Judah Halevi

Judah Halevi (c. 1075 to 1141) was a Hebrew poet and philosopher of Muslim and Christian Spain, a physician by profession and a pupil of the Andalusian school of Hebrew verse. He wrote love songs, wedding poems, poems of friendship and a large body of devotional and liturgical verse, and in prose the Kuzari, a defence of Judaism. Late in life he left Spain for the Land of Israel; his poems of Zion and of the sea voyage there are the best known of his work.

The poems here come from two English translators. Emma Lazarus gave seven of them in Poems, vol. II (1889), among them Longing for Jerusalem and To the West Wind. Nina Salaman's Selected Poems of Jehudah Halevi (Jewish Publication Society, 1924) gives eighty, in four groups (the journey to Zion, love and bridal songs, poems of friendship, devotional poems), followed by thirteen of them in rhymed versions, which appear here with the label (rhymed version). Where both translators render the same poem, both versions are kept. No portrait of Halevi survives.