"Heine's life mirrors that of [Rashel Mironovna] Khin's "misfit," being himself a self-hating Jew who mocked his coreligionists and in the end favorably re-assessed his old faith. Despite Heine's traditional Jewish upbringing, his father Samson permitted his wife Betty to remove her son from a private Jewish school and send him to a Catholic lycée. Consequently, Heine's knowledge of Judaism, like Berg's, was fragmentary and confused. Heine's adult apostasy, which he spoke of as an "admission ticket to European culture," brought him no such advantages, and he came to writhe under the stigma of being a convert. Though at times severely critical of Jews and Judaism, he shed much of his hostility as he learned more of Jewish history and culture. The Damascus Affair (1840), which involved a ritual murder libel against the Jews, marked the starting point of Heine's change of heart..."
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Sources
Carole B. Balin, To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia (2000)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Heinrich_Heine
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Heinrich Heine
1797 – 1856
deutscher Dichter, Schriftsteller und Journalist
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