Safed's Golden Age

Refugees from the Spanish expulsion settle in a Galilean hill town, and within a generation Safed holds the greatest concentration of Jewish scholarship anywhere. Yosef Karo writes the Shulchan Aruch there; Moshe Cordovero systematizes Kabbalah; Yitzchak Luria arrives and, in barely two years before his death, produces the mystical system that reshapes Jewish theology. Shlomo Alkabetz composes Lecha Dodi in the same circle. It is the one period when the Land, rather than the Diaspora, is the undisputed center of Jewish creativity, and it produces both the standard code of law and the dominant mystical framework.