he death
of the Babylonian tyrant, snatched away at night for desecrating the
holy Temple vessels. The quoted words are the refrain of the hymn, which
forms part of the Haggada, the curious medley of legends and songs,
recited by pious Jews at the _Seder_." Ay, the Passover celebration,
the _Seder_, remained in the poet's memory till the day of his death. He
describes it still later in one of his finest works:[97] "Sweetly sad,
joyous, earnest, sportive, and elfishly mysterious is that evening
service, and the traditional chant with which the Haggada is recited by
the head of the family, the listeners sometimes joining in as a chorus,
is thrillingly tender, soothing as a mother's lullaby, yet impetuous and
inspiring, so that Jews who long have drifted from the faith of their
fathers, and have been pursuing the joys and dignities of the stranger,
even they are stirred in their inmost parts when the old, familiar
Passover sounds chance to fall upon their ears."

My esteemed friend Rabbi Dr. Frank of Cologne has in his possession a
Haggada, admirably illustrated, an heirloom at one time of the Van
Geldern family, and it is not improbable that it was out of this
artistic book that Heinrich Heine asked the _Mah nishtannah_, the
traditional question of the _Seder_.

Heine left home very young, and everybody knows that he was apprenticed
to a merchant at Frankfort, and that his uncle Solomon's kindness
enabled him to devote himself to jurisprudence. But this, of important
bearing on our subject, is not a matter of common knowledge: _Always and
everywhere, especially when he had least intercourse with Jews, Jewish
elements appear most prominently in Heine's life._

A merry, light-hearted student, he arrived in Berlin in 1821. A curious
spectacle is presented by the Jewish Berlin of the day, dominated by the
_salons_, and the women whose tact and scintillating wit made them the
very centre of general society. The traditions of Rahel Levin, Henriette
Herz, and other clever women, still held sway. But the state frustrated
every attempt to introduce reforms into Judaism. Two great parties
opposed each other more implacably than ever, the one clutching the old,
the other yearning for the new. Out of the breach, salvation was in time
to sprout. In the first quarter of our century, more than three-fourths
of the Jewish population of Berlin embraced the ruling faith. This was
the new, seditious element with which young Heine was thro