Yehuda Alharizi

Also known as Judah al-Harizi, Yehuda ben Shlomo Alharizi

Castilian-born Hebrew poet, translator of Maimonides, and traveller whose rhymed-prose maqamat — the Tahkemoni — preserve a glittering eyewitness portrait of Jewish communities across Provence, Egypt, Syria, the Crusader kingdom, and Iraq in the early thirteenth century.

Alharizi was born in Toledo into the late efflorescence of Sephardi Hebrew letters, was educated in both Arabic and Hebrew literature, and made his early reputation as a translator: his Hebrew renderings of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed and of the Arabic maqamat of al-Hariri put two of the central works of Arabic-language Jewish thought into the hands of Ashkenazi Europe.

From about 1216 he travelled across the eastern Mediterranean, supporting himself as a poet and intermediary between rival Jewish patrons in Marseille, Alexandria, Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, and Baghdad. His great Hebrew rhymed-prose work, the Tahkemoni — fifty maqamat composed in the years of his travels — preserves vivid named portraits of the leading rabbinic and lay figures of every community he visited, the only literary source we have for many of them.

His comments on the Latin kingdom and on the Jewish community of Jerusalem in the brief window of restored Frankish access in the 1220s have made him one of the most cited single Hebrew witnesses for the early-thirteenth-century Latin East. He died in Aleppo in 1225, a few years before Frederick II's recovery of Jerusalem, and was the last great Sephardi traveller of his generation.

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