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Yehuda Halevi (Jewish Encounters)

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The twelfth century Spanish poet Yehuda Halevi was well-respected during his lifetime, but is better known today for his poetical defense of Judaism called The Kuzari, a book that is admired by so many Jews that numerous rabbis give classes and lectures on it, as if it is a holy book. Unfortunately, neither these rabbis nor their congregants delve deeply enough into the volume to understand it, as Halkin does.

Hillel Halkin, an expert on Hebrew literature, is an excellent choice to write about Halevi. Halkin states that very little is known about Halevi's personal life, including when he was born and died, who he married and about his children. The noun "Halevi" was not his name; it was applied to all Jews who are Levites, putative descendant of Jacob's son Levi, and means "The Levite." Virtually all that is known about him is drawn from brief often somewhat obscure personal references contained in his poems and some letters, including letters found in 1896 in the Cairo Genizah in Egypt. We know that he was not only a successful poet, but also a physician with a medical practice; but he wrote that he did not like being a doctor and felt that he was not good at it.

Halkin spends most of his book discussing Halevi's poetry. He gives many examples of Halevi's non-religious poems on wine, women, and song (such as, "O swear by Love that you remember days of embraces / As I remember nights crammed with your kisses"), his religious poems, and his poems about Israel, including his famous poem, whose opening words Halkin translates as, "My heart in the east, but the rest of me far in the west." The well-known line of the famous Israeli song of the 1967 war "Jerusalem of gold, of copper, and of light, / To all your songs I am a lute" was taken from Halevi's "Zion! Do You Wonder?" Halkin analyses many of the poems and shows how they are constructed. Readers will learn much about poetry from these discussions.

Halkin also writes about Spain during Halevi's lifetime, and this will interest people who want to know about this unusual, often turbulent period of Jewish history, the time and place when and where Judaism's greatest philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) was born.

But, Halevi's present-day renown is based on his Kuzari, a fictional account of a rabbi explaining Judaism to a non-Jewish Kuzar king. Halevi subtitled his Kuzari "The Book of Proof and Demonstration in Defense of the Despised Faith." Like his negative opinion about his medical practice, Halevi repudiated his Kuzari in a letter as "foolishness." Halkin suggests that Halevi may have been referring to an early version of this classic, but this is by no means certain because many of the ideas that Halevi offers his readers are difficult if not impossible to accept.

Halevi argues in a circular fashion, for example, that Judaism is not based on faith but on historical experience. We know, he insists, that there were six hundred thousand Israelites at Sinai because the Bible tells us so - and we know that the Bible is telling us the truth because six hundred thousand Israelites could not have been wrong. Halkin comments, "Wasn't Halevi aware, one wonders, of the faultiness of such logic? How could it have failed to occur to him that the biblical account of Sinai...might have been written long after the supposed events took place and been imagined, not by a multitude of Israelites, but by a small number of biblical authors?"

Halevi "proves" that free will exists by arguing that we know it exists because we feel that it exists. Halkin states that this "approach is disappointingly naïve."

But his most radical and outrageous notion, an idea never previously presented by anyone, is that Jews are biologically superior to non-Jews. Non-Jews, he insists, are incapable of fully developing spiritually, even converts to Judaism cannot develop because their biology remains unchanged. Thus, no non-Jew can become a prophet.
Halevi took an extremely conservative approach to the divine commandments. Whereas Moses Maimonides, for example, explained that all of the Torah's commands are rational, Halevi insisted that humans are incapable of understanding the divine commandments and they must be obeyed simply because God said so.

The Kuzari contains curious discrepancies, For example, Halevi rails against philosophy as being harmful to Judaism, yet he goes to great length to attempt to prove that an ancient Jewish book that he respected Sefer ha-Yetsirah is a philosophical book. Halkin suggests that Halevi extolled philosophy in an early version of the Kuzari, changed his mind, and forgot to edit this part of his volume.

Probably the only redeeming factor in the Kuzari is Halevi's argument that Jews should stop waiting for God to restore Israel to the Jewish people; Jews should take matters into their own hands.

Harkin compares Halevi's Kuzari to Maimonides' rational Guide of the Perplexed. "The reader attracted to Maimonides will find The Kuzari irrational in its assumptions, careless in its logic, dismissive of scientific thinking, presumptuously ethnocentric."

In short, this is an excellent presentation of Halevi's poetry and his radical ideas about Judaism.

Hillel Halkin has done something that is very difficult in this work: he has made the life of a poet who lived a thousand years ago seem vital and alive today. And he does this against the odds: there is relatively little material to compose a biography of Yehuda Halevi: there are letters, accounts from old books, and Halevis poems themselves. From these, he creates a credible and consistent account of one of Judaism's most interesting figures.

The conclusion of the book explores how different scholars have molded Halevi into the figure that they wanted him to be. Halkin fesses up to his own Halevi-making, all the while explaining the pitfalls of biography in post-modern historiography. In the second section Halkin slashes scholars he disagrees with, in very stern tones, all the while laying out his own scholarly prejudices. This is honest admission, but it leaves the reader a bit miffed. What of the Haveli so carefully delineated in the first part of the book? Are we only left with the Halevi we make?

For an exposition on an essentially romantic poet in a too-often romanticized time and place, this is a surprisingly nuanced and balanced presentation. It is an enjoyable traverse through medieval Jewish thought and art in counterpoint to the age's religious and philosophical scholarship. And it's fun.

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. I've always been attracted to Zionism and would love to move to Israel (I am content to yearn for Zion at the moment, however), and books like this one give me a push.

This book centers on telling the story of the greatest of Medieval Hebrew poets, Yehuda Halevi. Its outstanding feature is that much of the story is told and illustrated through the poetry of Halevi himself as translated by Halkin. In this way we have a real sense of the inner life of the Poet. But in telling the story of this great poet Halkin provides background regarding Jewish history in medieval Spain. He wanders near and far to continually provide the reader with interesting insights into a world in which the Jews were the weak , minority religion caught between the more powerful rivals, Islam and Christianity. Halkin tells the poignant story of Halevi's longing for Zion, and the dramatic journey in which he left a world in which he had recognition, admiration, wealth, friendship , family for the religious purpose of returning to Zion and coming closer to God. Halkin also gives a very clear summary of the main arguments of Halevi's classic philosophical work , 'The Kuzari'. He shows how after initially contending with the religious rivals Christianity and Islam Halevi dedicates most of the work to arguing against the Philosophy of the time. Halevi's well- known distinction in which he regards Judaism to be a religion whose truth was proven by Experience and not by Faith alone is the center of the argument. Halkin in describing the Poetry of Halevi also provides a primer of medieval Hebrew poetry , its forms and sources. He shows a mastery of the sources and provides the arguments of conflicting scholars on questions related to the life of Halevi. For instance one great question is the true identity of the husband of Halevi's one surviving daughter. Halkin also considers Halevi's influence on Jewish Thought and History. Halkin also adds his own autobiographical story as it relates to the vision of Halevi. This biography does justice to one of the great figures in Jewish literary and religious history. I could not recommend it more highly.

This delightful new biography of the medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi by Hillel Halkin is beautifully written (as is everything Halkin writes). Halevi comes alive as never before. So much so that the book reads like a novel.

Interspersed are a generous selection of Halevi's poems in Halkin's marvelous translation. One now need not know any Hebrew--indeed, one need not even be Jewish--to enjoy and appreciate Halevi's poetry, and this wonderful book.

My only complaint is that there is no key referring to the original titles of the translated poems.

Very difficult read book.
A lot of "could be's"," would
have been," "maybe", "perhaps".

Halkin has always been at his best as a translator--in that he has proved extraordinary in his renderings of modern Hebrew fiction. Here too, he makes the poetry of Halevi & others come to vibrant life. His close readings are often accomplished and truly memorable. But that significant achievement is sometimes compromised when he strains to make the condition of Jews in the multicultural and relatively tolerant environment of medieval Andalusia to more closely resemble the plight of their co-coreligionists in Christian Europe. Those moments are often unpersuasive and he seems to create a straw-man argument--few of the critics whose work he dislikes truly assert the kind of utopian age that he argues against. The long personal essay tacked on at the end does not have an organic relation to the early chapters of historical and literary analysis & could safely have been excluded. Ultimately, too much of this falls into an anachronistic way of framing Halkin's own triumphal Zionism.