Judah Halevi c. 1075 – 1141

Judah Halevi was a Spanish Jewish philosopher, poet, and physician who lived in the Christian and Muslim courts of medieval Iberia. His philosophical dialogue The Kuzari, conducted between a rabbi and the king of the Khazars, defends Judaism against the rival claims of Christianity, Islam, philosophy, and the surviving Karaite movement, arguing that revealed religion is rooted in historical experience rather than abstract speculation. Late in life he set out for the Holy Land, and is traditionally believed to have died as he approached Jerusalem. His Hebrew poetry, secular and religious, is among the finest of the medieval Jewish tradition.

Judah Halevi was born around 1075 in Tudela in the Christian-ruled kingdom of Castile, the son of a well-to-do Jewish family. He went south as a young man to study Talmud and Arabic at the Andalusian centre of Lucena under Isaac Alfasi, and earned his living as a court physician at Toledo, Cordoba, and Granada. He was the close friend of Moses ibn Ezra and patron of the young Abraham ibn Ezra. In 1140, troubled by the deteriorating position of Iberian Jewry between Christian Reconquista and Almohad invasion, he set out for the land of Israel; he reached Egypt and was honoured by the Cairo community; the precise circumstances of his death around 1141 — whether at Alexandria, Cairo, or, as tradition romantically claimed, at the gate of Jerusalem — remain disputed.

He was the greatest Hebrew poet of the medieval period; more than eight hundred poems survive, including the celebrated Songs of Zion and a long series of sacred and secular pieces. His one major prose work is the Book of the Khazar (Sefer ha-Kuzari), composed in Judaeo-Arabic and translated into Hebrew shortly after his death by Judah ibn Tibbon.

The Kuzari frames a defence of rabbinic Judaism as the dialogue between the king of the Khazars and representatives of philosophy, Christianity, Islam, and a Jewish sage; against the universal philosophical religion of Avicenna and Maimonides Halevi argued for the priority of historical revelation, the prophetic vocation of a particular people, the special quality of the land of Israel, and the limits of Greek reason in matters of faith.