Yehuda Halevi (review)

Hillel Halkin is an Israeli Jew, a Diaspora Jew, a Zionist, and a self-identified secular Jew. One of his previous books, Letters to an American Jewish Friend, makes a powerful argument that Israel is the place of the Jewish future. Halkin's own journey led him from the poetry of Whitman and civil rights work in Alabama to eventually leaving America for Israel and, having refused service in Vietnam, choosing to join the Israeli army where he was wounded in the Lebanon War. Halkin's muse and inspiration in this journey was Yehuda Halevi, the eleventh-century Spanish-Jewish poet, philosopher, and lover of Zion. Halevi's Spain, like Halkin's America, was a land distinguished by its convivencia, a place where, at least as the story is told, Jews, Christians, and Moslems shared the country harmoniously. Halevi wrote romantic, passionate poetry, reminiscent to Halkin of Whitman, as connected to the beauty of this world as to any sacred hope beyond it. Halevi's classic work of polemic, the Kuzari, has as its protagonist a Gentile, and Halevi chose, despite all the dangers, to journey at the end of his life to Zion. In his emotionally powerful, evocative biography, Halkin gives us a Halevi who is very human and very much of his own time, but whose struggles between religious and secular passions, between a tolerant Diaspora and a difficult journey to Israel, reflect Halkin's own twentieth-century dilemmas.

Halkin's Halevi is a hard-drinking poet with an eye for beautiful women who bears little resemblence to the sainted rabbi of tradition. Halkin's translations of Halevi's poems are masterful, and through these poems Halkin builds a plausible if somewhat speculative life history of Halevi. Halkin begins in a tavern, where a youthful Halevi complains poetically that he is far too young to stop drinking once he has begun:

And how can I give up the kad [jug]When my years have not yet reached kad [twenty-four]?

The poem is many stanzas long, composed in intricate rhyme, and seems to have been dashed off spontaneously in the tavern. As Halkin shows, Halevi never stopped writing worldly poems, and at the end of his life, pausing in Egypt on the final leg of his journey from Spain to Jerusalem, Halevi still is able to write:

Let's have more lutesFor the lovely girls.Is it their fault,Unwitting archers they are,That their arrows have pierced heartsThough their bare armsNever sought to lift a sword?

Halevi also composed poems for his patron and friend, Moshe Ibn Ezra:

Is that a lute behind the lattice,Doves in the branches,The sweet flight of swifts?Or has, with its eminence,The name of MosheFilled my thoughtsWith all theseTo earth's ends?

Halkin uses these lines, and others, to build a story of their relationship. Perhaps, Halkin imagines, Halevi stayed with Moshe Ibn Ezra and wrote poetry in his lush gardens. Perhaps he was Moshe Ibn Ezra's personal secretary, as other poets were for other patrons, or perhaps he wrote poems for household events. This sort of imaginative reconstruction is typical of the book and lends it emotional power, although it takes some attention from the reader (especially in the absence of footnotes) to distinguish between Halkin's research and his imagination. Halkin's imaginary recreation even finds for Halevi a lover, a woman about whom the following lines could have been written:

Then all I ask of Time's vast hoard is this:Your girdled waist, the red thread of those lipsThat were my honeycomb, and your two breastsIn which are hidden myrrh and all good scents.

Although no evidence is left of her identity, Halkin suspects that she was someone, almost certainly not Halevi's wife, who was Halevi's lover for a brief time and then left him to go on a journey. Halkin finds similarly in another of Halevi's poems grief over another kind of loss:

O daughter tornFrom her mother...