hich the teachers of the Church were reviling "the mad Jews, who ought
to be hewn down like dogs," it was possible for a Jew to be a
minnesinger, a minstrel among minstrels, and abundantly accounts for
Suesskind von Trimberg's association with knights and ladies. Suesskind,
then, doubtless journeyed with his brother-poets from castle to castle;
yet our imagination would be leading us astray, were we to accept
literally the words of the enthusiastic historian Graetz, and with him
believe that "on vine-clad hills, seated in the circle of noble knights
and fair dames, a beaker of wine at his side, his lyre in his hand, he
sang his polished verses of love's joys and trials, love's hopes and
fears, and then awaited the largesses that bought his daily bread."[46]

Suesskind's poems are not at all like the joyous, rollicking songs his
mates carolled forth; they are sad and serious, tender and chaste. Of
love there is not a word. A minnesinger and a Jew--irreconcilable
opposites! A minnesinger must be a knight wooing his lady-love, whose
colors he wears at the tournaments, and for whose sake he undertakes a
pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The Jew's minstrelsy is a lament for Zion.

In fact what is _Minne_--this service of love? Is it not at bottom the
cult of the Virgin Mary? Is it not, in a subtle, mysterious way, a phase
of Christianity itself? How could it have appealed to the Jew Suesskind?
True, the Jews, too, have an ideal of love in the "Song of Songs": "Lo,
thou art beautiful, my beloved!" it says, but our old sages took the
beloved to be the Synagogue. Of this love Princess Sabbath is the ideal,
and the passion of the "Song of Songs" is separated from German _Minne_
by the great gap between the soul life of the Semite and that of the
Christian German. Unbridled sensuousness surges through the songs rising
to the chambers of noble ladies. Kabbalistic passion glows in the
mysterious love of the Jew. The German minstrel sings of love's
sweetness and pain, of summer and its delights, of winter and its woes,
now of joy and happiness, again of ill-starred fortunes. And what is the
burden of the exiled Hebrew's song? Mysterious allusions, hidden in a
tangle of highly polished, artificial, slow-moving rhymes, glorify, not
a sweet womanly presence, but a fleeting vision, a shadow, whose elusive
charms infatuated the poet in his dreams. Bright, joyous, blithe,
unmeasured is the one; serious, gloomy, chaste, gentle, the other.

Yet