HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
1884 concerning her co-religionist: "His was a seed
sprung from the golden branch that flourished in
Hebrew-Spain between the years 1000 and 1200.
Whoever looks into the poetry of the medieval
Spanish Jews will see that Heine, the modem, cynical
German-Parisian, owns a place among these devout
and ardent mystics who preceded him by
fully eight centuries. The Intermezzo, so new and
individual in German literature, is but a well-sustained
continuation of the Divan and Gazelles of
Judah Halevi, or the thinly veiled sensuousness of
Alcharisi and Ibn Ezra. . . . What the world
thought distinctively characteristic of the man was
often simply the mode of expression pecuhar to his
people at their best." ^^
Israel Zangwill, like Emma Lazarus, undertook
to reclaim Heine for the Jewish people. He included
the poet among the Dreamers of the Ghetto
(1898). These were Jews of vision who had arisen
in the Ghetto from its establishment in the sixteenth
century to its dissolution in the nineteenth.
Heine, as one of these dreamers, took his place beside
Uriel Acosta, Sabbatai Zevi, Baruch Spinoza,
Salomon Maimon, Ferdinand Lassalle, and others.
The lengthy sketch on Heine was a sort of composite
conversation-photograph, entitled From a
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