The Diwan of Judah Halevi
The Diwan of Judah Halevi
THE LITRARY WORK
The collected Hebrew poems of judah Halevi; written between the 1080s and 1141 in the area now known as Spain and in the medieval Near East; first published in English in 1851.
SYNOPSIS
The poetic corpus includes secular verse (panegyrics, love poetry, descriptive poetry, wine poetry, wedding songs), liturgical verse, and personal verse. In the personal verse Halevi meditates about his religious vision, the fate of the Jewish people, and making a pilgrimage to Palestine.
Events in History at the Time of the Diwan
Judah Halevi, the best-known Hebrew poet of the Middle Ages, was born in the 1070s, probably in Tudela in what is now called Spain, where he lived for most of his life. At the time, Spain was predominantly an Arabicspeaking, Muslim territory known as al-Andalus and linked more tightly to North Africa and the rest of the Islamic world than to Europe. Halevi belonged to the Jewish social and intellectual aristocracy that flourished in al-Andalus during the age of the Islamic ascendancy (750-1300) in the Judeo-Arabic world. He was a physician, theologian, merchant, religious scholar, and prominent figure in public affairs. Sometime in his sixties, during the summer of 1140, after much debate within himself and with family and friends, Halevi sailed from al-Andalus with the intention of settling and dying in the original Jewish homeland of Palestine. Traveling by way of Alexandria, Egypt, he arrived in the Egyptian city in September 1140. Halevi, by then of wide renown, was acclaimed as a celebrity by its local Jewish community. He remained there for months and visited Cairo before boarding a ship for Palestine on May 14, 1141. Did his ship ever reach Palestine? According to a famous legend, Halevi reached the gates of Jerusalem and was kneeling there, reciting his “Ode to Zion,” when an Arab horseman, enraged at this display of Jewish piety, trampled him under the hooves of his steed. All we know for certain is that Halevi died sometime that summer and that medieval travelers say his grave was pointed out to them when they reached Tiberias. Before his pilgrimage, Halevi had been one of the most fluent and productive of the Hebrew poets, writing for both liturgical functions and for entertainment, and exchanging complimentary poetry with some of the most important Jewish leaders of al-Andalus. (During the Islamic ascendancy, Jewish intellectuals wrote and sponsored the writing of poetry, a taste they to a great extent acquired from the Arabic culture that surrounded them.) In middle age, Halevi began to compose poetry of a more personal kind, exploring his own religious motivations, arguing his principles with imaginary interlocutors, and revealing his doubts and fears. Some of his liturgical poetry found its way into the prayer rites of various Jewish communities. His secular poetry was collected even in his lifetime by the Egyptian Jews and soon after his death, an Egyptian scholar assembled his diwan, the corpus of his Hebrew poetry, both sacred and secular. Although the diwan has not reached us in its original form, several medieval recensions (revisions based on studying manuscripts of it) have survived. Thanks to these, we have access to one of the greatest Hebrew literary works of pre-modern times and to a magnificent record of Halevi’s own mind and sensibilities.
Events in History at the Time of the Diwan
A religious crossroads
In Halevi’s time, Islamdom was still the dominant force in the Mediterranean region, although it had long ago ceased to be a single political unit. Ruled by the Abbasid dynasty, the empire stretched, unmanageably, from Persia to the Atlantic Ocean. So unwieldy was it that individual territories had begun functioning more or less independently as early as the eighth century; al-Andalus, conquered for Islam in 711, had operated completely free of Abbasid control since the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty there in 756. In 929, at the high point of Umayyad rule, its emir had proclaimed himself caliph (a term for ruler that implies a claim to be the successor of Muhammad as head of the entire Islamic world). But unified Muslim rule of al-Andalus broke down early in the eleventh century and in its place there arose a number of miniature states. Generally referred to as the taifa kingdoms, these miniature states were continually making war on each other and on the rising Christian kingdoms of the North.
By the eleventh century, Christendom had begun encroaching on Islamic territories. The best known of these encroachments was the Crusades, a movement that led to the establishment of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099 on territory that had mostly been controlled by another independent dynasty, the Fatimid Kingdom, centered in Egypt. The entire territory would finally be retaken by Islam, but only after two centuries of intermittent warfare, during which Halevi made his journey. Christian pressure against Islam met with success as well in the central Mediterranean, where the Normans ended Arab rule over Sicily and southern Italy in 1071. Farther west, the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon made headway in their socalled Reconquista, their campaign to clear Spain of Muslim rule. Spread over centuries, the campaign amounted to a gradual conquest of alAndalus, which in fact led to the unification of most of the peninsula under Christian kingdoms in 1492.
Halevi was probably born shortly before one of the milestone events of the Reconquista, the conquest of the city of Toledo by Alfonso VI of Castile in 1085. Born either in Toledo or Tudela (the evidence is inconclusive), Halevi went south, to the heartland of Arabized Jewish culture, as a young man. He spent part of his adult life in Christian Toledo, several times moving within and between the Christian domain of Castile and the Muslim domain of al-Andalus. The following decades saw increasing Christian pressure on the rulers of the taifa kingdoms, as a result of which, they solicited the help of the Almoravids, a military-religious sect that ruled what is now Morocco. After a resounding victory over the Castilian troops in 1086, the Almoravids returned in 1091 to swallow up Seville, Granada, and the other remaining taifa kingdoms. They would dominate al-Andalus until the 1140s, when they would be replaced by the Almohads, another military Islamic sect from North Africa. The Almohads took over al Andalus a few years after Halevi’s departure for Palestine, which spared him the fate awaiting non-Muslims there. The arrival of the Almohads was disastrous for the monotheistic minorities, since this fanatical group abrogated the tolerance of mainstream Islam toward the minorities, forcing Judaism underground and resulting in the flight of most of the Jewish leadership to Christian territories, which, momentarily, were more hospitable.
The Jewish poet in al-Andalus
Jews had been present in the Iberian peninsula since Roman times (the oldest known synagogue to be excavated, in Elche, dates from the fourth century). Subject to intense persecution in the pre-Islamic period, while the peninsula was under Visigothic control, the Jews welcomed the arrival of the Muslim conquerors in 711. The Muslims were especially welcome to the Jews because mainstream Islam guaranteed the security of the minority monotheists—be they Jews or Christians—and their right to continue their ancestral ways. Al-Andalus experienced an economic and cultural efflorescence under the Umayyad caliphate and the period of the taifa kingdoms, which benefited the Jewish community along with the Muslim majority. During most of Muslim rule over al-Andalus, the Jews enjoyed freedom from persecution as well as communal autonomy, conditions that allowed some of its members to acquire real wealth. Members of the Jewish elite were able to obtain positions at court as physicians, tax and duty collectors, and all-purpose courtiers; others engaged in such lucrative businesses as silk manufacturing and international trade. This elite class produced a cadre of rabbis, philosophers, poets, and “men-of-many-parts,” who simultaneously occupied positions in the independent Jewish community and the Islamic court, managing their businesses and, in a few cases, carrying on a literary career.
The intellectual horizons of these men were broad, for many of them were engaged in Jewish and in larger Islamic society. In their younger years, they had progressed through both the Jewish and the Arabic educational systems. First they studied the Jewish religious tradition—the Old Testament, the Talmud (or oral law), and the associated works of religious lore. Next they often studied the native Arabic intellectual tradition, especially its poetry, grammar and belles-lettres, sometimes even the Quran, or Muslim holy book, and other Islamic religious texts. Alongside the native Arabic tradition, the Arabic language furthermore permitted them access to the Greek scientific and philosophical tradition.
In this rarefied society, poetry was an important vehicle of social cohesion as well as a popular form of entertainment. The Jews acquired a taste for poetry from Muslim court life, in which panegyric, lampooning, and funeral odes were vital political tools. Comparable to today’s promotional media, poems often served as a means of publicity for leaders, who would compensate individual poets with financial support in the form of patronage. Outside the political arena, poetry on love and wine-drinking were the most popular form of entertainment, and the improvisation of poetry was a much-relished amusement. Beginning in the tenth century, a Jewish courtier of the first Umayyad caliph of al-Andalus encouraged the development of poetry in Hebrew serving similar social functions as those served by poetry in Arabic and employing similar prosodic systems, rhetorical techniques, and thematic material. By Halevfs time, the taste for this kind of poetry had spread to other Jewish communities of the Arabic-speaking world and several Hebrew poets of genius had emerged, such as Samuel the Nagid (d. 1056) and Solomon ibn Gabirol (d. 1058).
Coming of age after a century and a half of this new form of Jewish literary productivity, Halevi contributed prolifically to all the themes and genres that were by now standard, writing panegyric odes to many of the leading members of the Jewish community and funeral odes on a number of them. He excelled in love poetry and expanded the repertoire of this popular genre by creating the subgenre of wedding songs, some of which are surprisingly sensuous considering their quasi-religious function:
Fragrances from far away,
riding on the breeze—
fragrances the wind has stolen
from this lovely maiden—
fragrances that tell the world
her time for love has come.
Lover, go to her! Don’t linger!
Browse inside her garden.
Hurry to her garden bed,
there to pluck her roses.
Touch the mandrakes of her breasts,
when they yield their fragrance.
Underneath her ornaments
is fruit her sun has ripened.
Only hold off one more day,
till the moon is full;
for tomorrow it will be
one of her adornments;
then her radiance will light you,
guide you to her chamber.
(Halevi, Diwan, vol. 2, pp. 29-30; trans R. P. Scheindlin)
The Arabized poet in the Jewish community
The Arabization and secularization of Hebrew literature did not find complete acceptance within the Jewish community. Later in the twelfth century, Maimonides would object vigorously to the singing of such songs as the one just quoted on the ground that they created an atmosphere of lewdness and degraded the holy language. In the early eleventh century, Samuel the Nagid’s son felt it necessary to claim that his famous father’s love poetry was never intended to be taken literarily but only as an allegory of the Jewish people’s love for God, in the tradition of the biblical Song of Songs. Here and there, Hebrew poetry itself hints at a certain degree of discomfort with its own subversiveness. To moralists, secular poetry was but the surface expression of the underlying illness of Jewish aristocrats: their love of luxury, power, and prestige; their aping of Arab ways, their worldliness; their inclination to forget that they were members of an exile community that by rights should be devoted not to pleasure but to penance for the sins that, it was generally assumed, had induced God to exile them from Palestine in the first place.
Even the intellectual pursuits of these Arabized poets were suspect, for Greek philosophy in its Arabic garb was seen by many as competing with Jewish religious teachings. The analogous problem had arisen in Islamic society, especially in the twelfth century, when the thought of Aristotle became more widely disseminated, especially in the Islamic west. Greek thinking, based on strict logic, applied to universally observable data, tended to level distinctions between religions and to relegate the revelations on which different faiths are based to mere principles of communal organization without any absolute claim to truth. As a pursuit common to intellectuals across the Jewish and Islamic communities, the very practice of philosophy threatened to blur communal distinctness.
Leaders of both religions reacted by laboring mightily to exploit the methods and materials of philosophical analysis in order to defend their revealed and traditional religious doctrines, thereby creating the disciplines of Islamic and Jewish theology. In the East, the Muslim thinker al-Ghazzali (d. 1111) had written a vehement polemic against philosophy to vindicate the absolute claims of Islam, and his work was quickly disseminated throughout the Muslim world. In the West, Halevi took a similar position in favor of Judaism by writing his theological treatise known as the Kuzari (Kitab al-hujjah). Echoes of this conflict resound in Halevi’s poetry.
In fact, the Jewish aristocracy to a large extent did not deserve the reproaches heaped on it by the Jewish moralists. Whether rich and sensuous or philosophically relativistic, Jewish aristocrats were, on the whole, generous in their financial support to their community. They were also devoted to their synagogues; faithful in their
JUDAISM VS, PHILOSOPHY—THE KUZARI
Halevi’s book is named for the Khazars, a kingdom of probably Turkic origin that in habited the region of the lower Volga River in what is now southern Russia. One of the kings of the Khazars converted to Judaism in the eighth century, and the ruling class of the kingdom remained Jewish until the destruction of the kingdom in the tenth century.
Halevi’s Kuzari is couched as a fictional dialogue between a rabbi and the Khazar king who converted. In response to the king’s questions about religion, the rabbi demonstrates to the king the superiority of Judaism to Aristotelian philosophy, Christianity, and Islam. Convinced by the rabbi’s arguments, the king converts, after which the rabbi discourses on many aspect of the Jewish religion as interpreted by Halevi, Halevi is not opposed to the application of reason to the understanding of religion, but he insists on the limitations of reason. Rather than philosophical speculation, he places prophetic revelation and personal experience of the divine at the center of his religious thought. At the end of the book, the rabbi takes leave of the king in order to make the pilgrimage to and settle in the land of Israel Palestine, This is the place where, as he has asserted throughout the book, God reveals himself to man, and is therefore the place where one can live closest to Him.
The rabbi of the Kuzari takes a strict position in favor of authenticity in Jewish life, belittling the conventional piety of the Jewish aristocracy and even attacking poetry, as practiced by the Jewish aristocracy of the time, as an unworthy use of Hebrew. Thus, in the Kuzari we find Halevi at odds with himself and his own career, and aligned with the moralists.
observance of religious rituals, commands and prohibitions; and enthusiastic in their intellectual pursuits. Moreover, their poetry was not all secular. The synagogue service was continually embellished with new liturgical poetry, which the Jewish aristocrats patronized just as enthusiastically as they did panegyric, love, winedrinking, and other secular poems. But worldly these aristocrats surely were, as the poetry they wrote, patronized, and devoured attests.
The Diwan in Focus
Contents overview
In the first part of his career, Halevi was a model representative of the aristocratic class in which he was raised. One recently discovered document permits us to glimpse him raising funds, via correspondence, for the communal project of ransoming a captive Jewish woman. In another document to Halevi in al-Andalus from a stranger in Castile, the stranger parades his knowledge of philosophy in the hope of gaining an audience with the great man. From the handful of existing documents comes a sketchy picture of a man who is wellconnected, widely respected, and fully engaged in the affairs of the Jewish community. It is a portrait amply confirmed and expanded by the poems in his own diwan. Here, in addition to official letters, we see Halevi’s poetic laments on the death of Jewish dignitaries, including scholars, poets, and courtiers. The diwan contains his panegyrics on rabbinic and lay leaders of al Andalus, North Africa, and Egypt—many of whom were his personal friends—and it contains his love poems to young beauties, both female and male, as was the custom in his day. Also in the diwan are wine-drinking poems, poems describing nature, wedding songs, epigrams, riddles in verse, and enormous quantities of poetry for the synagogue. A few of these synagogue poems have found their way into the traditional Jewish prayer book, and one is still sung at the midday meal every Sabbath by traditional Jews (“The Sabbath day, not to be forgotten”). Beyond these standard types, Halevi’s diwan contains verse that does not belong to any common genre and verse that, while belonging to a standard genre, has a twist that is distinctly his own.
Contents summary
In Halevi’s personal poems, he speaks about himself and about the change that began to overcome him in middle age:
Teach me your ways, O Lord, and turn
me back from being folly’s captive.
Teach me while yet I have the strength
to bear my penance, one You will not scorn,
before I turn into a burden to myself,
my limbs too weak to hold each other up,
my bones like cloth moth-eaten,
too frayed to carry me—
(Diwan, vol. 3, pp. 266-67; trans. R. P. Scheindlin)
We cannot tell if the poem with this passage was intended to be recited publicly as part of the liturgy, though it is so used by some Jewish communities. It sounds more like a personal prayer by someone who has become conscious not only that he will die, but also that the time will come when he will be too old to bear a reasonable penance for the sins of his youth, when there will be no merit in giving up worldly passions since they will have been dulled by frailty. The expression of this concern gives the standard moralizing about the need to repent before death a particular twist.
HALEVI AND THE ASCETIC LIFE
Halevi’s verse suggests that he aspires to a dedicated religious life, an ideal that moves from the conscientious observance of religious duties to a more thoroughgoing servitude to God, the subordination of all worldly concerns to divine ones, perhaps even a longing to dispense with worldly concerns altogether,. In his theological treatise, the Kuzari, Halevi asserts that asceticism is not favored by the Jewish tradition and is not a desirable form of piety; yet his diwan includes such counsel as the following lines, which seem, at least momentarily, to envision a kind of Jewish monasticism.
Go out in the middle of the night
to follow the way of the men of old,
whose mouths held praises,
whose souls held no deceit,
who spent their days in prayer
and their nights in fasting.
(Diwan, vol 3, p. 203; trans, R, P. Scheindlin)
From other poems, we learn of Halevi’s frustrations with his daily life. He complains of being too busy to attend to the study of Torah, of being at the beck and call of others, and of being too dependent on the practice of medicine (which, in line with some pietists, he has come to believe does not really have the power to heal, since disease and health are the result of God’s decree). Above all, he complains of being a slave to men rather than to God, a thought that recurs in his poetry, and to which he gives memorable expression in an epigram:
The slaves of Time are slaves of slaves;
the slave of God alone is free.
And so when others seek their lot,
God is lot enough for me.
(Diwan, vol. 2, p. 300; trans. R. P. Scheindlin)
Halevi’s diwan shows concern not only for personal spiritual welfare, but also for the tribulations of the Jewish people. All Hebrew liturgical poets complained about Israel’s exile from Palestine and some even reproached God for delaying its end, but the grief over Israel’s power-lessness and a concomitant rage are typically Halevi’s. In one poem, he describes Israel, God’s estranged beloved, as a dove no longer able to fly, fluttering around her lover’s head in a desperate effort to get his attention; the verse ends with his begging God to send a storm of fire that will destroy the oppressor. In another poem, Halevi speaks of a dream in which he sees the Muslim domination broken; slipping into the voice of prophecy, he evokes the biblical vision of a huge statue (representing the nations that have subjugated Israel), overturned and smashed into fragments by a stone flung from heaven. A different poem unites the desire for national redemption with the desire for personal spiritual fulfillment. Halevi describes a dream in which he sees the Temple in Jerusalem as it was before the destruction, more than a thousand years earlier (in 70 c.e.). Priests are offering sacrifices, and Levites (members of the tribe that, in antiquity, was devoted to the maintenance of the Temple and its non-sacrificial rituals) are singing psalms. Halevi pictures himself, a Levite and a poet, among the Temple singers, using his gift of song to assist in the cult of this imaginary Temple.
Two poems, both probably written when he was around 50 years old, tell us more concretely about Halevi’s thinking in relation to his pilgrimage. The first, “Your words are perfumed as with myrrh,” purports to be his response to a friend with whom the poet has been arguing about the sanctity of the land of Israel. Halevi puts into the friend’s mouth the claim that the sanctity of Jerusalem has been neutralized by the Christian occupation. In reply, Halevi points out that if this were true, it would turn the entire Jewish people into sinners for turning to Jerusalem in each of the daily obligatory prayers. But beyond that, it would turn the biblical patriarchs’ devotion to the land of Israel into nonsense, for they yearned for it even before it belonged to the Jews and offered sacrifices there even before the Temple was built. Even now, Halevi continues, with the city destroyed and the land in control of foreigners, its holiness is still present in the sites where prophets had visions of God, in the remains of the homes of prophets, priests, and kings, and in their graves. Even the Holy Ark, the tablets of the Ten Commandments, and the paraphernalia of the Temple, are still there, buried since the destruction and awaiting rediscovery at the time of the redemption that is to come.
It is one thing to venerate Jerusalem, face in its direction in prayer, and supplicate God for its restoration to the Jews, quite another to make it a central theme of religious meditation. That is what Halevi seems to have done, for in his writing about the land, he describes it with a concreteness and in a visionary style not paralleled in the writings of any other medieval Hebrew poet. In his usual concrete way, Halevi recalls again and again the trekking of patriarchs and pilgrims to and in the land.
He promised it to us.
Though only owls and jackals haunt it now,
what was there then but thorns and thistles
when God bestowed it on our fathers long ago?
Yet they paced its length and breadth
like people strolling in a flower-garden,
lived in it as strangers, transients,
each night seeking somewhere to put down their heads,
always on the lookout for some plot
where, dead, they might be buried.
There they learned to walk before the Lord,
adopted ways of righteousness.
(Dxwan, vol. 2, pp. 165-66; trans. R. P. Scheindlin)
The friend with whom Halevi argues in “Your words are perfumed as with myrrh” protests Halevi’s obsessive devotion to the land. Probably Halevi had expressed a desire to leave al-Andalus to make his pilgrimage and the friend had tried to dissuade him by saying that until the messianic redemption, the land’s holiness is inaccessible, or in a state of suspension. The friend certainly argued that holiness is available even in al-Andalus, in synagogues and in the burial places of great rabbis, for Halevi says,
What sense is there in honoring our dead,
when we neglect the tablets and the ark?
What sense in visiting the place of graves and worms,
when we neglect the sources of eternal life?
Are synagogues our only sanctuaries?
How can we forget the holy mountain?
(Diwan, vol. 2, p. 165; trans. R. P. Scheindlin)
Above all, the friend must have argued that the land does not really matter because God is too removed from worldly concerns to be aware of any particularity—any individual prayer or any particular religious rite. (This would likely have been the position of Jews who were strongly touched by philosophy; it is the position put by Halevi in the mouth of the philosopher in the Kuzarfs opening dialogue.) Toward the end of “Your words are perfumed as with myrrh” Halevi implies that this kind of thinking is the unspoken foundation of his opponent’s view and Halevi’s real target:
Look here, friend, use your judgment, think it over,
save yourself from mental traps;
above all, don’t let Greek philosophy seduce you;
it may have flowers, but it never will bear fruit.
Or if it does, it only comes to this:
The world was not created;
and no one stretched the heavens like a tent;
and in the beginning there was no creation;
the moon will wax and wane forevermore.
Just hear the incoherence of their doctrines,
constructed out of chaos and pretension;
they only leave a hollow in your heart,
and nothing in your mouth but syllogisms.
Why should I go following such twisting trails,
abandoning the mother of all highways?
(Diwan, vol. 2, p. 166; trans. R. P. Scheindlin)
By ending with the images of the crooked path and the highway, Halevi returns to the theme of pilgrimage—implicit throughout the poem—and states that neither the argument from philosophy nor the argument from recent history has dissuaded him from his plan to travel to the Holy Land.
Halevi’s contemplation of the pilgrimage is explicit in the second long poem on this subject, where he is again in dialogue, but this time with himself. He is 50 years old: When is he going to leave off childish things and devote himself seriously to God? How long will he put off collecting provisions for the road? Moralizing poets had long used this image of “provisions” to represent the accumulation of good works that would improve one’s chances for a favorable decision at the last judgment, but Halevi’s path is the more immediate one of pilgrimage. He urges himself to boldly walk the road of true devotion, regardless of the dangers he imagines. He sees himself on a ship during a storm at sea. The masts crack and collapse; the ballast has no more weight than straw; the sailors are terrified and their officers helpless; some passengers faint, and others throw themselves to the deck to pray, each to his own god. But he, the imaginary pilgrim, is facing east, in the direction of the Temple, and remembering how God split the Red Sea and the Jordan River. God approves the pilgrim’s intention: to reach the land of Israel and there renew the hymns of the ancient Levites with his own new poetry of praise. Instantly the storm subsides, and night falls:
The sun now sets, the stars are rising,
with the moon as captain, watching over them.
The night is like a Moorish woman dancing,
wearing an embroidered cloth with eyes,
cloth of sky-blue set with crystals.
Lost in the heart of the sea, the stars
dart and wander, like men compelled
to leave their homes as exiles
......................
Sea and sky, so like in color, seem to merge,
while in between
my heart makes yet another sea,
as my new songs and praises upward surge.
(Diwan, vol. 2, p. 163; trans. R. P. Scheindlin)
TAKING HIS CUE FROM THE BIBLE
Halevi’s vision of himself in the Holy Land is summed up in a single biblical verse, which he alludes to in his “Ode to Zion” and other poems. The verse, quoted pointedly near the end of his Kuzari, seems to anticipate Halevi’s legendary end, kneeling and finally crushed on the stony, holy soil: “For your servants delight in her stones, long for her soil” (Psalms 102:15).
In his great “Ode to Zion,” Halevi’s visionary spirit imagines himself walking up and down the Holy Land in the footsteps of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, seeking the divine spirit that, he is certain, still inheres in its ruins:
I wish that I could wander
where the Lord revealed Himself
to visionaries, prophets,
wish that somebody would make me wings
so I could fly away to you, so far,
and set the fragments of my broken heart
among your jagged mountains,
throw my face down to your ground,
to fondle your gravel, caress your soil
......................
What joy my soul would have if I could walk
naked, barefoot, on the ruins,
on the rubble that your Temple has become,
where once your covenant-tabernacle was.
(Diwan, vol. 2, pp. 156-57; trans. R. P. Scheindlin)
Here, the asceticism, the identification of personal salvation with the fate of the nation, the visionary spirit, the concreteness of Halevi’s vision, and the pilgrimage all unite in this climactic expression.
But Halevi’s diwan does not end here. The poet wrenched himself away from his family and community and left al-Andalus. He turned his back on the comforts due an old man who had led a long life in service to God, community, and poetry and in effect cast in his wake a rebuke to those who still believed in the synthesis of Jewish learning and tradition with Arabic social and intellectual life. But it was far from easy for Halevi to leave behind this complex and engaging culture. In Egypt, he was eagerly awaited by Jews no less committed to the synthesis than his compatriots in alb-Andalus. Friends and admirers wanted to host him, vied over him, boasted of their connection with him. He quickly reverted to the kind of life he had left, and even to the writing of secular poetry. Viewing the Nile in Cairo, he writes as sensuously as he had ever done back home:
Nature is dressed in white and colored garments,
sits on mats of gold brocade,
and every plot of planted ground along the Nile
is wearing checkered cloth
......................
Beside the Nile are girls
......................
their arms are weighed down with heavy bracelets,
their feet hobbled with their golden anklets.
They steal your heart, make you forget your age.
your mind goes back to youths and girls
from other times and places.
......................
in this Eden that is Egypt.
(Diwan, vol. 1, p. 112; trans. R. P. Scheindlin)
In writing this poem, a panegyric to a high official of the Egyptian Jewish community, Halevi not only reverted to love poetry; he also made an exception to his vow to stop writing panegyric poetry. In the Kuzari, he had complained that the fashion of writing Hebrew poetry in Arabic metrics, of which he was one of the greatest practitioners of all time, was an offense to the holy language; later it was reported that he had vowed to stop writing such poetry altogether. Yet Halevi continued to write this type of poetry profusely during his eight months in Egypt. Many of these poems are of the standard variety—panegyrics, descriptive poems, poems of entertainment. But others from this period are about the ocean voyage and pilgrimage, and they rank among his greatest lyrical works. Halevi is known to have waited five days on his ship in Alexandria’s port for a shift of wind. Perhaps he wrote these lines during the five days. “So up, my ship,” he urges in the poem, and “forward drive,” though he quakes at what awaits him (Diwan, vol. 2, p. 186; trans. R. P. Scheindlin).
I tremble
for my early sins,
all recorded in God’s book,
and even more for recent sins,
sins of my old age,
new sins every day.
No way
to repent my
waywardness—
what to do in this distress?
I put my life in my two hands,
and my soul and my blood
(all now thralls to sin),
put sin behind me,
throw myself in perfect trust
on One who forgives much,
One with power, One with might,
One who sets the bondsman free.
Let Him judge or chastise
with harshness or leniency;
whatever the outcome,
righteous is His decree.
(Diwan, vol. 2, pp. 186-87; trans. R. P. Scheindlin)
A window into the state of the Jews in al Andalus
The intensity of Halevi’s poems dealing with the exiled state of the Jews could well have arisen from his meditations on the world situation at his time. Although life in al-Andalus and Castile went on in the accustomed, comfortable ways, the Jews of Halevi’s era faced some dangers. Christendom and Islamdom were at war not only in distant Palestine but in Iberia also, and the Jews felt caught between the two forces:
Between the troops of Se’ir and Qedar (Christians and Muslims),
my own troops perish
......................
For they go out to battle each other,
but in their defeat, it is we who fall;
so it has always been for Israel.
(Diwan, vol. 4, p. 131; trans. R. P. Scheindlin)
For Halevi, the Jews’ status as bystanders in the duel for power between the two other monotheistic religions turned at least one Jewish holiday into a moment for the following ironic reflection. The late spring festival of Shavuot (sometimes known as Pentecost) is one of three annual pilgrimage festivals, on which the Jews are obliged by the Torah to visit the Temple in Jerusalem. But in Halevi’s day homage to the holy city is being performed by Christians, who have trooped from all over Europe to conquer Jerusalem for the sake of their religion, and by Muslims, who have died by the thousands defending the city and trying to recapture it for the sake of theirs. In the meantime, thinks Halevi, the Jews complacently gather in their synagogues in al-Andalus, perform what rites they can, and go home to their families feeling that they have done right by God.
Was there reason for the Jews to be concerned about the future? Since Halevi’s own death in 1141 coincides with the rise of the intolerant Almohad dynasty, the Jews of al-Andalus did not yet suffer directly from its repression. But long before the actual Almohad invasion, word must have reached al-Andalus of the fanaticism of this new North African dynasty and its fighting zeal. Probably some observers were imagining the day when the Almohads would replace the decadent Almoravids. Castile too gave cause for concern; during the reign of Alfonso VII (1126-57), Christians rioted against the Jews of Toledo, a noticeable shift from the security the Jews had enjoyed under Alfonso VI (1065–1109). Seeing danger everywhere, Halevi wonders in verse, “Is there a place for us in East or West where we are safe”? (Diwan, vol. 2, p. 165; trans. R. P. Scheindlin).
Such doubts must have seemed unnecessarily extreme to his contemporaries. In Halevi’s lifetime, there were occasional moments of unrest but the Jews of al-Andalus were not regularly troubled; their lives, property, and ancestral practices were protected by the government and by Islamic law. They were welcomed in the Christian kingdom of Castile for their business skills, as population for the newly conquered territories, and for their command of Arabic (still needed to administer those territories). There was a decided need among Castilian Christians for access to the higher learning of the Islamic world; thus, educated, multilingual Jews were hired by Christian lords to influential posts, and Jews participated in the translation of Arabic treatises on philosophy, mathematics, and physical science into Latin and Castilian. The few episodes of persecution during the reign of Alfonso VII, while violently lamented by Halevi, passed. Probably almost no Jewish leaders of the early twelfth century predicted the disasters that were to come. It is easy to imagine Halevi’s peers both wondering about his new level of piety and irritated by his premonitions of danger.
Sources and literary context
Like the work of all the Hebrew poets of al-Andalus and the other parts of the Arabic-speaking world, Halevi’s poetry of entertainment rests on Arabic precedents and models. The functions, themes, metrics, images, and stylistic devices that he shared with other contemporary Hebrew poets were all adapted from tenth-century Arabic poetry. Even his poetry written for the synagogue incorporates elements of meter and imagery adapted by Hebrew poets from secular and sacred Arabic verse. Halevi’s diwan also includes a handful of short poems written by others in Arabic and translated by Halevi into Hebrew.
By Halevi’s time, the Arabic poetic tradition had become so deeply rooted in Hebrew and so disseminated among Jews throughout the Arabicspeaking world that it no longer felt foreign. His poems were the finest flowering of a tradition that was already a century and a half old when he came to maturity. Furthermore, Hebrew poets had long since diverged from their Arabic models. In using poetry to lay out his personal religious vision and dilemmas, Halevi was following a distinctively Hebrew tradition. Arabic poets were more severely limited by traditional poetic practice and decorum than their Hebrew counterparts in verse that concerned personal experience. Rarely in the much larger corpus of Arabic poetry does one find an Arabic poet writing as openly about his own public position as Samuel the Nagid (d. 1056), about his intellectual and social ambitions as Solomon ibn Gabirol (d. 1058), or about his inner religious life as Halevi.
Reception
Halevi’s pre-eminence as a liturgical poet and as the author of social and personal poetry was recognized in his lifetime, as numerous contemporary references to him attest. Literary works from al-Andalus, medieval Provence, and Italy, single him out for special praise. His poems were often imitated, notably by poets in thirteenth-century Egypt and fourteenth-century Aragon. Many of his liturgical poems were adopted by contemporary congregations, especially in al-Andalus and other Arabic-speaking territories. A few of his poems were even incorporated into the prayers of the Jews of Christian Europe, notably his “Ode to Zion” (quoted above), still recited by Ashkenazic Jews on Tisrf a be-Av (the fast day commemorating the destruction of Jerusalem), and the Sabbath hymn mentioned above.
As noted, Halevi’s host in Alexandria made an unauthorized copy of Halevi’s poems while Halevi was out of town, creating jealousy within the Jewish elite of Alexandria and irritating the poet himself. This small and specialized collection may have been the nucleus of Halevi’s diwan, for it is generally accepted that the first recension of the diwan was made by an Egyptian Jewish scholar not long after Halevi’s death. This collection, like many Hebrew diwans, included Arabic headnotes to the poems, indicating, whenever possible, the circumstances under which the poems were composed. We are still unable to trace the later history of Halevi’s diwan except to ascertain that at least four copies have come down to us from pre-modern times, none of them identical but all showing traces of their origin in this original Egyptian recension, drawn from medieval manuscripts. In fact, the myriad copies of his poems on separate leaves or in miscellaneous manuscripts are the best evidence for the popularity of Halevi’s poetry in the Middle Ages.
—Raymond P. Scheindlin
For More Information
Brann, Ross. “Judah Halevi.” In The Literature of al Andalus. Ed. Maria Menocal et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Halevi, Judah. Diwan. Ed. Heinrich Brody. 4 vols. Berlin, 1909-1930.
_____. Kuzari. In Three Jewish Philosophers. Trans. Isaak Heinemann. New York: Atheneum, 1969.
_____. Poems from the Diwan. Trans. Gabriel Levin. London: Anvil Press, 2002.
_____. Selected Poems. Trans. Nina Salaman. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1929.
Scheindlin, Raymond P. The Gazelle: Medieval Hebrew Poems on God, Israel, and the Soul. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
_____. “Merchants and Intellectuals, Rabbis and Poets: Judeo-Arabic Culture in the Golden Age of Islam.” In Cultures of the Jews: A New History. Ed. David Biale. New York: Schocken, 2002.
_____. Wine, Women, and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.