Heine's Rabbi von Bacherach

If there is any one thing to be learned from the massive literature about Heine, it is that best results are achieved by close attention to his works as such. Although the Heine student has access to a great deal of external material in the form of his letters and of reports from friends and family, this material is often so confusing, contradictory and downright unreliable that it is often more fruitful to set it aside if not to ignore it altogether. The time and ingenuity which must be spent weighing relative probabilities in the external evidence can be expended to better purpose in examining the texts themselves. Heine's fragment Der Rabbi von Bacherach is a case in point, because much of the interpretation now available is dependent upon the credence given to Heine's assertion that the bulk of the work was destroyed by the fire in his mother's house in 1833. It has been reasonably doubted that there ever was much more to the work than the fragment we now possess. Heine's own progress reports in his letters are persistently vague. On June 25, 1824, he wrote to Moser that one-third was written;l four months later he spoke of some editorial work, but still remarked that kaum 1/3 davon geschrieben ist.2 In March of the following year, he wrote to Ludwig Robert that he had written little and that the Rabbi was noch nicht zur Hilfte fertig.3 For the next eleven months he asked Moser repeatedly for information, but spoke always of the work on the Rabbi as something about to be done, never as something completed.4 In May of 1826 Heine talked about including the Rabbi in Reisebilder II, und zwar sehr beschnitten,5 which at least suggests that there may have been no more of it extant then than there was after the fire. Only at the time of the publication of the fragment in 1840 does Heine allege, in two letters

Art · Art, Aesthetics, and Perception · German Literature and Culture Studies · Linguistic research and analysis · Philosophy

• The Homeless Nation

  Jefferson S Chase•Jewish Culture and History•2003

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• Can Damascus 1840 be Re- oriented ? From Shami historical memory to Sephardi and Mizrahi agency

  Noah S Gerber•Journal of Modern Jewish Studies•2020

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• Heinrich Heine'sThe Rabbi of Bacherachand the Ends of Judaism

  Richard Block•CR The New Centennial Review•2019

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