Galilean rabbi Moses ben Jacob Cordovero is…

Galilean rabbi Moses ben Jacob Cordovero is a disciple of Joseph ben Ephraim Karo, the Spanish-born Jewish author of the great codification of Jewish law, the Bet Yosef (House of Joseph”).

Cordovero, twenty-six, completes his first major systematic presentation of the Zoharistic Kabbala, "Pardes rimmonim” (“Garden of Pomegranates”), in 1548.

Until the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and during the two generations that followed it, the Kabbalistic literary output had certainly been abundant, in Spain until the expulsion as well as in Italy and the Middle East.

This endeavor is primarily a matter of systematizing or even popularizing the Zohar or of extending the speculation already developed in the thirteenth century; there are also some attempts at reconciling philosophy and Kabbala.

(It should be noted that even the traditionalist theologians have adopted a careful and rather reserved attitude toward Kabbala.)