Jerusalem! Have you no greeting?

Possibly his best-known and most influential poem, Judah ha-Levi’s “Jerusalem! Have you no greeting?” remains part of the liturgy for the Ninth of Av. The Hebrew poem expresses ha-Levi’s desire to emigrate to the land of Israel, which entailed a rejection of the Andalusi culture in which he was raised. Like similar Arabic odes, this poem begins with a lament for the physical spaces and then turns to the poet’s own heartache. Ha-Levi alternates between speaking for himself and speaking for Jerusalem. This poem had numerous imitators among later Jewish poets and was influential into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, inspiring literary translations into a number of modern languages, including a German one by Moses Mendelssohn.