Abulafia (disambiguation)

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Abulafia (the Latinized version of the Arabic name أبو العافية, Abu-l-Afiyya, Hebrew: אבולעפיה‎) can refer to:

1. Name of a widely scattered Sephardic Jewish family, one of whose branches, for the sake of clearer designation, bore the surname of ha-Levi. Members of this family were found in various cities of the Orient and in Africa in the sixteenth century. From the data collected by Zunz, "Z. G." pp. 432-434, The first Abulafia lived in the twelfth century in Toledo, and the first Jew to settle in Spain in modern times was an Abulafia from Tunis. It is probable that Moses Afia and Solomon Afia, mentioned in 1445 as prominent men in Saragossa, belonged to the same family.
2. Samuel Abulafia, a 13 century Jewish rabbi of that family.
   1. His son, the kabbalist Abraham Abulafia.
3. Todros ben Joseph Abulafia
   1. Meir ben Todros HaLevi Abulafia (Ramah), a major 13th-century Sephardic rabbi.
4. David Samuel Harvard Abulafia
5. Chaim Abulafia; he

[edit] Other usages

• Abulafia is also the name of a famous bakery in Tel Aviv's Jaffa district.

• Abulafia is also the nickname given by deuteragonist Jacopo Belbo to his home computer in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. The machine was used not only for word processing, but also to attempt to extract meaningful snippets from random permutations of text in a fashion reminiscent of Abraham Abulafia's methods.

• Paul Durham uses the word Abulafia as the escape code to call up a terminal in his virtual reality simulations in Greg Egan's Permutation City. This is again a reference to the permutation process, though it is unclear whether it is intended as an homage to the machine in Eco's work or to Abraham Abulafia himself.

• Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick claimed at one point to have been possessed by Abulafia's spirit.

• He is also mentioned in the book "Bee Season" by Myla Goldberg, and the film adaptation (2005) directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel.

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the 1901–1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, a publication now in the public domain.