C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Critical and Biographical Introduction by Richard Gottheil (1862–1936)
By Judah Halevi (c. 1075–1141)
I
Of the many poets which this new life produced,—lived as it was among a people to whom poetry was so natural a mode of expression,—to Abulhasan Jehudah ben Halevi all unite in giving the crown. Born in Toledo, Old Castile, his songs and verses soon became so well known and so oft recited that the person of their author has been almost forgotten in the love shown his productions. He lived only for his pen, and no deeds are accounted him which might make the telling of his life more than of a passing interest. He was learned—as most of the men of his race then were—in all the sciences of the Arabians; had made himself proficient in the language of both Quran and Bible, was learned in the practice of medicine and facile in the discussion of philosophy. His was a thoroughly religious nature; and in joining together philosophy, and poetry, and medicine, he was following a custom not unknown in the Jewish high schools. In philosophy he communed with man about God, in poetry with God about man; while his service to his fellow-men was through his power in the healing art. “I occupy myself in the hours which belong neither to the day nor to the night, with the vanity of medical science, although I am unable to heal. I physic Babel, but it continues infirm,” are his own words in a letter to a friend. This art he practiced in Toledo and Cordova; and in one of these places he wrote in the Arabic tongue a philosophical work (‘Kuzari’) which, though perhaps bad philosophy, is a poetical and beautiful defense of his own faith against the conflicting claims of Christianity and Mohammedanism.
But at the early age of thirteen, his pen had commenced to run in the cadence of rhyme and metre. His first poems were upon subjects which touch the young,—poems of friendship, of love, and of wine, in which he made the old sedate and stately language of the Bible shake with youthful mirth and laughter. And though he never really forsook such subjects light and gay, these poems were not the real expression of his inmost being. A strong sense of the Divine presence, a romantic love for the home of his faith,—in spite of its second home in Spain,—have made of Judah Halevi the chief of the national poets of Israel whose love was rooted in the land of the patriarchs and prophets. Of all his three hundred religious poems—almost one third of the poet’s legacy—none bear the stamp of intense feeling as do these national ones. In verse after verse he bemoans the ruins of the ancient places, bewails the exile of Israel’s children, and sings the larger hope of her returned glory.
So strong was the love of Zion within him that he could not rest until he had seen in the flesh that which his spiritual eye had beheld since his youth. He had already reached the age of sixty when he set out on his long journey to the Holy Land; alone, because he had not sufficiently persuaded others up to the pitch of his own faith. And yet not entirely alone! His muse went with him; and his track was strewn with the brightest pearls which have fallen from his lips. He reached Palestine; but our knowledge of his further doings there is cut off. His body must have been laid in the sacred soil; but no man knoweth the place of his sepulture. Like Elijah of old, he went up to heaven. The popular fancy has seized upon so welcome a figure, and has told how he was cut down by an Arab at the very walls of Jerusalem, after he had poured forth the ‘Ode to Zion,’ which has done more than any of his other pieces to keep his memory alive; and of which Heine—of the elder poet’s race, and inwardly also of his faith—has said:—
And that people has returned his love a thousandfold.