His partner at the piano, the composer Thomas Adès, provided more than accompaniment. Schumann’s selection of 16 poems from Heine’s “Lyric Intermezzo,” the Dichterliebe (Poet’s Love) Op. 48, gives the piano an unusually independent voice, including several extended postludes. Adès exercises a preternatural degree of control at the keyboard—his pianissimo trills sound like a muffled electric bell—and he switched seamlessly between restrained backing for Bostridge and boisterous renderings of the piano music.

Heine converted to Christianity in his youth but returned to Judaism on his death bed, where he wrote a handful of last, deeply religious poems. He remained conflicted until his death between the blandishments of secular culture and Jewish faith. Schubert and Schumann set his early love poetry, with its aching sense of loss and anti-Romantic self-awareness. Not until much later was Heine identified with the 12th-century Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi, whose love was “the very picture of destruction, and her name was Jerusalem.” Still, Heine’s early poems belong to the cultural treasure-chest of the Jewish people. The attraction and repulsion of earthly love in Heine’s verse betray the sense of the sacred that emerged in his deathbed poems. And the settings of great composers offer the easiest point of access now that Jews have parted company with the German language.

Bostridge’s voice is pretty rather than powerful, strongest in the head voice, and sometimes strained in lower registers. He has a disconcerting habit of starting vibrato a moment after starting a note. Many operatic tenors—one thinks of the late Fritz Wunderlich—brought a more beautiful sound to this repertoire.  All his vocal sins are forgiven, though, for his service to poet and composer.

Bostridge and Adès were at their best in songs like the Dichterliebe’s No. 14, in which the poet recounts a recurring dream about his lost love: She gives him a cypress branch and whispers a soft word to him, and then, “I wake up, the branch is gone, and I’ve forgotten the word.” To convey the somnambulant character of the narrative, Schumann keeps the meter eerily off-beat, so that the last line tumbles out too quickly, enhancing Heine’s punch line.

Not all of the Dichterliebe came off so well. No. 9 is a ghastly waltz, in which the poet lurks outside his beloved’s wedding party, listening to the dance music. “There’s a flute, a violin, and trumpets … and in between, the lovely little angels sob and groan,” the poet sneers. Inexplicably, Bostridge chose a tempo so fast that even the masterful Adès could not find many of the bass notes. (For Vladimir Horowitz’s version, see here at minute 1:25.)

And in the penultimate song, which tells of a fairy-tale land, Adès ignored Schumann’s repeated emphasis on the wrong beats, which so effectively convey the weirdness of the vision. To Heine’s complaint that “when the morning sun arrives, it all dissolves into foam,” Schumann evokes the popping of a bubble; and the popping bubble at the end of the song sets up the grand appoggiatura that announces the final number, a funeral march for the poet’s illusions.

Bostridge’s choice of an exceptionally fast tempo in the final song also was puzzling.  The verse is a dead-march that evokes giants carrying an enormous coffin to the sea, where the poet will bury his love and pain—not a quick-step. The overlap between the final measures of the preceding song and the opening of the last number also indicates a moderate pace. Bostridge had chosen a better tempo in an earlier performance.

These are small complaints, though, about a performance that for the most part displayed intelligence and attention to detail. The second half of the program included the seven Heine songs Schubert composed in the last year of his life, from the posthumously published Schwanengesang, or “Swan Song,” collection. Here Bostridge was entirely at home and convincing in all respects.

The evening opened with a curious self-indulgence: Bostridge performed a song by the English Renaissance composer John Dowland, and Adès followed with a solo composition—as the program notes explained, they were “exploding” Dowland’s music. It is the sort of work, to paraphrase Rossini, that one can’t appreciate at first hearing but isn’t likely to listen to twice.

We are honored to have this week’s winner be Yaffa Dermer, mother of top Netanyahu adviser Ron Dermer, whom senior writer Allison Hoffman profiled. After an unwise commenter questioned Dermer’s grandfather’s decision to be a builder in Florida rather than Israel, suggesting that regulations in the former were more lax, Dermer mère pounced:

Please be advised that Ron Dermer’s grandfather was a member of the bricklayers Union in the U.S. He only supervised constructions jobs for other contractors. He loved and protected the beauty and the integrity of landscape. He is the only supervisor who was honored at the end of any job, for example the Miami Museum of Science put a plaque in his memory for the fine work he did, or was made an honorary Conch when he supervised the Jail building in Key West. Don’t write lies. Ron’s mother and a very proud daughter.

And his grandson is the Likud prime minister’s top adviser. There’s an essay in that.

Yaffa Dermer gets Hillel Halkin’s biography of Yehuda Halevi, which is about a man (two, if you count Halkin) who felt he could only fully be a Jew in Israel. Her father, in this author’s own humble opinion, is a rebuke to that theory.

Bibi’s Brain
Yehuda Halevi [Nextbook Press]

If your eye for type is impeccable, you will note that the Hebrew font in which Halevi’s words are printed has never been seen before: It is the debut of Le Bé, an original digitized typeface created by Scott-Martin Kosofsky and Matthew Carter to be sort of the Hebrew version of Garamond. If you are a typeface nerd—yes, such people exist—I strongly recommend this Tablet Magazine slideshow all about it.

Of course, if you prefer the movies, you can watch Nextbook Press editor Jonathan Rosen discuss the project below:

The Selected Poems of Yehuda Halevi [Nextbook Press]
Letters Lost and Found [Tablet Magazine]
Related: Yehuda Halevi [Nextbook Press]

The Selected Poems of Yehuda Halevi is available from Nextbook Press here.

PRODUCED BY ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO. PHOTOGRAPHY BY AMANDA KOWALSKI.

Germany will not fade from the Jewish present, nor, indeed, from the Jewish past. When we try today to picture the world of German Jewry, we are most likely to see the pointlessness of it all through the eyes of Franz Kafka and other Jews who once formed the cutting edge of cultural experimentation. In 2005 the Jewish Museum in New York devoted its main exhibition space to the salons of wealthy Jewish women from the late 18th century through the 1940s and their patronage of early Modernist artists—Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso, Oscar Wilde, and Marcel Proust. The coffee-klatsch and a college education launched the careers of any number of Jewish literary figures, but memories are fading. As a small child I wondered at the writers who stood on my grandparents’ small bookshelf, with magically unpronounceable names—Leon Feuchtwanger, for example, the bestselling novelist of the 1920s whom Hitler dubbed the “number one enemy of the state.” English editions of his novels are hard to scrounge today from used booksellers. The cultural world of German-Jewish assimilation lies moldering in Jewish studies departments.

In truth, there are two stories within the terrible history of Germany and the Jews. One is the story of the German Jews, Europe’s most assimilated community, who contributed to German civic life in vast disproportion to their small numbers. The other story is the meeting of German culture and Jewish religion. This story will never quite fade from Jewish life. Like the medieval Jewish engagement with Greek and Islamic thought, it raises issues that should preoccupy Jewish scholars for generations. It took place far from the glittering salons of the Berlin elite, in yeshiva classrooms and the lodgings of itinerant students. But it continues to have bearing on how Jews might live in the modern world, and its lessons, good as well as bad, will not soon lose importance.

It is still painful for Jews to bring to mind their long encounter with German culture. In the 2009 edition of Yeshiva University’s journal Torah u-Madda, Marc B. Shapiro published a translation of a sermon that the great Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch gave before his synagogue on the hundredth birthday of the German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller in 1859. Hirsch lauded Schiller’s compassion and humanitarianism as Torah values, and quoted at length the poet’s “Ode to Joy,” the one Schiller poem Americans might have read, because Beethoven set its opening stanzas in his Ninth Symphony.

Shapiro’s translation bothered some Orthodox bloggers who objected to any kind reference to German culture. Schiller’s youthful Ode, to be sure, offers a soupy appeal to universal brotherhood that sounds better in his sonorous German verse than in the post-mortem of translation. Schiller wrote, for example,

Rancor and revenge be forgotten!
Our mortal enemy be forgiven!
Not one tear should oppress him,
No regret should gnaw at him.

The above strophe shows how much of the difference between German and Yiddish lies in pronunciation; in Yiddish we would say, rather, “Not one tear should oppress him? No regret should gnaw at him?” With due respect to Hirsch, there is some truth to the remonstration that he conceded too much to the universalism of German philosophy. But the give and take between German Jewish Orthodoxy and the poets of German Classicism was richer and subtler than his Schiller sermon might suggest.

By no accident, the outstanding leaders of what would become the main currents of American Judaism all studied at the University of Berlin during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the sage of postwar Modern Orthodoxy, wrote a doctorate in philosophy and mathematics there in 1932. Abraham Joshua Heschel, the leading voice of Conservative Judaism, finished his doctorate (later published as The Prophets) a couple of years later. The Reform scholar Leo Baeck earned his doctorate under the Berlin philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. The future Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, attended classes for two years in the early 1930s. Franz Rosenzweig, who belonged to no denomination but is read by all, had finished a dissertation (still in print) on Hegel and the state before abandoning academic life to lead a school for Jewish adult education.

Apart from Rosenzweig, none of them were German. Berlin was a magnet for Polish Jews like Schneerson, Heschel, and Baeck, and the Lithuanian Soloveitchik, because German Orthodoxy had created an intellectual world in dialogue with secular culture unlike any other since the time of Maimonides. At the center of this world was Berlin’s Hildesheimer Yeshiva, whose rector in the early 1930s, Yechiel Weinberg, led a Polish congregation before earning a doctorate in Hebrew at the University of Giessen. David Lincoln, rabbi emeritus at New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue, met some of the Hildesheimer faculty after they came to Britain as wartime refugees. “My teacher,” Lincoln recalls, “was a traditional Jew with a long beard and forelocks, utterly strict in observance, but he had done a dissertation on Wordsworth.”

Even Franz Rosenzweig, whose attachment to German identity never faded during his brief life, might be counted as an honorary Ostjud. In 1913 he had decided to convert to Protestant Christianity, like any good Hegelian. But Rosenzweig, raised in a secular home, felt that he should convert to Christianity as a Jew, and for the first time attended Yom Kippur services—as it happened, in a shtiebel with Eastern European Jews. The religious passion of the Polish minyan won him over, and he became a baal tshuvah, a Jew who turns to embrace Orthodox Judaism, rather than a Christian.

Judaism’s encounter with Germany took place far from the salons of the German-Jewish elite. The secular achievements of German Jews still astonish: Fewer than a million of them left a giant imprint on science, art, and industry, not to mention the 1914 war effort. In the 1830s, the foremost musician and the foremost poet in this land of music and poetry were, respectively, Felix Mendelssohn and Heinrich Heine—both Christian converts, but prominently identified as Jews. German Jews earned Nobel Prizes in science and Olympic gold medals in saber (after the dueling clubs at German universities excluded them). They built critical sectors of the German economy. Despite his personal anti-Semitism, Kaiser Wilhelm II relied on Walter Rathenau, the Jewish president of General Electric of Germany, and the shipping magnate Albert Ballin, who killed himself when Germany lost World War I. To the extent that German Jews helped build German industry, Hitler was the final beneficiary of their enterprise, and to is hard to suppress the wish that they had done something else.

The story has been told well by Fritz Stern, and Paul Mendes-Flohr and other writers have dissected the German Jews’ tragic identification with their new Fatherland. After World War II, German Jews became the butt of yekke jokes (after the jacket, or Jacke, that they  insisted on wearing even in Israel’s summer heat). “There’s no way Hitler could have lost that war if only he had gotten the Jews on his side,” goes one.

German-Jewish assimilation left little trace. The Reform and Conservative movements are German transplants to America, although in their present form they bear little resemblance to their Teutonic antecedents. The great biblical scholar Solomon Schechter (1847-1915) founded the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1903 as a traditional riposte to Reform Judaism, but his notion of a Jewish law that evolves by national consensus has left a legacy so confused that it is hard to speak of a Conservative Jewish theology. The German roots of Reform Judaism have long since faded.

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If Córdoba symbolizes anything in the context of architecture and religion, it is how all religions use power, when they have it, to promote their concept of their own grandeur and importance in architectural terms. The proposed construction of Cordoba House on a site two blocks from the area razed by Muslim jihadists is no exception to this rule. It is no worse than what has been done countless other times in the course of history, but it is not much better, either.

Philologos should definitely take a look at Nextbook Press’s Yehuda Halevi, by Hillel Halkin, which expertly examines the same time and place. The columnist would find much to agree with.

A Cordoban Chord [Forward]
Related: Why Cordoba?
Yehuda Halevi [Nextbook Press]

Córdoba was the capital of the Islamic caliphate that controlled the Iberian peninsula during the Middle Ages. Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who runs the Cordoba Initiative with his wife, named his project “after the period between roughly 800 and 1200 CE, when the Cordoba Caliphate ruled much of today’s Spain, and its name reminds us that Muslims created what was, in its era, the most enlightened, pluralistic, and tolerant society on earth,” he wrote in his 2004 book What’s Right With Islam. Rauf is seeking to align himself with those who see the period as the “Golden Age of Spain,” or what’s called the convivencia—“the coexistence”—when members of the three Abrahamic faiths lived side-by-side in peace, prosperity, and astonishing cultural and intellectual creativity.

For almost two centuries, though, as many Jewish scholars have described medieval Spain as atrocious for its Jews as have seen it as a sort of utopia. The latest to call the utopians’ bluff is essayist Hillel Halkin, in his 2010 Nextbook Press biography of the period’s greatest Jewish poet, Yehuda Halevi. “The higher Jews did rise,” Halkin writes of the time and place, “the more they aroused the anger and resentment of the Muslim or Christian majority, and the more vulnerable they became. The culture of tolerance stretched only so far.” Muslims, Christians, and Jews in medieval Spain “kept socially to themselves,” according to Halkin, “never intermarried, were convinced of the superiority of their own faith, and shared no common identity.” As for the intimations of some that the period was an ancestor of our contemporary multicultural West? “Such an analogy,” Halkin concludes, “is misleading.”

The debate over what Spain was like for its Jews 900 years ago has rarely been purely academic. Rather, over the past two centuries, Jewish historians have frequently seen in the period things they needed to see in order to make arguments about contemporary circumstances. If coexistence in Christian- and Muslim-ruled Spain was possible even in the 11th century, some have argued, then why do Jews today need a state in which they are the ones in charge—why, rather, shouldn’t the states in which they already reside welcome them as fully equal citizens? And if, on the other hand, even the convivencia—supposedly history’s most brightly shining beacon of multifaith tolerance—was a myth, then how could the Jews do without a state in which they are the ones in charge? The battle over medieval Spain is, to many, a battle over Zionism, and over what it means to be a Jew today.

***

According to Princeton historian Mark Cohen, the notion of convivencia, of medieval Spain as utopia, began with mid-19th century German-Jewish historians. Disappointed to find that emancipation did not equal equality, they crafted a long-ago world of true Jewish freedom as the model that their own world failed to live up to. “They looked back nostalgically to Muslim Spain, and said, ‘Look there,’ ” Cohen told me. “They wanted to embarrass the Christians.” They were not demanding a state of their own; on the contrary, they were demanding the right to live freely in another people’s state and, moreover, to be considered members of that people.

A subsequent batch of historians, under the spell of early-20th-century Zionism, cast medieval Spain not as a utopia but as, according to Cohen, “an unmitigated disaster.” They did so in order to argue that “Arab anti-Semitism is firmly rooted in a congenital, endemic Muslim/Arab Jew-hatred,” which in turn buttressed their case for a country of, by, and for the Jewish people.

So, which of those versions is right? Neither, Cohen said. In one essay, he refers to a “myth” (the German historians’ heaven) and a “counter-myth” (the Zionist historians’ hell) and asserts that the truth lies somewhere in between. Those who hold up the period as an ideal are exaggerating: “In a medieval situation,” he argues, “where you have monotheistic religions living in proximity, there is no such thing as toleration.” (In other words, tell “toleration” to the Jews of Granada, many of whom were massacred by angry Muslims in 1066, or to Granada’s Jewish vizier at the time, who was crucified.) And those who downplay the extent of tolerance and pluralism exaggerate, too. “If by convivencia,” said Cornell historian Ross Brann, “we mean that cultural and social proximity, conversation, and interaction among Jews, Muslims, and Christians were significant and productive,” then convivencia was real.

Despite the rise of this compromise position, some historians continue to push versions of the two more extreme visions of the period. The most prominent contemporary member of what might be termed the “utopian” school is Yale humanities professor María Rosa Menocal. And the historian to most recently advance the “counter-myth”—to posit that medieval Spain was largely hellish for its Jews—is Halkin.

***

Though Yehuda Halevi is wide-ranging (it spends a great deal of time, for example, on Halevi’s poetry, which Halkin translated), its central thesis is this: The defining moment of Halevi’s life was his decision to leave Spain for the Holy Land—a decision he made after realizing that a Jew could not freely and fully be a Jew in the Spain of his lifetime (roughly 1070 to 1140). “Halevi understood,” Halkin argues, “that Gentile oppression was the inevitable result of exilic existence.” It was an inevitable result nine centuries ago, and—to hear Halkin tell it—it remains an inevitable result today. And just as aliyah was the solution to the oppressiveness of exilic existence nine centuries ago, so it remains, according to Halkin, the solution today.

Yehuda Halevi is really a dual biography: a biography and an autobiography. “Like Yehuda Halevi,” writes Halkin, who moved from the United States to Israel in 1970, “I grew up with convivencia. It was just that the con didn’t go with the vivencia. Like wrong pieces of a puzzle, the two sides of me refused to fit together. The Jew and the American were barely on speaking terms.” The central moment in Halkin’s own life was when he chose to make aliyah, much as Halevi had done.

Halkin needs convivencia to have been a myth, and to be replaceable with a world in which the Granada pogrom was merely the most extreme example of a general trend, because Zionism—specifically, the strand of Zionism that states that Jews must rule themselves and have the ability to defend themselves—is a second-order value for him. For this reason, he attacks Menocal, the Yale professor and ultimate Golden Age-ist, in his book. In his interview with me, he asserted that medieval Spain has been “greatly idealized” and that Menocal and others, “in holding it up as some kind of human ideal of coexistence, are involved in a distortion of history.”

(Brann, of Cornell, disputes Halkin’s characterization. “Menocal only asserts that this period of cultural creativity featured abundant social and economic interaction,” he told me. And Cohen accused Halkin of projecting his polemical method onto Menocal; he insists that she is an academic historian seeking the objective truth rather than a debater trying to make a point. Menocal declined to comment for this article, instead referring me to Brann and Cohen.)

***

The professors I spoke to—who all offered various praises of Yehuda Halevi—supplied the same general critique: Halkin is a talented writer; he knows his stuff; but he is not an academic. More to the point, he does not possess the academic’s relentlessly single-minded focus on determining what actually happened. Rather, he allows his historical descriptions to be influenced by his ideological beliefs—”He’s very political,” said Raymond P. Scheindlin, of the Jewish Theological Seminary, “and has very strong opinions about the role of the Jewish people in the world.” (See Scheindlin and Halkin discussing Halevi earlier this year.)

Halkin can snipe as good as he is sniped at. “Academics are in the habit of deconstructing everyone but themselves,” he told me. Additionally, he is merely the latest in a two-century-old line of Jewish historians who have deployed preferred versions of medieval Spain in arguments about the present day. “I suppose you could say,” he admitted, “that the book was written all along with what I openly profess to having: A Zionist bias.” He added, “My Halevi is very much a Zionist, or a proto-Zionist. I approached the subject with that sense, and I came away with it only strengthened.”

Imam Rauf, the man behind the Cordoba Initiative, appears to be doing much the same thing as Halkin: using his view of what Spain used to be to advance his idea for what the world ought to be today. (Rauf is traveling and did not reply to requests for comment.) “We strive for a ‘New Cordoba,’ a time when Jews, Christians, Muslims, and all other faith traditions will live together in peace, enjoying a renewed vision of what the good society can look like,” he writes in the introduction to his 2004 book.

I asked Halkin what he thought of the Cordoba Initiative’s name. “It’s obvious what Cordoba stands for,” he replied. “Whether the real Cordoba was what Cordoba stands for is another question. But there’s nothing terribly wrong with it.”

So, maybe the solution is just to move beyond symbols? “We’re all basically defending our choices and lives and honors,” Halkin told me. “My Halevi is a defense of the choices I’ve made.”

“I’m willing to put Halevi aside and just say it,” he added.

Additional reporting by Mark Bergen.

• Our most favorite, of course, is the rave that esteemed intellectual Robert Alter gives to Hillel Halkin’s biography of Yehuda Halevi, published by Nextbook Press. “His biography,” says Alter, “with the translations it incorporates”—and Alter knows a thing or two about translating!—“gives us a vivid and persuasive sense of Yehuda Halevi that should make him more real and more understandable than he has been until now.” [“All the Good Things of Spain”]

• Ruth Wisse, author of Nextbook Press’s Jews and Power, remembers the great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever and the great Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich. [“The Poet from Vilna”]

• Walter Russell Mead explores Christian Zionism. [“Friends of Zion”]

• Anne Trubek reviews Allegra Goodman’s forthcoming novel, which was inspired by Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. [“Going Public”]

• Martin Kavka reviews Judith Shulevitz’s book on the Sabbath (which we podcast’d). [“Old-New Sabbath”]

• Ben Birnbaum slams Milton Steinberg’s posthumous novel, which staff writer Marissa Brostoff reported on. [“The Prophet’s Wife”]

Yehuda Halevi is one of the great poets of the Western tradition and arguably the finest Hebrew poet between the Bible and the 20th-century, but it is difficult to convey his life and achievement to an English-reading audience. Ignorance, false preconceptions, and confusions abound regarding the medieval Spanish world in which he flourished: the distinctive social and cultural matrix of Halevi’s poetry is not well understood, relations between Jews and Muslims at the time have too often been idealized, and the group identity of the Jews of medieval Iberia does not fit common stereotypes. The nature of Halevi’s poetry is an even greater challenge. His technical virtuosity makes his poems extraordinarily difficult to translate. They are endlessly inventive in their word and sound-play, exquisitely musical, and constantly resourceful in their marshalling of biblical allusions in line after line.

Hillel Halkin has done a superb job in responding to these challenges in what is, in my view, his best book. Yehuda Halevi is Halkin’s second foray into medieval Hebrew poetry. A decade ago, he published Grand Things to Write a Poem on: A Verse Autobiography of Shmuel Hanagid, about Halevi’s great predecessor. Halkin is a translator and old-fashioned “man of letters” rather than an academic, but the scholarly thoroughness and rigor (both historical and literary) that he brings to bear in writing Halevi’s biography are impeccable. He gives a lucid account of the emergence, in the latter part of the 10th-century, of a new Hebrew poetry that freely treated secular as well as religious subjects and that followed the qualitative versification, conventional tropes, and genre system of Arabic poetry. He also guides us through the political upheavals of the 11th- and 12th-centuries that drove Halevi from place to place.

The poet was born in Christian Spain, probably in Tudela, between 1070 and 1075. As a very young man, perhaps still an adolescent, he made his way to Granada in the Muslim south, where, in one of the most famous documented anecdotes in Hebrew literary history, he was befriended by Moshe ibn Ezra, the leading poet of the age, after a virtuoso improvisation in a verse competition at a drinking party. As Halkin vividly recounts the story, “the young man from Castile,” when given the challenge of reproducing on the spot the intricate formal structure of a poem by ibn Ezra, not only did so flawlessly but “played repeatedly with its language, echoing it, reflecting it, and sometimes surpassing it while following its every step like a consummate dance partner.”

After a few brief years of residence in Granada, Halevi, probably impelled by the invasion of the Almoravids from Morocco, began a period of wandering, eventually returning to Christian Spain and settling in Toledo. In Toledo, he supported himself as a physician, a profession for which, in Halkin’s plausible account, he had no great love.

After more than three decades in Toledo, in 1140, Halevi left Spain, in a project that could have only been regarded as bizarre and misguided in his own time, for the Land of Israel, then in the hands of the Crusaders and possessing a meager Jewish population. The details of his last months have been much disputed by scholars, but Halkin does an excellent job of sorting out the facts. Halevi’s ship disembarked at Alexandria in early September 1140. In Egypt he was lionized and, indeed, fought over by competing hosts. After half a year, in which as his poems show, he was not insensible to the lushness and luxury of Egypt, he extricated himself from his importunate hosts and on May 7, 1141, departed by ship for Acre. As the documents Halkin canvasses indicate, he died somewhere in the Land of Israel about three months after his arrival there. The story of his being trampled by an Arab horseman at the gates of Jerusalem is no doubt apocryphal, though it vividly registers the devotion to the Holy Land that he expressed so memorably in his Songs of Zion.

Beyond this broad outline, the details of Halevi’s life have to be teased out by inference, largely from hints in the poems. Halkin does this judiciously, though at least a few of his conclusions are necessarily conjectural. He proposes that Halevi had two children who died young, and a daughter who bore a grandson named after him and who was probably married to the son of the great poet and biblical commentator Abraham ibn Ezra. Halevi did not write about his wife, and Halkin infers from this that she did not play much of a role in his emotional life. This may well have been the case, but arguments from silence are always a little tricky. From the spectacular long love poem that begins “Why, my darling, have you barred all news,” which Halkin justly rates as one of Halevi’s finest poems, he concludes that the poet did have one early grand passion, but in the end was somehow separated from her. I would like to think so, too, though one must concede that there is a leap of inference in moving from poem to life and that even a poem as powerfully felt as this one might still have been an act of sheer poetic invention. Like many biographers, Halkin occasionally goes on to treat such conjectures as though they were established facts, though on the whole he is circumspect in building a picture of the life from the existing evidence.

The book also offers a helpful account of the immediate and larger contexts of Halevi’s career as well as of the later reception of his work. Against the common notion that this was a “Golden Age” of Hebrew poetry in which Arabs and Jews in Andalusia enjoyed the blessing of convivencia, or harmonious co-existence and mutual tolerance, he shows what serious historians of this time and place have long known: there were deep tensions between Arabs and Jews. Spanish Jews were on occasion subject to murderous pogroms, and though they drew from the riches of Arabic culture, the Muslims among whom they lived generally despised them. This attitude was richly reciprocated. Medieval Spanish Jews generally regarded Islam as, in Halkin’s blunt words, “an insult to human intelligence” for accusing Judaism of having fabricated a past about which the Jews alone possessed the authentic version.

Yehuda Halevi abounds in brilliant translations of the poems, and Halkin has clearly taken great pleasure in producing them. He has an apt sense for which are the finest poems. Such translation needs to be accompanied by commentary, and Halkin is consistently good in performing this task. His concise concluding comment on the famous poem that begins, “My heart in the East / But the rest of me far in the West” is exemplary: “It is a miniature marvel of balance in which opposites tug in different directions while remaining musically joined; an answer to a riddle that asks, what, though torn in two, remains whole; the last moment of equipoise in a man tensing his muscles to jump and to take Jewish history with him.” That jump to the East, of course, will be recorded in detail in the last section of the biography.

The discussion of the poems is also quite helpful to the English reader in identifying many of the subtle and telling allusions to biblical texts. I noticed only one slip. In a poem written in Egypt in which Halevi begs his hosts to allow him to leave for the Holy Land, Halkin claims that the phrase “Let me travel to my Lord,” shalchuni ve-elkha la-adoni, alludes to Moses’ “let my people go” because the same verb is used. In fact, these words are a verbatim quote from Genesis 24:54, in which Abraham’s servant implores Rebekah’s family in Mesopotomia to let him go back to his master in Canaan, a more pertinent destination for the poem than the wilderness to which Moses is headed: “Do not hold me back … send me off, that I may go to my lord.”

The translation of these intricate and virtuosic Hebrew poems is a difficult undertaking, and Halkin does an admirable job, producing English versions that seem to me preferable to Peter Cole’s widely praised translations. The best of the translations exhibit a decorous eloquence, like this stanza from the elegy that may have been for Halevi’s own daughter:
Alter Revised Halevi Article Image

O daughter torn
From her mother’s rooms!
What life have I left when,
Shaped from my soul,
She makes my tears flow
Like a spring from split stone?
How can she be so changed,
Once white as the moon,
That she now wears the earth
As her bridal gown,
Its sod the sweets
Of her wedding feast?
Bitter is my own misery,
For death has come between you and me.

In place of the monorhyme of the original, which is virtually impossible to reproduce in English, Halkin sensibly deploys, as he does often elsewhere, an irregular pattern of slant rhymes (stone-moon-gown) and almost-rhymes (sweets-feast). These hints of the musicality of the Hebrew reinforce the expressiveness of the English. At times, however, Halkin strains too hard for rhymes, producing odd or ungainly turns of phrase. In one religious poem, we encounter “Arabia’s minions” who covet Israel’s “beau,” that is, her God. “Beau,” which I suspect Halkin uses to get a near-rhyme with “sows” at the end of the line, is a mistake in register, carrying associations of Restoration comedy or antebellum Southern plantations. Similarly, in the love poem, “Why, My Darling, Have You Barred All News,” Halkin gives us: “My heart, half sweetness and half bitterness, / Honeyed kisses mixed with hemlock of adieus, / Has been shredded by you into pieces, / and each piece twisted into curlicues.” The first two of these lines are fine, but the shredding into pieces of the heart, and especially the curlicue, are something of an embarrassment. And yet, in this same poem, Halkin beautifully conveys the lovely force of the Hebrew in the following lines:

Between us lies a sea of tears I cannot cross,
Yet should you but approach its moaning waves,
They’d part beneath your steps,
And if, though dead, I heard the golden bells
Make music on your skirt, or your voice asking
how I was,
I’d send my love to you from the grave’s depths.

The mostly iambic meter of this English version works very nicely. It is not necessary for Halkin to claim, in a justification for his own use of accentual-syllabic meters, that the medieval Hebrew poems exhibit regular patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables despite their deployment of ostensibly quantitative meters. It is perfectly true, as he says, that the adoption of quantitative verse from the Arabic was artificial because Hebrew does not intrinsically have an audible distinction between long and short vowels. Instead, the half-vowel schwa (like the “a” in “alone”) and all its grammatical equivalents were conventionally defined as short syllables for metrical purposes. But poets attuned to the Arabic meters would surely have read the Hebrew in a fashion that brought out the patterned sequences of short and long and that actually muted stress. (A small case in point from a familiar text: in the hymn Adon Olam, the only proper way to read the two words azai melekh, “then king,” is u – - -, which is one metrical foot, and not u´´u, or as it is usually sung with a false stress on the last syllable to produce an iamb, u´u´.)

As Halkin justly observes in contrasting his view of Halevi’s last voyage with that of the American scholar of medieval Hebrew poetry, Raymond Scheindlin, “it is one of the measures of literary greatness that we see ourselves in it.” For Halkin, who made the decision as a young man to move from America to Israel, the ultimate realization of Halevi’s life was his determination in his last years to tear himself from “all the good things of Spain,” kol tuv sefarad, and make his way to the Land of Israel. Halkin discusses this driving motive intelligently as it is expressed in both the poetry and in Halevi’s famous philosophical dialogue, The Kuzari. He is careful not to represent it as a simple instance of medieval proto-Zionism. This is a plausible focus for defining Halevi’s life and work, and I am not inclined to debate it. If there is an emphasis that might be added to Halkin’s account, it is the rich sensuality that suffuses so many of the poems—those golden bells on the skirt of the beloved woman—religious as well as secular. Such sensualism sets him apart, at least in degree, from the other Hebrew poets of his era.

Many of Halevi’s most brilliant religious poems fall under the category called ahavah, the liturgical prelude in the morning service to the benediction “Blessed are You . . . who loves Israel.” As Halkin properly notes, these poems are strongly inflected by the allegorical reading of the Song of Songs, in which God is the lover and the people of Israel the beloved (though even in allegory, the sexiness of these biblical poems was not lost on Halevi). But there is also a strong carry-over from the secular love poems, shaped on Arabic models, in which the lovers have been painfully separated and the speaker (usually male), recalling the nights of rapture at some desert encampment, bemoans the separation. Some of Halevi’s ahavot vividly individualize the abandoned beloved and endow her with an erotic psychology, representing her, for example, as masochistically reveling in her suffering and humiliation because, coming as they do from her lover, they alone give meaning to her life.

In one of Halevi’s most memorable ahavot, the beloved begins with these words: “My love, have you forgotten how you lay between my breasts, / and how could you have let me be by slavers long oppressed?” At the end, after looking back on how she has been shamed and banished through the harsh stations of exile, she strikes an explicitly sexual note: “Give your strength to me, / and to you I’ll give my loving.” The last word, dodim, is drawn from the lexicon of the Song of Songs and obviously invokes the allegorical reading of that text, but, as Halevi was perfectly aware, it is a term that refers to lovemaking, not merely to an emotion of love. The messianic redemption is imagined in the poem concretely as a moment of sexual consummation: the divine lover, long absent, gives his strength to (or puts his strength into) his beloved, who responds with welcoming rapture.

There is surely no single key that explains extraordinary achievement such as Halevi’s, though sensual immediacy is one of his creative signatures. Hillel Halkin is no doubt aware of this characteristic, but his own emphasis falls elsewhere. In any case, his biography, with the translations it incorporates, gives us a vivid and persuasive sense of Yehuda Halevi that should make him more real and more understandable than he has been until now.

• Really interesting comments popped up since the podcast was published yesterday morning. “Asher” argues that when he first heard it, in Jerusalem right before the Six Day War, the words had different meaning than they do now:

I think the anachronistic criticism of their “politics” misses the point that it was originally not about the actual Jerusalem across the border in Jordan, but about the mythic Jerusalem of Jewish dreamers in exile. Hence the references to Yehuda Halevi, and the fittingness of the sad melody. Nobody could have imagined in May 1967 that the Old City would ever become accessible to Jews again. Even we living then in the sleepy little town of western Jerusalem, with its still pristine mountain air, on the quiet edge of no-man’s land, felt permanently exiled from the historical Yerushalayim, and were understandably oblivious to the daily lives of its unknowable Jordanian inhabitants. That was the sense in which the song spoke, as in Lamentations, of the city being desolate.

And “Qais” informs us that his family translated the song into Arabic [sic]:

Yesterday may grandmother told me, when she was playing in Jerusalem in the old city, in 1937 in her childhood, it was glorious city, the sun was shiny, her grandfather owned a small restaurant for Hummus and Falafel … she told me that in 1967 the Jews destroyed her neighbors houses and exiled her and her family to Jordan, after few years the Jews closed her Grandfather restaurant, she told me that some day she and her sister visited her remained relatives in the old city, her tears reached her chin, when she saw a Jews people settled in her child hood house, she told me I felt a pain in my throat that I want to cry but I can’t, it’s the feel when you see your home and you can’t enter it.

Thus we translated this song into Arabic; we listen to it every day from 1967 till now. Now it’s a destroyed city, now it’s an empty, nobody comes to the “temple” mount.

• As for the connection between the song’s lyrics and the poetry of Yehuda Halevi, Hillel Halkin had this to say in his new Nextbook Press biography:

On May 15, 1967, the nineteenth Independence Day of the state of Israel, Egyptian forces entered Sinai in large numbers after weeks of growing military tensions. That evening, in celebration of the holiday, a song festival attended by prime minister Levi Eshkol and army chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin was held in Jerusalem’s National Auditorium. The hit of the evening was a lyric called “Jerusalem of Gold,” written for the occasion by the librettist and composer Naomi Shemer and sung to a haunting minor-key melody by a wispy-voiced vocalist named Shuli Natan. The second line of its refrain of “Jerusalem of gold, of copper, and of light, / To all you songs I am a lute” was taken from Yehuda Halevi’s “Zion! Do You Wonder?”

Three weeks later, the Six Day War broke out. On its third day, the old walled city of Jerusalem, with its golden Dome of the Rock and Temple Mount, fell to Israeli troops. Wet-eyed paratroopers sang “Jerusalem of Gold” at the Western Wall. The war’s unofficial anthem and one of the most popular Israeli songs ever written, it marked the moment, one might say, at which Yehuda Halevi went from being a national poet to a fully nationalized one.

Song Cycle [Tablet Magazine]
Yehuda Halevi [Nextbook Press]

Earlier this month, we asked our readers to get in touch with their inner 11th century poet and reimagine so-called “poet laureate of the Jewish people” Yehuda Halevi‘s words. And today, we’re proud to announce the winner: Susan Comninos, whose poem you can enjoy below. And then later, maybe put it in your pocket?

Congratulations, Susan!

“Can I do what I’ve vowed to and must?”
- Yehuda Halevi

COVET

Thou shalt not
bear the winds higher
than they would blow. Thou shalt never

prick halls of glass
with a bow and arrow. Thou shalt fail
to sway the sky

with the ceiling, stone
through the floor, leaves
with feeling – the dense weight

of a dank heart. Thou
shalt entertain no note
without instruments, sloth

without toil – sweat from strong languor.
Thou shalt not stroke
wood of others’

baseboards, nor
bewail banisters
to a barren house. Thou

shalt bring in bees
from the hive, swear
allegiance to their stings – sing alone

of a scant
incandescence: of a lion’s
fraught den, and no honeyed signs.

-Susan Comninos

21st century America is a little bit different. For most of us, poetry is something outside of the everyday—but to celebrate National Poetry Month, Tablet is trying to be a bit more like medieval Spain by including a Halevi poem, in Halkin’s new translation, on the Scroll each afternoon. Halevi, writing from the ship that will take him to Palestine, addresses today’s poem to his friend Aharon el-Ammani, expressing his desire to visit him once more. Enjoy your daily drink of Andalusian wine below—or download and print out a pocket-sized version here. Plus, check out a bonus poetry feature from our archives, and don’t forget to enter Nextbook Press and Tablet Magazine’s Yehuda Halevi poetry contest!

At such a time, my eyes can’t hold
The tears back any more.
They pour like hailstones,
Hot from a storm-lit heart.
To part from Yitzhak was the easy part,
Even though the shock of it was rude.
But now that Shlomo is gone, too,
I’m left in solitude
With no hope of seeing anyone again.
And that’s the last of all my friends from Spain!

21st century America is a little bit different. For most of us, poetry is something outside of the everyday—but to celebrate National Poetry Month, Tablet is trying to be a bit more like medieval Spain by including a Halevi poem, in Halkin’s new translation, on the Scroll each afternoon. Halevi wrote today’s poem while far out at sea, where the world seemed deserted to him. “Neither bird, beast, nor man?” he asks. “Has nothing remained?” Enjoy your daily drink of Andalusian wine below—or download and print out a pocket-sized version here. Plus, check out a bonus poetry feature from our archives, and don’t forget to enter Nextbook Press and Tablet Magazine’s Yehuda Halevi poetry contest!

Be still, you booming surf, enough to let
A pupil go to kiss his master’s cheek!
(That’s Master Aaron, whose unflagging rod
The years have not made tremulous or weak.)
A teacher who never says, “The lesson’s done,”
A giver who never fears to give too much,
He makes me bless the east wind’s wings today
And curse tomorrow’s gusts out of the west.
How can a man who feels as though a scorpion
Has stung him leave Gilead’s balm behind?
How trade the shade of a grand, leafy tree
For winter’s ice and summer’s savagery,
The shelter of a masterly mansion
For the shriving of God’s rain and sun?

Twenty-first-century America is a little bit different. For most of us, poetry is something outside of the everyday. But to celebrate National Poetry Month, Tablet Mag is trying to be a bit more like medieval Spain by including a Halevi poem, in Halkin’s new translation, on the Scroll each afternoon. In today’s poem, Halevi writes about an experience of religious devotion so intense that he longs for the day he will die and be closer to God. “Far from You,” he writes, “all life is dying; Death is life with You beside me.” Enjoy your daily drink of Andalusian wine below—or download and print out a pocket-sized version here. Plus, check out a bonus poetry feature from our archives, and don’t forget to enter Nextbook Press and Tablet Magazine’s Yehuda Halevi poetry contest!

Lord, You are my sole desire,
Though I keep it my soul’s secret.
Could I but do Your will and die
That moment, I would seek it.
Placing in Your hands my spirit,

I would sleep—and sweet such sleep is.
Far from You, all life is dying;
Death is life with You beside me.

And yet I know not how to further
Most my faith or best to serve it.
Instruct me in Your ways, then, Lord,
And free my mind from folly’s service.
Teach me while I have strength to suffer,
Nor despise my suffering
In the time still left before,
Myself a burden to myself,
My cankered bones fail to support me
And, my only choice submission,
I make the voyage to my fathers,
Stopping to rest at their last stop
Deep in the earth, I who once was
A sojourner upon its surface.

My young years thought of naught save themselves.
When will my world-sated soul save itself?
How worship my Maker when all He has made
Makes me passion’s captive and slave,
Or strive for the heights when at the day’s end
Sister worm awaits my descent?
How, even, be glad in glad times,
When none know what the future will spell,
And the days underwrite my decay
With the nights, half of me to dispel
To the wind and half to the dust?
What can I plead when I am pursued
By my lust from my youth to my wane?
What of this world but Your will is my share,
And if You are not mine, what is mine?
What more can I ask or declare?
I am naked of deeds, Your justice my only attire.
Lord, You are my sole desire.

21st century America is a little bit different. For most of us, poetry is something outside of the everyday—but to celebrate National Poetry Month, Tablet is trying to be a bit more like medieval Spain by including a Halevi poem, in Halkin’s new translation, on the Scroll each afternoon. In today’s poem, Halevi speaks of the traumatic suddenness of his departure from Spain when he set out for Jerusalem: “I had no time to kiss my friends or family a last farewell.” Enjoy your daily drink of Andalusian wine below—or download and print out a pocket-sized version here. Plus, check out a bonus poetry feature from our archives, and don’t forget to enter Nextbook Press and Tablet Magazine’s Yehuda Halevi poetry contest!

Driven by longing
for the living God
to hasten to where
His anointed ones dwelt,
I had no time
to kiss my friends
or family
a last farewell;
no time to weep
for the garden I grew,
the trees watered and watched
as they branched and did well;
no time to think
of the blossoms they bore,
of Yehuda
and Azarel,
or of Yitzhak,
so like a son,
my sun-blessed crop,
the years’ rich yield.

Forgotten are my synagogue,
the peace that was
its study hall,
my Sabbaths
and their sweet delights,
the splendor of
my festivals:
I’ve left them all.
Let others have
the idol’s honors
and be hailed—
I’ve swapped my bedroom
for dry brush,
its safety
for chaparral,
the scents
and subtle fragrances
that cloyed my soul
for thistles’ smells,
and put away
the mincing gait
of landlubbers
to hoist my sail
and cross the sea
until I reach
the land that is
the Lord’s footstool.

21st century America is a little bit different. For most of us, poetry is something outside of the everyday—but to celebrate National Poetry Month, Tablet is trying to be a bit more like medieval Spain by including a Halevi poem, in Halkin’s new translation, on the Scroll each afternoon. In today’s poem, Halevi speaks of the traumatic suddenness of his departure from Spain when he set out for Jerusalem: “I had no time to kiss my friends or family a last farewell.” Enjoy your daily drink of Andalusian wine below—or download and print out a pocket-sized version here. Plus, check out a bonus poetry feature from our archives, and don’t forget to enter Nextbook Press and Tablet Magazine’s Yehuda Halevi poetry contest!

Has a new Flood drowned the alnd
And left no patch of dry ground,
Neither bird, beast, nor man?
Has nothing remained?
A strip of bare sand
Would be balm for the mind;
The dreariest plain,
A pleasure to scan.
But all that is seen
Is a ship and the span
Of the sea and the sky, and Leviathan
As he churns up the brine,
Which grips the ship as the hand
Of a thief grips his find.
Let it foam! My heart bounds
As I near the Lord’s shrine.

20th century America is a little bit different. For most of us, poetry is something outside of the everyday—but to celebrate National Poetry Month, Tablet is trying to be a bit more like medieval Spain by including a Halevi poem, in Halkin’s new translation, on the Scroll each afternoon. Today’s poem is an ode to Jerusalem that, Halkin points out, several centuries later was a favorite of the Jewish-born German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine. Enjoy your daily drink of Andalusian wine below—or download and print out a pocket-sized version here. Plus, check out a bonus poetry feature from our archives, and don’t forget to enter Nextbook Press and Tablet Magazine’s Yehuda Halevi poetry contest!

Zion! Do you wonder how and where your captives
Are now, and if they think of you, the far-flocked
remnants?
From north and south, east, west, and all directions,
Near and far, they send their greetings
As I send mine, captured by my longings
To weep like Hermon’s dew upon your mountains.
Mourning your lowliness, I am the wail of jackals;
Dreaming your sons’ return, the song of lute strings.
My heart stirs for Peniel, and for Bethel, and all those
places
With their pure traces of God’s presence, where your
gates,
Facing the portals of the highest heavens,
Stand opened by your Maker. You He illumines
Not with the sun, or moon, or stars, but with the rays
Of His own glory. Gladly I would choose
To pour my soul out where your chosen ones
Stood in a downpour of God’s effluence.
You are the throne of the Lord, His royal house –
How then are slaves enthroned in your lords’ houses?
If only I could wander past the way points
Where God appeared to your appointed and your
seers,
And, flying to you with a bird’s wings,
Shake woeful head, remembering the throes
Of your dismemberment, my face
Pressed to your earth, cherishing its soil and stones –
Yes, even so, the graves of patriarchs.
Wondrous in Hebron at your choicest tombs,
I would cross Gilead, and Carmel’s woods,
And stop to marvel at your lofty peaks
Across the Jordan, on which, illustrious,
Lie buried the two greatest of your teachers.
Your very air’s alive with souls;
Your earth breathes incense and your rivers
Run with balm. I would rejoice
To walk with my bare feet, in tatters,
Upon the ruins of your Sanctuaries,
In which, before it was removed from us,
The Holy Ark stood guarded by its Cherubs
Posted at the innermost of chambers –
And then, all worldly pomp cast off, I’d curse
The fate that did defile your peerless pilgrims.
How could I eat or drink, seeing the dogs
Make off with the remains of your proud lions?
How find the daylight sweet when my two eyes
Were forced to witness crows feast on your eagles?

Enough, desist from me, O cup of sorrows,
Drained to the dregs of all its bitterness!
Zion! God’s love, combined with Beauty’s grace,
Has bound to you the souls of all Your friends,
So that they joy when you’re at peace
And weep when you’re all wounds and wilderness.
Imprisoned, they yearn for you, each from his place
Turning to bow in prayer to your gates –
Your many flocks, dispersed to distant hills
Yet ever mindful of their vows
To re-ascend to you and reach your heights,
As the palm tree, rising above all else,
Is scaled by the bold climber. Who compares
To you? Not ancient Babylon, nor Greece:
What are all their empty oracles
Beside your Prophets and the breastplates of your priests?
The heathen kingdoms lapse, collapse, and pass,
But you remain forever, crowned for the ages.
God makes His home in you: Blesséd are those
Who dwell with Him, residing in your courts.
Blesséd is he who comes, and waits, and sees
The rising sun illuminate your dawns,
In which your steadfast share the happiness
Of your lost Youth, restored as it once was.

Halkin describes his own decision to move to Israel from the U.S. in 1970 as “very much a Halevian one.” Although he wasn’t nearly as familiar with his future subject then, looking back he can’t help but relate: “For Halevi, living in the Land of Israel was a matter of inner necessity. It was something he had to do for his own integrity, and the failure to do it left him feeling incomplete and inconsistent. Judaism was for him above all a religion of action—and living in the Land of Israel was the ultimate act, the abstention from which undermined the meaning of all else.”

Interested in hearing more? Halkin’s book tour begins tomorrow. Check out the schedule here.

Jerusalem Bound [Alef]

Maimonides, according to Halbertal, viewed Judaism as the religion of nature, while Halevi saw it as the religion of history. Halevi found inspiration in examples of the breaking of the chain of causality, like the parting of the Red Sea, while to Maimonides the natural world was the main medium of God’s message. As Halbertal put it: “Nature itself is the profoundest manifestation of the divine,” while, according to Halkin, Halevi’s Judaism was “above all, a religion of action; what a Jew thinks is secondary to how a Jew acts.” Maimonides, Halbertal asserted, would find Halevi’s Judaism to be “spectacle dependent,” while Maimonidean Judaism needs no drama. It holds that there is evidence of God in every aspect of the world: “not like the relationship of a carpenter to a table, but more like the sun and the light. The world is God’s shadow; the very existence of God sustains the world.”

From this point, Halbertal then brought up the aspect of Halevi’s philosophy that has turned him into a “darling of the Israeli settlement movement”: his belief in the intrinsic holiness of the land of Israel. In contrast, Halbertal argued, Maimonides would say that the land of Israel is no different in its essence from any other, and that “its significance comes from the events that have happened in it.”

Halkin countered that Halevi was not a racist—that he was talking about “souls, not bodies”—but agreed that, today, “the Israeli dispute about ‘the territories’ is a Maimonidean versus Halevian argument.” However, he added, “one has to understand where Halevi was coming from.” The Jewish circumstance in Halevi’s time was perhaps the lowest in its history: the first crusade had just taken place and there were massacres occurring in Spain and the Rhineland. For someone like Halevi, Halkin argued, these events were inexplicable: “What is going on here? Why are we losing adherents? Why are we under the sway of two ‘upstart’ religions?” To Halevi, Halkin said, no matter how low the Jews’ fortunes fell, they had to feel they were needed. Jews, he believed, were the link between God and humanity. In modern terms it might seem racist but he wasn’t arguing in terms of a master race, Halkin asserted, but was rather “desperately trying to salvage the fortunes of his people.”

Twentieth-century America is a little bit different. For most of us, poetry is something outside of the everyday—but to celebrate National Poetry Month, Tablet is trying to be a bit more like medieval Spain by including a Halevi poem, in Halkin’s new translation, on the Scroll each afternoon. Today’s first short poem—actually a fragment—is, as Halkin puts it, a “bantering quatrain” about a woman we know nothing about: maybe an actual love interest, maybe just a literary construct. The second poem is also about longing—for southern Spain, written while Halevi was living in the north. He would return many times to theme of homesickness. Enjoy your daily drink of Andalusian wine below—or download and print out a pocket-sized version here. Plus, check out a bonus poetry feature from our archives, and don’t forget to enter Nextbook Press and Tablet Magazine’s Yehuda Halevi poetry contest!

Ofra does her laundry in my tears
And dries it in the sunshine she gives off
She doesn’t need to take it to the trough,
Or wait to hang it till the weather clears,

***

A dove weeps in the treetops
And her sobs make my heart sore,
For its pangs are as her pain is
And my fate is shared by her.
I cry for kin and country,
She for her old nesting grounds;
I for my lost dear ones,
She for her scattered friends;
I for days long vanished,
She for youth now fled.

20th century America is a little bit different. For most of us, poetry is something outside of the everyday—but to celebrate National Poetry Month, Tablet is trying to be a bit more like medieval Spain by including a Halevi poem, in Halkin’s new translation, on the Scroll each afternoon. In today’s poem, a young Halevi accuses a former lover of becoming his “murderess” by abandoning him: “That you have shed my blood, I have two witnesses—/Your lips and cheeks. Don’t say their crimson lies!” Enjoy your daily drink of Andalusian wine below—or download and print out a pocket-sized version here. Plus, check out a bonus poetry feature from our archives, and don’t forget to enter Nextbook Press and Tablet Magazine’s Yehuda Halevi poetry contest!

Why, my darling, have you barred all news
From one who aches for you inside the bars of his own ribs?
Surely you know a lover’s thoughts
Care only for the sound of your hellos!
At least, if parting was the fate reserved for us,
You might have lingered till my gaze had left your face.
God knows if there’s a heart caged in these ribs
Or it has fled to join you in your journeys.

O would that you wore me as a seal upon your arms
As I wear you on mine! May both my hands
Forget their cunning if I forget the days,
My dearest, of our love’s first bliss!
Hard for the heart made vagrant are the memories
Of your ambrosia on my lips – but could I mix
My exhalations with their perfumed essence,
I would have a way to kiss you always.
Are women praised for their perfections?
Perfection in you is praised for being yours.
The fields of love have many harvesters —
And your harvest is bowed down to by their sheaves.
God grant that I may live to drain the lees,
Once more, of your limbs’ sweet elixirs!
Although I cannot hear your voice,
I listen, deep within me, for your footsteps.
O on the day that you revive Love’s fallen legions
Slain by your sword, think of this corpse
Abandoned by its spirit for your travels!
If life, my love, will let you have your wishes,
Tell it you wish to send a friend regards.
May it bring you to your destinations,
And God return you to your native grounds!

To celebrate National Poetry Month, every day for the rest of April we will be presenting a Halevi poem a day—or an excerpt of one—in their beautiful modern translations by Hillel Halkin, whose biography of Halevi was published by Nextbook Press earlier this year. For today, here is a pocket-sized version of two of Halevi’s most famous poems, “My Heart in the East” and “On Boarding Ship in Alexandria,” for you to print, fold, and share.

We’re hoping that not only will you love these poems, but that they’ll also inspire your own reimaginings of Halevi’s work. To that end, a contest: compose a song using Halevi’s lyrics, or create an illustration or video inspired by his writing; anything that applies your own creativity to interpret one of these poems. We’ll select the best entries and post them to Nextbook Press and Tablet; one winner will be chosen to win an Apple iPad! Publish your entry on your blog or website and send us a link, or share it in the comments section below. Deadline is April 26, and we’ll announce the winner on Poetry in Your Pocket Day, April 29.

Download complete contest rules here.

• The New York Jewish Week finds harmony between Hillel Halkin and Yehuda Halevi, the subject of Halkin’s book for Nextbook Press: “Hebrew literature, Zionism, Israel, the diaspora and its discontents, Jewish thought, the very essence of Jewishness itself—they all come together, over a span of 1,000 years, in the poet/philosopher and in his biographer.” [NYJW]

• Israel’s Communication Ministry has banned the Apple iPad from entering the country, and it’s not just because the company opted against a catchier name—rather, the computer’s “broadcast WiFi power levels are not compatible with Israeli standards,” whatever that means. [Arutz Sheva]

• MyJewishLearning.com is holding a contest to name its new parenting site. The prize is $500! We would offer them some rejects from before Tablet’s launch, but we doubt they will want “Pickle,” “Brisket,” or “Matzah Ball.” (What do you want, we were hungry!) [MJL]

• Eerily banal mug shots of Nazis. [Daily Heller]

• Sign a petition urging the Rabbinical Council of America to put more stock in leadership roles for Orthodox women.

April 22
12 Noon
JTS – Mendelson Convocation Center
New York, NY

April 24
6:15 pm
Lincoln Square Synagogue
New York, NY

April 25
3 pm
Museum of Jewish Heritage
New York, NY

April 26
7:30 PM
DC JCC
Washington, DC

April 27
8 pm
Princeton – Woodrow Wilson School – Bowl 1
Princeton, NJ

April 28
4 pm
Harvard Center for the Humanities
Cambridge, MA

One of Halkin’s most interesting arguments in the book is that Halevi may be considered a proto-Zionist: arguably the first, in fact (Halevi lived in the 11th and 12th centuries). He expounds on that here:

He’s one of the first, or the first figure in the Diaspora to call for Jewish return to the land of Eretz Yisroel on a pre-messianic basis.

The rabbinical and traditional position has always been waiting for the Moshiach and it was the very dominant position in Halevi’s time. He took the position and was the first one to articulate it that Jews need not and should not wait for the messiah to return to [Israel].

It’s a Jewish obligation to return, it’s a Jewish initiative and not a divine one.

Q&A with Hillel Halkin [Jewish Star]

Related: Yehuda Halevi [Nextbook Press]
Life of a Poet [Tablet Magazine]
The Pilgrim [Tablet Magazine]

Some notable pieces from the Spring 2010 number:

• Tablet Magazine book critic Adam Kirsch reviews 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, a new novel from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who is also the author of Nextbook Press’s Betraying Spinoza (got all that?).

• Hillel Halkin—author of Nextbook Press’s brand-spankin’-new biography of Yehuda Halevi—considers a new American Orthodox siddur.

• Ron Rosenbaum discusses Bob Dylan as an explicitly Jewish figure.

• Michael Weingrad interrogates why, amid a sea of Christian allegories, there are few if any good Jewish-inspired fantasy novels.

• Harvey Pekar and Tara Seibel offer a graphic review of comic artist R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis.

Jewish Review of Books
A Jewish Journal of Ideas is Born [Forward]

About halfway through Conviction, a melodrama about the Spanish Inquisition, a beautiful young crypto-Jewess sings a Halevi poem, “Shabbat, my love!”, to her lover, a priest:

Now ’tis dusk. With sudden light distilled
From one sweet face, the world is filled;
The turmoil of my heart is stilled—
For you have arrived, Shabbat, my love!

Check out the full text of the poem, and enjoy the rest of Andalusian History Month.

Conviction [NYT]

Related: Yehuda Halevi [Nextbook Press]
The Pilgrim [Tablet Magazine]
Life of a Poet [Tablet Magazine]

Halevi, who was born around 1070 CE, was perhaps the best writer of Hebrew between the Bible and Bialik; yet the key to his achievement was to import Arabic and Islamic forms into a Hebrew and Jewish context. He lived in a period still remembered fondly—and, Halkin cogently argues, inaccurately—as a paradise of convivencia, when Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Spain lived together in harmony; yet his lifetime was marked by constant fighting between Christian and Muslim rulers and regular persecutions of Jews by both. His classic prose work, The Kuzari, argues for the superiority of Judaism over Christianity, Islam, and rationalist philosophy, yet it does so in a way that strikes some contemporary Jews as unforgivably chauvinist, even racist.

Finally, and for Halkin’s purposes most important, Halevi’s life and death make him a central figure in modern debates over Zionism. Indeed, if you were trying to invent a myth that would capture all the ambiguities of the Jewish people’s relationship to the Land of Israel, you couldn’t come up with anything better than Halevi’s true story.

From his youth, Halevi was famous among writers and patrons of the arts in Jewish Spain. His sacred verse was chanted in synagogues even as his erotic poems circulated among connoisseurs. Unlike most poets, then and since, Halevi was also wealthy, thanks to his second career as a successful doctor. He lived in Muslim cities like Grenada and Cordoba, and Christian cities like Toledo; his friends and family, his whole world, was contained in Sepharad. He might very well appear to be a symbol for every Jew who has ever thrived in the Diaspora, from Babylon to America.

Yet starting in middle age, Halevi was consumed by the desire to visit the Land of Israel. In several poems (which Halkin gives in his own English translations), he chastised himself for not making the journey:

Don’t pretend you have to seek to know His will,
Or wait for auguries. Will but to do it!
Be bold as a panther, swift as a deer!
Fear not the open sea, though mountains of waves crest and crash,
And hands shake like rags in a gale.

In The Kuzari, which takes the form of a dialogue between a rabbi and the pagan king of the Khazars, Halevi allows the king to reproach the rabbi for not making aliyah: “you are disobeying a commandment of your Torah by not going to that land and living and dying there…. All your genuflections [to it] in your prayers are either unthinking or hypocritical, especially since your first ancestors chose to live there above all other places and to be sojourners there rather than natives in their birthplace.” The rabbi can only plead guilty to this hard accusation: “Indeed, you have shamed me, king of the Khazars…. The prayers we utter, such as ‘Bow down to His holy mount,’ ‘He who restores His presence to Zion,’ and the like, are like the starling’s caw, since we do not mean what we say.”

No American Jew can fail to recognize the kind of cognitive dissonance that Halevi confesses to here. Every Passover we recite, “Next year in Jerusalem,” without having the slightest intention of being in Jerusalem next year—even though, for us, the journey is infinitely easier and safer than it was for Halevi in the 12th century. It is the rare individual who, like Halevi, begins to hear this promise as an existential demand. Indeed, as Halkin makes clear, Halevi’s fellow Spanish Jews were anything but supportive of his desire to go to Jerusalem. He wrote two poems rebutting their arguments that it was more sensible, and just as pious, to stay home:

Are we to haunt old wormy graves,
And turn away from life’s eternal source?
Are synagogues our sole inheritance,
And is God’s holy mount to have no heirs?
And where, in East or West, are we more safe
Than in the land whose many gates all face
The heavens?

Yet as Halevi knew, for all the dangers that the Jews faced in Spain, the dangers involved in a voyage to Palestine were much greater. There were the all the perils of sailing—the storms, the pirates, the sickness, and disease. And when he reached Palestine, he would find not a thriving Jewish community but a Crusader state, where a few decades earlier victorious Christian knights had massacred the whole Jewish population of Jerusalem.

Despite all this, however, Halevi set sail in the summer in 1140 CE. Most of the dates and even many of the facts in Halevi’s life are conjectural—Halkin argues, based on Halevi’s poetry, that he had two children who died young, but there is no way of proving it. But we know about his final journey in almost day-by-day detail, thanks to the nearly miraculous 19th-century discovery of letters from and about Halevi in the Cairo Geniza. (That medieval document dump, whose riches were discovered by Solomon Schechter in 1896, will itself be the subject of a future book in the Jewish Encounters series.)

These documents show that the poet arrived in Alexandria just before the High Holidays and decided to wait out the rainy winter in Egypt. Here, once again, he found himself the toast of a prosperous Jewish community, and it must have taken a great effort of willpower to continue on his solitary journey. Halevi exhorted himself in verse:

Can Egypt hold me
When my soul’s thoughts pull me
To Zion’s mount?
On the day I take
To her comforter’s trail,
My pilgrim’s hair uncombed,
My feet unshod,
My heart’s flame will scorch her stones,
My eyes will flood her soil.

Halevi embarked on the last leg of his journey on May 7, 1141. Did he make it to Acre, the Crusader port, or even further, to Jerusalem? Did the Promised Land live up to his poetic visions, or was he disappointed to find a ruined, depopulated country? We can only guess: for the next reference to Halevi comes in a letter to one of his Egyptian friends, dated November 1141, where the poet’s name is followed by the letters zayin, tsadik, and lamed—the Hebrew abbreviation for “may the memory of the righteous be a blessing.” From this fragment of evidence, we know that Halevi must have died either on the way to Palestine or shortly after arriving.

It is as though history wanted to leave Halevi’s pilgrimage blank, so that future generations of Jews could fill it in with their own hopes and fears. Fittingly, then, the last section of Halkin’s book is a survey of all the stories posterity has told about Halevi’s end. The earliest of those stories dates to 1586, when a book published in Venice recorded that Halevi was killed by an Arab horseman while praying at the gates of Jerusalem. As Halkin writes, the story has little chance of being true—it was published more than four centuries after the event it purports to describe—but it does seem to tell us, “if not how Halevi died, how he should have died…. It had the right proportions of fatedness and accident, fulfillment granted and denied.”

Later historians put forward other hypotheses: that Halevi never left Egypt, or that he reached Palestine and was so disillusioned that he crept back to Spain “a shattered man.” But in the late 19th century, Halevi came to be seen as a nationalist figure, whose return to Palestine prefigured the Zionist project. The great historian Heinrich Graetz called Halevi “the first to grasp the significance of Judaism as an independent historical phenomenon.” The religious Zionist thinker Abraham Kook invoked Halevi in arguing that Jewish settlement in Palestine was a pious act. In turn, critics of religious Zionism have turned their fire on Halevi—as when the philosopher and scientist Yeshayahu Leibowitz declared that “Yehuda Halevi was a divine poet, but as author of The Kuzari, he stumbled into nationalist and racist chauvinism.”

Halkin is uniquely well placed to write about the contentious afterlife of Yehuda Halevi. Not only is he a translator, who can write insightfully about the complexities of Halevi’s Hebrew poetry, he is also an American Jew who made aliyah, giving him a personal stake in the battles over Halevi’s meaning for Jews inside and outside Israel. In fact, Halkin writes, his first book—Letters to an American Jewish Friend, which explained his decision to move to Israel—was originally meant to be titled “The Starling’s Caw,” after the line from The Kuzari quoted above. (Halkin recalls that his editor vetoed that title, on the grounds that “people will think you’ve written a guidebook to birdcalls.”) With Yehuda Halevi, Halkin shows once again why we cannot think about Jewishness, Israel, and Zionism without thinking about this thousand-year-old poet.

We Jews should’ve known this day was no good when, on it, Moses’s spies came from the Promised Land with reports of a terrible place littered with walled fortresses and roamed by angry giants. Moses ordered his doubting emissaries killed, but the curse of Tisha B’av lived on: the First Temple was destroyed on this day in 586 BCE. The Second Temple suffered the same fate exactly 656 years later, in 70 CE. Sixty-five years after that, in 135 CE, the Bar Kokhba revolt failed, its leader was killed, and its flagship city, Betar, was destroyed. Then, one year later, Jerusalem itself was burned, the Temple area plowed, and the fate of the Jews sealed for millennia. As if further insult was needed, in 1492, King Ferdinand of Spain signed the Alhambra Decree, setting Tisha B’Av as the deadline for all of Spain’s Jews to leave for good.

Coming at the end of the Three Weeks of mourning, which began with the 17th of Tammuz, Tisha B’Av signifies the conclusion of the period known as Bein Hameitzarim, or between the straits, a time of reflection and abstinence from pleasure.

ANY BAD GUYS?

In abundance: All of Moses’s cowardly and faithless spies, with the exception of Joshua and Caleb, who said that the land was good; Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian, besieger of Jerusalem and destroyer of the First Temple; Titus, Rome’s fearful officer who set flames to the Second Temple; and, last but not least, Ferdinand “The Catholic” of Aragon.

WHAT DO WE EAT?

Nothing. But unlike Yom Kippur, most rabbis tend to be a bit more lenient about fasting, making exceptions not only for those whose lives are seriously at risk but also for the ill and the generally unwell.

ANY DOS AND DON’TS?

Don’ts, mainly. Anything that gives us pleasure is prohibited, which rules out, among other things, bathing, wearing leather shoes, and carnal pursuits. If you thought maybe you’d replace the day’s heavy petting with Torah study—think again. Reading our Book of Books is considered a supreme joy and is therefore forbidden on Tisha B’Av. So is laying tefillin, as phylacteries are referred to as pe’er, or glory, and this is a decidedly inglorious day for the Jews.

ANYTHING GOOD TO READ?

We’re compensated for the day’s prohibitions with two splendid literary masterpieces: the Book of Eicha (Lamentations), which is read in the evening, and the Kinnot, poems of lamentation, in the morning. Taken together, these two are a powerful lesson in mourning. Eicha, while lyrically describing the ruin of Jerusalem, also speaks of a hopeful future, a time when the children of God, chastised, will learn their lessons and return to their former glory. The Kinnot, a vast and changing collection of works written through the centuries, strikes very much the same tone. The most famous author to work in the form was Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, who forever changed the genre’s focus from weeping over the tragedies of the past to looking expectantly at a brighter future. Be sad, these texts tell us, but not for long.

FIVE MORE THINGS YOU CAN DO:

• Secretly rejoice with this uplifting story of one good thing that happened on Tisha B’av, for a change

• Get in the groove with “Eicha,” the hip-hop song.

• Or, for the more traditional, listen to the book-on-tape in Hebrew.

• Ponder author A.B. Yehoshua’s own Tisha B’av meditation on Judaism.

• Start planning for breaking the fast.