ABSTRACT
Yehuda Halevi is a foundational figure in Hebrew literature. In the late nineteenth century the Zionists positioned him as an early inspiration, but his existential poetry also left a deep influence on diasporic Jewish literature (the biblical Edom), as the poem "My heart Is in the East" shows. He was born in Tudela and spent his youth in Andalusia. A friend of Moisés ben Ezra, he was a doctor and philosopher who lived also in Toledo and later on in Córdoba. He is the author of The Kuzari, a philosophical and theological volume made of a trialogue between Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders whose goal it is to convince the king of the Khazars that their religion is the right one to choose in a popular act of conversion. Toward the end of his life, Halevi abandoned the Diaspora to travel to Zion and thus cure the injury that divided his heart. He stopped in Alexandria, where he was received with acclaim. But he died on the voyage and never made it to the Promised Land. Halevi's work is an enlightened display of the tensions between Muslims, Christians, and Jews at the time of La reconquista, as the period of fruitful interreligious cohabitation came to an end. The poem included in this anthology evidences the pledge by Halevi to leave Spain for Zion. The reference to "the domains of Edom," as T. Carmi, Halevi's translator, puts it, refers to the conquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099.
