Sefer HaKanahספר הקנה
Castile · 1380
סק
Anonymous (14c. Castile)
Anonymous (14c. Castile)
? · RI · Castile
Anonymous author(s) of Sefer HaKanah and Sefer HaPeliyah (14th-century Spain), Kabbalistic works that reread the commandments and the Pentateuch through esoteric symbolism. Important for later Sabbatean and Hasidic interpretation.
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Stop 1 of 11340–1410Composed
CastileקסטיליהIberia
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
Castile in this era
In the mid-to-late 14th and early 15th centuries, Castile was a kingdom in flux under the rival Trastámara and earlier Bourbon lines, with Peter I, Henry II, and their successors competing for control amid civil war and dynastic instability. Jews in Castile during these decades occupied a precarious position: some were wealthy tax-farmers and physicians close to the crown, but the broader community faced mounting pressure from the Church, aggressive Christian merchants threatened by Jewish commercial success, and the violent pogroms of 1391—when mobs stormed Jewish quarters in Seville, Toledo, and other cities, killing thousands and forcing mass conversions. The anonymous Castilian sages of this era worked amid this terror, preserving halakhic tradition in communities that were simultaneously pillars of Iberian Christian society and its scapegoats; the Jewish quarter of Toledo, once a glittering center of translation and philosophy, became a symbol of precarious toleration and imminent catastrophe—a harbinger of the expulsion that would come in 1492.
About Castile
Region of medieval Spain where Joseph Gikatilla, Abraham Abulafia, and the Zohar's compositional circle worked. Coordinates anchored at Madrid as a regional centroid.