Great Regulars: From this fragment of evidence,

we know that [Yehuda] Halevi must have died either on the way to Palestine or shortly after arriving.

It is as though history wanted to leave Halevi's pilgrimage blank, so that future generations of Jews could fill it in with their own hopes and fears. Fittingly, then, the last section of Halkin's book is a survey of all the stories posterity has told about Halevi's end. The earliest of those stories dates to 1586, when a book published in Venice recorded that Halevi was killed by an Arab horseman while praying at the gates of Jerusalem. As Halkin writes, the story has little chance of being true--it was published more than four centuries after the event it purports to describe--but it does seem to tell us, "if not how Halevi died, how he should have died. . . . It had the right proportions of fatedness and accident, fulfillment granted and denied."

from Adam Kirsch: Tablet: The Pilgrim

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