Yitzhak Kaduri

Kaduri brought not merely blessings but curses into Israeli politics. In the early l990s he sent his curses to the mother of the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. So far as is known, she remained unscathed by them. In l995 he also publicly cursed Yitzhak Rabin, the former general and then Prime Minister, for his readiness to swap land for peace. A month later Rabin fell to a right-wing religious fanatic’s bullet in Tel Aviv.

Kaduri launched his own attempt to bring peace to Israel and its neighbours by inviting both the then Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and the Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Jerusalem around his 100th birthday in the autumn of l997. Both ignored him.

Kaduri became headline news in his nineties after a lifetime in the obscurity of Jerusalem’s tiny kabbalist sects. His kabbalism had little in common with the kabbalah movement which became a California cult in recent decades and of which the singer Madonna is one of the most dazzling devotees. Kaduri would have no truck with the California sect. “It is forbidden to teach kabbalah to a non-Jew,” he thundered when Madonna came to Israel to visit a mystic’s grave.

Kaduri’s own approach was based on profound study, stretching over decades, of the main kabbalist text known as the Zohar. This work, written in Aramaic, makes copious and, some critics say, obscure allusions to biblical texts. It was long believed to have been written in Palestine by an early Talmudic rabbi Shimon Ben Yochai in the 2nd century AD. But modern scholarship ascribes it confidently to the 13th-century Spanish Jewish scholar Moses de León.

The records of Kaduri’s birth were lost. It is known that it was in Iraq, in either Basra or Baghdad, and the assumption that it was during the autumn of l897 was unchallenged in later years. His father was a spice merchant, and the family wealth enabled Yitzhak to travel repeatedly to Jerusalem, then part of the Ottoman empire. He finally settled there in l922.

He earned his living as a translator for the British Army, then sustaining the League of Nations mandate for Palestine. In his early thirties Kaduri set up as a kabbalist, dispensing blessings, advice and amulets to the sick, troubled and childless, while earning his main living as a bookbinder. It was not until his sixties that his son and grandson set up an academy for him in the Bukharian quarter of Jerusalem, inhabited mostly by Oriental Jews. By then he was a venerable as well as charismatic figure in that part of the city.

His constituency lay with the constantly growing number of North African and Oriental Jews, both poor and poorly educated by Western standards, whose religion was said by critics to be based as much on superstition as on faith. It was to them that Kaduri’s amulets were particularly attractive. They were not put off by some bearing the label “Made in Taiwan”.

In his last years Kaduri additionally espoused the messianism of the European Chassidic sect Lubavitch. Kaduri repeatedly proclaimed the Messiah to be already living, albeit anonymously, in Israel. That led the recent Foreign Minister, the Moroccan-born David Levy, to accuse him of “dragging us back into the Dark Ages”. But such rare denunciations barely dented his influence on his religious, and for a while, political constituency.

Kaduri is survived by his second wife, Dorit, whom he married after his first wife died in l990, and by a son and daughter.

Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, Israeli mystic and kabbalah expert, was born in the autumn of l897. He died on January 28, 2006, aged 108.