by Paul Johnson
Heine’s ambiguities about his Judaism would fill, and indeed have filled, many books.67 He did not learn to read Hebrew properly. He hated being a Jew. He wrote of ‘the three evil maladies, poverty, pain and Jewishness’. In 1822 he was briefly associated with the Society for Jewish Science, but he had nothing to contribute. He did not believe in Judaism as such and saw it as an anti-human force. He wrote the next year: ‘That I will be enthusiastic for the rights of the Jews and their civil equality, that I admit, and in bad times, which are inevitable, the Germanic mob will hear my voice so that it resounds in German beerhalls and palaces. But the born enemy of all positive religion will never champion that religion which first developed the fault-finding with human beings which now causes us so much pain.’68 But if he rejected talmudic Judaism, he despised the new Reform version. The Reformers were ‘chiropodists’ who had ‘tried to cure the body of Judaism from its nasty skin growth by bleeding, and by their clumsiness and spidery bandages of rationalism, Israel must bleed to death…. we no longer have the strength to wear a beard, to fast, to hate and to endure out of hate; that is the motive of our Reform.’ The whole exercise, he said scornfully, was to turn ‘a little Protestant Christianity into a Jewish company. They make a tallis out of the wool of the Lamb of God, and a vest out of the feathers of the Holy Ghost, and underpants out of Christian love, and they will go bankrupt and their successors will be called: God, Christ & Co.’69
But if Heine disliked both Orthodox and Reform Jews, he disliked the maskils perhaps even more. He saw them as careerists heading for baptism. He noted that four out of six of Mendelssohn’s children converted. His daughter Dorothea’s second husband was Friedrich Schlegel; she became a Catholic reactionary. His grandson Felix became the leading composer of Christian music. It may not have been Heine who said, ‘The most Jewish thing Mendelssohn ever did was to become a Christian.’ But he certainly remarked: ‘If I had the luck of being the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, I would surely not use my talent to set the pissing of the Lamb to music.’70 When Eduard Gans converted, Heine denounced him as a ‘scoundrel’, guilty of ‘felony’, of ‘treason’, worse than Burke (in Heine’s view the arch-traitor who betrayed the cause of revolution). He marked Gans’s baptism by a bitter poem, An einen Abtrunnigen, ‘To an Apostate’.
Yet Heine himself had become a Protestant only a few months before, three days after he took his doctorate. His reasons were entirely worldly. By a law of August 1822, Jews had been excluded from state academic posts—a ruling aimed specifically at Gans. Ten years later Heine defended his Protestantism as his ‘Protest against injustice’, his ‘warlike enthusiasm which made me take part in the struggles of this militant church’. But this was nonsense, for he also argued that the spirit of Protestantism was not really religious at all: ‘The blooming flesh in Titian’s paintings—that is all Protestantism. The loins of his Venus are much more fundamental theses than those the German monk stuck on the church door of Wittenberg.’ And at the time of his baptism, he wrote to his friend Moses Moser: ‘I should not like it if you saw my baptism in a favourable light. I can assure you, if our laws allowed the stealing of silver spoons, I would not have done it.’71 His saying that baptism was ‘the entrance-ticket to European culture’ became notorious.72
Why, then, did Heine abuse Gans for what he did himself? There is no satisfactory explanation. Heine suffered from a destructive emotion which was soon to be commonplace among emancipated and apostate Jews: a peculiar form of self-hatred. He attacked himself in Gans. Later in life he used to say he regretted his baptism. It had, he said, done him no good materially. But he refused to allow himself to be presented publicly as a Jew. In 1835, lying, he said he had never set foot in a synagogue. It was his desire to repudiate his Jewishness, as well as his Jewish self-hatred, which prompted his many anti-Semitic remarks. A particular target was the Rothschild family. He blamed them for raising loans for the reactionary great powers. That, at any rate, was his respectable reason for attacking them. But his most venomous remarks were reserved for Baron James de Rothschild and his wife, who showed him great kindness in Paris. He said he had seen a stockbroker bowing to the Baron’s chamber-pot. He called him ‘Herr von Shylock in Paris’. He said, ‘There is only one God—Mammon. And Rothschild is his prophet.’ He said there was no more need for the Talmud, once the Jews’ defence against Rome, since every quarter-day the papal nuncio had to bring baron James the interest on his loan. None of this stopped him getting a lot of money out of the Rothschilds, or boasting that his relations with them were (as he put it) famillionaire.73
Heine, in fact, expected wealthy Jews to maintain him, even though he was not a rabbinical student but a secular intellectual. His father had been a hopeless failure at business; his own efforts, such as they were, did him little good. So he was perpetually dependent on his uncle, Solomon Heine, a Hamburg banker who became one of the richest men in Europe. Heine was always in need of money, however much he got. He even stooped to accept an annual secret pension of 4,800 francs from the Louis-Philippe government. But usually he pestered Uncle Solomon, none too politely: ‘The best thing about you’, he wrote to him in 1836, ‘is that you bear my name.’ The uncle was sceptical about Heine’s deserts, remarking: ‘If he had learned anything, he wouldn’t need to write books.’ He thought his nephew was a bit of a schnorrer, a professional Jewish beggar. But, faithful to the ancient tradition, he paid up. When he died in 1844 he left Heine a legacy, but on condition the poet did not attack him or his family. The sum was less than Heine had hoped for, so he engaged in a long-drawn-out row over the will with Solomon’s son.74
This was the personal background to Heine’s astonishing genius. In the 1820s he superseded Byron as Europe’s most widely acclaimed poet. The turning-point came with his Buch der Lieder (1827), which contained such famous lyrics as his ‘Lorelei’ and ‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’ (‘On Wings of Song’). The Germans came to recognize him as their greatest man of letters since Goethe. When he settled in Paris, he was hailed as a hero of European culture. His prose was as brilliant, and as popular, as his poetry. He produced scintillating travel books. He virtually established a new genre of French literature, the short essay or feuilleton. Much of his energy was wasted on furious quarrels and character-assassination, in which his self-hatred (or whatever it was) found an outlet, and which were so extravagant that they usually aroused sympathy for the victim. But his fame continued to spread. He contracted a venereal infection of the spine, which confined him to a sofa for his last decade. But his final poems were better than ever. Moreover, his lyrics were perfectly adapted to the new German art-song, now sweeping Europe and North America, so that all the leading composers, from Schubert and Schumann onwards, set him to music. There was no escaping Heine, then or ever since, especially for Germans, in whom he stirred irresistible responses. His works were used as German school textbooks even in his lifetime.
Many Germans found it hard to admit that this Jew had such a perfect German ear. They tried to convict him of ‘Jewish superficiality’, as opposed to true German profundity. The charge could not be made to stick. It was so manifestly untrue. It was as though a superfine talent had been building up in the ghetto over many secret generations, acquiring an ever more powerful genetic coding, and then had suddenly emerged to find the German language of the early nineteenth century its perfect instrument. The point had now been established: the Jew and the German had a special intellectual relationship. The German Jew was a new phenomenon of European culture. For German anti-Semites, this posed an almost unbearable emotional problem, epitomized in Heine. They could not deny his genius; they found its expression in German intolerable. His ghostly presence, right at the centre of German literature, drove the Nazis to incoherent rage and childish vandalism. They suppressed all his books. But they could not erase his poems from the anthologies and were forced to reprint them with what every schoolboy knew was a lie: ‘By an Unknown Author’. They seized a statue of him, once owned b
y the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and used it for target-practice. In 1941, on Hitler’s personal orders, his grave in the Montmartre cemetery was destroyed. It made no difference. In the last forty years, Heine’s work has been more widely and furiously debated, especially by Germans, than that of any other figure in their literature.
Heine had been banned in his lifetime too, at the insistence of Metternich—not as a Jew, but as a subversive. Therein lay another paradox, and a typical Jewish paradox. From emancipation onwards, the Jews were blamed both for seeking to ingratiate themselves with established society, enter it and dominate it; and, at the same time, for trying to destroy it utterly. Both charges had an element of truth. The Heine family was a case in point. Next to the Rothschilds themselves, who collected titles from half-a-dozen kingdoms and empires, the Heines were the most upwardly mobile family in Europe. Heine’s brother Gustav was knighted and made Baron von Heine-Geldern. His brother Maximilian married into the Tsarist aristocracy and was styled von Heine. His sister’s son became a Baron von Embden. Her daughter married an Italian prince. One of Heine’s close relatives became a Princesse Murat, another married the reigning Prince of Monaco.75 But Heine himself was both the prototype and the archetype of a new figure in European literature: the Jewish radical man of letters, using his skill, reputation and popularity to undermine the intellectual self-confidence of established order.
The notion of Heine as a lifelong radical needs severe qualification. Privately, at least, he always distinguished between the grim political progressives, and literary ones like himself. He hated their puritanism. He wrote to one of them: ‘You demand simple dress, abstemious habits and unseasonable pleasures; we, on the other hand, demand nectar and ambrosia, purple cloaks, sumptuous aromas, voluptuousness and luxury, laughing nymph-dances, music and comedies.’76 Privately, again, his conservatism increased with age. He wrote to Gustav Kolb in 1841: ‘I have a great fear of the atrociousness of proletarian rule, and I confess to you that out of fear I have become a conservative.’ When his long final illness confined him to what he called ‘my mattress-grave’, he returned to Judaism of a kind. Indeed, he insisted, quite untruthfully: ‘I have made no secret of my Judaism, to which I have not returned since I never left it’ (1850). His latest and greatest poems, Romanzero (1851) and Vermischte Schriften (1854), mark a return to religious themes, sometimes with a Judaic cast of thought. Like thousands of brilliant Jews before, and since, he came to associate the Hellenic spirit of intellectual adventure with health and strength, while age and pain turned him to the simplicities of faith. ‘I am no longer’, he wrote to a friend, ‘a zestful, well-nourished Hellene, smiling down on gloomy Nazarenes. I am now only a mortally ill Jew, an emaciated image of misery, an unhappy man.’ Or again: ‘Sickened by atheistic philosophy, I have returned to the humble faith of the ordinary man.’77
Nevertheless, the public persona of Heine was overwhelmingly radical, and to a great extent remained so. For generations of European intellectuals, his life and work was a poem to freedom. For Jews in particular, he presented the French progressive tradition as the true story of human advance, which all gifted young men and women should seek, each in their time, to push forward another league or two. He came close to a public declaration of faith when he wrote:
Freedom is the new religion, the religion of our time. If Christ is not the god of this new religion, he is nevertheless a high priest of it, and his name gleams beatifically into the hearts of the apostles. But the French are the chosen people of the new religion, their language records the first gospels and dogmas. Paris is the New Jerusalem, the Rhine is the Jordan that separates the consecrated land of freedom from the land of the Philistines.
For a time Heine even became, or fancied he did, a disciple of Saint-Simon. There was a streak of the hippy, the ‘flower-person’, in Heine: ‘the part of flowers and nightingales is closely allied to the revolution’, he wrote, quoting Saint-Simon’s dictum: ‘The future is ours.’ Heine never committed himself to a specific theory of revolutionary socialism. But in Paris he associated with many trying to devise one. They were often of Jewish origin.
One such was the young Karl Marx, who came to Paris in 1843. He had been editor of the radical Cologne newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, which the Jewish socialist Moses Hess (1812-75) had helped to found in 1843. It lasted only fifteen months before the Prussian government killed it, and Marx joined Hess in Parisian exile. But the two socialists had little in common. Hess was a true Jew, whose radicalism took the form of Jewish nationalism and eventually of Zionism. Marx, by contrast, had no Jewish education at all and never sought to acquire any. In Paris he and Heine became friends. They wrote poetry together. Heine saved the life of Marx’s baby Jennie, when she had convulsions. A few letters between them survive, and there must have been more.78 Heine’s jibe about religion as a ‘spiritual opium’ was the source of Marx’s phrase ‘the opium of the people’. But the notion that Heine was the John the Baptist to Christ’s Marx, fashionable in German scholarship of the 1960s, is absurd. A huge temperamental gulf yawned between them. According to Arnold Ruge, Marx would say to Heine: ‘Give up those everlasting laments about love and show the lyric poets how it should be done—with the lash.’79 But it was precisely the lash Heine feared: ‘The [socialist] future’, he wrote, ‘smells of knouts, of blood, of godlessness and very many beatings’; ‘it is only with dread and horror that I think of the time when those dark iconoclasts will come to power’. He repudiated ‘my obdurate friend Marx’, one of the ‘godless self-gods’.
What the two men had most in common was their extraordinary capacity for hatred, expressed in venomous attacks not just on enemies but (perhaps especially) on friends and benefactors. This was part of the self-hatred they shared as apostate Jews. Marx had it to an even greater extent than Heine. He tried to shut Judaism out of his life. Whereas Heine was deeply disturbed by the 1840 Damascus atrocities, Marx deliberately prevented himself from showing the smallest concern for any of the injustice inflicted on Jews throughout his lifetime.80 Despite Marx’s ignorance of Judaism as such, there can be no doubt about his Jewishness. Like Heine and everyone else, his notion of progress was profoundly influenced by Hegel, but his sense of history as a positive and dynamic force in human society, governed by iron laws, an atheist’s Torah, is profoundly Jewish. His Communist millennium is deeply rooted in Jewish apocalyptic and messianism. His notion of rule was that of the cathedocrat. Control of the revolution would be in the hands of the elite intelligentsia, who had studied the texts, understood the laws of history. They would form what he called the ‘management’, the directorate. The proletariat, ‘the men without substance’, were merely the means, whose duty was to obey—like Ezra the Scribe, he saw them as ignorant of the law, the mere ‘people of the land’.
Marx’s methodology, too, was wholly rabbinical. All his conclusions were derived solely from books. He never set foot in a factory and rejected Engels’ offer to take him to one. Like the gaon of Vilna, he locked himself up with his texts and solved the mysteries of the universe in his study. As he put it, ‘I am a machine condemned to devour books.’81 He called his work ‘scientific’ but it was no more scientific than theology. His temperament was religious, and he was quite incapable of conducting objective, empirical research. He simply went through any likely material to furnish ‘proof’ of conclusions he had already reached in his head, and which were as dogmatic as any rabbi’s or kabbalist’s. His methods were well summarized by Karl Jaspers:
The style of Marx’s writings is not that of the investigator…he does not quote examples or adduce facts which run counter to his own theory but only those which clearly support or confirm that which he considers the ultimate truth. The whole approach is one of vindication, not investigation, but it is vindication of something proclaimed as the perfect truth with the conviction not of the scientist but of the believer.82
Stripped of its spurious documentation, Marx’s theory of how history, class and produc
tion operate, and will develop, is not essentially different from Lurianic kabbalah’s theory of the Messianic Age, especially as amended by Nathan of Gaza, to the point where it can accommodate any awkward facts whatever. In short, it is not a scientific theory at all, but a piece of clever Jewish superstition.
Finally, Marx was the eternal rabbinical student in his attitude to money. He expected it to be provided to finance his studies, first by his family, then by Engels, the merchant, as his endless bullying schnorrer-letters testify. But the studies, as with so many learned rabbis, were never finished. After the publication of volume one of Capital, he could never put the rest together, leaving his papers in total confusion, from which Engels assembled volumes two and three. So the great commentary on the Law of History ended in muddle and doubt. What happened when the Messiah came, when ‘the expropriators are expropriated’? Marx could not say; he did not know. But he prophesied the Messiah-revolution all the same: in 1849, in August 1850, in 1851, in 1852, ‘between November 1852 and February 1853’, in 1854, in 1857, in 1858, in 1859.83 His later work, like Nathan of Gaza’s, was to a great extent an explanation for the non-arrival.