Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (the Ramak)

The great systematizer of Kabbalah before the Arizal, he organized the Zohar's teachings into a coherent whole in Pardes Rimmonim. His short Tomer Devorah turns those teachings into a guide for imitating God's compassion.

Life and legacy

Moses Cordovero was the foremost systematizer of Kabbalah in sixteenth-century Safed before Isaac Luria’s brief but transformative activity there. Drawing on the Zohar and earlier Spanish mystical traditions, Cordovero sought to reconcile divergent teachings concerning the divine attributes, emanation, creation, evil, prayer, and human action. His Pardes Rimmonim organized kabbalistic concepts into a coherent intellectual structure, while Tomer Devorah translated the doctrine of the divine attributes into an ethical program of human compassion and imitation of God. Cordovero trained or influenced many members of Safed’s mystical circles and wrote an extensive commentary on the Zohar. His work preserved the conceptual legacy of medieval Sephardic Kabbalah and remained influential even after Lurianic cosmology became dominant.

Sephardic connection

Safed scholar of an Iberian-descended family who systematized earlier Sephardic Kabbalah before the ascendancy of Lurianic teaching

Teachers and students