Judah Halevi, the best-known Hebrew poet of the Middle Ages, was born in the 1070s, probably in Tudela in what is now called Spain, where he lived for most of his life. At the time, Spain was predominantly an Arabicspeaking, Muslim territory known as al-Andalus and linked more tightly to North Africa and the rest of the Islamic world than to Europe. Halevi belonged to the Jewish social and intellectual aristocracy that flourished in al-Andalus during the age of the Islamic ascendancy (750-1300) in the Judeo-Arabic world. He was a physician, theologian, merchant, religious scholar, and prominent figure in public affairs. Sometime in his sixties, during the summer of 1140, after much debate within himself and with family and friends, Halevi sailed from al-Andalus with the intention of settling and dying in the original Jewish homeland of Palestine. Traveling by way...