The one-hundredth anniversary of Heine’s death on February 17,1856, will doubtless give rise to a flood of articles about the poet, including essays dealing with Heine’s puzzling and very contradictory relationship to Jewish nationalism and to the Jewish religion. Among those who flocked to the aging Heine’s “mattress grave” in Paris was the German-Czech poet, playwright, and novelist, Alfred Meissner (1822-1885), who was to Heine what Eckermann was to Goethe. Meissner (who was not a Jew) had been involved in revolutionary and Czech nationalist movements, and fled from Austria to France. There, in 1847, he met the invalid Heine and became closely attached to him, visiting him almost daily right up to the time of his death. The conversations between the two men of letters are recorded in Meissner’s Heinrich Heine, Erinnerungen, published in Hamburg a few months after Heine’s death, but now almost unavailable. The excerpt presented below (in my translation, and for the first time in English) can be found in German in an abbreviated version of the original memoirs, Die Matrazengruft: Erinnerungen an Heinrich Heine von Alfred Meissner, edited by Georg Weberknecht (Stuttgart, 1921), and also in Heinrich Heine, Gespraeche, Briefe, Berichte seiner Zeitgenossen, edited by Hugo Bieber (Berlin, 1926). It offers a picture of Heine taking up his Jewishness in characteristically ironic fashion.
The particular conversation I have selected took place in 1850. Heine was mistaken in his assumption that the Roman historian Tacitus had invented the fable of the Jews’ worship of an ass in their Temple—the originator was the Alexandrian philosopher Apion, an ardent Jew-hater. The Biblical episode referred to by Meissner and read aloud by Heine contains the following verses: “[The Israelites] borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment. And the Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them such things as they required; and they spoiled the Egyptians.” Some identification of the people mentioned by Heine may be in order: Georg Friedrich Daumer (1800-1875) was the author of an anti-Christian treatise, The Secrets of Christian Antiquity (1847). Gabriel Riesser (1806-1863) was the foremost champion in Germany of Jewish emancipation. Alexandre Weill (1811-98), originally trained for the rabbinate, was a prolific writer in German and French. Madame Heine—Mathilde Crescentia Mirat—was a simple and uneducated Parisian who delighted and embarrassed her husband with her naivety. The Iazyges were a division of the Sarmatae, a wild people who lived in ancient Central and Southern Russia. The Bal Mabille mentioned by Heine was a public ball, a forerunner of those gay festivities painted by Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec.—Alfred Werner
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One day I found Heine in a high mood, greatly delighted by a book . . . in which he had just been reading. It was none other than Tacitus. “Do you know,” he asked me, and he was still laughing, “do you know the weird explanation this shady Roman gives of the origin of the Jewish people? I have never come across a more malicious libel! Imagine, this fellow accuses the Jews, whom, by the way, he calls genus hominum absurdum atque sordidum, of stemming from lepers, and worshipping an ass in their Temple.”
“Perhaps he got it mixed up with the Golden Calf,” I said, “the one that was cast on Horeb . . . .”
“Perhaps, but here it is, plainly stated: they worship the ass. This about the shrewdest people on earth—have you ever heard anything like it? . . . It is too funny, and if I had come across it before I certainly would have used it for a poem.”
[Heine then fluently translated the Tacitus passage in question.]
. . . He repeated: “An ass in the Temple!” and rocked with laughter. “But have you noticed,” he went on, “the role the ass does play in Holy Scriptures? Remember Balaam’s ass, and the asses of Saul? And Christ makes his entry on an ass. Daumer was not wrong when he spoke of an ass’ cult of the Jews; still, it seems to me presumptuous of him to maintain that whenever the ass appears, the stiff-necked dogma becomes humaner. Humanism has never been a concern of asses.”
“This tale of Tacitus,” I said, “has its own piquancy, but I wouldn’t for anything give up the other, traditional story of the exodus . . . in the Second Book of Moses [Exodus]. What a tragedy, and punctuated by the comic flashes that are never absent from this people’s history! Don’t you agree? Over and over . . . the awesome visage of Jehovah turns into the face of that familiar old secondhand dealer who makes loans on pledges . . . .”
“You mean the story of the borrowing of the jewels and plate?” Heine asked. “Ah, yes, that fine old story, which has so often been repeated since, with some change of address.”
[Heine then read Exodus 12:35.]
He read in a loud, mock-dignified voice . . . then put the black-bound book back in its place on the night table. . . . He was silent for a while, then said in his usual voice, as if thinking aloud:
Still, it’s wrong of us to talk so mockingly. If from time to time Israel takes revenge on her persecutors with petty skullduggeries—well, that’s a millionth part of the compensation she has coming! A strange people—for thousands of years constantly beaten, constantly crying, constantly suffering, perpetually forgotten by God yet still cleaving to him, more tenaciously and loyally than any other people in the whole world! If martyrdom, patience and loyalty, endurance in calamity, if all this is ennobling, then these people are nobler than a lot of others. The history of the Middle Ages . . . shows us not a single year that is not marked for the Jews by tortures, autos-da-fé, beheadings, extortions, massacres. The Jews suffered more from the followers of Christ . . . than ever under the most brutal and primitive Poles and Hungarians, Bedouins, Iazyges and Mongols! Oh, how lovely is the religion of love! You probably know that in Rome, the Metropolis of the Faith, for two hundred years the Jews were forced to run races on the last day of the Carnival, naked, in a loin-cloth, for the delectation of the mob. Again, these miserable people are linked together with that fatal animal. The order was: first, the asses; second, the Jews; third, the buffaloes; fourth, the Berber horses. From the lowest, most despised, to the noblest! You hear, my dear Meissner, how I, almost in the same breath, deride the Jews and sympathize with them; but they seem to me indeed as ridiculous as they are worthy of being revered. Still I could never immolate myself completely for their sake, like Herr Riesser and some others. I can lose myself in no party, neither Republican nor Patriot, Christian nor Jew. This I have in common with all creative writers: not for the enthusiastic moment, but for centuries; not for one country, but for the world; not for one race, but for mankind. It would be in bad taste and petty of me to ever be ashamed of being a Jew—as my slanderers have accused me—but it would be equally ridiculous to claim that I am one. If you read my writings, you will find me defending the Jewish people over and over again, and next time you visit me I will show you an important example. I’ll read you a rather long poem that’s first coming out in my next collection. Just as I was born to hold up to eternal ridicule the bad and the obsolete, the absurd, the false and the ridiculous, so it is also in my nature to feel exalted, to admire the sublime, to celebrate the living.
Heine had spoken these last words in dead earnest. . . . But as if the customary smile around the mouth must again take its place, he added jokingly:
When the little Weill visits us, in the next few days, you, my dear friend, will be given still another proof of my piety in the ancient Mosaic faith. Weill used to be a cantor. He is the possessor of a golden tenor and chants the old desert songs of Judah in their original traditional purity, from their simple monotonousness right up to the highest flights of the Old Testament coloratura. My good wife, who is totally unaware that I am a Jew, is not a little puzzled when this unheard-of musical lamento, these tremolos and sotto-voces strike her ear. When Weill delivered his first piece, the poodle Minko crawled under the sofa, and Cocotte, the parrot, tried to hang herself on the bars of her cage. ‘Monsieur Weill, Monsieur Weill,’ Mathilde exclaimed angrily, ‘do not carry the joke too far!’ Weill went on singing, and the good woman turned to me and pressed me: ‘Henri, tell me, what kind of songs are these?’ ‘These are our German folksongs,’ I said—and I’ve stuck to that!
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At this very time everyone was gossiping about Heine’s conversion. Some said he was returning in spirit to Christianity; others, bolder, claimed he was returning to Judaism. Several passages in the prefaces to new editions of his books, and the fact that the Bible was often to be seen by his side, offered some basis for these rumors. We seldom spoke about this matter. But it did seem to me that Heine was then much preoccupied with thoughts of religion.
“If I could only get around on crutches,” he sighed. “Do you know where I would go?”
“No,” I answered.
“Straight to church!”
“You’re joking!” . . .
“No, no, certainly to church,” Heine answered. “And where else should one go on crutches? Of course, if I could go without crutches, I would rather take a walk on the smiling boulevards, or go to the Bal Mabille.”
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