A century later, Joseph Roth in Juden auf Wanderschaft, another East European travel memoir, was to celebrate, in almost the same words as Heine, the virtues of the Eastern Jew who has remained “echt und unberührt”,19 authentic and intact. It would seem that Heine’s writing inspired the great rediscovery of the world of East European Judaism, in its turn a new form of mythologizing promoted by the Zionist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, which arguably found its most famous literary celebration in the rewriting of the Hasidic legends by Martin Buber.20
The question is, did Heine manage to express himself on the Ostjuden in these terms simply by virtue of an inspired and farseeing intuition? It is true that in those years there began to appear in print the first written examples of Hasidic literature21 but it is highly unlikely that he was able to consult them nor can he have been inspired to express such a positive opinion by the contributions in the Zeitschrift that were published by the Verein. It is known that in the course of the nineteenth century the Wissenschaft des Judentums, which was more sensitive than the Maskilim to expressions of the popular Judaic spirit, was to judge the Hasidic phenomenon less severely. But in 1822, on the basis of what presuppositions did Heine view the opposition between Eastern and Western Jews? The reply to this question might, at first glance, be surprising: the interpretative categories which Heine uses to reappraise the authentic and integral life of the Ostjuden are, in fact, the same categories that he used to evaluate the tradition of popular German poetry as an expression of authentic life.
In order to understand this, it is enough to turn to the Harzreise, the first and highly successful of the Reisebilder published just two years after his Polish travelogue and reread the pages that describe the encounter of a cultured, carefree law student with the miners of the Harz. As happened in the case of the intellectual narrator in the Polish travelogue, here too the first-person narrator visits a community that is a world unto itself, on the margins of social and cultural development, a world where the people are outsiders who still live and work according to the ancient customs.
As in Über Polen, the narrator describes in realistic terms the extremely hard living conditions. But, exactly as it did with the Ostjuden, at a certain point, the narrator’s admiration becomes evident. The miners and their families, in fact, live a life that is completely justified in itself: “So stillstehend ruhig auch das Leben dieser Leute erscheint, so ist es dennoch ein wahrhaftes, lebendiges Leben” (HB 3,118). The narrator goes so far as to stay with the miners and take part in their community life, which is punctuated by the singing of Lieder, and the telling of legends and stories that have been handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, a poetic heritage that nourishes and preserves a common identity.
The re-evaluation of the Ostjudentum is couched in the same terms that are used to evaluate the tradition of popular Germanic poetry.22 Heine’s East-West experiments are experiments that were made possible by the categories of German historical-philological science understood within a wider spectrum such as Wissenschaft des deutschen Volkes, which was born from the rib of the Historical School of Savigny and took its first steps alongside the studies initiated by Jacob Grimm on old popular German poetry.23 Grimm believed that he could rediscover the most authentic traditions of the people in the Lieder, the fairytales, the sagas and legends and in poetry understood as a choral and collective expression in the marginal poetry of uncultivated people.
His philological-cultural work served an identity function: recovering accounts of the German past meant being able to construct the future of the nation on that rediscovered and revitalized past, and to set it on the road to unification.
In this context it is possible to note certain features in common with the search for Judaic identity pursued by the Verein. I will confine myself to pointing out a series of parallels: in the Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft of 1814 Savigny had recommended the study of the juridical heritage of the Holy Roman Empire – in contrast to Thibauts’s suggestion it be abolished – so that the scientia iuris could distinguish what is vital from what is no longer relevant in the collective juridical consciousness. 24 In the same way Zunz, as mentioned earlier, set out to recognize “das Alte brauchbare, das Veraltete schädliche, das Neue wünschenswerthe”.25 The idea that the testimonials of the medieval Rabbinic tradition should be studied in a new way at a time when it was recognized that the sun of that tradition had set, brings to mind the urgency with which Jacob Grimm turned his attention to popular German poetry, sagas and fables because, as he was to say to Savigny in 1814: “Zeit zu sammeln ist jetzt noch, vor Jahrhunderten hätte es kräftiger geschehen können” and “wir [sammeln] kurz vor dem einbrechenden Untergang und dagegen”.26
As the prose of the Reisebilder and his great essays of the Thirties demonstrate, Heine would be able to question the regressive and nationalistic tendencies of that Wissenschaft des deutschen Volkes which he had known intimately from its inception when he was studying in German universities. Already in the prose of Die Nordsee. Dritte Abteilung there is a distance from all forms of the mythologizing of identitarian compactness. The fishing community of the Island of Norderney described in that text is, in fact, also a tight-knit community that lives in an authentically poetic dimension like the Ostjuden and the miners of the Harz.
But now, within a philosophical-historical perspective, Heine confines himself to noting the great pain, “[den] große Schmerz über den Verlust der National-Besonderheiten, die in der Allgemeinheit neuerer Kultur verloren gehen, ein[en] Schmerz, der jetzt in den Herzen aller Völker zuckt” (HB 3, 326).27 This affirmation also sums up for him the final sense of the discussions of the Verein about the position to be assigned to the Judaic people and the Judaic spirit in the vicissitudes of World history. The great pain pulsating in the heart of all peoples also concerns the meaning and fate of Judaism in modernity that the Verein had tried in vain to recover and redefine.
That attempt had also pursued Heine himself in Der Rabbi von Bacherach, the novel he conceived as a powerful historical fresco that would reckon with that great, specifically Jewish pain and that was also to include a re-elaboration of the myth of the Sephardic Jews in the Spanish Golden Age. The project – unsurprisingly, given its premises – was to remain uncompleted. The Rhine Rabbi, although educated in the highly cultured and tolerant school of Toledo, would never manage to return to the liberal Spain of the three cultures. In the last pages of the first chapter, where the writing proceeded in parallel with the writing of Harzreise, there is an implicit acknowledgement: the esoteric goal of the Verein, “die Vermittlung des historischen Judentums mit der modernen Wissenschaft” (HB 9,183) was not, in fact, achievable. Poetic creation can follow other paths. Here no mediation can be envisaged nor can there exist a plausible symbiosis between the world of the Rhine Father with its Nibelung treasure and the Judaic melodies of the Haggadah that rise to the lips of the beautiful Sarah in flight with her Rabbi husband as the umpteenth pogrom is under way in the community of Bacherach. As has been convincingly demonstrated,28 it is here that the ‘third space’ of poetry emerges, a hybrid place in which over-sharply defined dichotomies and opposites interact in a play of perspectives that follow at the same time the fracture lines of the former. The last image that comes to the mind of the Rabbi’s wife as she is rocked by the waves of the Rhine is an Oriental fatherland that exists nowhere except in the individual and collective Jewish memory: “es zeigte sich oben die heilige Stadt Jerusalem, mit ihren Türmen und Toren; in goldner Pracht leuchtete der Tempel; […] im Allerheiligsten kniete der fromme König David, […] und lieblich ertönte sein Gesang und Saitenspiel, – und selig lächelnd entschlief die schöne Sara” (HB 1, 474). The Eastern fatherland in which the harp of David rings out is the ideal poetic space that Heine claims for himself and his vocation as a Jewish and German writer.29 The poet, to borrow from the phantasmagorical genealogy of a poem in Romanzero, the summa of Heine’s East-West imagination, is undoubtedly a pariah, a Schlehmil, but, above all, he is “der