personal choice was concerned, and had several potent
arguments in its favour.

Heine was proud of the splendid past of his race;
proud of its vigour and intensity; its indomitable
patience; its reticence in dark days, its exuberance in
happier seasons; proud of its highest achievements and
of its loftiest aspirations. In his heart brooded ever the
Juden-Schmerz, the "great sorrow of Israel." The accu-
mulated bitterness of centuries was often with him:
and a deep resentment against the long tyranny of the
ages wrought havoc with his "emancipated" sympathies.
On the other hand, the narrow-mindedness, the bigotry,
the gross aspirations, the impotent mental indolence,
of the lower Jewish classes in Germany, filled him with
angry impatience, when not actually with disgust. The
Jew-German, the hybrid who clung to all that was worth-
less in Israelitism and imitated or adopted what was
mean and vulgar among the Teuton Gentiles, was his
abhorrence. Like the Mr. McTavish who preferred his
whiskey neat and the water any time that might be
convenient, he liked the genuine Jew but did not relish
the amalgam. From his boyhood he had learned that
to be a Jew probably meant social degradation and
many hardships; that to be a Gentile signified such
lordship over circumstances as might be in the power
of the individual to attain. Father, mother, uncle,
relatives, and friends both Christian and Hebraic, had
persistently pointed out to him that not only worldly
advantage, but duty (that poor, insulted, daily-tortured
word), should impel him to a decision in conformity with
their advice. Heine was much too intelligent not to

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