About the Author:
About the Author:
"Yehuda Halevi, in full Yehuda ben Shemuel Ha-Levi, also Judah ha-Levi, or Judah ben Samuel Halevi (c.1075-1141) was a Spanish Jewish philosopher and poet. He was born in Tudela, Navarre, Spain.
Halevi was born either in Tudela or Toledo; he often referred to himself as coming from Christian territory, which would point to Toledo, which was conquered by Alfonso VI from the Muslims in Halevi's childhood (1086). As a youth, he seems to have gone to Granada, the main center of Jewish literary and intellectual life at the time, where he found a mentor in Moses Ibn Ezra. Although it is often said that he studied in the academy at Lucena, there is no evidence to this effect. He did compose a short elegy on the death of Isaac Alfasi, the head of the academy. His aptitude as a poet was recognized early. He was educated in traditional Jewish scholarship, in Arabic literature, and in the Greek sciences and philosophy that were available in Arabic. As an adult he was a physician, apparently of renown, and an active participant in Jewish communal affairs. For at least part of his life he lived in Toledo and may have been connected with the court there as a physician. In Toledo he complains of being too busy with medicine to devote himself to scholarship. At other times he lived in various Muslim cities in the south.
Like all Jewish intellectuals of Muslim Spain, Halevi wrote prose in Arabic and poetry in Hebrew. He was in fact the most prolific of the Hebrew poets of the Hebrew Golden Age and was regarded by some of his contemporaries (and by modern critics as well) as the greatest of all the medieval Hebrew poets. Like all the Hebrew poets of the Hebrew Golden Age, he employed the formal patterns of Arabic poetry, both the classical monorhymed patterns and the recently-invented strophic patterns. His themes embrace all those that were current among Hebrew poets: panegyric odes, funeral odes, poems on the pleasures of life, gnomic epigrams, and riddles. He was also a prolific author of religious verse. As with all the Hebrew poets of his age, strives for a strictly biblical diction, though he unavoidably falls into occasional calques from Arabic. His verse is distinguished by special attention to acoustic effect and wit.
Nothing is known of Halevi's personal life except the report in his poems that he ..." (Quote from wikipedia.org)
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