The Song of the Distant Dove: Judah Halevi's Pilgrimage.

• Author: Tanenbaum, Adena
• Position: Book review

The Song of the Distant Dove: Judah Halevi's pilgrimage. By RAYMOND P. SCHEINDLIN, New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008. Pp. x + 310. $45.

In the summer of 1140 Judah Halevi set sail from al-Andalus for Egypt, with the express intention of ending his days in the Land of Israel. Born in Christian Spain, Halevi (ca. 1075-1141) was an uncommonly gifted Hebrew poet who had gained his entree into Andalusian Jewish literary society already as a young man. Later he became the most esteemed Hebrew poet of his age as well as a highly respected physician, businessman, and communal leader, and the author of the Kuzari, an enduring work of religious thought composed in Judeo-Arabic. Called "the quintessence and embodiment of our country, our glory and leader, the illustrious scholar and unique and perfect devotee" by one twelfth-century correspondent, Halevi was deeply beloved and widely revered by his contemporaries (see S. D. Goitein, in Orientalia Hispanica [Leiden, 1974], 1: 343). Yet, towards the end of his life he renounced his fame and good fortune in favor of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Seemingly alienated from the social and intellectual elite of Jewish Andalusia, the poet resolved to "leave behind this Spain and all her luxuries" for the spiritual regeneration promised by "the Temple's rubble" (p. 169).

Halevi's biography has for generations captured the imagination of scholars and laymen alike, in part due to the dramatic legend of his death. A folk tradition that first surfaced in a sixteenth century Hebrew chronicle relates that the poet was cut down by an Arab horseman as he knelt at the gates of Jerusalem to kiss the stones of the holy city. But a certain allure has also attached to Halevi's rejection of Spain for the Holy Land. This cultural and intellectual volte-face has been viewed through a variety of lenses, colored by different historiographical agendas. The mid-nineteenth-century literary scholar Michael Sachs saw in Halevi a fervent nationalist immersed in the historical past of his people, "the most patriotic" of all the Andalusian poets, who furnished a practical solution to the statelessness of his people. Zionist thinkers from the late nineteenth century on cast Halevi as a proto-Zionist. In a provocative 1996 article (in Pe'amim 68: 4 15), Ezra Fleischer--for many years the doyen of medieval Hebrew poetic study--portrayed Halevi's pilgrimage as the exemplary act of a cherished communal leader motivated by political and educational, rather than strictly spiritual concerns. In his view, Halevi's emigration was intended to spur a mass exodus of Jews from Spain, as a way of preserving Jewish cultural autonomy.

Our insight into Halevi's pilgrimage has benefited immensely from the discovery of a medieval archive of letters preserved in the Cairo genizah, a depository for discarded manuscripts attached to the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo. A spectacular find brought to light by Shelomo Dov Goitein (d. 1985), these Judeo-Arabic letters by and about Halevi reveal the extraordinarily cosmopolitan world inhabited by the poet, his acquaintances, and business partners in twelfth-century Spain and Egypt. In a series of Hebrew publications beginning in the mid-1950s, and culminating in the integrated portrait in Volume Five of his magnum opus, A Mediterranean Society, Goitein elucidated Halevi's life story on the basis of documentary sources from the genizah. More recently, Moshe Gil and Ezra...