CHAPTER XIV.
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