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Friday, April 13, 1984
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Purely Commentary
Heine's Dedication to Many Legacies Enriching
His Poetic Works Treated as 'Jewish Comedy'
in Prof. Prawer's Immensely Researched Study
By Philip
Slomovitz
Preserving Jewry's memories: monumentally accumulated gems from Heine devotions
Jews who long have drifted from the faith
of their fathers, . . . are stirred in their
innermost parts when the old, familiar
Passover sounds chance to fall upon their ears.
eluded in what could be considered a memoir of note about
Heine in Prawer. In it there is also the indication of the
deep concern — perhaps devotion is the proper term s— of
Heine not only to the Holy Scriptures but also to whatever
he gathered from the Talmud. To quote Prawer on page
346:
The ordained function of the Jews did not
end with the Dispersion, and a sense of their his-
toric mission is alive even in those who, like Heine
himself and like Boerne, consciously transcended
their specifically Jewish allegiances to work for
the emancipation of all mankind. The writings of
Benjamin Disraeli, who was of course baptized
even earlier in life than Heine and Boerne, bear
witness to a similar sense of Hebraic mission and
Preservation of this notable devotion by Heinrich
Heine, recorded in one of his most notable works, The Rabbi
of Bacherach, is a time resort to the treasured in Jewish
legacies, commanding an emphasis on the influence of the
Seder and importance of the Passover observance for all
Jewish generations.
Passover and the freedoms the festival inspires is one
of the treasured emphases offered anew to this generation,
as it can and should be for all generations.
Interestingly and ,importantly, the recollections are
offered as the humorous in Heine. In reality, there is the
combination of the dramatic, the historjc, the traditional,
the inspired — all in a monumental work by a distin-
guished British scholar. They are combined in the im-
mensely scholarly and brilliant Heine's Jewish Comedy: A
Study of his Portraits of Jews and Judaism by S.S. Prawer
(Clarendon Press, Oxford).
The very fascination of this work commences most
appropriately with this quotation from Heine's A Journey
from Munich to Genoa:
(A people) demands its history from the hand
of the poet rather than that of the historian. It
does not ask for faithful reporting of naked facts;
what it wants is to see these dissolved again into
the original poetry from which they sprang. The
poets know this, and they secretly take a malici-
ous pleasure in remodeling, in whatever ways
they see fit, what the people's memory has
preserved; as a means, perhaps, of pouring scorn
on historians proud of their dryness and on
state-archivists as desiccated and dull as the
parchment of their documents.
So massive is the ingathering of Heine's legacies that
the impressive book is encyclopedic Jewishly, massive with
reference to Heine, brilliantly scholarly in the author's
research into the eminent poet's resort to Jewish tradi-
tional values and the rich sources used in providing an
enrichment of literary treasures.
Taking into the unavoidable consideration that the
Prawer work is about a convert to the Lutheran faith, the
collected effort gains noteworthy consideration.
S.S. Prawer, Taylor Professor of the German Language
and Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of the
Queens College, has already to his credit numerous other
highly-acclaimed works, including Heine: the Tragic
Satirist. Perhaps the new title, Heine's Jewish Comedy, also
should be credited with a consideration, the designation of Heinrich Heine
the poet as satirist. Consideration must be given at
destiny; but we will search Disraeli's works in
the outset to Heine's conversion, despite the many allu-
vain for anything like the irreverent application
sions to his Jewish interests. He ridiculed the other nota-
we have just heard Heine make of Hegel's obser-
bles who went to the baptismal font, yet the anti-Semitism
vation on dual physiological functions.
of the early 19th Century in Germany drove him to this act.
The book in which Heine perceives the moral
He had not interrupted his Jewish interests and concerns
and
poetic genius of the Jews most clearly at work
thereafter, as the Prawer volume indicates.
is, of course, the Old Tetament; and like most of
A measure of timeliness marks much of the back-
his works, Ludwig Boerne too is therefore shot
ground in Heine's baptism as it equates to the modern
through with references to biblical characters
times. The anti-Semitism which Heine sought to escape did
and incidents. A typical passage has Boerne re-
not vanish. It was a continuity.
flect on anti-Jewish feelings in his own day and
Heine as an exile from Germany may have had hopes
remind those who find it expedient to whip up
for a change in the German relations to Jews. The era was
such feelings of the fate suffered by earlier
much-exploited under the terms of an approaching "Eman-
enemies of Israel. He cites the Emperor Titus first,
cipation." There was little of it in the Heine experience, as
as he appears in Jewish history and tradition
Prof. Prawer asserts on page 222 of his newest work on
rather than in Corneille and Mozart, and accu-
Heine:
rately recalls Talmudic legends about his painful
The poet was not to leave Germany without
last
days. Then he turns to the Old Testament:
a
experiencing once more the forces that militated
"It is remarkable that all Israel's enemies
against full Jewish emancipation in Germany. In
have come to a bad end of this kind. What hap-
1822, if we can believe his cousin Herman Schiff,
pened to Nebuchadnezzar you know: you re-
he had said that anti-Jewish disturbances would
member how he becamse an ox in his latter days
not occur again in Germany, if only because "the
and had to eat grass. And look at that Persian
press is a weapon, and there are now two Jews
minister of state, that Haman — was he not
who can wield the weapon of a serviceable Ger-
hanged in the end, in Susa, the capital? And An-
man style. I am one of these; the other is (Ludwig)
tiochus, King of Syria, did he not rot while he was
Boerne."
still alive, eaten up by lice? Those latter-day vil-
If Heine did indeed say this, he was due for a
lians, our present-day Jew-haters, had better be-
rude awakening. In September 1830, just after his
ware!
return from Heligoland where news of the July
"But what's the use, they are not frightened
Revolution in France had reached him, Heine ex-
off by such terrible examples, and a few days ago I
perienced for himself a series of anti-Jewish
read yet another pamphlet against the Jews by a
demonstrations in Hamburg in the course of
professor of philosophy, no less, one who calls
which windows were smashed, Jews chased out
himself magis amica. He'll eat grass one of these
of places of public resort and maltreated, and the
days, you'll see; an ox he is already by nature, and
old taunting cry of Jew-baiters,
Hep,' heard
perhaps he'll be hanged some time for insulting
once more in the streets. Heine had already begun
the Sultana, the favorite of the Duke of Flachsen-
to think of eventually writing his memoirs, and he
fingen; already, I'm sure, he is as lousy as An-
made some notes for this purpose whose general
tiochus!"
drift is clear enough, even though they were in-
What Heine here puts into Boerne's mouth,
tended only for his own later use.
effectively caricaturing Boerne's speech
There is reference here to Ludwig Boerne. A third Jew
rhythms, is very much his own witty application
vho underwent baptism, Benjamin Disraeli, also is in-
of Old Testament stories.
Indeed, there are no limits to the Heine record as
Prawer incorporates it in what he terms Comedy. Heine
drew uponPirke Abot — Ethics of the Fathers. He was fully
aware of the Shammai and Hillel dispute and other tal-
mudic sources.
Indeed, this massive work on and about Heine deals
with personalities, and included are Spinoza and the recol-
lection about the herem, the expulsion of the famous
philosopher from the synagogue, Karl Marx and Heine's
differing views with him, as well as references to sages in
the Talmud and the poet's contemporaries.
The Spinoza record is especially significant since it
refers to the synagogue as such as Well as the conflict with it
by Spinoza. As the author states:
Spinoza's Golgotha, like that of his "great
kinsman," was preceded by a clash with Jewish
orthodoxy, and it took the form of a solemn expul-
sion from the Jewish community:
"Dear reader, if you ever go to Amsterdam let
the verger show you the Spanish Synagogue. This
is a beautiful building, its roof is supported by
four gigantic pillars, and at its center you can still
see the platform from which the anathema was
once pronounced on the despiser of the Mosaic
law, the hidalgo Don Benedict de Spinoza. A ram's
horn called the Shofar was sounded on this occa-
sion . . . The blowing of this horn accompanied
Spinoza's excommunication; he was solemnly ex-
pelled from the community of Israel and declared
henceforth unworthy to bear the title of 'Jew.'
His Christian enemies were magnaminous
enough to leave him in the enjoyment of that
title. The Jews, however, that Swiss Guard of De-
ism, were inexorable, and visitors are still shown
the square before the Amsterdam synagogue
where they once stabbed at him with their long
daggers."
We might note in passing that the synagogue
Heine here describes is not, in fact, the somewhat
less grand one that saw the ban, the herem, pro-
nounced against Spinoza. There is also evidence
that Heine intended, at one time, to let the
philosopher's rabbinical enemies down rather
more lightly than he did in the end; a draft pas-
sage places Spinoza's antagonist Voltaire next to
the rabbi of the Amsterdam synagogue and adds
the gloss that of these two it was not the rabbi who
seemed the more ridiculous.
That gloss he deleted, however, in order to
distance himself more effectively from represen-
tatives of an Orthodox Judaism that sought to
cast out a philosopher whom Heine clearly re-
garded, like most of his fellow members of the
now defunct Society for the Culture and Science
of the Jews, as a Jew of whose achievements and
personal qualities the Jewish people had every
right to be proud.
Just as Spinoza learned about religion, Heine
tells us, by a bitter experience connected with
daggers, so he learned about politics by a no less
bitter experience connected with a rope; for just
as Spinoza had collided with the Jewish religious
establishment, so the father of his betrothed col-
lided with the Dutch political establishment and
was hanged — badly and painfully — for that
offense. That last experience, Heine concludes,
lay behind his Tractatus theologico-politicus; a
work whose critique of biblical religion the poet
clearly knew and bent to his purposes.
In the passage just quoted, an implied parallel
is drawn between the behavior of Spinoza's
Christian enemies (who continued to abuse him as
a Jew when the Jewish community had taken
away his right to that appellation) and the be-
havior of Heine's own enemies, particularly in
Germany, who did not cease regarding him as a
Jew even after his baptism. He also projects into
this passage — when talking about the Shofar and
the part it plays in the expulsion ceremony — a
scene from a - later time than that of Spinoza: a
scene, that is, from the life of the philosopher
Salomon Maimon, who died in 1800 and whose
autobiography still remains one of the most valu-
able sources of our knowledge of Jewish life in
18th Century Germany.
Of the many personalities depicted in the Heine record
of interest in Jews, Judaism, the Bible, etc., especially
noteworthy is the inclusion of Moses Mendelssohn who was
called the "Luther of the Jews." This is worth quoting from
Prawer's Heine's Jewish Comedy:
Throughout this work Heine had sought to
show the political significance of placing a Ger-
man translation of the Bible into the hands of
German-speaking worshippers. The ultimate ef-
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