"If he does it out of conviction, he is a fool; if out of hypocrisy, he is a rascal."
It also vexed him that his opponents would not forget his Jewish origin, but, as in the case of Börne, reminded him of it at every opportunity. To appease his conscientious scruples in a measure, he continued to work at the romance, "The Rabbi of Bacharach." Through its medium he desired to make known his secret attachment to the Jews, and he wished to publish it in spite of the advice of his friend Moser, who was not blind to the glaring contradiction between thought and act, and the enmity it would necessarily draw down upon him.
Heine was not, however, so constituted as to allow remorse to trouble him for any length of time. Once having turned his back upon Judaism, he sought to lull his conscience. His pleasure-seeking after his conversion was only a means to this end. Heine ingeniously labored to discover faults in the Jews and Judaism, and thus to justify himself. In this impulse originated his hostile sallies against Judaism—that it is, for instance, "not a religion, but a misfortune." Afterwards, he sought to make the dividing line between Judaism and Christianity very faint; he characterized both faiths as self-torturing, monkish, and Nazarite; he vilified them equally, disregarded both, and acknowledged a Hellenistic religion of the "revival of the flesh." Nevertheless, it may be said that, in bright moments, his old love of Judaism revived, and he again showed his thoughtful conception of it. It annoyed Heine that Shakespeare should be reckoned among the Jew-baiters because he had created "Shylock," and he employed his brilliant eloquence to remove this blemish from the Jews and Shakespeare.
"Did Shakespeare aim at depicting a Jewess in Jessica? Certainly not. He portrayed only a daughter of Eve, one of those pretty birds who, as soon as they are fledged, flutter forth from the home-nest to their lovers.... In Jessica there is especially noticeable a certain timid shame which she cannot overcome in donning male garments. In this trait one may, perhaps, recognize the modesty characteristic of her race, which endows its daughters with so marvelous a charm. The chastity of the Jews is probably the consequence of the aversion which they felt to Oriental sensuality and the immoral worship which flourished among their neighbors, the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, and has continued, changing only its outward form, to the present day. The Jews are a chaste, abstemious, so to speak, an abstract people, and in purity of morals, approach the German nations.... The Greeks and Romans were devoted to the soil ... the later Northern immigrants to the person of their chieftains ... whilst the Jews from ancient times were attached to the law, to abstract thought, like our modern cosmopolitan Republicans ... liberty and equality were their religion."
Advanced in years, when a severe nervous affliction had still more cleared the mirror of his thoughts, Heine became conscious of the superiority of morality based upon piety over beauty, and returned with his whole heart to the love of his youth, his reverence for Judaism. His "Confessions" (1853–54) are inspired hymns to Jewish history and the Jewish people, and it is apparent that they are sincere. He was always enthusiastic on behalf of the Bible.
"The Jews may console themselves for the loss of Jerusalem and the Ark of the Covenant; this loss is but trifling when compared with the Bible, the indestructible treasure which they have saved.... I owe the re-awakening of my religious feelings to that Holy Book (the Bible), and it has become for me equally the source of salvation and the object of most ardent admiration.... I think I may flatter myself that I comprehend the character of Moses as revealed in the first portion of the sacred book (of the Old Testament). I consider his a most imposing figure. What a giant form! How small Sinai appears when Moses stands upon it! This mountain is only the pedestal for the feet of the man, whose head reaches up to the heavens, where he speaks with God.... Formerly, I felt no especial affection for Moses, probably because the Hellenic spirit was paramount in me, and I could not pardon the legislator of the Jews his hatred against the plastic arts. I did not see that, notwithstanding his hostility to art, Moses was a great artist, and possessed the true artistic spirit! But this spirit was directed by him, as by his Egyptian compatriots, to colossal and indestructible undertakings.... He built human pyramids, carved human obelisks; he took a poor shepherd family and created a nation from it, a great, eternal, holy people, a people of God, destined to outlive the centuries, and to serve as a pattern to all other nations, even as a prototype to the whole of mankind: he created Israel.... As of the artist, so also I have not always spoken with sufficient respect of his work, the Jews.... The history of the Middle Ages, and even of other times, seldom inscribed in its annals the names of these knights of the holy spirit, because they usually fought with closed visor. The deeds of the Jews, as well as their peculiar character, are little known to the world. One thinks one knows them, because their beards are visible, but nothing else has come in view; and now, as in the Middle Ages, they are a profound mystery, which may perhaps be revealed on the day of which the prophet speaks....
"Yes, to the Jews, to whom the world owes its God, it also owes His Word, the Bible; they saved it from the wreck of the Roman Empire, and in the frantic scramble of migrating tribes they preserved the precious book, until Protestantism sought it with them, translated the discovered work into the vernacular, and disseminated it through the whole world.... In the North of Europe and America, the influence of Palestine has grown to be so great, that one can fancy oneself transplanted into the midst of Jews.... I will not speak of most of the new communities of the United States where the life of the Old Testament is pedantically imitated ... but the caricature will not disappear, and the real, imperishable, and true portion, namely, the morality of ancient Judaism, will also flourish in those countries as luxuriantly as in former days on the banks of the Jordan and upon the heights of Lebanon. No palms are needed for man to be good; and to be good is better than to be beautiful.... Judæa has always appeared to me as a piece of the West lost in the East. In fact, with its spiritual belief, its severe, pure, almost ascetic morals, its abstract inner life, this land and its people have ever formed a remarkable contrast to the surrounding countries and their inhabitants, who paid homage to the most licentious and infamous nature cults, and dissipated their existence in bacchanalian orgies. Israel piously sat beneath its fig-tree, and sang the praise of the invisible God, and practised virtue and justice; whilst in the temples of Babylon, Nineveh, Sidon, and Tyre, sanguinary and immoral rites were celebrated, the description of which even now strikes us with horror. When one thinks of its surroundings, this early greatness of Israel cannot be sufficiently admired. Of Israel's love of liberty, whilst slavery was justified not alone in its immediate vicinity but by all the nations of antiquity, even by philosophers—of this I would rather not speak, in order to avoid compromising the Bible with our present rulers.... Instead of wrestling with the impossible, instead of foolishly decreeing the abolition of property, Moses strove to render it moral; he endeavored to bring the possession of property into harmony with morality, with the law of reason, and this he effected by the institution of the Jubilee, when all alienated hereditary property, which amongst an agricultural people was land, reverted to the original owners, no matter how they had lost possession thereof. This ordinance offers a most decided contrast to the law of prescription among the Romans.... Moses did not wish to abolish the holding of property; his plan was that every one should possess some land, that no one should become a slave, with slavish propensities, through poverty, for freedom was the ultimate aim of the great emancipator, and this desire breathes through all his laws dealing with pauperism. He detested slavery immoderately, almost fiercely.... If a slave, however, freed by law, refused to leave the house of his master, Moses commanded that the incorrigible rascal be nailed by his ear to the door-post of his master's house.... O Moses, our teacher, Moshe Rabbenu, exalted enemy of serfdom, I pray thee furnish me with hammer and nails, that I may nail our willing slaves, in their liveries of black and red and gold, by their long ears to the Brandenburg Gate."
The spirit of the Jewish law and of Jewish history had indeed come upon this erratic son of Israel, and revealed to him what few of his predecessors had thoroughly grasped, and none had so luminously delineated. Heine appreciated equally the profound wisdom displayed in the laws and the intellectual contests in the centuries of Jewish history, as also the precious ore of poetry, which streamed forth from the greatest Jewish poet of the Middle Ages. Scarcely had Michael Sachs, the preacher with the Psalmist soul and prophetic speech, unveiled the hidden beauties of the "Religious Poetry of the Jews in Spain," and more especially the almost forgotten glory of the poet Jehudah Halevi Alhassan, before Heine, deeply moved, set up a memorial to this singer and brother in race and art. With his magic wand he invoked the shade of Jehudah Halevi from the grave, and depicted him in his complete ideality and the full glow of his inspiration.
Until his last breath the struggle continued within Heine's breast between the two great principles in the construction of the world's history, the pure morality of Judaism and the symmetrical beauty of Hellenism, both of which he reverenced, but was unable to reconcile:—
"The contrasts are boldly paired,
Love of pleasure in the Greek, and the thought of God in the Judæan,