HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

The Wandering Jew
majority of Enghsh Jews, however, strenuously
objected to Jewish nationalism and wished to be,
above all. Englishmen, Englishmen of the Jewish
faith. For that reason, the Jews of the British Empire
who attended the Peace Conference at Versailles
fought against the recognition of Jews anywhere
in the world as a separate nationality and
refused to concur in the request for minority rights
for their co-religionists of Eastern Europe. The
English Jews were not compatriots of Marx,
Heine, or Trotzky, and rejected any moral association
with these revolutionaries. Judaism, as a religion,
should not be judged by its weaker adherents
or by the worst of its renegades but by its
noblest sons from Moses Maimonides in the twelfth
century to Moses Montefiore in the nineteenth century.
The mild-mannered, almost apologetic, reply
again illustrated that the conflict over Heine, the
Jew, failed to assume in England the ferocious dimensions
that it assumed on the Continent for a
century and more. Although the antisemitic approach
to the poet numbered Carlyle and the Quarterly
Review among its adherents, it wis never
dominant. Nor should one exaggerate the philo-
Semitic approach. Admiration for Heine's Jc\\ ish
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