Jewish Crusaders to Palestine in the Twelfth Century?

The Hebrew poet Judah Halevi (ca. 1085–1141), though born in the Christian north, spent his scholarly career in dialogue with the Arabic traditions of the Islamic south. In his poetry and prose, he adapted the zeal for holy places from Christian and Muslim writings while vociferously differentiating and defending Judaism from the other religions. His major prose work, the Judeo-Arabic dialogue Kitāb al-radd wa-l-dalīl fi l-dīn al-dhalīl (ca. 1135) suggests its author’s acute sense of being poised precariously between the Christian hammer and the Islamic anvil (as Salo Baron remarked sixty years ago). At the height of his career as a physician, possibly at the court of Toledo, Halevi abandoned Iberia for Palestine, arriving in Alexandria in 1140, and died either before or after reaching Palestine in 1141.

Halevi’s Hebrew poetry is famous for its so-called “Zionide” motifs of longing for the Holy Land and its expression of willingness to “leave behind all the opulence of Spain” and “behold the dust of the ruined Shrine” in Jerusalem. But his motives for making pilgrimage remain obscure, as does the relationship between his poetry and his eventual departure. Was he calling on ancient Hebrew tropes of mourning for the destroyed temple? on more medieval Arabic ones of nostalgia for the ruined campsite? or expressing Crusader zeal in Jewish garb?

This paper considers Halevi’s pilgrimage on the basis of a large number of recently published sources from the Cairo Geniza and one major recent study (Scheindlin, The Song of the Distant Dove). The goal is to raise larger problems about the meanings of crusade, jihād, pilgrimage, and dislocation in the twelfth-century Near East. Can a new understanding of geographic mobility and the twelfth-century meanings of “elsewhere” cast light on the range of medieval responses to the Christian–Islamic wars?