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Heinrich Heine’s “Hebräische Melodien,” whose three long poems comprise the third and final part of Romanzero (Romancero, 1851), has long been scanned by critics for evidence of alterations in his views of religion and his affiliation with Judaism. The overall meaning(s) and structure of the text are often identified and assessed by referring to the religious and psychological changes that resulted from Heine’s reaction to his debilitating illness, which confined him to what he called his “mattress-grave.” Alternatively, the poetic text becomes the evidential source for ascertaining revisions to his religious orientation. As interesting and informative as interpretations may be that rely heavily on biographical data to document the writer’s ideational and attitudinal developments or their literary representations, they often leave important aspects and issues of the poems uncharted and the reading of the whole unsettled. There are, however, approaches and alternate discourses recently explored within cultural studies, in general, and Jewish studies, in particular, that might contextualize this poetry in ways better able to illuminate both the more unyielding sections and the larger ideological and aesthetic significance of the overall text. This essay means to probe the “Hebräische Melodien” for the poetic articulation of the connection between a new understanding of diasporic life and the construction of Jewish identity by situating the text within two different, yet interrelated, frameworks: on the one hand, the “Orientalization” of Eastern European Jewry and glorification of medieval Sephardi culture by early nineteenthcentury European Jews, especially German Jews; and on the other, a more nuanced account of diaspora and exile that explores the viability of a truly integrative relationship between subdominant and dominant cultures. Interpreted within these contexts, the “Hebräische Melodien” may be read as a critique—especially apparent in the opening and closing poems—of the 3 A Politics and Poetics of Diaspora Heine’s “Hebräische Melodien” Bluma Goldstein 60 devastating consequences of an oppressive exilic life and, in the central poem, “Jehuda ben Halevy,”1 as an exciting effort to conceptualize a positive and productive diaspora that is not simply exile within a poetic structure that reflects and constructs that imagined reality. The three poems of this text are all concerned with Jewish life and culture within a diaspora that is more or less associated with Spain and with Jewish, Islamic, and Christian culture on Spanish soil. Even the initial poem, “Prinzessin Sabbat,” which makes only minor reference to Spain in the mistaken identification of “Jehuda ben Halevy” as the author of a poem that has become part of the Sabbath liturgy, grounds the transcendent move from weekday to Sabbath in a tale of transformation from the Arabian Nights, known only in its Arabic version. Although the event depicted in the final poem, “Disputation,” apparently takes place in late-fourteenth-century Christian Spain before the Spanish Inquisition was firmly entrenched but nonetheless perilous for the Jewish population, there is a reference to the Moors, to whom—along with the Jews—King Pedro speaks with civility. The central poem, “Jehuda ben Halevy,” which is clearly the most interesting and powerful of the three, follows a complex trajectory between the contemporary narrator-poet and the Sephardi cultural environment of Jehuda Halevy, between the ancient and medieval Mediterranean world and nineteenth -century Berlin and Paris, between a thriving Jewish diasporic life in twelfth-century Islamic Spain and a degraded one in contemporary Europe . This was, of course, not the first time that the significance of Spain and the shifting interaction of its Christian, Moorish, and Jewish populations have appeared in Heine’s writings—one thinks, among others, of the two “Almansor” texts (drama and later poem), the unfinished novel Der Rabbi von Bacharach and the poem “Donna Clara”—but the “Hebräische Melodien” seems to be uniquely directed toward both articulating a critique of the disabilities of Jewish exilic life and reconstructing a historically grounded diasporic alternative. During the period of emancipation and modernization in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Europe, Jews of the Middle East and the Maghreb, who were generally perceived as the “antithesis of ‘civilization,’”2 were referred to as “Orientals.” But since connotations of the term “oriental” (in Germanorientalisch orasiatisch) often suggested what was considered exotic, sensuous, and sensual, it also could have a positive valence. This is especially pronounced in “Jehuda ben Halevy” with its allusions to the Talmud’s Agadic texts as a fantastic garden akin to that wondrous one of the oriental...

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