In Egypt, a determined attempt was made by the Jews to keep him among them.  But it was vain.  Onward to Jerusalem:  this was his one thought.  He tarried in Egypt but a short while, then he passed to Tyre and Damascus.  At Damascus, in the year 1140 or thereabouts, he wrote the ode to Zion which made his name immortal, an ode in which he gave vent to all the intense passion which filled his soul.  The following are some stanzas taken from this address to Jerusalem: 

    The glory of the Lord has been alway
    Thy sole and perfect light;
    Thou needest not the sun to shine by day,
    Nor moon and stars to illumine thee by night. 
    I would that, where God’s spirit was of yore
    Poured out unto thy holy ones, I might
    There too my soul outpour! 
    The house of kings and throne of God wert thou,
    How comes it then that now
    Slaves fill the throne where sat thy kings before?

    Oh! who will lead me on
    To seek the spots where, in far distant years,
    The angels in their glory dawned upon
    Thy messengers and seers?

    Oh! who will give me wings
    That I may fly away,
    And there, at rest from all my wanderings,
    The ruins of my heart among thy ruins lay?

* * * * *

    The Lord desires thee for his dwelling-place
    Eternally, and bless’d
    Is he whom God has chosen for the grace
    Within thy courts to rest. 
    Happy is he that watches, drawing near,
    Until he sees thy glorious lights arise,
    And over whom thy dawn breaks full and clear
    Set in the orient skies. 
    But happiest he, who, with exultant eyes,
    The bliss of thy redeemed ones shall behold,
    And see thy youth renewed as in the days of old.

Soon after writing this Jehuda arrived near the Holy City.  He was by her side at last, by the side of his beloved.  Then, legend tells us, through a gate an Arab horseman dashed forth:  he raised his spear, and slew the poet, who fell at the threshold of his dear Jerusalem, with a song of Zion on his lips.

The new-Hebrew poetry did not survive him.  Persecution froze the current of the Jewish soul.  Poets, indeed, arose after Jehuda Halevi in Germany as in Spain.  Sometimes, as in the hymns of the “German” Meir of Rothenburg, a high level of passionate piety is reached.  But it has well been said that “the hymns of the Spanish writers link man’s soul to his Maker:  the hymns of the Germans link Israel to his God.”  Only in Spain Hebrew poetry was universal, in the sense in which the Psalms are universal.  Even in Spain itself, the death of Jehuda Halevi marked the close of this higher inspiration.  The later Spanish poets, Charizi and Zabara (middle and end of the twelfth century), were satirists rather than poets, witty, sparkling, ready with quaint quips, but local and imitative in manner and subject.