n and increased by the work of his sons-in-law and grandsons.
Of these, Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam, 1100-1160) was the most renowned.
The devoted attention to the literature of Judaism in the Rhinelands
came in the nick of time. It was a firm rock against the storm which was
about to break. The Crusades crushed out from the Jews of France all
hope of temporal happiness. When Alfassi died in 1103 and Rashi in 1105,
the first Crusade had barely spent its force. The Jewish schools in
France were destroyed, the teachers and scholars massacred or exiled.
But the spirit lived on. Their literature was life to the Jews, who had
no other life. His body bent over Rashi's illuminating expositions of
the Talmud and the Bible, the medieval Jew felt his soul raised above
the miseries of the present to a world of peace and righteousness, where
the wicked ceased from troubling, and the weary were at rest.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALFASSI AND RASHI.

Graetz.--III, p. 285 [292] _seq._

ALFASSI.

I.H. Weiss.--_J.Q.R._, I, p. 290.

RASHI.

Schiller-Szinessy.--_Encycl. Brit._, Vol. XX, p. 284.

CHAPTER XII

THE SPANISH-JEWISH POETS (II)

Jehuda Halevi.--Charizi.

Turning once more to the brighter condition of Jewish literature in
Spain, we reach a man upon whom the whole vocabulary of praise and
affection has been exhausted; a man of magnetic attractiveness, whom
contemporaries and successors have agreed to admire and to love. Jehuda
Halevi was born in Toledo about 1085, the year in which Alfonso VI
recaptured the city from the Moors. It was a fit birth-place for the
greatest Jewish poet since Bible times. East and West met in Toledo. The
science of the East there found Western Christians to cultivate it. Jew,
Moor, and Christian displayed there mutual toleration which existed
nowhere else. In the midst of this favorable environment Jehuda Halevi
grew to early maturity. As a boy he won more than local fame as a
versifier. At all festive occasions his verses were in demand. He wrote
wedding odes, elegies on great men, eulogies of the living. His love
poems, serenades, epigrams of this period, all display taste, elegance,
and passion.

The second period of Jehuda Halevi's literary career was devoted to
serious pursuits, to thoughts about life, and to practical work. He
wrote his far-famed philosophical dialogue, the _Cuzari_, and earned his
living as a physician. He was not an enthusiastic devotee to medicine,
however.