Yehuda Halevi

by Hillel Halkin

Part of the Jewish Encounter seriesA masterly biography of Yehuda Halevi, one of the greatest of Hebrew poets and a shining example of the synthesis of religion and culture that defined the golden age of medieval Spanish Jewry. Like Maimonides, with whom he contrasts sharply, Yehuda Halevi spanned multiple worlds. Poet, philosopher, and physician, he is known today for both his religious and secular verse, including his famed “songs of Zion,” and for The Kuzari, an elucidation of Judaism in dialogue form. Hillel Halkin brilliantly evokes the fascinating world of eleventh- and twelfth-century Andalusian Spain in which Halevi lived and discusses the influences that formed him. Relying on the astonishing discoveries of the Cairo Geniza, he pieces together the mystery of Halevi’s last days, with its fateful voyage to Palestine, which became a haunting legend. An acclaimed writer and translator, Halkin builds his account of Halevi’s life and death on his magnificent translations of Halevi’s poems. He places The Kuzari within the wider context of Jewish thought and explains why, more perhaps than any other medieval Jewish figure, Halevi has become an inspirational yet highly controversial figure in modern Jewish and Israeli intellectual life.

Genres: History, Biography, Judaism, Jewish, Poetry, Religion, Biography Memoir

369 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Hillel Halkin (born 1939) is an American-born Israeli translator, biographer, literary critic, and novelist, who has lived in Israel since 1970.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_...

Reviews

[Jan Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of the 60 books on my "biography-memoir" shelf, only a handful are biographies, and one of them is Heinrich Heine, another poet -- even though the books of poetry I've reviewed are as rare as the biographies.

Yet I found this book to be transporting, and that's what I was looking for.

Each time I'd heard of Yehuda Halevi, a Hebrew poet in the time of Muslim Spain, I couldn't get beyond the cardboard cut-out version. When I read a chapter on him recently, it was the same thing all over again. So, thinking maybe I should read his work The Kuzari: An Argument for the Faith of Israel, I consulted Prof. Google and was fortunate to come up with the present book. And it's a good thing, too: The Kuzari is not even a poem, as I was thinking, but a prose work.

And if I'd delved in without a teacher, I would have been lost. Luckily for me, Hillel Halkin is a teacher nonpareil. This book is a biography and a history. It's a poetry review by an author who's an expert translator. It's also religion, theology, and politics, and finally it's a mystery as to Halevi's life, works and death.

I was transported back to the Golden Age in medieval Spain, when Jews wrote beautiful poetry in Hispano-Hebrew under the influence of complicated formal Arabic requirements of rhyme and meter. Yehuda ben Shmuel Halevi was a virtuoso and the top poet of the time in his culture.

In the end, though, he gave it all up in favor of an uncertain journey to crusader-era Jerusalem. Why? For one thing, it turns out the so-called Golden Age was not all it's made out to be, despite our notion of convivencia as a time of utopian pluralism.

Halevi, born in the 1070s, traveled as a teenager across the frontier separating Christian and Muslim Spain to Andalusia, and began to make his mark, earning the recognition of an older poet under whose patronage he flourished. Eventually, as the Umayyad caliphate gave way to the more fundamentalist Almoravids, his patron had to hightail it northward once again. Halevi also traveled north. He likely had some earnings from liturgical poetry (piyyut, from the same Greek word from which we get poem) and commissioned poetry, but it now fell on him to earn a living, which he accomplished by becoming a physician. In middle age, after the reigning caliphate had mellowed, Halevi was able to return once again to the south, this time, Cordoba.

In the Spain of the Middle Ages, the three religious groups, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, remained socially separate with no modern shared sense of being Spaniards. Even though raids and sporadic fighting occurred, the two larger groups maintained the modicum of good behavior needed to get along. In those years, neither side was about to disappear, so they had to put up with each other.

Jews, meanwhile, being the smallest and least powerful of the three religious groups, were safe for Muslims to use in administrative positions or promote as needed -- with the caveat that, although Jews could rise, they could provoke envy and violent backlashes by doing so. In fact, the worst such uprising in Muslim Spain happened when two Jews in succession, a father and son who had been put in by the new caliphate to help them rule, rose to unprecedented power in Granada. Amid fears that the Jews were plotting to take over -- not at all likely since, being powerless, their best bet was loyalty to the regime -- 3000 were massacred. That had happened not long before Halevi's birth, yet the opportunities and the cultural attraction meant that the Jewish community in Granada was soon restored.

Yet and still, Jews had to know that some of those they encountered had not so long ago been involved in killing their people. That was the lay of the land. Still, Muslim Spain remained the locale with the highest cultural development, and Halevi chafed at his time in the north, even as he rose to preeminence as a poet and succeeded well enough as a physician.

Later I can include an example of his poetry, but now I want to turn to his other work, The Kuzari, to which, per Halkin, he gave a subtitle beyond the one Goodreads is showing; it was no less than "The Book of Proof and Demonstration in Defense of the Despised Faith." The Kuzari is the story of the conversion of the king of the Khazars to Judaism.

By the time Halevi was writing his work, the kingdom of the Khazars was disintegrating, but Halevi had no way of knowing that. The existence of that kingdom and the story of its conversion had long been a balm for the egos of subdued and humbled Jews. Halevi had probably begun his project as a religious debate with a Karaite, a Jewish persuasion that rejected rabbinical Judaism and was heretical in medieval Jewish eyes. The work then evolved. He completed an early version in 1129 and a final version around ten years later.

In the meantime, Halevi had begun to be preoccupied with the idea of a pilgrimage and a move to the Holy Land.

Back to The Kuzari: in Halevi's treatise, the king of the Khazars has had a dream in which he's told his intentions are worthy but his actions are not. And so he interviews a philosopher as well as men of the three Abrahamic religions to see which can help. He soon surmises that the philosopher is advising intellectual contemplation, which doesn't meet the requirement of improving his actions. The representatives of the other two religions, meanwhile, advocate belief, and that too fails to accord with his dream. The rabbi, however, is saying that deeds are the answer. Touché! Although the reasoning involved wouldn't convince modern thinkers, Halevi is not a modern but a medieval.

The Kuzari's major confrontation is not with Christianity or Islam, though, but with philosophy, for that is the problem of the age: faith versus reason.

In the process of the dialogue, the king, although persuaded, gets some of the good lines. He gets to convince the rabbi that, since he (the rabbi) calls himself a man of deeds, not simply intentions (or faith), it follows that thinking or talking about Zion, which was part of the rabbi's spiel, won't suffice. What the rabbi needs to do is undertake a pilgrimage and, in fact, emigration, to Crusader Jerusalem, no less.

Halevi's growing preoccupation with a return to Zion: could that have been the result of what we'd now call a midlife crisis? In the dualistic terms of the Middle Ages, the body weakens with age while the demands of the soul grow. Halevi is a romantic poet of the kind that later spread far and wide. For him, a journey to kiss the earth of the Holy Land had become the ultimate completion of his life.

But he has dithered. His friends -- and he was a sociable man -- thought the idea was nuts, even as he castigated himself for delaying. So his philosophical work became a means of self-persuasion.

We might think that such a move to the Holy Land was always a Jewish imperative. Not so, writes our author; in Halevi's time, the dominant view was that exile was meant for the expiation for sins, that submission would be rewarded in the world to come, and that Jews must wait for messianic leadership back to Zion in God's own good time.

So, Halevi's idea was a newly articulated one, and with it come theological and political implications. Religiously, the times were favorable for messianic ferment, given the instability of the frontier and the impending collapse of Muslim Spain. In political terms, Halevi sensed there was no future for him or for Jews within a collapsing society. More broadly put, did he discern that the longtime Jewish strategy of cultivating the powers-that-be would fail? That persecution was part and parcel of exilic life?

His life merging with his art, Halevi perceived two alternatives: to get along, or to heave up anchor and set sail. And the first is untenable.

There was an early, aborted voyage in 1130, around the time he completed the earlier version of The Kuzari, or maybe just a visit to Morocco. Then, at around 65 years old, after completing it in its final form, he set sail in 1140. A year in Egypt -- then onward to Crusader-occupied Palestine in May of 1141.

Halevi's poetry was lost to history, with little or nothing known of him beyond The Kuzari, until, 700 years later in 1838, a medieval collection of it surfaced in Tunis. In 1851, Heinrich Heine published a long ballad about him.

Then, another half-century later, the Cairo Geniza was discovered -- a geniza being a storeroom where any Jewish writings that might contain the word God -- basically, all of them -- piled up awaiting burial. This was a historical bonanza, generally speaking. In particular, the discovered correspondence from him and his friends shed light on Halevii's life, especially concerning his travels.

Halkin gives us a biography of Halevi's work: what becomes of it over the centuries and the myriads of debates it sparks -- too many to fit in this review! Is Yehuda Halevi the ultimate cop-out who, unable to tolerate inconsistency, signaled the collapse of a beautiful multicultural society? (More than one group has a vested interest in that idealized view of the convivencia!) Or was he signaling the reemergence of Jews as active participants in history, after centuries of passive inaction? Does envisioning a God who acts in history condemn one to bouncing from a sense of manic vindication to hopeless depression and back again as events unfold? Or does such a vision give meaning to life? Was Halevi the first Zionist? The first religious Zionist?

Maybe he's the anti-Maimonides. Maimonides, a toddler when Halevi set sail eastward, looms large in Judaism. "From Moses to Moses (Maimonides), there is no one like Moses," goes the saying. Maimonides is the great philosopher who reconciled Judaism with philosophy and de-anthropomorphized God. Enter Yehuda Halevi as the representative of an active God, an accessible
God. Although Maimonides' light shines bright in Judaism while Halevi in comparison is on the dark side of the moon, Halkin highlights him as a countervailing force whose influence makes itself known in early Kabbalah, in the thirteenth-century Zohar, a primary Kabbalistic work, and on down through the centuries.

Just as we might ask ourselves whether we're an Aristotelian or a Platonist, we could ask if we're a Maimonidean or a Halevian. Oversimplistic as that question may be, which are you?

Halkin ends with a chapter of his own answers, his own memoir.

In a life, everything cannot be of equal importance. What is essential, what less so? What is worth dying for? Here I'm remembering Amos Oz's uncle in his A Tale of Love and Darkness: most important for him was his vision of European universalism, and for that he stayed in Eastern Europe, along with his wife and three-year-old son, and for it they all died, with his dream.

Sometimes it's not the multiculturalism that's worth living or dying for. Sometimes it's the particularism.

When you leave a particularism, have you really entered a free zone? Or, is what you've entered, in fact, some other particularism?

Should all black people act "white?" Should Muslims give up what defines their identities? Should minority religious groups convert to the religion of the majority (or be considered disloyal)?

Should the protagonist of the novel Americanah remain in America or else be considered a cop-out? Does she take the easy way out by returning to Nigeria?

Pluralism ain't easy. I dare say we haven't figured it out yet.

The remaining mystery of this book is how Yehuda Halevi died.

He set sail in May 1141, and correspondence found in the geniza indicates that by the end of that summer he was dead. Legend says he was killed while kneeling and praying by the gates of Jerusalem, trampled by an Arab horseman who was envious of his religious passion. If so, he died kissing that earth for which he had longed. Could that legend hold a kernel of truth (although the horseman would have been more likely to be a crusader)? A smattering of textual evidence from the geniza says maybe so.

But we do not know, other than that romantic end to his life to match his poetry.

Addendum: This book lacks an index or bibliography but does have a comprehensive timeline, coming at the end instead of the typical format, that somewhat serves the purpose. I wonder if not have an index is deliberate. You have to absorb the entire book well enough to have some sense of where things are.

[Lorri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yehuda Halevi, by Hillell Halkin, is an in depth analysis of much of Halevi’s poetry along with discussing his fictional book, The Kuzari: In Defense of the Despised Faith.

Halkin includes critiques of Halevi’s The Kuzari, which is a story about a dialogue between a rabbi and King Bulan of the Khazars. The king eventually calls upon a Christian missionary, Greek philosopher and a Muslim mullah, and a Jewish holy man. His religious satisfaction ended with the rabbi and what he had to say. Therein lies the theory and legendary concept of the fact that the Khazars were Jewish converts.

[Jim Leffert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yehuda Halevi, who lived between roughly 1070 and 1141, is the best known of medieval Hebrew poets. One of a group of Jewish poets in Spain who imported sophisticated Arabic styles of poetry into Hebrew literature. Halevi wrote religious poems, dazzling odes to friendship, love poems, and poems that expressed his feelings for Jerusalem. In this volume, part of the Schocken – Nextbook Jewish Encounters series, Halkin offers a vivid account of Halevi’s life and splendid translations of his poems.

Halkin reminds us that memories of a Golden Age of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish co-existence and cultural exchange in Andalusia (Southern Spain) are somewhat exaggerated. Halevi was a refugee at several points, moving back and forth between Christian and Muslim areas of the country. Nonetheless, he hobnobbed with other Andalusian Jewish poets who delighted to top one another with feats of improvisation.

In addition to poetry, Halevi’s output famously included The Kuzari, a defense of the Jewish religion. The Kuzari presents Halevi’s views on Judaism in the guise of a dialogue between a rabbi and the King of the Khazars, a kingdom in Asia Minor whose 8th century ruler and subjects reportedly converted to Judaism. The rabbi initially dismisses the claims of Greek philosophy and then, taking on Christianity and Islam, offers arguments about the special worthiness of the Jewish religion and people and also the land of Israel. Some scholars consider Halevi the first Zionist figure. Not only did he argue that the Jewish people should return to Israel (and not wait for the messianic age to do so) in order to fulfill their religious destiny but at the end of his life, he left Spain for Palestine himself, travelling by way of Egypt. His end is clouded by legend, but many scholars believe that he did make it to his destination and then died soon after.

In addition to ably reconstructing Halevi’s final journey, Halkin offers a lucid explanation of Halevi’s thought. The Kuzari’s rejection of the claims of philosophy sets Halevi at odds with those thinkers, such as Maimonides and the Muslim scholar Averroes, who sought to integrate religion and philosophy. Indeed, one of this book’s virtues is that it reminds us of the gap between the God of philosophers, which is more of an abstract First Principle, and the God of the religious imagination, who cares about people’s fate and actions.

Citing others’ research, Halkin also surveys the varied ways in which religious thinkers, philosophers, and poets over the centuries responded to Halevi’s religious thought and literary legacy. Halkin traces a connection between Halevi’s theology and the elaborate Creation story that later emerged in the Kabbalah. Liberal religious thinkers in the Enlightenment cited Halevi’s criticisms of Greek philosophy to promote the claims of religion over secular philosophy, while Romantic poets read their personal struggles into Halevi’s poetry. Maria Rosa Menocal, a historian of the Golden Age of Spain, somewhat tendentiously viewed Halevi as a figure who rejected that era’s spirit of cultural pluralism and tolerance.

Especially relevant to contemporary political controversies, Halevi’s claim that the land of Israel itself is holy, and moreover, his suggestion that if all Jews were to settle in Israel, it would hasten the coming of the Messiah, foreshadowed the teachings of both secular and religious Zionists who claimed him as a forebear. The latter included Abraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook, the Chief Rabbi of British Mandate Palestine, who saw God’s hand at work in the activities of non-religious Socialist Halutzim who built kibbutzim, and his son, Rabbi Tsvi Yehudah Kook, the spiritual leader of the settlement movement Gush Emunim, who saw God’s hand in the 1967 military conquest and Jewish “resettlement” of the West Bank. Nor surprisingly, liberal religious thinkers such as Yishayahu Leibowitz (the brother of the bible commentator Nehama Leibowitz) and David Hartman and intellectuals such as Abraham Burg and Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi have criticized Yehuda Halevi for espousing dangerous notions such as the intrinsic holiness of the land of Israel and a theology of history involving a special Jewish destiny.

Halkin concludes with a rather long-winded autobiographical account of Halevi’s meaning for him. He defends Halevi against those who accuse him of inspiring chauvinism and even racism, and relates that The Kuzari’s central lessons--that deeds, not intentions alone, are most important and that Jewish destiny can best be fulfilled in Israel--are what led him, an American who came of age in the early 60’s, to settle in Israel.

[Aaron Liebman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writer Hillel Halkin has produced a book about Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi that deserves literary and professional envy from both professors and rabbis. The work is built around the body of poetic works (which few people know) and the theological works but reads with the excitement of a detective novel. These sources Halkin unravels with virtuosity as he narrates R. HaLevi's biography from his youth in Andalusia (Muslim Spain around 1090 C.E.), his later connections with the eminent Jewish personalities of the age and his fame in Alexandria, and finally, to his disappearance or perhaps his violent death at the gates of Jerusalem (or a location unknown). On explaining HaLevi's poetry, its metrics, forms, and meaning-- Halkin may be without peer. He also demonstrates familiarity with the geographic and historical context in which R. HaLevi wrote including wise comments on the politically charged Jewish-Muslim-Christian relations in Andalusia. Add to this the fine quality of his deliberation when he considers even oddball academic views and our debt to the author grows. Halkin shows himself consistently too gifted a reader of prose and poetry to lose sight of the central meanings and significances of R. HaLevi's life and works distracted by the contrarian voices that he nonetheless acknowledges. Lastly, Hillel Halkin's book is the product of a Zionist's sensibility at its best in which Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi cuts a deservedly distinguished figure.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author is a much more “present” voice in this biography than is usual. Eventually, in Chapter 8, he tells us why and it’s a good answer: almost every prior treatment of Halevi have incorporated obvious projections by their authors, and Halkin is honest enough to admit the same is true of his own.

On some level: lucky us. Halkin is a great writer (I’m tempted to call him the Israeli Tom Wolfe, and would be interested in a comparison of the lives and careers of these rough-contemporaries who defined much of their lives around their migrations to and from New York...). And since I like his baggage, I find a Halevi infused with it easier to side with than some of the older alternatives.

Look, I’m not much of a poetry reader, but the book lets/makes me appreciate its subject’s poetry, both because of their importance as poetry and as thought and because Halkin’s translations are good in their own right. This will also serve well as the fuel I need to power through the rest of The Kazari, which I’d stalled in. So I owe Halkin my thanks for that, too.

[Dave Nichol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hillel Halkin is a good writer, and this is perhaps the first stop for anyone who wants to learn about Yehuda Halevi. He condenses a large amount of research effectively into a relatively compact book, sticking to his conjectures about the most likely version of events, but generally making the reader aware of the weight of the evidence.

I would have liked more of the poetry to be included in full, however. It’s great that Halkin uses transliterations to explain Hebrew and Arabic meters and rhyming but it would have been nice to have more of them in Hebrew as well, though it might have shrunk the potential audience of the book. Because the poetry is great! Halevi is, of course, brilliant, and Halkin’s translations convey the tone of the poem, capturing at least some of the rhyming and meter that a contemporary reader of the poetry might experience. I’m not a fluent reader of Hebrew or Arabic, but I found the translations, while free, to be very impressive.

I am always in a hurry to finish and get on to the next book...perhaps to my own loss. But the last two chapters captivated me. Halkin looks at how Halevi was interpreted and appropriated by later readers, and gives an enjoyable overview of how he was read over the centuries. When it comes to the Zionist readings of Halevi’s life and work (both are relevant!), as well as the post-Zionist reactions, Halkin weaves his own life story into the mix, and makes a statement that is coherent and profound.

It turns out that Halkin is not only a linguist and a writer, he’s also a philosopher. Quick asides pepper his writing throughout the book, always timely, enlightening, and fun. He recognizes, of course, that his interpretation of Halevi is colored by his own personal story: “This is as it should be. It is one of the measures of literary greatness that we see ourselves in it. The good reader reads with his whole ind; the best reader, with his whole life. Yehuda Halevi brings out the best in us” (293).

This is why I enjoyed this book so much; because of the connection I feel with Halevi’s story, and Halkin’s...and my own.

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography of Halevi focuses more on his poetry, and less on his religious work, than I had expected. Having said that, Halkin does discuss Kuzari (Halevi's most famous non-poetic work, ,in which a rabbi converts a Khazar king and debunks other religions and secular philosophy) in some detail. He suggests that rather than being a pure polemic, the Kuzari is somewhat autobiographical: the philosopher, the king and the rabbi all represent Halevi at different points in life.

Halkin also debunks the idea that pre-15th century Spain was a paradise of religious tolerance, pointing out that anti-Jewish pogroms occurred not just in Christian Spain but in Muslim Spain as well. Although Islam at first glance seems more similar to Judaism (because of its rigorous monotheism) Halkin points out that this is an oversimplification because Christianity accepts more or less the same Bible as Judaism, while the Koran rewrites it to some extent.

[Barak Kassar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first came across Yehuda Halevi on a podcast (details:https://www.instagram.com/p/CkUf7a2rd...) and (if Goodreads allows links you will see I was quite captured!)
I enjoyed and learned a ton from Halkin’s book on Halevi.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a masterful biography of Yehuda Halevi, the famous Jewish philosopher and poet who lived in Spain during the 12th-century. Halkin writs almost lyrically about Halevi and his times, managing to convey a welath of scholarly information in extremely readable prose. He also does an excellent job of sprinkling the narrative with translations of Halevi's own poems, which really makes the biography the masterpiece it is.

With a figure like Yehuda Halevi, who holds an important place in Jewish history but about whom little concrete is known, any portrait of his life is going to be necessarily speculative. Halkin does a good job of letting the reader know when he is guessing and what he is basing his guesses on. In the final chapter, he takes the unusual step of talking about his own life and how it has influenced his reading of the evidence -- and then discusses other recent readings of Halevi, and of his time period, with the same perspective.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in Spanish or Jewish history, in medieval poetry and philosophy, or just in fascinating biographies in general.

[Guy H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hillel Halkin's masterful biography of Yehuda Halevi has inspired me deeply. Very few books, fiction or non-fiction, have made me think and feel so deeply. Before reading the book, I was only slightly acquainted with Halevi's poetry from a Jewish history class, but I didn't feel a deep connection to Halevi or his world. I now do. Halkin peppers what historians know about Halevi and his world with educated guesses about his life and family that I found fascinating. Moreover, Halkin interprets Halevi's work and life so that they are indistinguishable. He imagines Halevi as a figure like Thoreau who wrote poetry and philosophy and then practiced what he preached.

[Sherry Leffert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hillel Halkin's translations of Yehuda Halevi's poetry in this book are extraordinary. I wish he would have included the Hebrew side by side. Halkin recreates of the world of Halevi's background and early life in 11th-12th century Andalusian Spain
in a vivid and compelling manner.
In analyzing Ha Levi’s role as a Zionist, Halkin readily acknowledges his personal projections and identifications, but I can’t agree with his analysis. Still, it’s a fine book.

[Sue · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book reminded me why I don't really like biography as much as history. This book was more of the former. It also contained examples of lots of Yehuda Halevi's poems, in Hillel Halkin's brilliant translations - but only in translations. I had hoped the original Hebrew would be here, too. I did enjoy the detailed explanation of Halevi's famous "The Kuzari."

[Neil Krasnoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I were only rating the first 3 chapters of this book, my rating would be 5 stars. During these exciting opening chapters the author recreates the atmosphere of 11th Century Spain via poetry. It is reading at its finest. However, starting with the chapter on Kuzari, Halevi's most famous and enduring work, Henkin descends into commentary and criticism that isn't nearly as enjoyable.

[Eliezer Sneiderman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Halkin avoids the academic predilection for presentism. He gives a balanced portrait of HaLevi, with an insight into HaLevi's poetry. To many writers start looking at a thinker from the present, expecting a work to address modern structures and questions. Halkin, thankfully, did not do this.