Meir Ibn Gabbai

The influential kabbalist Meir ben Ezekiel Ibn Gabbai is thought to have been born in Spain. When he was about twelve years old, during the 1492 expulsion, his family fled to the Ottoman Empire, where he later married a Romaniote woman named Sasbona. How he received his rabbinic education is unknown, but by 1516 he was serving on a rabbinic court in Tire, now Turkey, and in 1540 in Manisa. He may have died in Edirne. Ibn Gabbai is known for three Hebrew kabbalistic works: Tolaʿat Yaʿakov (Worm of Jacob; 1507), on prayer; ʿAvodat ha-Kodesh (The Holy Service; 1531), a popular introduction to the kabbalistic system of the Zohar and a critique of Maimonidean rationalism; and Derekh Emunah (Way of Faith; 1539), a treatise on the sefirot drawing on Azriel of Girona’s Shaʿar ha-Shoʾel. His strongly theurgic kabbalah, in which ritual devotion influences the divine realm, developed on the eve of the Lurianic flowering in Safed.