Abstract

This article extracts from Heinrich Heine’s famous poem “Prinzessin Sabbat” a portrait of the Jew as a figure that occupies a liminal state between humanity and animality. This figure of the Jew, who spends the week as a dog and regains his humanity on the Sabbath, has been conventionally read as allegorical of Jewish existence in the diaspora. Without challenging this interpretation, I propose an alternative reading of the figure of the Jew in Heine’s poem as emblematic of his own deteriorated physical condition during the last eight years of his life, and link it to his departure from the “Hellenic” persona he had previously espoused in his writings, and to his renewed interest in Judaism. The Judaism with which Heine identified toward the end of his life had little to do with the “Nazarene” mentality that he had fiercely denounced in his earlier writings. Rather, the figure of the Jew in Heine’s late writings problematizes the prevalent anthropocentric outlook that maintained since biblical times the supremacy of humanity over all of creation, and breaks the traditional boundary between human and earthly nature. From the perspective of the Jew who shares the suffering that epitomizes creaturely life, Heine articulates a subtle critique of German Romanticism.

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