HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

The Wandering Jew
other creed in its place. As the offspring of such an
unequal marriage, Heine was shown to have grown
up without establishing firm roots either in the
Jewish or the German camp. Though he personally
might have utterly forsworn all belief in the
religion of the Hebrews, he nevertheless could not
free himself from certain hereditary attitudes. He
could not, for instance, survey religion with the
cold indifference of a German rationalist. What he
did not love and admire, he had to hate and despise.
He blended a rancorous personal spleen with
the frigidities of a contemptuous metaphysician.
Devoid of all convictions, he could be bitter and
sneering about the convictions of others.
This theme, that Heine's Jewishness was the
cause for the perversity of his genius, frequently
recurred in the press of Germany throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it was only
seldom voiced in England. Except for Thomas Carlyle,
no major English writer stressed this conclusion.
The Victorian press was not generally anti-
Semitic and, though it might attack Heine because
it disagreed with his extreme radicalism, it did not
seek in Heine's Jewish origin the explanation for
his dangerous doctrines or his unpleasant traits.
Solely in Blackwood's Magazine of November,
[105]