out plainly, when, "persistently loyal to Jewish customs," he eats,
"with good appetite, yes, with enthusiasm, with devotion, with
conviction," _Shalet_, the famous Jewish dish, about which he says:
"This dish is delicious, and it is a subject for painful regret that
the Church, indebted to Judaism for so much that is good, has failed to
introduce _Shalet_. This should be her object in the future. If ever she
falls on evil times, if ever her most sacred symbols lose their virtue,
then the Church will resort to _Shalet_, and the faithless peoples will
crowd into her arms with renewed appetite. At all events the Jews will
then join the Church from conviction, for it is clear that it is only
_Shalet_ that keeps them in the old covenant. Boerne assures me that
renegades who have accepted the new dispensation feel a sort of
home-sickness for the synagogue when they but smell _Shalet_, so that
_Shalet_ may be called the Jewish _ranz des vaches_."
Heine forgot that in another place he had uttered this witticism in his
own name. He long continued to take peculiar pleasure in his dogmatic
division of humanity into two classes, the lean and the fat, or rather,
the class that continually gets thinner, and the class which, beginning
with modest dimensions, gradually attains to corpulency. Only too soon
the poet was made to understand the radical falseness of his definition.
A cold February morning of 1848 brought him a realizing sense of his
fatal mistake. Sick and weary, the poet was taking his last walk on the
boulevards, while the mob of the revolution surged in the streets of
Paris. Half blind, half paralyzed, leaning heavily on his cane, he
sought to extricate himself from the clamorous crowd, and finally found
refuge in the Louvre, almost empty during the days of excitement. With
difficulty he dragged himself to the hall of the gods and goddesses of
antiquity, and suddenly came face to face with the ideal of beauty, the
smiling, witching Venus of Milo, whose charms have defied time and
mutilation. Surprised, moved, almost terrified, he reeled to a chair,
tears, hot and bitter, coursing down his cheeks. A smile was hovering on
the beautiful lips of the goddess, parted as if by living breath, and at
her feet a luckless victim was writhing. A single moment revealed a
world of misery. Driven by a consciousness of his fate, Heine wrote in
his "Confessions": "In May of last year I was forced to take to my bed,
and since then I have not risen. I confess frankly that meanwhile a
great change has taken place in me. I no longer am a fat Hellenist, the
freest man since Goethe, a jolly, somewhat corpulent Hellenist, with a
contemptuous smile for lean Jews--I am only a poor Jew, sick unto death,
a picture of gaunt misery, an unhappy being."
This startling change was coincident with the first symptoms of his
disease, and kept pace with it. The pent-up forces of faith pressed to
his bedside; religious conversations, readings from the Bible,
reminiscences of his youth, of his Jewish friends, filled his time
almost entirely. Alfred Meissner has culled many interesting data from
his conversations with the poet. For instance, on one occasion Heine
breaks out with:[104]
"Queer people this! Downtrodden for thousands of years, weeping always,
suffering always, abandoned always by its God, yet clinging to Him
tenaciously, loyally, as no other under the sun. Oh, if martyrdom,
patience, and faith in despite of trial, can confer a patent of
nobility, then this people is noble beyond many another.--It would have
been absurd and petty, if, as people accuse me, I had been ashamed of
being a Jew. Yet it were equally ludicrous for me to call myself a
Jew.--As I instinctively hold up to unending scorn whatever is evil,
timeworn, absurd, false, and ludicrous, so my nature leads me to
appreciate the sublime, to admire what is great, and to extol every
living force." Heine had spoken so much with deep earnestness. Jestingly
he added: "Dear friend, if little Weill should visit us, you shall have
another evidence of my reverence for hoary Mosaism. Weill formerly was
precentor at the synagogue. He has a ringing tenor, and chants Judah's
desert songs according to the old traditions, ranging from the simple
monotone to the exuberance of Old Testament cadences. My wife, who has
not the slightest suspicion that I am a Jew, is not a little astonished
by this peculiar musical wail, this trilling and cadencing. When Weill
sang for the first time, Minka, the poodle, crawled into hiding under
the sofa, and Cocotte, the polly, made an attempt to throttle himself
between the bars of his cage. 'M. Weill, M. Weill!' Mathilde cried
terror-stricken, 'pray do not carry the joke too far.' But Weill
continued, and the dear girl turned to me, and asked imploringly:
'Henri, pray tell me what sort of songs these are.' 'They are our
German folk songs,' said I, and I have obstinately stuck to that
explanation."
Meissner reports an amusing conversation with Madame Mathilde about the
friends of the family, whom the former by their peculiarities recognized
as Jews. "What!" cried Mathilde, "Jews? They are Jews?" "Of course,
Alexander Weill is a Jew, he told me so himself;--why he was going to be
a rabbi." "But the rest, all the rest? For instance, there is Abeles,
the name sounds so thoroughly German." "Rather say it sounds Greek,"
answered Meissner. "Yet I venture to insist that our friend Abeles has
as little German as Greek blood in his veins." "Very well! But
Jeiteles--Kalisch--Bamberg--Are they, too.... O no, you are mistaken,
not one is a Jew," cried Mathilde. "You will never make me believe that.
Presently you will make out Cohn to be a Jew. But Cohn is related to
Heine, and Heine is a Protestant." So Meissner found out that Heine had
never told his wife anything about his descent. He gravely answered:
"You are right. With regard to Cohn I was of course mistaken. Cohn is
certainly not a Jew."
These are mere jests. In point of fact, his friends' reports on the
religious attitude of the Heine of that period are of the utmost
interest. He once said to Ludwig Kalisch, who had told him that the
world was all agog over his conversion:[105] "I do not make a secret of
my Jewish allegiance, to which I have not returned, because I never
abjured it. I was not baptized from aversion to Judaism, and my
professions of atheism were never serious. My former friends, the
Hegelians, have turned out scamps. Human misery is too great for men to
do without faith."
The completest picture of the transformation, truer than any given in
letters, reports, or reminiscences, is in his last two productions, the
_Romanzero_ and the "Confessions." There can be no more explicit
description of the poet's conversion than is contained in these
"confessions." During his sickness he sought a palliative for his
pains--in the Bible. With a melancholy smile his mind reverted to the
memories of his youth, to the heroism which is the underlying principle
of Judaism. The Psalmist's consolations, the elevating principles laid
down in the Pentateuch, exerted a powerful attraction upon him, and
filled his soul with exalted thoughts, shaped into words in the
"Confessions":[106] "Formerly I felt little affection for Moses,
probably because the Hellenic spirit was dominant within me, and I could
not pardon the Jewish lawgiver for his intolerance of images, and every
sort of plastic representation. I failed to see that despite his hostile
attitude to art, Moses was himself a great artist, gifted with the true
artist's spirit. Only in him, as in his Egyptian neighbors, the artistic
instinct was exercised solely upon the colossal and the indestructible.
But unlike the Egyptians he did not shape his works of art out of brick
or granite. His pyramids were built of men, his obelisks hewn out of
human material. A feeble race of shepherds he transformed into a people
bidding defiance to the centuries--a great, eternal, holy people, God's
people, an exemplar to all other peoples, the prototype of mankind: he
created Israel. With greater justice than the Roman poet could this
artist, the son of Amram and Jochebed the midwife, boast of having
erected a monument more enduring than brass.
As for the artist, so I lacked reverence for his work, the Jews,
doubtless on account of my Greek predilections, antagonistic to Judaic
asceticism. My love for Hellas has since declined. Now I understand that
the Greeks were only beautiful youths, while the Jews have always been
men, powerful, inflexible men, not only in early times, to-day, too, in
spite of eighteen hundred years of persecution and misery. I have learnt
to appreciate them, and were pride of birth not absurd in a champion of
the revolution and its democratic principles, the writer of these
leaflets would boast that his ancestors belonged to the noble house of
Israel, that he is a descendant of those martyrs to whom the world owes
God and morality, and who have fought and bled on every battlefield of
thought."
In view of such avowals, Heine's return to Judaism is an indubitable
fact, and when one of his friends anxiously inquired about his relation
to God, he could well answer with a smile: _Dieu me pardonnera; c'est
son metier._ In those days Heine made his will, his true, genuine will,
to have been the first to publish which the present writer will always
consider the distinction of his life. The introduction reads: "I die in
the belief in one God, Creator of heaven and earth, whose mercy I
supplicate in behalf of my immortal soul. I regret that in my writings I
sometimes spoke of sacred things with levity, due not so much to my own
inclination, as to the spirit of my age. If unwittingly I have offended
against good usage and morality, which constitute the true essence of
all monotheistic religions, may God and men forgive me."
With this confession on his lips Heine passed away, dying in the thick
of the fight, his very bier haunted by the spirits of antagonism and
contradiction....
"Greek joy in life, belief in God of Jew,
And twining in and out like arabesques,
Ivy tendrils gently clasp the two."
In Heine's character, certainly, there were sharp contrasts. Now we
behold him a Jew, now a Christian, now a Hellenist, now a romanticist;
to-day laughing, to-morrow weeping, to-day the prophet of the modern
era, to-morrow the champion of tradition. Who knows the man? Yet who
that steps within the charmed circle of his life can resist the
temptation to grapple with the enigma?
One of the best known of his poems is the plaint:
"Mass for me will not be chanted,
_Kadosh_ not be said,
Naught be sung, and naught recited,
Round my dying bed."
The poet's prophecy has not come true. As this tribute has in spirit
been laid upon his grave, so always thousands will devote kindly thought
to him, recalling in gentleness how he struggled and suffered, wrestled
and aspired; how, at the dawn of the new day, enthusiastically
proclaimed by him, his spirit fled aloft to regions where doubts are set
at rest, hopes fulfilled, and visions made reality.
THE MUSIC OF THE SYNAGOGUE[107]
Ladies and Gentlemen:--Let the emotions aroused by the notes of the
great masters, now dying away upon the air, continue to reverberate in
your souls. More forcibly and more eloquently than my weak words, they
express the thoughts and the feelings appropriate to this solemn
occasion.
A festival like ours has rarely been celebrated in Israel. For nearly
two thousand years the muse of Jewish melody was silent; during the
whole of that period, a new chord was but seldom won from the unused
lyre. The Talmud[108] has a quaint tale on the subject: Higros the
Levite living at the time of the decadence of Israel's nationality, was
the last skilled musician, and he refused to teach his art. When he sang
his exquisite melodies, touching his mouth with his thumb, and striking
the strings with his fingers, it is said that his priestly mates,
transported by the magic power of his art, fell prostrate, and wept.
Under the Oriental trappings of this tale is concealed regretful anguish
over the decay of old Hebrew song. The altar at Jerusalem was
demolished, and the songs of Zion, erst sung by the Levitical choirs
under the leadership of the Korachides, were heard no longer. The
silence was unbroken, until, in our day, a band of gifted men disengaged
the old harps from the willows, and once more lured the ancient melodies
from their quavering strings.
Towering head and shoulders above most of the group of restorers is he
in whose honor we are assembled, to whom we bring greeting and
congratulation. To you, then, Herr Lewandowski, I address myself to
offer you the deep-felt gratitude and the cordial wishes of your
friends, of the Berlin community, and, I may add, of the whole of
Israel. You were appointed for large tasks--large tasks have you
successfully performed. At a time when Judaism was at a low ebb, only
scarcely discernible indications promising a brighter future, Providence
sent you to occupy a guide's position in the most important, the
largest, and the most intelligent Jewish community of Germany. For fifty
years your zeal, your diligence, your faithfulness, your devotion, your
affectionate reverence for our past, and your exalted gifts, have graced
the office. Were testimony unto your gifts and character needed, it
would be given by this day's celebration, proving, as it does, that your
brethren have understood the underlying thought of your activities, have
grasped their bearing upon Jewish development, and have appreciated
their influence.
You have remodelled the divine service of the Jewish synagogue,
superadding elements of devotion and sacredness. Under your touch old
lays have clothed themselves with a modern garb--a new rhythm vibrates
through our historic melodies, keener strength in the familiar words,
heightened dignity in the cherished songs. Two generations and all parts
of the world have hearkened to your harmonies, responding to them with
tears of joy or sorrow, with feelings stirred from the recesses of the
heart. To your music have listened entranced the boy and the girl on the
day of declaring their allegiance to the covenant of the fathers; the
youth and the maiden in life's most solemn hour; men and women in all
the sacred moments of the year, on days of mourning and of festivity.
A quarter of a century ago, when you celebrated the end of twenty-five
years of useful work, a better man stood here, and spoke to you. Leopold
Zunz on that occasion said to you: "Old thoughts have been transformed
by you into modern emotions, and long stored words seasoned with your
melodies have made delicious food."
This is your share in the revival of Jewish poesy, and what you have
resuscitated, and remodelled, and re-created, will endure, echoing and
re-echoing through all the lands. In you Higros the Levite has been
restored to us. But your melodies will never sink into oblivious
silence. They have been carried by an honorable body of disciples to
distant lands, beyond the ocean, to communities in the remote countries
of civilization. Thus they have become the perpetual inheritance of the
congregation of Jacob, the people that has ever loved and wooed music,
only direst distress succeeding in flinging the pall of silence over
song and melody.
Holy Writ places the origin of music in the primitive days of man,
tersely pointing out, at the same time, music's conciliatory charms: it
is the descendant of Cain, the fratricide, a son of Lemech, the slayer
of a man to his own wounding, who is said to be the "father of all such
as play on the harp and guitar" (_Kinnor_ and _Ugab_). Another of
Lemech's sons was the first artificer in every article of copper and
iron, the inventor of weapons of war, as the former was the inventor of
stringed instruments. Both used brass, the one to sing, the other to
fight. So music sprang from sorrow and combat. Song and roundelay,
timbrels and harp, accompanied our forefathers on their wanderings, and
preceded the armed men into battle. So, too, the returning victor was
greeted, and in the Temple on Moriah's crest, joyful songs of gratitude
extolled the grace of the Lord. From the harp issued the psalm dedicated
to the glory of God--love of art gave rise to the psalter, a song-book
for the nations, and its author David may be called the founder of the
national and Temple music of the ancient Hebrews. With his song, he
banished the evil spirit from Saul's soul; with his skill on the
psaltery, he defeated his enemies, and he led the jubilant chorus in the
Holy City singing to the honor and glory of the Most High.
Compare the Hebrew and the Hellenic music of ancient times: Orpheus with
his music charms wild beasts; David's subdues demons. By means of
Amphion's lyre, living walls raise themselves; Israel's cornets make
level the ramparts of Jericho. Arion's melodies lure dolphins from the
sea; Hebrew music infuses into the prophet's disciples the spirit of the
Lord. These are the wondrous effects of music in Israel and in Hellas,
the foremost representatives of ancient civilization. Had the one united
with the other, what celestial harmonies might have resulted! But later,
in the time of Macedonian imperialism, when Alexandria and Jerusalem
met, the one stood for enervated paganism, the other for a Judaism of
compromise, and a union of such tones produces no harmonious chords.
But little is known of the ancient Hebrew music of the Temple, of the
singers, the songs, the melodies, and the instruments. The Hebrews had
songs and instrumental music on all festive, solemn occasions,
particularly during the divine service. At their national celebrations,
in their homes, at their diversions, even on their journeys and their
pilgrimages to the sanctuary, their hymns were at once religious,
patriotic, and social.[109] They had the viol and the cithara, flutes,
cymbals, and castanets, and, if our authorities interpret correctly, an
organ (_magrepha_), whose volume of sound surpassed description. When,
on the Day of Atonement, its strains pealed through the chambers of the
Temple, they were heard in the whole of Jerusalem, and all the people
bowed in humble adoration before the Lord of hosts. The old music ceased
with the overthrow of the Jewish state. The Levites hung their harps on
the willows of Babylon's streams, and every entreaty for the "words of
song" was met by the reproachful inquiry: "How should we sing the song
of the Lord on the soil of the stranger?" Higros the Levite was the last
of Israelitish tone-artists.
Israel set out on his fateful wanderings, his unparalleled pilgrimage,
through the lands and the centuries, along an endless, thorny path,
drenched with blood, watered with tears, across nations and thrones,
lonely, terrible, sublime with the stern sublimity of tragic scenes.
They are not the sights and experiences to inspire joyous songs--melody
is muffled by terror. Only lamentation finds voice, an endless,
oppressive, anxious wail, sounding adown, through two thousand years,
like a long-drawn sigh, reverberating in far-reaching echoes: "How long,
O Lord, how long!" and "When shall a redeemer arise for this people?"
These elegiac refrains Israel never wearies of repeating on all his
journeyings. Occasionally a fitful gleam of sunlight glides into the
crowded Jewish quarters, and at once a more joyous note is heard, rising
triumphant above the doleful plaint, a note which asserts itself
exultingly on the celebration in memory of the Maccabean heroes, on the
days of _Purim_, at wedding banquets, at the love-feasts of the pious
brotherhood. This fusion of melancholy and of rejoicing is the keynote
of mediaeval Jewish music growing out of the grotesque contrasts of
Jewish history. Yet, despite its romantic woe, it is informed with the
spirit of a remote past, making it the legitimate offspring of ancient
Hebrew music, whose characteristics, to be sure, we arrive at only by
guesswork. Of that mediaeval music of ours, the poet's words are true:
"It rejoices so pathetically, it laments so joyfully."
Whoever has heard, will never forget Israel's melodies, breaking forth
into rejoicing, then cast down with sadness: flinging out their notes to
the skies, then sinking into an abyss of grief: now elated, now
oppressed; now holding out hope, now moaning forth sorrow and pain. They
convey the whole of Judah's history--his glorious past, his mournful
present, his exalted future promised by God. As their tones flood our
soul, a succession of visions passes before our mental view: the Temple
in all its unexampled splendor, the exultant chorus of Levites, the
priests discharging their holy office, the venerable forms of the
patriarchs, the lawgiver-guide of the people, prophets with uplifted
finger of warning, worthy rabbis, pale-faced martyrs of the middle ages;
but the melodies conjuring before our minds all these shadowy figures
have but one burden: "How should we sing the song of the Lord on the
soil of the stranger?"
That is the ever-recurring _motif_ of the Jewish music of the middle
ages. But the blending of widely different emotions is not favorable in
the creation of melody. Secular occurrences set their seal upon
religious music, of which some have so high a conception as to call it
one of the seven liberal arts, or even to extol it beyond poetry. Jacob
Levi of Mayence (Maharil), living at the beginning of the fifteenth
century, is considered the founder of German synagogue music, but his
productions remained barren of poetic and devotional results. He drew
his best subjects from alien sources. At the time of the Italian
Renaissance, music had so firmly established itself in the appreciation
of the people that a preacher, Judah Muscato, devoted the first of his
celebrated sermons to music, assigning to it a high mission among the
arts. He interpreted the legend of David's AEolian harp as a beautiful
allegory. Basing his explanation on a verse in the Psalms, he showed
that it symbolizes a spiritual experience of the royal bard. Another
writer, Abraham ben David Portaleone, found the times still riper; he
could venture to write a theory of music, as taught him by his teachers,
Samuel Arkevolti and Menahem Lonsano, both of whom had strongly opposed
the use of certain secular melodies then current in Italy, Germany,
France, and Turkey for religious songs. Among Jewish musicians in the
latter centuries of the middle ages, the most prominent was Solomon
Rossi. He, too, failed to exercise influence on the shaping of Jewish
music, which more and more delighted in grotesqueness and aberrations
from good taste. The origin of synagogue melodies was attributed to
remoter and remoter periods; the most soulful hymns were adapted to
frivolous airs. Later still, at a time when German music had risen to
its zenith, when Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven flourished,
the Jewish strolling musician _Klesmer_, a mendicant in the world of
song as in the world of finance, was wandering through the provinces
with his two mates.
Suddenly a new era dawned for Israel, too. The sun of humanity sent a
few of its rays into the squalid Ghetto. Its walls fell before the
trumpet blast of deliverance. On all sides sounded the cry for liberty.
The brotherhood of man, embracing all, did not exclude storm-baptized
Israel. The old synagogue had to keep pace with modern demands, and was
arrayed in a new garb. Among those who designed and fashioned the new
garment, he is prominent in whose honor we have met to-day.
From our short journey through the centuries of music, we have returned
to him who has succeeded in the great work of restoring to its honorable
place the music of the synagogue, sorely missed, ardently longed for,
and bringing back to us old songs in a new guise. An old song and a new
melody! The old song of abiding love, loyalty, and resignation to the
will of God! His motto was the beautiful verse: "My strength and my song
is the Lord"; and his unchanging refrain, the jubilant exclamation:
"Blessed be thou, fair Musica!" A wise man once said: "Hold in high
honor our Lady of Music!" The wise man was Martin Luther--another
instance this of the conciliatory power of music, standing high above
the barriers raised by religious differences. It is worthy of mention,
on this occasion, that at the four hundredth anniversary celebration in
honor of Martin Luther, in the Sebaldus church at Nuremberg, the most
Protestant of the cities of Germany, called by Luther himself "the eye
of God," a psalm of David was sung to music composed by our guest of the
day.
"Hold in high honor our Lady of Music!" We will be admonished by the
behest, and give honor to the artist by whose fostering care the music
of the synagogue enjoys a new lease of life; who, with pious zeal, has
collected our dear old melodies, and has sung them to us with all the
ardor and power with which God in His kindness endowed him.