ר׳ יהודה הלוי

ר׳ יהודה הלוי (Judah or Yehudah Halevi; c. 1075–1141) was an Andalusian Hebrew poet, Jewish thinker and physician whose life joined the Arabic intellectual culture of medieval Iberia with a sustained religious longing for the Land of Israel. Modern scholarship generally prefers Tudela, then under Muslim rule, as his birthplace, although Toledo was traditionally proposed. As a young poet he entered the Granada circle of ר׳ משה בן יעקב אבן עזרא and subsequently lived and worked in several Iberian centres, including Córdoba and Toledo. He wrote sacred and secular Hebrew poetry—liturgical poems, elegies, friendship and wedding poems, and the celebrated Songs of Zion—while practising medicine and participating in a network that included ר׳ יוסף אבן מיגאש and ר׳ אברהם אבן עזרא. His Judaeo-Arabic philosophical dialogue כתאב אלחג׳ה ואלדליל פי נצר אלדין אלד׳ליל, later known through ר׳ יהודה אבן תיבון's Hebrew translation as ספר הכוזרי, defends rabbinic Judaism through a dialogue between the Khazar king and a Jewish sage. In 1140 he left Iberia for the East. Cairo Geniza documents place him in Alexandria and Fustat and preserve letters in his own hand. He sailed toward the Land of Israel in May 1141, but the surviving evidence does not establish that he arrived. A later Geniza letter implies that he died by the summer or early autumn of 1141; the famous story of his death at Jerusalem's gates is a late legend, not contemporary evidence.