Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia was one. Born in Aragon in 1240, he was taught the Torah and Talmud by his father after the family moved to Navarre. When Abulafia was 18, his father died, and the young man began wandering the world, eventually deciding to go to Israel and find the Ten Lost Tribes. Unfortunately, the Crusades had made a journey to Israel dangerous, so he returned to Europe, studied the Guide for the Perplexed of Maimonides, and started having visions.
He studied Kabbalah, and immersed himself in the Sefer Yetzirah, finding in it the path to perfection for a human being. In 1280 he went to Rome to convert Pope Nicholas III to Judaism. Hearing of his intention, the pope gave orders to burn the heretic. Before Abulafia reached Rome, he heard that Nicholas died of a stroke, so he returned to Messina, where he was imprisoned for a month by the Order of Friars Minor.
In Messina he is reported to have declared himself a prophet and the Messiah, which angered the local Jewish congregation. A letter against Abulafia written by the influential to Shlomo ben Aderet of Barcelona, who was making it his life's work to speak out against the rise of false Messiahs, helped put an end to Abulafia's career. Up until 1291 he was in Malta and writing his own works on meditation and symbolism, after which he disappears from records.
The other major "Messiah" of this century was Nissim ben Abraham, whom we discussed in the story of Abner of Burgos.
It is interesting that there was enough concern about false Messiahs that Shlomo ben Aderet had a career about denouncing and disproving them. Let's take a look at Shlomo next.
(The illustration is from William Holman Hunt's 1860 "The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple.")
