New “Yehuda Halevi” bio captures poetry of the 12th century

“Hopeless romantic” would probably be the last description on your mind were you to conjure the image of a twelfth-century rabbi. But Hillel Halkin’s “Yehuda Halevi” (2010, Schocken Books, 368 pgs.), the latest in Schocken’s “Jewish Encounters” series, provides just that image. And what a beautiful portrait it is, of a deeply religious man enthralled with poetic expression and esthetics, who spent his life enriching Jewish thought and literature with his inspiring poetry and philosophy. One of the reasons why Rabbi Yehuda Halevi remains such a fascination through the ages is that he is an inspiration to those Jews who view their religious lives as much more than just doing things by the Book.

The so-called “Golden Age of Spanish Jewry,” a period from roughly the 10th to 12th centuries, was far from idyllic. It was, however, a time of unprecedented religious tolerance for Jews and Christians in the Islamic world. It was also a time when the parent culture was steeped in haute philosophy, art, and poetry. The Jews of Andalusia (the Islamic name for the Iberian peninsula) absorbed this culture and developed a form of literary expression that imitated the Arabic genre that germinated it. All this is connoted in the word convivencia, a term coined to idolize (sometimes falsely) the peace and commingling of ideas among the three great religions in medieval Spain.

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