The Arabic-Spanish-Jewish School of Poets: Heinrich Heine’s “Jehudah Ben Halevy” and World Literature

Abstract

This article argues that Heine’s 1851 poem “Jehuda ben Halevy” modifies Goethe’s concept of world literature to make a place within it for the geographically dispersed, multilingual literature of the Jewish diaspora. Heine’s efforts to imagine Jewish literature as world literature resemble those of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, which made explicit the political implications of Goethean world literature by likening the arrival of Jewish literature in a world literary canon to the achievement of civil rights for German Jews. The article argues, however, that Heine goes further than Jewish scholars like Michael Sachs and Leopold Zunz by suggesting that Jewish literature not only deserves attention as world literature, but that its transculturality and multilingualism anticipate it and provide a model for future thought on world literature. Heine’s reflections in “Jehuda ben Halevy” indeed foreshadow contemporary interventions in the study of world literature regarding the status of medieval literature, untranslatability, and multilingualism.