Notes to Chapter 5 { 335ing suggests that wit is a hollow currency (Scheidemünze) in the Jewish nation and that the
great Jewish spirits “rather are pathetic or subtle logicians... such were Spinoza, Mendels-
sohn” (ibid.). Later in the novel the narrator expounds on the deleterious effects of wit and
locates the origins of Jewish wit in the dynamics of Jewish secularization and acculturation
(ibid., 2 : 150 ). The narrator echoes Lessing’s disdain for wit, which he, too, likens to a cheap
currency and even to a kind of “spiritual suicide, which betrays the most profound emo-
tions and turns them into their opposite for momentary attention” (ibid., 2 : 150 – 51 ). The nar-
rator’s characterization of wit as superficial, self-indulgent, and unhealthy accords with Auer-
bach’s opposition to irony and witty self-dramatization in his Europa reviews and elsewhere.
42. Auerbach, Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur, 49.
43. “Die Jeune Allemagne in Deutschland,” 1 : 161 – 2. The pamphlet’s anonymous author
is generally held to be its publisher, Samuel Gottlieb Liesching (see, for example, Jacob Katz,
From Prejudice to Destruction, 180 ; Alfred Estermann, Politische Avantgarde, 2 : 659 ). Paul
Rose (RA, 177 , note 17 ) identifies the author as Paul Pfitzer [sic], brother of Gustav Pfitzer
[sic]. I analyze Gustav Pfizer’s criticism of Heine below.
44. For example: “Young Germany swears by nothing higher than the name Heine, and it
is indeed from this ingenious, yet, unfortunately, just as frivolous as ingenious Heine, that the
whole mischief has issued. A Jew by birth.... He was the first, moved [verlockt] by Jewish
antipathies and French examples, to make the mocking of Christianity and morality, German
nationality and custom [Sitte], the proposals to emancipate the flesh... the fruitful subject
that the Young Germans have since played out in all their variations” (Wolfgang Menzel,
“Die junge Literatur,” 1 : 166 ).
45. For the history and usage of the phrase “Die jeune Allemagne,” see Estermann, Poli-
tische Avantgarde, 2 : 608 , note 5.
46. Auerbach, Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur, 64.
47. Ibid., 66.
48. Ibid., 67 – 68. Of Auerbach’s postscript directed at the pamphlet “Die jeune Alle-
magne in Deutschland,” Paul Rose remarks: “Auerbach had grasped that the main thrust
of Jew-hating had become the charge of egoism, whether financial or moral egoism. And he
believed that this continuation of Jew-hatred was contaminating the very feeling of German-
ness that should eradicate it” (RA, 230 ).
49. Auerbach, Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur, 13.
50. Ibid., 14.
51. Willi Goetschel has demonstrated how Heine had recently subversively unwritten
much of the Hegelian narrative of reason’s progress (unto Hegel) by assigning Spinoza a
central place in intellectual history in his Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in
Deutschland (Spinoza’s Modernity, 253 – 64 ).
52. Another significant immediate response by a Jew to the links Menzel (and the anon-
ymous authors he inspired) posited between Young German morality and politics and
Heine’s Jewishness was by Jakob Weil in 1836. Weil refuted the charge that Heine’s mockery
of Christianity was driven by “Jewish antipathies” by insisting that Heine’s foremost reli-
gious target was Judaism (and Christianity only because of its association with Judaism). In
disassociating Heine from Judaism, Weil emphasizes that Heine is not a Jew but a “panthe-
ist,” a strategy that underscores the double obstacle Heine posed for Auerbach: Heine was
seen as the embodiment of both corrosive “Jewishness” and of “pantheism,” a version of