Part 2

On a first reading, these last two lines strike one as oddly out of place in a love poem. But as we look again, they seem to suggest, that in a nature so full and wholesome as Halevi’s, love did not lead to a selfish forgetfulness, nor marriage mean a joy which could hold by its side no care for others. Rather to prove that love at its best does not narrow the sympathies, but makes them widen and broaden out to enfold the less fortunate under its happy, brooding wings. And though at the crowning moment of his life Halevi could spare a tender thought for his ‘tribe,’ with very little right could the foolish, favourite epithet of ‘tribalism’ be flung at him, and with even less of justice at his race. In truth, they were ‘patriots’ in the sorriest, sincerest sense--this dispossessed people, who owned not an inch of the lands wherein they wandered, from the east unto the west. It is prejudice or ignorance maybe, but certainly it is not history, which sees the Jews as any but the faithfullest of citizens to their adopted States; faithful, indeed, often to the extent of forgetting, save in set and prayerful phrases, the lost land of their fathers. Here is a typical national song of the twelfth century, in which no faintest echo of regret or of longing for other glories, other shrines, can be discerned:--

‘I found that words could ne’er express The half of all its loveliness; From place to place I wander’d wide, With amorous sight unsatisfied, Till last I reach’d all cities’ queen, Tolaitola[4] the fairest seen.

* * * * *

Her palaces that show so bright In splendour, shamed the starry height, Whilst temples in their glorious sheen Rivall’d the glories that had been; With earnest reverent spirit there, The pious soul breathes forth its prayer.’

The ‘earnest reverent spirit’ may be a little out of drawing now, but that ‘fairest city seen’ of the Spanish poet,[5] might well stand for the London or Paris of to-day in the well-satisfied, cosmopolitan affections of an ordinary Englishman or Frenchman of the Jewish faith. And which of us may blame this adaptability, this comfortable inconstancy of content? Widows and widowers remarry, and childless folks, it is said, grow quite foolishly fond of adopted kin. With practical people the past is past, and to the prosperous nothing comes more easy than forgetting. After all--

‘What can you do with people when they are dead? But if you are pious, sing a hymn and go; Or, if you are tender, heave a sigh and go, But go by all means, and permit the grass To keep its green fend ’twixt them and you.’[6]

In the long centuries since Jerusalem fell there has been time and to spare for the green grass to wither into dusty weeds above those desolate dead whose ‘place knows them no more.’ That Halevi with his ‘poetic heart,’ which is a something different from the most metrical of poetic imaginations, cherished a closer ideal of patriotism than some of his brethren may not be denied. ‘Israel among the nations,’ he writes, ‘is as the heart among the limbs.’ He was the loyalest of Spanish subjects, yet Jerusalem was ever to him, in sober fact, ‘the city of the world.’

In these learned latter days, the tiniest crumbs of tradition have been so eagerly pounced upon by historians to analyse and argue over, that we are almost left in doubt whether the very A B C of our own history may still be writ in old English characters. The process which has bereft the bogy uncle of our youthful belief of his hump, and all but transformed the Bluebeard of the British throne into a model monarch, has not spared to set its puzzling impress on the few details which have come down to us concerning Halevi. Whether the love-poems, some eight hundred in number, were all written to his wife, is now questioned; whether 1086 or 1105 is the date of his birth, and if Toledo or Old Castille be his birthplace, is contested. Whether he came to a peaceful end, or was murdered by wandering Arabs, is left doubtful, since both the year of his death[7] and the manner of it are stated in different ways by different authorities, among whom it is hard to choose. Whether, indeed, he ever visited the Holy City, whether he beheld it with ‘actual sight or sight of faith,’ is greatly and gravely debated; but amidst all this bewildering dust of doubt that the researches of wise commentators have raised, the central fact of his life is left to us undisputed. The realities they meddle with, but the ideals, happily, they leave to us undimmed. All at least agree, that ‘she whom the Rabbi loved was a poor woe-begone darling, a moving picture of desolation, and her name was Jerusalem.’ There is a consensus of opinion among the critics that this often-quoted saying of Heine’s was only a poetical way of putting a literal and undoubted truth. On this subject, indeed, our poet has only to speak for himself.

‘Oh! city of the world, most chastely fair; In the far west, behold I sigh for thee. And in my yearning love I do bethink me, Of bygone ages; of thy ruined fane, Thy vanish’d splendour of a vanish’d day. Oh! had I eagles’ wings I’d fly to thee, And with my falling tears make moist thine earth. I long for thee; what though indeed thy kings Have passed for ever; that where once uprose Sweet balsam-trees the serpent makes his nest. O that I might embrace thy dust, the sod Were sweet as honey to my fond desire!’(1)

Fifty translations cannot spoil the true ring in such fervid words as these. And in a world so sadly full of ‘fond desires,’ destined to remain for ever unfulfilled, it is pleasant to know that Halevi accomplished his. He unquestionably travelled to Palestine; whether his steps were stayed short of Jerusalem we know not, but he undoubtedly reached the shores, and breathed ‘the air of that land which makes men wise,’ as in loving hyperbole a more primitive patriot[8] expresses it.

And seeing how that ‘the Lord God doth like a printer who setteth the letters backward,’[9] there is small cause, perchance, for grieving in that the breath our poet drew in the land of his dreams was the breath not of life but of death.

THE STORY OF A STREET

To the ear and eye that can find sermons in stones, streets, one would fancy, must be brimful of suggestive stories. There might be differences of course. From a stone of the polished pebble variety, for instance, one could only predict smooth platitudes, and the romance in a block of regulation stucco would possibly turn out a trifle prosaic. But the right stone and the right street will always have an eloquence of their own for the right listener or lounger, and certain crumbling old tenements which were carted away as rubbish some few years ago in Frankfort must have been rarely gifted in this line. ‘Words of fire,’ and ‘written in blood,’ would, in truth, have no parabolic meaning, if the stones of that ancient _Judengasse_ suddenly took to story-telling. A long record of sorrow, and wrong, and squalid romance, would be unfolded, and, inasmuch as the sorrows have been healed and the wrongs have been righted, it may not be uninteresting to look for a moment at the picturesque truths that lie hidden under that squalid romance, which, like a mist, hung for centuries over the Jews’ quarter.

The very first authentic record of the presence of Jews in Frankfort comes to us in the account of a massacre of some hundred and eighty of them in 1241. This persecution was probably epidemic rather than indigenous in its nature, its germ distinctly traceable to those conscientious and comprehensive attempts of Louis the Saint, in the preceding year, to stamp out Judaism in his dominions. At any rate, for German Jews, an era of protection began under Frederick Barbarossa, and the Frankfort Jews among the rest, during the next hundred years, enjoyed the ‘no history’ which to the Jewish nation, pre-eminently amongst all others, must have been synonymous with happiness. But the story begins again about the middle of the fourteenth century when the Black Plague raged, and sanitary inspection, old style, took the form of declaring the wells to be poisoned, and of advising the burning and plunder of Jews by way of antidote. Jews were prolific, their hoards portable, their houses slightly built, so the burnings and the massacres and the liftings become intermittent and a little difficult to localise, till about the year 1430, when Frederick III., egged on by his clergy, made an order for all Jews in Frankfort to reside out of sight and sound of the holy Cathedral. A site just without the ancient walls of the town, and belonging to the council, was allotted to them, and here, at their own expense, the Jews built their _Judengasse_.

The street contained originally some hundred and ninety-six houses, and iron-sheeted gates, kept fast closed on Sundays and saint days, grew gradually to be barred from inside as well as outside on the Ghetto. The pleasures and the hopes which Jews might not share they came by slow degrees to hate and to despise, and the men with the yellow badges on their garments learnt to cringe and stoop under their load, and the dark-eyed women with the blue stripes to their veils lifted them only to look upon their children. Undeniably, by every outward test, the poor pariahs of the Ghetto were degenerate, and their sad and sordid lives must have looked both repellent and unpicturesque to the passer-by. But it may be doubted whether the degeneracy went much deeper than the costume. If the passer-by had passed in to one of these gabled dwellings, when the degrading gaberdine and the disfiguring veil were thrown aside, he would have come upon an interior of home life which would have struck him as strangely incongruous with the surroundings. Amid all the wretched physical squalor of the street he would have found little mental and less spiritual destitution. If the law of the land bid Jews shrink before men, the law of the Book bid them rejoice before God. Both laws they obeyed to the letter. Beating vainly at closed doors, they learnt to speak to the world with bated breath and whispered humbleness, but ‘His courts’ they entered, as it was commanded them, ‘with thanksgiving,’ and ‘joyfully’ sang hymns to Him. And the ‘courts’ came to be comprehensive of application, and the ‘hymns’ to include much literature. There was always a vivid domestic side to the religion of the Jews, and the alchemy of home life went far to turn the dross of the Ghetto into gold. Their Sabbath, in the picturesque phrase of their prayer-book, was ‘a bride,’ and her welcome, week by week, was of a right bridal sort. White cloths were spread and lamps lit in her honour. The shabbiest dwellings put on something of a festive air, and for ‘_Shobbus_’ the poorest _haus-frau_ would manage to have ready at least one extra dish and several best and bright-coloured garments for her family. On the seventh day and on holy days the slouching pedlar and hawker fathers, with their packs cast off, were priests and teachers too, and every day the Ghetto children, for all their starved and stunted growth, had unlimited diet from the _Judengasse_ stores of family affection and free schooling. They were probably, however, at no time very numerous, these Ghetto babies, for up to a quite comparatively recent date (1832) Jewish love-affairs were strictly under State control, and only fifteen couples a year were allowed to marry.

Ludwig Börne, or Löb Baruch as he is registered in the Frankfort synagogue (1786), was a result of one of these eagerly sought privileges, and it is easy to see how he came to write, ‘Because I was born a slave I understand liberty; my birthplace was no longer than the _Judengasse_, and beyond its locked gates a foreign country began for me. Now, no town, no district, no province can content me. I can rest only with all Germany for my fatherland.’ An eloquent expression enough of the repressed patriotism which was, perforce, inarticulate for centuries in the _Judengasse_ of Frankfort.

Prison as the street must have seemed to its tenants, there was at least one occasion when its gates had the charms rather than the defects appertaining to bolts and bars. In 1498, a harassed, ragged little crowd from Nuremberg fled from their persecutors to find in our Frankfort _Judengasse_ a safe city of refuge, and for a century or more the Imperial coat-of-arms was gratefully emblazoned on the Ghetto gates as a sign to the outer world that the Frankfort Jews, though imprisoned, were protected. Yet we may fairly doubt if the feeling of security could have been much more than skin-deep, since in 1711, when nearly the whole of the street was burnt down, we find that some of the poor souls were so afraid of insult and plunder, that many refused to open their doors to would-be rescuers, and so, to prevent being pillaged, perished in the flames. An oddly pathetic prose version of the famous Ingoldsby martyr, who ‘could stand dying, but who couldn’t stand pinching.’

When, in 1808, Napoleon made Frankfort the capital of his new grand duchy, the Ghetto gates were demolished, and many vexatious restrictions were repealed. Such new hopes, however, as the Frankfort Jews may have begun to indulge, fell with Napoleon’s downfall in 1815. Civil and political disabilities were revived, and it was not till 1854 that the last of these were erased from the statute-book.

The one house in that sad old street, the stirring sermons in whose stones might be ‘good in everything,’ would be No. 148, the little low-browed dwelling with the sign of the Rose and Star--a veritable Rose of Dawn it has proved--which was purchased more than a hundred years ago [in 1780] by Meyer Amschel Rothschild, the founder of the great Rothschild house. Every one knows the fairy-like story of that old house; how Meyer Amschel, intended by his parents to be a rabbi, as many of his ancestors had been before him, chose for himself a different way of helping his fellow-men; how he went into commerce, and made commerce, even in the Ghetto, dignified and honourable, as he would have made chimney-sweeping if he had adopted it; how he became agent to the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, how faithfully he discharged his stewardship, and how his money took to itself snowball properties, and changed the tiny _Judengasse_ tenement into gorgeous mansions. And the old stones would tell, too, of how faithful were the old merchant prince and the wife of his youth to early associations; how sons and daughters grew up and married, and moved to more aristocratic neighbourhoods, but how Meyer Amschel and his old wife clung to the shabby old home in the Ghetto, and lived there all their lives, and till she died, nearly fifty years ago.[10] The very iron bars of those windows would speak if they could, saying never a word of their old bad uses, but telling only how kind and wrinkled hands were stretched out through them day by day, and year after year, dealing out bread to the hungry. No. 148 could certainly tell the prettiest story in all the street, and preach the most suggestive line in all the sermons carted away with those stones of the Frankfort _Judengasse_. And it would be a story with a sequel. For when all the other sad old houses were demolished, the walls and rafters of No. 148 were carefully collected and numbered, and for a while reverently laid aside. And now, re-erected, the house stands close by its old site, serving as the centre or depôt for the dispensing of the Rothschild charities in Frankfort. Fanciful folks might almost be tempted to believe that stones with such experiences would be sufficiently sentient to rejoice at the pretty sentiment which refused to let them perish, and which, regarding them as relics, built them up afresh, and consecrated them to new and noble uses.

HEINRICH HEINE: A PLEA

‘That blackguard Heine.’--CARLYLE. ’“Who was Heine?” A wicked man.’ CHARLES KINGSLEY.

There are some persons, some places, some things, which fall all too easily into ready-made definitions. Labels lie temptingly to hand, and specimens get duly docketed--‘rich as a Jew,’ perhaps, or ‘happy as a king’--with a promptitude and a precision which is not a trifle provoking to people of a nicely discriminative turn of mind. The amiable optimism which insists on an inseparable union between a Jew and his money, and discerns an alliterative link between kings and contentment, or makes now and again a monopoly of the virtues by labelling them ‘Christian,’ has, we suspect, a good deal to do with the manufacture of debatable definitions, and the ready fitting of slop-made judgments. Scores of such shallow platitudes occur to one’s memory, some mischievous, some monotonous, some simply meaningless, and many of the most complacent have been tacked on to the telling of a life-story, brimful of contradictions, and running counter to most of the conventionalities. The story of one who was a Jew, and poor; a convert, without the zeal; a model of resignation, and yet no Christian; a poet, born under sternest conditions of prose, and with sad claims, by right of race, to the scorn of scorn and hate of hate, which we have been told is exclusively a poet’s appanage--surely a story hardly susceptible of being summed up in an epithet. It is a life which has been told often, in many languages, and in much detail; this small sketch will glance only at such portions of it as seem to suggest the clue to a juster reading and a kindlier conclusion.

It was in the last month of the last year of the eighteenth century, in the little town of Düsseldorf in South Germany, that their eldest son Heinrich, or Harry as he seems to have been called in the family circle, was born unto Samson Heine, dealer in cloth, and Betty his wife. That eighteenth century had been but a dreary one for the Jews of Europe. It set in darkness on Heine’s cradle, and on his ‘mattress grave,’ some fifty years later, the dawn of nineteenth century civilisation, for them, had scarcely broken. ‘The heaviest burden that men can lay upon us,’ wrote Spinoza, ‘is not that they persecute us with their hatred and scorn, but it is by the planting of hatred and scorn in our souls. That is what does not let us breathe freely or see clearly.’ This subtlest effect of the poison of persecution seemed to have entered the Jewish system. Warned off from the highroads of life, and shunned for shambling along its bye-paths, the banned and persecuted race, looking out on the world from their ghettoes, had grown to see most things in false perspective. Self loomed large on their blank horizon, and gold shone more golden in the gloom. God the Father, whose service demanded such daily sacrifice, had lost something of that divinest attribute; men, our brothers, could the words have borne any but a ‘tribal’ sound? Still, in those dim, dream-peopled ghettoes, where visions of the absent, the distant, and the past must have come to further perplex and confuse the present, one actuality seems to have been grasped among the shadows, one ideal attained amid all the grim realities of that most miserable time. Home life and family affection had a sacredness for the worst of these poor sordid Jews in a sense which, to the best of those sottish little German potentates who so conscientiously despised them, would have been unmeaning. Maidens were honourably wed, and wives honoured and children cherished in those wretched Judenstrassen, where ‘the houses look as if they could tell sorrowful stories,’ after a fashion quite unknown at any, save the most exceptional, of the numerous coarse, corrupt, and ludicrously consequential little courts which were, at that period, representative of German culture.

The marriage of Heine’s parents had been one of those faithful unions, under superficially unequal conditions, for which Jews seem to have a genius. It had been something of the old story, ‘she was beautiful, and he fell in love’; she, pretty, piquant, cultivated, and the daughter of a physician of some local standing; he, just a respectable member of a respectable trading family, and ordinary all round, save for the distinction of one rich relative, a banker brother at Hamburg.

Betty’s attractions, however, were all dangerous and undesirable possessions in the eyes of a prudent Jewish parent of the period, and Dr. von Geldern appears to have gladly given this charming daughter of his into the safe ownership of her somewhat commonplace wooer, whose chiefest faculty would seem to have been that of appreciation. It proved, nevertheless, a sufficiently happy marriage, and Betty herself, although possibly rather an acquiescent daughter than a responsive bride in the preliminaries, developed into a faithful wife and a most devoted mother, utilising her artistic tastes and her bright energy in the education of her children, and finding full satisfaction for her warm heart in their affection. Her eldest born was always passionately attached to her, and in the days of his youth, as in the years that so speedily ‘drew nigh with no pleasure in them,’ unto those latest of the ‘evil days’ when he lay so unconscionably long a-dying, and wrote long playful letters to her full of tender deceit, telling of health and wealth and friends, in place of pain and poverty and disease, through all that bitter, brilliant life of his, Heinrich Heine’s relations with his mother were altogether beautiful, and go far to refute the criticism attributed, with I know not how much of truth, to Goethe, that ‘the poet had every capacity save that for love!’ ‘In real love, as in perfect music,’ says Bulwer Lytton in one of his novels, ‘there must be a certain duration of time.’ Heine’s attachment to his mother was just lifelong; his first love he never forgot, nor, indeed, wholly forgave, and his devotion to his grisette wife not only preceded marriage, but survived it. Poor Heine! was it his genius or his race, or something of both, which conferred on him that fatal _pierre de touche_ as regards reputation, ‘_il déplait invariablement à tous les imbeciles_’?