Why should not Börne and Heine have a page in Jewish history? Not only did Jewish blood flow in their veins, but they were imbued with true Jewish spirit.
The lightning darts which they flashed across Germany, now in the colors of the rainbow, again in glaring sheets, were charged with the electricity of Jewish Talmudism. Both Börne and Heine renounced Judaism, but only like combatants who, appropriating the enemy's uniform and colors, can all the more easily strike and annihilate him. Both expressed, with a clearness which left nothing to be desired, how much they cared for the religion of the cross, which they professed. There is, therefore, not the slightest reason why Christianity should count Börne and Heine as members of its flock on account of the idle ceremony through which they passed in church. One of them, in spite of his changing moods, at heart remained truer to Judaism than the Friedländers who constituted themselves its representatives. These two gifted individuals, the pride of Germany, are still greater ornaments to Judaism. To these two Jews, the Germans owe their pure taste, their feeling for truth, and their impulse for liberty—to these two Jews persecuted through life by the abominable "Hep, hep." The mists of the Middle Ages, with which the Germans artificially surrounded themselves in order to obscure the truth, were dispersed by the flashes of wit of Börne and Heine, and light in its purity was restored. They grafted wit and life on German literature, and banished that clumsiness and awkwardness which had aroused the ridicule of the neighboring nations.
In their childish spite against the Jews, the Teutomaniacs, the Rühses and Hundts, asserted that Judaism could not produce a man of forcible character, or gifted with a true sense of art. History at once gave them the lie, and put them to shame. Judaism furnished forth a vigorous apostle of liberty, with language recalling that of the prophets and the Roman Catos, who confounded all the ideas of the Germans concerning law; and it supplied a poet, with artistic sense characterized by a mixture of pathos and cutting irony, who abolished all their hard and fast rules of art. The rich, varied blossoms of the Börne-Heine mind sprang from Jewish soil, and were only watered by European culture. Hence the close connection between them in spite of their dissimilarity and mutual antipathy. Not only was their wit Jewish, but also their love of truth, their aversion to vain display, their hatred of veiling and palliating wrongs, their contempt for official pomp, for obscuring clouds of incense, for ringing of bells, ambrosial organ tones covering slavery, perversion of justice, and oppression. The democratic, freedom-loving spirit, noticeable in Börne more than in Heine, and the analytical, Spinoza-like mode of reasoning, more characteristic of Heine than of Börne, are Jewish to the core. Had they been born Christians, and brought up in the atmosphere of red-tapeism, neither of them would have developed as rescuing powers, which with laughing mien helped to banish deeply-rooted perversions and absurdities. The slaves became deliverers, and saved their enemies from the double yoke of political and social inferiority. The Teutomaniacs almost deserve thanks for having tormented the Jews with their reactionary measures. They roused, if not Heine, certainly Börne, who was inclined to idle speculation, and furnished him with the dart that wounded the enemy.
Ludwig Börne, or Löb Baruch (born in Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1786; died in Paris, 1837), saw the light in the same year when it was extinguished for Mendelssohn, as though history wished to compensate the bereaved Jews for the loss of the sage of Berlin. Börne resembled Mendelssohn in some respects: in his timid, bashful, somewhat awkward bearing, in his self-control, his strength of character, and his strict adherence to an adopted system of morality. Both became the objects of admiration by accident, in spite of themselves. Both drew up for themselves æsthetic rules of conduct without having been trained to do so.
Börne despised the Jews of his time, and spoke of them as if he were their arch-enemy. Jewish antiquity, misrepresented to him in his youth, and still more dimmed by his Berlin and Halle friends, he looked upon as a caricature. The ancient Jews from the day of Abraham until the time of "wealthy Solomon" appeared to him "as if they had wished to parody history." He did not suspect how much his inward self, the truthfulness of his nature, owed to Judaism. The filth of Lucinde, consecrated by Schleiermacher, so disgusted Börne at the age of sixteen, that even a stealthy perusal of the book possessed no charm. The sobriety with which Judaism had endowed him showed Börne the right way of balancing his ideal nature, and avoiding too harsh a discord with the real world. At an early age he became acquainted with a goddess to whom he was devoted in extravagant love, and to whom he remained faithful until his dying breath. "The true nature of virtue may be expressed in a few words. What is virtue? Virtue is bliss. And bliss? It is liberty. We cannot further inquire, what is liberty, for liberty is in accord with reason, in accord with God, and in accord with the unconditional—it explains itself." So thought Börne, and so he wrote in his diary at the age of eighteen; and this idea governed his inner being as long as he lived, and was the motive power of all his actions. Virtue is liberty, and liberty is virtue; they necessitate and produce bliss. Yet Börne limited his love of liberty; he guarded himself from overstepping that narrow boundary at which the pursuit of an ideal turns to madness.
May not his Jewish blood, or at any rate, the sad pages of Jewish history, explain his worship of liberty, which influenced his body and mind? How hard and degrading the absence of liberty was could be felt only by a Jew, in comparison with whom an Indian or a Russian bondsman was a free man. Frankfort, the birth-place of Börne, with its disgraceful laws concerning the residence of Jews, effectually taught him love of liberty. When, only a boy, he was prohibited from walking on the footpath, and had to keep to the dusty road for vehicles, when every ragged Christian beggar, or drunkard, was allowed to call to him, "Mach Mores, Jud!" the thought may have struck him that the absence of liberty was damnation and the presence of liberty salvation. "I, a slave from my birth, love liberty more than you; yea, because I was trained in servitude, I understand liberty better than you!" he often said. His much admired style, his perfect, captivating manner, his profound epigrams, recall the gnomic wisdom of Bible and Talmud. In short, Börne owes his favorable points to Judaism. But he neither was grateful for his gifts, nor did he acknowledge their origin, which he estimated no more than did his Berlin friends. On one occasion, indeed, he said:
"I should not deserve to enjoy the light of the sun, were I, on account of mockery upon which I have always looked with contempt, ungrateful for God's great favor, in having made me at once a German and a Jew: for I know how to value the undeserved fortune of being at the same time a German and a Jew, to be able to strive after all the virtues of the Germans without participating in their faults."
He added, addressing the Germans:—
"I pray you, do not despise my Jews. If only you were as they are, you were better. You have deprived the Jews of air, they have thus been preserved from rottenness; you have strewn the salt of hatred into their hearts, their hearts have thus been kept fresh. You have imprisoned them for the whole long winter in a cellar, and stopped up the cellar door with dung; but you, exposed to the frost, were half frozen to death. When spring arrives, we shall see who will blossom first, Jew or Christian."
Börne did not, however, himself believe in the endurance of the Jews, and he gave utterance to those words only because he was vexed, or in order to vex the Germans. He said at the same time, ironically: "You know how my heart beats for the Jews."