Judah ha-Levi
Judah ha-Levi was a prominent Jewish poet, philosopher, and physician born in Muslim Spain during a flourishing period for Jewish culture. Coming from an affluent family, he received a broad education that included not just Hebrew and religious studies but also Arabic, mathematics, and philosophy. Much of his poetic work, comprising around eight hundred poems, served both religious and secular purposes, showcasing his technical skill and emotional depth. His secular poetry often explored themes of love and nature, while his religious verses conveyed a profound connection to Jewish identity and longing for Zion, exemplified in his famous "Ode to Zion."
Ha-Levi's most significant philosophical contribution is found in his work, "The Book of the Kuzari," which defends Judaism against rival faiths and emphasizes the importance of a direct relationship with God through the Jewish experience. Despite facing personal and communal hardships, including violence against Jews during his lifetime, he remained dedicated to his creative pursuits and spiritual beliefs. His legacy endures, as his poetry continues to resonate with themes of yearning and hope, making him a central figure in Jewish literature and culture. His works have been translated into multiple languages, ensuring that his insights and artistry reach a diverse audience.
On this Page
Judah ha-Levi
Hebrew poet and philosopher
- Born: c. 1075
- Birthplace: Tudela, Kingdom of Pamplona (now in Spain)
- Died: July 1141
- Place of death: Egypt
Judah ha-Levi, one of the greatest Hebrew poets, was also an important medieval religious philosopher of the Arabic-Aristotelian tradition.
Early Life
The son of Samuel ha-Levi, Judah ha-Levi (JEW-duh hah-LEE-vi) was born in Muslim Spain . As a member of an affluent, well-educated Jewish family, ha-Levi began the study of Hebrew and religion when he was quite young, but his schooling was not limited to those subjects. Growing up during a golden age of Jewish life in Spain, he was exposed to a wide range of learning Arabic, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy. Because of the fluidity of religious demarcations in Spain during this period, he also learned Castilian, and the languages of all three Spanish religions (Hebrew, Arabic, and Castilian) are employed in his poetry .
When Judah ha-Levi was about fifteen, he may have gone to Lucena to study under the noted Talmudist Isaac Alfasi. According to some sources, after this teacher's death in 1103 ha-Levi remained at Lucena for some time, serving as secretary to Alfasi's successor, Joseph ibn Megash. The death of Alfasi and the succession and marriage of Ibn Megash occasioned some of ha-Levi's earliest verses. Sometime in his youth, he also became friendly with a celebrated older Jewish poet, Moses ibn Ezra of Granada. Ha-Levi had participated in a poetry contest at Córdoba, the object being to write an imitation of a complex poem by Ibn Ezra. Ha-Levi's entry won, and it so impressed the senior poet that he invited ha-Levi to visit him. After meeting the handsome, dark-haired youth, Moses ibn Ezra wrote,
How can a boy so young in years
The two remained lifelong friends. Ha-Levi for a time lived in Ibn Ezra's house, and the older man's death in 1139 elicited a moving elegy from ha-Levi.
Ha-Levi was making other important friendships as well. From Baruch Albalia he may have derived his interest in Arabic-Aristotelian philosophy, while Levi al-Taban of Saragossa, Judah ben Gajath of Granada, and Abraham ibn Ezra shared and encouraged his poetic interest. Abraham ibn Ezra became an especially close friend. The two enjoyed discussing biblical exegesis, and Ibn Ezra's important commentaries occasionally show evidence of ha-Levi's influence. Tradition maintains that Ibn Ezra's son married ha-Levi's daughter.
Life's Work
Throughout his life, ha-Levi was a poet first, a physician and philosopher only secondarily. Of his literary work, some eight hundred poems survive. Though most are religious, a substantial number are secular; of these, about eighty are love poems in the manner of Arabic and Christian verses of the day. In these poems, the lady typically is cruel to her lover; the lover yearns for her and fills buckets with his tears; the lady shines even in the darkest night; her eyes slay the lover. Despite their highly stylized formula, the poems reveal technical virtuosity in the use of internal rhyme and musicality, and the imagery can be strikingly original, as when he likens a face surrounded by long red hair to the setting sun turning the sky crimson. Humor, too, surfaces in these poems.
Awake, my dear, from your slumber arise,
Throughout his life, ha-Levi would admire and celebrate female beauty.
Ha-Levi was also sensitive to the beauty and grandeur of nature. Celebrating the return of spring, he wrote,
And now the spring is here with yearning eyes
On another occasion, a storm at sea prompted him to proclaim the power of nature and to recognize a person's weakness in the face of elemental rage. Commenting on these nature poems, Heinrich Graetz has observed,
One can see in his lines the flowers bud and glisten; one inhales their fragrance; one sees the branches bending beneath the weight of golden fruits, and hears the songsters of the air warble their love songs. . . . When he describes the fury of a storm-tossed sea, he imparts to his readers all the sublimity and terror which he himself felt.
Another, larger group of ha-Levi's secular poems are occasional pieces, such as those composed for the death of his teacher and the marriage of Ibn Megash. Most of the extant poems in this category are eulogies or laments, which often combine personal grief with a sense of cosmic desolation, for in the death of a friend or fellow Jew he read the fate of the Jewish nation.
There is no sanctuary and no rest,
This concern for the Jewish condition also informs ha-Levi's religious poetry. About half the surviving poems, some 350, are prayers for festivals (piyyutim ), many of which continue to be recited. His models here were not only the biblical lamentations of Job and Jeremiah but also contemporary Hebrew and Arabic verses. Most focus on national tragedies, though he sometimes describes personal experiences and expresses a desire for salvation. The Psalms provided examples for other, more personal religious poetry in which he recorded his fears and struggles, failures and joys.
Only about thirty-five known poems deal directly with Zion, yet on these more than any others rest his fame and reputation as a poet, for into these works he poured his deepest, most powerful feelings. “My heart is in the East, and I am in the uttermost West / How can I find savor in food? How shall it be sweet to me?” For him, the vision of Israel was not an abstraction but a reality that he saw before him daily. Recognizing the plight of the Jews in the Diaspora, subject to the whims of mobs and petty tyrants, he asks rhetorically,
Have we either in the east or in the west
Of these poems, none is more moving than the “Zionide” (Ode to Zion), still recited in synagogues around the world each Ninth of Ab, the fast commemorating the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem and, fittingly, the 1492 exile of the Jews from Spain, a disaster ha-Levi had feared and foreseen. In four stanzas with but a single rhyme throughout, ha-Levi expresses the Jewish longing for Jerusalem, the joy and grief for its past glories, the sense of hope unfulfilled, and the anticipation of joyful redemption when “the chosen are returned to thee/ And thy first youth in glory is renewed.” The Hebrew poet Israel Efros has declared, “If the hearts of the Jews of all time could be formed into one great throbbing heart and made to turn toward the East, the song that it would sing would be” ha-Levi's “Ode to Zion.”
Ha-Levi's poetry circulated widely in manuscript, and from the beginning of printing his works were incorporated into prayer books. They have been translated into many languages, including German (1845), English (1851), Italian (1871), Hungarian (1910), Dutch (1929), and Spanish (1932).
Poetry could not, however, earn for ha-Levi a living, so he was forced to turn to medicine. His attitude toward the profession is conveyed in a letter to a friend.
I occupy myself in the hours which belong neither to the day nor to the night with the vanity of the medical science, although I am unable to heal. . . . I cry to God that He quickly send deliverance to me and give me freedom to enjoy rest, that I may repair to some place of living knowledge, to the fountain of wisdom.
His disclaimer of skill notwithstanding, he apparently served as court physician to Alfonso VI of Toledo, which had fallen to the Christians in 1085. The murder of his patron, Solomon ibn Ferrizuel, in 1108 shocked ha-Levi; together with the sufferings caused by fundamentalist Muslims and the Christian Crusaders, this event reemphasized the precariousness of the Jewish position in exile.
The death of Ibn Ferrizuel seems to have driven ha-Levi from Toledo. During the following years, he traveled throughout Spain, visiting Granada, Málaga, Córdoba, and Seville. In this last city, he became friendly with the court physicians Abū Ayūb Solomon ibn al-Muՙallim and Abū al-Ḥasan ben Meir ibn Kamniel, and here he married in 1120. Further travel took him back to Toledo (1130) and Córdoba (c. 1134). Increasingly, he felt alienated from his native land; after the deaths of his wife and his close friend Moses ibn Ezra, he resolved to follow his heart to Israel. Shortly before leaving Spain, he codified a treatise he had been developing for almost twenty years, his Kītab al-Ḥujjah waal dalīl fī nasr al-dīn al dhalīl (1139; Judah Halevi's Kitab al Khazari, 1905; best known as Book of the Kuzari).
The work is based on the conversion to Judaism of Bulan, king of the Khazars, a Tartar tribe in Russia, in 740. Hasdai ibn Shaprut (c. 910-970) had corresponded with Joseph, another Khazar king, who had sent an account of the religious debates among Christians, Muslims, and Jews that had led to Bulan's decision to convert; ha-Levi was familiar with these letters and may have conversed with Khazar descendants living in Spain. The Book of the Kuzari, however, transcends a mere attempt at historical re-creation. Ha-Levi was concerned with the Karaite movement in Judaism that sought to reject all Talmudic tradition in favor of a literal reading of the Torah, the five books of Moses, and he was equally concerned with the inroads of Arabic-Aristotelian philosophy. He had apparently studied Avicenna and al-Fārābi, as well as their opponent, the mystical al-Ghazzālī, and had sided with the latter. These concerns combined with ha-Levi's personal convictions to create a brilliant explication and defense of Judaism.
As the Book of the Kuzari opens, Bulan is troubled by a dream in which an angel has told him that while the king's intentions please God, his actions do not. Bulan therefore summons a philosopher to help him. The philosopher replies that purity of heart is more important than action, but Bulan's dream has already demonstrated the error of such a view. The king then calls in a Muslim and a Christian theologian; because the Jews are persecuted and universally despised, he does not invite a representative of that faith. As the Christian and the Muslim speak, though, Bulan realizes that both draw heavily from Judaism, and at the end of the first section he brings in a Jewish spokesman, the Haver (friend).
In the succeeding four sections, the king and the Haver, who serves as ha-Levi's spokesperson, discuss the nature of Judaism. Bulan first wants to know how the Jews understand God. The Haver replies that actual experience is more important than theoretical speculation. He then links the Jewish people, Israel, and the Hebrew language, a fusion that ha-Levi increasingly believed to be essential: The Jew could survive only with a homeland in which he spoke his own language. In the third section, the Haver explains Bulan's dream by saying that to worship God one must fulfill his commandments. Section four finally addresses the question Bulan had asked about the nature of God. As Elohim, the Haver replies, God is remote, but as Adonai he has revealed himself through history and prophecy. Only the Jews have enjoyed this intimate revelation from and relationship with God, so all other religions must approach God through the Jews.
Thus far, the Haver has focused on distinguishing Judaism from the other major religions. In the final section, he returns to the philosopher. Acknowledging Aristotle's authority in matters of logic and mathematics, he maintains that in spiritual matters speculation is handicapped because the philosopher knows God only indirectly. The Prophet, on the other hand, has experienced God directly. Herein lies the strength of Judaism; 600,000 people saw the parting of the Red Sea and heard God's voice at Sinai. No other religion can claim such an immediate encounter with the divine, an encounter cherished through an unbroken chain of tradition. Ha-Levi thus indicates the weakness of the Karaite view: The rejection of the Talmudic heritage would leave Judaism with no stronger claim to validity than that of Christianity or Islam, since without the historical link to Sinai Judaism would lose its unique experience of revelation.
At the end of the Book of the Kuzari, the Haver tells Bulan of his intention to go to Israel. Why, the king replies, should the Haver undertake a dangerous journey to a perilous land? Since the destruction of the Temple, God no longer physically resides in Israel, so one can find God anywhere if one seeks with a pure heart. Speaking for ha-Levi, the Haver responds that heart and soul are perfectly pure only in the place selected by God. Though God has removed his physical presence from Israel, God's spirit remains, and therefore the Haver must go.
Still, ha-Levi's own decision to leave was not reached easily. In the Book of the Kuzari, Bulan anachronistically warns the Haver of the anti-Jewish sentiments of the Crusaders then controlling the Holy Land. Ha-Levi's letters express doubts about the journey, as does the following introspective poem:
Yet he feared and trembled with falling tears
In 1140, though, he finally set off for Israel, arriving in Alexandria on September 8. Like his Spanish compatriots, the Jews of Egypt sought to dissuade him from further travel. Why leave the comforts and safety of civilization for a desolate, war-torn land? Still, ha-Levi pressed onward toward his goal, passing through Cairo, Tyre, and Damascus.
Did he ever reach Israel? Was he able to “pass to Hebron, where the ancient graves/ Still wait for me, and wander in the dusk/ Of the forest of Carmel”? Did he “stand upon the summit of the mountains/ Where once the unforgotten brothers stood/ And the light of them was seen throughout the world”? Did he “fall to the earth and press my lips into the dust and weep thy desolation/ Till I am blind, and, blind, still comfort thee”? Were these words of his “Ode to Zion” prophecy or dream? No one knows; his final resting place, like that of Moses, remains undiscovered. Yet legend maintains that he did indeed reach the Wailing Wall, and that there, as he prostrated himself to kiss the sacred ground, an Arab horseman trampled or stabbed him to death even as ha-Levi was uttering the words of his “Ode to Zion.”
Significance
Shortly after ha-Levi's death, Judah ibn Tibbon translated the Book of the Kuzari into Hebrew (c. 1150); ha-Levi had chosen to write in Arabic to make the work accessible to a wider audience. In later years, it was translated into many other languages and enjoyed popularity not only in Jewish but also in Christian and Muslim circles for its championship of faith above reason. The Book of the Kuzari impressed Johann Gottlieb von Herder, for example, who claimed that in writing his dialogues he used ha-Levi rather than Plato as his model.
Yet it was as a poet that ha-Levi saw himself, and it is as a poet that his reputation has chiefly survived. More than six centuries after his death, Herder's countryman Heinrich Heine called ha-Levi's poetry “pure and true and blemish-free,” and in 1882 Emma Lazarus published translations of a number of ha-Levi's poems in Songs of a Semite. Brilliant in technique, striking in imagery, adept in musicality, they reveal a talent of the first order. His contemporaries and successors repeatedly sang his praises. To Moses ibn Ezra, he was “the pearl diver and lord of most rare jewels.” The thirteenth century poet Judah ben Solomon Harizi declared that ha-Levi's poetry
shines like a crown over the congregation of Israel, adorns its neck like the most precious strand of pearls. . . . All are his followers and attempt to sing in his manner, but they do not reach even the dust of his chariot, and humbly they kiss his feet.
Later, Abraham Bedersi referred to his verses as “the Urrim and Tummim of Jewish song.”
Such praise is merited; his poems are living jewels, sighing for the tragedies of the Jews and panting for salvation. He expressed the dreams of an exiled, homeless people and offered hope that despite the present darkness they might yet “behold in wonderment/ the beauteous splendor” of their land. The rhythms of ha-Levi's lines are the heartbeats of his nation. Judah ha-Levi is the enduring poet laureate of Zion.
Bibliography
Cohen, Richard A., ed. Ninety-two Poems and Hymns of Yehuda Halevi. Translated by Thomas Kovach, Eva Jospe, and Gilya Gerda Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Provides translations of ha-Levi’s hymns and poems, including “Ode to Zion.” Also includes an introductory essay.
Druck, David. Yehuda Halevy: His Life and Works. Translated by M. Z. R. Frank. New York: Bloch, 1941. Good introduction to ha-Levi’s life and writings, and the discussions of the Book of the Kuzari and the poetry remain useful.
Efros, Israel. “Some Aspects of Yehudah Halevi’s Mysticism.” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 11 (1941): 27-41. An erudite discussion of the Book of the Kuzari’s treatment of mysticism and rationalism. Notes ha-Levi’s sources and explores the meanings of certain obscure terms in the work.
Feldman, Leon A. “Yehudah Halevi: An Answer to a Historical Challenge.” Jewish Social Studies 3 (1941): 243-272. Based on an address given at the octocentennial observance of ha-Levi’s death. Calls ha-Levi “the greatest Hebrew poet after the conclusion of the Bible.” Solid historical and philosophical background on medieval Spain and the relationship of that milieu to ha-Levi’s ideas. Concludes with a discussion of ha-Levi’s enduring significance.
Kayser, Rudolf. The Life and Time of Jehudah Halevi. Translated by Frank Gaynor. New York: Philosophical Library, 1949. Places ha-Levi within the context of the Jewish golden age in Spain and also within the context of the conflict between Western rationalism and Eastern mysticism. In the Book of the Kuzari and in his emigration, ha-Levi reveals his sympathy with the latter.
Menocal, Maria Rosa, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells, eds. The Literature of Al-Andalus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Part of the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series, provides a biographical look at the literature of ha-Levi in Arabic Andalusia.
Minkin, Jacob S. “Judah Halevi.” In Great Jewish Personalities in Ancient and Medieval Times, edited by Simon Noveck. Washington, D.C.: B’nai B’rith Department of Adult Jewish Education, 1959. A chronological presentation of the life and works. Draws on the poetry and the Book of the Kuzari to gain insights into ha-Levi’s experiences and thoughts.
Silman, Yochanan. Philosopher and Prophet: Judah Halevi, the Kuzari, and the Evolution of His Thought. Translated by Lenn J. Schramm. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Explores the whole range of ha-Levi’s philosophical and religious thought, from Aristotelianism, to form and matter, divinity, theology, anthropology, god and world, and more.
Zinberg, Israel. “Jehudah Halevi the Poet.” In A History of Jewish Literature, translated and edited by Bernard Martin, vol. 1. Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972. Analyzes the evolution of ha-Levi’s poetry as the writer matured. Includes generous excerpts from ha-Levi’s verses.