THE WANDERING JEW
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they lived and worked did not allow them to reconcile themselves
to ideas which were nationally or religiously limited and induced
them to strive for a universal
Weltanschauung.
II
Spinoza's ethics were no longer the Jewish ethics, but the ethics
of man at large--just as his God was no longer the Jewish God: his
God, merged with nature, shed his separate and distinctive divine
identity. Yet, in a way, Spinoza's God and ethics were still Jewish,
only his was the Jewish monotheism carried to its logical con–
clusion and the Jewish universal God thought out to the end; and
once he had been thought out to the end, he ceased to be Jewish.
Heine wrestled with Jewry all his life; his attitude towards it
was characteristically ambivalent, full of love-hate or hate-love. He
was in this respect inferior to Spinoza who, excommunicated by the
Jews, did not become a Christian. Heine did not have Spinoza's
strength of mind and character; and he lived in a society which
even in the first decades of the nineteenth century was still more
backward than Dutch society had been in the seventeenth. At first
he pinned his hopes on that pseudo-emancipation of Jews, the ideal
of which Moses Mendelsohn had expressed in the words: "Be a Jew
inside your home and a man outside." The timidity of that German–
Jewish ideal was of a piece with the paltry Liberalism of the gentile
German bourgeoisie: the German Liberal was a "free man" inside
his
home, and an
allertreuester Untertane
outside. This could not
satisfy Heine for long. He abandoned Jewry and surrendered to
Christianity in order to obtain an "entry ticket to European culture."
At heart he was never reconciled to the abandonment and the con–
version. His rejection of Jewish orthodoxy runs through the whole of
his work. His Don Isaac says to the Rabbi von Bacherach: "I could
not be one of you. I like your cooking much better than I like your
religion. No, I could not be one of you; and I suspect that even at
the best of times, under the rule of your King David, in the best of
your times, I would have run away from you and gone to the temples
of Assyria and Babylon which were full of the love and the joy of
life." Yet, it was a fiery and resentful Jew who had, in
An E,dom,
«gewaltig beschworen den tausendjaehrigen Schmerz."
