In the May issue of Commentary, Jean-Paul Sartre drew a “Portrait of the Inauthentic Jew.” Perhaps the most famous and successful of all “inauthentic Jews”—at least for a while—was Heinrich Heine, who denied his Judaism in the interests of a “universal humanity.” But from his case it would seem that “inauthenticity,” if deeply enough felt and intensely enough lived, may even result in a re-assertion of “authenticity.” Such, at least, is one of the implications of Martin Greenberg’s article on Heine presented here.

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Suis-je Juif? Suis-je un homme?
Je suis Juif. Je suis un homme.
                                —Bernard Lazare

In the 2nd century BCE, after the world triumph of Hellenic culture under Alexander the Great, we come upon Jews in Jerusalem who, in addition to Hellenizing their names, underwent a painful operation to efface the marks of their circumcision. The crudity of this denial of their Jewishness strikes us today as barbarous; the importance of the gymnasium in Hellenic social life and a culture no doubt less “internal” than our own account for it. In the modem age this operation has been spiritualized, without rendering it any less painful . . .

Heinrich Heine, one of the first of the type of the modern Jewish intellectual, wrestled with the fact of his Jewishness his whole life through. In a recent edition of the Confessio Judaica¹ this struggle is plainly seen. Jüdisches Manifest is a collection of all the recorded remarks that Heine made on the Jews and things Jewish, whether in prose, poetry, letters, or conversation. It has been put together on what would appear a rather barbarous principle: in every instance where Heine referred to the Jews, the reference was simply excerpted from its context (except in the case of the poetry and The Rabbi of Bacherach) and so printed. But the result is not nearly so bad as one would expect—much of Heine’s prose reduces itself to a running series of mots that do not suffer too great damage out of context; and, more important, the number of remarks made by Heine on the Jews is so formidable (three hundred closely printed pages) that, once assembled, they create their own context.

Yet in an essential way this book does violence to Heine and Heine’s life. Despite the editor’s restrained preface, its final effect, simply by assembling the material between two covers, is to “claim” him for the Jews. Heine was a Jew. But we are not permitted to “claim” him as one, if for no other reason than that he himself forbade it. True child of the i 9th century that he was, and Jew that he was, he felt that to profess himself a Jew was to limit the universality of his humanity. In a conversation reported by Alfred Meissner, Heine said that he had this in common with all artists, that he wrote not for the “enthusiastic moment but for the centuries, not for a country but for the world, not for a tribe but for humanity. It would be wanting in taste on my part and petty if, as they say about me, I had ever been ashamed of being a Jew, but it would be equally ridiculous if I professed to be one.” Heine was among the first to see how illusory this “humanity” was that he vaunted in common with his century. Yet be, like us today, though disillusioned, could never quite abandon it. Moreover, and in this his statement is perfectly justified, for him to have been a Jew in any sense that would permit us, as Jews, to “claim” him, would have meant an intolerable limitation, not indeed of his metaphysical “humanity,” but of his energy, his art, his life. It would have meant an intolerable surrender to the narrowness and timidity of the middle-class Jewish existence that was the actuality about him in Western Europe in the first half of the 19th century. Citizen of the world—as he was—and Freiheitskämpfer, or the German Jewish middle class; there was hardly any other alternative.

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Heine was obsessed by his Jewishness—the size of this book makes that plain. Though “obsessed” is perhaps the wrong word, since it implies a crippling effect and Heine’s Jewishness did not, as it did in the case of so many others, cripple him. On the contrary, it was a perpetual spur to his wit (he was the wittiest man of his century), to his poetry (very few modern Jews have been able to make great poetry out of their situation as Jews in a non-Jewish world; Heine did it by means of irony, as later on Kafka, when the situation worsened, did it by means of pathos), to his criticism of society (he was one of the most clear-headed, unsentimental, and redoubtable of the radical political writers of the 9th century).

Throughout his life Heine in general experienced his Jewishness as a burden, a limitation, and a hindrance. I don’t think we can fully appreciate in this country how much of a burden his Jewishness must have been to him, how much of a burden Jewishness is—whether he chooses to shoulder it or not—to any Western European Jew. European society and European culture are feudal and aristocratic in origin, however much the middle class later contributed to them. The Jew, excluded until recently from this culture, had been since earliest times its living antithesis. The chief symbols of a thousand years of European society: knight, warrior, troubadour, courtier, landed nobleman, cultivated aristocrat—who better than the Jew was their anti-symbol? When a Jew asserted a claim to this culture, he did so in spite of the existing traditions. The democratic revolution did not change this situation—it simply helped the Jew in asserting this claim. Even when the Jew’s effort to assimilate this culture was crowned with every success, his Jewishness remained at best either something that he steadfastly ignored (a kind of silent lament), or an embarrassingly irrelevant, somewhat ridiculous, and tormentingly inelegant intrusion on the otherwise fashionable décor of his life. In America, however, where there is no feudal or aristocratic past, it is precisely the most deep-seated traditions of the country that assure the Jew his right to participate in society. It is the denial of this participation that flies in the face of existing traditions.

A serious anti-Semitic politics in this country would have to be one that dissented with the historical basis of American society, whereas in Europe it is able to invoke (although modern anti-Semitism has rarely contented itself with that only) some of the oldest traditions of the Continent in its support. For the most part, therefore, among sensitive American Jews their individual Jewishness is not a problem (or a self-reproach) everlastingly to be contended with, but is simply part of the given. (There are of course many other factors involved here. With Kafka too, who represents the last stage in the development of the European Jew, Jewishness loses its particular problematic poignancy. With Kafka everything has become problematic, and this no doubt figures very importantly in the explanation of the sensitive American Jew’s attitude toward his Jewishness.)

But for Heine it was a problem that he never ceased to contend with, a given that he sought to evade by one means or another throughout his entire life. In 1825, about the age of twenty-seven, a few months after having been baptized, he wrote to Moses Moser: “I assure you, if the law had permitted the theft of silver spoons, I would not have been baptized.” And then of course there is his famous mot, magnificent in the flatness of its statement, and so thunderingly wrong: “The baptismal certificate is the ticket of admission to European culture.” Baptism was a direct attempt to evade the disability of his Jewishness. It failed miserably, as Heine himself said, and perpetually thereafter prompted him to make shamefaced witticisms at his own expense. (Someone asked him how he was. “Ach, how am I?” he groaned. “All meshumodim [converts] should feel the way I do.”)

But the reason for his baptism’s lack of success was not its failure to buy him his way into European culture. European culture was no problem, as Solomon Maimon had shown half a century before, coming out of the ghetto on the dead run to hurdle it in one brilliant leap, uncouth manners, Yiddish accent, and all. Heine soon enough possessed himself of (“stole”) that silver spoon. The problem was not European culture but European society.

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There, of course, there was no place for him, not until every element of the old regime had been purged away and a universal Europe had come into existence. He devoted a good part of his life to that end, and yet the goal of a universal Europe was so defined that he had continually to deny himself as a Jew. In a letter to Moses Moser in 1823, he had written: “That I shall be a partisan of the rights of the Jews and their civil equality, this I confess, and in troubled times that will unfailingly arrive the German mob will hear my voice echo in the beer parlors and palaces. Yet the born foe of all positive religions shall never stand forth as champion of the religion that first introduced that ill-tempered moralistic censoriousness (Menschenmäkelei) which now causes us so much pain.”

It was not enough, however, to disavow the Jewish religion. He had to disavow the social character of the Jew. The conversion of this “born foe of all positive religions” had been a negative, cowardly, and unsatisfactory flight from his Jewishness into a Christianity of which he was, if anything, even more critical. But Heine was seeking, like so many Jews after him, to escape the Jewish condition not by negatively fleeing it but by positively transcending it. Thus, in his role as a radical critic of society, he so defined the social essence of the Jew (at the same time that he loudly defended his “human” essence) as to include in the category “Jew” all members of the trading middle class, whether Jew or Christian. A “Jew” is the embodiment of the “Schachergeist,” and “Judaism” can count among its followers, in addition to the “unbaptized Jews,” those “whom I call—to distinguish them from the circumcised—baptized Jews, in common speech also known as Christians.” (This is that same “Jew” from which the young Marx, in his pamphlet on the Jewish question, wished to “emancipate” the world.) In this way Heine, a radical democrat and critic of the bourgeoisie, divested himself of his Jewishness not in spite of but through his radical opinions.

Later on he made a second division of mankind, into “Hellenes” and “Nazarenes,” by which he was able to throw off the name of Jew again. “Nazarenes” (or “Jews”) were the ascetic men of the spirit, hostile to this world, to pleasure and to art, while “Hellenes” were the life-loving celebrators of those very things. “Thus there have been Hellenes in the families of German ministers, and Jews who were born in Athens and were probably descended from Theseus.” And in the ranks of the Hellenes, Heine counted himself as the “great Pagan Number 2” (Goethe was Number 1).

But above and beyond these more or less explicit evasions, Heine resorted to what Sartre calls the “escape into the universal.” This, says Sartre, for the inauthentic Jew, is the “royal road of flight” from “la situation de juif.” It is best, I think, to explain this historically, although Sartre doesn’t do so. The Jews entered the modern world of the intellect riding on the back of the ideas of the Enlightenment; they entered modern political society on the back of the French Revolution, which was an imperfect realization of these ideas. The Enlightenment believed in the sovereignty of reason in every sphere of human life, in the existence of universal laws accessible to this reason, in a universal religion and a universal humanity. History was a progressive realization of these universals, in the course of which every particularity of time, place, religion, and race would be sloughed off, leaving exposed an abstract, unqualified, and perfect Man in the center of a Universal Just Society. When Napoleon visited Düsseldorf in Heine’s thirteenth year, the editor of Jüdisches Manifest recounts in a wonderful anecdote, Rabbi Judah Löb Abraham Scheuer, elected spokesman for the Düsseldorfer clergy, welcomed him as the “new Cyrus.” And Napoleon replied: “Before God all men are brothers. They shall love and assist one another regardless of their religious differences.”

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To Jews in Heine’s position (but by no means to all Jews) such a pronouncement must have been a trumpet calling them out of centuries of oppression. The catch, however, in Napoleon’s statement is the “regardless.” It is not Jews and Christians who are brothers, men are brothers, regardless—in spite of—the fact that they are Jews and Christians. Given the relation of forces that actually obtained, there was never the slightest doubt as to who would have to do the “disregarding.”

The “escape into the universal” is this continual “disregarding” of one’s Jewishness in favor of one’s “humanity.” As Sartre says, this type of inauthentic Jew “realizes on a higher plane that accord and that assimilation which are denied him on the social plane.” For a brief period of the 8th century, perhaps, it was possible to live happily—really happily—on that “higher plane,” as Solomon Maimon had done, entirely and honestly indifferent to what existed outside the world of ideas. But this real indifference soon turned “inauthentic,” and that modem type of abstract and abstracted Jew of the pure intellect was born, so wonderful in some ways, so pathetic in others. Then, too, secular Jews began to look forward to a millenial future that would resolve the differences between the universal and the social planes and so finally bring about a universal accord. Marx, the greatest critic of modern society, can probably be convicted of the “escape into the universal,” and yet, despite Sartre, by evading what degree of Jewishness he had and concentrating on rather than disregarding the differences between the plane of the universal and the plane of the social, by ruthlessly confronting middleclass society with the disparity between its universalist pretensions and its limited reality, he threw himself into an even more “extreme” situation than he had evaded, lived to the very “limits” of this situation, and thus achieved an even greater “authenticity.” Perhaps among revolutionists alone, and there only occasionally, was it possible not simply to evade one’s Jewishness but really to transcend it. To characterize a man like Trotsky, for instance, as an “inauthentic Jew” may have a certain amount of impersonal truth, indeed, but seems woefully wanting in any sense as a measure of the man, or even as a description of him qua Jew.

Of course, Heine’s Jewishness was a much larger factor in his life than Marx’s. With him there was no question of resolving elsewhere in a more authentic existence his inauthenticity as a Jew. Heine was to achieve his authenticity in another way.

Early in his life already, in the midst of the most sneering and contradictory references to the Jews, a note of defiance appears in Heine’s attitude to the non-Jewish world—a somewhat childish note. This is wonderfully illustrated in the poem “Donna Clara,” where the “daughter of the Alcides,” Donna Clara, plainly an anti-Semite of the modern type, is wooed in the castle garden by an unknown knight, who with his soft kisses stills her violent and incessant ejaculations against the Jews. When the trumpets’ peal summons her back to the castle, and she begs his name from him, he answers:

I, Señora, your beloved,
Am the son of that renowned,
Great and highly learned Rabbi,
Israel of Saragossa.

In the “Hebrew Melodies” Heine advises his wife to forget theaters and concerts for a while and fill in the blank spaces in her French education by learning Hebrew. In that way she will be able to read Judah ha-Levi, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, and Moses Ibn Ezra, “the triple star” of the “golden age of the Arabic-Old Hispanic school of Jewish poets.”

Near the end of his life, in the “Confessions,” this attitude of defiance and Jewish pride reaches an explicit culmination: “I see now that the Greeks were only pretty youths, while the Jews were always men, powerful, unyielding men, not only in the past but to the present day, in spite of eighteen centuries of persecution and misery. I have since learned to prize them better, and if pride of birth were not a foolish contradiction in a champion of the revolution and its democratic principles, the writer of these pages could be proud that his ancestors belonged to the noble House of Israel, that he is a descendant of those martyrs who gave the world a God and a morality, and who fought and suffered on all the battlefields of thought.”

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Now this sort of thing is a contradiction, I not indeed of any democratic principles (it is almost sad that Heine, in the face of the accumulated insolence of the degenerate aristocracy of Europe and their hangers-on, who sneered at him as an upstart Jew, should have felt that his “democratic principles” forbade his taking pride in his Jewish birth), but of the universal ideas that he professed. How could he take pride in the accidental and contingent quality of Jew when the essence Man shone forth from him with such splendor?

Far more important than this growing Jewish pride, however, was an increasing suspicion of the future very inconsistent in an enthusiast of the coming triumph of the Universal Man. In 1823, at the age of twenty-five, Heine had already remarked with startling prescience: “Although I am a Radical in England and a Carbonari in Italy, nevertheless I am no Demagogue in Germany for the entirely accidental and trifling reason that with the triumph of the latter several thousand Jewish heads, and precisely the best ones, would fall.” Much later, in the “Confessions,” he observed that “what today they call the hatred of the proletariat for the rich, used to be called hatred of the Jews”—a remark whose force today, after one hundred years of the sentimentalization of the proletariat, is even greater than it was at the time he made it.

Heine was apparently gradually possessed by an intuition of disaster. It sprang from his apprehensions as to the future course of German history, but in the end it shook most of his former opinions to their foundation. This intuition attained its clearest expression in an amazingly prophetic passage of the essay, “On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany.” He has just remarked that the Germans, a methodical nation, had to work out their philosophy first and their revolution afterward. There will be Kantians, Fichteans, and “philosophers of nature” forthcoming in this revolution whose ruthlessness will “fill the world with terror and amazement.” “For if the Kantian’s hand strikes heavily and without hesitation because his heart is stirred by no traditional respect, if the Fichtean boldly defies every danger because it has no real existence for him, then the philosopher of nature will be terrible because he can join hands with the primeval forces of nature, because he can call up the demoniac energies of Old Germanic pantheism, and because then there will awaken in him that battle ardor which we find among the ancient Germans, which fights neither to kill nor to conquer, but simply to fight. Christianity has—and that is its fairest merit—somewhat mitigated the brutal German lust for battle. But it could not destroy it. When once that taming talisman, the Cross, is broken, the savagery of the old battlers will flare up again, the insane berserk rage sung so much by the Northern bards. That talisman is rotten. The day will come when it will pitiably collapse. Then the old stone gods will rise from the forgotten rubble and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and Thor with his giant hammer will leap up and begin smashing Gothic cathedrals. . . .”

As a Jew and an exile from Germany, Heine had a vantage ground from which to look into the future. If his vision was not broad and profound, it was at least piercing. If he did not quite know how to reconcile what he saw with the otherwise optimistic ideas that he shared with his generation, adding one more contradiction to the mass of contradictions of which he was constituted, what he saw was at least enough effectually to separate him from the dominant tendencies of his time. Heine was one of those few men of the 19th century who were able to see past the bright abstractions to the dark side of their age.

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Having broken with his age in this, he was obliged—although much time had to elapse—to break with it in other ways. In the Epilogue to the Romanzero, after having already endured several of the bed-ridden years of semi-paralysis that were to put him in his grave, Heine announced his return to a belief in a personal God: “Yes, like the prodigal son, I have come back to God after a long time spent in feeding the swine among the Hegelians.” This did not mean that the “born foe of all positive religions,” the old soldier in the “war for the liberation of humanity,” had made his peace with the respectable powers of the world. “No, my religious views and convictions have remained free of any trace of churchiness—no ringing of bells has led me on, no altar candles have dazzled me.” Heine returned to no fold, neither the Lutheran nor the Jewish. On the other hand, it was not an act as meaningless as his baptism, as many of his admirers apparently want to think. His premonitions of doom sent the arrogant structure of enlightened Hegelianism tumbling. Thus left exposed to the chill winds of the void, he modestly crept in where many before him had crept. In the Preface to the second edition of “On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,” that same essay in which he had years before prophesied a future for Europe wholly at variance with the views of his “enlightened friends,” Heine had this to say: “Ach! Several years later a bodily and spiritual alteration took place in me. How often since then I have pondered the story of that Babylonian king who considered himself the Almighty God, but who miserably fell from the heights of his conceit and like an animal crawled on the ground and ate grass (it was probably lettuce). This story stands in that great and splendid Book of Daniel, and I recommend it for the edification it affords not only to my good friend Ruge, but also to my much more stubborn friend Marx, yes, to Messrs. Feuerbach, Daumer, Bruno Bauer, Hengstenberg, and however else the others may be called, these godless self-constituted gods.”

Heine’s return to a belief in God is without any significance for the future course of his age, or our own age, and I do not dwell on it at length for that reason. God “died” in the i 9th century and Heine was not the man to revive him. What it means for the understanding of Heine as a Jew, however, is of great significance. It meant the collapse of that “universal” into which he had escaped. It meant an end to the possibility of taking refuge from his Jewishness in an abstract and ultimate “Humanity.” It meant-however reluctant he was to part with it-openly facing the world as a Jew without the screen of ideas behind which for a century most of the Jews of the West had hidden. It meant acknowledging himself as Jew, laying claim to the name of Jew—“authenticity,” to use Sartre’s term. “I am no longer a godlike biped; I am no longer the ‘first German after Goethe,’ as Ruge called me in healthier days; I am no longer the great Pagan Number 2, whom people likened to vine-wreathed Dionysus, while the title of a grand—ducal, Weimarian Jupiter was bestowed upon my colleague Number 1; I am no longer the pleasure-loving, somewhat embonpointed Hellene who smiled down on melancholy Nazarenes—I am now only a poor, sick Jew, a wasted picture or misery, an unhappy man!”

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The quality of Jew is an ambiguous one, and there are doubtless many ways to realize it greatly. Heine fled from his Jewishness like a plague only to find it perversely confronting him at the end of his life. He gave up the struggle at last, wearily and reluctantly yielding to it, and in that consists his greatness as a Jew. There are other ways, I repeat, to achieve greatness as a Jew. Heine’s, no doubt, is one of the humbler ways. But great it is nevertheless. It is the very violence of his efforts to deny himself that makes his ultimate affirmation so moving. Heine arrived at his authenticity precisely by first traversing every path of inauthenticity.

Heine’s example is one, I think, that reveals how purely formal and analytic Sartre’s categories are, how little they obtain in “existence” itself. Heine was not, nor is there any Jew—or any person—entirely authentic or inauthentic. You are not confronted with a clear-cut choice between the two, as Sartre would seem to argue. Indeed, your choice is made before you realize it, often by someone else, and you live, perhaps, to regret it later. You are inauthentic, in this world, before you are aware of the possibility of being otherwise. (And yet you cannot deny your own inauthentic past, for that is a type of inauthenticity too. There are Jews who change their names from Siegfried to Yitzhak, and who, in thus attempting to deny themselves, such as they were, are as inauthentic in the second instance as they were in the first.) Officially, the modem world considers you of the Jewish “persuasion.” A free agent, you have been “persuaded” to be a Jew, and are free, as part of your Rights of Man, to be “unpersuaded,” as was Heine for a time. This is the lie with which you begin to live. Here, of course, Sartre is correct. You cannot choose not to be a Jew, you can only choose to be an authentic or inauthentic Jew. But in the same breath Sartre is wrong. You cannot choose to be authentic or inauthentic; Jew or Gentile, you can only choose not to be inauthentic any longer. And in that lies Heine’s greatness as a Jew.

The argument I have pursued is of course more abstract and neat than what it is meant to describe. The living Heine, as he is revealed in his writings, is too ambiguous and wonderful a creature for any criticism to hope to do him justice. But the argument has to be so abstracted if there is to be one. Heine’s authenticity, achieved late and with difficulty, was no perfect state of Jewish bliss. It was something constantly to be striven for, and, once attained, something to which he could never quite reconcile himself. Heine sighed on his deathbed for those enthusiastic illusions of which he had so reluctantly disabused himself. “‘I have come back to Jehovah!’ he said a few days before his death, and the friend from whom we had this, also a witty and celebrated writer, added: ‘It was one of his regrets.’”

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¹ Heinrich Heine, Jüdisches Manifest. Eine Auswah! aus seinen Werken, Briefen und Gesprächen, Herausgegeben von Hugo Bieber. Mary S. Rosenberg, New York, 1946.