Chaim Abulafia
1660 CE–1744 CE · Acharonim · Hebron
R. Chaim ben Yaakov Abulafia (1660-1744) led the dramatic 18th-century Sephardic re-settlement of Tiberias. Born in Hebron of an old Sephardic-Eretz-Yisrael family, he served as Chief Rabbi of Izmir before being invited in 1740 by the Bedouin sheikh Dahir al-Umar to come rebuild the long-abandoned Jewish community of Tiberias.
Abulafia traveled to Tiberias in 1740 (aged 80) and personally supervised the rebuilding of synagogues, mikvaot, and study halls — an act understood by many of his contemporaries as a quasi-messianic step. His Etz HaChaim, Mikraei Kodesh on Tanach, and Yashresh Yaakov are kabbalistically-tinged Sephardic homiletic and Talmudic works.
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HebronLand of Israel
What they did here
Born in Hebron to a long-established Sephardic-Eretz-Yisrael family.
Hebron in this era
Under Ottoman rule, Hebron remained one of the Jewish world's most sacred sites—home to the Cave of the Patriarchs and a modest but devoted community of scholars and pilgrims. The city never rivaled Tzfat's explosive mystical ferment, yet it maintained its own contemplative character, drawing pietists and kabbalists who came to pray at the tombs of Abraham and Sarah. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Jewish quarter existed in precarious equilibrium with its Muslim neighbors, the community sustained by donations from diaspora Jews and by the labor of artisans and small traders. By the eighteenth century, as Hasidic ideas spread eastward from Poland, Hebron's scholars engaged with these currents, though they remained rooted in the older mystical traditions of Lurianic kabbalah. The city's strength lay not in numerical size or political power but in spiritual resonance: for centuries, the modest stone houses clustered near the Machpelah held a Jewish population living consciously in the shadow of biblical memory, their continued presence a claim and a prayer.
About Hebron
Hebron (Arabic al-Khalil) is a city in the southern West Bank, about 30 km south of Jerusalem, and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the Levant. According to the Bible, Abraham bought the Cave of the Patriarchs (Machpelah) there as a family tomb, and the site is holy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Herod the Great built the enclosure that still stands over it, later a church and then the Ibrahimi Mosque. Sephardi kabbalists settled there after the expulsion from Spain, and in 1924 the Slabodka yeshiva moved to Hebron until the 1929 massacre of Jews. Since the 1997 Hebron Protocol, the city has been divided between Palestinian Authority and Israeli administration.
In Hebron at the same time
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Chaim Abulafia’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
Shevet Musar, Nehemiah Hayon, Aaron Alfandari, Sephardic Rishon LeTzion, Abraham Kalisker, Chaim Abulafia
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.