YEHUDA HALEVI
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(Redirected from Judah Halevi)
'Judah Ha-Levi', in full 'Yehuda ben Shemuel Ha-Levi', also 'Yehudah Halevi', or 'Judah ben Samuel Halevi' (Hebrew: 'יהודה הלוי') (c.1075–1141) was a Spanish Jewish philosopher and poet. He was born in Tudela, Navarre, Spain.
As a youth, Ha-Levi lived a life of pleasure. He mixed pleasure with learning. It is possible that Judah's father, Samuel "the Castilian," sent Judah, who was his only son, to Lucena to be educated in the various branches of Jewish learning at the school of Isaac Alfasi. On the death of his master, Judah composed an elegy.[1] It was probably in Lucena, too, that Judah won the friendship of Alfasi's most prominent pupils, Joseph ibn Migas and Baruch Albalia.
Judah chose medicine as his profession; but he quickly displayed an aptitude and love for poetry. The early ripening of his poetic talent aroused the admiration of his friend and senior, the poet Moses ibn Ezra, who accorded him enthusiastic praise.
He was well acquainted with the productions of the Arabic and the Castilian poets; yet the muse spoke to him in the old and sacred language of the Bible (Biblical Hebrew), in which "he sang for all times and places, soon becoming the favorite of the people." His earliest writing followed the structures of Arabic poetry, and dealt with popular Arabic themes: wine, women, and song. He became versed in Greco-Arabic philosophy also. His personal style was characterized by wit, irony, humor and inventiveness with language. It is astonishing to consider that Hebrew was not his native spoken language. The fluid and lively style of his verse reads as if Hebrew was a living language (which was not the case in the Middle Ages).
After completing his studies, which he, being in easy circumstances, had been able to pursue deliberately, Judah returned to Toledo, where he soon acquired so large a practice that he complained in a letter to his friend David Narboni[2] of a lack of tranquility and leisure. He married in Toledo; and from allusions in some of his poems it is evident that his only child was a daughter, through whom he had a grandson, also named Judah.
There is a tradition which claims that Yehuda HaLevi's daughter married Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra and they had 5 sons. Four of these sons are understood to have died in their youth, and the fifth, Yitzhak, travelled to Baghdad where he is believed to have converted to Islam.
Judah ha-Levi does not seem to have been contented in Toledo; for he removed to the Jewish city of Yae. Even here, he did not feel at ease. Though personally he occupied an honored position as a physician, he felt the intolerance of the Almoravid fanatics toward his co-religionists, his "people". He had long yearned to relocate to the Holy Land. This yearning was deepened by his intense application to his religio-philosophical work, and by his resulting clearer insight into Judaism; and at length he decided to set out on a journey to the Land of Israel. First he toured Spain in the hope to gather fellow Jews to join him on the journey to Israel, but found no souls willing to forsake the comforts of the Golden Age of Spain for the arduous journey to the underdeveloped Holy Land. For himself at least, he wished "to do away with the contradiction of daily confessing a longing, and of never attempting to realize it";[3] and therefore, on the death of his wife, he bade "fare-well" to daughter, grandson, pupils, friends, rank, and affluence.
After a stormy passage, he arrived in Alexandria, Egypt, where he was enthusiastically greeted by friends and admirers. At Damietta, he had to struggle against the promptings of his own heart, and the pleadings of his friend Halfon ha-Levi, that he remain in Egypt; which also was Jewish soil, and free from intolerant oppression. However he resisted the temptation to remain there, and started on the tedious land route,although he soon fell ill, and passed away while still in Egypt. He is buried there until today.
The life-work of Judah ha-Levi was devoted to poetry and philosophy. His poetry is usually classified under the headings "secular and religious," or, as in Brody's new edition of the "Diwan," under "liturgical and non-liturgical." Such a division, however, can be only external; for the essential characteristic of Judah's poems is the expression of a deeply-religious soul, which is the lofty key to which they are attuned. Even in his drinking- and love-songs, an attentive reader may hear the vibrations of religion's overtones.
The first place in his secular or non-liturgical poetry is occupied by poems of friendship and eulogy. Judah must have possessed an attractive personality; for there gathered about him as friends, even in his earliest youth, a large number of illustrious men, like Levi al-Tabban of Saragossa, the aged poet Judah ben Abun, Judah ibn Ghayyat of Granada, Moses ibn Ezra and his brothers Judah, Joseph, and Isaac, the vizier Abu al-Hasan, Meïr ibn Kamnial, the physician and poet Solomon ben Mu'allam of Seville, besides his schoolmates Joseph ibn Migas and Baruch Albalia. Judah is considered the Prince of Poets. However, the Vizier Samuel ha-Nagid of Granada who excelled the Sephardic poetry scale was in the previous generation as was the poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol of Malaga and Saragossa.
He was associated also with the grammarian Abraham ibn Ezra. In Córdoba, Judah addressed a touching farewell poem to Joseph ibn Ẓaddiḳ, the philosopher and poet. In Egypt, where the most celebrated men vied with one another in entertaining him, his reception was a veritable triumph. Here his particular friends were Aaron ben Jeshua Alamani in Alexandria, the nagid Samuel ben Hananiah in Cairo,[4] Halfon ha-Levi in Damietta, and an unknown man in Tyre, probably his last friend. In their sorrow and joy, in the creative spirit and all that moved the souls of these men, Judah sympathetically shared; as he says in the beginning of a short poem: "My heart belongs to you, ye noble souls, who draw me to you with bonds of love".[5]
Especially tender and plaintive is Judah's tone in his elegies[6] Many of them are dedicated to friends. Besides those composed on the deaths of the brothers Judah (Nos. 19, 20), Isaac (No. 21), and Moses ibn Ezra (No. 16), R. Baruch (Nos. 23, 28), Meïr ibn Migas (No. 27), his teacher Isaac Aifasi (No. 14), and others, one of the most affecting is that on Solomon ibn Farissol, who was murdered on May 3, 1108. The news of this friend's death suddenly changed Judah's poem of eulogy (Nos. 11, 22) into one of lamentation (Nos. 12, 13, 93 et seq.), which for grandeur and loftiness of tone has been compared to David's lament over Jonathan (see David and Jonathan).
Joyous, careless youth, and merry, happy delight in life find their expression in his love-songs. Many of these are epithalamia; and are characterized by a brilliant near-eastern coloring, as well as by a chaste reserve. In Egypt, where the muse of his youth found a glorious "Indian summer" in the circle of his friends, he wrote his "swan-song".[7]
:Wondrous is this land to see, With perfume its meadows laden, But more fair than all to me Is yon slender, gentle maiden. Ah, Time's swift flight I fain would stay, Forgetting that my locks are gray.
Drinking songs and enigmas in rime by Judah have also been preserved.
After living a life devoted to worldly pleasures, ha-Levi was to experience a kind of "awakening"; a shock, that changed his outlook on the world. Like a type of "conversion" experience, he turned from the frivolous life of pleasure, and his poetry turned to religious themes.
It seems that his profound experience was the consequence of his sensitivity to the events of history that were unfolding around him. He lived during the First Crusade and other wars. There was a new kind of religio-political fanaticism emerging in the Christian and Muslim worlds. Holy wars were brewing, and ha-Levi may have recognized that such trends had never been good for the Jews. At the time, life was relatively "good" in Spain for the Jewish community. He may have suspected things were about to change for the worse, however.
If one may speak of religious geniuses, then Judah ha-Levi must certainly be regarded among the greatest produced by medieval Judaism. No other writer, it would seem, drew so near to God as Judah; none else knew how to cling to Him so closely, or felt so safe in His shadow. At times the body is too narrow for him: the soul yearns for its Father in Heaven, and would break through the earthly shell.[8] Without God, his soul would wither away; nor is it well with him except he prays.[9] The thought of God allows him no rest; early and late He is his best beloved, and is his dearest concern.[10] He occupies the mind of the poet waking and sleeping; and the thought of Him, the impulse to praise Him, rouse Judah from his couch by night.[11]
Next to God, the Jewish people stands nearest to his heart: their sufferings and hopes are his. Like the authors of the Psalms, he gladly sinks his own identity in the wider one of the people of Israel; so that it is not always easy to distinguish the personality of the speaker.
Often Judah's poetic fancy finds joy in the thought of the "return" of his people to the Promised Land. He believed that perfect Jewish life was possible only in the Land of Israel. The period of political agitation about 1130, when Islam, so intensely hated by the poet, was gradually losing ground before the victorious arms of the Christians, gave Judah reason to hope for such a return in the near future. The vision of the night, in which this was revealed to him,[12] remained indeed but a dream; yet Judah never lost faith in the eventual deliverance of Israel, and in "the eternity" of his people. On this subject, he has expressed himself in poetry:
:Lo! Sun and moon, these minister for aye; The laws of day and night cease nevermore: Given for signs to Jacob's seed that they Shall ever be a nation — till these be o'er. If with His left hand He should thrust away, Lo! with His right hand He shall draw them nigh.[13]
The remarkable, and apparently in-dissoluble, union of religion, nationalism, and patriotism, which were so characteristic of post-exilic Judaism, reached its acme in Judah ha-Levi and his poetry. Yet this very union, in one so consistent as Judah, demanded the fulfillment of the supreme politico-religious ideal of medieval Judaism—the "return to Jerusalem". Though his impassioned call to his contemporaries to return to "Zion" might be received with indifference, or even with mockery;[14] his own decision to go to Jerusalem never wavered. "Can we hope for any other refuge either in the East or in the West where we may dwell in safety?" he exclaims to one of his opponents (ib.). The songs that accompany his pilgrimage[15] sound like one great symphony, wherein the "Zionides" — the single motive ever varied — voice the deepest "soul-life" alike; of the Jewish people and of each individual Jew.
The most celebrated of these "Zionides," with its remarkable monotony, is found in every Jewish liturgy, and is usually repeated in the synagogue on the Ninth of Ab.[16] The following is the English translation by Nina Davis (l.c. p. 37) of the opening lines:
:Zion, wilt thou not ask if peace's wing Shadows the captives that ensue thy peace, Left lonely from thine ancient shepherding?
:Lo! west and east and north and south — world-wide — All those from far and near, without surcease, Salute thee: Peace and Peace from every side."
The poems of Judah ha-Levi, which have been adopted into the liturgy, number (in all) more than 300. The longest, and most comprehensive poem is a "Kedushah," which summons all the universe to praise God with rejoicing, and which terminates, curiously enough, in Ps. ciii. These poems were carried to all lands, even as far as India (Zunz, "Ritus," p. 57); and they influenced the rituals of the most distant countries. Even the Karaites incorporated some of them into their prayer-book; so that there is scarcely a synagogue in which Judah's songs are not sung in the course of the service.Zunz, "S. P." p. 231 The following criticism of Judah's synagogal poems is made by Zunz:
:As the perfume and beauty of a rose are within it, and do not come from without, so with Judah word and Bible passage, meter and rime, are one with the soul of the poem; as in true works of art, and always in nature, one is never disturbed by anything external, arbitrary, or extraneous.
Judah by his verses has also beautified the religious life of the home. His Sabbath hymns should be mentioned here; one of the most beautiful of which ends with the words:
:On Friday doth my cup o'erflow, What blissful rest the night shall know, When, in thine arms, my toil and woe Are all forgot, Sabbath my love!
:'Tis dusk, with sudden light, distilled From one sweet face, the world is filled; The tumult of my heart is stilled — For thou art come, Sabbath my love!
:Bring fruits and wine and sing a gladsome lay, Cry, 'Come in peace, O restful Seventh day!'
Judah used complicated Arabic meters in his poems, with much good taste.[17] A later critic, applying a Talmudic witticism to Judah, has said: "It is hard for the dough when the baker himself calls it bad." Although these forms came to him naturally and without effort, unlike the mechanical versifiers of his time,[18] he would not except himself from the number of those he had blamed. His pupil Solomon Parḥon, who wrote at Salerno in 1160, relates that Judah repented having used the new metrical methods, and had declared he would not again employ them. That Judah felt them to be out of place, and that he opposed their use at the very time when they were in vogue, plainly shows his desire for a national Jewish art; independent in form, as well as in matter.
Judah was recognized by his contemporaries as "the great Jewish national poet", and in succeeding generations, by all the great scholars and writers in Israel.
The position of Judah ha-Levi in the domain of Jewish philosophy is parallel to that occupied in Islam by Ghazali, by whom he was influenced. Like Ghazali, Judah endeavored to liberate religion from the bondage of the various philosophical systems in which it had been held by his predecessors, Saadia, David ben Marwan al-Mekamez, Gabirol, and Bahya. In a work written in Arabic, and entitled "Kitab al-Ḥujjah wal-Dalil fi Nuṣr al-Din al-Dhalil" (known in the Hebrew translation of Judah ibn Tibbon by the title "Sefer ha-Kuzari," Judah ha-Levi expounded his views upon the teachings of Judaism, which he defended against the attacks of non-Jewish philosophers, Karaites, and those he viewed as "heretics".
For a discussion of ha-Levi's philosophical work, see Kuzari, considered one of the finest works in Jewish literature.
★ List of craters on Mercury
1. Brody, "Diwan des Abul-Ḥasan Jehuda ha-Levi," ii., No. 14, p. 100
2. Brody, l.c. i. 224, 225
3. Kaufmann, "Jehuda Halevi"
4. "Monatsschrift," xl. 417 et seq.
5. Brody, l.c. i., No. 45)
6. Brody, l.c. ii. 67 et seq.
7. Geiger, l.c. p. 168
8. S. D. Luzzatto, "Diwan," No. 14; Heller, "Die Echten Melodien," p. 227
9. Luzzatto, l.c. No. 57; Heller, l.c. p. 135
10. Heller, l.c. p. 82; "Ṭal Orot," No. 12
11. Luzzatto, l.c. No. 81; Heller, l.c. p. 229
12. Geiger, l.c. p. 154
13. Luzzatto, l.c. No. 61; transl. by Nina Davis in "Songs of Exile," p. 49
14. Luzzatto, l.c. No. 86
15. Brody, l.c. ii. 153
16. Brody, l.c. ii. 155
17. For further details see Brody, H. ''Studien zu den Dichtungen Jehuda ha-Levi's'', Berlin, 1895
18. see "Cuzari," v. 16)
★ The Kitab al-Khazari of Judah Hallevi, full English translation at sacred-texts.com
'Judah Ha-Levi', in full 'Yehuda ben Shemuel Ha-Levi', also 'Yehudah Halevi', or 'Judah ben Samuel Halevi' (Hebrew: 'יהודה הלוי') (c.1075–1141) was a Spanish Jewish philosopher and poet. He was born in Tudela, Navarre, Spain.
| Contents |
| Youth |
| Journey to the Holy Land |
| His work |
| Secular poetry |
| Love songs |
| Religious poetry |
| Patriotism |
| Analysis of his poetry |
| Synagogal poetry |
| As a philosopher |
| See also |
| Notes |
| External links |
Youth
As a youth, Ha-Levi lived a life of pleasure. He mixed pleasure with learning. It is possible that Judah's father, Samuel "the Castilian," sent Judah, who was his only son, to Lucena to be educated in the various branches of Jewish learning at the school of Isaac Alfasi. On the death of his master, Judah composed an elegy.[1] It was probably in Lucena, too, that Judah won the friendship of Alfasi's most prominent pupils, Joseph ibn Migas and Baruch Albalia.
Judah chose medicine as his profession; but he quickly displayed an aptitude and love for poetry. The early ripening of his poetic talent aroused the admiration of his friend and senior, the poet Moses ibn Ezra, who accorded him enthusiastic praise.
He was well acquainted with the productions of the Arabic and the Castilian poets; yet the muse spoke to him in the old and sacred language of the Bible (Biblical Hebrew), in which "he sang for all times and places, soon becoming the favorite of the people." His earliest writing followed the structures of Arabic poetry, and dealt with popular Arabic themes: wine, women, and song. He became versed in Greco-Arabic philosophy also. His personal style was characterized by wit, irony, humor and inventiveness with language. It is astonishing to consider that Hebrew was not his native spoken language. The fluid and lively style of his verse reads as if Hebrew was a living language (which was not the case in the Middle Ages).
After completing his studies, which he, being in easy circumstances, had been able to pursue deliberately, Judah returned to Toledo, where he soon acquired so large a practice that he complained in a letter to his friend David Narboni[2] of a lack of tranquility and leisure. He married in Toledo; and from allusions in some of his poems it is evident that his only child was a daughter, through whom he had a grandson, also named Judah.
There is a tradition which claims that Yehuda HaLevi's daughter married Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra and they had 5 sons. Four of these sons are understood to have died in their youth, and the fifth, Yitzhak, travelled to Baghdad where he is believed to have converted to Islam.
Journey to the Holy Land
Judah ha-Levi does not seem to have been contented in Toledo; for he removed to the Jewish city of Yae. Even here, he did not feel at ease. Though personally he occupied an honored position as a physician, he felt the intolerance of the Almoravid fanatics toward his co-religionists, his "people". He had long yearned to relocate to the Holy Land. This yearning was deepened by his intense application to his religio-philosophical work, and by his resulting clearer insight into Judaism; and at length he decided to set out on a journey to the Land of Israel. First he toured Spain in the hope to gather fellow Jews to join him on the journey to Israel, but found no souls willing to forsake the comforts of the Golden Age of Spain for the arduous journey to the underdeveloped Holy Land. For himself at least, he wished "to do away with the contradiction of daily confessing a longing, and of never attempting to realize it";[3] and therefore, on the death of his wife, he bade "fare-well" to daughter, grandson, pupils, friends, rank, and affluence.
After a stormy passage, he arrived in Alexandria, Egypt, where he was enthusiastically greeted by friends and admirers. At Damietta, he had to struggle against the promptings of his own heart, and the pleadings of his friend Halfon ha-Levi, that he remain in Egypt; which also was Jewish soil, and free from intolerant oppression. However he resisted the temptation to remain there, and started on the tedious land route,although he soon fell ill, and passed away while still in Egypt. He is buried there until today.
His work
The life-work of Judah ha-Levi was devoted to poetry and philosophy. His poetry is usually classified under the headings "secular and religious," or, as in Brody's new edition of the "Diwan," under "liturgical and non-liturgical." Such a division, however, can be only external; for the essential characteristic of Judah's poems is the expression of a deeply-religious soul, which is the lofty key to which they are attuned. Even in his drinking- and love-songs, an attentive reader may hear the vibrations of religion's overtones.
Secular poetry
The first place in his secular or non-liturgical poetry is occupied by poems of friendship and eulogy. Judah must have possessed an attractive personality; for there gathered about him as friends, even in his earliest youth, a large number of illustrious men, like Levi al-Tabban of Saragossa, the aged poet Judah ben Abun, Judah ibn Ghayyat of Granada, Moses ibn Ezra and his brothers Judah, Joseph, and Isaac, the vizier Abu al-Hasan, Meïr ibn Kamnial, the physician and poet Solomon ben Mu'allam of Seville, besides his schoolmates Joseph ibn Migas and Baruch Albalia. Judah is considered the Prince of Poets. However, the Vizier Samuel ha-Nagid of Granada who excelled the Sephardic poetry scale was in the previous generation as was the poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol of Malaga and Saragossa.
He was associated also with the grammarian Abraham ibn Ezra. In Córdoba, Judah addressed a touching farewell poem to Joseph ibn Ẓaddiḳ, the philosopher and poet. In Egypt, where the most celebrated men vied with one another in entertaining him, his reception was a veritable triumph. Here his particular friends were Aaron ben Jeshua Alamani in Alexandria, the nagid Samuel ben Hananiah in Cairo,[4] Halfon ha-Levi in Damietta, and an unknown man in Tyre, probably his last friend. In their sorrow and joy, in the creative spirit and all that moved the souls of these men, Judah sympathetically shared; as he says in the beginning of a short poem: "My heart belongs to you, ye noble souls, who draw me to you with bonds of love".[5]
Especially tender and plaintive is Judah's tone in his elegies[6] Many of them are dedicated to friends. Besides those composed on the deaths of the brothers Judah (Nos. 19, 20), Isaac (No. 21), and Moses ibn Ezra (No. 16), R. Baruch (Nos. 23, 28), Meïr ibn Migas (No. 27), his teacher Isaac Aifasi (No. 14), and others, one of the most affecting is that on Solomon ibn Farissol, who was murdered on May 3, 1108. The news of this friend's death suddenly changed Judah's poem of eulogy (Nos. 11, 22) into one of lamentation (Nos. 12, 13, 93 et seq.), which for grandeur and loftiness of tone has been compared to David's lament over Jonathan (see David and Jonathan).
Love songs
Joyous, careless youth, and merry, happy delight in life find their expression in his love-songs. Many of these are epithalamia; and are characterized by a brilliant near-eastern coloring, as well as by a chaste reserve. In Egypt, where the muse of his youth found a glorious "Indian summer" in the circle of his friends, he wrote his "swan-song".[7]
:Wondrous is this land to see, With perfume its meadows laden, But more fair than all to me Is yon slender, gentle maiden. Ah, Time's swift flight I fain would stay, Forgetting that my locks are gray.
Drinking songs and enigmas in rime by Judah have also been preserved.
Religious poetry
After living a life devoted to worldly pleasures, ha-Levi was to experience a kind of "awakening"; a shock, that changed his outlook on the world. Like a type of "conversion" experience, he turned from the frivolous life of pleasure, and his poetry turned to religious themes.
It seems that his profound experience was the consequence of his sensitivity to the events of history that were unfolding around him. He lived during the First Crusade and other wars. There was a new kind of religio-political fanaticism emerging in the Christian and Muslim worlds. Holy wars were brewing, and ha-Levi may have recognized that such trends had never been good for the Jews. At the time, life was relatively "good" in Spain for the Jewish community. He may have suspected things were about to change for the worse, however.
If one may speak of religious geniuses, then Judah ha-Levi must certainly be regarded among the greatest produced by medieval Judaism. No other writer, it would seem, drew so near to God as Judah; none else knew how to cling to Him so closely, or felt so safe in His shadow. At times the body is too narrow for him: the soul yearns for its Father in Heaven, and would break through the earthly shell.[8] Without God, his soul would wither away; nor is it well with him except he prays.[9] The thought of God allows him no rest; early and late He is his best beloved, and is his dearest concern.[10] He occupies the mind of the poet waking and sleeping; and the thought of Him, the impulse to praise Him, rouse Judah from his couch by night.[11]
Patriotism
Next to God, the Jewish people stands nearest to his heart: their sufferings and hopes are his. Like the authors of the Psalms, he gladly sinks his own identity in the wider one of the people of Israel; so that it is not always easy to distinguish the personality of the speaker.
Often Judah's poetic fancy finds joy in the thought of the "return" of his people to the Promised Land. He believed that perfect Jewish life was possible only in the Land of Israel. The period of political agitation about 1130, when Islam, so intensely hated by the poet, was gradually losing ground before the victorious arms of the Christians, gave Judah reason to hope for such a return in the near future. The vision of the night, in which this was revealed to him,[12] remained indeed but a dream; yet Judah never lost faith in the eventual deliverance of Israel, and in "the eternity" of his people. On this subject, he has expressed himself in poetry:
:Lo! Sun and moon, these minister for aye; The laws of day and night cease nevermore: Given for signs to Jacob's seed that they Shall ever be a nation — till these be o'er. If with His left hand He should thrust away, Lo! with His right hand He shall draw them nigh.[13]
Analysis of his poetry
The remarkable, and apparently in-dissoluble, union of religion, nationalism, and patriotism, which were so characteristic of post-exilic Judaism, reached its acme in Judah ha-Levi and his poetry. Yet this very union, in one so consistent as Judah, demanded the fulfillment of the supreme politico-religious ideal of medieval Judaism—the "return to Jerusalem". Though his impassioned call to his contemporaries to return to "Zion" might be received with indifference, or even with mockery;[14] his own decision to go to Jerusalem never wavered. "Can we hope for any other refuge either in the East or in the West where we may dwell in safety?" he exclaims to one of his opponents (ib.). The songs that accompany his pilgrimage[15] sound like one great symphony, wherein the "Zionides" — the single motive ever varied — voice the deepest "soul-life" alike; of the Jewish people and of each individual Jew.
The most celebrated of these "Zionides," with its remarkable monotony, is found in every Jewish liturgy, and is usually repeated in the synagogue on the Ninth of Ab.[16] The following is the English translation by Nina Davis (l.c. p. 37) of the opening lines:
:Zion, wilt thou not ask if peace's wing Shadows the captives that ensue thy peace, Left lonely from thine ancient shepherding?
:Lo! west and east and north and south — world-wide — All those from far and near, without surcease, Salute thee: Peace and Peace from every side."
Synagogal poetry
The poems of Judah ha-Levi, which have been adopted into the liturgy, number (in all) more than 300. The longest, and most comprehensive poem is a "Kedushah," which summons all the universe to praise God with rejoicing, and which terminates, curiously enough, in Ps. ciii. These poems were carried to all lands, even as far as India (Zunz, "Ritus," p. 57); and they influenced the rituals of the most distant countries. Even the Karaites incorporated some of them into their prayer-book; so that there is scarcely a synagogue in which Judah's songs are not sung in the course of the service.Zunz, "S. P." p. 231 The following criticism of Judah's synagogal poems is made by Zunz:
:As the perfume and beauty of a rose are within it, and do not come from without, so with Judah word and Bible passage, meter and rime, are one with the soul of the poem; as in true works of art, and always in nature, one is never disturbed by anything external, arbitrary, or extraneous.
Judah by his verses has also beautified the religious life of the home. His Sabbath hymns should be mentioned here; one of the most beautiful of which ends with the words:
:On Friday doth my cup o'erflow, What blissful rest the night shall know, When, in thine arms, my toil and woe Are all forgot, Sabbath my love!
:'Tis dusk, with sudden light, distilled From one sweet face, the world is filled; The tumult of my heart is stilled — For thou art come, Sabbath my love!
:Bring fruits and wine and sing a gladsome lay, Cry, 'Come in peace, O restful Seventh day!'
Judah used complicated Arabic meters in his poems, with much good taste.[17] A later critic, applying a Talmudic witticism to Judah, has said: "It is hard for the dough when the baker himself calls it bad." Although these forms came to him naturally and without effort, unlike the mechanical versifiers of his time,[18] he would not except himself from the number of those he had blamed. His pupil Solomon Parḥon, who wrote at Salerno in 1160, relates that Judah repented having used the new metrical methods, and had declared he would not again employ them. That Judah felt them to be out of place, and that he opposed their use at the very time when they were in vogue, plainly shows his desire for a national Jewish art; independent in form, as well as in matter.
Judah was recognized by his contemporaries as "the great Jewish national poet", and in succeeding generations, by all the great scholars and writers in Israel.
As a philosopher
The position of Judah ha-Levi in the domain of Jewish philosophy is parallel to that occupied in Islam by Ghazali, by whom he was influenced. Like Ghazali, Judah endeavored to liberate religion from the bondage of the various philosophical systems in which it had been held by his predecessors, Saadia, David ben Marwan al-Mekamez, Gabirol, and Bahya. In a work written in Arabic, and entitled "Kitab al-Ḥujjah wal-Dalil fi Nuṣr al-Din al-Dhalil" (known in the Hebrew translation of Judah ibn Tibbon by the title "Sefer ha-Kuzari," Judah ha-Levi expounded his views upon the teachings of Judaism, which he defended against the attacks of non-Jewish philosophers, Karaites, and those he viewed as "heretics".
For a discussion of ha-Levi's philosophical work, see Kuzari, considered one of the finest works in Jewish literature.
See also
★ List of craters on Mercury
Notes
1. Brody, "Diwan des Abul-Ḥasan Jehuda ha-Levi," ii., No. 14, p. 100
2. Brody, l.c. i. 224, 225
3. Kaufmann, "Jehuda Halevi"
4. "Monatsschrift," xl. 417 et seq.
5. Brody, l.c. i., No. 45)
6. Brody, l.c. ii. 67 et seq.
7. Geiger, l.c. p. 168
8. S. D. Luzzatto, "Diwan," No. 14; Heller, "Die Echten Melodien," p. 227
9. Luzzatto, l.c. No. 57; Heller, l.c. p. 135
10. Heller, l.c. p. 82; "Ṭal Orot," No. 12
11. Luzzatto, l.c. No. 81; Heller, l.c. p. 229
12. Geiger, l.c. p. 154
13. Luzzatto, l.c. No. 61; transl. by Nina Davis in "Songs of Exile," p. 49
14. Luzzatto, l.c. No. 86
15. Brody, l.c. ii. 153
16. Brody, l.c. ii. 155
17. For further details see Brody, H. ''Studien zu den Dichtungen Jehuda ha-Levi's'', Berlin, 1895
18. see "Cuzari," v. 16)
External links
★ The Kitab al-Khazari of Judah Hallevi, full English translation at sacred-texts.com
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