Yehuda Halevi Hardcover - 2010

Excerpt

1

It may be the only time on record when a young man in a tavern has insisted, not that he was old enough to drink, but that he was not old enough to stop drinking.

It happened in Andalusia, in the Muslim-ruled south of Spain. We can’t say exactly where. It could have been in Córdoba, or in Granada, or in Seville, or in any of the other towns that the young man passed through and lived in after leaving the Christian north as an adolescent. We can’t say exactly when it happened, either. Since the young man was born sometime between 1070 and 1075, we know only that it was toward the end of the eleventh century. This was a time— a thousand years after the destruction of the Second Temple, eight hundred years after the redaction of the Mishnah, and five hundred years after the compilation of the Babylonian Talmud—in which 90 percent of the world’s Jews lived in a Muslim expanse that stretched from the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Morocco to the Indian subcontinent, and from Yemen to the Aral Sea. Andalusia was in the far northwestern corner of this vast territory, pressing against and pressed back on by Christian Europe. It had been a part of the Islamic realm ever since Arab and Berber warriors from North Africa stormed the Straits of Gibraltar in 711 and conquered most of Spain.

If the night was warm and rainless, as most Andalusian nights are, the young man was probably sitting at a table out-of-doors, in an interior courtyard of the sort still found everywhere in the south of Spain. (What tourist to the region has not seen, on a street of seemingly plain houses, a door swing open and shut on a gardened patio like the tantalizing flash of a secret existence?) Perhaps, if it was springtime, a blossoming orange or lemon tree gave off its sweet-and-sour scent. The young man was unlikely to have been drinking alone, since he was too popular to be left by himself for long. From a neighboring table, an admirer sent a jug of wine. The young man thanked him with a poem. It may have been written afterwards and delivered by a messenger. Yet judging by the young man’s gifts and the art of poetic improvisation in Muslim Spain, it was most probably composed on the spot and carried back by the waiter who had brought the wine. It went, in a free English translation:

I shall sing your praise all my days

For the nectar you sent for my lips.

Brother Jug joins in my lays,

And from him I won’t cease my sips

Even though all my friends say, “Come, come!

How much longer will you play the rake?”

“What?” I’ll reply. “I have Gilead’s balm

And shan’t drink to cure every ache?”

I’m too young to put down the cup

I’ve only begun to pick up. To and for

What end should I stop

When my years are not yet two and four?

In Hebrew, the language in which this poem was written, the young man’s punning avowal that he was under twenty-four (which need not mean he was twenty-three; he could just as well have been sixteen or seventeen) works differently from my English rendition. Traditionally, each of the Hebrew consonants has a numerical value, and the word kad, “jug,” is composed of the letters kaf, which stands for twenty, and dalet, which stands for four. Literally, then, the poem’s last two lines read:

And how can I give up the kad [jug]

When my years have not yet reached kad [twentyfour]?

Its pun aside, the young man’s poem obeyed complex rules, since not only was the Hebrew verse of his day required to have meter and rhyme, its standards for both were more stringent than those of formal English poetry. Regardless of its length, a poem in the classical style was allowed only a single mono-rhyme, with which each of its lines had to end. When it came to meter, on the other hand, a poet had to choose among a dozen possible patterns, each consisting of a rigidly adhered-to alteration of “long” and “short” syllables. For this particular poem, the young man chose the meter, known as the marnin or “allegro,” short-long-long-long, short-long-long-long, short-long-long, a single sequence of which made up the half-lines or hemistiches into which each of the poem’s full lines was divided.

Dashing off, amid the hubbub of a tavern, a poem so demanding yet wittily accomplished would have been an impressive feat. It would not have ranked, however, as a singular one. Talented poets in Andalusia were expected to do such things. It is told of Shmuel Hanagid (993–1056), the first of the great Hispano-Hebrew poets, that he once had quoted to him a couplet on the subject of biting into an apple. Not to be outdone, he proceeded to compose, one after another, fifteen short but perfectly constructed poems on the same theme before running out of time, breath, or inspiration.

Indeed, if calling an age “poetic” refers, not to some supposed collective sublimity or imaginativeness of mind, but, more mundanely, to the widespread use of poetry in ordinary life as a medium of communication and social exchange, the young man was born in one of the most historically poetic of ages. When, for instance, the same Shmuel Hanagid decided one spring day in Granada to throw a party for his friends, the invitations he sent out were in the form of a poem telling them to “Take note, make haste, and do not fail"/"To gather in my garden.” But this would have been only the beginning. Hanagid’s invitees might have informed him of their acceptance by sending him a poem in return; some might have turned up at his door with poems as gifts; if there were toasts or speeches, these would have been in poetic form, too; any party games played would have included competitions in which the guests were asked to write a poem on the same theme or having the same formal properties; and a good time having been had, poems would be sent as thank-you notes. It was a world in which, in cultivated circles, no solemn occasion, birth, wedding, or death went without a poem to commemorate it; in which friends wrote each other letters in poetry or, if they were in a hurry, in a more easily composed rhymed prose; in which the ability to pen a creditable poem was considered as indispensable a part of an education as filling out a job application is in our own age. A poet who was more than merely creditable was a sought-after figure, often supported by wealthy patrons for whom he wrote verse to order.

In the Arabic-speaking Jewish society in which our young man lived, the language of these poems was always Hebrew. Yet the central role accorded to poetry did not stem originally from a Jewish impulse. Its history went back to the preliterate life of the Arabian desert, whose Bedouin tribes had poured out of it following the founding of Islam in the early seventh century and rapidly overrun much of the world under the new religion’s martial banner. Among these desert nomads, the ability to extemporize verse had always been valued greatly. Poems were an everyday vehicle for the expression of emotion; for the sending of messages and requests; for the carrying of news from one encampment to another; for the recording and remembering of unusual events; for the wooing of the opposite sex; for the enhancement of celebrations; for the flattering of authority; for the vaunting of one’s exploits; for the praising of one’s friends and the derogation of one’s enemies, and the like. The popular poetry tournaments held at the commercial fairs of pre-Islamic times testified to the regard in which gifted poetic improvisers were held—and when, at moments of high drama or strong feeling, characters in medieval Arabic prose narratives like One Thousand and One Nights break into poetic speech, they are harking back to the traditions of the desert.

The cosmopolitan culture of the great Islamic cities of the East, such as Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo, with their class of professional poets supported by the patronage of royalty and wealth, was far removed from Bedouin life. Yet the special place of poetry persisted in Arab society and spread from the East to Andalusia. The annals of Muslim Spain are replete with stories that illustrate how readily men and women were moved to, and swayed by, poetic diction. The eleventh-century poet-king of Seville, Ala’llahi AlMu’tamid, we are told, owed his marriage to this propensity. Once, as a young prince, he was sailing on the Guadalquivir River with a friend when, struck by the ripples on it, he spontaneously exclaimed, Sana’a ‘r-rihu min el-mai zarad, “The wind has spun a coat-of-mail from the water,” and challenged his companion to add a second line. Some slave girls were doing their laundry on the riverbank, and while the friend racked his brain, one of them, a stunning beauty who had overheard the prince’s challenge, called back across the water, Eyyu dir’in li-qitalin low qamad, “What armor for battle if it stiffened!” Al-Mu’tamid was so taken by her cleverness and looks that he bought her from her master and married her. She was to be the love of his life.

Jewish Andalusia was not an exact replica of its Muslim surroundings. But while Jews in the Muslim world lived, on the whole, within a social framework of their own, they were more heavily influenced by their host culture than any previous rabbinically regulated Jewish society in the Diaspora. This was why Hebrew poetry, which was modeled on its Arabic counterpart in form and content, was so important to them, and why our young man had left home in his teens to seek his literary fortune in Spain’s south, where the art of poetry was more advanced.

Media reviews

  “In a shimmering gem of a new book, the critic and translator Hillel Halkin has brought to life, with vibrant and personal immediacy, the passions, ideas, sensibilities, convictions—and the voice—of this emblematic Jewish spirit. . . . Our own period has seen renewed interest in Halevi, of which Halkin’s book, coruscating and compulsively readable, is an undoubted masterwork.  It has also witnessed vigorous debates over his legacy. Reviewing each of them before advancing his own bold readings, Halkin brings home both the tantalizing elusiveness of Halevi’s life and the vital pertinence of his example.”
—Jewish Ideas Daily

“A thoroughly researched, carefully rendered biography that evokes the vanished world of golden age Spanish Jewry. . . . One of its great assets is Halkin’s original translations of Halevi’s verse.  It is precisely Halkin’s admiration of the poet that makes his subject come so fully to life.”
—Forward

“Offering more than a masterful biography, Halkin includes many eloquent English renderings of Halevi’s poems, no mean achievement as these were written in an Arab-influenced Hebrew style, meter, and idiom. . . . But Halkin’s greatest contribution is his nimble navigation of the twists and turns of Halevi’s turbulent life and the controversies that punctuate the many interpretations of his thought. . . . Given that the mountain of literature about Halevi has produced as much confusion as information, Halkin’s broad yet deeply learned synthesis of his subject’s life and works is particularly welcome.”
—Moment magazine

“During the Spanish middle ages, one of poetry’s golden eras, Yehuda Halevi’s work glimmered with an astonishing virtuosity among its masters. Halkin has written a vivid, smart, and engaging portrait of both the artist and his age. Against a shifting background of political and religious thought, Halkin presents us with a poet who cast a romantic eye on the fallen world, a passionate pilgrim and philosopher after whom Hebrew poetry was never the same.” 
—J. D. McClatchy
 
“There’s a great deal to enjoy in Yehuda Halevi, but for me it’s the poetry that truly inspires. The translations do their job: one feels the heft, courage, and urgency of Halevi’s passion to sing, and comes away understanding that, before and beyond all the tortured politics and endless blood, the real history of the Jewish people can be found not in exile but in the great love poetry, stemming all the way from the Song of Songs to Halevi to Amichai—the true home of Jewish longing and imagination.”
—Philip Schultz
 
“A wonderfully fresh biography of the great medieval Jewish poet and philosopher. Halkin has also provided a potent reading of Halevi’s poems, a powerful contextual study of his times, and a provocative interpretation of his legacy. Read this definitive work and you will be deeply immersed in the world of a figure that Heinrich Heine described as ‘God-kissed.’”
—Edward Hirsch