestine: Alkabetz had preached a sermon on Shavuot night, the eve of the group’s aliya, in which he described how a magid, an emissary from God, had urged Karo to lead his disciples to the land of Israel because it was a time of grace: “Fortunate are you, my sons,” the magid told him. “Return to your studies and do not interrupt them for even a moment, and ascend to the land of Israel, for not all times are equally [propitious]…. Therefore make haste and go up… for it has already been said, ‘the time of reaping the fruits has come,’ and not all times are the same.”⁶⁷

Alkabetz, the third outstanding figure in the spiritual leadership of Safed, introduced special prayer customs and composed works of Kabala and many religious poems, which were suffused with a yearning for redemption (one of his best-known poems, Lecha Dodi, “Come, My Beloved,” became part of the Sabbath Eve service throughout the Jewish world). In one of his prayers, Alkabetz calls upon the Almighty to redeem the Jewish people, arguing that by going up to the land of their fathers, he and his colleagues had proven their devotion and were worthy of divine assistance:

Another major religious figure who left his imprint on Safed was R. Isaac Luria, also known as the “Ari.” Luria was born in Jerusalem and attended the yeshiva of R. Betzalel Ashkenazi in Cairo, where he studied the Zohar. By his account, the prophet Elijah appeared to him and commanded him to go back to the land of Israel in order to attain the highest holiness, an understanding of the divine wisdom, and a knowledge of the secrets of the Tora. Inspired by this revelation, he returned to Palestine and settled with his disciples in Safed, where he played an unparalleled role in the development of Jewish mysticism. His doctrines concerning creation and redemption, and the kabalistic school that formed around them, were crucial not only for the development of Kabala in subsequent generations, but also in the emergence of the Hasidic movement in the eighteenth century.

The Messiah did not materialize in 1540, but this did not discourage those who had built their vision of the future around that date. A number of mystics tried to resurrect messianic hopes by pushing the date back to 5335 (1575), based on their reading of a verse in the book of Daniel.⁶⁹ However, the messianic anticipations for the later date paled in comparison to those that had preceded the year 5300. An aborted plan to rebuild the city of Tiberias raised hopes among Italian Jews during this intermediary period (according to several midrashic traditions, the first step in the process of redemption is to take place there),⁷⁰ but these were quickly dashed and did not trigger any serious movement of aliya.⁷¹ Luria died three years before the second date posited for redemption, in 1572, at the age of 38; and Karo’s death followed in 1575—the very year that he had hoped to see the Messiah.

As the messianic ferment subsided, Safed itself declined. One main cause was the severe economic crisis that struck the country and damaged most of the city’s wool industry. Government authorities also grew more hostile to the Jews, and in 1576 even attempted to expel about one thousand Jewish families from Palestine to Cyprus. Religious persecution of the Jews of Safed—on the pretext that they had built synagogues without permission—brought an end to the community. R. Moses Alsheich’s lamentation, modeled on the book of Lamentations, which Jews read every year on Tisha B’av, depicts the end of this crucial chapter in the history of Jewish settlement in Palestine: “And who is the man who has seen the city, which has been called the acme of beauty, the joy of all the world, a great city of scholars and scribes…? How has its blossom been plundered like a wilderness…. Many are its enemies and those who destroy it.”⁷²

 

Despite these crises in the Jewish community in Palestine towards the end of the sixteenth century, and especially in Safed, a new movement of immigration to the land of Israel started up only a few decades later. This time, the messianic ferment was based on a passage from the Zohar, which concluded that in the year 5408 (1648), the dead would be resurrected, an event which the tradition describes as one of the later stages in the process of redemption.⁷³ In the words of the Zohar:

Dozens of leading rabbinic sages and their families came to Palestine in the years before 1648. Most of them were kabalists of the school of R. Moses Cordovero and R. Isaac Luria, who believed that by studying and disseminating esoteric doctrines they were fulfilling one of the important conditions for the coming of the Messiah. These included R. Abraham Azulai from Morocco, author of the important kabalistic treatise Hesed Le’avraham; R. Jacob Tzemah from Portugal, who edited the writings of R. Haim Vital, the renowned disciple of Luria; and R. Nathan Shapira of Krakow, author of the well-known work Tuv Ha’aretz which deals with the sanctity of the Holy Land according to the Kabala.

But perhaps the most illustrious figure who came to Palestine at this time was R. Isaiah Horowitz, author of Shnei Luhot Habrit and known as the “Shelah,” after the acronym of the title of this work. Around 1620, Horowitz, who had served as chief rabbi in Dubno, Ostraha, Frankfurt am Main, and Prague, decided to move to Palestine. Prior to that, Horowitz had argued strenuously for the existence of a natural link between settling the land and the coming of the redemption, and it upset him deeply that the masses of Jews did not go to the land of Israel. “For my heart burned continually,” he wrote, “when I saw the children of Israel building houses like princely fortresses, making permanent homes in this world in an impure land… which seems, heaven forbid, as if they were turning their minds away from the redemption.”⁷⁷ Horowitz saw his own aliya as a necessary step in bringing about the redemption that was expected with the turn of the fifth century of the millennium.⁷⁸