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Introduction Estrangement Al-tagharrub and al-ightirab—emigration and estrangement. Like the English pair “travel” and “travail,” these Arabic words share a common root (ghrb) that underscores the intimate relation between moving from one place to another and resigning oneself to the burden of alienation. Al-tagharrub is the word that the Andalusian Jewish intellectual Judah Halevi (1075– 1141) uses in his famous Kuzari: Book of Refutation and Indication Concerning the Lowly Faith to describe the patriarch Abraham’s faithful emigration from his birthplace of Ur of the Chaldeans to Cana"an according to God’s command.1 Al-ightirab is the word that the Jewish spokesman in the book uses to describe the duty to journey to the Land of Israel as an ultimate act of devotion.2 Halevi’s Jewish spokesman offers a twist on a rabbinic dictum as a prooftext for the obligation to emigrate: galut mekhaperet avon (Makkot 2b), “galut atones for sin,” where the word galut, often translated as “exile,” is understood as the equivalent of the Arabic ightirab, “estrangement.” In the Talmudic context, galut refers to the exile from the Land of Israel. In Halevi’s usage, the idea is ironically reversed so that the actualization of atonement requires emigration from one’s homeland to the Land of Israel with its concomitant hardship of alienation. Galut is not the condition of banishment from the Promised Land; it is the acceptance of the yoke of estrangement that results from leaving one’s homeland. Even for Halevi, who rhapsodized famously in Hebrew about the ease with which he would renounce “the good things of Sefarad”3 in order to “behold the dust of the ruined shrine”4 in Jerusalem, emigration’s devotional value lay primarily in estrangement.5 As important as reaching the land where God’s commands can be executed perfectly is the self-sacri¤ce of becoming a gharib—one who has traveled a distance, a foreigner, a stranger. Halevi was one of numerous intellectuals who pondered the signi¤cance of emigration out of Islamic Iberia, al-Andalus, during a transitional period in Iberian Jewish history. Inasmuch as Halevi’s own emigration from al-Andalus to Palestine was undertaken with the devout passion of the rab1 binic character in the Kuzari, we must bear in mind that the aristocratic Jewish society of al-Andalus, which celebrated Halevi as its doyen, was beginning to deteriorate. Due to the numerous political shifts of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries—including the Reconquista and the invasions of the Almoravids and the Almohads—many Andalusian Jews took ®ight to relocate in destinations including Christian Iberia, the rest of Europe, and the Islamic East, including Palestine. For many, emigration out of al-Andalus created an experience of estrangement, which might result in personal crisis or, as Halevi suggests, become integral to an act of religious devotion. The Arabic words for estrangement (al-ightirab; al-ghurba) are layered with connotations that emerge from a long literary and cultural history. Estrangement is the dominant theme of countless Islamic sources, Arabic poems from the pre-Islamic and medieval periods, proverbs, treatises, letters of travelers, and even travelers’ graf¤ti.6 Travelers often wrote about their sense of dhull, humiliation, but also recognized the experience of estrangement as a crucible in which one’s manhood and fortitude could be tested. When Judah Halevi’s older Jewish contemporary Moses Ibn Ezra (1055– 1138) found himself displaced from his Andalusian home of Granada, fated to reside in the Christian kingdom of Navarre at the far north of the Iberian Peninsula, he possessed a broad repertoire of Arabic aphorisms upon which to draw for lamenting his situation of “long estrangement” (al-ightirab al-tawil): I am imprisoned in jail, nay, buried in a tomb. It is true what is said, “The intellectual is not more satis¤ed by that which gives him sustenance than he is by his homeland.” It is written in the Qur#an of the Arabs (4:66), “If we had ordered them to kill themselves or abandon their homes, only few would have done so.” “Killing oneself” and “leaving one’s home” are considered equivalent. It is also said, “Estrangement [al-ghurba] is one of the two prisons.” It is also said, “The foreigner [al-gharib] is one who has lost the social companions whose company he enjoys and the con¤dants upon whom he depends.” Another said, “The foreigner is like a plant whose land has been taken by night and...

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