History of the Jews (62 page)

Heine, in fact, expected wealthy Jews to maintain him, even though he was not a rabbinical student but a secular intellectual. His father had been a hopeless failure at business; his own efforts, such as they were, did him little good. So he was perpetually dependent on his uncle, Solomon Heine, a Hamburg banker who became one of the richest men in Europe. Heine was always in need of money, however much he got. He even stooped to accept an annual secret pension of
4,800 francs from the Louis-Philippe government. But usually he pestered Uncle Solomon, none too politely: ‘The best thing about you’, he wrote to him in 1836, ‘is that you bear my name.’ The uncle was sceptical about Heine’s deserts, remarking: ‘If he had learned anything, he wouldn’t need to write books.’ He thought his nephew was a bit of a
schnorrer
, a professional Jewish beggar. But, faithful to the ancient tradition, he paid up. When he died in 1844 he left Heine a legacy, but on condition the poet did not attack him or his family. The sum was less than Heine had hoped for, so he engaged in a long-drawn-out row over the will with Solomon’s son.
⁷⁴

This was the personal background to Heine’s astonishing genius. In the 1820s he superseded Byron as Europe’s most widely acclaimed poet. The turning-point came with his
Buch der Lieder
(1827), which contained such famous lyrics as his ‘Lorelei’ and ‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’ (‘On Wings of Song’). The Germans came to recognize him as their greatest man of letters since Goethe. When he settled in Paris, he was hailed as a hero of European culture. His prose was as brilliant, and as popular, as his poetry. He produced scintillating travel books. He virtually established a new genre of French literature, the short essay or
feuilleton
. Much of his energy was wasted on furious quarrels and character-assassination, in which his self-hatred (or whatever it was) found an outlet, and which were so extravagant that they usually aroused sympathy for the victim. But his fame continued to spread. He contracted a venereal infection of the spine, which confined him to a sofa for his last decade. But his final poems were better than ever. Moreover, his lyrics were perfectly adapted to the new German art-song, now sweeping Europe and North America, so that all the leading composers, from Schubert and Schumann onwards, set him to music. There was no escaping Heine, then or ever since, especially for Germans, in whom he stirred irresistible responses. His works were used as German school textbooks even in his lifetime.

Many Germans found it hard to admit that this Jew had such a perfect German ear. They tried to convict him of ‘Jewish superficiality’, as opposed to true German profundity. The charge could not be made to stick. It was so manifestly untrue. It was as though a superfine talent had been building up in the ghetto over many secret generations, acquiring an ever more powerful genetic coding, and then had suddenly emerged to find the German language of the early nineteenth century its perfect instrument. The point had now been established: the Jew and the German had a special intellectual relationship. The German Jew was a new phenomenon of European culture. For German anti-Semites, this posed an almost unbearable
emotional problem, epitomized in Heine. They could not deny his genius; they found its expression in German intolerable. His ghostly presence, right at the centre of German literature, drove the Nazis to incoherent rage and childish vandalism. They suppressed all his books. But they could not erase his poems from the anthologies and were forced to reprint them with what every schoolboy knew was a lie: ‘By an Unknown Author’. They seized a statue of him, once owned by the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and used it for target-practice. In 1941, on Hitler’s personal orders, his grave in the Montmartre cemetery was destroyed. It made no difference. In the last forty years, Heine’s work has been more widely and furiously debated, especially by Germans, than that of any other figure in their literature.

Heine had been banned in his lifetime too, at the insistence of Metternich—not as a Jew, but as a subversive. Therein lay another paradox, and a typical Jewish paradox. From emancipation onwards, the Jews were blamed both for seeking to ingratiate themselves with established society, enter it and dominate it; and, at the same time, for trying to destroy it utterly. Both charges had an element of truth. The Heine family was a case in point. Next to the Rothschilds themselves, who collected titles from half-a-dozen kingdoms and empires, the Heines were the most upwardly mobile family in Europe. Heine’s brother Gustav was knighted and made Baron von Heine-Geldern. His brother Maximilian married into the Tsarist aristocracy and was styled von Heine. His sister’s son became a Baron von Embden. Her daughter married an Italian prince. One of Heine’s close relatives became a Princesse Murat, another married the reigning Prince of Monaco.
⁷⁵
But Heine himself was both the prototype and the archetype of a new figure in European literature: the Jewish radical man of letters, using his skill, reputation and popularity to undermine the intellectual self-confidence of established order.

The notion of Heine as a lifelong radical needs severe qualification. Privately, at least, he always distinguished between the grim political progressives, and literary ones like himself. He hated their puritanism. He wrote to one of them: ‘You demand simple dress, abstemious habits and unseasonable pleasures; we, on the other hand, demand nectar and ambrosia, purple cloaks, sumptuous aromas, voluptuousness and luxury, laughing nymph-dances, music and comedies.’
⁷⁶
Privately, again, his conservatism increased with age. He wrote to Gustav Kolb in 1841: ‘I have a great fear of the atrociousness of proletarian rule, and I confess to you that out of fear I have become a conservative.’ When his long final illness confined him to what he called ‘my mattress-grave’, he returned to Judaism of a kind. Indeed,
he insisted, quite untruthfully: ‘I have made no secret of my Judaism, to which I have not returned since I never left it’ (1850). His latest and greatest poems,
Romanzero
(1851) and
Vermischte Schriften
(1854), mark a return to religious themes, sometimes with a Judaic cast of thought. Like thousands of brilliant Jews before, and since, he came to associate the Hellenic spirit of intellectual adventure with health and strength, while age and pain turned him to the simplicities of faith. ‘I am no longer’, he wrote to a friend, ‘a zestful, well-nourished Hellene, smiling down on gloomy Nazarenes. I am now only a mortally ill Jew, an emaciated image of misery, an unhappy man.’ Or again: ‘Sickened by atheistic philosophy, I have returned to the humble faith of the ordinary man.’
⁷⁷

Nevertheless, the public persona of Heine was overwhelmingly radical, and to a great extent remained so. For generations of European intellectuals, his life and work was a poem to freedom. For Jews in particular, he presented the French progressive tradition as the true story of human advance, which all gifted young men and women should seek, each in their time, to push forward another league or two. He came close to a public declaration of faith when he wrote:

 

Freedom is the new religion, the religion of our time. If Christ is not the god of this new religion, he is nevertheless a high priest of it, and his name gleams beatifically into the hearts of the apostles. But the French are the chosen people of the new religion, their language records the first gospels and dogmas. Paris is the New Jerusalem, the Rhine is the Jordan that separates the consecrated land of freedom from the land of the Philistines.

 

For a time Heine even became, or fancied he did, a disciple of Saint-Simon. There was a streak of the hippy, the ‘flower-person’, in Heine: ‘the part of flowers and nightingales is closely allied to the revolution’, he wrote, quoting Saint-Simon’s dictum: ‘The future is ours.’ Heine never committed himself to a specific theory of revolutionary socialism. But in Paris he associated with many trying to devise one. They were often of Jewish origin.

One such was the young Karl Marx, who came to Paris in 1843. He had been editor of the radical Cologne newspaper
Rheinische Zeitung
, which the Jewish socialist Moses Hess (1812-75) had helped to found in 1843. It lasted only fifteen months before the Prussian government killed it, and Marx joined Hess in Parisian exile. But the two socialists had little in common. Hess was a true Jew, whose radicalism took the form of Jewish nationalism and eventually of Zionism. Marx, by contrast, had no Jewish education at all and never sought to acquire any. In Paris he and Heine became friends. They wrote poetry
together. Heine saved the life of Marx’s baby Jennie, when she had convulsions. A few letters between them survive, and there must have been more.
⁷⁸
Heine’s jibe about religion as a ‘spiritual opium’ was the source of Marx’s phrase ‘the opium of the people’. But the notion that Heine was the John the Baptist to Christ’s Marx, fashionable in German scholarship of the 1960s, is absurd. A huge temperamental gulf yawned between them. According to Arnold Ruge, Marx would say to Heine: ‘Give up those everlasting laments about love and show the lyric poets how it should be done—with the lash.’
⁷⁹
But it was precisely the lash Heine feared: ‘The [socialist] future’, he wrote, ‘smells of knouts, of blood, of godlessness and very many beatings’; ‘it is only with dread and horror that I think of the time when those dark iconoclasts will come to power’. He repudiated ‘my obdurate friend Marx’, one of the ‘godless self-gods’.

What the two men had most in common was their extraordinary capacity for hatred, expressed in venomous attacks not just on enemies but (perhaps especially) on friends and benefactors. This was part of the self-hatred they shared as apostate Jews. Marx had it to an even greater extent than Heine. He tried to shut Judaism out of his life. Whereas Heine was deeply disturbed by the 1840 Damascus atrocities, Marx deliberately prevented himself from showing the smallest concern for any of the injustice inflicted on Jews throughout his lifetime.
⁸⁰
Despite Marx’s ignorance of Judaism as such, there can be no doubt about his Jewishness. Like Heine and everyone else, his notion of progress was profoundly influenced by Hegel, but his sense of history as a positive and dynamic force in human society, governed by iron laws, an atheist’s Torah, is profoundly Jewish. His Communist millennium is deeply rooted in Jewish apocalyptic and messianism. His notion of rule was that of the cathedocrat. Control of the revolution would be in the hands of the elite intelligentsia, who had studied the texts, understood the laws of history. They would form what he called the ‘management’, the directorate. The proletariat, ‘the men without substance’, were merely the means, whose duty was to obey—like Ezra the Scribe, he saw them as ignorant of the law, the mere ‘people of the land’.

Marx’s methodology, too, was wholly rabbinical. All his conclusions were derived solely from books. He never set foot in a factory and rejected Engels’ offer to take him to one. Like the
gaon
of Vilna, he locked himself up with his texts and solved the mysteries of the universe in his study. As he put it, ‘I am a machine condemned to devour books.’
⁸¹
He called his work ‘scientific’ but it was no more scientific than theology. His temperament was religious, and he was
quite incapable of conducting objective, empirical research. He simply went through any likely material to furnish ‘proof’ of conclusions he had already reached in his head, and which were as dogmatic as any rabbi’s or kabbalist’s. His methods were well summarized by Karl Jaspers:

 

The style of Marx’s writings is not that of the investigator…he does not quote examples or adduce facts which run counter to his own theory but only those which clearly support or confirm that which he considers the ultimate truth. The whole approach is one of vindication, not investigation, but it is vindication of something proclaimed as the perfect truth with the conviction not of the scientist but of the believer.
⁸²

 

Stripped of its spurious documentation, Marx’s theory of how history, class and production operate, and will develop, is not essentially different from Lurianic kabbalah’s theory of the Messianic Age, especially as amended by Nathan of Gaza, to the point where it can accommodate any awkward facts whatever. In short, it is not a scientific theory at all, but a piece of clever Jewish superstition.

Finally, Marx was the eternal rabbinical student in his attitude to money. He expected it to be provided to finance his studies, first by his family, then by Engels, the merchant, as his endless bullying
schnorrer
-letters testify. But the studies, as with so many learned rabbis, were never finished. After the publication of volume one of
Capital
, he could never put the rest together, leaving his papers in total confusion, from which Engels assembled volumes two and three. So the great commentary on the Law of History ended in muddle and doubt. What happened when the Messiah came, when ‘the expropriators are expropriated’? Marx could not say; he did not know. But he prophesied the Messiah-revolution all the same: in 1849, in August 1850, in 1851, in 1852, ‘between November 1852 and February 1853’, in 1854, in 1857, in 1858, in 1859.
⁸³
His later work, like Nathan of Gaza’s, was to a great extent an explanation for the non-arrival.

Marx was not merely a Jewish thinker, he was also an anti-Jewish thinker. Therein lies the paradox, which has a tragically important bearing both on the history of Marxist development and on its consummation in the Soviet Union and its progeny. The roots of Marx’s anti-Semitism went deep. We have already seen the part anti-Jewish polemic played in the works of enlightenment writers like Voltaire. This tradition passed into two streams. One was the German ‘idealist’ stream, going through Goethe, Fichte, Hegel and Bauer, in each of whom the anti-Jewish elements became more pronounced.
The other was the French ‘socialist’ stream. This linked the Jews to the Industrial Revolution and the vast increase in commerce and materialism which marked the beginning of the nineteenth century. In a book published in 1808, François Fourier identified commerce as ‘the source of all evil’ and the Jews as ‘the incarnation of commerce’.
⁸⁴
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon went further, accusing the Jews of ‘having rendered the bourgeoisie, high and low, similar to them, all over Europe’. Jews were an ‘unsociable race, obstinate, infernal…the enemy of mankind. We should send this race back to Asia, or exterminate it.’
⁸⁵
Fourier’s follower, Alphonse Toussenel, edited the anti-Semitic journal
Phalange
and in 1845 produced the first full-scale attack on the Jews as a network of commercial conspirators against humanity,
Les Juifs: rois de l’époque: histoire de la féodalité financière
. This became a primary source-book for anti-Semitic literature, in many languages, for the next four decades.