Spinoza's Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine

CHAPTER 18 Tradition as Innovation in Heine's "Jehuda Ben Halevy": Counterhistory in a Spinozist Key

far from arguing that assimilation, or its opposite, would provide the Jewish answer to the challenge of modernity, Heine instead plays out the charged tension of the nineteenth-century cultural contradictions that helped shape the dialectics of the German Jewish experience. He responds to this challenge with a keen critical awareness of the need to rethink tradition in a new way that captures the double aspect of cultural transmission as the site of preserving the old through its ever new reinvention. Heine’s project of reconceptualizing history and historiography articulates a new understanding of tradition as formative and constitutive yet simultaneously Xuid and open to constant new reinscriptions. Tradition emerges in Heine as both foundational and the site of permanent innovation , and both in equal measure. Differential in character, tradition for Heine is what links the old with the new, the connecting element that enables change as much as it may seem to block it. As the poetic theory and practice of writing counterhistory, Heine’s Romanzero introduces an array of ideas that pose a challenge to any inquiry into how to represent past and present, and not only in poetry. It is in the concluding section, “Hebrew Melodies,” that poetological self-reXection combines with free poetic imagination to pose the question of tradition as the question of modernity. At the center of the “Hebrew Melodies” stands “Jehuda ben Halevy,” a poem that projects Jewish tradition as no longer 266 c h a p t e r 1 8
tradition as innovation in heine’s “jehuda ben halevy” Counterhistory in a Spinozist Key just a question of the past but as the vital force that carries the poet’s voice into the future. Resolutely unapologetic, “Jehuda ben Halevy” rests on a concept of tradition that critically reXects the dialectics of cultural transmission. Heine’s self-conscious presentation of Jewish tradition owes—through the mediation of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden— much to Mendelssohn’s initiative to propose a modern concept of Judaism that would not only meet the standards of modernity but was understood to be a crucial force in bringing about this modernity in the Wrst place. There was, in Heine’s eyes, no reason to be shy about Judaism’s universal cultural importance, which Heine, in typical fashion, expresses in dialectical manner: Striking, indeed, is the deep afWnity which prevails between these two ethical nations, Jews and old Germans. [. . .] Fundamentally, the two peoples are alike—so much alike, that one might regard the Palestine of the past as an Oriental German—just as one might regard the Germany of today as the home of the Holy Word, the mother-soil of prophecy, the citadel of pure spirituality. But it is not Germany alone which possesses the features of Palestine. The rest of Europe too raises itself to the level of the Jews. I say raises itself—for even in the beginning the Jews bore within them the modern principles which only now are visibly unfolding among the nations of Europe.1 Es ist in der Tat auffallend, welch innige Wahlverwandtschaft zwischen den beiden Völkern der Sittlichkeit, den Juden und Germanen besteht. Diese Wahlverwandtschaft […] hat einen tiefern Grund, und beide Völker sind sich ursprünglich so ähnlich, daß man das ehemalige Palästina für ein orientalisches Deutschland ansehen könnte, wie man das heutige Deutschland für die Heimat des heiligen Wortes, für den Mutterboden des Prophetentums , für die Burg der reinen Geistheit halten sollte. Aber nicht bloß Deutschland trägt die Physionomie Palästinas, sondern auch das übrige Europa erhebt sich, denn die Juden trugen, schon im Beginne das moderne Prinzip in sich, welches sich heute erst bei den europäischen Völkern sichtbar entfaltet. (B 4, 257–58) While the association with the project of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden and Mendelssohn’s mostly unacknowledged role in foregrounding the expectations of the Verein’s generation have deWning Tradition as Innovation in “Jehuda ben Halevy” 267 importance for the development of Heine’s argument, Spinoza’s free and untrammeled thought presents the theoretical framework. A “pantheist of the joyful sort” (“ein Pantheist der heitern Observanz”),2 Heine has notions of tradition and history that take their cue from the free-spirited philosophical sovereignty and self-reliance paradigmatically advanced in Spinoza. Spinoza thus not only makes his appearance in Heine’s theoretical views but...