Heine, Heinrich (Vol. 54) - S. S. Prawer (essay date 1983)
S. S. Prawer (essay date 1983)
SOURCE: "Prologue: A Comet Lights the Diaspora," in Heine's Jewish Comedy: A Study of His Portraits of Jews and Judaism, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1983, pp. 1-43.
[In the following excerpt, Prawer discusses Heine's life, especially his relationship with Eduard Gans, focusing on his changing attitudes toward Judaism.]
Heine's work is full of verbal snapshots, portraits, and caricatures of Jews actual and imagined, historical and contemporary, famous and obscure, single and in groups, ex-Jews, and Jews who remained within the community to which their fathers had belonged. . . . The gallery . . . depicts peddlers, old clothes men, pawnbrokers, corn-cutters, shopkeepers, brokers, speculators of various kinds, bankers, scholars, rabbis, synagogue cantors and beadles, university students, poets, musicians, painters, impresarios, journalists, society hostesses, and Jews in many other walks of life—all seen...
[The entire page is 16789 words long]
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