A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur Read Free Book Online

a great future. But, unlike Disraeli, who thought that the Jews should be given full civic rights not on sufferance but because they were a superior race, Lassalle felt that they had deteriorated beyond redemption: ‘Cowardly people, you don’t deserve a better lot, you were born to be servants.’
    Börne was baptised after having prepared for the Frankfurt Jewish community a long and detailed memorandum about the discrimination to which his co-religionists in his native city were subjected; Heine converted after writing to one of his closest friends that it was beneath his honour and dignity to become a Christian just in order to enter the state service in Prussia. Times are bad, he added ominously - honest men have to become scoundrels. A few weeks after his baptism he wrote to the same friend: ‘I am now hated by Christian and Jew alike; I very much regret my baptism, nothing but misfortune has occurred to me since.’ And he was at his most sarcastic in a pun about those shamefacedly embracing Christianity:
Und Du bist zu Kreuz gekrochen
Zu dem Kreuz, das Du verachtest
Das Du noch vor wenigen Wochen
In den Staub zu treten dachtest!
(So you have repented,
  crawling towards the very
cross which you derided
only a few weeks ago!)
    Heine’s conversion has remained something of a mystery. Only a little while before he had written to another friend, Moritz Embden, that he was indifferent in matters of religion and that his attachment to Judaism had its roots in his deep antipathy to Christianity.
    Heine made a great many contradictory statements about Judaism, as he did about Germany and the future of Socialism; it is rarely profitable to search for ideological consistency in the work of a poet, nor is its presence necessarily a virtue. Börne, his contemporary, was more of a politician, and his strength too was the literary essay, not politico-economic analysis. But precisely because Börne and Heine, unlike Marx, did not try to develop a scientific Weltanschauung , they were better able to understand the essence of the Jewish question; they felt in their bones that there was no breaking out of what Börne once called the ‘magic Jewish circle’. Everyone spoke about the Jews; he had experienced this a thousand times and yet it remained forever new: ‘Some accuse me of being a Jew, others forgive me for being a Jew, still others even praise me for it. But all of them reflect on it.’ Both Börne and Heine were more concerned with Jewish topics after their conversion than before; Heine announced towards the end of his life that he felt no need to return to Judaism because he had never really left it. Börne, too, took a more positive view in his later years. The Jews had more spirit than the non-Jews, he noted; they had passions - but only great ones (which recalls Heine’s saying that the Greeks had always been no more than handsome youths, whereas the Jews were always men). Börne defended the Jews against their detractors in the same way as he used his pen on behalf of other just causes; like Heine he felt no link with any positive religion. Judaism had no deeper meaning for the modern Jew of which these two writers were the first perfect specimens. It was the family disease that had followed them for thousands of years, the plague that had been carried forth from Pharaonic days, as Heine wrote in a poem dedicated to the new Jewish hospital in Hamburg; it was an incurable illness - no steam bath, modern drugs, or other appliances or medicines could heal it. Would it disappear, perhaps, in that future, better, world order, the vision of which intrigued Heine in his more optimistic moments? Was there any point in reflecting about the future of Judaism and the Jews? The narrow limits of intellectual analysis were acutely stated in a private letter of Moritz Abraham Stern, a mathematician and one of the first Jewish professors in Germany, to his friend Gabriel Riesser:
I am as remote from Judaism as from