Three perspectives on Judah Halevi's voyage to Palestine

The recent publication of Raymond P. Scheindlin's The Song of the Distant Dove (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) offers an opportunity to chart the course of scholarship on Judah Halevi's famous voyage to Palestine. For a century and a half students of history, literature and philosophy have subjected Halevi's odyssey to microscopic scrutiny, and the present study sorts the literature into two opposing camps, which can be crudely termed Zionist and Diasporist, based on their understanding of Halevi's purpose: one group views the journey as a clarion call to Spanish Jewry to abandon the option of life in the Diaspora, and likewise to forsake the Iberian synthesis of Graeco-Arabic and Jewish culture, while the other group portrays the voyage as a personal-religious quest, akin to the pilgrimages made by devout Muslims in advanced age. A very small group maintains that Halevi may have held both intentions. The historiographical survey concludes by noting that a contemporary tendency can be attributed to the proponents of both the Zionist and Diasporist interpretations.