HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

The Wandering Jew
time a behef which excluded every spiritual element.
In his wit and humor also Heine was a true
child of the Hebrew race. However original he
may have been, he exhibited the characteristics and
pecuharities of Hebrew humor, of the wittiest and
most hght-hearted people of the world, which, in
the midst of unparalleled misfortunes and sufferings,
has preserved an ineradicable buoyancy and
an unconquerable spirit of satire." "
Alexander H. Japp, in the British Quarterly Review
of October, 1881, saw Heine as the avenger
of the injustice and the oppression which the Jews
suffered at the hands of a Philistinish Germany. Evil
at last came home to roost, when the greatest lyric
poet of Germany repaid in ridicule and irony the
wrongs inflicted upon his people by the land of his
birth.
The London Quarterly Review, in 1889, touched
upon Heine's Jewishness when it treated him as the
living emblem of the nineteenth century. This century
sang and moaned through his eloquent lips and
what he, the pioneer of freedom and intellect, the
rebel against the divine order of things, thought
and suffered interested not only Germany but also
all of Europe. Yet Heine remained, in spite of himself,
always a Jew. Though he hated and loved his
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