Talk:Judah Halevi

Some ranting
"Judah ben David ha-levi of Cologne became 'Hermannus quondam Idueus' (Hermann the erstwhile Jew) when he approached the baptismal font in 1129 at the age of twenty. He soon became a Premonstratensian canon, rose to the priesthood, and ultimately was chosen abbot of the Premonstratensian cloister at Scheda. Like Peter Alfonsi, Hermann authored a book to explain his apostasy, although his Opusculum de conversione sua concerns the events leading up to his conversion rather that the substantive differences between Judaism and Christianity. Hermann's interesting treatise has been termed the most compelling autobiographical account of religious conversion since Augustine's Confessions, and it provides us with the only source for evaluating his departure from the Jewish community."

The above seems to refer to someone else &mdash; this page is for Judah ben Samuel Halevi of Toledo. I don't know anything about Judah ben David Halevi and don't have an EJ handy, so it's up to someone else (or User:66.185.252.134) to make a new page and a disambiguation between the two. I won't have an EJ again until August 2006. --Mgreenbe 19:24, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Terrible and Inconcievable Mistakes in the Most Obvious of Things
I was enraged to find that someone has mistakingly written that the birthplace of our great and most noble philosopher Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, writer of that most revered of texts, the Book of the Khazari, was Toledo. It is an outrage! the Rihal was born in Tudela, and in 1075 (NOT 1085) by most acounts, this all from the Encyclopedia Judaica. I can scarce believe that the wrath of god has not incinerated this misleading webpage yet, and it is through my fix to the page that I intend to mend the evil done to our great scholar and thus assist in educating the small-minded. Bold text

birth and death dates
I'm reverting the birth and death dates back to the actual year's links. It's hardly relevant to record birthdate and deathdate for poetry; I should think this would be more significant for publication of poetry or its subject matter. If someone objects, please give a reason.--SidP 08:11, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Journey to the Holy Land
This section seems rather incomplete.

In the preface to Gabriel Levin's translation of On The Sea (Ibis Editions, 1997, Jerusalem), Levin indicates that while Halevi might have initially sought an overland route to Palestine, we do know that he boarded a ship for Palestine and that the ship set sail; otherwise, we have no further record of his journey or his last days. From Levin's preface:

"The Israeli scholar Yospeh Yahalom has recently suggested that, in traveling to Cairo, Halevi sough not pleasure but rather an alternative, overland route to Palestine, and that the poet was somehow foiled in his plans. Whatever the case, the Mediterranean was simply too dangerous to navigate during the winter months [ . . .] Yehuda Halevi boarded ship for Palestine on Thursday, May 8.  The ship, however, was still in port on Sunday the eleventh [ . . . ] Scribbling in haste after returning from bidding farewell to Halevi [on May 16], Abu Nasr writes: 'The west wind has risen, the ship has sailed.'  In October and then November, the poet's demise is lamented in two separate letters written by friends of Halevi's in Egypt.  And yet the exact date, location, and circumstances of his daeath have remained a mystery." (pp. 15-16).

Requested move (archived -- new requested move below)

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of the . Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

Yehuda Halevi → Judah ha-Levi — Per WP naming conventions. English name should be given. Plus proper punctuation would be ha-Levi, since this is not a surname but rather an eke-name ("the Levite"). —Briangotts (Talk) (Contrib) 17:52, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Survey

 * Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with  or  , then sign your comment with  . Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's naming conventions.

Discussion

 * Any additional comments: --Briangotts (Talk) (Contrib) 17:52, 6 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Support, move sounds reasonable and consistent with WP:NAME, assuming a redirect from Yehuda Halevi to the new name. The only issue I see is using a hyphen in the title, but I suppose redirects of all possible versions would address that.  For what it's worth, EB titles it as Judah ha-Levi as you suggest. -- M P er el  18:23, 6 September 2007 (UTC) (see below, changed opinion)
 * Strongly Oppose he is not called "Judah" in English but "Yehuda". Should we also rename Johann Sebastian Bach to John Sebastian Bach because "John" is English for Johann, and while we are about it, how about renaming Eduardo da Silva to Edward da Silva because Edward is the English for Eduardo? Also ha-Levi is not the typical spelling used, one sees Halevy and Halevi Kuratowski&#39;s Ghost 23:59, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment - He is known as Judah in English. Yehuda is an anglicization of his Hebrew name. Should Judah haNasi, Judah II, Tribe of Judah etc. be moved to Yehuda? Moreover, the common use of Halevy does not make it correct. "Halevy" is a modern surname based on the tribal designation "ha-Levi" ("the Levite"). Briangotts (Talk) (Contrib) 14:18, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Oppose, I've changed my mind as Kuratowki's Ghost makes a very good point. -- M P er el 07:32, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Support Judah ha-Levi is more common in English than Yehuda Halevi. Kuratowski is right that we should not anglicize automatically, but we should when English does. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:39, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment. I came to close this RM, but I think I'll leave this to someone else. Namely, your Google scholar argument is apparently persuasive, but if you take a look at Page 3 onwards, you will see a huge repetition of apparently identical text, all coming from International Journal of Middle East Studies. That largely skews the results. Otherwise, I agree with you that we shouldn't transliterate automatically, but this is a borderline case. Duja ► 09:38, 14 September 2007 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the . Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

It was requested that this article be renamed but there was no consensus for it to be moved. --Stemonitis 07:13, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Requested Move (take two)

 * The following discussion is archived. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Re-opening a move suggestion from the current 'Yehuda' to 'Judah.' From what I've found (including quite recently), Judah is the conventional English transcription by a decent margin, and most of the scholarship on Halevi uses 'Judah'. It is true, there are more variations in last name (ha-Levi first Halevi), but I won't get in to that here. I'm not sure the appropriate way to catalogue this below, so I'll just some books that I've found that use 'Judah'. Here are two very recent: Adam Shear - The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167-1900 (2008) and Diana Lobel - Between Mysticism and Philosophy (2007), both very good.
 * This doesn't seem to have aroused much controversy, so I'm going to just change it...hope that doesn't raise a firestorm.Sammermpc (talk) 03:38, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Should this prove controversial, I can find more, but let's see how this goes...Sammermpc (talk) 03:26, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Support the name I'm familiar with. I've added subsections for the bibliography if necessary.0 Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:24, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Other discussion
See my comments in the closed move request above. I've looked at Duja's reply; if there were once massive repeats, I don't see them now. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:30, 14 December 2008 (UTC
 * Yeah, I agree. A string "Yehuda Halevi" on Google Scholar yields ~250. "Judah Halevi," around 1100.Sammermpc (talk) 00:22, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Plagiarism
This text is plagiarized almost completely from the Jewish Encyclopedia. [] 24.233.254.29 (talk) 23:14, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Jewish Encyclopedia is in the public domain. I don't have time right now, but if the article really is copied, we should add an acknowledgement.Peter Chastain (talk) 21:40, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
 * It is indeed mostly (all?) a copy from the PD edition of the JE. Making that fact known would actually improve the article vastly IMHO, since right now it reads like the author's opinion (e.g. "If one may speak of religious geniuses, then Judah Halevi must certainly be regarded among the greatest produced by medieval Judaism. No other writer, it would seem, drew so near to God as Judah; none else knew how to cling to Him so closely, or felt so safe in His shadow.")  As a quotation from an authoritative source, this is fine; as the opinion of a Wikipedia author, not so much.  So... what's the best way of making that happen? Check for quotes and just blockquote (possibly the whole article)?  Or is there a better way to do it the Wiki way?Gharlane (talk) 04:11, 30 November 2014 (UTC)

Worldcat author listing
Regards ‫·‏לערי ריינהארט‏·‏T‏·‏m‏:‏Th‏·‏T‏·‏email me‏·‏‬ 12:04, 3 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Judah ha-Levi 12th cent

His name in Arabic
The name of Judah Halevi in Arabic as provided in the last version of this article is يهوذا هاليفي which is wrong. It has to be written as يهوذا اللاوي. This is also how it is written on the cover of his Kuzari's Arabic-edition A brief description of the book Kuzari in Arabic, where is also a photo of the front cover of its Arabic edition, so; I fixed that. -- M. A. Ahmedi (talk) 01:46, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

ש
no article in english about his song. i also hope this will be added to wiki palestine project: http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%9C%D7%91%D7%99_%D7%91%D7%9E%D7%96%D7%A8%D7%97 "my heart is in the east but i am in the far west" it's about the love to the land of israel ... Also gdalia yosef ibn yahiya says he was killed by an arab riding a horse due to his devotion to israel... --79.181.102.198 (talk) 13:21, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Travel to "Israel"?
At the time Judah made his travel there was no [State of] Israel (or Palestine). It was called the Holy Land. The wikilink goes to "Land of Israel", but its use as "Israel" is misleading. —Hexafluoride Ping me if you need help, or post on my talk 10:01, 2 May 2017 (UTC)