Yehuda Halevi
Nine Poems
Yehuda Halevi (c. 1075–1141) was the Hebrew poet who culminated the startling period of Andalusian cultural production that Jewish history calls the Golden Age. In a moment of symbiosis in Islamic Spain from the eleventh to the twelfth centuries, Hebrew poetry flowered as it had not since the Bible and would not again until the modern era. A courtier-rabbi class arose serving Muslim rulers, steeped in their Arabic language and culture. The men of this new Jewish elite adapted Arabic poetics to Hebrew, including quantitative meters and a purist approach to the lexicon, while adopting Arab poetry’s embrace of secular alongside religious verse.
Halevi was born on the frontier between al-Andalus and Castille, possibly in Tudela, while it was still under Muslim control. As a teenager he went south to Granada, where he rose to prominence as one of the finest Hebrew poets of the age. In addition to over eight hundred extant religious and secular poems, he wrote (in Arabic) The Kuzari, an important work of Jewish philosophy that challenged the rationalism that was ascendant in the Jewish thought of the period. He was also a successful physician and merchant who moved, in the increasing political instability of the period, between a number of communities, including Lucena, Seville, and Christian Toledo.