ABSTRACT
In the centuries following the medieval period the majority of Jews lived in Eastern Europe and in the lands of the Ottoman empire. By the fifteenth century the Ottoman Turks had become a major world power and many Ashkenazic Jews settled in Ottoman lands. In the next century the population was supplemented by large numbers of Jewish Marranos fleeing from the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions. Later in the sixteenth century kabbalistic speculation was transformed by the greatest mystic of Safed, Isaac Luria. Originally brought up in Egypt where he studied the Talmud and engaged in business, Luria withdrew to an island on the Nile where he meditated on the Zohar for seven years. In 1569 he arrived in Safed and died two years later after having passed on his teaching to a small group of disciples.
