HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
people by turns, they were still his father's house
from which he could not run away by apostasizing.
William Sharp, in his Heine biography of 1888,
went to considerable length to explain Heine's apostasy,
without either justifying or condemning it.
He pointed out the weighty reasons that prompted
the poet, who was ever proud of the splendid past
of his race, to abandon it. Heine had learned early
in life, according to Sharp, that to be a Jew meant
social degradation and innumerable hardships but
that to be a Gentile signified such lordship over circumstances
as might be in the power of the individual
to attain. Besides, indifference to religion was
characteristic of his home environment. He was not
at all happy to purchase immunity from the ills of
life by baptism, he did not discard Judaism out of
any spirit of mockery, but his hand was forced, he
yielded against his better judgment, and he paid a
heavy penalty ever thereafter — because his enemies
continued to hate him as a Jew, despite his conversion,
and the Jews scorned him as an apostate;
and even those German Christians who accepted
him as a man and a brother did so in the same superior
way as a Louisianian or a South Carolinian
might accept a Negro convert as a fellow-citizen.
Charles Grant, in the Contemporary Review of
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