Judah Halevi

Halevi's various residences in Spain are unknown; he seems to have lived at times in Christian Toledo, at other times in Islamic Spain. Although he occupied an honored position as a physician, intellectual, and communal leader, his religious convictions may have compelled him to want to abandon his homeland to spend his final days in Israel. His motivations were likely complex, so he may have felt equally motivated by devotion, depression, and curiosity. The Halkin biography explores the idea that he enjoyed "celebrity" for decades, and suggests that the loss of significant family and friends may have motivated the perilous travels.

The uncertainties of Jewish communal status in the period of the Reconquista or the failure of messianic movements may have weighed on him as well, as he considered the future security of the Jewish position in the diaspora. In his treatise known as the Kuzari, he claimed that true religious fulfillment is possible only in the presence of the God of Israel, which, the text suggested, was most palpable in the Land of Israel. Contrary to a prevalent theory, his poetry shows beyond doubt that his pilgrimage was a completely individual act and that he had no intention of setting off a mass pilgrimage.

Halevi sailed for Alexandria from Spain. Arriving on September 8, 1140, he was greeted enthusiastically by friends and admirers. He then went to Cairo, where he visited several dignitaries, including the Nagid of Egypt, Samuel ben Hanania, and his friend Halfon ben Nathaniel Halevi. He did not permit himself to be persuaded to remain in Egypt, but returned to Alexandria and sailed for Israel on May 14, 1141. Little is known of his travels after this moment. It is estimated Halevi died in July or August, possibly after having reached Palestine, based on a letter from Abu Nasr ben Avraham to Halfon ben Netanel dated November 12, 1141.[9] Legend also has it that Halevi was killed by an Arab horseman as he arrived in Jerusalem, with the first account found within a Hebrew miscellany published around 450 years after Halevi's presumed death.[8][10]

An 1141 letter to a prominent rabbi in Damascus also potentially refers to Halevi's death at the gates of Jerusalem.[11] As only fragments are preserved of this letter, it's unclear whether the writer is discussing Halevi or another Jew. [12]

During his last years, Halevi's poetry dealt extensively with the idea of the pilgrimage and described some of it. Documents that remain are panegyric to his various hosts in Egypt, explorations of his religious motivations, description of storms at sea, and expressions of his anxieties and doubts. We are well informed about the details of his pilgrimage thanks to letters that were preserved in the Cairo geniza. Poems and letters bearing on Halevi's pilgrimage are translated and explicated in Raymond P. Scheindlin, The Song of the Distant Dove (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Judah's secular or non-liturgical poetry is occupied by poems of friendship, love, tenderness, humor, and eulogy. Judah must have possessed an attractive personality; for there gathered about him as friends, even in his earliest youth, a large number of illustrious men, like Levi al-Tabban of Zaragoza, the aged poet Judah ben Abun, Judah ibn Ghayyat of Granada, Moses ibn Ezra and his brothers Judah, Joseph, and Isaac, the vizier Abu al-Hasan, Meïr ibn Kamnial, the physician and poet Solomon ben Mu'allam of Seville, besides his schoolmates Joseph ibn Migas and Baruch Albalia. Also the grammarian Abraham ibn Ezra.

In Córdoba, Judah addressed a touching farewell poem to Joseph ibn Ẓaddiḳ, the philosopher and poet. In Egypt, where the most celebrated men vied with one another in entertaining him, his reception was a veritable triumph. Here his particular friends were Aaron ben Jeshua Alamani in Alexandria, the nagid Samuel ben Hananiah in Cairo,[15] Halfon ha-Levi in Damietta, and an unknown man in Tyre, probably his last friend. In their sorrow and joy, in the creative spirit and all that moved the souls of these men, Judah sympathetically shared; as he says in the beginning of a short poem: "My heart belongs to you, ye noble souls, who draw me to you with bonds of love".[16]

Especially tender and plaintive is Judah's tone in his elegies[17] Many of them are dedicated to friends such as the brothers Judah (Nos. 19, 20), Isaac (No. 21), and Moses ibn Ezra (No. 16), R. Baruch (Nos. 23, 28), Meïr ibn Migas (No. 27), his teacher Isaac Alfasi (No. 14), and others. In the case of Solomon ibn Farissol, who was murdered on May 3, 1108, Judah suddenly changed his poem of eulogy (Nos. 11, 22) into one of lamentation (Nos. 12, 13, 93 et seq.). Child mortality due to plague was high in Judah's time and the historical record contains five elegies written for the occasion of the death of a child. Biographer Hillel Halkin hypothesizes that at least one of these elegiac poems may have been written in honor of one of Judah's children who did not reach adulthood and who is lost to history.[18]

Halevi's poetry includes verses relating to his vocational work as a physician. Halevi's prayer for the physician was first translated into English in 1924.[19]

My God, heal me and I shall be healed.
Let not Thine anger be kindled against me so that I be consumed.
My medicines are from you, whether good
Or evil, whether strong or weak.
It is Thou who shalt choose, not I.
Of Thy knowledge is the evil and the fair.
Not upon my power of healing I rely.
Only for Thine healing do I watch.

Joyous, careless youth, and merry, happy delight in life find their expression in his love-songs. Many of these are epithalamia and are characterized by a brilliant Near-Eastern coloring, as well as by a chaste reserve. In Egypt, where the muse of his youth found a glorious "Indian summer" in the circle of his friends, he wrote his "swan-song:"[20] "Wondrous is this land to see, With perfume its meadows laden, But more fair than all to me Is yon slender, gentle maiden. Ah, Time's swift flight I fain would stay, Forgetting that my locks are gray."

Drinking songs by Judah have also been preserved.[21]

Judah is noted as the most prolific composer of Hebrew riddles, with a corpus of at least sixty-seven riddles,[22]^: 21 some of which survive in his own hand, and even in draft form,[23][24][25] though only a few have been translated into English.[26] Judah's riddles are mostly short, monorhyme compositions on concrete subjects such as everyday artefacts, animals and plants, or a name or word; one example is the following:

What is it that's blind with an eye in its head,

But the race of mankind its use can not spare;

Spends all its life in clothing the dead,

But always itself is naked and bare?[27]

After living a life devoted to worldly pleasures, Halevi was to experience a kind of "awakening"; a shock, that changed his outlook on the world. Like a type of "conversion" experience, he turned from the life of pleasure, and his poetry turned to religious themes. Halevi became a prolific author of piyyutim.

It seems that his profound experience was the consequence of his sensitivity to the events of history that were unfolding around him. He lived during the First Crusade and other wars. There was a new kind of religio-political fanaticism emerging in the Christian and Muslim worlds. Holy wars were brewing, and Halevi may have recognized that such trends had never been good for the Jews. At the time, life was relatively good in Spain for the Jewish community. He may have suspected things were about to change for the worse, however.

His attachment to the Jewish people is an equally significant theme: he identifies his sufferings and hopes with that of the broader group. Like the authors of the Psalms, he gladly sinks his own identity in the wider one of the people of Israel; so that it is not always easy to distinguish the personality of the speaker.

Often Judah's poetic fancy finds joy in the thought of the "return" of his people to the Promised Land. He believed that perfect Jewish life was possible only in the Land of Israel. The period of political agitation about 1130, when the conflict between Islam and Christianity intensified, giving Judah reason to hope for such a return in the near future. The vision of the night, in which this was revealed to him,[28] remained indeed but a dream; yet Judah never lost faith in the eventual deliverance of Israel, and in "the eternity" of his people. On this subject, he has expressed himself in poetry:

Lo! Sun and moon, these minister for aye; The laws of day and night cease nevermore: Given for signs to Jacob's seed that they Shall ever be a nation — till these be o'er. If with His left hand He should thrust away, Lo! with His right hand He shall draw them nigh.[29]

His piyyut, Mi Kamokha, was translated by Samuel di Castelnuovo and published in Venice in 1609.

The longest, and most comprehensive poem is a "Kedushah," which summons all the universe to praise God with rejoicing, and which terminates, curiously enough, in Psalm 103. These poems were carried to all lands, even as far as India,[30] and they influenced the rituals of the most distant countries. Even the Karaites incorporated some of them into their prayer-book; so that there is scarcely a synagogue in which Judah's songs are not sung in the course of the service.[31] The following observation on Judah's synagogal poems is made by Zunz:

As the perfume and beauty of a rose are within it, and do not come from without, so with Judah word and Bible passage, meter and rime, are one with the soul of the poem; as in true works of art, and always in nature, one is never disturbed by anything external, arbitrary, or extraneous.[31]

Judah also wrote several Sabbath hymns. One of the most beautiful of them ends with the words:

On Friday doth my cup o'erflow / What blissful rest the night shall know / When, in thine arms, my toil and woe / Are all forgot, Sabbath my love!

'Tis dusk, with sudden light, distilled / From one sweet face, the world is filled; / The tumult of my heart is stilled / For thou art come, Sabbath my love!

Bring fruits and wine and sing a gladsome lay, / Cry, 'Come in peace, O restful Seventh day!'

Judah used complicated Arabic meters in his poems, with much good taste.[32] A later critic, applying a Talmudic witticism to Judah, has said: "It is hard for the dough when the baker himself calls it bad." Although these forms came to him naturally and without effort, unlike the mechanical versifiers of his time,[33] he would not except himself from the number of those he had blamed. His pupil Solomon Parḥon, who wrote at Salerno in 1160, relates that Judah repented having used the new metrical methods, and had declared he would not again employ them. That Judah felt them to be out of place, and that he opposed their use at the very time when they were in vogue, plainly shows his desire for a national Jewish art; independent in form, as well as in matter.

In 1422, Provencal Jewish scholar Jacob ben Chayyim Comprat Vidal Farissol published a commentary on Judah's liturgical poem "Cuzari".[34]

Judah was recognized by his contemporaries as "the great Jewish national poet",[8] and in succeeding generations, by all the great scholars and writers in Israel. His poetry and writing have also been considered an early expression of support for Jewish nationalism.[35]

The remarkable, and apparently indissoluble, union of religion, nationalism, and patriotism, which were so characteristic of post-exilic Judaism, reached its acme in Judah Halevi and his poetry. Yet this very union, in one so consistent as Judah, demanded the fulfillment of the supreme politico-religious ideal of medieval Judaism—the "return to Jerusalem". Though his impassioned call to his contemporaries to return to "Zion" might be received with indifference, or even with mockery;[36] his own decision to go to Jerusalem never wavered. "Can we hope for any other refuge either in the East or in the West where we may dwell in safety?" he exclaims to one of his opponents (ib.). The songs that accompany his pilgrimage[37] sound like one great symphony, wherein the "Zionides" — the single motive never varied — voice the deepest "soul-life" alike; of the Jewish people and of each individual Jew.

The most celebrated of these "Zionides" is commonly in the synagogue on Tisha B'Av:[38]

Zion, wilt thou not ask if peace's wing / Shadows the captives that ensue thy peace / Left lonely from thine ancient shepherding?

Lo! west and east and north and south — world-wide / All those from far and near, without surcease / Salute thee: Peace and Peace from every side."

Judah Halevi's vision of a God that is accessed through tradition and devotion, and not philosophical speculation, dominates his later work. His position in domain of Jewish philosophy is parallel to that occupied in Islam by al-Ghazali, by whom he was influenced, yet Judah Halevi strongly despised Islam. Like al-Ghazali, Judah endeavored to liberate religion from the bondage of the various philosophical systems in which it had been held by his predecessors, Saadia, David ben Marwan al-Mekamez, Gabirol, and Bahya. In a work written in Arabic, and entitled Kitab al-Ḥujjah wal-Dalil fi Nuṣr al-Din al-Dhalil, كتاب الحجة و الدليل في نصرة الدين الذليل, (known in the Hebrew translation of Judah ibn Tibbon by the title Sefer ha-Kuzari), Judah Halevi expounded his views upon the teachings of Judaism, which he defended against the attacks of non-Jewish philosophers, Aristotelian Greek philosophers and against those he viewed as "heretics".