oppression, forever dashing over them, strung their nerves to the point
of reaction. The world was closed to them in hostility.
There was
nothing for them to do but laugh--laugh with forced merriment from
behind prison bars, and out of the depths of their heartrending
resignation. Complaints it was possible to suppress, but no one could
forbid their laughter, ghastly though it was. M. G.
Saphir, one of the
best exponents of Jewish wit, justly said: "The Jews seized the weapon
of wit, since they were interdicted the use of every other sort of
weapon." Whatever humdrum life during the middle ages offered them, had
to submit to the scalpel of their wit.
As a rule, Jewish wit springs from a lively appreciation of what is
ingenious. A serious beginning suddenly and unexpectedly takes a merry,
jocose turn, producing in Heine's elegiac passages the discordant
endings so shocking to sensitive natures. But it is an injustice to the
poet to attribute these rapid transitions to an artist's vain fancy. His
satire is directed against the ideals of his generation, not against the
ideal. Harsh, discordant notes do not express the poet's real
disposition. They are exaggerated, romantic feeling, for which he
himself, led by an instinctively pure conception of the good and the
beautiful, which is opposed alike to sickly sentimentality and jarring
dissonance, sought the outlet of irony.
Heine's humor, as I intimated above, springs from his recognition of the
tragedy of life. It is an expression of the irreconcilable difference
between the real and the ideal, of the perception that the world,
despite its grandeur and its beauty, is a world of folly and
contradictions; that whatever exists and is formed, bears within itself
the germ of death and corruption; that the Lord of all creation himself
is but the shuttlecock of irresistible, absolute force, compelling the
unconditional surrender of subject and object.
Humor, then, grows out of the contemplation of the tragedy of life. But
it does not stop there. If the world is so pitiful, so fragile, it is
not worth a tear, not worth hatred, or contempt. The only sensible
course is to accept it as it is, as a nothing, an absolute
contradiction, calling forth ridicule. At this point, a sense of tragedy
is transformed into demoniac glee. No more is this a permanent state.
The humorist is too impulsive to accept it as final.
Moreover, he feels
that with the world he has annihilated himself. In the phantom realm
into which he has turned the world, his laughter reverberates with
ghostlike hollowness. Recognizing that the world meant more to him than
he was willing to admit, and that apart from it he has no being, he
again yields to it, and embraces it with increased passion and ardor.
But scarcely has the return been effected, scarcely has he begun to
realize the beauties and perfections of the world, when sadness,
suffering, pain, and torture, obtrude themselves, and the old
overwhelming sense of life's tragedy takes possession of him. This train
of thought, plainly discernible in Heine's poems, he also owes to his
descent. A mind given to such speculations naturally seeks poetic solace
in _Weltschmerz_, which, as everybody knows, is still another heirloom
of his race.
These are the most important characteristics, some admirable, some
reprehensible, which Heine has derived from his race, and they are the
very ones that raised opponents against him, one of the most interesting
and prominent among them being the German philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer. His two opinions on Heine, expressed at almost the same
time, are typical of the antagonism aroused by the poet.
In his book,
"The World as Will and Idea,"[102] he writes: "Heine is a true humorist
in his _Romanzero_. Back of all his quips and gibes lies deep
seriousness, _ashamed_ to speak out frankly." At the same time he says
in his journal, published posthumously: "Although a buffoon, Heine has
genius, and the distinguishing mark of genius, ingenuousness. On close
examination, however, his ingenuousness turns out to have its root in
Jewish shamelessness; for he, too, belongs to the nation of which Riemer
says that it knows neither shame nor grief."
The contradiction between the two judgments is too obvious to need
explanation; it is an interesting illustration of the common experience
that critics go astray when dealing with Heine.
II
When, as Heine puts it, "a great hand solicitously beckoned," he left
his German fatherland in his prime, and went to Paris.
In its sociable
atmosphere, he felt more comfortable, more free, than in his own home,
where the Jew, the author, the liberal, had encountered only prejudices.
The removal to Paris was an inauspicious change for the poet, and that
he remained there until his end was still less calculated to redound to
his good fortune. He gave much to France, and Paris did little during
his life to pay off the debt. The charm exercised upon every stranger by
Babylon on the Seine, wrought havoc in his character and his work, and
gives us the sole criterion for the rest of his days.
Yet, despite his
devotion to Paris, home-sickness, yearning for Germany, was henceforth
the dominant note of his works. At that time Heine considered Judaism "a
long lost cause." Of the God of Judaism, the philosophical
demonstrations of Hegel and his disciples had robbed him; his knowledge
of doctrinal Judaism was a minimum; and his keen race-feeling, his
historical instinct, was forced into the background by other sympathies
and antipathies. He was at that time harping upon the long cherished
idea that men can be divided into _Hellenists_ and _Nazarenes_. Himself,
for instance, he looked upon as a well-fed Hellenist, while Börne was a
Nazarene, an ascetic. It is interesting, and bears upon our subject,
that most of the verdicts, views, and witticisms which Heine fathers
upon Börne in the famous imaginary conversation in the Frankfort
_Judengasse_, might have been uttered by Heine himself.
In fact, many of
them are repeated, partly in the same or in similar words, in the
jottings found after his death.
This conversation is represented as having taken place during the Feast
of _Chanukka_. Heine who, as said above, took pleasure at that time in
impersonating a Hellenist, gets Börne to explain to him that this feast
was instituted to commemorate the victory of the valiant Maccabees over
the king of Syria. After expatiating on the heroism of the Maccabees,
and the cowardice of modern Jews, Börne says:[103]
"Baptism is the order of the day among the wealthy Jews.
The evangel
vainly announced to the poor of Judæa now flourishes among the rich. Its
acceptance is self-deception, if not a lie, and as hypocritical
Christianity contrasts sharply with the old Adam, who will crop out,
these people lay themselves open to unsparing ridicule.-
-In the streets
of Berlin I saw former daughters of Israel wear crosses about their
necks longer than their noses, reaching to their very waists. They
carried evangelical prayer books, and were discussing the magnificent
sermon just heard at Trinity church. One asked the other where she had
gone to communion, and all the while their breath smelt.
Still more
disgusting was the sight of dirty, bearded, malodorous Polish Jews,
hailing from Polish sewers, saved for heaven by the Berlin Society for
the Conversion of Jews, and in turn preaching Christianity in their
slovenly jargon. Such Polish vermin should certainly be baptized with
cologne instead of ordinary water."
This is to be taken as an expression of Heine's own feelings, which come
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. Börne 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 countri