It was in the last month of the last year of the eighteenth century, in the little town of Düsseldorf in South Germany, that their eldest son Heinrich, or Harry as he seems to have been called in the family circle, was born unto Samson Heine, dealer in cloth, and Betty his wife. That eighteenth century had been but a dreary one for the Jews of Europe. It set in darkness on Heine’s cradle, and on his ‘mattress grave,’ some fifty years later, the dawn of nineteenth century civilisation, for them, had scarcely broken. ‘The heaviest burden that men can lay upon us,’ wrote Spinoza, ‘is not that they persecute us with their hatred and scorn, but it is by the planting of hatred and scorn in our souls. That is what does not let us breathe freely or see clearly.’ This subtlest effect of the poison of persecution seemed to have entered the Jewish system. Warned off from the highroads of life, and shunned for shambling along its bye-paths, the banned and persecuted race, looking out on the world from their ghettoes, had grown to see most things in false perspective. Self loomed large on their blank horizon, and gold shone more golden in the gloom. God the Father, whose service demanded such daily sacrifice, had lost something of that divinest attribute; men, our brothers, could the words have borne any but a ‘tribal’ sound? Still, in those dim, dream-peopled ghettoes, where visions of the absent, the distant, and the past must have come to further perplex and confuse the present, one actuality seems to have been grasped among the shadows, one ideal attained amid all the grim realities of that most miserable time. Home life and family affection had a sacredness for the worst of these poor sordid Jews in a sense which, to the best of those sottish little German potentates who so conscientiously despised them, would have been unmeaning. Maidens were honourably wed, and wives honoured and children cherished in those wretched Judenstrassen, where ‘the houses look as if they could tell sorrowful stories,’ after a fashion quite unknown at any, save the most exceptional, of the numerous coarse, corrupt, and ludicrously consequential little courts which were, at that period, representative of German culture. The marriage of Heine’s parents had been one of those faithful unions, under superficially unequal conditions, for which Jews seem to have a genius. It had been something of the old story, ‘she was beautiful, and he fell in love’; she, pretty, piquant, cultivated, and the daughter of a physician of some local standing; he, just a respectable member of a respectable trading family, and ordinary all round, save for the distinction of one rich relative, a banker brother at Hamburg.