Abraham Abulafia and the Emergence of Christian Kabbalah

Abstract The present study asserts the special importance of Italian Kabbalah in the emergence of Christian Kabbalah. With a more open approach than others, relating to his definition of Judaism as being in recognition of the divine name, Abraham Abulafia’s prophetic Kabbalah was quite different both from other forms of Kabbalah and from traditional understandings of Judaism, and thus opened the way for an appropriation of his ideas through the Sicilian and Latin translations of his works.