Singer of Zion

Yehuda Halevi
by Hillel Halkin
Schocken, 368 pp., $26

World circles with Jerusalem at the center, from Yehuda Halevi’s ‘Book of Kusari’ (15th c.)

bpk / SBB

This is a tour de force. Hillel Halkin’s Yehuda Halevi is a complex, daring, and consistently fascinating biography of a complex and daring man, one of the great heroes of Hebrew literature and Jewish history. Halevi comes second only to King David in his fame and influence as a Hebrew poet. He was also a renowned theologian who, in his last years, abandoned life in the fast lane of medieval Spain to make the perilous journey to settle in the land of Israel.

Writing Halevi’s biography is a different sort of perilous journey. It requires mastery of a wide range of complex material in many languages, the judgment to make good guesses where the record goes blank, and the sheer virtuosity to convey the essence of medieval Hebrew poetry in modern English. Halkin has completed the hard journey with distinction. His book is a fine wine with a million complex overtones, or a moonlit garden-court where the music of Halevi’s poetry (a hidden fountain) mingles with the soft voice of his philosophy and the exotic fragrances of his long-ago life (Halkin calls him “the first great romantic figure in Jewish history”)—and where you feel, too, like a persistent breeze, the strong connections between the great medieval poet and his 21st-century biographer. Halkin was born in America, settled in Israel, and became a compelling spokesman for Zionism and the resettlement of modern Jews in the Jewish state. Halevi is not merely a hero; he is Halkin’s hero.