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placed at the concatenation of various cultures, struggles with
him–
self and with the problems of his time, we find someone who, like
Uriel Acosta, breaks down under the burden, and someone who,
like Spinoza, makes of that burden the wings of his greatness. Heine
was in a sense the Uriel Acosta of a later age. His relation to Marx,
Spinoza's intellectual grandson, is comparable to Uriel Acosta's re–
lation to Spinoza.
Heine was torn between Christianity and Jewry, and between
France and Germany. In his native Rhineland there clashed the
influences of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic Empire
with those of the old Holy Roman Empire of the German Kaisers. He
grew up within the orbit of classical German philosophy and within
the orbit of French republicanism; and he saw Kant as a Robespierre
and Fichte as a Napoleon in the realm of the spirit; and so he de–
scribes them in one of the most profound and beautiful passages of
,(ur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland.
In
his
later years he came in contact with French and German socialism and
communism; and he met Marx with that apprehensive admiration
and sympathy with which Acosta had met Spinoza.
Marx likewise grew up in the Rhineland. His parents having
ceased to be Jews, he did not struggle with the Jewish heritage
as
Heine did. All the more intense was his opposition to the social and
spiritual backwardness of contemporary Germany. An exile most
of his life, his thought was shaped by German philosophy, French
socialism, and English political economy. In no other contemporary
mind did such diverse and great influences meet so fruitfully. Marx
rose above German philosophy, French socialism, and English
p0-
litical economy; he absorbed what was best in each of these trends
and transcended the limitations of each.
To come nearer to our time: Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and
Freud-every one of them was formed amid historic crosscurrents.
Rosa Luxemburg is a unique blend of the German, Polish and Rus–
sian characters and of the Jewish temperament; Trotsky was the
pupil of a Lutheran Russo-German Gymnasium in cosmopolitan
Odessa on the fringe of the Greek-Orthodox Empire of the Tsars;
and Freud's mind matured in Vienna in estrangement from Jewry
and in opposition to the Catholic clericalism of the Habsburg capital.
All of them had this in common: that the very conditions in which
