To be a Jew in Germany in the early part of the present century meant, if not actual physical persecution, a political and social one of the crudest kind for all whose intellectual and spiritual necessities carried them beyond the barriers imposed by legislation and by society. It is true that in Berlin there had gathered a brilliant circle of cultivated Israelites who had risen to the highest intellectual attainments; but they were excluded, as well as their less-enlightened brethren, from all national existence, and even from all the learned professions except that of medicine. They had formed, what was called a "Society for the Promotion of Culture and Progress among the Jews," in which Heine himself was at one time much interested, but after his baptism he seems to have mingled as little as possible with his own people. Heine's conversion to Christianity--or rather his baptism, for the word "conversion" cannot be applied to the renunciation of one form of religious dogma and the adoption of another for purely material ends--has been the cause of more controversy than any other incident of his life, and has always been used as a main stronghold and point of attack by his enemies. There is not much defence to offer for the act, for Heine, in spite of a Voltairean scorn of dogma and creed, possessed a deep tinge of religious feeling, and that he felt keenly the humiliation of his position--to use no harsher term--can be seen by the following expression regarding it. "Is it not foolish?" he writes to a friend. "I am no sooner baptized than I am cried down as a Jew: I am now hated by Jew and Christian alike." And again, in speaking of another converted Jew who is engaged in preaching his newly-acquired doctrine: "If he does this from conviction, he is a fool: if he does it from hypocritical motives, he is worse. I shall not cease to love Gans, but I confess I had far rather have learned instead of this that he had stolen silver spoons. That you, dear Moser," he continues, "should think as Gans does I cannot believe, although assured. I should be very sorry if my own baptism should appear to you in any favorable light. I assure you if the laws permitted the stealing of silver spoons I should not have been baptized." The jest has its pathos as well as its wit, for Heine's pecuniary prospects were always precarious, and the fatal baptism, which only brought upon him the pity and contempt of his friends and doubled the insults of his enemies, defeated its own ends and contributed nothing to his material needs.