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 from the perspective of a nineteenth-century German poet who was born a Jew but who thought it necessary to pay...