BÖRNE AND HEINE.
Börne and Heine--Börne's Youth--His Attitude to Judaism--His
Love of Liberty--His Defense of the Jews--Heine: his Position
with Regard to Judaism--The Rabbi of Bacharach--Heine's
Thoughts upon Judaism--Influence of Börne and Heine.
1819-1830 C. E.
Why should not Börne and Heine have a page in Jewish history? Not only
did Jewish blood flow in their veins, but they were imbued with true
Jewish spirit.
The lightning darts which they flashed across Germany, now in the
colors of the rainbow, again in glaring sheets, were charged with
the electricity of Jewish Talmudism. Both Börne and Heine renounced
Judaism, but only like combatants who, appropriating the enemy's
uniform and colors, can all the more easily strike and annihilate him.
Both expressed, with a clearness which left nothing to be desired, how
much they cared for the religion of the cross, which they professed.
There is, therefore, not the slightest reason why Christianity should
count Börne and Heine as members of its flock on account of the idle
ceremony through which they passed in church. One of them, in spite
of his changing moods, at heart remained truer to Judaism than the
Friedländers who constituted themselves its representatives. These two
gifted individuals, the pride of Germany, are still greater ornaments
to Judaism. To these two Jews, the Germans owe their pure taste, their
feeling for truth, and their impulse for liberty--to these two Jews
persecuted through life by the abominable "Hep, hep." The mists of the
Middle Ages, with which the Germans artificially surrounded themselves
in order to obscure the truth, were dispersed by the flashes of wit of
Börne and Heine, and light in its purity was restored. They grafted
wit and life on German literature, and banished that clumsiness and
awkwardness which had aroused the ridicule of the neighboring nations.
In their childish spite against the Jews, the Teutomaniacs, the Rühses
and Hundts, asserted that Judaism could not produce a man of forcible
character, or gifted with a true sense of art. History at once gave
them the lie, and put them to shame. Judaism furnished forth a vigorous
apostle of liberty, with language recalling that of the prophets and
the Roman Catos, who confounded all the ideas of the Germans concerning
law; and it supplied a poet, with artistic sense characterized by a
mixture of pathos and cutting irony, who abolished all their hard and
fast rules of art. The rich, varied blossoms of the Börne-Heine mind
sprang from Jewish soil, and were only watered by European culture.
Hence the close connection between them in spite of their dissimilarity
and mutual antipathy. Not only was their wit Jewish, but also their
love of truth, their aversion to vain display, their hatred of veiling
and palliating wrongs, their contempt for official pomp, for obscuring
clouds of incense, for ringing of bells, ambrosial organ tones covering
slavery, perversion of justice, and oppression. The democratic,
freedom-loving spirit, noticeable in Börne more than in Heine, and
the analytical, Spinoza-like mode of reasoning, more characteristic
of Heine than of Börne, are Jewish to the core. Had they been born
Christians, and brought up in the atmosphere of red-tapeism, neither
of them would have developed as rescuing powers, which with laughing
mien helped to banish deeply-rooted perversions and absurdities. The
slaves became deliverers, and saved their enemies from the double yoke
of political and social inferiority. The Teutomaniacs almost deserve
thanks for having tormented the Jews with their reactionary measures.
They roused, if not Heine, certainly Börne, who was inclined to idle
speculation, and furnished him with the dart that wounded the enemy.
Ludwig Börne, or Löb Baruch (born in Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1786;
died in Paris, 1837), saw the light in the same year when it was
extinguished for Mendelssohn, as though history wished to compensate
the bereaved Jews for the loss of the sage of Berlin. Börne resembled
Mendelssohn in some respects: in his timid, bashful, somewhat awkward
bearing, in his self-control, his strength of character, and his strict
adherence to an adopted system of morality. Both became the objects
of admiration by accident, in spite of themselves. Both drew up for
themselves æsthetic rules of conduct without having been trained to do
so.
Börne despised the Jews of his time, and spoke of them as if he were
their arch-enemy. Jewish antiquity, misrepresented to him in his
youth, and still more dimmed by his Berlin and Halle friends, he
looked upon as a caricature. The ancient Jews from the day of Abraham
until the time of "wealthy Solomon" appeared to him "as if they had
wished to parody history." He did not suspect how much his inward
self, the truthfulness of his nature, owed to Judaism. The filth of
Lucinde, consecrated by Schleiermacher, so disgusted Börne at the age
of sixteen, that even a stealthy perusal of the book possessed no
charm. The sobriety with which Judaism had endowed him showed Börne
the right way of balancing his ideal nature, and avoiding too harsh a
discord with the real world. At an early age he became acquainted with
a goddess to whom he was devoted in extravagant love, and to whom he
remained faithful until his dying breath. "The true nature of virtue
may be expressed in a few words. What is virtue? Virtue is bliss. And
bliss? It is liberty. We cannot further inquire, what is liberty, for
liberty is in accord with reason, in accord with God, and in accord
with the unconditional--it explains itself." So thought Börne, and so
he wrote in his diary at the age of eighteen; and this idea governed
his inner being as long as he lived, and was the motive power of all
his actions. Virtue is liberty, and liberty is virtue; they necessitate
and produce bliss. Yet Börne limited his love of liberty; he guarded
himself from overstepping that narrow boundary at which the pursuit of
an ideal turns to madness.
May not his Jewish blood, or at any rate, the sad pages of Jewish
history, explain his worship of liberty, which influenced his body
and mind? How hard and degrading the absence of liberty was could be
felt only by a Jew, in comparison with whom an Indian or a Russian
bondsman was a free man. Frankfort, the birth-place of Börne, with its
disgraceful laws concerning the residence of Jews, effectually taught
him love of liberty. When, only a boy, he was prohibited from walking
on the footpath, and had to keep to the dusty road for vehicles, when
every ragged Christian beggar, or drunkard, was allowed to call to him,
"Mach Mores, Jud!" the thought may have struck him that the absence
of liberty was damnation and the presence of liberty salvation. "I, a
slave from my birth, love liberty more than you; yea, because I was
trained in servitude, I understand liberty better than you!" he often
said. His much admired style, his perfect, captivating manner, his
profound epigrams, recall the gnomic wisdom of Bible and Talmud. In
short, Börne owes his favorable points to Judaism. But he neither was
grateful for his gifts, nor did he acknowledge their origin, which he
estimated no more than did his Berlin friends. On one occasion, indeed,
he said:
"I should not deserve to enjoy the light of the sun, were I,
on account of mockery upon which I have always looked with
contempt, ungrateful for God's great favor, in having made
me at once a German and a Jew: for I know how to value the
undeserved fortune of being at the same time a German and a
Jew, to be able to strive after all the virtues of the Germans
without participating in their faults."
He added, addressing the Germans:--
"I pray you, do not despise my Jews. If only you were as they
are, you were better. You have deprived the Jews of air, they
have thus been preserved from rottenness; you have strewn the
salt of hatred into their hearts, their hearts have thus been
kept fresh. You have imprisoned them for the whole long winter
in a cellar, and stopped up the cellar door with dung; but you,
exposed to the frost, were half frozen to death. When spring
arrives, we shall see who will blossom first, Jew or Christian."
Börne did not, however, himself believe in the endurance of the Jews,
and he gave utterance to those words only because he was vexed, or in
order to vex the Germans. He said at the same time, ironically: "You
know how my heart beats for the Jews."
Since the time when his mind began to mature, he beheld in the Jews
only money-makers, as on the Exchange at Frankfort, or deriders of
religion ashamed of their race, as in the salon of Henrietta Herz;
moreover, his education had made Judaism seem so despicable that he did
not judge it worthy of consideration. Thus Börne never understood what
was most sacred to the Jews, and he was unable to fathom the depths
of his own mind, and discriminate between what he owed to the general
state of culture and what to Judaism.
His healthy spirit, however, and love for the oppressed guarded him
from the unprincipled conduct of Rachel, of those who frequented
the salons at Berlin, and of many others who turned their backs
contemptuously upon the Jews. Even as a youth Börne hated the idea that
the word "Jew" might be insultingly cast at him.
"And when they come and tell you that you are a Jew," he wrote
in his diary, "how they bandy about the Jewish jargon, so that
one must almost die of laughter.
"Oh! when I think of that, my mind is tossed as by a storm, my
soul would fain burst from its dwelling-place, and seek the
body of a lion, that it might meet the villain with jaw and
claw."
His anticipations proved correct, he was not spared the insult, and his
lion's claw was shown. While a student, he procured from the police of
Frankfort a passport, in which the spiteful police-clerk had inserted
the words: "Jew of Frankfort."
"My blood stood still, but I could neither say nor do anything,
for my father was present. I then swore in my heart: only wait,
the time will come when I shall write a passport for you, a
passport for all of you."
For a moment it seemed as if Börne would forget his oath. The Jews of
Frankfort had bought equality for half a million of money, and Börne,
who had studied law and shown himself a young man of promise, was one
of the first to receive a position in the Frankfort police department.
But if Börne was inclined to forget that he was a Jew, and remembered
only that he was a German, the people of Frankfort did not forget it,
and imprudently and brutally reminded him of his secret oath. He was
the first victim of the reaction; he was expelled from office, as soon
as the Jews of Frankfort were driven back into the Ghetto. The insolent
manner in which they were cheated out of trebly pledged freedom
revolted Börne's feeling for liberty, and he sharpened his first arrows
in defense of the members of his own race. They were directed against
the narrow-minded citizens of Frankfort, who in the nineteenth century
had restored the laws of 1616 concerning the residence of the Jews,
"that romance of malice," as Börne called them. The feelings which
agitated him during the years of ever-increasing reaction against the
Jews he put into the mouth of a Jewish officer in a novel:
"You stole from me the pleasures of childhood, you arrant
knaves! You threw salt into the sweet cup of my youth, you
placed malicious slander and hateful derision in my road in
manhood; arrest me you could not, but fatigued, vexed, without
joyfulness, I reached my goal.... That I cannot even revenge
myself, that I should not have the power to forgive, nor
the weakness to chastise! They are out of my reach in their
fox-hole!... You ask me why I shun my fatherland. I have none;
I have never left my home. My home is in dungeons; where there
is persecution I breathe the atmosphere of my childhood. The
moon is as near to me as is Germany."
Instead of revenging himself for the wounds inflicted upon him and
the members of his race by German Jew-hatred, Börne undertook the
difficult task of extinguishing this hatred. In the "Waage," his organ,
he erected ideal standards, by which he measured the narrow, petty
circumstances of the Germans, and their short-sightedness.
Before Louis Baruch undertook his campaign against German faults and
prejudices, or rather before he undertook the education of the Germans,
he renounced Judaism, was baptized in Offenbach, and assumed the name
Karl Ludwig Börne (June 5, 1818). How little he cared for the Christian
faith we may judge from his remark that he "repented the money spent on
baptism." He did not wish the effect of his missiles to be lessened by
the prejudice which might arise from the fact of their being discharged
by a Jew. It is, however, difficult to excuse a man of Börne's
character for deserting, without any such struggle as Heine's with
himself, the colors of the weak and oppressed, who should have been
ennobled in his eyes by the very pain of degradation; deserting for a
cause, moreover, in which he did not believe. Germany soon discovered
that she had gained an author of Lessing's caliber. Börne's wit was
felt the more keenly, because at every turn one could perceive the
correctness of the picture and observe the genuineness and integrity
of the painter. A glance revealed that he wrote with "the blood of his
heart and the sap of his nerves," hence his words made the impression
of weighty deeds.
He could not behold in silence the folly and cruelty of the "Hep, hep"
year, and he wrote "for the Jews." "I should have said for right and
liberty; but if these terms were understood, nothing need be said." He
pointed his finger at fools, and threw light on the faces of villains.
"A sort of fatal necessity," he said, "was connected in past times
with Jew-massacres. They seem to have arisen from an indistinct,
inexplicable feeling inspired by Judaism, which, like a scoffing and
threatening spirit, like the ghost of a murdered mother, accompanied
Christianity from its cradle." Börne analyzed German Jew-hatred into
its constituents, and showed the absurdity of each. On another occasion
(1820) he told them the stern truth:
"I pardon the German nation for its Jew-hatred, for it is a
nation of children, and for this reason, just like an infant,
needs a go-cart to enable it some day to stand firm, so that
by means of the barriers to liberty it may learn to do without
barriers. The German nation would collapse a hundred times a
day if it were without prejudices. But individual adults I
cannot pardon for their Jew-hatred."
Dr. Ludwig Holst, a newly-fledged Jew-hater, who had developed his
cult into a philosophical system, and who, as Börne says, sounded "a
metaphysical Hep, hep," was attacked by him with scoffs and sneers.
"Hatred of Jews is one of the Pontine bogs which poison the
beautiful land of our liberty. We see the hopeful friends of
the fatherland with pale faces wandering about hopelessly.
German minds dwell on Alpine heights, but German hearts
pant in damp marshes. Holst wishes to kill the Jews, and if
they resist, he turns round to his circle of onlookers, and
says: 'Now you see that I am right in taxing the Jews with
unparalleled insolence; they will not suffer their heads to be
struck off ever so little, and they sulk.' ... You hate the
Jews, not because they have earned hatred, but because they
earn money.... What you call human rights, which, it must be
conceded you grant Jews, are only animal rights. The right of
seeking food, of devouring it, of sleeping, and of multiplying,
are enjoyed also by the beasts of the field--until they are
slain, and to the Jews you grant no more.... Men of Frankfort,
Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen, answer me. You complain that Jews
are all usurers, yet you prevent the mental development of
those who abandon usury! I will not be turned away; I demand a
reply. Men of Frankfort, tell me: Why should the practice of
medicine be restricted to four Jews, and that of the law be
allowed to none?... In the same way in which you in your free
city now storm against the Jews, did you not twenty years ago
storm against Catholics?... Do you doubt the arrival of the
day which will command you to look upon Jews as your equals?
But you wish to be _forced_! The German is deaf. You will
not obey voluntarily; fate will have to take hold of you and
drag you hither and thither. Shame upon you!" Börne remarks
in conclusion: "I love neither Jew as Jew, nor Christian as
Christian; I love them because they are human beings, and born
to be free. Liberty shall be the soul of my pen, until it
becomes blunted, or my hand is lamed."
But Börne wished the Jews to forget as a bad dream their history
of a thousand years, and to become Germans. He did not possess the
far-sightedness of Heine.
Heinrich Heine (born in Düsseldorf, 1799, died in Paris, 1854) in
his innermost self was infinitely more of a Jew than Börne; indeed,
he possessed to a great extent all the favorable and unfavorable
characteristics of Jews. Who can paint this "wicked favorite of the
Graces and Muses" (as he was called), this scoffing romancer and
lyrical philosopher, with his chameleon-like nature? Börne's mind
resembled transparent spring-water, which trickles over pebbles,
and foams only when attacked by winds. Heine's mind, on the other
hand, resembled a whirlpool, upon whose surface the sunbeams play in
prismatic colors, but which drags approaching vessels into its roaring
depths, and dashes them to pieces unless they are of the strongest
build. For Heine was as deep a thinker as he was an artistic poet, as
unrelenting a critic as he was an amiable scoffer, as full of original
thoughts as he was of verses. Heine had not to search for Truth; Truth
flew to Heine. She, like the Muse, revealed herself to him, jesting
and playing with him as her favorite. Behind his banter there often
was more earnest conviction than in the litany of a morose moralist.
Heine longed for ideals which his mind could revere, and because he did
not find them he scoffed at the false gods who allowed themselves to
be worshiped. He has certainly given profound solutions to problems
of history. He never sacrificed substance to form, when the former was
of greater value than the latter. It is true that he often changed his
opinions, but he did not play with his convictions. His religious views
changed also; but he did not change his mind. He never wrote or acted
against such convictions as he entertained at the time. If for a time
he was slave to the false philosophical theory which makes a god of
man, he afterwards acknowledged his error, and derided it thoroughly.
Heine was certainly no pattern of virtue, neither was he so great a
sinner as his sharp pen and tongue might lead one to suppose. He never
lost his profound, noble nature, nor his sense of the sublime; neither
did he roll in the mud of sensuality, as he would have his readers
believe. He painted himself blacker than he was. He had his share
of that acute sensitiveness which is the lot of poets, actors, and
preachers, and this morbid state was in Heine's case connected with
severe nervous suffering. In his sensitive condition he wrote things
of which his sober judgment disapproved, but which he was ashamed to
recall.
Heine had an advantage over Börne by reason of his sincere affection
for his mother. Betty von Geldern came of a respected, it is said, an
ennobled Jewish family. This educated mother, to whom he owed his bent
of mind, was a religious woman, and brought up her children in the
knowledge of the Jewish faith. The religious discord which had early
alienated Börne from Judaism was unknown to Heine, and in his youth he
strictly avoided the transgression of Jewish customs. He did not indeed
learn so much Hebrew as Börne, but because he imbibed with love the
little that he did learn, that little never left him, nor did he forget
it later in life, whilst Börne wiped Hebrew entirely from his memory.
Heine's love of Judaism, which, in spite of his mockery, was never
quite dead, and especially his deep understanding of it, sprang from
the fond memories of his youth, which remained with him like sweet,
pleasing dreams. His soul was also filled with the charm of true Jewish
family life, which gave him the proper standard by which to measure
what men call virtue and happiness.
He had a warm though vague attachment to Judaism or the Jewish race, to
its pathetic history and sacred books, and he was forcibly impressed by
the antiquity of Judaism and its continuity of existence, defying time
and myriads of obstacles. Now and again Heine felt proud of belonging
to this ancient aristocracy. He felt what he wrote late in life:
"Now I perceive that the Greeks were only handsome youths, but
the Jews have always been men, powerful, stubborn men, not only
in days of yore, but even at present, in spite of eighteen
centuries of persecution and misery. I have since learned to
know them better, and to value them more highly, and if pride
of descent were not always a foolish contradiction, I might
feel proud of the fact that my progenitors were members of the
noble house of Israel, that I am a descendant of those martyrs
who have given a God and morality to the world, and who have
fought and suffered on all the battle-fields of thought."
This consciousness slumbered gently in him from his youth onwards. But
he did not clearly define to himself his attitude towards Judaism.
The Jews, in whom solidity, high virtue, and morality were still to
be found, repelled him by their unæsthetic exterior and religious
ceremonies, which he did not understand. He felt his sense of beauty
wounded by the repulsive exterior of Judaism and its representatives.
His eye could not penetrate through ugly veils. The circle of more
refined Jews, which in early manhood he joined in Berlin--the older
men, Friedländer, Ben-David, Jacobson, and their young imitators--did
not cherish Judaism so deeply as to infuse into him the spirit of
sacrifice for the faith. And in the semi-Jewish circle which also
he frequented during his stay in Berlin, as in that of Rachel von
Varnhagen, at this time already baptized, he beheld only thorough
contempt for Jews and Judaism, and an enthusiastic, romantic
predilection for Christianity.
But Heine, unlike Börne, had too independent a judgment to be lured
into idolatrous worship of the intellectual idols of the day. Sophistry
could not undermine his devotion to Judaism. On the contrary, Heine
joined the society of a number of young men whose object was to promote
culture among Jews, and as one of its members, he subscribed to their
tacit vow, not to suffer themselves to be baptized for the sake of a
government appointment. The impulse by which he and the other members
were actuated was no doubt vague; but at any rate it manifests the
desire to do his share towards the improvement of his brethren. He
undertook to aid in strengthening the society and in widening its
scope. Heine's opinion even of the much-despised Polish Jews was not
utterly unfavorable, and they found a champion in him.
Heine would have espoused the cause of Judaism with heart and soul, if
Judaism itself, _i. e._, its sons, had developed powers of mind and
character, if the freshness of youth and attractive charms had been
coupled with the dignity of its old age, its purport, and calling,
and if it could have inspired respect in the educated world. In his
impatience he wished to see Judaism, like the legendary Messiah chained
at Rome, suddenly divest itself of its ragged cloak, its leprous skin,
throw off its aspect of servitude, and be transformed into a richly
adorned, blooming, commanding youth. The process of rejuvenescence
seemed to him too slow, the means employed too petty, the bearing of
those who wished to further it, especially their coquetry with the
dominant Church, seemed to him to be weak, apish, and undignified.
Israel lacks energy. Chiropodists (David Friedländer and
Co.) have sought to heal the body of Judaism of its fatal
excrescences, and on account of their unskillfulness and their
cobweb bandage of reason, Israel must bleed to death. Would
that the delusion that impotency, privation of strength,
one-sided negation are glorious, might soon cease.... We no
longer have the courage to wear a beard, to fast, to hate,
and by reason of hatred to suffer. This is the motive of our
reformation. Those who have received their enlightenment and
education from comedians wish to give Judaism new decorations
and new scenes, and the prompter is to wear white bands instead
of a beard. They wish to pour the ocean into a neat little
hand-basin.... Others desire evangelical Christianity under
Jewish names."... "Even I do not possess the strength of mind
(he frankly confessed) to wear a beard, and to allow myself to
be called, 'dirty Jew'."
We see clearly his attachment to Judaism in the case of his pardonable
hatred of the oppressor and despiser of his race, of the enemy who had
received salvation from Judaism, which he imprisoned and spat upon. In
the renewed pain of old wounds, inflicted upon the Jews by heathen and
Christian Rome, he compressed a world of boiling anger into the word
Edom. Thus he jeered in a poem to Edom:--
"For a thousand years or longer
We bear with each other in a brotherly way;
Thou dost endure that I should breathe,
I endure that thou shouldst rave.
"Only sometimes, on dark days,
Was thy mood a curious one,
And thy pietistic claws
Didst thou color with my blood.
"Now our friendship waxeth stronger,
And daily increaseth in strength;
For I myself began to rave,
And I become almost like to thee."
Still greater was Heine's hatred towards deserters, traitors, Jews who
for the sake of personal gain turned their back upon their suffering
brethren, and went over to the enemy. Heine could not believe that
a Jew ever was baptized from earnest conviction; baptism was in his
opinion self-delusion, if not a lie. The Gospel, preached in vain
to the poor of Judæa, was now, as he averred, prospering among the
rich. Heine gave vent to this hatred in his dramatic poem "Almansor"
(completed in 1823). But he found it unsuitable to introduce the
characters as Jews, to tell in glowing verses of their affliction and
the contempt in which they were held. He therefore put these verses
into the mouths of the Mussulmans of Granada, who through devilish
malice were experiencing the same cruel fate as the Jews, and who
felt a yawning chasm in their hearts at having been forced to embrace
Christianity. It is unmistakable that these verses breathe forth Jewish
suffering. The Jewish poet, however, incurred bitter enmity by this
drama.
It is proof of Heine's warm attachment to his race that when he was
deeply vexed by private and public disappointments, he proceeded to
glorify it. The enthralling psalm, once sung by a Hebrew bard at
Babel's waters, was constantly in his mind:
"May my tongue cleave parched
To the roof of my mouth, and my right hand
Wither, if ever
I forget thee, O Jerusalem."
For affronts put upon him in connection with the performance of
"Almansor," it was his intention to take thorough revenge on his
German-Christian enemies, and to hold up a mirror to them in a Jewish
novel. In the "Rabbi of Bacharach" he described vividly, as only he
could, the sad and the glorious scenes of Jewish history, and to this
end he carefully studied the Jewish chronicles, as he wished to keep
strictly to history. His imagination only illuminated facts, but did
not invent them, there being material enough at his disposal. Heine did
not shrink from ransacking the rubbish contained in old books, such as
Schudt's "Jewish Curiosities," "that memorial of Frankfort Jew-hatred";
and he succeeded in extracting something even from chaff and straw.
"The spirit of Jewish history reveals itself more and more to me, and
the pursuit of it will no doubt prove useful to me in the future."
In the course of Jewish history, outlined by acts of heroism and by
sacrifices, he beheld a connection between the plans of Providence: "In
the same year in which the Jews were expelled from Spain, the new land
of religious liberty was discovered." The golden period of mediæval
Jewish history--the history of the Spanish Jews--had greatest
charm for him. In the foreground of this stage he wished to introduce
proud Jews, who would not bow their necks beneath the yoke of German
restrictions and canonical arrogance, and who professed their religion
with pride; but this epoch was not well known at that time, and Heine
longed in vain for sources whence to draw pregnant information. Instead
of facts, those to whom he applied gave him only threshed straw. But
Heine allowed no difficulty to prevent his collecting interesting
historical material for his novel; this production was to be the child,
not of his hate, but of his love. He fairly basked in it: "Since it
proceeds from love, it will be an immortal book, an ever-burning lamp
in the palace of God--no fitful theatrical light."
Heine's romance was indeed grandly conceived. The scene of action was
laid in Germany, but the history of the Jews of Spain, their expulsion,
and enforced baptism, were to be the main incidents.
However, at the time when Heine was earnestly engaged in the study
of Judaism, and became enthusiastic for its history, and hated
Christianity most fiercely, he quietly passed over to the Christian
fold (June 28, 1825), and assumed the baptismal name of Christian
Johann Heinrich. He had fought for a long time against this temptation.
He expressed his opinion upon the question plainly:--
"Not one of my family is opposed to it except myself. This act
may be of importance to me, as through it I may the better
devote myself to the cause of my unhappy co-religionists. But I
should consider it a blot upon my dignity and honor, if I were
to be baptized in order to obtain a post in Prussia--in dear
Prussia!... Vexation may drive me to become a Catholic, and
hang myself."
In spite of this declaration he became a convert, in order to obtain
a position in Prussia, and also to escape from humiliating dependence
upon his uncle. In his diary he wrote the following verses upon the
subject:--
"And unto the cross now bendest thou low,
To the cross that erstwhile thou didst despise;
Which but a few short weeks ago
Seemed so vile in thy scornful eyes."
Shortly afterwards (July 20, 1825) he passed his law examination. But
he pursued phantoms, and had made a vain sacrifice of his honor. He was
unable to procure employment, and could not dispense with his uncle's
support. Shamefaced as a girl guilty of some fault, Heine communicated
the fact of his conversion in allegorical language to his bosom friend
Moser:
"A young Spanish Jew, at heart a Jew, who, owing to the demands
of pleasure, had abjured his faith, corresponded with the
youthful Judah Abrabanel, and sent him a poem translated from
the Moorish. Perhaps he was loth to tell his friend in plain
terms of his not very creditable performance; still he sends
the poem.--Do not meditate about it."
Through his apostasy, Heine became only the more embittered against
Christianity, as though it were directly responsible for his
faithlessness, his loss of dignity, and his disloyalty to his better
self. "I assure you," he wrote to his intimate friend, "if the law
had permitted the stealing of silver spoons, I should not have been
baptized." When at about the same time, Edward Gans, the leader of
young Israel, founder of the Society of Culture, and one of its active
promoters, also embraced Christianity, Heine could not forgive him, for
he had not been compelled by poverty to take the step. Heine was yet
more indignant when informed that Gans had induced weak-minded Jews to
forsake their belief.
"If he does it out of conviction, he is a fool; if out of
hypocrisy, he is a rascal."
It also vexed him that his opponents would not forget his Jewish
origin, but, as in the case of Börne, reminded him of it at every
opportunity. To appease his conscientious scruples in a measure, he
continued to work at the romance, "The Rabbi of Bacharach." Through its
medium he desired to make known his secret attachment to the Jews, and
he wished to publish it in spite of the advice of his friend Moser, who
was not blind to the glaring contradiction between thought and act, and
the enmity it would necessarily draw down upon him.
Heine was not, however, so constituted as to allow remorse to trouble
him for any length of time. Once having turned his back upon Judaism,
he sought to lull his conscience. His pleasure-seeking after his
conversion was only a means to this end. Heine ingeniously labored to
discover faults in the Jews and Judaism, and thus to justify himself.
In this impulse originated his hostile sallies against Judaism--that
it is, for instance, "not a religion, but a misfortune." Afterwards, he
sought to make the dividing line between Judaism and Christianity very
faint; he characterized both faiths as self-torturing, monkish, and
Nazarite; he vilified them equally, disregarded both, and acknowledged
a Hellenistic religion of the "revival of the flesh." Nevertheless, it
may be said that, in bright moments, his old love of Judaism revived,
and he again showed his thoughtful conception of it. It annoyed Heine
that Shakespeare should be reckoned among the Jew-baiters because he
had created "Shylock," and he employed his brilliant eloquence to
remove this blemish from the Jews and Shakespeare.
"Did Shakespeare aim at depicting a Jewess in Jessica?
Certainly not. He portrayed only a daughter of Eve, one of
those pretty birds who, as soon as they are fledged, flutter
forth from the home-nest to their lovers.... In Jessica there
is especially noticeable a certain timid shame which she
cannot overcome in donning male garments. In this trait one
may, perhaps, recognize the modesty characteristic of her
race, which endows its daughters with so marvelous a charm.
The chastity of the Jews is probably the consequence of the
aversion which they felt to Oriental sensuality and the immoral
worship which flourished among their neighbors, the Egyptians,
Assyrians, and Babylonians, and has continued, changing only
its outward form, to the present day. The Jews are a chaste,
abstemious, so to speak, an abstract people, and in purity of
morals, approach the German nations.... The Greeks and Romans
were devoted to the soil ... the later Northern immigrants to
the person of their chieftains ... whilst the Jews from ancient
times were attached to the law, to abstract thought, like our
modern cosmopolitan Republicans ... liberty and equality were
their religion."
Advanced in years, when a severe nervous affliction had still more
cleared the mirror of his thoughts, Heine became conscious of the
superiority of morality based upon piety over beauty, and returned with
his whole heart to the love of his youth, his reverence for Judaism.
His "Confessions" (1853-54) are inspired hymns to Jewish history and
the Jewish people, and it is apparent that they are sincere. He was
always enthusiastic on behalf of the Bible.
"The Jews may console themselves for the loss of Jerusalem
and the Ark of the Covenant; this loss is but trifling when
compared with the Bible, the indestructible treasure which they
have saved.... I owe the re-awakening of my religious feelings
to that Holy Book (the Bible), and it has become for me
equally the source of salvation and the object of most ardent
admiration.... I think I may flatter myself that I comprehend
the character of Moses as revealed in the first portion of
the sacred book (of the Old Testament). I consider his a most
imposing figure. What a giant form! How small Sinai appears
when Moses stands upon it! This mountain is only the pedestal
for the feet of the man, whose head reaches up to the heavens,
where he speaks with God.... Formerly, I felt no especial
affection for Moses, probably because the Hellenic spirit was
paramount in me, and I could not pardon the legislator of the
Jews his hatred against the plastic arts. I did not see that,
notwithstanding his hostility to art, Moses was a great artist,
and possessed the true artistic spirit! But this spirit was
directed by him, as by his Egyptian compatriots, to colossal
and indestructible undertakings.... He built human pyramids,
carved human obelisks; he took a poor shepherd family and
created a nation from it, a great, eternal, holy people, a
people of God, destined to outlive the centuries, and to serve
as a pattern to all other nations, even as a prototype to the
whole of mankind: he created Israel.... As of the artist, so
also I have not always spoken with sufficient respect of his
work, the Jews.... The history of the Middle Ages, and even
of other times, seldom inscribed in its annals the names of
these knights of the holy spirit, because they usually fought
with closed visor. The deeds of the Jews, as well as their
peculiar character, are little known to the world. One thinks
one knows them, because their beards are visible, but nothing
else has come in view; and now, as in the Middle Ages, they are
a profound mystery, which may perhaps be revealed on the day of
which the prophet speaks....
"Yes, to the Jews, to whom the world owes its God, it also
owes His Word, the Bible; they saved it from the wreck of the
Roman Empire, and in the frantic scramble of migrating tribes
they preserved the precious book, until Protestantism sought it
with them, translated the discovered work into the vernacular,
and disseminated it through the whole world.... In the North
of Europe and America, the influence of Palestine has grown
to be so great, that one can fancy oneself transplanted into
the midst of Jews.... I will not speak of most of the new
communities of the United States where the life of the Old
Testament is pedantically imitated ... but the caricature will
not disappear, and the real, imperishable, and true portion,
namely, the morality of ancient Judaism, will also flourish in
those countries as luxuriantly as in former days on the banks
of the Jordan and upon the heights of Lebanon. No palms are
needed for man to be good; and to be good is better than to be
beautiful.... Judæa has always appeared to me as a piece of
the West lost in the East. In fact, with its spiritual belief,
its severe, pure, almost ascetic morals, its abstract inner
life, this land and its people have ever formed a remarkable
contrast to the surrounding countries and their inhabitants,
who paid homage to the most licentious and infamous nature
cults, and dissipated their existence in bacchanalian orgies.
Israel piously sat beneath its fig-tree, and sang the praise
of the invisible God, and practised virtue and justice;
whilst in the temples of Babylon, Nineveh, Sidon, and Tyre,
sanguinary and immoral rites were celebrated, the description
of which even now strikes us with horror. When one thinks of
its surroundings, this early greatness of Israel cannot be
sufficiently admired. Of Israel's love of liberty, whilst
slavery was justified not alone in its immediate vicinity but
by all the nations of antiquity, even by philosophers--of
this I would rather not speak, in order to avoid compromising
the Bible with our present rulers.... Instead of wrestling with
the impossible, instead of foolishly decreeing the abolition
of property, Moses strove to render it moral; he endeavored to
bring the possession of property into harmony with morality,
with the law of reason, and this he effected by the institution
of the Jubilee, when all alienated hereditary property,
which amongst an agricultural people was land, reverted to
the original owners, no matter how they had lost possession
thereof. This ordinance offers a most decided contrast to the
law of prescription among the Romans.... Moses did not wish
to abolish the holding of property; his plan was that every
one should possess some land, that no one should become a
slave, with slavish propensities, through poverty, for freedom
was the ultimate aim of the great emancipator, and this
desire breathes through all his laws dealing with pauperism.
He detested slavery immoderately, almost fiercely.... If a
slave, however, freed by law, refused to leave the house of
his master, Moses commanded that the incorrigible rascal be
nailed by his ear to the door-post of his master's house.... O
Moses, our teacher, Moshe Rabbenu, exalted enemy of serfdom, I
pray thee furnish me with hammer and nails, that I may nail our
willing slaves, in their liveries of black and red and gold, by
their long ears to the Brandenburg Gate."
The spirit of the Jewish law and of Jewish history had indeed come
upon this erratic son of Israel, and revealed to him what few of
his predecessors had thoroughly grasped, and none had so luminously
delineated. Heine appreciated equally the profound wisdom displayed
in the laws and the intellectual contests in the centuries of Jewish
history, as also the precious ore of poetry, which streamed forth from
the greatest Jewish poet of the Middle Ages. Scarcely had Michael
Sachs, the preacher with the Psalmist soul and prophetic speech,
unveiled the hidden beauties of the "Religious Poetry of the Jews in
Spain," and more especially the almost forgotten glory of the poet
Jehudah Halevi Alhassan, before Heine, deeply moved, set up a memorial
to this singer and brother in race and art. With his magic wand he
invoked the shade of Jehudah Halevi from the grave, and depicted him in
his complete ideality and the full glow of his inspiration.
Until his last breath the struggle continued within Heine's breast
between the two great principles in the construction of the world's
history, the pure morality of Judaism and the symmetrical beauty of
Hellenism, both of which he reverenced, but was unable to reconcile:--
"The contrasts are boldly paired,
Love of pleasure in the Greek, and the thought of God in the
Judæan,
* * * * *
Oh! this conflict will never end,
The true must always contend with the beautiful."
He suspected that the harmonious intermingling of the two elements
was the task of European civilization; but he was unable to effect it
in himself. From this conflict his aberrations arose, and also his
impulse to dominate them by ridicule, and thus prevent their mastering
him.
The Jewish world is greatly indebted to its two apostate sons, Börne
and Heine. They did not indeed destroy all German anti-Jewish feeling,
but they at least subdued it. Referring to the absurd cry of "Hep,
hep," Heine once said, "This can never occur again, for the press is
a weapon, and there are two Jews who possess German style, the one
being myself, the other Börne." His prediction was nearly fulfilled,
for since the appearance of these two, such fierce outbreaks against
Jews have not recurred. Germany has not produced more talented, more
artistic, more refined writers than these two Jews.
Young Germany, which originated the present state of culture, and
created the Year of Liberation, 1848, is the offspring of these
two Jewish fathers. Invective, calumny, and the secret police were
perfectly correct in designating the leaders of young Germany as Jews,
because without the influence of the Jewish spirit they would not have
become the champions of freedom. Jew-haters thought that they were
inflicting disgrace on the fair-haired combatants in calling them Jews,
whilst actually they only bestowed honor upon them. But the list of
Börne's and Heine's services to Germany is not yet exhausted. They
induced the French to respect the staunchness of the German spirit.
Börne and Heine were the first to draw France and Germany together,
to unite German depth of thought with French elegance. They first
dispelled the clouds which separated these two nations, causing the
French people to ascend and the Germans to descend the mountain, meet
each other half-way, and, regardless of mutual antagonism and of
their oppressors, stretch forth their hands in brotherly union. This
Messianic time, when it arrives, will have been prepared by two Jews,
who were fulfilling their national mission.