Picture taken by Yuval Y · CC BY-SA 3.0

Moshe Chaim Luzzatto wrote Mesillat Yesharim (The Path of the Just), an ethical treatise with mystical underpinnings that became so central to Jewish moral education that, a century after his death, the Musar movement built its curriculum around it — a place it still holds in yeshivas today. He also wrote Hebrew poetry and drama, including the biblical play Shimshon u-Felistim, and is counted among the founders of modern Hebrew literature. At twenty he claimed to receive teachings from a celestial maggid, a claim that alarmed rabbinical authorities wary of false-messiah movements and forced him into recantation and exile; he died of plague shortly after settling in the Holy Land.