Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  German Jews are often, and mistakenly, viewed as a “special case” in Jewish history—mainly because we know how the story ended. This awareness has produced a good deal of blame directed at both nineteenth- and twentieth-century German Jews for their failure to foresee a future that almost no one (despite the ex post facto prescience attached to Heine’s words about book burning) imagined before it actually happened. The issues confronted by German Jews, including conversion and intermarriage, in their relationship with the larger culture have surfaced and resurfaced throughout modern Jewish history—from countries like Russia, where Jews were always profoundly oppressed, to the United States, where institutionalized legal equality overcame extralegal discrimination to produce the greatest success story of the Diaspora.

  Heine was born in Düsseldorf, where Jews were emancipated under Napoleon’s occupation between 1806 and his defeat at Waterloo in 1815. The nine-year-old Heinrich watched French troops march into his town on the banks of the Rhine, and the municipality of some six thousand (fewer than 10 percent Jews) became a French arrondissement. The French occupation removed all legal, educational, professional, and political restrictions previously imposed on Jews by the Prussian state. As Amos Elon observes, Heine thus became part of the first, small generation of German Jews to “grow up as a free man.”1 His adult friend (and occasional intellectual antagonist) the liberal Jewish journalist Ludwig Börne was only eleven years older than Heine, but when Börne was born in Frankfurt, Jews were still locked into a ghetto at sunset and on Sundays. Like Heine, Börne converted to Lutheranism as an adult, and he, too, regretted having been baptized. (For many German-speaking Jewish converts to Christianity, this confused and ambivalent attitude toward their formal change of faith would manifest itself throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, until the eve of the Holocaust. In his novel The Conversion, set in Austria before the First World War, the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld describes a civil servant, Karl, who converts—as Heine did—in order to secure a public job generally closed to Jews. After Karl and two other converted Jewish friends become involved in a bar fight with anti-Semitic peasants, the Jews argue about whether any convert from Judaism has the right to call their antagonists goyim because, as one of the converts argues, “we’re goyim too.” Karl replies, “I’m an apostate, not a goy.”)2

  When Heine was a young man, it seems unlikely (though not impossible) that a converted Jew would think that baptism had turned him into a goy rather than a nominal Christian. With Napoleon’s defeat, which meant the end of the secular bedrock of the Napoleonic Code, all German Jews on formerly French-occupied territory were automatically returned to second- and third-class legal status.*2 Just four years after the withdrawal of Napoleon’s armies, when Heine was twenty-one, violent anti-Jewish demonstrations known as the Hep! riots swept through cities along the Rhine. “Hep!,” shouted by mobs destroying and looting Jewish houses and businesses, was an acronym of the Latin Hierosolyma est perdita (Jerusalem is lost), attributed by legend to Roman soldiers during the siege of Jerusalem in 70, and to warriors of the First Crusade who stopped for recreational pogroms in the Rhineland on their way to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim infidels.

  At the time of the Hep! riots, unconverted Jews were generally barred from state jobs, including employment at universities—the latter being a customary way for writers and artists to support themselves. At age twenty-seven, Heine was already a poet of some repute but remained financially dependent on his wealthy uncle, the Hamburg banker Salomon Heine. Heinrich was baptized into the Lutheran church on June 28, 1825, by a sympathetic pastor who apparently knew that the conversion was only a formality. To his friend Moses Moser, one of a circle of Berlin Jewish intellectuals who dreamed of uniting Judaism—or a Jewish educational background—with contemporary German culture, Heine wrote, “From my way of thinking, you can well imagine that baptism is an indifferent affair. I do not regard it as important even symbolically, and I shall devote myself all the more to the emancipation of the unhappy members of our race. Still I hold it as a disgrace and a stain upon my honor that in order to obtain an office in Prussia—in beloved Prussia—I should allow myself to be baptized.”3

  The plan was for Heine to support himself, and his writing, as a lawyer or teacher at a law school—both positions closed to unconverted Jews in Prussia. For many German Jews of his generation, conversion did open public jobs, including those in universities and government departments. Heine’s and Moser’s friend Eduard Gans, a protégé of Hegel at the University of Berlin and one of the first German Jews to earn a doctoral degree in jurisprudence and philosophy, finally converted to Protestantism (a few months after Heine) after having been denied any academic position. The magic baptismal waters soon landed him a job on the faculty of the University of Berlin. But that did not happen for Heine (possibly because of his openly expressed democratic political views). Heine was furious at Gans for converting, but he was too self-aware not to realize that his reaction was a projection of anger at himself for having done the same thing. Rarely has an opportunistic conversion produced so little for someone who considered baptism so great a stain upon his honor. “I think so often about Gans because I do not want to think about myself,” he told Moser. “I get up at night and curse myself in front of the mirror.”4 Beloved Prussia. For Heine, as for so many other German Jews, the real beloved was the German language.*3 As Elon notes, Heine was the first German Jewish writer to assert (in 1820) that his true homeland, or fatherland, was the German language, “our most sacred possession,…a fatherland even for him who is denied one by malice and folly.”5

  •

  If issues in intellectual and moral history could be settled by quantitative measures, the scholarly and religious attention devoted to Jewish conversions throughout the ages would have to be deemed disproportionate. During the past two thousand years of Western civilization, conversions from paganism to Christianity and from one branch of Christianity to another far outnumber any conversions from Judaism to Christianity (or vice versa). If we are considering secular influences on religious conversion, the Reformation alone changed many more people’s lives than any attempt to convert Jews—by force, persuasion, or, most notably in Germany, the seductive promise of baptism as, in Heine’s words, the “admission card to European culture.” And yet the turning points and ultimate fates of civilizations are not determined by numbers alone. Judaism, to paraphrase Langston Hughes’s famous line about slavery and blacks in white America, has always been the rock upon which Western Christianity stumped its toe.*4 Had the Moors, instead of moving east to Turkey (and beyond) and south to Africa, also dispersed themselves throughout Europe, as the Jews did after their expulsion from Spain, Western Christianity would have had two damaged toes. There is no reason to think that the ghetto gates of the pre-emancipation era would not have locked in Muslims as well as Jews. But that would have been another story. The unconverted Jew and unconverted Muslim both posed a challenge to Christianity’s absolute truth claim, and that is why the Convivencia collapsed with the Catholic rulers’ reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula. In the end, though, only the Jews remained to pose the challenge by their unconverted presence in the heart of Europe.

  Throughout Christianity’s first millennium, literally millions of new believers were, had to be, the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of pagans. Yet no one referred to these Christian converts as “assimilated pagans” or suggested that they were not to be trusted because their ancestors had once painted their skin and howled at celestial bodies as a form of worship. So it is impossible to write a secular history of religious conversion in the West without recognizing the special place of Jews, for many Christians of many eras, as a living rebuke to the majority religion. Judaism, like Christianity and Islam, is a historical religion but—even though Abraham is the biblical father of both Israel and Ishmael—Judaism has the first historical claim. The refusal of Jews to give up that prior claim made their conversion mo
re important to Christians, at least until the recent modern era, than the conversion of any other people. (In my Catholic elementary school in the 1950s, our daily morning prayers still included a special plea for the conversion of the Jews as well as the conversion of Russia, thought to be lost to atheistic communism.)

  Even converted Jews—assimilated into and in many instances making invaluable contributions to the cultures in which they lived—posed a challenge, because of the enduring suspicion that something about Jewishness adhered to a convert even after the ceremonial and theological rebirth of baptism. As Heine’s comments about his conversion suggest, this Christian suspicion could in some instances be well founded—and not only because of the racialization of anti-Semitism that reached its apotheosis in Nazi Germany and had its closest antecedents in the Spanish cult and laws of limpieza de sangre. There was something about Jews themselves that prevented not their assimilation but their disappearance into Christian society, in a fashion that affected both the converted and the unconverted. And if Jews lived, as so many did in Europe, in societies that wanted them to disappear rather than assimilate, religious conversion did not, could not, accomplish that end.

  For German Jews, the desire to be treated like everyone else—say, for purposes of getting an education or making a living—stood in delicate equipoise with a sense of specialness, of not merely having survived but of having contributed so much to their culture against such great odds. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the tension between the Jews’ sense of specialness and their knowledge of daily discrimination was heightened, and rendered more tragic, by their profound love for German culture and language. It is both the profundity of the love, and in some (though by no means all) respects the lack of reciprocity from German Christians—not that world’s eventual ruination under Hitler—that gives the conversion experience of post-Enlightenment German Jews its particular poignancy.

  Only fifty-four years separate Heine’s birth from the arrival in Berlin of fourteen-year-old Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), the father of the Jewish Enlightenment, known throughout Europe as the “German Socrates” and in Germany as “the Jewish Luther.” (Given Luther’s strongly expressed anti-Semitic views, the latter appellation is a stellar example of contemporary German intellectuals’ misunderstanding of even the most respected Jews among them.) Mendelssohn was an observant Jew in the small-“r” reformed fashion, which would eventually turn into Reform Judaism with a capital “R.” In spite of Mendelssohn’s own religious devotion, four of his six children who lived to adulthood became converts to Lutheranism. His most famous grandchild, the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–47), was an authentically devout Lutheran. The composer’s father, Abraham, had changed his name to Bartholdy after converting to Christianity, but Felix always insisted on keeping the hyphenated “Mendelssohn.” According to one account (possibly apocryphal), the young composer’s father once presented him with business cards bearing the single surname “Bartholdy,” and Felix threw them out.6 But Mendelssohn’s wife was the daughter of a Huguenot pastor, and the composer’s deep interest in Christian music was a sore point with some of his Jewish contemporaries.*5 In 1846, the uncomfortable convert of convenience Heine wrote, with what can only be described as vulgar malice, to a friend, “If I had the good fortune to be Moses Mendelssohn’s grandson, I would not use my talents to set the piss of the Lamb to music.”7 The composer’s sincere Christianity, and his commitment to the revival of Bach’s sacred music (which, astonishing as it seems today, went out of fashion for nearly seventy years after his death), did nothing to mitigate the taint of his Jewish lineage as far as Jew-haters were concerned.

  Richard Wagner, in his notorious 1850 essay, “Judentum in der Musik” (“Jewishness in Music”), declared that Mendelssohn, as a Jewish composer, could never have achieved the profound musical understanding of a true German. This ex cathedra pronouncement was made even though Mendelssohn had become the key figure in the revival of interest in Bach’s works in Germany. In 1829, at age twenty, Mendelssohn conducted a historic performance of Bach’s long-forgotten St. Matthew Passion. The event marked the restoration of Bach’s great liturgical composition to the most revered canon of German music. Based on Mendelssohn’s own study of the score, the performance was the first to be widely reviewed by musical experts since Bach’s death. While it would be foolish to suggest that Bach could ever have been totally forgotten, the renaissance of popular and critical acclaim for his body of work would surely have taken longer without Mendelssohn’s intervention. The story of Felix Mendelssohn, never regarded as simply a German composer in his own time and of course reviled in the Nazi era, embodies, in the most sorrowful way, the limits of conversion as a transformative instrument for Jews in the country to which they were so deeply attached.

  The end for the Mendelssohn line of German Jewish converts to Christianity is encompassed in the searing, ironic novel Mendelssohn Is on the Roof, by the Czech Jewish writer Jiři Weil. Prague, like Breslau, Danzig, Memel, and many other cities throughout the parts of Europe that once belonged to either the Austro-Hungarian or Prussian empire, had a large community of German-speaking Jews who identified themselves with German culture. In the novel, set in occupied Czechoslovakia (in Nazi-speak, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) during World War II and originally published in Czechoslovakia in 1960, SS General Reinhard Heydrich, a lover of music and—even for his breed—a notably virulent hater of Jews, has ordered his minions to remove a statue of the Jew Mendelssohn from the roof of a Prague concert hall. There is only one problem: the workers do not have the slightest idea of what the composer looked like, so they decide to tear down the statue with the biggest nose—which happens to be a bust of Wagner. The Nazis, worried that they may be making a mistake, then pick the wrong Jew to try to identify the real Mendelssohn. The SS commandeers, as an “expert” adviser, an ultra-Orthodox Talmudic scholar who does not listen to secular music or look at graven images, and to whom the name of the reformer and philosopher Moses Mendelssohn—forget about his grandson, the Christian composer—is anathema.

  Ambitious Jews elsewhere, in continental Europe and in England, also faced the question of whether to convert in Christian societies that always perceived a conflict between being a Jew and being, say, a true Englishman or Frenchman. But it is difficult to imagine Heine’s near contemporary Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) writing about England with the double edge of Heine’s famous opening lines from “Night Thoughts”—“Should I think of Germany at night / It puts all thought of sleep to flight.” But, then, it is impossible to imagine a Jew, converted or unconverted, rising to the highest level of politics in nineteenth-century Germany, either before or after unification, as Disraeli did in Victorian England.

  •

  If there ever was a conversion of convenience, even though it turned out quite inconveniently, Heine’s stealth baptism as a Lutheran certainly qualifies. His early life in French-occupied territory was not free of anti-Semitism, and his first mention of his Jewishness in his memoir, in a passage titled “My First Flogging,” is infused with a characteristic ambiguity. Young Heinrich asked his father who his grandfather was, and his father replied, “Your grandfather was a little Jew, and had a long beard.” For whatever reason, Heine repeated his father’s comment to his classmates at school the next day and inadvertently started a commotion. “The boys jumped on to the benches and tables, pulled the blackboards down from the walls, threw them and the inkstands on to the floor,” Heine recalled, “with shouts of laughter, bleatings, gruntings, yellings, and crowings—a fiendish concert, with one burden, ‘His grandfather was a little Jew with a long beard.’ ” The class tutor, a Jesuit priest, blamed Heine for having aroused his schoolmates by talking about a grandfather who was a Jew with a beard. The miscreant was then “soundly flogged in consequence.” Heine describes being beaten to the point where “the stripes left on my back were dark blue. I have never forgotten this.”8 He then provides a telling descr
iption of the ways in which such an experience affected his own imaginative picture of his Jewish family background.

  With the name of the man who gave me my first flogging, I recall the occasion of it, namely my unfortunate genealogical confession; and the association is still so strong that, whenever I hear of a little Jew with a long beard, I feel creeps down my back….I never afterward felt any great desire to make a nearer acquaintance with such a doubtful grandfather, or to give a description of my family tree to a large audience, when it had been so badly received by a small one.

  I will not entirely pass by my paternal grandmother, though I have little to say of her. She was a remarkably handsome woman, and the only daughter of a Hamburg banker, known far and wide for his wealth; which leads me to suppose that the little Jew, who carried her off from her father’s house to his humble home in Hanover, must have possessed some qualities besides his long beard, and been a worthy man.9

  What this passage does not say is probably more important than what it does say. Why, if you were asking your father what his father was like, would his first response be that your grandfather was a little Jew with a beard? Why not say he was a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker as well as a Jew? Why would a boy pass on such a provocative description to his (presumably Gentile) schoolmates? Why, exactly, does having married the daughter of a banker mean that the little Jew must have had some admirable qualities—especially since greed was a prominent feature of negative anti-Semitic stereotypes?