ABSTRACT
In Heinrich Heine's story, Abraham is characterized by his youth, with his parents deceased, and more the exponent of an epigonal existence than his biblical equivalent, the founding father of a new people. Heine's Abraham appears more like the end point rather than the beginning and source of origin of the Jewish people. In an underhanded way, Heine's story seems to suggest that it might be the hermeneutically vicious circle of epigonal application that leads to the rabbi's failure as far as his desire for biblical succession reduced to mere imitation and repetition is concerned. Yet Heine's post-Romantic take casts the fragment as the place holder of a totality that exists only thanks to the rupture and discontinuity, the interpretative play that reconstitutes its continuity through the emancipatory move of creatively imaginative reappropriation. The role of Don Isaac assumes particular significance if Heine's employment of the Abarbanel family is given fuller attention.
