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According to legend, Safed was set between Mount Meron and Mount Canaan atop a mountain rising 3600 feet above sea level, to be closer to the heavens and to inspire its artists and holy men. The air of Safed is so pure, the legend continues, that it shimmers with promises of immortality. Indeed, in the early 18th century, Rabbi Abraham Azoulay declared, "The air of Safed is the purest in the land...the souls of those buried there fly quickly to...the Garden of Paradise. The narrow streets and alleys of the old city, however, are as strange as the homelies of the Kabbalah. Their meanderings are so intricate that more than one visit is need to decipher them and to be completely penetrated by their atmosphere.
From tsfat, Hebrew for painting, Safed is mentioned in the Jerusalem Talmud as one of the relay points for the bonfire signals announcing the sanctification of the new moon. Flavius Josephus (37-91), the commander of the revolt against the Romans in the Galilee, built a fortress within the walls of Safed, or very nearby. Safed is mentioned in liturgical poems as early as the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries and changed hands many times over the following centuries. In 1140, Fulques of Anjou built a new fortress in Safed to dominate and survey the road linking Damascus and Saint John of Acre. In 1168, the Crusaders gave the town over to the Templars who held it for twenty years. In 1188, Saladin's men took Safed from them. In 1220, the Abbasids destroyed the city, and twenty years later, in 1240, the Templars won it back again and rebuilt it. In 1266, the Mameluks built up its walls to make Safed their headquarters, if not the capital of a province stretching from the Galilee north to Lebanon.
A Jewish community had existed in Safed as of the XIth century, but it first began to expand under the Mameluks, and by 1480, the city numbered 300 Jewish families. In 1492, the first Jews expelled from Spain came to Safed and brought with them their trade in oil, spices, and milk products as well as their mystical traditions. Safed became a center for the Kabbalah and the home of many famous men. They included Jakob Berab, who attempted to renew the tradition of full rabbinic ordination and to restore the Sanhedrin, the highest political-religious Jewish institution in Palestine in the period just after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (1522-1570), theoretician of the Kabbalah and author of Pardes Rimon, or The Garden of Pomegranates. Isaac Luria and his disciple Chaim Vital (1543-1620), author of Etz Chaim or The Tree of Life, both of whom established a new current within the Kabbalah. Joseph Karo, author of the Shulchan Aruch, the code of regligious prescriptions still used today by orthodox Jews. These communities of Holy Men gave Safed its air of peaceful inspiration and their mystical practices quickly spread to the entire Jewish world.
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