Trudy Gold
The Unrequited Love Affair? Part 2

Trudy Gold - The Unrequited Love Affair Part 2

- All right, well, good afternoon, everyone for the second part of this session on really what happened to the followers and the children of Moses Mendelssohn. Now, let me point out from the beginning that you’re actually only talking, upon the turn of the century around 1800, there were only about 3,000 Jews in Berlin, about 2% of the population. And they’re very much, if you like, a rarefied group of people. And they do continue their separation from the bulk of Jewry. This is actually a quote from Leopold Zunz, who I’m going to be talking about later. “Jews who are really Jews,” and he’s talking about the Jews of Berlin, “Baptised Jews, enlightened ones who devoutly spent all of Yom Kippur in Jacobson’s Temple. Converts, returned to Judaism. Prosolites, Jews who are were anti-Semite and born Christians. Indifference is a younger generation who doesn’t know what it is, and some truly enlightened Jews, perhaps seven or eight.” So a very cynical response, but bear in mind we’re not talking about a large number of people, but it is in Berlin where the Enlightenment is very much at its peak. And the last of the ladies that I want to refer to, remember I talked about that strange phenomenon that is known as the Salon Jewesses. Let me talk to you now about Rahel Varnhagen, and bearing in mind that we’ve already looked at Henriette Herz and Dorothea Mendelssohn.

Can we see her picture if you don’t mind, Jude? She was very close to both Dorethea and to Henriette, who was also a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, and through them close to Henriette Herz. And she was probably her best friend through the whole of her life. And, she, later on, is going to host one of the most glittering salons of the 1800s, and she meets Goethe in Karlsbad and again in 1815. Now, I’m going to read to you the great quote from Amos Elon. And I told you that Amos Elon’s written one of the best books on German Jewry, “The Pity of It All.” “She hated her Jewish background, and was convinced it had poisoned her life. Her overriding desire was to free herself from the shackles of her birth. She never really succeeded. After her mother died, she converted. But her origins haunted her even on her deathbed. The idea that as a Jew, she was always required to be exceptional, and to go on proving it at all times was repugnant to her.” Now, let’s talk a little bit about her background. She was the daughter of a very wealthy Berlin jeweller and a banker, of course, one of those court Jews. She has these very close friendships with this very rarefied circle. And remember one of the problems: the children were not having a Jewish education. One of the problems we always have to look at, Moses Mendelssohn managed to walk the tightrope. And I find this period incredibly interesting for the simple reason that we still have the same dilemmas today. We have the same issues. Are we part of the society in which we lived? Are we part of Jewish society?

Why can’t we be part of both? And today, of course, you have the added complication of the State of Israel. How does that affect our identity? But if you go back to this period, remember it’s Moses Mendelssohn who said, “Be a Jew at home, and a man in society.” So this small group of elitists, what they’re trying to do is to walk the tightrope. But the problem: Moses Mendelssohn had a Talmudic education. He knew the prophets. He was an observant Jew. His children, and particularly the women, they didn’t have the same kind of education. And also, if you think of the glittering salons they hosted, they were absolutely exposed to the pinnacle of German society. They’re going to be close to, for example, the Humboldt brothers who are going to form the University of Berlin. Schlager, some of the top intellectuals in Germany are the people they’re mixing with. So, if you compare that with the world of the ghetto, and the bulk of Jewry in Germany is still living in ghettos, or the Jews of Poland in the Pale where rabbinic law reigned supreme, this is the tassel. If you go back to mediaeval times, I’m pretty sure Jews would’ve felt their culture was superior. But now, what has happened in the intervening years? The Renaissance, the invention of the printing press, the Enlightenment.

And now Jews are dreaming of becoming part of a world that is absolutely dazzling them. And what is that world going to do? Is it going to accept them? And they’re already beginning to feel the tension. So what happened to her? As I said, she hosted one of the most glittering salons in Berlin, and she had quite a lot of emotional disappointments. And in the end, she converted to marry a young Prussian nobleman, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense. He was a figure of the Enlightenment. He was a biographer, he was a diplomat. He was very close to the Humboldt brothers, who, of course, created the university. He’s very much a figure in Berlin society. And it was a marriage of love. And in 1815, because he’s a diplomat, they are in Vienna for the Congress of Vienna to settle the peace of Europe. And her salon, along with Henriette Herz’s, has become one of the most important salons of the time. And all the influential figures of the time come to see Rahel Varnhagen. And somebody said last time, “What happened in these salons?” I just want you to imagine: books were read aloud, philosophy was discussed, the piano would’ve been played, the latest currents in literature, in philosophy, Goethe would’ve been adored. This was the kind, and of course, Goethe who’d written Werther, which is Romanticism. I think that the tragedy was, and I do think it’s a tragedy, that Mendelssohn becomes part of German society under the Enlightenment. These characters are going to be swept up into the Romantic movement. She returns to Berlin in 1819 when her husband retired from his diplomatic post. And she writes to her brother-in-law in… Her brother in 1807, “Hail, hail to Fichte. He has drawn out the very best in me. I went to his lectures in Berlin.”

Now I’m going to come onto Fichte in a moment because in his address to the German nation, he is very, very complicated about the Jews. So one of the problems, this is a man who she is intellectually totally drawn to, and yet we’re going to find out that, in fact, he is anti-Jewish. And she’s also going to experience the Hep-Hep riots, which I’m also coming onto, which are anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish riots that break out throughout Germany. And this is what she writes about them: “I am boundlessly sad, and in a way that I have never been before, on account of the Jews. I know my country. Unfortunately, the hypocritical new love of the Christian religion from the Middle Ages with its art, poetry, atrocities, initiates the people and incites them to the only atrocity to which it’s still reminded of.” So what she’s saying, she’s a very smart woman. She understands that Romanticism, let me repeat this, because this is the real difference between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. “The hypocritical new love for the Middle Ages.” Think Wagner. “With its art, its poetry, its atrocities invokes the people to the only atrocity to which it is still reminded, the old sanctions, and, of course, assault on the Jews. It’s not a matter of religious hatred. They didn’t love their own religion.” It’s not religious. They’re going back to that time in history, they’re looking nostalgically back at that time when Germany was great under Frederick Barbarossa, or even further back if you want, they go back to the pagan tribes who defeated the might of Rome.

And this is going to become very much part of the Weltensharm of these romantics. And later on, it’s going to diffuse into something very, very dangerous because it’s going to diffuse into an extreme nationalism. Look, in 1815, there were German thinkers who dreamed the Germany would be united. In 1815 at the Congress of Berlin, of Vienna, I beg your pardon, what happens is the city states are cleaned up. There’d been 360 of them each with their own, if you think about it, each with their own coinage, one of the reasons that Germany had so many wonderful musicians, every court, every autocratic court had a Kapellmeister. But it wasn’t. What happens is there are 36 states, and eventually Prussia is going to emerge as the most important state, particularly under Otto von Bismarck, and next week I’m going to be talking about Bismarck’s Germany. Now, one of the other problems of the Congress of Vienna: I mentioned last time that Prussia actually emancipated the Jews officially in 1812. But more territory was awarded to Prussia in 1815. And in the new part, they’re not emancipated. And what you’re going to see happening between 1815 and 1871, rights are given, rights are taken away. The Congress of Vienna wanted to smash the ideas of the French Revolution and the ideas of Napoleon. The Jews are irrelevant actually. Napoleon had liberated the Jews from the ghettos. So you see, they are caught, the Jews are caught, the small percentage of the population, the upper echelons, the wealthier falling madly in love with Germany, and, yet, can they be part of the dream of the new Germany?

Now, the three women I’ve talked about, they were all very different in their personalities. All of them convert to Christianity. They did. They somehow believed. I think they converted because they believed in the romantic dream. But I’m going to, ironically, and this is what I find fascinating, the most interesting biography of Rahel Varnhagen is actually written by Hannah Arendt. And, in fact, I think Dennis interviewed, there’s a new book out on the feud between Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt. She’s a very complicated woman. And we will be talking about her later on in the course. It was Hannah Arendt’s first book, and she in many ways, she empathised with Rahel Varnhagen. And, of course, she is a student of Heidegger. She comes from a very assimilated Jewish family in Breslau much, much later. But she understood the agony. She was in love with German culture. She was also in love with Heidegger. And, of course, she begins the book in 1929. She had to flee from Germany in 1933. And the biography, it is the biography of a remarkably complicated, troubled and very passionate woman. But I would say Hannah Arendt is mirroring herself in Rahel Varnhagen. She is so important in German Romanticism. She was also at the centre of the Cult of Goethe. She’d met him twice. They were the highlights of her life. But she also understood the problem of, I think more than Henriette Herz, more than Dorothea Mendelssohn.

She understood the problem of being born a Jew and being born a woman. And she, I’m going to read to you a letter she wrote. Can we go onto the next slide? I think I paraphrased it, didn’t I, Judy? Yes. “I imagine that I was thrust into this world when some supermundane being plunged these words into my heart with a dagger. Yes, have sensibility, see the world as only a few see it, be great, noble. But I had one thing more, be a Jewess! And now my whole life is a slow bleeding to death. I can ascribe every evil, every misfortune, every vexation that has befallen me because of it.” But she also says, and I’m reading it to you now, “What a history! Here I am, a fugitive from Egypt and Palestine who has found your help. Love, attention, divine guidance has led me to you dear, August.” Her husband. “And you to me. With sublime rapture, I’m contemplating my origins, and this faithful nexus between the oldest memories of mankind and the latest developments, linking poles far apart in time and space.” And then he goes on to say, “I have thought of Jesus and cried over his passion. I have felt for the first time in my life that he is my brother. And Mary, how much she must have suffered. She witnessed the pain of her beloved son, and did not succumb, but kept standing at the cross. I could not have been able to do that. I wouldn’t have been strong enough. May God forgive me. I confess how weak I am.” So she plunges headlong into Christianity, and she sees the fact that she’s Jewish as the blight on her life.

And, ironically, as I said to you, what I find absolutely fascinating is it is her biography that is written by Hannah Arendt, and it was Hannah Arendt who, of course… Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. Her professor joined the Nazi Party. He was the rector of the university. She was the one who rehabilitated him. So, again, this terrible soul agony. And the tragedy was she didn’t really understand the greatness of the Jews. Towards the end of his life, Heine, who I really am going to get on today, he did say, “In the end, I understand that the Greeks were beautiful, but the Jews were proud men.” Anyway, shall we go on? Now, this is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He’s a very, very important figure. And, of course, he’s the one that Rahel Varnhagen went to see his lectures, and he’s one of the founders of the Humboldt University. Now, he came from a peasant stock. He was very, very bright. He came to the attention of a local landowner who paid for his education. He had a very, very strong grounding in classics, and then went to a brilliant secondary school. His later pupils were were both Schlager and Nietzsche. Nietzsche studied with Fichte. 1780, he studied theology at Jena, which was the centre, of course, of Romanticism. Later on, transferred to Leipzig, his patron actually died before he completed his study. And he had to become a tutor to complete his studies, and he became part of a Freemasons lodge, which Goethe was associated with. So he goes right into the heart of German intellectual society. He begins to study Kant.

He wrote the critique of all revelations about Kant. Kant praised him, and said, “He’s the only man who really understands me.” His fame grows. He becomes a professor at the University of Jena. He’s dismissed for his views. In 1800, he moves to Berlin where he’s absolutely at the centre of intellectual life, and, of course, goes to all the salons. And he then writes, during the time, after the defeat of the Germans at Jena, he actually writes the address to the German nation. What he does is he is calling for German nationalism. He is the first really, the Germans, the Prussians have been defeated at Jena. He is calling, and he says this, he looks for the scapegoat. “A powerfully hostilely despised nation is infiltrating almost every country in Europe. This nation is in a state of perpetual war with all these countries, severely affecting their citizenry. I’m referring to the Jewish nation, Das Judentum. I believe and hope to demonstrate subsequently that the Jewish nation is so dreadful, not because it is isolated and closely knit, but rather because it is founded on the hatred of mankind.

It is a people whose most humble member elevates his ancestors higher than we exalt our entire history. Jewry sees its ancestor as a patriarch, older than itself, et cetera, et cetera.” However, he’s going to be against, he was very much against the Jews being granted citizenship in old Prussia in 1812. But he did say they must have human rights. They are, in fact, human. And he says, “For they are human, and their malevolence does not justify our becoming like them.” But the point I’m making, this man that Rahel Varnhagen, who was at the centre of German intellectual life, is now posing a new kind of thought. So, the followers with the defeat of the Prussians at Jena, the followers of the king, they flee east. And on Sunday, December 1807, Johann Fichte stood before an audience in the Amphitheatre of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and began the first of 14 lectures, addressed to the German nation. I’ve read you one tiny extract. Believed it was his duty to mobilise a defeated nation. It is the founding document of German nationalism. What he wanted to do, there’s 14 lectures to instil a belief in the native superiority of its culture. And he is the one who really does begin to shape German identity. And, of course, when the Humboldt University is founded in 1810, he becomes a professor. He becomes rector in 1811. Another professor was Schleiermacher. He was the man who was responsible for the conversion of Henriette Herz.

So you see what’s happening, at the centre of intellectual life now, German Romanticism is taking a different form. It’s now talking about German nationalism. And it’s not going to come to reality until 1871 when Bismarck is finally going to unify Germany as a nation through three wars: war with Denmark, war with Austria, and war with France. The university was very, very interesting because on one level the Humboldt brothers saw themselves as great figures of the Enlightenment, but the university was anchored in very traditional subjects: science, law, philosophy, theology, history, medicine. And also they did begin later on the new disciplines: chemistry and natural sciences. One of the students, Falba, that is what he writes: “There’s no question here of drinking, duelling, and pleasant communal outings. In no other university can one find such a passion for work, such an inclination for the scientists, such a calm and still silence.” So on one level, Fichte creates ethical idealism of the German nation. On the other hand, he’s got a reverent attitude towards the Bible. He rejects Judaism, and he did also write, “They are human.” He keeps on saying this: “Their malevolence doesn’t justify our becoming like them.” I am repeating that. However, he sets a path that I’m going to do in much more detail when I do the history of German anti-Semitism, because this is all so complicated, and we are spending time on Germany, what I’ve decided to do, my next two sessions are going to be on Bismarck and the Jews of Bismarck’s Germany.

And then I’m going to look at the background to German anti-Semitism. But please don’t forget, we’re also going to see the emancipation of the Jews. And alongside this thread, there’s also the beginnings of an incredible Jewish success story. The Jews are going to scale the heights in every trade, profession, the arts, and they are going to go to the forefront. By 1900, 50% of the doctors and 50% of the lawyers in Berlin are Jewish. So it’s a complicated story. And then in 1819, the Hep-Hep riots break out. Now the riots occurred, the Hep-Hep. Now was it the battle cry of the crusaders? It’s the anti-Jewish riots of 1819. What had happened was there had been a harvest failure. The riots begin in August 1819 in Wurzburg, and what really causes the riots was the disappointment of German nationalism, the failure of the harvest, the fact that many people didn’t know their place in the world, and let’s find a scapegoat. The problem was they begin in Wurzburg, and it was only after several days that the troops were called in, the Jewish population, the small population of Wurzburg, they had to flee the city. They camped in tents, several were killed, riots. It’s like the old pogroms of the Middle Ages.

They spread like wildfire through Bavaria, Bamberg, Bayreuth, Darmstadt, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Frankfurt, Koblenz, Cologne, all the cities along the Rhine. If you think about those cities that had destroyed their Jewish population in 1095 again. And, in fact, a German researcher has looked at the cities that were most anti-Jewish in Hitler’s time, and he’s made some sort of parallels with this. Sometimes, in towns the police actually stand by and let it happen. However, in Heidelberg, two professors and the students prevented the pogrom. In Karlsruhe, Ludvig, who was the Grand Duke of Baden, demonstrated his solidarity with the Jews by taking up residence in the home of a prominent Jew. The Jewish magazine didn’t mention the riots at all. And this is again what Rahel Varnhagen: “I’m infinitely sad on account of the Jews in a way I have never experienced before. Why should this massive people be driven out of their homes? They want to keep them only to despise and torture them further. I know my country. The Germans were bold with indignation, and why? Because they are the most civilised, peace-loving, and obedient people, their newfound hypocritical love for Christianity, may God forgive my sin, and the Middle Ages with its poetry, art, and atrocities incites the people to commit the only atrocity they still can: attacking the Jews.”

Now the furor, it takes quite a few days for it all to calm down. And also, remember what’s happening in some of the German states. Again, I’m quoting Amos Elon: “In some places, attempts were made to return Jews to their old mediaeval status. As of 1816, only 12 Jewish couples allowed to marry in Frankfurt.” Remember when I was talking about the Rothschild family. “The 400,000 guild and the city Jews had paid for emancipation in 1811 was returned. In the Rhineland, newly reverted to Prussia, Jews lost citizenship given by the French. Those few appointed to public office were dismissed.” So that also tells you, for example, Marx’s family, Karl Marx’s father, he was the grandson of rabbis on both sides, but his father’s brother was a rabbi. But he’d become a lawyer. He had a choice: become a Christian, or go back to the ghetto. He chose to become a Christian. And, of course, later on he then converted his son when Karl Marx was eight years old. Ironically, his enemies always saw him as a Jew, though he himself hated Judaism. So let’s go on, and have a depiction of the Hep Hep riots. I’m going to read you now from Greiz, Heinrich Greiz, the first important Jewish historian who I’m going to mention at the end of this session. This is how he describes it: “The zenith of Talmudic Jew hatred was reached by the inflammatory pamphlet, "The Mirror of the Jews” by Hartvig Kuntz.“

I’ll come onto that later. "Although, I, for my part, hold that the killing of Jews is neither a sin nor a crime, but only a police offence, I would nevertheless never counsel that they be condemned and punished, unheard as seems to be fashioned now.” And this is what this man, Hartvi Hunt says: “Let the children of Israel be sold to the English who could employ them in their Indian plantations instead of the Blacks, that they may not increase. The men should be emasculated and their wives and daughters lodged in houses of shame. The best plan would be to purge the land entirely of this vermin, either by exterminating them or driving them from the country.” Greitz said that the Hep Hep riots of Hunt were the poison of fruits of the seed, which Fichte and Schleiermacher had sown.“ So can we really understand what it was all about? Was it about that the Jews had formally asked for emancipation at the Congress of Vienna, which most German academics were against? Was it that Jews were portrayed as upstarts? Was it that anti-Jewish pamphlets abounded because of the terrible defeat and the disappointed nationalism? Also, Jewish economic competition. Hep Hep was the rallying cry. It’s controversial. Some people think it’s the actual cry of the German peasant shepherds, "Hep Hep” as they’d gather up their sheep. Some others, “Hierosolyma est perdita”, Jerusalem is lost. So next time you hear hip hip hooray, maybe you won’t stick with it anymore.

But there was another response. And a few weeks after the riots, a group of young Jews met together. Can we see the first one? The first one is a man called Edward Gans. Now Edward Gans, he was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin. He’d studied at Berlin University, then at Gossinger and at Heidelberg. He attended Hegel’s lectures and was very influenced. He took his doctorate. He lectured at Berlin University. In 1825, though, he’s going to convert. He becomes a professor extraordinary, a professor at the University of Berlin in law. He was very much, though, opposed to the nationalism of the romantic movement. Now, I’ve told you that he finally converts. But I want you to go back to a time before that. Can we come to the next one? ‘Cause a group of young men come together, Moses Moser. He was a partner in the firm of Moses Friedlaender, the son of David, so he’s a banker. Very wealthy, he attended philosophical lectures at Berlin University. And there he met other Jewish intellectuals. And together, he becomes a very close friend of Heinrich Heine who called him the living appendix to Nathan the Wise. And they, with another man, Leopold Zunz, Let’s see Leopold Zunz, the next slide, please, Judy.

Leopold Zunz, they come together. He came from a far more religious background. He was the son of a Talmudic scholar. His wife was the daughter of a cantor. He’d studied Torah, and Talmud, and grammar. He went to the Jewish Free School, which had been created in Wolfbuttel in Lower Saxony. They brought in a reforming educator. So he was interesting. He had a very strong Jewish education, but he also had a strong secular education. Now, what happens is, this group of young people come together, they come together with Heinrich Heine, and what they do is they create an organisation, the Wissenschaft, where they are going to try and improve the lot of Jews in Germany. They are going to try and raise up the Jews in Germany. Another member of the group was Moses Bier, who is the brother, brother of Maya Bier. Now, this is what they’re going to try and do. It’s Zunz who presents what he calls the Jud Nobel, the failings or flaws in the Jews. It’s a response to the Hep Hep riots. How can we improve ourselves so that the Germans will love us? Main purpose is to make the Jews emerging from the ghetto more acceptable to their neighbours by eliminating external differences. And Heinrich Heine is going to become the secretary. Amos Elon: “As an exercise in Jewish self-criticism, he’d anticipated the Zionists by almost a century.”

Because don’t forget, the Zionists themselves also thought that the Jews had become downgraded in the diaspora. But their kind of downgraded was different. They said we’d become much too passive. We don’t take events into our own hands. Now this is what they come up with. And I want you to listen to this very, very carefully. “Outline of improvements needed: religious concepts, especially God’s love and exclusive favouring of the Jews. It leads to conceit. We are too superstitious. We’re intolerant of other viewpoints. Our neglect of decent, manual labour in favour of aesthetic idleness or overly literal observance of ceremonies.” You see, this is taking on board the line of the Gentiles. The Zionists did the same. The Jews had never been allowed to own land. If you think back to when they were free people in Judea, if they were ever free of the Romans, but the point is, they fulfilled every branch of society. The Christian world had determined Jewish occupation. And you see how it’s now being turned on them. “We are too involved in huckstering. We are avaricious, we are greedy. We have a contempt for science. It all leads to the persistent delusion contrary to the law that is permissible to cheat non-Jews. We are a cult. Our synagogue services, our forms of prayer. The obsolete, harmful, senseless customs. Over emphasis on ceremonial law. The inner constitution of the communities.” And of course they’re talking about the Jews of Eastern Europe. “The tyrannical rabbis in their power. The fanaticism of the rabbis. Alms wasted on idlers. We give too much to the, we allow people to study in the yeshiva all their lives.

And we don’t expect them to do any work.” The bad schools of the religious, the schools are very, very bad. They’re not teaching anything that is going to be useful. They’re not saying, “Don’t teach parts of Judaism,” but they’re already playing. So this is about self-improvement. Then they talk about education. Remember, Heine is the secretary. “Effeminate. We have become far too effeminate as a people. Our children therefore show cowardice. We don’t give our children good examples. There’s ignorance, there’s immorality. Our Talmudic students are uncouth. They have bad manners. A disparity between the teaching of the law and its observance in the home. Faulty and useless instruction in school. No instruction in languages and science, only Talmud. No appreciation of learning evoked amongst the students. Teachers are very badly paid and they’re substandard. The neglect of the mother tongue. You are not taught German. Yiddish, neglect and discrimination against women.” Don’t forget there are women beginning to find their place in the romantic movement. “What is the perception of Jews in Christian society?” Again, it’s all listed. “Only traders. Mostly petty commerce or peddling. No artisans. Shunning physical labour, no farming. Neglect of the self, no physical activity. Little desire to improve our situation. No class distinction, superficial cleverness, hence misinformation. Lack of thorough concentrated study. Scant interest in the Enlightenment. Apostasy, withdrawing form or forcing themselves on Christians. Uncouth language. Social intercourse very, very poor.

Our manners are disgusting.” After the society, and this is their programme. They’re going to improve everything. After the society’s established, they set up a research institute and a library, and set up a free school in Berlin. In fact, one of the patrons was Mordecai Manuel Noah, who, of course, was the American Jewish adventurer who had become mayor of New York. And he’s sending money. And they did publish a short-lived magazine. So this is what they’re saying. And I think it’s a very downgrade, well, it’s obviously a very downgraded picture of the Jews. Now, ironically, later on, Zunz is going to become far more involved in the Jewish world, and he’s going to become a great, great scholar. And he did try to walk both worlds. But you’re going to see how out of all of this does come reform and liberal Judaism, which Jeremy Rosen is going to be talking about in a couple of weeks. But this is a very, very, I think it’s a very downgraded document. And Heine not only becomes the secretary, he becomes a member and teacher. He debates with them all. What they’re trying to do is to establish what it means to be a Jew in post-enlightened Europe. In fact, when Ganz converted, Heine called him an apostate. Don’t forget, Heine himself converts. He says, “Baptism is the passport to European civilization.” Now let’s come on to Heinrich Heine. Now David is going to be talking about him on Saturday. So I’m not going to be dealing with his poetry. I’m really going to be dealing a little with Heine as a Jew. And his total ambiguity towards it. Now he’d been born in Dusseldorf in 1789, and he dies in Paris in 1856. His father was a textile merchant.

His mother was the daughter of a physician. He’s the eldest of four children. And one brother, Gustav later became Baron Heine and became the publisher of a Viennese newspaper. And another cousin became a physician in St. Petersburg. He is a third cousin of Karl Marks, and they were quite close in Paris. Under the French occupation at the time of his birth, he was very much in favour of the revolution. And, of course, he as a young boy, he very much admired the code Napoleon, trial by jury. He was a very, very clever boy. He admired Napoleon as the promoter of revolutionary ideas. His father was a traditional Jew who had given, but his wife was a creature of the Enlightenment, and he’d very much given away to it. As a young child, he went to a Jewish school, but then his mother sent to him to a Catholic lycee, so he only had a very rudimentary knowledge of Judaism and Hebrew. But he did know very, very good French. He also acquired a huge love for the folklore of Germany. He went to business school in Dusseldorf where he learned to read English, the commercial language, the most successful member of the family was his Uncle Salomon Heine, who was a merchant and a banker. He was the Rothschild of Hamburg. And by the time of his death in 1844, he was worth $100 million. And he’s often going to be bailing Heine out. Heine moved to stay with his uncle, became an apprentice, but he had very little aptitude for business. He also had a great passion for Salomon’s daughter Amelie. And it was not reciprocated.

He then transferred his affections to her sister, but that was also unsuccessful. He’s got no talent for business so then it’s decided he should study law. So he went to the University of Bonn where liberal students were at war with the Prussian authorities. And that’s where Heine becomes a radicalised character, a socialist involved in politics. He was much more interested in studying literature than law. Although he knows he’s a Jew, he doesn’t know much of his Jewish education. And William Schleiger was engaged as a lecturer. And we know that Heine went to some of his lectures and was fascinated by German Romanticism. Later on, he would mock him. Heine, as he develops, becomes very much the doubly alienated. This time he wrote a book called “Almansor”. “Almansor” is the story of the burning of the Quran at the time of the Inquisition of the Moriscos. And in it, he quoted that incredible line, which is quoted by so many people, including me, very, very often, “Any society that burns books will one day burn people.” And it’s at this stage that he decides he’s going to be a writer. Amelie has become engaged. So his Uncle Salomon pays for him to send him to Berlin. And this is when he falls in love with Berlin. It’s incredibly cosmopolitan.

And, of course, he becomes part of the cultural life of Berlin. He goes to all the salons, he mocks everybody. Henriette Herz who has converted. He says she wears a cross around her nose, around her neck, the length of her nose. He developed a friendship with Varnhagen and also with Rahel Varnhagen. He’s right at the centre of intellectual life. And it’s then he begins to, he writes much of his verses there, and they are praised by the intellectuals. It’s at this stage that he becomes involved with the Wissenschaft, and what he’s trying to do is to balance his Jewishness and his modernity. And he has a close friendship with Ganz, and Moses Moser, and Zunz. And as a result, he begins to investigate Jewish history, particularly the Golden Age of Spain. In 1824, he writes the “Rabbi von Bacherach”, but he never completes it. He leaves Berlin and joins his family, and the poetry part of the homecoming. He’s gradually becoming one of Germany’s most important poets. He decides to convert. He leaves the society, even though he’s mocked Ganz, because he says, “Conversion is the passport to European civilization.” He had wanted an academic career, and to do that, he needed to convert to Christianity. But it never happened and he, but then he becomes more and more involved with liberals. He gets involved in, sort of, underground politics. And finally, he writes, and writes, and writes. He satirises religious bigotry, political reaction. And, in fact, in the end, he’s arrested. And when he’s arrested, he experiences anti-Jewish tirades from his opponents.

He’s becoming more and more radical. And so he decides, he tries again for a chair at Munich. He fails. So he goes to Paris. He settles in Paris after the Liberal Revolution of 1830. And for years after he left, his works are banned in Germany. And he becomes the leader of Young Deutschland in Germany. The French hailed him as a genius, and he becomes very much at the centre of German cultural tradition, and bringing together French and German cultural tradition. He’s an important journalist. The “Allgemeine Zeitung”. His circle included Balzac, LaSalle, who I’m going to be talking about next week. He was a person of Jewish birth who created German communism. George Sand, who of course later on lived with Chopin. And his third cousin, Karl Marx, Berlioz. But he was always homesick for Germany. Now it’s absolutely fascinating. Germany was his stepmother. He loved it. He felt alienated from Germany. He married a shop girl called Mathilde. And in the end he was confined to what he called his mattress grave. Was it syphilis? We don’t know. But from his mattress grave, he went on writing, and writing, and writing. He wrote German lyric poetry. Let me give you an idea of how powerful his works are. Six of his Lieder were set to music by Schubert, seven by Mendelssohn, seven by Liszt, six by Brahms, six by Strauss. In Paris, he writes the story of Yehuda Ha-Levi, the story of the poet, scholar, and philosopher, who was educated in traditional Jewish scholarship, Greek, and philosophy. So towards the end of his life, he’s beginning to think you can marry up being a Jew and a man of the modern life.

He also becomes… What he admires of Yehuda Ha-Levi was that he was a man of the outside world, but he also participated. Look, he’s the court physician, and he’s a foreign minister. But he also writes poetry in Arabic and in Hebrew. He wrote of the pleasures of life, he writes of the religious life. And during his last years, he spent his final years in Israel, where he believed it was the only place where a Jew could be both. I’m talking about here, Yehuda Ha-Levi. But he becomes very, very important to Heine. In his work “Deutschland”, he mocks Moses Mendelssohn, whose grandson had adventured so far into Christianity that he calls him the Kapellmeister. This is Heine in a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle: “I cannot believe this man has put his talents to the service of that religion, and squandered his gifts on the church.” Marx wanted to convert his cousin to his political outlook. And Marx had a very problematic relationship with his Jewishness. And he was the man who said, “Money is the jealous God of Israel.” He adored Heine. He adored being part of his family. He adored being part of his circle. But Heine never took the final step into his politics. But the point about Marx where the two of them met, he knew Shakespeare by heart, and through him Heine developed a great love of Shakespeare. And when Marx left Paris, he said the saddest thing is parting with Heine. Later on, Gustav Mahler, who later also converted, he looked at all these characters. This is what he said: “A Jew is like a swimmer with a short arm. He has to swim twice as hard to reach the shores.”

But can we move on please, Judy? Because this is something that… This is Heine’s quote on why he became a Christian. “From the nature of my thinking, you can deduce that baptism is a matter of indifference to me. For me perhaps its significance will be that I can better devote myself to championing the rights of my unfortunate brethren. The baptismal certificate is the ticket of admission to European culture.” It’s very famous, that line. “My becoming a Christian is the fault of those Saxons who suddenly changed sides. Or of Napoleon who really didn’t have to go to Russia, or of his teacher of geography who did not tell him that Moscow winters were very cold.” Let me just read to you a poem he wrote in 1831. His uncle had endowed a hospital for poor Jews in Berlin. “A hospital for sick and needy Jews, poor humans who are triply miserable with three great sicknesses, with poverty, pain, and Jewishness. The worst of these inflictions is the last. A thousand-year family disease dragged from the hollow of the Nile, the unhealthy beliefs of Ancient Egypt.” He was so ambiguous about it all. Now, can we look though at something else he wrote, which I think is absolutely extraordinary? He wrote it in 1834, 99 years before Adolph Hitler. Remember this is what he wrote in his work, “The History of Religion and Philosophy of Germany.” He got Germany. He is the double bind. The double alienated. “Christianity”, and I want you to listen very, very carefully, “and that is its greatest merit, has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it.

Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, the insane, berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flames. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of 1,000 years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the gothic cathedrals.” You see, he’s talking about a pagan Germany. He’s talking about the love of the old gods. “Do not smile at my advice, the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans,” we’ve talked about Kants, we’ve talked about Ficht, “and philosophers of nature.” The romantics. “Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning proceeds thunder.

German thunder is of a true Germanic character. It is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet it will come, and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world’s history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar, the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany, which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.” Wow. Wow, wow, wow. The prophet of the future. Anyone who burns books will one day burn people. He also, he was so ambiguous about Germany. He dreamed of Germany. He wrote songs that were poems that were set to music by Germany’s greatest musicians. You know, the Nazis could never ban him. They couldn’t ban him because it was Schubert. It was Liszt. So what they did, they wrote “anon”. And as I said, towards the end of his life, he was asked about his Jewishness as he was dying on his mattress grave. He was confined to his bed for the last nine years of his life. And he said, let me repeat it. “I now know that the Greeks were beautiful, but the Jews were real men.” Heinrich Heine. As I said, Professor Pima is going to be talking about his poetry. He is an extraordinary individual. I think we’d better stop there because we have another lecture. Let’s just have a look at the questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: “Were the salons by invitation only, or could anyone show up?”

A: That’s an interesting question. I think you would have to have an invitation. You couldn’t just… But there were not that many great intellectuals in Berlin. Remember, there are only 3,000 Jews, still have a limit on the number of Jewish families allowed to live there. Not after 1812.

Yes, Myrna, as I said, it can be two things. It can be Hierosolyma est perdita, but some people believe it was the shepherds’ cry. I think we probably should have a lecture on Gluckel of Hamelin. It won’t be me. I think it would be my friend Sandra Myers. I dunno if she’s interested, if she’s listening at the moment. But you’re right, it’s an important thing.

Yes, Jules, some people believe it’s Hierosolyma est perdita, others think that that’s just a story. I don’t think you’ll find that on the internet. I’m afraid you’re going to have to go to the textbooks for that, Margaret.

Q: “How did people live in their 90s when there were no…”

A: Look, I think some people were just incredibly strong. Look, it was unusual to live as long as that.

Q: This is an interesting question from David Sefton. “Do you think there’s a link between Zunz’s group and the Yishuvs’ pushing of Hebrew at the expense of Yiddish?”

A: It’s a very good question, David. I don’t want to give you an off-the-cuff answer. I think the main reason they chose Hebrew is they saw, and remember the majority of the leadership of the Yishuv were Eastern European. They saw Yiddish as the language of the diaspora. They saw Yiddish as downgraded, whereas they spoke Hebrew when they were proud Jews in their own land. That was the idea. In fact, they spoke Aramaic. But that’s another story. So I think it’s more that. Though, talking of German. I know that when they established the university in Heifer, the Teknion, there was a great debate. They believed, I think it was in 1912, they thought that German should be the language because that was the language of science.

"The German Jew feels to be superior individually. He considered himself German first and Jewish next. Therefore, many German Jews converted.” Yes, they fell in love with German culture. No question of it. Look, you can’t say that it’s, we cannot predict the future. And, frankly, if you were living in Berlin in say, 1900, the Hep Hep riots were horrific, but that would have been 80 years before, there’d been no outbreaks. After 1871, all Jews were emancipated in Germany, and it was the most incredible success story. I mean, if you want to think about how German and Austrian Jews enriched American, and British, and Canadian culture, or the culture of the Yishuv. Look, the Yishuv, it was the German immigrants to Palestine that made the Yishuv into a, sort of, cosmopolitan European city like Tel Aviv, they opened up coffee houses. Think about the Palestine Orchestra. Think about the theatres. You know, they were an incredible bunch of people. You know, Heine, in one of his periods of ambiguity, he did say those two ethical nations, the Jews then the Germans will create a new Jerusalem. Sometimes he hated Germany, sometimes he loved Germany. Poor old Germany, he said. He couldn’t decide, he was Germany’s stepchild. He hated what was coming up, what was coming out of Romanticism. He believed in social justice. He believed in freedom. The burning of the books, remember. He said that 100 years before Hitler burned the books.

“Any society that burns books will one day burn people.” He was a prophet. Very, very unusual man. When I was in Paris a couple of weeks ago with Patrick, we actually went to Heine’s grave. And I put a stone on it. It’s not in the Jewish section, but it’s near the Jewish section, which I find rather interesting. Where does he fit? Does he fit anywhere? Well, see what Professor Piemer’s got to say, and maybe we can come up with some sort of…

“The Greeks were beautiful, but the Jews were proud men.” “Sounds like the origins of the self-hating Jews.” Um, Marx were certainly a self-hating Jew. I’m going to go that far. Look, they fall in love with a society that turns against them. Fichte, they went to his lectures. How do you deal in a situation like that? It’s complicated.

“Heine was a realist. He didn’t trust the world.” I don’t know, I don’t think he liked wealthy Jews either. He made a lot of fun of his Uncle Salomon. Although Uncle Salomon kept him. He was a cynical, acid, clever man. I mean, I think David’s going to talk about some of his aphorisms. He’s absolutely extraordinary. He had a brain like a razor, and remember, he’s doubly outsider. He’s a Jew alienated from Judaism. He converts, but he’s never a Christian. He is a German who goes to live in France.

Q: Where does Heinrich Heine belong?

A: To me, he belongs to the world. He belongs to the world of ideas. I think one of the greatest. He certainly, if I had to make a list of my heroes, Heine would certainly be there along with some other very strange characters.

Q: “Could you please explain in detail how a Jew converted?”

A: You know, it’s not very difficult to, it’s much harder to become a Jew than to become a Christian. You basically have to persuade the Lutheran or the Catholic that you’re sincere and you’re baptised. That’s it. And in Prussia, they would’ve been Lutheran, mainly. Mendelssohn actually became a Calvinist because he went to the Calvinist Church, I believe. In the south, you would’ve converted to Catholicism. It depended where the… And I think many of the romantics converted to Catholicism because that was smells and bells. But you don’t have to do a two-year course of study, Christine. Judaism makes it difficult because Judaism believes there are many paths to the Almighty, and provided you obey the Noahhide Commandments, you shouldn’t convert people. They should just obey those seven commandments in Noah. On the contrary, Christianity believes you can only be saved through baptism. That’s why the missionary movement was so important.

Thank you all, and I will see you again next Tuesday. God bless everyone.