Book Report (Classic): Song of the Distant Dove by Raymond Scheindlin
Some thoughts - mostly positive - about Scheindlin's study of Yehudah Halevi (plus a few lines of poetry)
[A book review companion to the Rishonim podcast episode number 12, linked here]
Dr. Tamar Ron Marvin has probably produced more Rishonim-related online scholarly-but-accessible content than anyone else (a small field, sure, but one that I care about). On her website, she has an excellent page called “54 Essential Books in Jewish Studies,” which is a wonderfully well-rounded list, even if the actual number of books she mentions in the article is over 200.
In order to represent the so-called “Golden Age” of Jews in Muslim Spain - the unique culture that existed in the southern Iberian Peninsula, known as al-Andalus, in approximately 950-1150 - Dr. Marvin has number 29: Raymond P. Scheindlin, The Song of the Distant Dove: Judah Halevi’s Pilgrimage (Oxford, 2007). She writes:
It was shockingly difficult to choose a book to represent Jewish life in Muslim Iberia. But Yehudah ha-Levi is about as iconic an Andalusi Jew as you can get, with all his complexities and even idiosyncrasies. This reconstruction of ha-Levi’s turn away from al-Andalus captures many of those complexities.
Having reread Scheindlin’s book recently, along with several other works of scholarship precisely on the cultural and intellectual history of this era, I wholeheartedly agree with her pick - even though it is with a bit of irony. The best way to understand al-Andalus might just be through the man who, sometime in his fifties, decided to turn his back on the world that so thoroughly made him into who he was. In this book, Raymond Scheindlin (who has also published lovely translations of medieval Hebrew verse), brings R. Yehudah Halevi, his world, and his poetry to life with great historical and literary sensitivity.
If there is a contest for “most Andalusi Jew,” I think the prize should probably go to Rabbi Shmuel ha-Nagid. But Judah Halevi (or “Yehudah ha-Levi”) makes for a fascinating foil for Andalusi Jewish culture precisely because he eventually threw it all away. Halevi ascended to the height of this cultural and intellectual world as a highly respected medical doctor, religious leader, and songwriter (to call him a ‘poet’ doesn’t quite capture what that meant for his time and place; he was more like a rockstar than a literature professor). He began his career as an ambitious Jewish teenager who traveled to the Jewish cultural center of Muslim Spain, the city of Granada, like an aspiring 20th century actor might move to Hollywood in the hopes of being discovered. In Yehudah Halevi’s case, his move was wildly successful, owing to his dazzlingly superior talents. As Moshe ibn Ezra writes to him:
“One so young / And still unsung / Has shouldered all / of wisdom’s weight. //
Come from the North / his light shines forth / to everywhere / illuminate.”
Halevi’s poetry represents the peak of the Arabic style of Hebrew verse that had so gripped the Jews of Muslim Spain, and he just ascended from there. He studied the books of science, medicine, and philosophy to the extent that he could hold court on all the “important” topics of the day and amassed considerable wealth through his various business investments. Then, sometime in his fifties (probably), he looked at this glittering life he had built and turned his back on it all.
Scheindlin's book absolutely sparkles in its reconstruction of this dramatic pivot. Through careful analysis of documents from the Cairo Geniza and Halevi's own searing poetry, he reveals a man wrestling with a spiritual crisis. Usually, it’s not a good idea to psychoanalyze anyone unless they sit on your therapy couch, especially someone who is so many hundreds of years away and from an entirely different cultural world. Yet, Scheindlin does exactly that - and he does so brilliantly, by building up this world with such careful detail that both Halevi's life and his disillusionment with it make perfect sense. Scheindlin’s reconstruction of Halevi’s frame of mind is beyond compelling; by extensive citations from his personal letters and readings of his poetry, Yehudah Halevi’s voice comes out so clear and strong that Scheindlin’s own commentary is almost superfluous.
According to his own letters and poetry, Halevi had come to see his life's achievements as a kind of sophisticated form of idolatry. All his efforts to gain prestige and wealth in Spain - his respected position, his business ventures, his celebrated poetry - seemed like elaborate ways of serving false gods, pursuing foreign idols instead of the Jewish values of closeness to God. He felt compelled to prove that he truly meant it when he said (in his famous poem libi ba-mizrah) “easily I could leave behind this Spain and all her luxury/ as easy to leave as dear the sight the Temple’s ruins would be to me,” and throw his lot in with God above (see the poem that I translated below).
Ironically, even Halevi's dramatic rejection of Andalusi culture was itself deeply Andalusi. Scheindlin brilliantly situates Halevi's spiritual crisis within the Islamic concept of "tawba" (perhaps similar to “teshuva”) a turning away from worldly success toward religious truth associated with middle or old age, somewhat similar to a “deathbed conversion” phenomenon. This was a cultural pattern familiar to Muslim Spain, where successful courtiers and intellectuals would sometimes dramatically renounce their achievements for a life of religious devotion (and is also present to a lesser extent in the work of Yehudah Halevi’s mentor, Moshe ibn Ezra). Readers of Halevi's monumental masterpiece, the Kuzari, usually consider it to be a quintessentially Jewish book, expressing total rejection of foreign values and philosophies. Yet even this ‘pure’ expression of Jewishness bears some unmistakable influenced of the Muslim scholar al-Ghazali - although Scheindlin does not develop this particular idea much, instead referring readers to other works (the best resource on Halevi’s intellectual sources is likely the book by Diana Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy: Sufi Language of Religious Experience in Judah Ha-Levi’s Kuzari).
Sepharad looms large in Jewish memory, and since the modern era, Jews have been especially enthralled by the "Golden Age" of Muslim Spain. It's a story we love to tell ourselves: a time when Jews could be both fully Jewish and fully integrated into the broader intellectual culture, writing Arabic-inspired poetry one minute and profound religious commentary the next. But Yehudah Halevi's example is itself the proverbial fly in the ointment, the dark shadow of Jewish consciousness that nags at the modern Jew and asks, are you in a foreign land serving foreign gods, building up a life of material wealth and comforts while leaving your spiritual storehouses empty? Are modern Jews, even the most religious, truly ready to give up “Spain and all her luxuries”?
It is regarding Yehuda Halevi’s own response to this question where I would differ slightly with Scheindlin's interpretation and instead agree with the assessment of another one of Yehudah Halevi’s recent English biographers, Hillel Halkin (whose book is also excellent, by the way, and written in a much less scholarly tone). Scheindlin sees Halevi’s pilgrimage to the land of Israel primarily as an extreme personal act, almost like a medieval version of someone giving up their law practice to become a monk and denouncing all worldly pleasures. Personally, I think Halevi's own writings suggest something more radical. He speaks of his interlocutors, his friends and acquaintances who he was leaving behind, as serving idolatry, as being in the thrall of foreign gods (again, see the poem I translated below). Even if he didn’t make any efforts to sway any companions into joining him on his journey or looked to start a movement akin to the Zionism of the 19th and 20th centuries, there is no doubt that by his example he was issuing a challenge to his entire community, if only intellectually. He would have wanted his coreligionists to consider the possibility that all their sophisticated cultural achievements, their mastery of Arabic poetry and Greek philosophy, their comfortable integration into Muslim intellectual life, had come at the cost of authentic Jewish experience.
Either way, Raymond Scheindlin’s book still serves as an excellent window into both the cultural world of Jewish al-Andalus and the dramatic rejection of that world by one of its most famous sons. Through meticulous scholarship and elegant prose, Scheindlin reconstructs not just Yehudah Halevi's physical journey but his intellectual and spiritual odyssey, bringing to life his outside cultural world and his internal psychological one with equal grace.
It is this journey, perhaps more than anything else, that makes Yehudah Halevi such a compelling figure today, nearly a millennium after his death. His poetry about Zion still appears in prayer books, his philosophical work is still studied in yeshivas, but it's his life choices that continue to provoke the most discussion. His work and his example articulating a tension, a challenge, for the comfortable diaspora that has characterized Jewish life in the Americas (and elsewhere) for the past few decades. He wasn't an outsider pointing fingers but the ultimate insider - someone who had mastered every aspect of his society's sophisticated synthesis before declaring it spiritually bankrupt. Perhaps Halevi also felt the changing winds, with the shifting borders of Muslim Spain and the steady rise of intolerant political factions and envisioned the destruction of Jewish al-Andalus that was about to take place a mere decade after his death (echoes that may resonate troublingly today but hopefully remain nothing more than that). Scheindlin's brilliant reconstruction of Halevi's world and crisis make it something more than historical scholarship - it is a mirror held up to our own golden ages.
[Below is my own personal translation of a few lines from the poem הֲיוּכְלוּ פְגָרִים]
Trembling and afraid,
With tears flowing like rain
Who goes forth from Spain
To search out a distant shore
To ride upon the waves
Through desert lands braves
Past lions in their caves
Where leopards prowl and roar
He spurns his friends' call
Chooses wandering's thrall
Leaves chamber's comforts all
For barren wastes galore
He'll climb upon the hills
Descend into the valleys
To make sure that he fulfills
And keeps the oaths he swore
He'll go wandering beyond
The region of Zoan
To the land of Canaan
Where chosen mountains soar
His interlocutors are strident
His friends speak defiance
He listens but stays silent
As if no words he bore
How long he'll counter them
Why bother to condemn
While grief they cannot stem
They’re in a drunken stupor
They praise the servitude
Of kings in grateful mood
Though in his eyes pursued
Idolatries galore
As slaves to Philistines
Hittites, Hagarim,
Whose mind they careen
Towards gods of foreign lore.
Get going, ship!
Take the trip
To where Shekhinah
Within it is stored.
Fly with haste
God’s hand has graced
Your sails are braced
With wings of dawn.