Judah Halevi left comfortable Spain to chase the land his poems longed for
A respected physician in Toledo, Judah Halevi wrote some 800 Hebrew poems, and many are still sung in synagogues today. His best-known lyric sets a heart in the East against a body stranded in the West, and late in life he decided to act on it.
He was born between 1075 and 1080 in either Toledo or Tudela; an unclear manuscript leaves the question open. Both towns were ruled by the Muslim Almoravids in his boyhood, and both fell to Christian kings during his life, Toledo in 1085 and Tudela in 1118. He learned scripture and Talmud, Arabic, medicine, mathematics and philosophy, and as a young man in Granada he entered a poetry competition with a piece modelled on Moses ibn Ezra, which brought him notice and a close friendship with Abraham ibn Ezra. His daughter would marry Abraham's son Isaac.
Like other poets of the Jewish golden age in Spain, he borrowed Arabic verse forms, from the qasida to the muwashshah, sometimes closing Hebrew poems with refrains in Andalusi Arabic and Romance. He wrote drinking songs, riddles, wedding pieces and love lyrics, plus a prayer for the physician that trusts God rather than his own skill to heal. His elegies are the most tender; when his friend Solomon ibn Farissol was murdered on 3 May 1108, a poem of praise turned into a lament. Henrik Bródy's four-volume edition, issued from 1895 to 1904, sorts the collected diwan into seven genres.
His philosophical dialogue, the Kuzari, defends Judaism as revealed religion and argues that God's presence is most palpable in the Land of Israel. It ends with the rabbi character setting off for Jerusalem, and Halevi did the same. He landed in Alexandria on 8 September 1140 to a warm welcome, called on friends in Cairo, and shook off a lawsuit brought by an apostate before his ship left on 14 May 1141.
After that the trail goes cold. A letter dated 12 November 1141 implies he died in July or August, perhaps still in Egypt, perhaps in Palestine. A legend first printed some 450 years later has a horseman striking him down at Jerusalem's gates as he recited his ode to Zion. Tradition places his tomb, next to Abraham ibn Ezra's, in the Galilee village of Cabul.
Source: Judah Halevi
