A study of great Jewish names in modern literature has impressed me with the fact that every Jewish man of letters has attained his fame by virtue of qualities that are essentially Jewish. In other words, we cannot fully understand the work of even modern Jewish literary men unless we know the fundamental qualities of Jewish genius. To illustrate what is meant by this assertion, we may consider briefly the work of three nineteenth century Jewish authors--Heine, Beaconsfield, and Zangwill. These men are apparently wholly different; and yet they attained literary eminence through qualities or mind and heart which we have learned to associate with the race from which they sprang. _Heinrich Heine: A Jew at Heart_ Heinrich Heine is the one writer of the first rank that Germany can boast between the death of Goethe in 1832 and the advent of the younger generation of dramatists, Sudermann, Hauptmann, and the rest, sixty years later. To free himself from such a limitation as his Jewish birth seemed to him to be, and with the more specific object, it is said, of securing a government position in Prussia, Heine allowed himself to become a convert to Christianity. "Judaism," he said, "is not a religion; it is a misfortune." His conversion, however, failed to profit him. He lost the fellowship of his own people, and was contemptuously called "the Jew" by his enemies. In a sense, the designation was entirely just. A Jew at heart Heine remained to the day of his death. On his death bed, speaking of the Jews he said: "Queer people this! Downtrodden for thousands of years, weeping always, suffering always, abandoned always by its God, yet clinging to him tenaciously, loyally, as no other under the sun. Oh, if martyrdom, patience, and faith in spite of trial can confer a patent of nobility, then this people is noble beyond any other. It would have been absurd and petty if, as people accuse me, I had been ashamed of being a Jew."