Rabbi Eliyahu de Vidas רבי אליהו די וידאש

Little is known of Rabbi Eliyahu de Vidas himself, and it is better said plainly: there are no firm dates. The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives neither year of birth nor of death and says the place of death is unknown; the current "1518–1587" is unsupported. What is certain: the sixteenth century, Safed, and later a connection with Hebron, where one of the graves in the old cemetery is ascribed to him.

He was Cordovero's disciple — and in his book always calls him "my teacher," never by name.

Reshit Chochmah was completed in 1575 and printed at Venice in 1579, in the author's lifetime. Five great gates: fear, love, repentance, holiness, humility — with appendices on the commandments, on the education of children, on honesty in business. It was reprinted some forty times and three times abridged, because of its length.

Its place in history deserves naming separately. The kabbalah of the Zohar and of Cordovero reached a wide readership not through treatises but through books of musar like this one — by way of fear, love and repentance rather than the sefirot. That, incidentally, is an argument in the dispute over what actually circulated among the communities by the seventeenth century: what circulated was not the Lurianic system but the Zohar rendered into the language of conduct.