Judah halevi biography samples

As an adolescent, Halevi wrote a Hebrew ode of introduction to Moses ibn Ezra, in which he conjures a vision of poetic bliss and intellectual friendship. Halevi duly found his way to Granada, remaining in the city and forming close friendships with the circle of Hebrew poets thriving there. He left only in , when the city fell to the Almohades.

Just three years later, soldiers of the First Crusade devastated Jewish communities across Christian Europe. While it is difficult to establish a precise chronology of these years, it is known that he studied and practiced medicine. In his most famous work, The Kuzari , Halevi foreshadowed the philosophy of Zionism and Jewish nationalism.

Sources: This material was originally published in Sparks! Download our mobile app for on-the-go access to the Jewish Virtual Library. Prior to his voyage, Judah Halevi lived it in his imagination and poetry, overcoming deep fears in this way; he even taught himself to anticipate happily and excitedly the dangers of the future " Ha-tirdof ne'arut ," " Ha-yukhlu pegarim ".

As for its being desolate, it was also given that way to the forefathers. Important descriptive poems are structurally influenced by ancient biblical poetical forms e. They begin with a description of the world, but the subsequent descriptions diminish in perspective: the stormy Mediterranean Sea , the weak ship at its mercy, and finally the poet himself in prayer.

Following that is the final calm after the storm. The roaring of the waves dominate the rhythm and sound patterns. His prayer is identified with Jonah's, and the roaring of the sea is consciously identified with the moaning of his heart. Numerous imitations and translations of this poem have appeared. By virtue of its inclusion according to the Ashkenazi rite in the kinot for the Ninth of Av , many generations have lamented the destruction of the Temple and dreamt their dream of redemption in the words of this poem.

All aspects of the poem focus on Zion. The holy qualities of the land are specified at length with a lyric feeling which imaginatively transplants the poet to places of former revelation, prophecy, monarchy, and to the graves of the forefathers. In a unique poetic outcry, he expresses his grief at its destruction and his humiliation in subjugation:.

He expresses the happiness of his hope in the quiet lines which end the poem. With these lines he blesses those who will be fortunate enough to see the real redemption in the dawn. Judah Halevi's poems were widespread in manuscript from an early period. Thousands of fragments of his poems were preserved in the Genizah , and also in other manuscripts collections that are kept today in Russia and many other countries.

During his lifetime they were already known outside of Spain. From the 19 th century scholars began to publish his secular and liturgical poems from manuscripts in literary journals and periodicals, e. Geiger, in Melo Hofnayim ; S. Edelman in Ginzei Oxford ; J. Luzzatto in Tal Orot and in Iggeret Shadal — The first scholar to publish collections of Judah Halevi's poems as individual books and to publish his complete diwan was S.

He received from Oxford a copy of the manuscript of the diwan made by Joshua Elijah bar-Levi 14 th century and published the poems in it in Betulat Bat Yehudah Prague, He also began to publish the entire diwan but he only managed to publish the first section of it Lyck, Afterward many collections of Judah Halevi's poems were published, completely or in part.

The following may be mentioned: A. Warsaw, —94 ; H. Brody, Diwan Jehudah ha-Levi , 4 vols. Tel Aviv , In the various anthologies of Hebrew poetry much space was devoted to Judah Halevi's poems, e. Albrecht, Sha'ar ha-Shir ; H. Wiener, Mivhar ha-Shirah ha-Ivrit , 2 , ed. Habermann ; H. A new comprehensive and critical edition of all Halevi's poems is one of the great desiderata of medieval Hebrew poetry in our days.

Yahalom is working on it. Part of Judah Halevi's poetry has been translated and published either alongside the Hebrew original or by itself, e. Levin , etc. Pinkhof ; Hebrew and Spanish by A. Targarona ; Italian by S. Patai Halevi's poetry has received countless commentaries and very different interpretations. No other medieval author has been received with the same enthusiasm by all subsequent generations.

His poetry is considered one of the outstanding models of the Andalusian school. But no one has doubted the literary and esthetic value of his poetry. Halevi follows the conventions of the time in poems that may be considered "formalist," like most of his love or bacchic poems that are sometimes almost literal translations from Arabic; but even in these cases he has his own particular and personal style.

He can also write with the most profound lyricism, expressing in a wondrous way his own aspirations or those of his people in exile. His words of friendship are not simple formulas, and his affection for his people is entirely sincere.

Judah halevi biography samples

As a poet, he feels like a prophet proclaiming the liberation of Israel. Coming from the Christian North, as a stranger, Halevi became fully integrated in the Andalusian world with its Arabic lore, exhibiting the maximum degree of cultural adaptation. Even some of the most significant topics and images that he employs in his poetry, including the feelings of the exile and the heart's separation from the object of its affection, are taken from Arabic poets, always with the nuances imposed by a Jewish mind.

But he seems to have become disenchanted with the life of al-Andalus, gradually rejecting the Andalusian-Jewish courtly cultural and social values; a consequence of this may have been the trip to Jerusalem in the last days of his life and his possible decision to abandon the writing of poetry. Analyzing this particular situation of Halevi, R.

Brann sees in the poet's contradictory attitudes toward poetry a sign of the conflicts inherent in living in two quite different worlds, in cultural ambiguity; for him, Halevi did not undergo a "conversion" in his adult years; he remained an Andalusian and compunctious Hebrew poet conflicted about the ambiguity of his literary identity.

However, in the last 15 years of his life, Brann observes in Halevi a clear deviation from literary traditions and cultural conventions that produces a "culturally subversive discourse" tending to replace the dominant values of this society. Scheindlin has examined the individual vision and religious experience of Halevi in contrast to that of Ibn Gabirol as reflected in liturgical poetry.

Although both poets share the Neoplatonic psychology, they are in fact widely separated: Halevi attributes great importance to the distance between God and man, to His transcendence, introducing in his poems a climate of tranquil confidence in God and a passive acceptance of His will that seem to have their main sources in Arabic religious poetry.

In a very beautiful study Scheindlin has contemplated Halevi's pilgrimage as a literary phenomenon, underlining the significance of his pervasive use of imagery involving birds. Birds can be connected with Israel, with the human soul, or with the pilgrimage itself. In particular, he frequently employs the image of the dove to represent the nation Israel, combining it many times with the words "silence" and "distance" to express the exile or the dream of redemption.

When finally he focused his literary energies on the pilgrimage, the distant, silent dove served him also as an image of his search for the land of his dreams. Halevi's poetry was not an isolated phenomenon. When he arrived in al-Andalus he met a large number of poets in all the important Jewish centers. He learned from them and became the friend of many of them.

Poetry was one of the most highly esteemed activities of Andalusian society, a sign of intellectual distinction and an ideal of life. Literary meetings, competitions, proof of inventive capacity and imaginative talent, correspondence between poets, riddles, plays on words and images were usual practices among these groups of cultivated Jewish Andalusians.

Judah Halevi was one of medieval Jewry's most influential thinkers, and his arguments for the truth of Judaism and the essential superiority of the Jewish People are invoked to this day in traditionalist circles. Although Halevi rejected Islamic Aristotelianism, which was beginning to be adopted by his fellow Jews and would soon be considered by most Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides as scientifically authoritative, he maintained that Judaism could be defended rationally by emphasizing its empirical basis.

Hence, his rejection of the leading philosophy of the day did not mean that he was an anti-rationalist. The story is based on the historical conversion of the central Asian Khazars to Judaism in the eighth century, even though Halevi's account of the king's search for truth is purely his own literary invention. As the story is told by Halevi, the king first heard and rejected the doctrines of an Aristotelian philosopher, a Christian, and a Muslim.

The philosopher presented a theory of a wholly impersonal God who does not care which actions humans choose; such a stance contradicted the evidence of the king's own dream. In contrast, both the Christian and Muslim claimed that the actions of their religion are those which are pleasing to God, but the king rejected their creeds as illogical Christianity and unsubstantiated Islam.

Having had the king reject the dominant intellectual and religious doctrines of his day, Halevi then presented the king as finally inviting a Jew to hear his views. This dialogue provided Halevi with the framework for presenting his defense of Judaism. Halevi used the Bible as the basic text for his reconstruction of Jewish history, paying only scant attention to rabbinic interpretations of the biblical narrative.

His use of midrash is selective, highlighting those traditions which emphasize Jewish particularity. There is very little legal material in The Kuzari , but Halevi was well aware of rabbinic halakhah , especially compared to the Karaite practices. Certain trends in the Jewish mystical tradition, especially merkavah speculation, also had an impact on Halevi's ideas; in turn, his thought had a vital impact on later Kabbalah.

The Kuzari benefited greatly from an assortment of non-Jewish sources. While Halevi rejected Greek philosophy as it was developed in the Islamic world, he was very much aware of the Aristotelian system of which he may have been enamored in his youth. Greek science, as moderated by the Islamic environment, had an impact on his thought as well.

He believed that both relied on theoretical constructs rather than hard, empirical truth. Kalam arrived at the correct conclusions, such as the creation of the world and the existence and unity of God, but it was useful mainly for apologetics. For instance, he believed that the world is eternal; if he had known the Bible, he would have used his reason to defend the proposition that the world was created Kuzari Furthermore, philosophy can go only so far: philosophical, syllogistic knowledge of God, for instance, is possible, but it is deficient compared with immediate, unmediated experience dhawq , literally "taste" of God through prophecy Kuzari — The Jewish tradition provided true knowledge based on the experience of the Jewish people.

The reliability of the tradition is guaranteed by the large number of witnesses to the miraculous exodus from Egypt, the revelation on Mt. Sinai, and the entrance into the Land of Israel. Not only were there hundreds of thousands of observers of these events, but also the original testimony of these witnesses has been transmitted publicly over the centuries.

Since, Halevi claimed, all Jews accepted the accuracy of the biblical account as having been passed down to them by previous untold generations, there is no possibility of error or falsification of the tradition. If the Bible were a fabrication, there would not be universal Jewish consent to its truth. In contrast, Christianity and Islam claimed to have been revealed to only a small number of people, and, therefore, cannot be validated.

Although this historical argument for the certainty of the Jewish tradition is not totally original it has an antecedent in the work of Saadiah Gaon , Halevi's formulation of it is probably his most significant legacy. Once Halevi established the veracity of Judaism, he employed reason to explain its truths. Nothing in Scripture or tradition, he claimed, contradicted reason Kuzari , Thus, one may look for justifications of problematical doctrines such as the superiority of the Jewish people or historical occurrences such as revelation.

These explanations may strike the modern reader as rationally invalid, but they were based in part on medieval scientific notions or commonplace notions of the time. In any event, it is too facile to dismiss Halevi as solely a doctrinaire religious critic of philosophy; he attempted to replace Aristotelian rationalism, which to his mind was insufficient, with a form of Jewish empiricism.

Positions: Hasmonean Sadducean Pharisee Boethusian. People: Aristobulus of Alexandria Philo of Alexandria. Burial [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions. Oxford : Oxford University Press. ISBN LCCN S2CID Jerusalem, Israel: Keter Publishing House. The Oxford Handbook of Abrahamic Religions. Oxford University Press.

Studien zu den Dichtungen Jehuda ha-Levi's. JSTOR June Mediterranean Historical Review. ISSN Yehuda Halevi. Nextbook Press. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Sep 10, [May 21, ]. Al-Andalus, 18 1 , Yehudah haLevi ca. The Open Siddur Project. Yehudah ha-Levi". Mandel Institute for Jewish Studies : — Ha-Levi, Judah.

Divan Des Jehuda Halevi l. In Singer, Isidore; et al. The Jewish Encyclopedia. Salaman, Nina Ruth Davis. Judah Halevi. Retrieved Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters. Berlin: Digital Form Freimann-Sammlung. Encyclopedia Judaica".