Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Joseph Friedlander, comp. The Standard Book of Jewish Verse. 1917.

By Heinrich Heine (Trans. Margaret Armour)

Jehuda Ben Halevy

“IF, Jerusalem, I ever

Should forget thee, to the roof

Of my mouth then cleave my tongue,

May my right hand lose its cunning—”

In my head the words and music

Round and round keep humming, ringing,

And I seem to hear men’s voices,

Men’s deep voices singing psalms—

And of long and shadowy beards

I can also catch some glimpses—

Say, which phantom dream-begotten

Is Jehuda ben Halevy?

But they swiftly rustle past me,

For the ghosts avoid, with terror,

Rude and clumsy human converse;

Yet, in spite of all, I knew him.

Yes, I knew him by his forehead

Pale and proud with noble thought,

By the eyes of steadfast sweetness;

Keen and sad they gazed in mine.

But more specially I knew him

By the enigmatic smiling

Of the lovely lips and rhythmic

That belong to poets only.

Years they come, and years they vanish;

Seven hundred years and fifty

It is now since dawned the birthday

Of Jehuda ben Halevy.

At Toledo in Castile

First he saw the light of heaven,

And the golden Tagus lulled him

In his cradle with its music.

The unfolding of his powers

Intellectual was fostered

By his father strict, who taught him

First the book of God, the Thora.

With his son he read the volume

In the ancient text, whose fair,

Picturesque and hieroglyphic,

Old-Chaldean, square-writ letters

From the childhood of our world

Have been handed down, and therefore

Seem familiarly to smile on

All with naïve, childlike natures.

And this ancient, uncorrupted

Text the boy recited also

In the Tropp—the sing-song measure,

From primeval times descended.

And the gutturals so oily,

And so fast he gurgled sweetly,

While he shook and trilled and quavered

The Schalscheleth like a bird,

And the boy was learned early

In the Targum Onkelos,

Which is written in low-Hebrew

In the Aramaean idiom,

Bearing somewhat the resemblance

To the language of the prophets

That the Swabian does to German—

In this curious bastard Hebrew,

As we said, the boy was versed,

And ere long he found such knowledge

Of most valuable service

In the study of the Talmud.

Yes, his father led him early

To the Talmud, and threw open

For his benefit that famous

School of fighting the Halacha.

Where the athletes dialectic,

Best in Babylon, and also

Those renowned in Pumbeditha

Did their intellectual tilting.

He had here the chance of learning

Every art and ruse polemic;

How he mastered them was proven

In the book Cosari, later.

But the lights are twain, and differ,

That are shed on earth by heaven;

There’s the harsh and glaring sunlight,

And the mild and gentle moonlight.

With a double radiance also

Shines the Talmud; the Halacha

Is the one, and the Hagada

Is the other light. The former

I have called the school of fighting;

But the latter, the Hagada

I will call a curious garden,

Most fantastic, and resembling

Much another one that blossomed

Too in Babylon—the garden

Of Semiramis; ’mongst wonders

Of the world it was the eighth.

Queen Semiramis, whose childhood

With the birds was spent, who reared her,

Many birdlike ways and habits

In her later life retained;

And, unwilling to go walking

On the flat and common earth,

Like us other common mortals,

Made a garden in the air—

High on pillars proud, colossal,

Shone the cypresses and palms,

Marble statues, beds of flowers,

Golden oranges and fountains;

All most cunningly and surely

Bound by countless hanging bridges,

That might well have passed as creepers,

And on which the birds kept swinging—

Birds of many colours, solemn,

Big, contemplative and songless,

While the tiny, happy finches,

Gaily warbling, fluttered round them—

All were breathing, blest and happy,

Breathing pure and balmy fragrance,

Unpolluted by the squalid,

Evil colour of the earth.

The Hagada is a garden,

Is just such another whimsy

Of a child of air, and often

Would the youthful Talmud scholar,

When his heart was dazed and dusty

With the strifes of the Halacha,

With disputes about the fatal

Egg the hen laid on a feast day,

Or concerning other problems

Of the same profound importance—

He would turn to seek refreshment

In the blossoming Hagada,

Where the beautiful old sagas,

Legends dim, and angel-fables,

Pious stories of the martyrs,

Festal hymns and proverbs wise,

And hyperboles the drollest,

But withal so strong and burning

With belief—where all, resplendent,

Welled and sprouted with luxuriance!

And the generous heart and noble

Of the boy was taken captive

By the wild romantic sweetness,

By the wondrous aching rapture,

By the weird and fabled terrors

Of that blissful secret world,

Of that mighty revelation

For which poetry our name is.

And the art that goes to make it,

Gracious power, happy knowledge,

Which we call the art poetic,

To his understanding opened.

And Jehuda ben Halevy

Was not only scribe and scholar,

But of poetry a master,

Was himself a famous poet;

Yes, a great and famous poet,

Star and torch to guide his time,

Light and beacon of his nation;

Was a wonderful and mighty

Fiery pillar of sweet song,

Moving on in front of Israel’s

Caravans of woe and mourning

In the wilderness of exile.

True and pure and without blemish

Was his singing, like his soul—

The Creator having made it,

With His handiwork contented,

Kissed the lovely soul, and echoes

Of that kiss forever after

Thrilled through all the poet’s numbers,

By that gracious deed inspired.

As in life, in song the highest

Good of all is simply grace,

And who hath it cannot sin in

Either poetry or prose.

And that man we call a genius,

By the grace of God a poet,

Monarch absolute, unquestioned,

In the realm of human thought.

None but God can call the poet

To account, the people never—

As in art, in life the people

Can but kill, they cannot judge us.