"No casuistess in the Gay Science was she, no lady _doctrinaire_, who delivered her oracles in the judgment-chamber of a Court of Love.[178] "She, whom the Rabbi loved, was a woe-begone poor darling, a mourning picture of desolation ... and her name was Jerusalem." Jehuda ben Halevy, like the Crusaders, makes his pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and there, amid the ruins, sings a song of Sion which has become famous among his people:-- "That lay of pearled tears is the wide-famed Lament, which is sung in all the scattered tents of Jacob throughout the world. "On the ninth day of the month which is called Ab, on the anniversary of Jerusalem's destruction by Titus Vespasianus. "Yes, that is the song of Sion, which Jehuda ben Halevy sang with his dying breath amid the holy ruins of Jerusalem. "Barefoot, and in penitential weeds, he sat there upon the fragment of a fallen column; down to his breast fell, "Like a gray forest, his hair; and cast a weird shadow on the face which looked out through it,--his troubled pale face, with the spiritual eyes. "So he sat and sang, like unto a seer out of the foretime to look upon; Jeremiah, the Ancient, seemed to have risen out of his grave. "But a bold Saracen came riding that way, aloft on his barb, lolling in his saddle, and brandishing a naked javelin; "Into the breast of the poor singer he plunged his deadly shaft, and shot away like a winged shadow. "Quietly flowed the Rabbi's life-blood, quietly he sang his song to an end; and his last dying sigh was Jerusalem!" But, most of all, Heine shows us this side in a strange poem describing a public dispute, before King Pedro and his Court, between a Jewish and a Christian champion, on the merits of their respective faiths. In the strain of the Jew all the fierceness of the old Hebrew genius, all its rigid defiant Monotheism, appear:-- "Our God has not died like a poor innocent lamb for mankind; he is no gushing philanthropist, no declaimer. "Our God is not love, caressing is not his line; but he is a God of thunder, and he is a God of revenge. "The lightnings of his wrath strike inexorably every sinner, and the sins of the fathers are often visited upon their remote posterity. "Our God, he is alive, and in his hall of heaven he goes on existing away, throughout all the eternities. "Our God, too, is a God in robust health, no myth, pale and thin as sacrificial wafers, or as shadows by Cocytus. "Our God is strong. In his hand he upholds sun, moon, and stars; thrones break, nations reel to and fro, when he knits his forehead. "Our God loves music, the voice of the harp and the song of feasting; but the sound of church-bells he hates, as he hates the grunting of pigs."[179]