The Sages of Tzfat

For a few extraordinary decades in the sixteenth century, the little town of Tzfat held more great minds than any city in the Jewish world. They prayed in each other’s synagogues, sat on each other’s courts, argued, ordained and married into each other’s families. These are some of the people whose lives crossed Maran’s.

Rabbi Yaakov Beirav (Mahari Beirav)

The leading sage of Tzfat when Karo arrived, and the head of its yeshiva and court. In 1538 he set out to renew rabbinic ordination, the first link in restoring a Sanhedrin. Karo was among the four he ordained. When the plan was blocked from Jerusalem, Beirav left the Land; Karo succeeded him as head of the court and carried his yeshiva forward.

Rabbi Moshe di Trani (the Mabit)

Karo’s colleague at the head of Tzfat’s rabbinical court, and an author of responsa in his own right. The two great judges did not always agree — their disagreements fill pages of halachic literature — but together they made the court of Tzfat the address for the whole Jewish world.

Rabbi Shlomo HaLevi Alkabetz

Poet, kabbalist and Karo’s companion from their years in the Ottoman Balkans. It was Alkabetz who wrote the letter describing the Shavuot night on which the Maggid spoke, and who, like Karo, answered its call: he settled in Tzfat in the mid-1530s. His hymn Lecha Dodi, sung in synagogues everywhere each Friday night, was born in the Tzfat of Maran.

Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (the Ramak)

Alkabetz’s brother-in-law, and counted among Karo’s students. Ordained young, he became the great systematiser of kabbalah before the Arizal; his Pardes Rimonim remains a pillar of kabbalistic thought. According to one tradition, the Arizal himself directed Karo to study kabbalah through the Ramak’s teachings rather than his own.

Rabbi Moshe Alsheich (the Alsheich HaKadosh)

A student of Karo from his youth, who followed him to Tzfat, called him “my father,” sat as a judge on his court, and was ordained by him in the effort to keep Beirav’s semikhah alive. His Torah commentary is still widely studied. His own synagogue nearby is one of the few in Tzfat said to have survived the earthquakes; tradition holds that sages including Karo and the Arizal came to hear his Shabbat sermons there.

Rabbi Yitzchak Luria (the Arizal)

He came to Tzfat in 1570, more than forty years younger than Karo, and in barely two years transformed Jewish mysticism forever. Tradition tells that the two giants — the master of the revealed Torah and the master of the hidden — came to revere each other and joined their families in marriage. (See The Lion and the Master.)

Rabbi Chaim Vital

The Arizal’s foremost disciple, who recorded his teachings, and a student of the Alsheich, who ordained him in 1590 — so that the semikhah given to Karo in 1538 passed, through the Alsheich, to him.

Visitors and correspondents

• Rabbi David ibn Zimra (the Radbaz) and Rabbi Yaakov de Castro, leading sages of Egypt, came to Tzfat to see him.
• Zechariah al-Dhahiri, the Yemenite poet and traveller, left an eyewitness account of Karo teaching his students on Shabbat.
• Rabbi Moshe Isserles (the Rema) of Kraków, Karo’s great Ashkenazi counterpart, whose glosses on the Shulchan Aruch made it the code of all Israel.
• Rabbi Yosef ibn Lev of Istanbul, who at first hesitated to let his students rely on the Beit Yosef — until a forgotten source changed his mind. (See The Source That Would Not Come.)
• Rabbi Elisha Gallico, a sage of Tzfat, whom Karo asked to draft one of the last communal decrees of his life.

And later: the Shelah HaKadosh

Rabbi Yeshaya HaLevi Horowitz (c. 1565–1630), known by the name of his great work Shnei Luchot HaBrit, came to the Land of Israel half a century after Maran’s death. In his section on Shavuot he preserved Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz’s letter about the night the Maggid spoke — and through the Shelah, the custom of learning through Shavuot night spread across the Jewish world.