Born to a Jewish family in Düsseldorf in 1797, Heinrich Heine attended university, became part of a scholarly circle that founded the academic discipline of Jewish studies, converted to Lutheranism (obtaining, in his own words, a “passport to European civilization”), and lived for most of his life in Paris, where he earned his reputation as one of the greatest poets in the German language. Reviewing a new biography of the poet by George Prochnik, along with a new translation of Heine’s Hebrew Melodies—a cycle of Jewish-themed poems—Neil Arditi notes that “no biography of Heine could possibly satisfy the demands of every Heine reader. Arditi writes:
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More about: Conversion, German Jewry, Heinrich Heine, Jewish literature, Judaism, Poetry