An essay in universal history from an Orthodox Christian Point ofView part the age of revolution

46. THREE WESTERN JEWS: (2) HEINE

And yet there were many assimilated Jews who went to the other extreme: far from emphasizing their Jewishness, they did everything in their power not only to deny it in their own personal lives, but also to extirpate the very principle of nationality from political life in general. The French revolution had been the watershed. Before it, Jewish revolutionary activity had been religious in character – and therefore nationalist as well, insofar as Talmudism was in essence the faith of the Jewish nation. During the revolution, the activity of the Jewish revolutionaries had been neither religious nor specifically anti-religious in character, but nationalism under the guise of internationalism, Jewish emancipation under the guise of obtaining equal rights for all men and all nations.

According to Norah Webster, “religious feeling appears to have played an entirely subordinate part” among the Jews in the French Revolution. “The Jews… were free before the Revolution to carry on the rites of their faith. And when the great anti-religious campaign began, many of them entered whole-heartedly into the attack on all religious faiths, their own included… The encouragement accorded by the Jews to the French Revolution appears thus to have been prompted not by religious fanaticism but by a desire for national advantage…”¹³¹
However, after the revolution the situation changed again. There were as many Jews as ever in the secret societies¹³²; but nationalism no longer seems to have been their motive. For the Jews were now, as we have seen, thoroughly emancipated in some western countries, such as Britain and France, and on the way there in many more. Their financial power, symbolized by the Rothschilds, was enormous. And except to some extent in Germany, there were no real barriers to their political advancement, either. And even in Germany, according to William Marr, “we Germans completed in the year 1848 our abdication in favour of the Jews… Life and the future belong to Judaism, death and the past to Germandom.”¹³³
But the Jews who poured into the socialist revolutionary movements in the second quarter of the nineteenth century were neither Judaists nor interested in the fate of their fellow Jews. Rather, they tended to identify Jewry and Jewishness with the most hated aspects of the capitalist system. A forerunner of this phenomenon was the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine.
Heine, as Paul Johnson writes, “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 the religion which first developed the fault-finding with human beings which now causes us so much pain.’ 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.’…
“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 [his attacks on the baptised Jew] 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.’… Heine 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.”¹³⁴
But there are strong indications that while trying to repudiate his Jewishness, Heine remained loyal to his race. Thus “I would fall into despair,” he wrote to a friend in 1823, “if you approved of my baptism”. Again, in one work he described three symbolic beauties: Diana – ancient classical art, Abondona – romantic art, and Herodias – a Jewess, and declared himself to prefer “the dead Jewess”. Indeed, according to the Jewish historian Graetz, Heine only superficially renounced Jewry, “and was like those warriors who remove the arms and banner from the enemy, so as to use them to beat and annihilate him more thoroughly!”¹³⁵ To prove the point, some four of five years before his death (from syphilis), Heine returned to the Judaist faith…
Again, if Heine was a radical, he saw more clearly than almost any conservative – and this clarity of sight was another characteristic of his Jewishness, given to him by his outsider status - the horrors to which radicalism would lead. As Golo Mann writes, “he foresaw the inevitable annihilation of the rich and their state by the poor, the ‘dangerous classes’ as they were called in France at the time. His prescience did not make him happy, yet he despised the existing social order; his attitude was that of one who was above or outside it. It was as though Heine was bewitched by Communism. In his articles he constantly talked about it at a time when only a very few people concerned themselves with it. He spoke of it more with dread than hope, as of an elemental movement of the age, immune to politics.
“’Communism is the secret name of the terrible antagonist who confronts the present-day bourgeois regime with proletarian domination and all its consequences. There will be a terrible duel… Though Communism is at present little talked about, vegetating in forgotten attics on wretched straw pallets, it is nevertheless the dismal hero destined to play a great, if transitory part in the modern tragedy…’ (20 June 1842).
“Three weeks later he prophesied that a European war would develop into a social world revolution from which would emerge an iron Communist dictatorship, ‘the old absolutist tradition… but in different clothes and with new catchphrases and slogans… Maybe there will then only be one shepherd and one flock, a free shepherd with an iron crook and an identically shorn, identically bleating human herd. Confused, sombre times loom ahead, and the prophet who might want to write a new apocalypse would need to invent entirely new beasts, and such frightening ones that St. John’s animal symbols would appear like gentle doves and amoretti by comparison… I advise our grandchildren to be born with very thick skins.’
“Then again he saw Communism not as a system under which men would enjoy the material benefits of life but as one under which they would slave at their jobs with dreary monotony; once he even predicted [with Dostoyevsky] the marriage of the Catholic Church with the Communists and foresaw an empire of asceticism, joylessness and strict control of ideas as the child of this union. Heine made himself few friends by such prophecies. The conservatives, the good German citizens, regarded him as a rebel and a frivolous wit. The Left saw in him a faithless ally, a socialist who was afraid of the revolution, who took back today what he had said yesterday and who behaved like an aristocrat. It is true that Heine, the artist, was both an aristocrat and a rebel. He hated the rule of the old military and noble caste, particularly in Prussia, despised the role of the financiers, particularly in France, and yet feared a leveling reign of terror by the people….
“Heine could not identify himself with any of the great causes that excited his compatriots at home or in exile [in Paris]; the servant of beauty and the intellect cannot do this. He could only see things with gay, sarcastic or melancholy eyes, without committing himself. Yet just because he was detached, sometimes to the point of treachery, his work has remained more alive than that of his more resolute contemporaries.
“Those who had no doubts, who were reliable, were equally irritated by Heine’s attitude towards Germany. At times he loved it and could not do otherwise. He had been born there and spoke its language; he was only a young man when he wrote the poems which have become part of Germany’s national heritage. Sick and lonely in exile, he longed for home. Yet at other times he mocked his compatriots in a manner which they could not forgive for their philistinism, their provincialism, their weakness for titles, their bureaucrats, soldiers and thirty-six monarchs. In an extremely witty poem he says that if there were ever to be a German revolution the Germans would not treat their kings as roughly as the British and French had treated theirs…
“No sooner had Heine written verses of this kind and mocked at the Germans for their lamb-like patience than he warned the French that the German revolution of the future would far exceed theirs in terror.
“‘A drama will be enacted in Germany compared with which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll. Christianity may have restrained the martial ardour of the Teutons for a time, but it did not destroy it; now that the old restraining talisman, the cross, has rotted away, the old frenzied madness will break out again.’
“The French must not believe that it would be a pro-French revolution, though it might pretend to be republican and extreme. German nationalism, unlike that of the French, was not receptive to outside influences filled with missionary zeal; it was negative and aggressive, particularly towards France. ‘I wish you well and therefore I tell you the bitter truth. You have more to fear from liberated Germany than from the entire Holy Alliance with all its Croats and Cossacks put together…’ Heine toyed with things cleverly and irresponsibly. At the time it was thought in France, in Italy and in Germany too that nationalism was international, closely related to the republican and the democratic cause; that nations, once they were free and united at home, would join forces in one great league of nations. Heine did not share this view. He regarded nationalism, particularly German nationalism, as a stupid, disruptive force motivated by hatred…”¹³⁶
Talmon writes that Heine “was vouchsafed an uncanny prophetic insight into the terrifying potentialities of German Romantic pantheism, with its vision of man as a being swallowed up or impelled by cosmic forces, the all-embracing Will of History, and the destiny of the Race. These were the favourite images of the various architects of catastrophe, who never tired of pouring scorn on the bloodless, cogitating, analysing and vacillating creature cut off from the vital forces of being.”¹³⁷