Many of the members of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden had had access to the excellent education guaranteed by the university system, which had been modernised in line with the ideals of the Wissenschaft as defined by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Undisputed stars of the German academic firmament, such as the jurist Savigny and the philosopher Hegel together with the great philologists Wolf and Boeckh, were teaching, in Berlin in those years. And their lessons left their mark. This was true, above all, in the case of Leopold Zunz9, who followed the great philologists but also to a certain extent the positive-historical approach to law of Savigny and the Historical School, when he grasped the importance of reconstructing the textual tradition of the Middle Ages. This can be deduced from his pioneering work of 1818, Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur. According to Zunz, the period in which he was living and the process of emancipation that at that time marked the end of the Rabbinic tradition in the history of the Jews also offered a unique opportunity to gather and organize post-biblical Judaic literature as a whole. From a religious and theological point of view, detaching oneself from the Talmud and the Rabbinic tradition, as indeed Mendelssohn had done, now signified being able to rediscover that tradition in the sign of a scholarly interest. In this respect philology represented the reference science. “Hier“ we read in the above-mentioned essay “wird die ganze Litteratur der Juden, in ihrem größten Umfange, als Gegenstand der Forschung aufgestellt, ohne uns darum zu kümmern, ob ihr sämmtlicher Inhalt auch Norm für unser eigenes Urtheilen soll oder kann.”10 Only a scientific comparison with the post-biblical Judaic past can help provide an accurate image of the nature of the Jews and Judaism and of the significance of their history. Only careful philological research will make it possible to recognize and separate “das Alte brauchbare, das Veraltete schädliche, das Neue wünschenswerthe”11 in the historical documents.
While Zunz is looking to philology and the methods of the Historical School,12 the president of the Verein, the jurist Eduard Gans is very far from Savigny’s systematic framework.13 The three talks that Gans delivered for the Verein attribute the aspirations of that small intellectual avant-garde to Hegel’s philosophy of universal history and to his dialectics.14 It is a question of vindicating now, from a non-confessional standpoint, the role that is due to Jewish Nationalität in modern times. In the face of the risk that within Hegel’s philosophical-historical framework Judaism would prove to be a great event belonging only to the past, Gans is only able to offer an evocative natural metaphor: “in die grosse Bewegung des Ganzen soll [das Judentum] untergegangen scheinen und dennoch fortleben, wie der Strom fortlebt in dem Ozean.”15 The apologetic intention of the Verein, although it is in contrast with the desire for an objective study, is expressed in the mythologizing of a specific segment of the historical Diaspora: it glorifies the Golden Age of the Sephardic Jews in Spain.16 The young Jewish scholars of Berlin celebrate this era as a great model that unites autonomous culture and social integration, a model that could and should be re-proposed for the present. But how and under what circumstances?
The Verein, Heine would write in an affectionate and melancholy obituary in 1840, aimed high and followed “eine hochfliegend große, aber unausführbare idee” (HB 9, 179).
[Der] esoterische Zweck jenes Vereins [war] nichts anderes als eine Vermittlung des historischen Judentums mit der modernen Wissenschaft, von welcher man annahm, daß sie im Laufe der Zeit zur Weltherrschaft gelangen würde. (HB 9, 183)
As to the militancy of the young Heine in the Verein, especially in its last decade, there is no lack of studies,17 starting from the scrutiny of the numerous accounts of the two years spent in Berlin between 1821 and 1823: the many letters sent to Moses Moser, whom Heine referred to as the “eigentliche Seele” (HB 9,180) of the group; the respect and admiration he expressed for Zunz, from whose teachings in the Synagogue he expected “freylich keine Erbauung und sanftmüthige Seelenpflaster; aber etwas viel besseres, eine Aufregung der Kraft“ (HSA 20, 72-73); and the attention he devoted to the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums – he advised Zunz to insist on its cultural aspects and style with a view to making it more appealing to a wider audience (HSA 20, 102-103).
Nevertheless, a critical reappraisal of Heine’s experience with the Verein in parallel with the publication and genesis of his other works of the same period may reveal a few surprises especially if we consider what Heine managed to achieve through the east/west dichotomy. His indirect response, through the medium of literary essays, to the possibility of a new Jewish identity, vital and integrated in the present and, hence, his response to the suitability of the Spanish model for the Verein, consists in an inversion of that tendency or, in other words, a dislocation. The model Eastern Jew is no longer the Sephardic Jew of medieval Spain, but the kind of Jew he would meet when he left Berlin and travelled east. In his account of a journey he made to Poland in 1822 he tells of his first encounter, as a cultured Jewish intellectual from the German world, with the world of the shtetl.
“Das Äußere des polnischen Juden ist schrecklich. Mich überläuft ein Schauder, wenn ich daran denke, wie ich […] zuerst ein polnisches Dorf sah, meistens von Juden bewohnt.” (HB 3,75) At the sight of that community made up of “zerlumpten Schmitzgestalten”, Heine is overcome by a feeling of nausea. “Ihre Sprache ist ein mit Hebräisch durchwirktes, und mit Polnisch façonniertes Deutsch” (HB 3, 76) that grates on his ears. But – he goes on – that disgust “wurde […] bald verdrängt von Mitleid, nachdem ich den Zustand dieser Menschen näher betrachtete, und die schweinstallartigen Löcher sah, worin sie wohnen, mauscheln, beten, schachern und – elend sind” (HB 3, 76). In short, the Eastern Jews – Heine continues – “sind offenbar mit der europaischen Kultur nicht fortgeschritten und ihre Geisteswelt versumpfte zu einem unerquicklichen Aberglauben, den eine spitzfindige Scholastik in tausenderlei wunderlichen Formen hinein quetscht.” (HB 3, 76)
In this judgment of the religious tradition of Jews from the East there can doubtlessly be traced some of the criticisms already leveled by the Haskalah, the Judaic enlightenment, at the Rabbinic tradition. And the remark on superstition might well lead us to believe that these observations also involve the Hasidic movement, which was considered a serious obstacle to the renewal of Judaism. There is a plethora of polemical writings by the Maskilim in which the mystic irrationalism and cultural practices of the new religious current (or, rather, neo-Hasidism) that had sprung up in Eastern Europe were unreservedly condemned. Regarding the situation of the Polish Jews in general, in his Polish travel memoir Heine confines himself to mentioning only Über die Verbesserung der Israeliten im Königreich Polen, a government report by David Friedländer, published in 1819 from which, in fact, he garnered a wealth of information. His praise of the report, however, is tempered by the critical reservation that the merits and moral standing of the Rabbis has not been fully understood. (HB 3, 74)
In Über Polen, however, a few lines after the realistic description that introduces for the first time a large number of typical, albeit negative, features that would recur in a long series of literary portrayals of the Judaic world of Eastern Europe, a singular re-evaluation emerges:
Dennoch, trotz der barbarischen Pelzmütze, die seinen Kopf bedeckt, und der noch barbarischen Ideen, die denselben füllen, schätze ich den polnischen Juden weit höher als so manchen deutschen Juden, der seinen Bolivar auf dem Kopf, und seinen Jean Paul im Kopfe trägt. (HB 3,77)
How best to interpret such an explicit appreciation of a Judaic identity that has remained resolutely true to itself? Is it a criticism of the illusions of the advocates of a reformed Judaism?18 Is it a reiteration of the critical reservations he had expressed concerning the Friedländer report? If so, is it an indirect denunciation of the consequences of a model for emancipated Jews which, for the Western Jews, among whom Heine is also to be numbered, was taking shape within the distorting mirror of anti-Semitism? Another passage in the travelogue would lead us to think so:
In