The Subjective Significance of the Landscape of Tsfat

Abstract

In the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, this city had a mixed Arabo-Jewish population. After 1948 its population changed; most of the veteran Jewish residents left, as did the Arab residents. In their place Jewish immigrants who came to Israel mainly from North Africa and Asian countries settled there. Some of these new residents have absorbed the mystical atmosphere of the town and thus continue a tradition of many hundreds of years. Of all the northern settlements in Israel, Tsfat has become more and more clearly a settlement of central importance; this is a process which has continued from the time of the Crusades. The importance of Tsfat rose in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for several reasons, amongst them the settlement there of some of the Jews expelled from Spain, and the economic development of the city which specialized in the textile industry. The growth of Tsfat from an economic point of view created an important basis for the absorption of Jewish immigrants from all over the world. This phenomenon of the arrival of learned scholars had not existed since the completion of the Talmud, and they chose to settle in Tsfat because, after Jerusalem, it was the most important economic community. However, the two factors mentioned-the settled-economy factor and the culturalreligious scholarship factor-are insufficient to explain why it was Tsfat that became a city whose image is synonymous with mysticism and mystery. The third factor is connected with the general development of Jewish thought at the height of the Middle Ages and Tsfat's place in this development. In the long period between the Middle Ages and modern times the Kabbala, more than any other school of Judaism, fashioned the theoretical perception and image of the Land of Israel. In the period when Jewish life in general and the life of each Jew in particular had reached a nadir, the desire for redemption and a rise from such depths grew. The Kabbala assisted in this revival by transforming the Land of Israel from being a realistic concrete entity, into a spiritually symbolic entity. The Kabbala developed the concept of symbol. The concrete objects somehow suggest heavenly spheres (sephirot). The reality we see, the real world, is only the revealed presence of