HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
1841, was Heine used to illustrate an anti-Semitic
thesis. In an article entitled Hebraistic, the claim
was made that Jews had no turn for literature of
any kind. In order to prove "the anti-literary and
pro-old-clothes propensities of the Jews in all the
countries of modern Europe," the author undertook
to refute the common belief that, in Germany
at any rate, Jewish intellect was able to shake off
its ghetto mentality and its base bondage to money
and apparently did succeed in forming a literary
school of merit. Certainly, with such a "strongarmed
Maccabee" as Heine to fight the battles of
the Jews, it required courage to buckle on armor
and to oppose Jewish pretensions to literary talent.
But the author was not dismayed by the seeming
difficulty of his task. He pointed out that unhappy
beings like Heine and his collaborator Borne attained
their celebrity in the world of letters by a
total abnegation of the Jewish character in all aspects.
They repudiated Judaism and were more
bitter against the Old Testament than against the
New. They propounded as their gospel the ultraradicalism
of Count St. Simon, a Frenchman, and
of Robert Owen, an Englishman. Their literature,
though written by ex-Jews, was not Jewish literature,
and they themselves could in no sense be re-
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