Yehuda Halevi (1070-1141) was one of — if not the — greatest of the Hebrew poets during the cultural flowering of the Jews in Medieval Spain. And why should anybody today care?
Readers may well ask that question as they begin the biography “Yehuda Halevi” (353 pages, $25 hardcover) that U.S.-born Israeli author and translator Hillel Halkin wrote for the outstanding “Jewish Encounters” series produced by Schocken Books and Nextbook.
Halkin starts with a partly charming, partly puzzling chapter showing how the young Halevi won the friendship and patronage of Moshe Ibn Ezra (1055-1135), wealthy poet, philosopher and government official in Granada.
The chapter describes how poetry was central to the pleasures of people, Jewish and Arab, belonging to the cultivated classes of that time and place. To be able to write a poem was an important social skill.
People would send poems as invitations and RSVPs, give poems as gifts, or try to top or complete each other’s poems as party games. And people who excelled at this became celebrities.
Halevi shined in this milieu, and Halkin devotes several pages to analyzing the poem he sent to Ibn Ezra, a bit of virtuoso extemporizing done at a party, to show how gifted Halevi was. One is willing to take Halkin’s word for it, but his demonstration is technical and dry, and can only be of interest to another Hebraist.
Yet I would advise readers not to get bogged down by this chapter, but to press onward through the book. For Halevi – a rabbi, physician and theologian as well as a poet — was a fascinating person who lived in a fascinating time.
His poetry may be only of academic interest today — although I would encourage enterprising composers to explore them, especially the secular ones, for possible setting. (At least one already might have; Halkin says that Naomi Shemer lifted a couple of Halevi lines for her “Jerusalem of Gold.”)
But Halevi’s great book about Judaism, “The Kuzari: The Book of Proof and Demonstration in Defense of the Despised Faith” (completed around 1140), raises and explores issues eternally pertinent to Jewish life. Indeed, Halkin and others pair it with the “Guide for the Perplexed” by Maimonides (1135-1204) as the greatest works of medieval Jewish theology.
These two books, however, are antipodal, according to Halkin. “[E]very Jewish intellectual might be called a Maimonidean or a Halevian. He either believes that Judaism can and needs to be harmonized with the advanced thought of his age [like Maimonides] or he doesn’t [like Halevi]…. Of course, such antitheses are simplistic.… Still, whoever reads both … will tend to feel instinctively more drawn to one or the other.”
Halevi’s life also communicates some important messages. He arrived at the end of the “golden age” of medieval Spanish Jewry, which Halkin demonstrates was not as “golden” as many would claim.
At that time and place, Jews could rise in status, wealth and even political power. But in a Spain divided between rival and often warring Christian and Muslim realms, “the higher Jews did rise, the more they aroused the anger and resentment of the Muslim and Christian majority, and the more vulnerable they became. The culture of tolerance stretched only so far… In the long run, the antagonism prevailed.”
In the decade before Halevi’s birth, Muslims of Granada massacred 3,000 Jews. During his lifetime, the Christian Crusaders carried out massacres of Jews on their way to the holy land and murdered the Jerusalem Jewish community once they got there.
No wonder Halevi, who lived and worked in both Christian and Muslim Spain, described Judaism as “the despised faith” that needed a defense.
And also no wonder that at the end of his life, Halevi decided he just couldn’t go on living in exile, but had to try to settle in the land of Israel, even though it was ruled by the Crusaders. One of his poems still encountered today expresses that longing – “My heart is in the East and I am at the edge of the West.”
That message has personal resonance for Halkin, who describes how he himself struggled with his American and Jewish identities before he moved to Israel, and how he found in Halevi an inspiring “proto-Zionist.” But he acknowledges that others have and do see Halevi differently, and “This is as it should be.”
”It is one of the measures of literary greatness that we see ourselves in it,” Halkin writes. “The good reader reads with his whole mind; the best reader, with his whole life. Yehuda Halevi brings out the best in us.” And that is why we might care about Halevi today, and why this book about him is well worth reading.
Formerly op-ed editor, Leon Cohen has written for The Chronicle for more than 25 years.
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