knowledge of Hebrew seems to have been very limited. It is an
interesting fact that his first poem, "Belshazzar," which he tells us he
wrote at the age of sixteen, was inspired by his childhood's faith and
is based upon Jewish history. Towards the end of his life he said to a
friend:[96] "Do you know what inspired me? A few words in the Hebrew
hymn, _Wayhee bechatsi halaila_, sung, as you know, on the first two
evenings of the Passover. This hymn commemorates all momentous events in
the history of the Jews that occurred at midnight; among them the death
of the Babylonian tyrant, snatched away at night for desecrating the
holy Temple vessels. The quoted words are the refrain of the hymn, which
forms part of the Haggada, the curious medley of legends and songs,
recited by pious Jews at the _Seder_." Ay, the Passover celebration,
the _Seder_, remained in the poet's memory till the day of his death. He
describes it still later in one of his finest works:[97] "Sweetly sad,
joyous, earnest, sportive, and elfishly mysterious is that evening
service, and the traditional chant with which the Haggada is recited by
the head of the family, the listeners sometimes joining in as a chorus,
is thrillingly tender, soothing as a mother's lullaby, yet impetuous and
inspiring, so that Jews who long have drifted from the faith of their
fathers, and have been pursuing the joys and dignities of the stranger,
even they are stirred in their inmost parts when the old, familiar
Passover sounds chance to fall upon their ears."
My esteemed friend Rabbi Dr. Frank of Cologne has in his possession a
Haggada, admirably illustrated, an heirloom at one time of the Van
Geldern family, and it is not improbable that it was out of this
artistic book that Heinrich Heine asked the _Mah nishtannah_, the
traditional question of the _Seder_.
Heine left home very young, and everybody knows that he was apprenticed
to a merchant at Frankfort, and that his uncle Solomon's kindness
enabled him to devote himself to jurisprudence. But this, of important
bearing on our subject, is not a matter of common knowledge: _Always and
everywhere, especially when he had least intercourse with Jews, Jewish
elements appear most prominently in Heine's life._
A merry, light-hearted student, he arrived in Berlin in 1821. A curious
spectacle is presented by the Jewish Berlin of the day, dominated by the
_salons_, and the women whose tact and scintillating wit made them the
very centre of general society. The traditions of Rahel Levin, Henriette
Herz, and other clever women, still held sway. But the state frustrated
every attempt to introduce reforms into Judaism. Two great parties
opposed each other more implacably than ever, the one clutching the old,
the other yearning for the new. Out of the breach, salvation was in time
to sprout. In the first quarter of our century, more than three-fourths
of the Jewish population of Berlin embraced the ruling faith. This was
the new, seditious element with which young Heine was thrown. His
interesting personality attracted general notice. All circles welcomed
him. The _salons_ did their utmost to make him one of their votaries.
Romantic student clubs at Lutter's and Wegener's wine-rooms left nothing
untried to lure him to their nocturnal carousals. Even Hegel, the
philosopher, evinced marked interest in him. To whose allurements does
he yield? Like his great ancestor, he goes to "his brethren languishing
in captivity." Some of his young friends, Edward Gans, Leopold Zunz, and
Moses Moser, had formed a "Society for Jewish Culture and Science," with
Berlin as its centre, and Heinrich Heine became one of its most active
members. He taught poor Jewish boys from Posen several hours a week in
the school established by the society, and all questions that came up
interested him. Joseph Lehmann took pleasure in repeatedly telling how
seriously Heine applied himself to a review which he had undertaken to
write on the compilation of a German prayer-book for Jewish women.
To the Berlin period belongs his _Almansor_, a dramatic poem which has
suffered the most contradictory criticism. In my opinion, it has usually
been misunderstood. _Almansor_ is intelligible only if regarded from a
Jewish point of view, and then it is seen to be the hymn of vengeance
sung by Judaism oppressed. Substitute the names of a converted Berlin
banker and his wife for "Aly" and "Suleima," Berlin under Frederick
William III. for "Saragossa," the Berlin Thiergarten for the "Forest,"
and the satire stands revealed. The following passage is characteristic
of the whole poem:[98]
"Go not to Aly's castle! Flee
That noxious house where new faith breeds.
With honeyed accents there thy heart
Is wrenched from out thy bosom's depths,
A snake bestowed on thee instead.
Hot drops of lead on thy poor head
Are poured, and nevermore thy brain
From madding pain shall rid itself.
Another name thou must assume,
That if thy angel warning calls,
And calls thee by thy olden name,
He call in vain."
Such were Heine's views at that time, and with them he went to
Goettingen. There, though Jewish society was entirely lacking, and
correspondence with his Berlin friends desultory, his Jewish interests
grew stronger than ever. There, inspired by the genius of Jewish
history, he composed his _Rabbi von Bacharach_, the work which, by his
own confession, he nursed with unspeakable love, and which, he fondly
hoped, would "become an immortal book, a perpetual lamp in the dome of
God." Again Jewish conversions, a burning question of the day, were made
prominent. Heine's solution is beyond a cavil enlightened. The words are
truly remarkable with which Sarah, the beautiful Jewess, declines the
services of the gallant knight:[99] "Noble sir! Would you be my knight,
then you must meet nations in a combat in which small praise and less
honor are to be won. And would you be rash enough to wear my colors,
then you must sew yellow wheels upon your mantle, or bind a blue-striped
scarf about your breast. For these are my colors, the colors of my
house, named Israel, the unhappy house mocked at on the highways and the
byways by the children of fortune."
Another illustration of Heine's views at that time of his life, and with
those views he one day went to the neighboring town of Heiligenstadt--to
be baptized.
Who can sound the depths of a poet's soul? Who can divine what Heine's
thoughts, what his hopes were, when he took this step? His letters and
confessions of that period must be read to gain an idea of his inner
world. On one occasion he wrote to Moser, to whom he laid bare his most
intimate thoughts:[100] "Mentioning Japan reminds me to recommend to you
Golovnin's 'Journey to Japan.' Perhaps I may send you a poem to-day from
the _Rabbi_, in the writing of which I unfortunately have been
interrupted again. I beg that you speak to nobody about this poem, or
about what I tell you of my private affairs. A young Spaniard, at heart
a Jew, is beguiled to baptism by the arrogance bred of luxury. He sends
the translation of an Arabic poem to young Yehuda Abarbanel, with whom
he is corresponding. Perhaps he shrinks from directly confessing to his
friend an action hardly to be called admirable.... Pray do not think
about this."
And the poem? It is this:
TO EDOM
"Each with each has borne, in patience
Longer than a thousand year--
_Thou_ dost tolerate my breathing,
_I_ thy ravings calmly hear.
Sometimes only, in the darkness,
Thou didst have sensations odd,
And thy paws, caressing, gentle,
Crimson turned with my rich blood.
Now our friendship firmer groweth,
Daily keeps on growing straight.
I myself incline to madness,
Soon, in faith, I'll be thy mate."
A few weeks later he writes to Moser in a still more bitter strain: "I
know not what to say. Cohen assures me that Gans is preaching
Christianity, and trying to convert the children of Israel. If this is
conviction, he is a fool; if hypocrisy, a knave. I shall not give up
loving him, but I confess that I should have been better pleased to hear
that Gans had been stealing silver spoons. That you, dear Moser, share
Gans's opinions, I cannot believe, though Cohen assures me of it, and
says that you told him so yourself. I should be sorry, if my own baptism
were to strike you more favorably. I give you my word of honor--if our
laws allowed stealing silver spoons, I should not have been baptized."
Again he writes mournfully: "As, according to Solon, no man may be
called happy, so none should be called honest, before his death. I am
glad that David Friedlaender and Bendavid are old, and will soon die.
Then we shall be certain of them, and the reproach of having had not a
single immaculate representative cannot be attached to our time. Pardon
my ill humor. It is directed mainly against myself."
"Upon how true a basis the myth of the wandering Jew rests!" he says in
another letter. "In the lonely wooded valley, the mother tells her
children the grewsome tale. Terror-stricken the little ones cower close
to the hearth. It is night ... the postilion blows his horn ... Jew
traders are journeying to the fair at Leipsic. We, the heroes of the
legend, are not aware of our part in it. The white beard, whose tips
time has rejuvenated, no barber can remove." In those days he wrote the
following poem, published posthumously:[101]
TO AN APOSTATE
"Out upon youth's holy flame!
Oh! how quickly it burns low!
Now, thy heated blood grown tame,
Thou agreest to love thy foe!
And thou meekly grovell'st low
At the cross which thou didst spurn;
Which not many weeks ago,
Thou didst wish to crush and burn.
Fie! that comes from books untold--
There are Schlegel, Haller, Burke--
Yesterday a hero bold,
Thou to-day dost scoundrel's work."
The usual explanation of Heine's formal adoption of Christianity is that
he wished to obtain a government position in Prussia, and make himself
independent of his rich uncle. As no other offers itself, we are forced
to accept it as correct. He was fated to recognize speedily that he had
gained nothing by baptism. A few weeks after settling in Hamburg he
wrote: "I repent me of having been baptized. I cannot see that I have
bettered my position. On the contrary, I have had nothing but
disappointment and bad luck." Despite his baptism, his enemies called
him "the Jew," and at heart he never did become a Christian.
At Hamburg, in those days, Heine was repeatedly drawn into the conflict
between reform and orthodoxy, between the Temple and the synagogue. His
uncle Solomon Heine was a warm supporter of the Temple, but Heine, with
characteristic inconsistency, admired the old rigorous rabbinical system
more than the modern reform movement, which often called forth his
ridicule. Yet, at bottom, his interest in the latter was strong, as it
continued to be also in the Berlin educational society, and its "Journal
for the Science of Judaism," of which, however, only three numbers were
issued. He once wrote from Hamburg to his friend Moser: "Last Saturday I
was at the Temple, and had the pleasure with my own ears to hear Dr.
Salomon rail against baptized Jews, and insinuate that they are tempted
to become faithless to the religion of their fathers only by the hope of
preferment. I assure you, the sermon was good, and some day I intend to
call upon the man. Cohen is doing the generous thing by me. I take my
_Shabbes_ dinner with him; he heaps fiery _Kugel_ upon my head, and
contritely I eat the sacred national dish, which has done more for the
preservation of Judaism than all three numbers of the Journal. To be
sure, it has had a better sale. If I had time, I would write a pretty
little Jewish letter to Mrs. Zunz. I am getting to be a thoroughbred
Christian; I am sponging on the rich Jews."
They who find nothing but jest in this letter, do not understand Heine.
A bitter strain of disgust, of unsparing self-denunciation, runs through
it--the feelings that dictate the jests and accusations of his
_Reisebilder_. This was the period of Heine's best creations: for as
such his "Book of Songs," _Buch der Lieder_, and his _Reisebilder_ must
be considered. With a sudden bound he leapt into greatness and
popularity.
The reader may ask me to point out in these works the features to be
taken as the expression of the genius of the Jewish race. To understand
our poet, we must keep in mind that _Heinrich Heine was a Jew born in
the days of romanticism in a town on the Rhine_. His intellect and his
sensuousness, of Jewish origin, were wedded with Rhenish fancy and
blitheness, and over these qualities the pale moonshine of romanticism
shed its glamour.
The most noteworthy characteristic of his writings, prose and verse, is
his extraordinary subjectivity, pushing the poet's _ego_ into the
foreground. With light, graceful touch, he demonstrates the possibility
of unrestrained self-expression in an artistic guise. The boldness and
energy with which "he gave voice to his hidden self" were so novel, so
surprising, that his melodies at once awoke an echo. This subjectivity
is his Jewish birthright. It is Israel's ingrained combativeness, for
more than a thousand years the genius of its literature, which
throughout reveals a predilection for abrupt contrasts, and is studded
with unmistakable expressions of strong individuality. By virtue of his
subjectivity, which never permits him to surrender himself
unconditionally, the Jew establishes a connection between his _ego_ and
whatever subject he treats of. "He does not sink his own identity, and
lose himself in the depths of the cosmos, nor roam hither and thither in
the limitless space of the world of thought. He dives down to search for
pearls at the bottom of the sea, or rises aloft to gain a bird's-eye
view of the whole. The world encloses him as the works of a clock are
held in a case. His _ego_ is the hammer, and there is no sound unless,
swinging rhythmically, itself touches the sides, now softly, now
boldly." Not content to yield to an authority which would suppress his
freedom of action, he traverses the world, and compels it to promote the
development of his energetic nature. To these peculiarities of his race
Heine fell heir--to the generous traits growing out of marked
individuality, its grooves deepened by a thousand years of martyrdom, as
well as to the petty faults following in the wake of excessive
self-consciousness; which have furnished adversaries of the Jews with
texts and weapons.
This subjectivity, traceable in his language and in his ancient
literature, it is that unfits the Jew for objective, philosophic
investigation. It is, moreover, responsible for that energetic
self-assertiveness for which the Aramaean language has coined the word
_chutspa_, only partially rendered by arrogance. Possibly it is the root
of another quality which Heine owes to his Jewish extraction--his wit
Heine's scintillations are composed of a number of elements--of English
humor, French sparkle, German irony, and Jewish wit, all of which,
saving the last, have been analyzed by the critics. Proneness to
censure, to criticism, and discussion, is the concomitant of keen
intellect given to scrutiny and analysis. From the buoyancy of the
Jewish disposition, and out of the force of Jewish subjectivity, arose
Jewish wit, whose first manifestations can be traced in the Talmud and
the Midrash. Its appeals are directed to both fancy and heart. It
delights in antithesis, and, as was said above, is intimately connected
with Jewish subjectivity. Its distinguishing characteristic is the
desire to have its superiority acknowledged without wounding the
feelings of the sensitive, and an explanation of its peculiarity can be
found in the sad fate of the Jews. The heroes of Shakespere's tragedies
are full of irony. Frenzy at its maddest pitch breaks out into merry
witticisms and scornful laughter. So it was with the Jews. The waves of
oppression, forever dashing over them, strung their nerves to the point
of reaction. The world was closed to them in hostility. There was
nothing for them to do but laugh--laugh with forced merriment from
behind prison bars, and out of the depths of their heartrending
resignation. Complaints it was possible to suppress, but no one could
forbid their laughter, ghastly though it was. M. G. Saphir, one of the
best exponents of Jewish wit, justly said: "The Jews seized the weapon
of wit, since they were interdicted the use of every other sort of
weapon." Whatever humdrum life during the middle ages offered them, had
to submit to the scalpel of their wit.
As a rule, Jewish wit springs from a lively appreciation of what is
ingenious. A serious beginning suddenly and unexpectedly takes a merry,
jocose turn, producing in Heine's elegiac passages the discordant
endings so shocking to sensitive natures. But it is an injustice to the
poet to attribute these rapid transitions to an artist's vain fancy. His
satire is directed against the ideals of his generation, not against the
ideal. Harsh, discordant notes do not express the poet's real
disposition. They are exaggerated, romantic feeling, for which he
himself, led by an instinctively pure conception of the good and the
beautiful, which is opposed alike to sickly sentimentality and jarring
dissonance, sought the outlet of irony.
Heine's humor, as I intimated above, springs from his recognition of the
tragedy of life. It is an expression of the irreconcilable difference
between the real and the ideal, of the perception that the world,
despite its grandeur and its beauty, is a world of folly and
contradictions; that whatever exists and is formed, bears within itself
the germ of death and corruption; that the Lord of all creation himself
is but the shuttlecock of irresistible, absolute force, compelling the
unconditional surrender of subject and object.
Humor, then, grows out of the contemplation of the tragedy of life. But
it does not stop there. If the world is so pitiful, so fragile, it is
not worth a tear, not worth hatred, or contempt. The only sensible
course is to accept it as it is, as a nothing, an absolute
contradiction, calling forth ridicule. At this point, a sense of tragedy
is transformed into demoniac glee. No more is this a permanent state.
The humorist is too impulsive to accept it as final. Moreover, he feels
that with the world he has annihilated himself. In the phantom realm
into which he has turned the world, his laughter reverberates with
ghostlike hollowness. Recognizing that the world meant more to him than
he was willing to admit, and that apart from it he has no being, he
again yields to it, and embraces it with increased passion and ardor.
But scarcely has the return been effected, scarcely has he begun to
realize the beauties and perfections of the world, when sadness,
suffering, pain, and torture, obtrude themselves, and the old
overwhelming sense of life's tragedy takes possession of him. This train
of thought, plainly discernible in Heine's poems, he also owes to his
descent. A mind given to such speculations naturally seeks poetic solace
in _Weltschmerz_, which, as everybody knows, is still another heirloom
of his race.
These are the most important characteristics, some admirable, some
reprehensible, which Heine has derived from his race, and they are the
very ones that raised opponents against him, one of the most interesting
and prominent among them being the German philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer. His two opinions on Heine, expressed at almost the same
time, are typical of the antagonism aroused by the poet. In his book,
"The World as Will and Idea,"[102] he writes: "Heine is a true humorist
in his _Romanzero_. Back of all his quips and gibes lies deep
seriousness, _ashamed_ to speak out frankly." At the same time he says
in his journal, published posthumously: "Although a buffoon, Heine has
genius, and the distinguishing mark of genius, ingenuousness. On close
examination, however, his ingenuousness turns out to have its root in
Jewish shamelessness; for he, too, belongs to the nation of which Riemer
says that it knows neither shame nor grief."
The contradiction between the two judgments is too obvious to need
explanation; it is an interesting illustration of the common experience
that critics go astray when dealing with Heine.
II
When, as Heine puts it, "a great hand solicitously beckoned," he left
his German fatherland in his prime, and went to Paris. In its sociable
atmosphere, he felt more comfortable, more free, than in his own home,
where the Jew, the author, the liberal, had encountered only prejudices.
The removal to Paris was an inauspicious change for the poet, and that
he remained there until his end was still less calculated to redound to
his good fortune. He gave much to France, and Paris did little during
his life to pay off the debt. The charm exercised upon every stranger by
Babylon on the Seine, wrought havoc in his character and his work, and
gives us the sole criterion for the rest of his days. Yet, despite his
devotion to Paris, home-sickness, yearning for Germany, was henceforth
the dominant note of his works. At that time Heine considered Judaism "a
long lost cause." Of the God of Judaism, the philosophical
demonstrations of Hegel and his disciples had robbed him; his knowledge
of doctrinal Judaism was a minimum; and his keen race-feeling, his
historical instinct, was forced into the background by other sympathies
and antipathies. He was at that time harping upon the long cherished
idea that men can be divided into _Hellenists_ and _Nazarenes_. Himself,
for instance, he looked upon as a well-fed Hellenist, while Boerne was a
Nazarene, an ascetic. It is interesting, and bears upon our subject,
that most of the verdicts, views, and witticisms which Heine fathers
upon Boerne in the famous imaginary conversation in the Frankfort
_Judengasse_, might have been uttered by Heine himself. In fact, many of
them are repeated, partly in the same or in similar words, in the
jottings found after his death.
This conversation is represented as having taken place during the Feast
of _Chanukka_. Heine who, as said above, took pleasure at that time in
impersonating a Hellenist, gets Boerne to explain to him that this feast
was instituted to commemorate the victory of the valiant Maccabees over
the king of Syria. After expatiating on the heroism of the Maccabees,
and the cowardice of modern Jews, Boerne says:[103]
"Baptism is the order of the day among the wealthy Jews. The evangel
vainly announced to the poor of Judaea now flourishes among the rich. Its
acceptance is self-deception, if not a lie, and as hypocritical
Christianity contrasts sharply with the old Adam, who will crop out,
these people lay themselves open to unsparing ridicule.--In the streets
of Berlin I saw former daughters of Israel wear crosses about their
necks longer than their noses, reaching to their very waists. They
carried evangelical prayer books, and were discussing the magnificent
sermon just heard at Trinity church. One asked the other where she had
gone to communion, and all the while their breath smelt. Still more
disgusting was the sight of dirty, bearded, malodorous Polish Jews,
hailing from Polish sewers, saved for heaven by the Berlin Society for
the Conversion of Jews, and in turn preaching Christianity in their
slovenly jargon. Such Polish vermin should certainly be baptized with
cologne instead of ordinary water."