born 1534, Jerusalem
died Aug. 5, 1572, Safed, Syria
Jewish mystic and founder of a school of Kabbala .
He was brought up in Egypt, where he pursued rabbinic studies. He dedicated himself to the study of the Kabbala with messianic fervour, and in 1570 he journeyed to a centre of the movement in Galilee. He died two years later in an epidemic, having written little. The Lurianic Kabbala, a collection of Luria's doctrines recorded after his death by a pupil, had great influence on later Jewish mysticism and on Hasidism . It propounds a theory of the creation and later degeneration of the world and calls for restoration of the original harmony through ritual meditation and secret combinations of words.