The following was from the introduction I’m writing with Alex Gourevitch for a new translation of Marx’s On the Jewish Question. I say was because I just had to cut it. It doesn’t work. But I thought I’d share it here, as a public service. If you’re ever the victim of antisemitic insults and want to know what to do, check out how a master rhetorician—Heinrich Heine—dealt with that kind of abuse, though please don’t use the homophobia he does in response!

Heine forges one last weapon for his comic arsenal, which later writers like Kraus and Jewish American comedians will borrow and refine. At the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, the Jewish comedian Lewis Black describes the weapon thus: “What you think is criticism is nothing compared to the self-loathing I can bring to the table.” Faced with an antisemite’s ridicule, his making barbs about your being Jewish, turn the tables on him. Make his antisemitism into a contest or a game and see who plays it better. Show by your performance of truly outrageous antisemitism how bad he is at his. Show how superior a player, a performer, and ultimately a human being who can step outside himself, you are.

Heine tested this weapon in his infamous duel of words with August von Platen, a minor poet and middling playwright, and a gay, poor, aristocrat, who was hanging on to the thinnest branch of a once-solid family tree. Heine criticized Platen’s talent, and Platen responded with a full-length play, performed in Munich, that featured “witless word-plays” on Heine’s being Jewish. The humiliated Heine responded with a vicious homophobic attack on Platen’s sexuality and poetry—and a scathing skewering of his antisemitism. Heine recites a litany of antisemitic insults that appear in Platen’s play: “After spending several hours writing love songs, I sit myself down and hasten to circumcise ducats.” “On the Sabbath I huddle with long-bearded muttering Jews and sing the Talmud.” “On the eve of Easter I slaughter an underage Christian and, out of malice, always select a miserable writer to sacrifice.” In short, “I’m a real Jew.”

Heine pauses to catch his breath, then tells us that none of these insults in fact appear in Platen’s play. He’s made them all up. But that’s what’s wrong with the play: Heine had no choice but to invent antisemitic insults because Platen is not a sufficiently skilled antisemite to make them up on his own. He has “the best of motives”—that is, Platen’s an antisemite through and through—but he doesn’t “know how to make use of them.” If he were more gifted, if he were more talented, he’d come up with better digs. But he’s not, so he can’t, leaving Heine with his final complaint: “It pains me deeply to see how the poor Count lets slip every opportunity for a good joke!”