70 M O D E R N T I M E S I I : S A F E D A N D T H E L U R I A N I C K A B B A L A H 6 Modern Times II: Safed and the Lurianic Kabbalah Following the destruction of the great Jewish center in the Iberian peninsula in 1492, groups of Jewish intellectuals gradually congregated in the small town of Safed in the Upper Galilee, attracted by the traditional belief that Rabbi Shimeon bar Yohai, the main figure of the Zohar, was buried in the nearby village of Miron. The Jewish community in Safed was very small (hardly two thousand families in the sixteenth century), but it included many of the most inspired and ambitions minds of the period. A pioneering spirit imbued the community, which believed itself to be the religious leader of the Jewish people. In the 1530s the town’s scholars were engaged in a revolutionary endeavor. They intended to reconstitute the traditional ordination of rabbis, which started with Moses on Mount Sinai and continued through biblical and talmudic times but was discontinued in the beginning of the Middle Ages, when it was relegated to the realm of messianic redemption.
