What is "azriel"

Azriel, Asriel or Ezriel may refer to:

• Azriel (Jewish mystic) (c. 1160-c. 1238), also known as Azriel of Gerona
• Azriel Hildesheimer (1820-1899), German rabbi
• Azriel Rabinowitz (1905-1941), Lithuanian rabbi and Holocaust victim
• Azriel Rosenfeld (1931-2004), American professor and expert on computer image analysis
• Azriel Graeber (b. 1948), Talmudic Scholar and founder of the Jewish Scholarship Society
• Azriel Lévy (b. 1948), Logician, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
• Ezriel Carlebach (1909-1956), Israeli journalist

Fictional characters:

• Azriel is the title character's name in the Anne Rice novel Servant of the Bones.
• Asriel is the name of a key character in the 2015 indie game Undertale.

Other uses:

• Azri'el, a moshav in central Israel

Azriel of Gerona, Azriel ben Menahem ( Heb. עזריאל בן מנחם) (c. 1160 – c. 1238) was one of the most important kabbalists in the Catalan town of Girona (north of Barcelona) during the thirteenth century when it was an important center of Kabbalah. He is the teacher of the most important figure from the kabbalist community of Girona, Nahmanides.

Azriel was the most important student of the mystic Isaac the Blind. His writings covered subjects pertaining to the sefirot and included his mystical interpretation of Jewish liturgy and of the aggadah. He took on Gabirol's philosophical work to integrate it into the ten sefirot.

While his teacher Isaac the Blind considered Divine Thought to be the first supernatural quality to emanate from the Ayn Sof (or Eternal Being), Azriel argued that Divine Will was the first emanation. Therefore, it was the act of the will rather than the act of the intellect that was the first manifestation of God’s Eternal Being.