Folklore and the Location of Jewish Identity: The Case of Heinrich Heine

• In Event: Cultural Mobility in Jewish Literature

Abstract

I seek to explore the fluid boundaries of the German Jewish experience in modernity. My subject is the iconic figure of Heinrich Heine and the seminal role that folklore plays in his multifaceted presentation of self. I argue that Heine uses folklore to reposition Judaism at the core of an emergent German nationalism, citing two works that bookend his career—an early failed novelette, THE RABBI OF BACHERACH, and his masterful late poem, “Princess Sabbath.” In both, universal folkloric tropes take on a particular Jewish voice, staking a claim within the national narrative in which Jewish identity moves to center stage.
In the RABBI, the titular Jewish couple’s flight up the Rhine forms the novel’s structural spine. Seen through Sarah’s hallucinatory trance, the river’s traditional folkloric tropes merge with Jewish tales of Passover and flight to devolve into an eschatological vision of Jewish redemption. The Rhine, at the geographic and ideological heart of a politically fragmented Germany, is claimed then as a mythic and healing JEWISH site. In contrast to the Grimm Brothers’ vision of folklore as purely and uniquely German, Heine’s Rhine epitomizes an unstable, fluid, INTERCULTURAL space where images, traditions, and tales merge, separate, collide, and re-form. It is this space, I argue, that is the space of the German Jew.
Suffused with Arab legend, Hebrew myth, witchcraft, religious ritual, Jewish history and Jewish domestic space, “Princess Sabbath” celebrates intertexuality as a literary and an ideological choice, a woman again at its center. Jack Zipes alerts us to the long history of the iconic witch/fairy in European folklore. Invariably cast as paired opposites, as here, together they incarnate the immense, fearful power of women as mediators of cultural and physical survival. In its intricate interplay of Jewish and non-Jewish elements, “Princess” serves as a ringing challenge to a claimed German cultural hegemony and as a moving statement of the complexities of an evolving German Jewish identity. Within that complex evolution, the ancient art of folklore, with its endless possibility of transmutation, reigns supreme, marker of the Jewish journey through time and space.

author

• Angela Botelho, Graduate Theological Union