No account of Heine is complete which does not notice the Jewish element in him.  His race he treated with the same freedom with which he treated everything else, but he derived a great force from it, and no one knew this better than he himself.  He has excellently pointed out how in the sixteenth century there was a double renascence,—­a Hellenic renascence and a Hebrew renascence—­and how both have been great powers ever since.  He himself had in him both the spirit of Greece and the spirit of Judaea; both these spirits reach the infinite, which is the true goal of all poetry and all art,—­the Greek spirit by beauty, the Hebrew spirit by sublimity.  By his perfection of literary form, by his love of clearness, by his love of beauty, Heine is Greek; by his intensity, by his untamableness, by his “longing which cannot be uttered,"[174] he is Hebrew.  Yet what Hebrew ever treated the things of the Hebrews like this?—­“There lives at Hamburg, in a one-roomed lodging in the Baker’s Broad Walk, a man whose name is Moses Lump; all the week he goes about in wind and rain, with his pack on his back, to earn his few shillings; but when on Friday evening he comes home, he finds the candlestick with seven candles lighted, and the table covered with a fair white cloth, and he puts away from him his pack and his cares, and he sits down to table with his squinting wife and yet more squinting daughter, and eats fish with them, fish which has been dressed in beautiful white garlic sauce, sings therewith the grandest psalms of King David, rejoices with his whole heart over the deliverance of the children of Israel out of Egypt, rejoices, too, that all the wicked ones who have done the children of Israel hurt, have ended by taking themselves off; that King Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Haman, Antiochus, Titus, and all such people, are well dead, while he, Moses Lump, is yet alive, and eating fish with wife and daughter; and I can tell you, Doctor, the fish is delicate and the man is happy, he has no call to torment himself about culture, he sits contented in his religion and in his green bedgown, like Diogenes in his tub, he contemplates with satisfaction his candles, which he on no account will snuff for himself; and I can tell you, if the candles burn a little dim, and the snuffers-woman, whose business it is to snuff them, is not at hand, and Rothschild the Great were at that moment to come in, with all his brokers, bill discounters, agents, and chief clerks, with whom he conquers the world, and Rothschild were to say:  ’Moses Lump, ask of me what favor you will, and it shall be granted you’;—­Doctor, I am convinced, Moses Lump would quietly answer:  ’Snuff me those candles!’ and Rothschild the Great would exclaim with admiration:  ‘If I were not Rothschild, I would be Moses Lump.’"[175]

There Heine shows us his own people by its comic side; in the poem of the Princess Sabbath[176] he shows it to us by a more serious side.  The Princess Sabbath, “the tranquil Princess, pearl and flower of all beauty, fair as the Queen of Sheba, Solomon’s bosom friend, that blue stocking from Ethiopia, who wanted to shine by her esprit, and with her wise riddles made herself in the long run a bore” (with Heine the sarcastic turn is never far off), this princess has for her betrothed a prince whom sorcery has transformed into an animal of lower race, the Prince Israel.