_Hep_, _Hep_, was the dominant note in the European concert, when at the beginning of the twelfth century our poet was born. France, Italy, Germany, Bohemia, and Greece had each been, at different times within the hundred years which had just closed, the scene of terrible persecutions. In Spain alone, under the mild sway of the Ommeyade Kaliphs, there had been a tolerably long entr’acte in the ‘fifteen hundred year tragedy’ that the Jewish race was enacting, and there, in old Castille, whilst Alfonso VI. was king, Jehudah Halevi passed his childhood. Although in 1085 Alfonso was already presiding over an important confederation of Catholic States, yet at the beginning of the twelfth century the Arab supremacy in Spain was still comparatively unshaken, and its influence, social and political, over its Jewish subjects was still paramount. Perhaps the one direction in which that impressionable race was least perceptibly affected by its Arab experiences was in its literature. And remembering how very distinctly in the elder days of art the influence of Greek thought is traceable in Jewish philosophy, it is strange to note with these authors of the Middle Ages, who write as readily in Arabic as in Hebrew, that, though the hand is the hand of Esau, the voice remains unmistakably the voice of Jacob. Munk dwells on this remarkable distinction in the poetry of the period, and with some natural preference perhaps, strives to account for it in the wide divergence of the Hebrew and Arabic sources of inspiration. The poetry of the Jews he roundly declares to be universal, and that of the Arabs egotistic in its tendency; the sons of the desert finding subjects for their Muse in traditions of national glory and in dreams of material delight, whilst the descendants of prophets turn to the records of their own ancestry, and find their themes in remorseful memories, and in unselfish and unsensual hopes. With the Jewish poet, past and future are alike uncoloured by personal desire, and even the sins and sufferings of his race he enshrines in song. If it be good, as a modern writer has declared it to be, that a nation should commemorate its defeats, certainly no race has ever been richer in such subjects, or has shown itself more willing, in ritual and rhyme, to take advantage of them.