At 161st Street and Grand Concourse in the Bronx, there is a highly ornate fountain named Lorelei located in a rather lonely park dedicated to dead poets. Inscribed at the base of Lorelei is the name and visage of a man — once upon a time, Germany’s favorite Romantic poet. Hitler tried his best to remove all memory of him from German culture, even going so far as to anonymize the attribution of his poems and to order the atomization of his grave site with explosives, all because the poet, Heinrich Heine, was born a Jew.

This Friday, the 24th of Kislev and the eve of Ḥanuka, is Heine’s Hebrew birthday. He was born December 13th, 1797.

I first encountered Heine, in Amos Elon’s survey of German Jewry, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743-1933. Here’s why I love him so much. Besides his sharp wit and poetry, Heine railed against patriotic chauvinism. In 1817 at the age of 20 he witnessed the Hep! Hep! riots and a mass burning of “subversive” books  accompanied by speeches against Jews, foreigners, “and cosmopolitans, et al.” Three years later, he penned the following prescient line in his verse tragedy, “Almansor,”:

Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.
[Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people.]

Heine had keen, almost prophetic insight. Elon writes that he “voiced the first, most acute prophecies about German nationalism and militarism.” Heine is famous for having predicted the dangers of Prussian nationalism manifest in a unified Germany. Living as a fugitive expatriat in France in 1834, “he saw the demons lurking under the surface of German life and warned the French:”

Watch out! I mean well with you and therefore I tell you the bitter truth. You have more to fear from a liberated Germany than from the entire Holy Alliance along with all Croats and Cossacks.

A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll. Christianity restrained the martial ardor of the Germans for a time but it did not destroy it; once the restraining talisman is shattered, savagery will rise again, . . . the mad fury of the berserk, of which Nordic poets sing and speak. . . . The old stony gods will rise from the rubble and rub the thousand-year-old dust from their eyes. Thor with the giant hammer will come forth and smash the gothic domes.

The German thunder. . . rolls slowly at first but it will come. And when you hear it roar, as it has never roared before in the history of the world know that the German thunder has reached it’s target.

(H. Heine. “Zur Geschichte von Religion und Philosphie im Deutschland,” Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 3, p.505.)

His  attitude towards Judaism was highly influenced by the difficulty he and other assimilated intellectual German Jews felt in the face of state oppression. But these sentiments were tempered when he experienced Polish Jewry during a trip in 1821, writing:

Despite the barbaric-looking fur cap on his head and the even more barbaric ideas within, I hold the Polish Jew in much higher regard than many a German Jew with a Bolivar hat on top of his head and Jean Paul inside it. In stark isolation, the character of the Polish Jew has evolved into an integral whole; by breathing the air of tolerance this character has acquired the stamp of freedom. . . . As for me, I prefer the Polish Jew, with his grimy fur, his flea-bitten beard, his odor of garlic, and his wheeling and dealing to many others in all their savings-bond splendor.

(Heine. Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 2, p.69.)

This description mixes criticism with a liberal romantic pride in ethnic Judaism born outside the constraints and pressures of the assimilationist Germany he was familiar with. In contrast, his attitude towards Reform Judaism reflects deep misgivings. Elon notes that Heine was “dubious about fashionable modifications like German [Jewish] prayer books and organ music. They were merely imitative of Christianity and offered only a “new stage set and decor.” The new rabbis (Heine called them souffleurs–prompters) wore a Protestant parson’s ‘white band’ in their collars. Reform Judaism was like mock turtle soup, he thought, ‘turtle soup without the turtle.’ Heine was an early precursor of the legendary Spanish anarchist who asked a Protestant missionary, ‘How can I believe in your religion when I don’t even believe in mine, which is the only true one?’” Like many Jews in his circle he submitted to a Baptism that held meaning only in the burden of shame and bitterness he would carry the remainder of his life. Professional life in Germany was entirely closed off to Jews unless they submitted to a Baptism. Regardless, his tragic humiliation has haunted his name ever since.

Fleeing Germany for freedom in France, Heine was quickly attracted to the early socialism espoused by Henri de Saint-Simon, a practical philosophy that espoused a mix of free love, pantheism, technocracy, and meritocracy — in short, liberal ideals anathema to more conservative and traditional sentiments. Meanwhile, he continued to write romantic poetry that drew its imagery from the well of both German and Jewish mythology.

Undeniably, I feel a kinship here. I am one dreaming being even when the catalog of prideful identities bifurcates and fragments my imagination in so many useless ways. I am navigating my religious, ethnic, and national identity when ethnic patriotism and religious demands make claims on the integrity and authenticity of my being Jewish, and often enough seem to distract from more universal truths.

The pity of it all is that the fathomless tragedy of the Holocaust was not only the mass slaughter of our families and the dissolution of our being. It is also in how Germany butchered and mutilated itself, for we were once Germans even if they refused to accept this, and how much the poorer they are for it. Romantics like Heine pined for acceptance as Jewish Germans, a desire absolutely justified by his ancestors cultural identity rooted in the more than 1500 year long residence amidst the misty woods and vales of Ashkenaz. Ethnic narratives profoundly shaped by Zionist self-reliance and a complete rejection of Germany following the Holocaust, conspire as well to obscure the profoundly deep connections Ashkenaz Jewry had in those lands, cities, and shtetls stolen from our grandparents and great-grandparents. Their presence as neighbors was organically entangled in their culture, but they pretended it wasn’t so, and what a bloody mess they left behind when they ripped us out from inside them.

This coming Sunday 2-5pm, December 13th, I’ll be at the Lorelei Fountain in the Bronx reading Heine’s poem Die Lorelei, drinking a toast in his honor, and lighting the third light of Ḥanuka. Anyone who cares to is welcome to join me.

Portrait of Heine by Gottlieb Gassen, 1828

Die Lorelei

by Heinrich Heine

Tags: imagination,romanticism
Categories: Poetry and Yiddishkeit
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From her yeshivah digs in Jerusalem, Gella Solomon (of Nogah Chadash) writes to me of an aggadic commentary she’s recently composed on the story of Cain and Abel (or transliterated, Qayin and Hevel). Her midrash, narrated by Cain is deeply humanistic — Cain expresses himself and his experience of fratricide in human terms that easily resonate with our experiences of desire and disappointment. But at the same time, G. Solomon leaves Cain within the world of midrash and its poignant exegetical suggestions, within the world of myth where Cain remains fully aware that he is a character being used as a homiletical device. Within this setting, Solomon lets Cain explain himself, his actions, his set up.

Here is how Solomon has Cain describe his relationship to his brother with special attention to his eponymous name, Hevel, which has the literal meaning of “breath” connoting a sense of his “fleeting” and impermanence:

I would sometimes prod him to see if he would dissolve into vapor at my touch. You have to understand, it wouldn’t have seemed so odd. In those times, things were as they were and we, the first three, were discovering a newly created world. We were each so different from each other, would it be so odd to have a man who was flesh and a man who was not? Well he was solid enough– solid enough to bleed, solid enough to kill– but though, as it turned out, he could be killed, he did not truly live. Hevel was not Named. Hevel did not speak. I was given to Mother Chava to be Man after Father Adam. Hevel was added. Added to be My Brother.

To see what I would do.

Read more. (link, Beyond the Near)

With the essential role Cain must play in the narrative, can he actually have free will. This is a playful suggestion Solomon makes — but from Dwayne Hoover’s revelation in Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions to Nobusuke Tagomi’s epiphany in Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, the self-awareness of imaginary characters is a postmodern trope that resonates. As Authors we can give our characters a tselem elohim (an image of their creator) — and our characters in turn reflect whatever creative spirit we possess to our readers. When we write, when we dream we are in a state of communion with those that we are dreaming. Our imagination gives them life and if the myth of their life can be transmitted, it can endure long after we’ve ceased dreaming them.

Solomon’s reading of Cain also reminds me of the sympathetic reading of Judas Iscariot in the second century Gospel of Judas. In that second century work, Jesus asks Judas to turn him into the Romans, since “betrayal” is not really possible for a supposedly living god whose determination of all events must preclude the free will of betrayal. In the Gospel of Judas, Judas is the most beloved since only the most trusted lover of a god could be entrusted with the most painful job of assuring his capture and execution. In this reading popular with early Christian Gnostics, Judas is written in a sense similar to Abraham ready to offer up his son Isaac.The theme of child sacrifice within biblical and post-biblical christian narratives is more fully explored in Jon D. Levenson’s excellent Death and Ressurection of the Beloved Son: Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity.

Strangely enough, the gnostic sect that appreciated and possibly authored the Gospel of Judas were Sethians – a sect the predated Christianity and traced the lineage of their spiritual authority to Adam and Eve’s third son, the one born to replace the murdered Abel — Seth. In Sethian traditions, aspects which in other common traditions are seen as failures (e.g. the transgression of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden) are seen rather as necessities in an unraveling emergence of divine transformation.

Solomon doesn’t make mention of Seth in her midrash, though his absence could I think easily be remedied with a perusal of the extant midrashim on the significance of Seth, as well as the more recent discoveries of ancient lost gnostic works such as the Apocalypse of Adam.

Tags: emergence,gnostic,imagination,midrash,sentience
Categories: Mythology and Yiddishkeit
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