Poems from the Diwan

Yehuda Halevi, who wrote both secular and devotional poems, is considered one of the finest poets in post-biblical Hebrew literature. Suffused with warmth, moving easily between the mundane and the otherworldly, and, above all, delicately elegiac, the poet's voice cuts across all the literary genres and religious modes on which he drew.

Born in the second half of the 11th century, Halevi wandered in his youth between Muslim and Christian Spain before settling in Córdoba around 1110. Towards...