Jewish Literature and Other Essays Part 18

HEINRICH HEINE AND JUDAISM

I

No modern poet has aroused so much discussion as Heinrich Heine. His works are known everywhere, and quotations from them--gorgeous b.u.t.terflies, stinging gnats, buzzing bees--whizz and whirr through the air of our century. They are the _vade mec.u.m_ of modern life in all its moods and variations.

This high regard is a recent development. Within the last thirty years a complete change has taken place in public opinion. Soon after the poet's death, he was entirely neglected. The _Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung_, whose columns had for decades been enriched with his contributions, took three months to get up a little obituary notice. Then followed a period of acrimonious detraction; at last, cordial appreciation has come.

The conviction has been growing that in Heine the German nation must revere its greatest lyric poet since Goethe, and as time removes him from us, the baser elements of his character recede into the background, his personality is lost sight of, and his poetry becomes the paramount consideration.

What is the att.i.tude of Judaism? Does it acknowledge Heine as its son?

Is it disposed to accept _c.u.m beneficio inventarii_ the inheritance he has bequeathed to it? To answer these questions we must review Heine's life, his relations to Judaism, his opinions on Jewish subjects, and the qualities which prove him heir to the peculiarities of the Jewish race.

Heine's family was Jewish. On the paternal side it can be traced to Meyer Samson Popert and Fromet Heckscher of Altona; on the maternal side further back, to Isaac van Geldern, who emigrated in about 1700 from Holland to the duchy of Julich-Berg. He and his son Lazarus van Geldern were people of importance at Dusseldorf, and his other sons, Simon and Gottschalk, were known and respected beyond the confines of their city.

Simon van Geldern was the author of "The Israelites on Mount h.o.r.eb," a didactic poem in English, and on his trip to the East he kept a Hebrew journal, which can still be seen. His younger brother Gottschalk was a distinguished physician, and occupied a position of high dignity in the Jewish congregations in the duchies of Julich and Berg. It is said that he provided for the welfare of his brethren in faith "as a father provides for his children." His only daughter Betty (Peierche) van Geldern, urged by her family and in obedience to the promptings of her own heart, married Samson Heine, and became the mother of the poet.

Heine himself has written much about his family,[95] particularly about his mother's brother. Of his paternal grandfather, he knew only what his father had told him, that he was "a little Jew with a great beard."

On the whole, his education was strictly religious, but it was tainted with the deplorable inconsistency so frequently found in Jewish homes.

Themselves heedless of religious ceremonies, parents exact from their children punctilious observance of minute regulations. Samson Heine was one of the Jews often met with in the beginning of this century who, lacking true culture, caught up some of the encyclopaedist phrases with which the atmosphere of the period was heavy. Heine describes his father's extraordinary buoyancy: "Always azure serenity and fanfares of good humor." The reproach is characteristic which he addressed to his son, when the latter was charged with atheism: "Dear son! Your mother is having you instructed in philosophy by Rector Schallmeier--that is her affair. As for me, I have no love for philosophy; it is nothing but superst.i.tion. I am a merchant, and need all my faculties for my business. You may philosophize as much as you please, only, I beg of you, don't tell any one what you think. It would harm my business, were people to discover that my son does not believe in G.o.d. Particularly the Jews would stop buying velvets from me, and they are honest folk, and pay promptly. And they are right in clinging to religion. Being your father, therefore older than you, I am more experienced, and you may take my word for it, atheism is a great sin."

Two instances related by Joseph Neunzig, one of his playmates, show how rigorously Harry was compelled to observe religious forms in his paternal home. On a Sat.u.r.day the children were out walking, when suddenly a fire broke out. The fire extinguishers came clattering up to the burning house, but as the flames were spreading rapidly, all bystanders were ordered to range themselves in line with the firemen.

Harry refused point-blank to help: "I may not do it, and I will not, because it is _Shabbes_ to-day." But another time, when it jumped with his wishes, the eight year old boy managed to circ.u.mvent the Law. He was playing with some of his schoolmates in front of a neighbor's house. Two luscious bunches of grapes hung over the arbor almost down to the ground. The children noticed them, and with longing in their eyes pa.s.sed on. Only Harry stood still before the grapes. Suddenly springing on the arbor, he bit one grape after another from the bunch. "Red-head Harry!"

the children exclaimed horrified, "what are you doing?" "Nothing wrong,"

said the little rogue. "We are forbidden to pluck them with our hands, but the law does not say anything about biting and eating." His education was not equable and not methodical. Extremely indulgent towards themselves, the parents were extremely severe in their treatment of their children. So arose the contradictions in the poet's character.

He is one of those to whom childhood's religion is a bitter-sweet remembrance unto the end of days. Jewish sympathies were his inalienable heritage, and from this point of view his life must be considered.

The poet's mother was of a different stamp from his father. Like most of the Jews in the Rhenish provinces, his father hailed Napoleon, the first legislator to establish equality between Jews and Christians, as a savior. His mother, on the other hand, was a good German patriot and a woman of culture, who exercised no inconsiderable influence upon the heart and mind of her son. Heine calls her a disciple of Rousseau, and his brother Maximilian tells us that Goethe was her favorite among authors.

The boy was first taught by Rintelsohn at a Jewish school, but his 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 halala_, sung, as you know, on the first two evenings of the Pa.s.sover. This hymn commemorates all momentous events in the history of the Jews that occurred at midnight; among them the death of the Babylonian tyrant, s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 Pa.s.sover 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 Pa.s.sover sounds chance to fall upon their ears."

My esteemed friend Rabbi Dr. Frank of Cologne has in his possession a Haggada, admirably ill.u.s.trated, 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 languis.h.i.+ng 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. Subst.i.tute 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sume, 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 Gottingen. 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 G.o.d." 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] "n.o.ble 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 j.a.pan reminds me to recommend to you Golovnin's 'Journey to j.a.pan.' 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 n.o.body 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sures 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 a.s.sures 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 Friedlander 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 a.s.sure 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 moons.h.i.+ne of romanticism shed its glamour.

The most noteworthy characteristic of his writings, prose and verse, is his extraordinary subjectivity, pus.h.i.+ng 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 ident.i.ty, and lose himself in the depths of the cosmos, nor roam hither and thither in the limitless s.p.a.ce 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-a.s.sertiveness 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 a.n.a.lyzed by the critics. p.r.o.neness to censure, to criticism, and discussion, is the concomitant of keen intellect given to scrutiny and a.n.a.lysis. 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 ant.i.thesis, and, as was said above, is intimately connected with Jewish subjectivity. Its distinguis.h.i.+ng 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 das.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sages 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 shuttlec.o.c.k of irresistible, absolute force, compelling the unconditional surrender of subject and object.