JOSEPH YAHALOM BIOGRAPHY in 2009, Professor Dr. Joseph

JOSEPH YAHALOM BIOGRAPHY In 2009, Professor Dr. Joseph (Yossi) Yahalom formally retired from his post as Professor of Hebrew Poetry and Literature at the Hebrew Univer- sity. Many of us have had the pleasure of knowing Yossi personally and professionally and have enjoyed his extensive knowledge of and thorough familiarity with Hebrew literature and Jewish culture. Joseph Yahalom was born on April 11, 1941, in Haifa, Israel. His parents, who were originally from a German-Polish border town, left Europe and settled in Palestine before the Second World War. Soon after, Joseph and his parents moved to Jerusalem. He attended the Yavneh School there, where he received his primary and secondary education. During his time at Yavneh, he became deeply interested in the Hebrew language and literature. He completed his studies at the Lipschitz Institution of Teaching in Jerusalem and went on to join the army. In 1962, Joseph Yahalom passed his First Degree Examination at the Hebrew University. While continuing his studies in the Hebrew language and linguistics for the Second Degree Examination at the Hebrew Uni- versity, he served as an Educational Of¿cer in the army. He passed this examination in 1967, whereupon he was invited by one of his most promi- nent teachers, Professor Ze’ev Ben-Hayyim, to join a team of scholars at the Academy of the Hebrew Language and participate in the Historical Dictionary project. Amidst famous researchers such as Israel Yeivin and Gad Ben-Ami Zarfati, Joseph Yahalom began and completed his thesis The Syntax of the Ancient Piyyut as a Basis for its Style. His guides were Professors Ze’ev Ben-Hayyim and Hayyim Schirmann. The completion of his War- burg price awarded thesis in 1973 marked the start of a long and successful academic career in both Hebrew and Jewish studies, with much emphasis on poetry and poetics. Yahalom’s continuing interest in and research on ancient Piyyut led to a number of editions of Hebrew and Aramaic texts as well as to studies on the early Palestinian vocalization system and the language of Piyyut based on the Genizah ¿ndings. The invaluable results of his Piyyut studies induced Yahalom to write a description of the rela- tionship between poetry and society in a book published in 1999. Meanwhile, he served as a lecturer at the Hebrew University from 1974 until he became full professor in 1985. In 1983, Joseph Yahalom was al- 2 BIOGRAPHY ready elected a member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. He spent most of his sabbaticals abroad in the USA (as a Fellow of Dumberton Oaks, Harvard, and Yale) or in Great Britain (as a Fellow of Cambridge University). Both in Israel and abroad, Yahalom participated in research teams at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, and at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, USA. For a period of time, Yahalom was Head of the De- partment of Hebrew Literature in the faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University and a member of the editorial boards of Tarbiz and Jerusalem Studies of Hebrew Literature. In 2003, he received the Yizhak Ben-Zvi award for his lifetime study of Jewish history and Hebrew literature, in particular Hebrew poetry. Joseph Yahalom’s research on Hebrew medieval liturgical poetry fo- cused on a period of roughly one thousand years, from the days of early Byzantium until the ¿nal days of Jewish presence on the Iberian Peninsula and the Sephardic diaspora, and was his main scholarly activity. Yahalom’s bibliography testi¿es to his expertise of understanding Hebrew verse, lay- ing much emphasis on the interaction between the Jewish and surrounding cultures, which concur with Yahalom’s overall convictions and views about Jewish literature in context. In his view, no Hebrew composition was ever created in a literary or historical void; thus, parallel develop- ments in surrounding cultures have to be studied thoroughly. Jewish hym- nography reveals many points of contact with poetry written in Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, Spanish, and Turkish. Two personalities have been and still are the central subject matter of Yahalom’s research: Judah Halevi and Judah al-ণarizi who both originate from Andalusian Spain and are major ¿gures in the literary and intellectual history of medieval Judaism. In recent years, Yahalom has had extensive publications on the life and oeuvre of Judah Halevi, trying to establish the cohesion of literary and documentary sources including his autographs and the numerous letters composed by him and about him. Yahalom invested much of his scholarly attention in the redaction and reception history of various diwans, collections of poems written by Judah Halevi. A critical reconstruction of the interrelationship and inÀuence of these diwans is forthcoming, containing approximately ¿ve hundred poems under the redaction of an outstanding Jewish copyist from Fustat called ণiyya. Simi- larly, due to many new discoveries mainly in the Genizah collections of St. Petersburg, Yahalom, in close cooperation with Professor Joshua Blau and Professor Paul Fenton, was able to reconstruct a travelogue of al-ণarizi .

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