Yehuda HaLevi

The greatest Hebrew poet of Sepharad, whose Songs of Zion voice longing for the Land of Israel. His Kuzari defends Judaism through revelation and lived history. He set out for the Land of Israel in 1140; the legend that he died at Jerusalem's gates is unproven.

Who was Yehuda HaLevi?

Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi is the greatest Hebrew poet of Sepharad and, for many, the greatest Hebrew poet since the Bible. His poems of love, friendship and faith are still sung; his Songs of Zion gave voice to a longing for the Land of Israel that Jews have recited for nine centuries; and his Kuzari remains one of the best-loved works of Jewish thought. At the end of his life he left everything behind to make the journey to the Land of Israel himself.

A young poet in al-Andalus

Yehuda HaLevi was born around 1075, probably in Tudela, then under Muslim rule; some sources say Toledo. He was drawn as a young man to the south, to the Jewish courts and academies of al-Andalus, where Hebrew poetry was flowering in the forms and meters of Arabic verse. According to a well-known story, he won a poetry contest in Granada by matching a difficult poem by Moshe ibn Ezra, the most celebrated poet of the day. Ibn Ezra took him under his wing, and the two remained close friends.

The Almoravid conquest of al-Andalus in the 1090s scattered the Jewish elite of Granada. HaLevi moved between the Jewish communities of Muslim and Christian Spain, living for long periods in Toledo, by then under Christian rule, and in Córdoba. He worked as a physician, a profession that brought him into the circles of the powerful. He also took part in the great network of Jewish merchants and scholars that stretched across the Mediterranean, and letters he wrote and received survive among the documents of the Cairo Geniza.

The poet

About eight hundred of his poems survive. He wrote wine songs and love poems, verses of friendship and mourning, riddles, and poems for weddings, in the style of the Andalusian courts. He wrote about three hundred and fifty liturgical poems, piyyutim, many of which entered the prayer books of Sephardi and other communities. His poems are sung at the Shabbat table and in the synagogue across the Sephardi world.

Above all he wrote the Songs of Zion, poems of longing for the Land of Israel. The most famous begins:

My heart is in the east, and I am at the edge of the west.

His ode Tziyon halo tishali, “Zion, will you not ask after your captives,” entered the kinot, the dirges recited on Tisha BeAv, and inspired generations of later poets to write in its meter.

The Kuzari

HaLevi’s prose masterpiece is the Kuzari, written in Judeo-Arabic and completed around 1140. Its full title is The Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Despised Religion. It is built on the story of the king of the Khazars, a Central Asian people whose rulers were said to have converted to Judaism. The king dreams that his intentions are pleasing to God but his deeds are not. He questions a philosopher, a Christian and a Muslim, and finally a rabbi, whose answers make up most of the book.

The rabbi does not begin with philosophical proofs. He begins with history: the God of Israel is the God who brought the people out of Egypt and gave them the Torah before the eyes of hundreds of thousands. Faith rests on a shared, living tradition, not on abstract reasoning, and the people of Israel, the Hebrew language and the Land of Israel have a special place in God’s plan. The rabbi argues that the Land is where prophecy can flourish, and the book ends with his decision to go there.

Rabbi Yehuda ibn Tibbon translated the Kuzari into Hebrew in 1167, and it has been studied in every Jewish community since, from the yeshivot of the Sephardi world to modern classrooms.

The journey to the Land of Israel

In 1140, already in his sixties, HaLevi left Spain, his family and his friends to go to the Land of Israel. Friends tried to dissuade him, pointing out that the Land was ruled by the Crusaders and that God could be served anywhere. He answered them in verse.

He sailed to Alexandria, arriving in September 1140, and spent several months in Egypt, where he was received with honor. Letters from the Cairo Geniza show that he sailed for the Land of Israel in May 1141, and that he died soon after, probably that summer. Where he died is not known.

A legend first recorded centuries later tells that he reached the gates of Jerusalem and was trampled by a horseman as he knelt and recited Tziyon halo tishali. It is not history, but it has become part of how Jews remember him: the poet who gave his life to reach Zion.

Yehuda HaLevi’s legacy for Sephardim

Yehuda HaLevi is the voice of Sepharad at its height, when Jews wrote Hebrew poetry as beautiful as anything in Arabic and studied Torah alongside philosophy and medicine. His piyyutim are part of Sephardi prayer, his Kuzari is a cornerstone of Sephardi Jewish thought, and his Songs of Zion speak for the love of the Land of Israel that Sephardi Jews carried through every exile, long before modern Zionism. When Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews returned to Israel in the twentieth century, they were living out the journey he had begun.

Sephardic connection

Andalusian Hebrew poet and Judeo-Arabic thinker whose works became central to Sephardic religious and literary culture

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