Harry Heine was born in 1797 in Düsseldorf, Germany. He was the son of Samson Heine and Betty von Geldern, who educated their son in schools run by Jesuits and French refugees. Harry grew up in a culinary Jewish atmosphere: Shabbat dinners and Passover seders. He learned Hebrew only so he could say the blessings at the holidays. His youth had been the most benevolent period for German Jews, thanks to the emancipation Napoleon had brought to Germany.

In 1815, he traveled to Hamburg to visit his uncle Solomon Heine, the city’s most important banker. Heine sent him to study law, first in Bonn and then in Berlin. There, he began to frequent the home of Rahel Varnahagen, a meeting place for many intellectuals, such as Alexander von Humboldt and members of Leopold Zunz’s group, who founded the Society for the Scientific Study of Judaism, with the aim of uniting modern culture with Judaism. In Rahel’s salons, Harry confronted, on the one hand, his yearning for a unified Germany, like any young German, and on the other, the effects of discrimination for being Jewish.

With Napoleon’s defeat, the rights granted them by emancipation were reversed, and Jews lost many of the prerogatives they had achieved. The Society for the Study of Judaism failed, leading several of its members to convert to Christianity, the only path to a professional career in Prussia at that time. The effect this had on Heine caused him to abandon his focus on Jewish themes and instead devote himself to German literature. From 1822 to 1827, he produced a series of poems that practically placed him at the pinnacle of German literature, culminating in his «Buch der Lieder,» one of the most beautiful collections of lyric verse produced by a German poet. His wit was essentially Jewish, derived from the intellectual circles where he moved in Berlin. He began writing a romantic novel, «Rabbi von Bacharach,» on the theme of the persecution of Jews by the Crusaders, but did not finish it.

Since he had to belong to the bar to earn a living, Harry Heine accepted the title, «the ticket to European culture.» It was then that he wrote to his friend Moses Moser: “From what you see, you can imagine that baptism is of no importance to me. I don’t consider it important, even as something symbolic, and that’s why I will dedicate myself even more to achieving the emancipation of the unfortunate members of our people. Nevertheless, I consider it a disgrace and a stain on my honor that, in order to hold a position in Prussia, I had to allow myself to be baptized.”

Harry, now Christian Johann Heinrich Heine, soon saw that his sacrifice didn’t do him much good. In 1827, he wrote “Buch Le Grand,” an apologia for Napoleonic ideas. This closed the door even further to him, so he emigrated to France, where he died in 1856. In his work “Almansor,” he wrote: “This is only the prelude: where they burn books, they will eventually end up burning people.” Heinrich Heine, the great German poet, was baptized but not converted, and he never ceased to be Harry the Jew.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: The Jewish Encyclopedia and “Emancipation” by Michael Goldfarb.