Better a Scholar Than a Prophet: Studies on the Creation of Jewish Studies (Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts, 81) 9783161592973, 9783161592980, 3161592972

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Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts 81 In collaboration with

Michael Brenner · Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky · Sander Gilman Raphael Gross · Daniel Jütte · Miriam Rürup Stefanie Schüler-Springorum · Daniel Wildmann (managing) edited by the

Leo Baeck Institute London

Ismar Schorsch

“Better a Scholar than a Prophet” Studies on the Creation of Jewish Studies

Mohr Siebeck

Ismar Schorsch, born 1935; 1957 B.A., Ursinus College; 1961 M.A., Columbia University; 1962, Rabbinic Ordination, Jewish Theological Seminary; 1969 Ph.D in History, Columbia University; 1986–2006 chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York; 1991– 2010 president of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York; currently holds the titles chancellor emeritus and Herman Abramowitz distinguished service professor of Jewish History.

ISBN 978-3-16-159297-3 / eISBN 978-3-16-159298-0 DOI 10.1628/978-3-16-159298-0 ISSN 0459-097X / eISSN 2569-4383 (Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts) The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Mohr Siebeck Tübingen. www.mohrsiebeck.com This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was printed on non-aging paper and bound by Hubert & Co. in Göttingen. The cover was designed by Uli Gleis in Tübingen. Image: Alexander Marx, Librarian and Professor of Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary (1903–1953), a student of Moritz Steinschneider and creator of the Seminary᾿s renowned library. Courtesy of the Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary, New York. Printed in Germany.

For Jonathan, Rebecca and Naomi in whose precious lives the story continues

Preface The compilation of this volume of essays published by me since I stepped down as chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2006 coincides with my 50th year at the Seminary. At the insistence of Prof. Gerson D. Cohen, my Doktorvater and role model, I returned from Columbia in 1970 after having earned my doctorate, and where I had already started teaching, never to leave. From that perch I was able to observe and contribute to the remarkable explosion of Jewish studies in the colleges and universities across America and beyond. I remember vividly the early days of the Association of Jewish Studies when our hopes did not extend beyond imagining but one Jewish generalist at a school. Today at many a university there is in fact a cluster of Jewish specialists covering a panoply of Jewish subfields and most astonishing of all, Germany with the institutionalization and funding of Jewish studies in its universities has become the third dominant center for Jewish scholarship behind Israel and America. Wissenschaft des Judentums has returned to the land of its origins, and German is once again an indispensable language of Jewish studies, not to read what was published before 1939, but what is coming out of Germany today. In that half-century the Seminary became my Heimat as well as my home. It provided me with the space and stability, the library and resources, the colleagues and students and the challenges and stimulation to grow inwardly and outwardly. Above all, it encompassed my determination to live in two worlds, one enchanted by the ritual, values and literature of traditional Judaism and the other invigorated by the bracing power of critical scholarship. Since its founding the Seminary has nurtured an ethos of two truths, cherishing equally the inspiration that comes by way of poetry as well as the knowledge mediated through prose. A single lens was never sufficient for it to exhaust the meaning of a text or the nature of historical reality. Quintessentially an interpretive culture, Judaism read Torah for peshat and derash, for the plain meaning of a text and for its imaginative reworking. And it was that undogmatic and appreciative mindset which enabled the Seminary faculty time and again to advance the fields of Talmud, Bible, Jewish theology, medieval Hebrew poetry and Jewish literature with groundbreaking scholarship. A culture of mutual respect gave rise to an interactive relationship between sacred texts and critical scholarship that valorized a quest for understanding.

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That precious culture became my Heimat because I embraced it intellectually, religiously and administratively. For twenty years the Seminary even called upon me as chancellor to bear the responsibility to sustain, enrich and disseminate the ethos it embodied. Toward that end I steadfastly wrote a Torah comment on the weekly parasha in a religious voice that never betrayed my scholarly integrity. Canon Without Closure, a selection of those comments that came out in 2007, gives ample evidence that faith and critical scholarship are not only compatible but mutually fructifying. When I retired from the chancellorship, I eagerly resumed full-time scholarship still fascinated by the turn to Jewish history in the nineteenth century pioneered largely by German Jews. My years in administration had matured my thinking and improved my writing without dulling my research tools. I was drawn to the dramatic eruption of new knowledge and the urgent need for contextualization that together dictated an ever deeper understanding of the history of its sacred texts. When I knew less, I had imagined writing the narrative history of that revolution of the mind. But even now the languages required, the fields to master and the interplay to unravel far exceed my competence. What this volume does offer is a rare glimpse of the whole: the erosion of the hegemony of talmudic study in Ashkenaz, the emergence of subfields like midrash and medieval liturgical poetry, the turn to the East and the lure of Islam and early efforts at the incorporation of biblical criticism into the purview of Jewish studies. Wissenschaft des Judentums was of twofold importance to the destiny of German Jewry: it complemented its hard-fought outward political emancipation with a bitterly contested internal intellectual emancipation and it overtly challenged the dominant Christian theological construct of supersession. Ultimately, the failure to dislodge that deeply engrained construct from the vaunted “value-free” institution of the German university would deprive German Jewry of the cultural respect it sorely needed to make a fragile political and social integration a lasting achievement. Erev Shavuot 5780 (May 28, 2020)

Ismar Schorsch

Table of Contents Preface ............................................................................................................ VII

Part I: Introduction Identity-Formations in Conflict: The Emergence of Jewish Studies in PostNapoleonic Germany .......................................................................................... 3

Part II: Wissenschaft Matters 1. Catalogues and Critical Scholarship: The Fate of Jewish Collections in Nineteenth-Century Germany ................................................................. 29 2. Wives and Wissenschaft: The Domestic Seedbed of Critical Scholarship ..................................................................................... 40 3. Moritz Steinschneider on the Future of Judaism after Emancipation .......... 57 4. Schechter’s Indebtedness to Zunz ............................................................... 66 5. Schechter’s Seminary: Polarities in Balance ............................................... 73 6. Scholem on Zunz: An Egregious Misreading.............................................. 95 7. Missing in Translation: The Fate of the Talmud in the Struggle for Equality and Integration in Germany ........................................................ 112 8. Unity amid Disunity: The Emergence of the German-Jewish Einheitsgemeinde ...................................................................................... 128

Part III: The Hebrew Bible 9. Leopold Zunz on the Hebrew Bible ......................................................... 137 10. In the Shadow of Wellhausen: Heinrich Graetz as a Biblical Critic ........ 158 11. Coming to Terms with Biblical Criticism ................................................ 179

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Part IV: Orientalism 12. Converging Cognates: The Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in Nineteenth Century Germany ............................................................... 199 13. Moritz Steinschneider: The Vision Beyond the Books ............................ 237 14. Beyond the Classroom: The Enduring Relationship between Heinrich L. Fleischer and Ignaz Goldziher............................................... 267 List of First Publications ................................................................................. 303 Index of Modern Authors ................................................................................ 305 Index of Subjects ............................................................................................. 311

Part I

Introduction

Identity-Formations in Conflict: The Emergence of Jewish Studies in Post-Napoleonic Germany Unlike the pioneers of critical scholarship in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the founders of Wissenschaft des Judentums in Germany were not autodidacts. Yet given the formidable obstacles they had to overcome, their turn to history was a remarkable intellectual achievement. To be sure, they gained their formal education in German gymnasiums and universities. But few career paths awaited them upon graduation and money to publish was always hard to come by. Moreover, their scholarship was cultivated entirely outside the framework of the university. That esteemed institution of scholarly preeminence in nineteenth-century Germany never became a haven for Jewish scholarship, neither in the early stages of its evolution nor later as a locus for its pursuit. Despite its professed ethos of value free scholarship, the German university remained a Protestant institution that trained the clergy for the Evangelical Church, studied the Hebrew Bible from a Christian perspective and exhibited complete academic indifference to the history and culture of post-biblical Judaism, even as it excluded all scholars of Jewish studies and nearly all other Jews with expertise in other disciplines from the ranks of its faculty. In short, the university was not immune to the hostility to Jews and Judaism that pervaded German society, a deep-seated animosity that impeded the acquisition of full emancipation for Jews until 1871 and thereafter thwarted the extension of equality to them as dictated by law in many sectors of public employment and German society.1 From its earliest days, the founders of Wissenschaft des Judentums wrote in German rather than Hebrew like their Eastern European counterparts in order to reach an educated German readership. Writing solely in Hebrew or Yiddish, traditional Jews until the generation of Mendelssohn felt little compunction to explain themselves to their suspicious Christian neighbors. And 1 Eleonore Sterling, Judenhass (Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969); Shulamit Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code – Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (hereafter LBIYB), 23 (1978), 25–46; Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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German would remain the dominant medium of critical Jewish scholarship as it spread worldwide until the Nazis extinguished the symbiosis. More than a century of prodigious German-Jewish scholarship in countless new directions had failed to counter the toxic effect of German nationalism. Academic appointments in Jewish fields were made at the Sorbonne, Cambridge, Harvard and Columbia long before 1964 when the first Jewish chair was belatedly created in Germany at the Freie Universität in the American zone of Berlin. Thus 200 years after its birth in 1818, Wissenschaft des Judentums is not only firmly embedded in institutions of higher learning around the globe, but also surprisingly in Germany itself, where in Potsdam there is even a School of Jewish Theology consisting of a cluster of Jewish academics. With some 800 to 1000 books on Jewish subjects published annually today in Germany, the German language has once again become an indispensable tool for doing Jewish scholarship.2 Utterly unimaginable in 1945, Germany currently ranks just behind Israel and the United States as the third most productive center for Jewish scholarship in terms of quantity and quality. Critical Jewish scholarship, a veritable revolution of the mind, was indubitably the most farreaching contribution that German Jewry pioneered in its confrontation with modernity.

I The lifespan of Leopold Zunz overlapped with that of Leopold von Ranke, lending meaning to serendipity. Zunz was born in 1794, one year before Ranke, and died in 1886, the same year as Ranke. Although in 1848 Ranke was a member of the faculty committee at the University of Berlin that turned down Zunz’s request for an appointment to a professorship in Jewish history and literature, the path-breaking historical scholarship of both men manifested a striking affinity. Both wrote history from the bottom up, ever in search of hard facts that rested on plausible, if not irrefutable evidence. Accordingly, both engaged in an indefatigable search for new knowledge far beyond the ken of conventional historians and both deemed all periods and culture equally worthy of intensive study. The ultimate philosophic import of their painstaking endeavors would emerge only after a sufficient accumulation of reliable particulars. The hallmark of Zunz’s remarkable 1818 bibliographic essay “On Rabbinic Literature” that surveyed the terrain of post-biblical Jewish history was

2

In conversation with Renate Evers, Director of Collections at the Leo Baeck Institute, New York.

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its sustained quest for new knowledge. The orderliness, specificity and comprehensiveness of the essay with its delineation of topics and subfields, and citation of relevant literature is truly astounding. At the time Zunz was but a third-year student at the university in Berlin, founded in 1810 in reaction to Napoleon’s humiliating defeat of Prussia and occupation of its capital. By 1818 Prussia was absorbed in the midst of a frenetic rejection of all traces of French influence including the emancipation of its Jewish subjects. German nationalists had effectively mobilized students and urban dwellers to vilify and extirpate all expressions of French rationalism and Jewish otherness.3 At the university Zunz found himself in a class taught by Friedrich Rühs who stood at the forefront of a phalanx of conservative intellectuals out to deny Jews equality in Prussia. Unlike France, they contended, Prussia was a Christian state and the deplorable condition of its Jewish subjects had everything to do with Judaism itself rather than with medieval Christian oppression. With Rühs, an authority on medieval history, Zunz chose history as the weapon for his counter-offensive and in so doing, his erudition unfurled the agenda of more than a century of Jewish scholarship to come. More proximately, he implied that too little was known of the tortuous history of the Jewish experience to conduct a fair and informed debate on the state of German Jewry. New knowledge would eventually show that Jews were heirs to a religious culture no less grand and ennobling than the one German nationalists rushed to embrace in their abhorrence of French rationalism. In retrospect, however, the encounter ominously anticipated that the Christian identity incorporated by German nationalism in its furious flight from the West would never tolerate German Jews imbued by Wissenschaft des Judentums with pride in their millennial past as equal citizens.4 Isaac Marcus Jost, Zunz’s erstwhile compatriot, confronted the urgency of the moment more directly. The generation of new knowledge was at best a long term strategy. To address the ongoing deliberations of Prussian statesmen and bureaucrats, Jost set about to hastily compile and publish in German from 1820 to 1828 a nine-volume narrative history from the Maccabees to the eighteenth century on the basis of the faulty, bigoted and truncated sources already well known. Like Zunz, Jost validated the turn to history and his appended excursuses on the Bible and Talmud contained nuggets of me-

3 Eleonore Sterling, “Anti-Jewish Riots in Germany in 1819: A Displacement of Social Protest,” Historia Judaica, 12 (1950), 105–42; Jacob Katz, “The Hep-Hep Riots in Germany of 1819: The Historical Background” (Hebrew), Zion, 38 (1973), 62–115; Uriel Tal, “Young German Intellectuals on Romanticism and Judaism – Spiritual Turbulence in the Early 19th Century,” Salo Wittmayer Baron Jubilee Volume, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1974), 2, 919–38. 4 Ismar Schorsch, Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 7–23.

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thodological originality. But overall his highly negative depiction of Rabbinic Judaism and its medieval Ashkenasic offspring recycled the animosity of the radical wing of the German Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, while conceding the demand of German conservatives that Judaism needed to be reformed, if not discarded before Jews could become eligible for Prussian citizenship.5 When the crescendo of German nationalism turned to violence against Jews in many parts of Germany in 1819, a small group of vulnerable and anxious young Jewish intellectuals gathered in Berlin to hammer out an ideology and program to advance the cause of emancipation in Prussia. They worked intensively on many fronts to project a commitment to collective self-improvement that would defend and complete the partial emancipation extended in 1812 by Prussian liberals who had come to power in the wake of Napoleon’s humiliating victory. Zunz served as the heartbeat of that enterprise and his brand of critical scholarship was its most lasting contribution. The modest journal he edited bore the name Wissenschaft des Judentums, which was soon to become the banner for the entire movement and its handful of essays constituted what Zunz envisioned by the turn to history. First, the study of Jewish history required the systematic utilization of non-Jewish sources. Second, to fully grasp any episode, institution or literary document under study, one needed to be attentive to the likelihood of external influence. Jewish history did not occur outside of an influential context and could no longer be fathomed in isolation. And finally, the most valid primary sources for a subject were those close to it in terms of time and place. In a tour de force Zunz constructed a biography of Rashi solely on the basis of information garnered from his own writings and contemporaries. The understanding of our most venerated figures and sacred texts stood to benefit enormously from an academic method that stripped them from the fictions of mythological thinking.6 The Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews (Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden) ceased functioning in the early days of 1824. Far ahead of its time, it exercised no influence on the ruling plutocracy of the Berlin Jewish community or on the Prussian government. In a gesture of lament, Zunz retained its papers and alone remained faithful to its scholarly vision. From 1824 to 1831 he toiled as the foreign correspondent of a leading Berlin newspaper, where he perused and excerpted the foreign press from 8 am to 1 pm. On his own time, he devoured every Jewish book and manuscript he could lay his hands on and in 1832 unexpectedly produced the first 5

Idem, “From Wolfenbuettel to Wissenschaft – The Divergent Paths of Isaak Markus Jost and Leopold Zunz,” LBIYB, 22 (1977), 109–28. 6 Idem, “Breakthrough into the Past: The Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden,” LBIYB, 33 (1988), 3–28.

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classic of the Wissenschaft movement. Its intent was to allay the dread of religious reform by a reactionary government. The German synagogue sermon was not an innovation of Jews seeking emancipation, but simply the most recent genre of an ancient tradition to invest the words of Scripture with meaning through creative imagination, a form of reading found already in Scripture itself. In making that bold argument, Zunz dated and ordered a vast body of diverse rabbinic literature to construct more than a millennial history of midrashic literature. Not only had midrash prevented the meaning of the Hebrew Bible from ever devolving into a fossil, but it also transformed Jewish identity from a static to a dynamic reality. For all his brilliance, Zunz never denied his indebtedness to others. In closing his forward, he paid special tribute to the erudition and generosity of Shlomo Yehudah Rapoport in Lemberg, whom he had cited no less than 110 times in his book. Years later Zunz would herald Rapoport as the Azariah de Rossi (the astounding Renaissance forerunner of Wissenschaft des Judentums in sixteenth-century Italy) of his generation, the veritable founder of its critical scholarship. It may well have been, however, Zunz’s essay on Rashi in 1823 that moved Rapoport to embark on composing in the following decade his own celebrated six teeming Hebrew biographical essays on rabbinic luminaries from the tenth and eleventh centuries enthralled by the world of Islam. A three-year correspondence between the two men readied Zunz to write; to answer a Rapoport epistle often demanded of Zunz half a day of preparation.7 Born in 1790, Rapoport was a talmudic prodigy tempered by the Haskalah (the Hebrew Enlightment). As a young adolescent, he met Nahman Krochmal, the leader of that movement in Galicia, who soon became a lifelong friend and mentor. In a highly insular society dominated by Hasidism, together they dared to pore over classical Jewish texts from a critical perspective. In 1816, at age 31, Krochmal felt the need to defend himself publicly in a heartrending letter to the leading rabbinic sage in Zolkiew from scurrilous attacks by local Hasidim because of his relationship with a harried Karaite survivor in the neighborhood. To do critical scholarship in Berlin was a lonely pursuit; in Galicia it could be downright perilous.8 The point of interfacing these distant venues is to stress that the mindset that matured into critical Jewish scholarship appeared independently in different corners of Europe. It did not simply emanate from Berlin. And nothing documents Zunz’s appreciation of this cross-fertilization more than the vast corpus of his correspondence. When Krochmal died in 1840, Zunz honored

7

Idem, Leopold Zunz, 55–91. The Writings of Nachman Krochmal (Hebrew), ed. and introd. Simon Rawidowicz (London/Waltham, MA: Ararat Publishing Society, 1961), 413–16. 8

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his deathbed wish to edit and bring out his unfinished manuscript, even though the two men had never met. Zunz sensed just how original Krochmal’s deep study of all layers of Jewish creativity from the Bible to Kabbalah might be and how important it was to disseminate its findings in both Eastern and Western Europe.9 Nothing alleviated the grinding isolation of committed scholars nor stimulated their own thinking more than the constant exchange of serious letters. For students of the Wissenschaft movement these letters often provide vital commentary on the texts these solitary pioneers were engaged in writing. Zunz’s Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt (The Synagogue Sermons of the Jews Studied Historically) not only unfurled a monument to the revelatory power of critical scholarship, but also readied a fertile field of research destined to yield a bounty of unending harvests. Across Europe several generations of scholars were inspired by his work to study and edit the midrashic texts he had painstakingly detected, identified and ordered chronologically. In 1845, Berlin’s gifted conservative-leaning rabbi Michael Sachs introduced his splendid volume of translations of Sephardic Hebrew poems from Spain with a sweeping essay in which he asserted that the intuitive, non-rational mindset of the authors of midrash gave them special insight into the spiritual world of the Hebrew Bible. It was only with the swift ascendancy of Islam in the ninth and tenth centuries that Greek science and philosophy in Arabic garb began to erode that affective intimacy. Eight years later, Sachs displayed again his affinity for midrash with a large anthology of midrashic gems felicitously retold in German poetic form. Both volumes inspired Heine’s profusion of German-Jewish poems in the final years of his tormented life.10 Sachs was but the first of Zunz’s acolytes. By the beginning of the twentieth century, midrash had mushroomed to be the largest subfield of Wissenschaft des Judentums as measured by the entries of The Jewish Encyclopedia, itself a grand capstone of nineteenth-century critical scholarship. A seminal contributor to that upsurge was Adolph Jellinek, a yeshiva prodigy from Moravia, who in 1843 translated into German with many annotations Adolphe Franck’s French survey of the history of Kabbalah. During his fourteenyear stay in Leipzig, Jellinek studied Arabic at the university with Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, Germany’s leading Orientalist, and ranged robustly over the entire terrain of midrash and Kabbalah. By the early 1850s he was arguing compellingly that the primary author of the Zohar was Moses de Leon, a late thirteenth-century Spanish mystic at war with the philosophical 9

Ismar Schorsch, “The Production of a Classic: Zunz as Krochmal’s Editor,” LBIYB, 31 (1986), 281–315. 10 Michael Sachs, Die religiöse Poesie der Juden in Spanien (Berlin: Veit, 1845); idem, Stimmen vom Jordan und Euphrat (Berlin: Veit, 1853).

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legacy of Maimonides, and not the second-century romantic Tanna, Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai. In 1853 Jellinek began to publish at intervals a Hebrew periodical programmatically called Beit ha-Midrash (The House of Midrash) in which over the next quarter century he would publish and comment upon some 89 obscure midrashic texts often saturated with the vocabulary of Kabbalah. The first volume Jellinek adorned with a florid Hebrew dedication to Leopold Zunz, to whom he would return in the German introduction to his first text. Jellinek forewarned his readers that he was not about to repeat what Zunz had to say about each of the texts he was going to publish. For no serious student of midrash would dare to approach these texts without Zunz’s book in hand. In truth, he averred that “we can only come to appreciate this grand work when we enter into its details, for it is only then that we come to marvel at the care and deep knowledge with which the master works.” In 1865 Jellinek moved to Vienna to become an exemplar of the GermanJewish pulpit rabbinate without leaving his scholarship behind. Toward that end he opened an institute for the study of rabbinic literature and the preparation of students for the rabbinate in 1862. With his faculty of Isaac Hirsch Weiss and Meir Friedmann (Ish Shalom), he turned Vienna into an emporium of research on midrash. Both men enriched the field with a gamut of valuable editions of midrashic texts. Years later, Weiss acknowledged in his memoirs that as an aspiring young scholar he pored over Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge “as assiduously and carefully as I was wont to study the Talmud and Poskim (halakhic decisors).”11 Solomon Schechter’s love of midrash owes much to the three years he spent in the 1870s at the feet of Weiss and Friedmann in Jellinek’s rabbinical school, a debt he would repay with his 1887 edition of Avoth de Rabbi Nathan, the first critical edition of a rabbinic text in the Wissenschaft era. In later years he wrote an appreciative essay about each of his teachers. Nor is it an accident that three years after the death of Zunz in 1886, he honored him with a biographical essay that included a generous outline of Die gottedienstlichen Vorträge to introduce the English-speaking world to its inestimable contents. Though unfinished and to be published only posthumously, the essay confirmed Zunz’s influence down to the third generation of Wissenschaft scholars and indeed beyond.12 Zunz’s reach also extended far beyond the borders of Prussia and Saxony. In 1868 Salomon Buber, the grandfather of Martin, published for the first time the text of Pesihta de Rav Kahana, a Palestinian midrash from the end of

11

Ismar Schorsch, “Scholem on Zunz: An Egregious Misreading,” (in this volume). Idem, “Schechter’s Indebtedness to Zunz,” Jewish Historical Studies. Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 48 (2016), 9–16. 12

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the seventh century, arranged according to the order of its festival calendar. Without ever seeing a manuscript of the original, Zunz had reconstructed, identified and dated the text on the basis of some 200 passages in later rabbinic literature that he had managed to assemble, a monumental tribute to Zunz’s tenacity, ingenuity and erudition. Before the end of his lengthy introduction, Buber, who was to edit yet other midrashic texts, broke into praise of Zunz: Before I finish I must thank the great reconnoiter, rabbi and scholar extraordinaire, morenu-ha-rav Lipmann Zunz, may his flame continue to burn brightly, who served as my eyes in several matters. Notwithstanding that in some places he missed the mark, because hearing is not the same as seeing, and the Pesikta eluded the sight of this great scholar whereas it lies before me today, I will sing his praises with a full heart, for it is entirely deserving. A scholar is to be preferred to a prophet. He was the first to point out the existence of a Pesikta text which had disappeared completely until now. I am sure that he will celebrate the reemergence of this treasure into the light of day as he beholds it with his own eyes.13

Yet another third generation Zunz acolyte was Julius Theodor, who had graduated from the Breslau Seminary in 1878. To further his singular dedication to the study of midrash, he chose to remain in the rabbinic post of the small Posen community of Bojanowo. In a series of penetrating essays published in the scholarly journal of the Seminary, Theodor profoundly deepened the internal analysis of early midrashic works. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Zunz’s birth in 1794, Theodor celebrated three of his irreversible achievements: “That which he demolished will never be restored and that which he proved will never be undone and most significantly, the revolution he inaugurated in scholarship has few parallels in the entire history of scholarship.” By the time of his own death in 1923, he had completed 80 percent of his monumental critical edition of Bereishit Rabba, which Chanoch Albeck finished by 1936. And it was Albeck who was to make sure that Zunz’s influence would extend to Israel by having his Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge translated into Hebrew and updated in the 1940s.14 What had drawn Zunz to the study of midrash in the first place was its unending creativity. In apparent contrast to the corpus of Jewish law, it permitted a freedom of individual expression that prevented the sacred Canon from ever closing. The divine word bore an infinity of meanings that enabled each generation to meet its needs through an exercise of religious imagination. Ineluctably, by the end of the nineteenth century Wissenschaft had revealed how midrash fed into and fertilized new genres of human expression such as piyut, fictional biography, folklore, mysticism, theology, the

13 14

Idem, “Scholem on Zunz.” Ibid.

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Church Fathers and eventually even Jewish art. Midrash had recast the Hebrew Bible into a wellspring of ever flowing spiritual sustenance.15

II Not all those inspired by Zunz to master the methodology of critical scholarship followed him into the field of midrash, none more talented, energetic and versatile than Abraham Geiger. Born in 1810 in Frankfurt am Main, Geiger acquired his firm grounding in the Hebrew language, the Hebrew Bible and Talmud from his father and older brother, and his knowledge of Latin, Greek and mathematics from tutors at home. His Orthodox family feared the erosion of his faith in a gymnasium or university. At Heidelberg, which he attended despite his family’s misgiving, Geiger wrote a prize-winning dissertation published in 1833 that methodically showed for the first time some of the Jewish sources of the Quran. To his credit, he did not treat Mohammad disparagingly. Soon thereafter Geiger solved the age-old conundrum of the order of the Mishnah’s 63 tractates. Like the Quran, where the Suras are roughly arranged by descending size, the six thematic divisions of the Mishnah are each internally ordered by size with the largest tractate first and the shortest last.16 With university teaching closed to unconverted Jews, Geiger entered the active rabbinate in which he would serve for 52 years until his death in 1874, still at the height of his powers. Throughout that illustrious career, Geiger stood as an incomparable exemplar of the modern rabbi, distinguished from his medieval forerunners by education, function and authority. As it took shape in the mid-decades of the nineteenth century across the denominational spectrum, the modern rabbinate represented a new form of religious leadership fluent in German and certified with an earned doctorate, but still bearing formal rabbinic ordination. Speaking in the name of Judaism rather than Jewish law, the modern rabbi preached weekly, taught adults as well as children and ministered to troubled souls. Geiger did not become a rabbi by default but out of conviction. Early on he sensed its vital role in preparing Judaism for the transformation that would come with emancipation, while laboring to convince its assimilating members to remain loyal.

15

Maren R. Niehoff, “Zunz’s Conception of Haggadah as an Expression of Jewish Spirituality,” LBIYB, 43 (1998), 3–14. 16 Ludwig Geiger (ed.), Abraham Geiger: Leben und Lebenswerk (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1910), 1–231; Abraham Geiger, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judentum aufgenommen? (Bonn: F. Baaden, 1833); idem, “Einiges über Plan und Anordnung der Mischna,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie (hereafter WZJT), 2 (1836), 472–92.

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In Wiesbaden, his first pulpit, Geiger created a scholarly journal in 1835 whose unambiguous title Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie (A Scholarly Journal for Jewish Theology) declared its purpose precisely. Geiger hoped to bring academic heft to the exploration of Jewish theology. Its goal was not to be the tool needed for creative theology, but the application of historical research to shed light on the stages and venues of Judaism’s unfolding. Geiger realized early on that critical scholarship had replaced revelation with history, or being with becoming. With documentary evidence now the key to understanding the formation of Judaism, the scholar superseded the prophet in importance. Geiger’s aspiration was to enact religious reform critically (“scientifically”), that is to separate the chaff from the wheat, the essential from the incidental.17 No less noteworthy, Geiger’s intended audience was the lay and rabbinic leadership of the Jewish community rather than the bureaucrats of sundry German states. While Zunz aimed to garner the respect of non-Jews for the unappreciated high culture of Judaism, Geiger set out to persuade Jews that they were heirs to a dynamic religion responsive to the circumstances in which it found itself. And toward that end Geiger recruited an international circle of fifteen kindred spirits who were listed as regular contributors to his periodical, eleven of whom earned a living as rabbis or preachers and four who simply toiled as Privatgelehrte (‘gentlemen’ scholars). A collective undertaking would amplify their voices, fructify their research and diminish their sense of isolation. Edited singlehandedly by Geiger, the journal (basically an annual) quickly launched his rise to the forefront of a nascent German reform movement. By 1838 Geiger had earned an invitation from the Jewish community in Breslau, the second largest in Prussia, to become its first modern rabbi. He still lacked, however, the requisite Prussian citizenship, which forced him to spend a year in Berlin awaiting official approval. Aside from the ardor of the indeterminacy, the time was well spent because Geiger drew close to Zunz. In 1836 Geiger had already secured his name as a contributing editor for the second issue of his journal and four learned biographical notes totaling 26 pages. But their agendas were destined to diverge, notwithstanding Geiger’s admiration for Zunz’s scholarship. Breslau proved to be for Geiger a haven professionally but a hotbed religiously. Though brilliant and original, his scholarship was often highly reactive. His first adversary was Samson Raphael Hirsch whom he had befriended for a time as a fellow student in Heidelberg. In the late 1830s Hirsch had burst into public view with an ingenious and full-throated defense of traditional Judaism. Neither emancipation nor modernity were to be feared if the hal-

17

Ludwig Geiger, 41–49.

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akhic system could be reinforced by means of an elaborate scaffolding of creative theology that rested on a vast foundation of speculative biblical exegesis. Infuriated by the wholly subjective nature of Hirsch’s system, Geiger resorted to a scathing review in 1839, followed up by two compact volumes of mishnaic studies designed to show that the Talmud’s interpretation of the Mishnah often consisted of a willful misreading of the text. More synthetically, Geiger contended in 1844 in two ambitious essays in his periodical that over time the rabbis increasingly lost their capacity to elucidate the plain meaning of biblical texts of a halakhic nature. In other words, the halakhic superstructure of Judaism rested upon a deeply flawed mode of legal interpretation.18 What Geiger clearly preferred was the rational biblical exegesis of a small circle of rabbinic exegetes in northern France in the twelfth century. Geiger was the first scholar to identify their unconventional fidelity to the plain meaning of the text (peshat) and twice published samples of their work that he had uncovered. In a bold declaration of principle that resonated with present-mindedness, Geiger signaled why the Talmud had fallen short: “Only in times in which serious, critical (wissenschaftliche) research is applied to the interpretation of biblical texts can Judaism reach the pinnacle of its own day and truly progress in its internal development.”19 Geiger’s second adversary was none other than Zunz, who in 1845 had published a dense cultural history of Ashkenazic Jewry modestly titled Zur Geschichte und Literatur (On History and Literature, that is a work in progress). Not only the first of its kind, this packed study ran counter to the emerging identity of German Jewry. Since the early days of its protracted struggle for emancipation, German Jewry had progressively distanced itself from its insular Ashkenazic roots and adopted a medley of Sephardic postures and practices deemed more rational, respectable and culturally attuned to a religious minority living in two worlds. Zunz bristled at the embrace of this “Sephardic mystique” and produced an in-depth study of medieval Ashkenaz to correct the historical travesty and injustice. The work pulsated with palpable empathy, but left Geiger unmoved and agitated. Their relationship had already been strained by a series of occasional essays in which Zunz overtly berated the Reformers for their willingness to sacrifice far too much of Judaism to extract from a vacillating, if not antagonistic Prussian govern18

Abraham Geiger, “Recensionen: Hirsch’s Versuche und Mittheilungen,” WZJT, 4 (1839), 355–81; idem, “Das Verhältniss des natürlichen Schriftsinnes zur talmudischen Schriftdeutung. Eine Skizze,” WZJT, 5 (1844), 53–81, 234–59; idem, Lehrbuch zur Sprache der Mischnah (Breslau: F.E.C. Leuckart, 1845); idem, Lesestücke aus der Mischnah (Breslau: F.E.C. Leuckart, 1845). 19 Idem, Parschandatha. Die nordfranzösische Exegetenschule (Leipzig: Leopold Schnauss, 1855), 6.

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ment a full measure of political equality. Before Geiger went public with his highly charged review of Zunz’s book, however, he traveled to Berlin to tell Zunz personally of his dismay. The review itself was a cri de coeur. Geiger lamented the barreness of the subject matter which failed to offer modern Jews any spiritual sustenance. Geiger was adamant that not all periods or subjects merited research, certainly not Jewish contributions to the sciences or episodes of nationhood. A scholar’s agenda should be dictated by contemporary need, and since the cultural achievements of Spanish Jewry utterly overshadowed those of their coreligionists in German lands, it was to their legacy that modern Jews will flock to draw inspiration and self-esteem.20 Accordingly, in the next two decades of Geiger’s astonishing productivity, a predominance of Sephardic studies appeared, as if to remonstrate where food for a pining soul was to be found. Thus in quick order Geiger published a small study of Maimonides as a halakhist ready to accommodate a grievous reality in 1850 and a year later a full biography of Judah Halevi interspersed with samples of his poetry in translation. In 1855 Geiger turned for a second time to his pet northern French Torah exegetes and then a year later to a study on the Hebrew poetry emanating from Spain and Italy in which the Hebrew originals accompanied his translations. The forward to the latter carried a pitch for the lofty nature of Hebrew poetry: “Not far from the bloody, thorn-strewn highways nor from the wildly overgrown roads of scholasticism, there are lovely paths of poetry blooming with flowers that wind their way throughout the Middle Ages.” Finally, in 1869 he crowned his poetic trilogy with a richly contextualized study of Solomon Ibn Gabirol. In contrast to the universal chords intoned by the Sephardic poets, Geiger found little more than the anguished cry of a downtrodden and persecuted people in the poetry of Ashkenaz. The influence of Arabic rhyme, meter and classical idiom had enabled the Hebrew poets of Spain and Italy to achieve an unheralded “Golden Age.” Though annotated, Geiger’s trilogy was intended to be accessible, popular and uplifting, a subtle rebuke of Zunz’s heavy hand.21 As the epitome of the modern rabbinate, Geiger was ever mindful of his pulpit obligations. His Judaism and Its History (Das Judentum und seine Geschichte), a series of 34 public lectures finished in 1871, recast the products of keen analytic research into an elegant global narrative that carried its history 20

Ismar Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” idem, From Text to Context (Hanover/London: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 71–92; idem, Leopold Zunz, 131–41. 21 Abraham Geiger, Moses ben Maimon. Studien (Breslau: A. Gosohorsky, 1850); idem, Divan des Castiliers Abu’l-Hassan Juda ha-Levi nebst Biographie und Anmerkungen (Breslau: Joh. Urban Kern, 1851); idem, Parschandatha; idem, Jüdische Dichtungen der spanischen und italienischen Schule (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1856), Vorwort; idem, Salomo Gabirol und seine Dichtungen (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1867).

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from antiquity to the sixteenth century. In a lucid tone both instructive and inspirational, Geiger described how the creative religious genius of Israel was touched by “the Universal Spirit” to fashion a uniquely monotheistic faith, protected at first by statehood and then sent forth stateless to bring its ethical monotheism to all of humanity. Solely now a religious entity, Judaism displayed a rare capacity to adapt to its surroundings even as it continued to refine its conception of God.22 The culmination of Geiger’s hardcore scholarship and its most enduring achievement was his 1857 book The Text and Translations of the Bible in their Relationship to the Internal Development of Judaism (Die Urschrift for short). As the titled intimated, the study set forth a construction of Judaism that turns on the axiom of development. The interpretation of Scripture was the dynamic that prevented Judaism from ever stagnating. Using his exquisite philological tools, Geiger showed that in light of the ancient translations, the biblical text remained fluid and elastic. Indeed, in the earliest stage of transmission, he boldly contended that passages that had been rendered offensive by new beliefs and sensibilities were simply altered by emendation. And once the text reached its canonized form, it lent itself to endless exegetical creativity. In essence, then, Geiger’s book is a history of that complex interpretive tradition with astonishing results. Most importantly, the halakhic system emerged as an arena of exegetical disputation in every age between conservative and progressive parties, eventually consolidating in the direction of a dominantly progressive development. By that time Geiger had clearly discarded his early indictment of the halakhic discourse as reflective of only a minimal appreciation for the plain meaning of the biblical text. Instead he now projected the Pharisees as the populist torchbearers of a progressive Judaism. In one fell swoop in a display of awesome scholarship, Geiger bequeathed to the Reform movement a Judaism rooted in the past but equipped for the present and to the world of Wissenschaft a Judaism that defied supersession.23

22

Idem, Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte, 3 vols. (Breslau: Schletter’schen Buchhandlung, H. Skutsch, 1865–1871). 23 Idem, Urschrift und Übersetzungen der Bibel in ihrer Abhängigkeit von der inneren Entwickelung des Judentums (Breslau: Julius Hainauer, 1857).

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III By mid-century the Jewish landscape in the German states had begun to fracture religiously in the face of modernity, and Geiger’s longstanding religious adversary, Zacharias Frankel, was also drawn to the milestone of Zunz’s Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge. The tools and perspectives of critical scholarship could be wielded by combatants on either side of the religious divide. Frankel was born in 1801 in Prague, with its 8000 Jews still one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. It was in Pest, however, that he finished his gymnasium studies and earned his doctorate in 1830 from its local university. By 1836 he had been invited to Saxony to head its nascent Jewish community in Dresden as its rabbi, where he would remain until chosen to found a modern rabbinical school in Breslau in 1854. During his eighteenyear tenure in Dresden he fought for the emancipation of Jews in Saxony, solidified the communal structure in Dresden, built its much admired Moorish synagogue, assumed the national leadership of an emerging bloc of conservative reformers and launched his career in Jewish scholarship. Like Geiger, he was a master of the pulpit, a tireless editor of ideological journals and a confident polemicist. What inspired Frankel in Zunz’s work was its vision of development marking an entire field of rabbinic literature. Though he had no interest in following Zunz into the field of midrash, Frankel wrote him in 1836, after Zunz had visited him in Teplitz, his first pulpit, that his broad conceptualization induced him to replicate the structure for the field of Talmud. The immediate goal was to identify the factor of time in its dialectical layers. Development was a function of the age and location in which the rabbis lived and their opinions needed to be grounded in their context. Frankel was eager to explore the Greek literature of Alexandrian Jewry to uncover the origins of the talmudic discourse. Eventually he hoped to plot the development of the entire corpus of the halakhic system. From the outset Zunz offered the encouragement for which Frankel yearned: “Continue your research and share with the public what you will find and thus truth and scholarship will advance us roundly. When you have moved to Dresden, brighten my days occasionally with a letter earmarked for Berlin”.24 Frankel formulated his view of “positive-historical Judaism” in the tumultuous decade of the 1840s, when religious reform and political emancipation collided head on. The term “positive,” long a synonym for operative law, reaffirmed the essentially legal character of Judaism, while “historical” al-

24

National Library of Israel, ARC 40 792, F1, book II, 15, dated March 24, 1836.

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luded to its unfolding over time. Though codified ritual gave expression to moral values and religious feelings, it was not immutable. Conversely, history at times reinforced a practice like the use of Hebrew in the worship service even when halakhic grounds were absent. In sum, the two factors commingled to yield a moderate form of religious reform as effected in Dresden. The ultimate vindication of Judaism, however, became its venerable antiquity, that is an ever deepening reverence for its hoary past.25 Frankel’s unexpected elevation to the directorship of the newly founded Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau in 1854 gave him a post with unmatched resonance. Its tenured faculty was expected to advance the frontiers of critical scholarship. For his students Frankel shaped a curriculum that blended secular and religious studies. With the Seminary as the focal point of their studies and life, they received a large dose of biblical and rabbinic texts, introductions to emerging new subfields of Jewish studies and preparatory courses for the rabbinate, while residing in a wholly Jewish ambience. Frankel led the institution till his death in 1875 and in that tenure taught extensively, mentored his students with care and helped them find pulpits after graduation. Frankel put his imprint on the German rabbinate with graduates who often published their own ongoing research even as they instructed their laity in the fruits of critical scholarship.26 In due time Breslau became the model for rabbinical schools soon to open in London, Vienna, Budapest and New York, often by Seminary graduates, if not for the Reform and Orthodox schools opened in Berlin in 1872 and 1873. Frankel’s ordination attested a secularly educated, Jewishly literate and halakhicly observant rabbi. Zunz was none too pleased with Breslau. It betrayed his long held conviction that the rightful setting for Wissenschaft des Judentums was the German university. Political emancipation, he contended, without a commensurate respect for Judaism was a plant without roots, and the only institution that could affect the suspicion and disparagement of Judaism rampant in German society was the university. The inclusion of jüdische Wissenschaft in its study halls would convey to a hostile public that Judaism evinced a venerable religious culture worthy of research and preservation. Contemporary Jews were indeed heirs to a heritage that had fertilized its environs wherever it found a haven. To have critical scholarship done within the confines of a rabbinical school, irrespective of its standards, would saddle it with a new form of gettoization. Although Zunz failed in his own efforts to gain an

25

Ismar Schorsch, “Zacharias Frankel and the European Origins of Conservative Judaism,” From Text to Context, 255–65. 26 Markus Brann, Geschichte des Jüdisch-Theologischen Seminars in Breslau (Breslau: Th. Schatzky, n.d.).

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academic beachhead in Berlin, he remained steadfast in his refusal to settle for an inferior alternative.27 In addition, Zunz had grave doubts about the quality of the scholarship practiced in Breslau. Frankel had proudly declared that his brand of scholarship was Glaubenswissenschaft, that is a critical study of the central religious texts of Jewish life. The noun “Glauben” (faith) in his terminology was the object of “Wissenschaft” (science). Judaism had nothing to fear from critical scholarship because its traditional practice of textual analysis was emblematic of value-free scholarship. For Frankel the open-ended give and take of talmudic dialectics bore all the earmarks of modern critical scholarship. In contrast, Zunz understood Glaubenswissenschaft as a term of opprobrium. For him “Glauben” signified not the object to be researched, but rather the constraints that governed it. The scholarship emanating from Breslau was still hedged in by dogmatic strictures that were inviolable. Clever exegesis to circumvent a principle of faith was the polar opposite of value-free scholarship, a form of dilettantism that Zunz disdained. While still in Dresden, Frankel began a monthly journal in 1851 devoted to the study of the history and scholarship of Judaism (called Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums). The external history of the Jews he regarded as far less important. In the mid-1840s, at the height of the denominational strife wracking German Jewry, he had edited a short-lived theological periodical. His second effort, soon to be based in Breslau, became the medium for his own research on the history of halakhah as well as that of his faculty. But beyond his own institutional needs, Frankel fostered a rare forum for the growing number of scholarly practitioners of Wissenschaft and an attractive platform from which to pitch scholarship to a popular audience. Frankel edited the Monatsschrift painstakingly for seventeen years. At his retirement as editor in 1868, it loomed as the predominant venue for Wissenschaft scholarship in Central Europe, which it was to remain until 1939, always edited by Breslau faculty. With the Seminary and the journal to his credit, Frankel ranks as the most effective institution builder of the Wissenschaft movement. No less impressive, his intense activism did not erode his commitment to his original vision of a history of halakhah. The pages of his journal abound with forays into disparate aspects of the subject treated historically, comparatively and ethically. And his dedication culminated with the completion of two dense Hebrew volumes in 1859 on the Mishnah and in 1870 on the Talmud Yerushalmi. In both Frankel succeeded in demonstrating how critical

27

Ismar Schorsch, “Moritz Steinschneider on the Future of Judaism after Emancipation,” (in this volume).

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it was to study these foundational texts within their Palestinian provenance and how often his keen eye and vast erudition anticipated textual problems that would become the staple of later scholarship. Not only did the inestimable value of these volumes endure as long as his institutional creations, but it also assured that Breslau would stay at the forefront of talmudic scholarship, with the study of rabbinic literature at the core of its curriculum and research agenda. Frankel had transformed the study of Jewish law into a subfield of Judaica that turned on the paradigm of development.28 Adding to the luster of Frankel’s achievement was his invitation at the outset to Heinrich Graetz to join his founding faculty. Graetz had just published the first volume of his monumental History of the Jews (Geschichte der Juden) (actually volume 4) and Breslau would provide him with the security, library, colleagues and students vital to completing the project in 1876, a total of eleven volumes covering the sweep of the Jewish experience from the conquest of Canaan by Joshua to 1848. Few were the Wissenschaft scholars who had the good fortune to find such a collegial setting to offset the lonely drudgery of hardcore research. Frankel had gotten to know the power of Graetz’s thought and expression in 1846 when he published in the final volume of his earlier periodical a lengthy conceptualization of the entire trajectory of Jewish history. Graetz agreed with Hegel and others that innate ideas were the force that drove historical phenomena. But to ascertain what they actually were could only be derived from studying history itself. The unalterable essence of Judaism could not be posited a priori. And what Graetz’s robust survey of the three major historic periods of Judaism (biblical, inter-testamental and rabbinic and exilic) revealed was a three dimensional essence that was inseparably political, religious and philosophical. The depth of an imprint like land and statehood on the history of the first period verified its essential (permanent) character.29 This bracing overview did not morph into the infrastructure of Graetz’s later Geschichte der Juden, but it did thoroughly warrant and vindicate its overt nationalistic tone. As the bearers of a unique form of monotheism that elevated God above nature, the Jewish people never left behind the task to incorporate that advanced faith into a living political reality. Graetz’s conception of Jewish history was distinctly non-developmental. Essential components made manifest in earlier periods were still perpetuated in the present. 28

Shamma Friedman, “Zacharias Frankel and the Study of the Mishnah” (Hebrew), in Guy Miron (ed.), From Breslau to Jerusalem: Rabbinical Seminaries Past, Present and Future (Hebrew), (Jerusalem: Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, 2009), 51–85. 29 Heinrich Graetz, The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays, translated, edited and introduced by Ismar Schorsch (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1975), 63–124.

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Thus Graetz wrote of the Maccabees and the Zealots in their rebellions against the Syrians and the Romans as if they were nineteenth-century Greek revolutionaries rising to evict their Ottoman overlords from their homeland. Nor did he conceal his animus to the medieval Church or to Luther or to the rabid German nationalism in post-Napoleonic Germany. He dwelled on the insecurity of existence in a homeless disapora, even as he stressed the influence of Jewish creativity on key junctures of general history. Graetz wrote to inspire Jews with a history of heroes and martyrs, of pietists and poets, of intellectuals and messianists, and countless personal testimonies suggest that he in fact did connect many to a people, religion and culture that they had abandoned in their quest for assimilation and acceptance. Inevitably his exuberant national history ran afoul of a fervent veteran German nationalist in the midst of a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the decade following the unification of Germany by Bismarck in 1871. In 1879, Heinrich von Treitschke, from his perch at the University of Berlin, denounced Graetz’s pervasive hostility to Christianity and Germany as an insufferable impediment to the welding of multiple German subcultures into a proud and homogeneous German nation. Like Graetz, Treitschke used history to reinforce national identity. Deep research undergirded the power of Graetz’s narrative. In densely packed excursuses at the back of each volume, Graetz explained the countless sources, reconstructions and resolutions seamlessly imbedded in his story. The decision to omit them from the English edition of Graetz’s history flagrantly distorted the verisimilitude and sophistication of his achievement. The strength of his probing endnotes is what has compelled scholars to pore over them long after Graetz’s narrative had been set aside. Graetz finished his History of the Jews in 1876 with the last of his two volumes devoted to Israel’s extended biblical period. He had delayed their composition until he had a chance in 1872 to tour Palestine itself with a copy of the Hebrew Bible in hand. Not surprisingly, his rendition of Israelite history is redolent with romantic descriptions of the impact of its topography on the course of events. Nor were these final two volumes the end of his scholarly career. They simply transitioned him from a general historian of the Jewish people to a Jewish Bible scholar. Until his death in 1891, Graetz published profusely on a wide array of subjects pertaining to the Hebrew Bible, including its canonization, the history and reliability of the Mesora and commentaries on the books of Esther, Song of Songs, Psalms and Proverbs. Back in 1818 Zunz had failed to touch on biblical criticism in his defining bibliographical essay. The field was dominated by Protestant scholars ensconced in the theological faculties of German universities, where they educated the future pastors of the Protestant Church. Hebrew and Arabic were taught as ancillary tools to explicating the Hebrew Bible. Beyond that foun-

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dational text, universities showed no interest in the history of post-biblical Judaism. To be sure, prior to Graetz a few Wissenschaft scholars on occasion had ventured into the critical study of the Hebrew Bible from Jost, the young Zunz, Krochmal, Luzzatto, Geiger and the late Zunz. But their contributions were tangential to other agendas. In contrast, Graetz’s heavy teaching load at Breslau consisted largely in the study of individual biblical books from each of the three divisions of the Tanakh. At Breslau University where he began teaching in 1870 as an unpaid honorary professor, his assignment was not Jewish history but the Hebrew Bible. Hence Graetz did not shift fields unprepared. Yet notwithstanding all his philology and profusion of emendations, he never subjected the Torah to biblical criticism. At the Seminary, the Torah remained sacrosanct. Graetz’s overriding objective was to incorporate biblical history into the purview of Wissenschaft des Judentums. One could hardly acclaim the longevity of the three-thousand-year history of the Jewish people without thoroughly understanding the vectors that converged to bring it about. If the Bible engendered and sustained Israel throughout its tortuous history, the origin and meaning of that spiritual wellspring had to be fathomed through the gaze of the historical lens. Though Graetz’s industry was almost immediately overshadowed by the source criticism and developmental paradigm that culminated with Julius Wellhausen, the prodigious output of his effort over two decades delivered an urgent argument of the need to challenge the Protestant dominance with its implicit message of supersession.30

IV Of the gaggle of young scholars who flocked to Zunz after 1832, no one drew closer to him or remained more loyal than Moritz Steinschneider. Moreover, from 1845 until Zunz’s death in 1886 the two men lived in Berlin. Born in Prossnitz, Moravia’s second largest Jewish community, in 1817, Steinschneider had already studied at universities in Prague, Leipzig and Vienna, before arriving in Berlin as an accomplished student of Arabic and Islam. At Zunz’s recommendation he accepted the invitation to write the entry on Jewish literature for the prestigious multi-volume encyclopedia on the arts and sciences (Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste). When published in 1850, the book-length entry ran to a total of 114 doublecolumned quarto pages covering 2500 years of literary creativity and the

30 Ismar Schorsch, “In the Shadow of Wellhausen: Heinrich Graetz as a Biblical Critic,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, 109:3 (Summer 2019), 384–405.

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names of some 1600 authors plus sundry others still unknown by name. In 1857 it came out in English greatly revised and expanded. The work became Steinschneider’s calling card. Aside from its scope, Jewish Literature shifted the center of gravity of literary creativity to authors in the world of Islam, where the vast majority of Jews lived at the time. The lingua franca of many was Judeo-Arabic (that is Arabic in Hebrew characters). A common language gave Jews access to the culture of Islam in the era of its ascendancy. Like Michael Sachs, Steinschneider demarcated the exposure to the pervasive rationalism of Islamic grammar, sciences and philosophy as effecting a change of mentalite´ that ended the intuitive, graphic mode of midrashic expression. In this early stage of his scholarly career, Steinschneider already sensed what would ultimately become his loftiest contribution: the seminal role played by Jewish translators from Arabic to Hebrew in the transmission of Greek wisdom from the Arabic East to the Latin West. In brief, Steinschneider redefined the parameters of Jewish scholarship. Together he and Zunz encompassed the Jewish worlds under Islam and Christendom.31 A shared passion for the search for new sources animated their scholarship. The stunning grandeur of Steinschneider’s encyclopedia entry soon earned him another invitation: this time to catalogue the Hebrew books in the Bodleiana at Oxford printed prior to 1732. Its true value, though, was that he now had access to the largest collection of Hebrew manuscripts in Europe. As he worked on his catalogue, Steinschneider never took his eye off related manuscripts buried in the archives and thereby found many a nugget critical for Zunz’s research. Of larger consequence, his 9559 entries which constituted the bulk of the Bodleiana Catalogue were packed with references to manuscripts in the archives pertaining to particular authors. The final entry was poignantly dedicated to Zunz. Published in 1860 at enormous expense to Oxford, the four stout volumes became the gold standard for future catalogues of Jewish manuscripts.32 Steinschneider went on to catalogue the Hebraica collections in the libraries of Leiden, Hamburg, Munich (twice) and Berlin. His unfailing acuity in identifying anonymous manuscripts and his transcriptions of passages therefrom are testimony to the care with which he perused the manuscripts he catalogued. In the process he gained a profound appreciation for the cross-fertilization that rendered Jewish literature such a vital component of Islamic civilization. For Steinschneider the spirit knew no ghetto. 31

Idem, “Moritz Steinschneider: The Vision Beyond the Books,” in Studies on Steinschneider, eds. Reimund Leicht and Gad Freundenthal (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2012), 3–36; Moritz Steinschneider, Jewish Literature (reprint, New York: Hermon Press, 1955). 32 Idem, Catalogus librorum hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana (Berlin: Friedlaender, 1852–1860).

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Steinschneider’s emergence at mid-century coincided with the belated rise of Orientalism in Germany, spearheaded by Fleischer in Leipzig. In 1839 on his academic wandering, Steinschneider had studied with him for six months, enough time to forge a lifelong friendship. At the founding conference of Germany’s first nationwide Oriental society (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft) in Dresden in the early fall of 1845, Fleischer arranged for three of the fifteen papers to be given by Jews – Geiger, Frankel and Steinschneider. Fleischer was a master of Arabic, Turkish and Persian along with a good knowledge of biblical Hebrew, and unabashedly welcomed Jewish students with a command of biblical and rabbinic Hebrew. He had personally invited Zunz to become an early member of the Society and opened its journal to works of Jewish scholarship. A small but steady stream of Jewish students soon materialized to study with Fleischer, an avowed practitioner of valuefree scholarship. In tribute to Fleischer’s exemplary career, Steinschneider invited him in 1874 to replace Geiger, who had just died, on the small academic council of the Zunz Foundation in the midst of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf and a rising tide of anti-Semitism. Fleischer understood the import of this interfaith gesture and graciously accepted and stayed on the council until his death in 1888, the first and last Christian scholar in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic deemed worthy of the honor. The second half of the nineteenth century was not only to see an ever larger number of young Jews gravitate to Orientalism, but also to herald the publication of a spate of Arabic originals to medieval classics that had till then survived only in Hebrew translations. Among the most laudable were the editions of Maimonides by Solomon Munk and of Saadia Gaon by Joseph Derenbourg and his son Hartwig. Both Munk and Derenbourg, though born in Germany, had fled their homeland to pursue scholarship in Paris that culminated in prestigious professorships in French institutions of higher education. The overall continuity of German-Jewish cultural history is striking: Whereas in the first half of the nineteenth century German Jews chose to slough off their Ashkenazic identity by embracing the veneer of a Spanish mystique, in the second half they turned that mystique into substance by a deep study of the Arabic legacy of Jews under Islam. By century’s end, with the infusion of the wealth of the Cairo Geniza, research on the diverse legacy firmly fixed the gaze of Jewish scholarship to the East.33

33 Ismar Schorsch, “Converging Cognates: The Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” (in this volume).

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V It is appropriate to close this integrated narrative on the founding of critical Jewish scholarship by returning to its central figure. Leopold Zunz layed the groundwork for two major subfields of Wissenschaft des Judentums. The first, as we have seen, was the field of midrash; the second was the field of medieval Hebrew religious poetry or piyut. Three incredibly rich volumes that came out in 1855, 1859 and 1865 culminated decades of arduous and meticulous research. Each bore the word synagogue in its title because Zunz contended that like midrash, piyut emanated from the synagogue. In Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters (The Synagogue Poetry of the Middle Ages), he surveyed the entire genre as a successor to the Psalms of the Bible, that is, the medium in which Israel addressed God. A lengthy list compiled the persecutions medieval Jews endured to give historical context to many of the penitential poems on which Zunz especially focused. Despite their often difficult Hebrew, Zunz translated more than 200 sample passages into readily accessible German. His intent was clearly to show that medieval Jews had turned insecurity and oppression into high culture that often brimmed with pain at God’s seeming indifference. Die Ritus des synagogalen Gottesdienstes (The Liturgical Rites of the Synagogue) highlighted the legitimacy of liturgical diversity. Across the Jewish world, Zunz detected that Jewish communities assumed the freedom to orchestrate their prayerbooks and worship services according to their local needs and sensibilities, despite adherence to a basic common structure. It is that deep insight that prompted Steinschneider in 1865 to advise the leadership of the Berlin Jewish community in the spirit of Zunz not to compose its new prayerbook to go along with their new synagogue building as a model for all of German Jewry. Such hubris ran counter to the pluralistic practice of the ages. Eloquent testimony as to the still unmatched quality of Zunz’s 1859 study is the exquisite Hebrew translation of Die Ritus, the first of its kind, published in 2016 in Israel by the World Union of Jewish Studies. Zunz’s third volume, the Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie (Literary History of Synagogue Poetry) brought together paytanim (liturgical poets) with their piyutim (liturgical poems) where possible. It is a massive register of vast erudition and indefatigable labor that limns the content and contours of a literature still largely concealed in obscurity. Over decades Zunz had labored to recover the names of nearly 1000 paytanim and some 6000 piyutim up to the middle of the sixteenth century, though a good number of poets and poems remained undatable.

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Thus when Zunz claimed that the synagogue was the crucible that forged the national character of the Jewish people in exile, the argument rested on prodigious research. The ancient dialogue between God and Israel embedded in the Hebrew Bible in the form of Torah and Psalms never lapsed with the destruction of the Temple, but was transmuted and sustained in the form of midrash and piyut. As Jews proudly erected their Moorish synagogues in the anticipation of an emancipation that would be complete and permanent, the scholarship of Zunz imbued the institution with a history and purpose that sanctioned its lived holiness.34 What his scholarship and that of his gifted cohort failed to attenuate was the contempt in which Judaism was held in the German university and beyond. Political equality in an unremittingly illiberal state and society remained a French transplant bereft of native soil. When Zunz wrote in April 1817 to his beloved mentor and surrogate father that the newly founded University of Berlin was awash in all forms of Jew-hatred (Rishes), modern Jews and nascent German nationalists were about to get entangled in conflicting formations of collective identity.35 Both were to employ the study of history to imbue their disparate ethnic compatriots with a gripping group identity that would engender meaning, pride and cohesiveness. As elsewhere, intense nationalism would give rise to a singular nation. Tragically, the group identities to emerge were ensnared in unresolvable conflict. Whereas Jewish advocates of emancipation rested their case on the secular principles of the French Revolution, German nationalists heralded the religious, hierarchical and stratified structure of medieval Germany. A separation of Church and State was anathema to German nationalists, who insisted that a united Germany would forever be a Christian state in which Jews were unfit for citizenship. German nationalists cherished the Holy Roman Empire as an unending source of customary law, folklore, mythology, literature and religious piety, while the scholars of jüdische Wissenschaft tended to perceive the Christian Middle Ages as a cauldron of religious hatred and recurring persecution. Treitschke’s outburst against Graetz turned essentially on their bitterly contested perceptions of those fraught centuries, nor was it destined to be the first or last of such head-on collisions. As Eleonore Sterling pointed out long ago, in 1850 when Prussia finally declared the exercise of the rights of citizenship to be independent of religious affiliation, thus advancing the cause of

34

Idem, Leopold Zunz, 182–214; Leopold Zunz, Die synagogale Poesie (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1855), 1–8. 35 Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), Leopold Zunz. Jude – Deutscher – Europäer (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1964), 83–84.

26

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Jewish emancipation, that selfsame royal edict reiterated the Christian identity of the state.36 In the end, the rational discourse of Wissenschaft des Judentums proved ineffective against Germany’s avowed Sonderweg fueled by its consistently replenished fear of the French abroad and the Jews within.37

36

Sterling, Judenhass, 208 n. 10; idem, “Der Kampf um die Emanzipation der Juden im Rheinland,” in Monumenta Judaica. Handbuch (Köln: J.P. Bachem, 1963), 305. 37 Walter Grab, Zwei Seiten einer Medaille (Köln: PapyRossa Verlag, 2000); Hermann Greive, “Verspätete Aufklärung und sakraler Nationalismus,” in Werkhefte, Zeitschrift für Probleme der Gesellschaft und des Katholizismus, 24 (1970), 38–46, 67–75; Thomas Henne und Carsten Kretschmann, “Friedrich Carl von Savignys Antijudaismus und die ‘Nebenpolitik’ der Berliner Universität gegen das preussische Emanzipationsedikt von 1812,” in Jahrbuch für Universitätsgeschichte, 5 (2002), 217–25; Susanne Massmann, “Das Fremde ausscheiden,” in Machtphantasie Deutschland, eds. Hans Peter Hermann, Hans-Martin Blitz, Susanne Massmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1996); Micha Brumlik, Deutscher Geist und Judenhass (München: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2000); Marco Puschner, Antisemitismus im Kontext der politischen Romantik (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2008); William Hiscott, Saul Ascher. Berliner Aufklärer (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2017).

Part II

Wissenschaft Matters

1. Catalogues and Critical Scholarship: The Fate of Jewish Collections in Nineteenth-Century Germany Archives tend to put people to sleep. They seem about as exciting as footnotes. Yet the frontiers of knowledge can hardly be advanced without them. What we know of the past is always but “a plank from a shipwreck,” to quote the memorable image of Francis Bacon.1 To approach Leopold Ranke’s lofty goal of getting a good look at the past, we need to come up with more planks, and it is no accident that his prodigious output was firmly anchored in pioneering archival research. For all his attention to diplomacy and foreign affairs, he wrote history literally from the bottom up, on the basis of untold documents long buried in oblivion. And I shall try to show in his spirit that good history, whatever the subject, is still most often inspired and nourished by the discovery of new sources. Like the Germans, Jews turned to the serious study of their own history in the nineteenth century. For many, especially those trained at German universities, Judaism became a historical phenomenon, subject to the havoc of time and place and ceasing to be static or essential. During the protracted debate in German society in the post-Napoleonic era over whether to extend full citizenship to its Jewish subjects, young Jewish intellectuals began to challenge the dominance of Christian scholars on the nature and history of Judaism with the presumed advantage of the insider. For the first time since the Renaissance, the victims wrote to tell their story in the vernacular rather than in Hebrew. The change in language indicated the shift in targeted audience. Wissenschaft des Judentums was born in battle for admission into the German body politic.2 We can pinpoint the year of its birth to 1818 with the appearance of a compact tract of some 30 pages entitled Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur.3

1

Anthony T. Grafton, “Rediscovering a Lost Continent,” The New York Review of Books,” October 5, 2006, 44. 2 Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context (Hanover/London: Brandeis University Press, 1994). 3 Leopold Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, 3 vols. (Berlin: Louis Gerschel, 1875–76), 1, 1–31.

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Its author was a brilliant 24-year-old student at the newly founded University of Berlin incensed by the distorted views of Judaism of Friedrich Rühs, his professor of history, who had denounced in writing the recent partial emancipation of Prussian Jews. In protest, Leopold Zunz dropped his class and set about to write a rebuttal dripping with sarcasm.4 To his credit, he soon abandoned the project to elevate the discourse with a sweeping conceptualization of what a genuinely historical study of Judaism would entail. In an age when scholarship was embracing the critical study of every aspect of human culture, why, he asked, was Judaism still being dismissed by the unexamined, recycled claims of religious prejudice? Medieval Jews had produced works on astronomy, medicine, mathematics, geography, architecture, business, industry, music and art. The term “rabbinic literature” completely obscured these secular interests and precluded understanding Judaism as a well-rounded cultural phenomenon. Zunz proposed instead the adjective “neo-Hebraic” (as opposed to biblical Hebrew) or simply “Jewish” to properly encompass the dynamic diversity of the literary corpus. Under the three broad rubrics of ideas, language and history, Zunz laid out not only the genres of the field, but using the few flawed extant catalogues available also cited published and unpublished samples of many. In a sense, Zunz’s tract served as a bibliography which vindicated his conceptual revolution. Prejudice fed by ignorance fueled the raging debate over Jewish citizenship in Prussia. A deep and dispassionate study of Judaism required above all recourse to the archives. By way of example, Zunz promised to publish soon a Latin translation (still the lingua franca of German academic life) of a Hebrew ethical treatise by a thirteenth-century Sephardic philosopher. Because he had only a single manuscript of the Hebrew text, he was as yet reluctant to publish the original. The initiative had a twofold purpose: to show that medieval Jews were not benighted, though modern savants were for speaking ex cathedra about a subject whose contours they could scarcely imagine. By virtue of its vision and rigor, its erudition and passion, Etwas was destined to become the cornerstone of modern Jewry’s turn to history, the intellectual equivalent of its political emancipation. In the universities to which German Jews, especially in Prussia, streamed out of all proportion to their numbers in the general population, they were exposed to a lethal combination of the canons of historical thinking and the evolutionary thrust of German philosophy, which relegated Judaism to a past long transcended. The first to give voice to an insider’s view of the Jewish experience was Zunz’s school mate and friend Isaak Markus Jost. Sadly, however, his nine-

4

Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem (henceforth JNUL), ARC, 40 792, C 13 (Das Buch Zunz), 25–6, D 1.

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volume Geschichte der Israeliten composed in haste from 1820 to 1828 and covering approximately 2000 years of Jewish history from the Maccabees to 1815 failed to break much new ground. Jost contented himself with a narrative history largely restricted to the external history of the Jews (except for his jaundiced treatment of rabbinic Judaism) by reordering what was already known. In his rush to mollify public opinion, he skipped all archival research to erect an edifice that stood without any semblance of a foundation.5 In contrast, Zunz worked vertically rather than horizontally, and his 1832 one-volume history of Judaism’s sermonic literature became the inspiration and gold standard of the entire Wissenschaft enterprise.6 By focusing on internal history, Zunz brought out what Jews did for themselves and not what others had done to them. In place of sovereignty and a sacred geographic center, he argued, they fashioned a mobile sanctuary for prayer and study. The synagogue emerged to sustain their spiritual resilience throughout their long exile, embodying the forum in which they could also give expression to their national aspirations. Equally striking, Zunz now identified, dated and described the homiletical (that is, midrashic) writings to which the synagogue gave rise. Painstaking textual analysis transformed a chaotic literary legacy into a coherent body of religious creativity. In the process, Zunz highlighted countless formerly peripheral, unknown and even no longer extant texts which established beyond dispute that the sermon was not a modern invention of synagogue reform. However, to write history from the bottom up by enlarging the number of documents at our disposal demands, above all, the availability of relevant collections, and these were hard to come by in the Germany of the 1820s and would get even harder. Prior to publishing his watershed work, Zunz had occasion to consult the largest Hebrew library in Germany in August, 1828, when he spent five days in Hamburg scouring that of David Oppenheimer.7 A printed catalogue of its 4500 printed books and 780 manuscripts had appeared two years earlier, making the treasure trove momentarily accessible.8 The library harbored the singular legacy of the former rabbi of Prague and Bohemia, who had it transferred to Hanover for safekeeping several decades before his death in 1736. Johann Christian Wolf, a professor of Oriental languages in Hamburg, brought it to the attention of the scholarly world by utilizing its wealth in his celebrated four-volume catalogue Bibliotheca Hebraea (1715–33), which bequeathed to Zunz’s generation a far-flung study of Hebrew bibliography. Because of Wolf’s involvement, Zunz quipped cynically in his pioneering 1845 survey of extant Jewish libraries and catalogues, 5

Isaak Markus Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten, 9 vols. (Berlin: Schlesinger, 1820–28). Leopold Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden (Berlin: A. Asher, 1832). 7 JNUL, ARC, 40 792, C 13, 51. 8 Kohelet David, Hamburg, 1826. 6

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nearly all of which were private, that Oppenheimer’s library was “one of those few monuments erected by Jews and preserved by Christians.”9 Simultaneous with the publication of his book in 1832, Zunz became reacquainted with Heimann Joseph Michael, who also lived in Hamburg, and with whom he had played as a child.10 Like Oppenheimer, Michael was a learned bibliophile, though a businessman rather than a rabbi. The two men bonded immediately and an extensive correspondence ensued that attests the degree to which Zunz drew on his collection and erudition for his research. Circumstances permitting, he would have readily moved to Hamburg.11 At his premature death in 1846, Michael had amassed a collection of 5401 books, nearly all Hebraica, and 860 manuscripts. Zunz wrote the forward to the subsequent catalogue, in which he said of his friend: “There are people about whom no one has heard while the spirit still animates them. Only at death does the world learn what they have accomplished in seclusion.”12 To the dismay of Zunz and his few learned compatriots, both collections ended up in England. In 1829 the Bodleian Library of Oxford University purchased Oppenheimer’s legacy for the modest sum of 9000 thalers, while in 1848 the British Museum acquired Michael’s books and the Bodleian, his manuscripts.13 Zunz intervened in both instances with Prussian authorities in a vain effort not to lose access to these treasures. On August 20, 1846 Prussia’s Minister of Education and Church Affairs, J.A.F. Eichhorn, responded quickly, curtly and coldly to his long letter of August 17 that “I cannot take up the purchase of the library.”14 That same summer of 1846, Zunz’s friend Meier Isler of Hamburg, who worked in the city’s library, issued an appeal to the wealthy Jews of his city on the front page of Der Orient, the clearing house for Jewish scholarship in Germany, to add Michael’s extraordinary collection to that of the local li-

9

Leopold Zunz, Zur Geschichte und Literatur (Berlin: Veit, 1845), 235 (“[…] zu den wenigen Denkmälern gehört, die Juden errichtet und Christen erhalten haben”). 10 JNUL, ARC, 40 792, C 13, 59. 11 Shimeon Brisman, A History and Guide to Judaic Bibliography, (Cincinnati/New York: Hebrew Union College Press, 1977), 88; Abraham Berliner, Briefwechsel zwischen Heimann Michael und Leopold Zunz (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kaufmann, 1907). 12 Ozrot Chajjim. Katalog der Michaelschen Bibliothek (Hamburg: A. Ascher, 1848), page one of the Vorwort (“Es giebt Menschen, von welchen, während der Geist in ihnen still wirkend arbeitet, Niemand hört, die, was sie im Verborgenen geschaffen, erst sterbend der Welt darreichen.”). 13 Brisman, 40; Julius Fürst, Bibliotheca Judaica, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1849–63), 3, xlvii, lii. 14 Ludwig Geiger, “Zunz im Verkehr mit Behörden und Hochgestellten,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, 60 (1916), 333 (“dass ich auf den Ankauf der Bibliothek nicht eingehen kann.”)

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brary, which, he claimed, already owned the largest of any public library in German: It is now nearly 20 years that a similar treasure, assembled for the same purpose, was shipped out of Germany to a remote corner of the scholarly world, where buried and inaccessible it is of no value to scholarship […]. Let us not commit such a travesty a second time. May the new interest in Jewish scholarship that since then has been aroused contribute to fostering an appreciation for this vital task. It is a matter of honor for Germany, and especially for its Jews, that this collection remain here.15

The appeal, unfortunately, fell on deaf ears. The opportunity afforded by both transactions could not overcome the pervasive lay indifference which constantly hampered the institutionalization of the new science in Germany. Communal apathy and university hostility destined many scholars of Judaica to live at a subsistence level, far removed from the wellsprings of their research. Thus while German universities surely imbued young Jewish scholars with the tools and perspectives of critical scholarship, the truly great collections of Hebrew rare books and manuscripts were to be found in Oxford, London, Paris, Leiden, Parma and Rome, which they could ill afford to visit.16 Yet without a modern catalogue, their treasures were unknown and inaccessible. Bibliography was the indispensable handmaid of critical scholarship. Toward that end, the Bodleian invited Moritz Steinschneider, Zunz’s prote´ge´, in 1848 to catalogue its collection of printed books. The project would make him the greatest Jewish bibliographer of his age, if not of all time. In truth, he wanted to catalogue its incomparable horde of manuscripts, for they teemed with far more novelty. Both he and Bulkeley Bandinel, the librarian, regarded the book catalogue as a stepping stone to the manuscripts, and his five trips to Oxford over the next decade yielded many a dramatic discovery. Altogether he toiled intensively for 13 years with the complete confidence and personal assistance of Bandinel to produce an encyclopedic Latin catalogue that covered every book in the collection printed before 1732. Along the way with Bandinel’s encouragement and checkbook, Steinschneider purchased rare books in good condition to fill in lacunae. The four stout volumes of the catalogue, amounting to more than 9,500 entries packed with dense biographical data, cost the Bodleian a grand total of 2,050 pounds. Though Steinschneider’s health did not permit him to continue with

15

Der Orient, 25.Juni, 1846 (no. 26), 197 (“Es ist nunmehr bald zwanzig Jahre, dass ein ähnlicher Schatz, für denselben Zweck zusammengebracht, aus Deutschland entführt und in einen Winkel der gelehrten Welt gebracht wurde, wo er den Meisten unzugänglich ohne Nutzen für die Wissenschaft fast vergraben ist […]. Lasset uns nicht zum weiten Male einen ähnlichen Jammer erleben.”). 16 Fürst, xxxi–lxi.

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the catalogue of its manuscripts, the exhaustiveness and precision of his book catalogue would never be duplicated.17 Despite the imperialism of the British libraries, their German counterparts were still heirs to important collections of Hebrew manuscripts. With every manuscript a potential game changer, the quality of a collection mattered as much as its size. By the 1870s in a quick succession of German catalogues of Hebrew manuscripts in the libraries of Munich, Hamburg and Berlin, where he now worked on a very part-time basis, Steinschneider, unearthed the treasures that awaited the diligent scholar.18 Manuscripts often do not self-identify. What made Steinschneider a uniquely reliable guide is that he read his manuscripts rather than scanned them before describing their content and identifying, where possible, their author and provenance. With astonishing alacrity, he deciphered different scripts and alphabets to master a wide range of literary genres. In consequence, his catalogues abounded with precious information. He listed the title and author, where known, of each manuscript, analyzed its subject matter, often quoting interesting passages, format permitting, and finally cited the modern scholars who had written on it, while correcting their errors. His commitment to truth strained many a friendship. By his count Munich had 418 codices, that is bound volumes often containing more than one manuscript, Hamburg 355 and Berlin 259.19 Besides having the largest and oldest collection in Germany, Munich also had the most varied. Indeed, Steinschneider averred that in terms of diversity, Munich was the equal of the much larger manuscript collections of Oxford, Paris, London and the Vatican.20 Years before, Max Lilienthal, a young rabbi with a doctorate in search of a career, had composed an incomplete and badly marred catalogue of Munich’s Hebrew manuscript collection, which he published in the literary supplement of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums from May 19, 1838 to November 16, 1839. The disjointed format of the catalogue was never consolidated by republication in book form, though 17 Moritz Steinschneider, Catalogus librorum hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana, 4 vols. (Berlin: Friedlaender, 1852–60); Alexander Marx, Essays in Jewish Bibliography (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947), 132–38; Edmund Craster, History of the Bodleian Library 1845–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 106. 18 Marx, 141–42, 152–53. 19 Moritz Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Handschriften der Königlichen Hof- und Staatsbibliothek in München (München: Palm, 1875); idem, Catalog der hebräischen Handschriften in der Stadtbibliothek zu Hamburg und der sich anschliessenden in anderen Sprachen (Hamburg: Otto Meissner, 1878); idem, Verzeichniss der Hebräischen Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin: Ascher, 1878), zweite Abtheilung, Berlin, 1897. 20 Moritz Steinschneider, “Die hebräischen Handschriften der k. Hof- und Staatsbibliothek in München,” in Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Klasse der k. Akademie der Wissenschaft in München, 1875, 205.

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Steinschneider’s personal collection of his own publications does contain an interleafed Handexemplar that swarms with his handwritten corrections and additions. It is evident that it served as the point of departure and road map for his own catalogue.21 Notwithstanding its flawed condition and inaccessibility, Lilienthal’s catalogue did catch the eye of M.H. Landauer, who hastened to Munich on a subvention from the government of Württemberg to pore over its substantial corpus of Kabbalistic manuscripts. Sickly from birth and in deteriorating health, Landauer had studied at the universities of Munich and Tübingen before passing his state exam in Württemberg to become a rabbi. He would die in 1840 at age 33.22 In the short time allotted him in the library archives, he read voraciously and empathetically. The dozens of notebooks he left behind pulsated with an inchoate but coherent history of Jewish mysticism. When edited and published posthumously by Julius Fürst, the editor of Der Orient, in 1845, his profusion of insights and conjectures not only put the study of Kabbalah on the Wissenschaft agenda, but attracted other scholars to head for Munich.23 The ultimate significance of a collection, however, eludes the confines of a catalogue and is better captured by highlighting the research it spawned and fertilized. To illustrate this criterion, I should like to close by mentioning three Jewish scholars of world renown whose research is indebted to their contact with Munich. My first example is Gershom Scholem, the great master of Jewish mysticism. As an adolescent in Berlin prior to World War One, he had embraced Zionism and immersed himself in a serious study of Hebrew sacred texts. By 1919, he had discarded his plans to pursue a doctorate in mathematics at Göttingen and decided instead to go to Munich because of its wealth of Kabbalah manuscripts to advance his passion for Jewish mysticism.24 His dissertation on an early, fragmentary and difficult kabbalistic text, known as Bahir (light) and first published in 1651, broke new ground in part because Scholem was able to base his translation and commentary on a 21 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums. Literarisches und homiletisches Beiblatt, 19. Mai, 1838 – 1. Juni, 1839, thereafter called Literatur. Archäologie. Homiletik, 360, 544, 559–60, 588 and 604. The Handexemplar is in the Jewish Theological Seminary Library, ARC, 108, no. 128. 22 Israelitische Annalen, 3 ( 1841), 69–70. 23 Literaturblatt des Orients, 1845, cols. 178–85, 194–96, 212–15, 225–29, 322–27, 341–45, 417–22, 471–75, 488–92, 507–10, 556–58, 570–74, 587–92, 709–13, 748–50. 24 Gershom Scholem, Mi-Berlin le-Yerushlayim (Hebrew), (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1982), 125. For more personal considerations that entered into Scholem’s decision to study in Munich, see the richly suggestive recent research by David A. Rees, “Ein Dichter, ein Mädchen und die jüdischen Speisegesetze: Gershom Scholems Entscheidung für München und die Kabbala,” Münchner Beiträge zur Jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur, Heft 2 (2007), 19–29. [I thank Mr. Rees for bringing his essay to my attention.]

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less garbled manuscript in Munich from 1298. Years later he would learn that it was with this same manuscript that the Renaissance virtuosa Pico della Mirandola had begun his own study of Kabbalah in 1486.25 In 1923 Scholem left Germany for Palestine to eventually turn the new and tiny Hebrew University into the world center for the study of Jewish mysticism. It is striking that his pioneering work after the dissertation should begin with a catalogue in 1927, not exactly an inventory of primary sources, to be sure, published or unpublished, whose state of disorder defied the capacity of any single scholar, but rather a catalogue raisonne´ that covered some 1219 secondary works written in the last 400 years on the subject of Jewish mysticism. Scholem’s dissertation and catalogue appeared as volumes one and two of a grandious research project on the literature of and scholarship on Jewish mysticism by a society that proudly bore the name of Johann Albert Widmanstad, the sixteenth-century Renaissance scholar whose gift of manuscripts had firmly laid the foundation of Munich’s collection of Hebraica.26 Among Munich’s prize possessions was the only surviving manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud, the fountainhead of rabbinic Judaism. Dating from 1342, it was not only complete but uncensored by papal authorities.27 Traditional scholars had long known that over the centuries scribal errors had increasingly corrupted many a Talmudic passage now petrified in the printed text. Since the early 1860s, Fürchtegott Lebrecht in Berlin, an admirer of Zunz and a student of Wilhelm Gesenius, Halle’s great grammarian and lexicographer of biblical Hebrew, had been pushing the cause of a critical edition of the Talmud.28 But it was to be Raphael Nathan Rabbinowicz, a 30-year-old Lithuanian yeshiva product untouched by the philological training of a German university, who seized the initiative to come to Munich to utilize its unique Talmudic manuscript as the focal point of a critical edition. Arriving penniless, he quickly garnered for his daunting vision the enduring and unstinting support of Abraham Merzbacher, an ordained Orthodox rabbi, banker and avid collector of Hebraica. From 1868 to 1888, the year of his untimely death, Rabbinowicz produced 14 volumes in Hebrew covering more than half of the Talmud. In parallel columns, each page showed those

25

Gerhard Scholem, Das Buch Bahir, reprint (Hamburg: Aurinia Verlag, 2008), Vorwort zur Neuausgabe. 26 Idem, Das Buch Bahir (Leipzig: W. Drugulin, 1923); idem, Bibliographia Kabbalistica (Leipzig: W. Drugulin, 1927). Both bore the alluring subtitle: “Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte der jüdischen Mystik. Im Auftrag der Johann Albert Widmanstetter Gesellschaft.” 27 Steinschneider’s 1875 Munich catalogue included a fold-out facsimile of one page of the manuscript. 28 Fürchtegott Lebrecht, Kritische Lese verbesserter Lesarten und Erklärungen zum Talmud (Berlin: W. J. Peiser, 1864).

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passages of a tractate in which a divergence occurred between the printed text and the Munich manuscript. At the bottom of the page, Rabbinowicz cited and explained still other readings of each passage from other manuscripts and Talmudic commentators that he had assembled in order to enlarge the pool of textual variants.29 Heinrich Ehrentreu, a Hungarian Orthodox colleague in Munich, who would later tutor Scholem in Talmud when he came to the city, completed, edited and published in 1897 yet a fifteenth volume left unfinished by Rabbinowicz at his death.30Dikdukei Sofrim (scribal variants), as he called his testament to originality, erudition, hard work and perseverance, revealed for the first time the extensive fluidity of the Talmudic text. Still, he insisted in his introduction that his exercise in lower criticism was to have no bearing on accepted halakhic opinions that derived from the standard text. What motivated him was piety, not impiety: to cleanse the dominant sacred text of traditional Judaism of error and corruption.31 With the continued discovery of ever more Talmudic fragments and the awesome technology of the computer, the quest for a critical edition of the Bablylonian Talmud in our own day is finally nearing a semblance of completion.32 Unlike Scholem and Rabbinowicz, Steinschneider came to Munich in mid-career, highly respected and intensely focused. Cataloguing its Hebrew manuscripts did not actually require his residing in the city. The library obliged him by sending the codices to Berlin, which he finished perusing by 1869.33 That he saw fit to do two editions of his Munich catalogue in 1875 and 1895 is eloquent testimony to his regard for the importance of the collection. It was the only one of his catalogues to come out twice. The second edition was some 50 pages longer and carried more excerpts than the first. Its bibliographical data also evidenced the extent to which contemporary scholarship had utilized the collection in the intervening 20 years.34 In his massive lifetime’s work Die hebräischen Uebersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher of 1893, which was almost entirely based on manuscripts, he cited Munich manuscripts some 500 times.35

29 Raphael Natan Rabinowicz, Sefer Dikdukei Sofrim (Hebrew), (München: Heinrich Resl, 1867–81), 14 vols., 1, dedication and introduction. Steinschneider’s Munich catalogue of 1875, 43. 30 Rabinowicz, 13, introduction; Scholem, Mi-Berlin le-Yerushalayim, 138. 31 Rabinowicz, 1, 24. 32 See http://www.liebermaninstitute.org. 33 Munich Catalogue, 1875, Vorwort. 34 Moritz Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Handschriften der k. Hof- und Staatsbibliothek in München, 2nd ed. (München: Palm, 1895). 35 Idem, Die hebraeischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher, reprint (Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1956), 1073–74.

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It was the exceptional diversity of the collection that invigorated Steinschneider’s research agenda. To his delight, he found there an abundance of manuscripts in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew letters) in the fields of medicine, mathematics and philosophy.36 Many were in fact rare or unique copies of Arabic philosophic texts that shed new light on the legacy of such Islamic giants as Al-Farabi, Al-Gazzali and especially Averroe¨s, the primary Muslim expositor of Aristotle. Indeed, Steinschneider was fond of reiterating that Averroe¨s’s corpus survived the Middle Ages largely in the guise of Hebrew translations.37 His discovery in Munich of a thirteenth-century Hebrew summary of Plato’s philosophy led him to author a major work on Al-Farabi in 1869 and thereafter to publish a spate of mathematical and medieval studies deriving from its manuscripts.38 In short, Munich provided Steinschneider with invaluable ammunition to expand his lifelong campaign to alter the cultural profile of medieval Jewry. In libraries across Europe, its literature was still being classified under the category of Bible and theology, as if writing among medieval Jews were restricted to their rabbis.39 And yet in the Islamic world, Jews wrote in Arabic, produced a significant body of non-religious literature and played a vital role as translators in the circuitous chain of transmission that brought the wisdom of the Greeks to the Christian West. By going underground, that is into the archives, Steinschneider could show that above ground, the spirit knew no ghetto. In 1843 scarcely a single Arabic original of a Jewish text had as yet seen the light of day.40 By century’s end, many a classic preserved only in Hebrew translation had been reconnected with its underlying Arabic medium in which it was originally written. Moreover, a host of new unknown texts authored by Jews or Jewish converts to Islam in disciplines impinging on Judaism but well beyond it, added dramatic evidence that Jews were an integral part of the fabric of Islamic civilization in the era of its ascendancy. Spearheaded by Steinschneider in Berlin and Salomon Munk and Joseph Derenbourg in Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century, this extraordinary work of excavation not only paved the way for the appreciation of the flood-tide of documents that started flowing from the Cairo Geniza at the turn of the century, but also matched it in scope and significance.

36

See his lecture in the Sitzungsberichte […] der k. Akademie (note 19), 199–206. Moritz Steinschneider, “Schriften der Araber in hebräischen Handschriften,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 47 (1893), 342. 38 Idem, “Hebräische Handschriften in München (k. Bibibliothek) über arabische Philosophie,” Serapeum, 15. Mai, 1867 (no. 9), 136–40. 39 Idem, Serapeum, 15. Februar, 1846 (no. 3), 39; idem, 15. Januar, 1847 (no. 1), 7. 40 Idem, “An Introduction to the Arabic Literature of the Jews,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, 9 (1897), 224; idem, Die arabische Literatur der Juden, reprint (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1964), xlvi. 37

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39

Above all, this cadre of polymaths established beyond cavil the inextricable link between archives and history, their catalogues and critical scholarship. Aquifers are indispensable to keeping a landscape fertile.

2. Wives and Wissenschaft: The Domestic Seedbed of Critical Scholarship In his eightieth year, not quite a year after the death of his beloved Adelheid on August 18, 1874, a forlorn Leopold Zunz, who had spearheaded the turn to history in modern Judaism, confided to David Kaufmann, his aspiring young biographer, that “a reliable and skilled hand could compose a piece of Jewish history on the basis of the correspondence which I have conducted over sixty years.”1 Nearly fifty years before, Zunz had ascribed that same valence in a light-hearted reprimand of his wife. Shortly after she had arrived in Hamburg from Berlin in 1827 for a visit that would keep them apart for more than a month, she slipped in noting the date and location of one of her first letters back home. The error evoked in Leopold, always a stickler for precision, a flight of fancy full of bite and bluster: Date your letters correctly, for a day will come when […] our letters alone will have survived the flood to attest the existence in Berlin of cultured Jews, both male and female, who could rightly be angry that their mother married their father rather than the first good [gentile] lawyer, lieutenant or duke [to come along]. And if the notoriety does not beguile you, consider what our letters as autographs of famous Jewish men and women will one day go for in London.2

Whimsical though it was, that prescient sentiment to save their correspondence yielded a treasure trove of personal letters of unequaled immediacy. The first scholar to fully appreciate the value of this collection was Ludwig Geiger, the son of the Reform scholar and intellectual Abraham Geiger, and a prodigious historian of German literature as well as of German Jewry. In 1915–16, Geiger prepared a massive manuscript of Zunz letters to his paternal-like teacher Samuel Meyer Ehrenberg, to Samuel’s son Philipp, who succeeded his father at the helm of the Jewish school in Wolfenbüttel, and to Samuel’s nephew Meier Isler, his sister’s son, who eventually became the director of the Hamburg city library.3 While Geiger had already begun to 1 Markus Brann, “Mitteilungen aus dem Briefwechsel zwischen Zunz und Kaufmann,” Jahrbuch für Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur (hereafter JJGL), 5 (1902), 171. 2 Leo Baeck Institute New York (hereafter LBINY) Archives, Leopold and Adelheid Zunz Collection, Leopold to Adelheid, August 11, 1827. 3 Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem (hereafter JNUL), ARC, 4° 792, V 2.

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mine Zunz’s papers to publish some of his professional correspondence, he acknowledged in his introductory essay that reading the personal letters bordered on a religious experience.4 His manuscript included a number of postscripts by Adelheid and a brief discussion of her persona and significance.5 Unfortunately, his death in 1919 aborted the project. When the work was revised, expanded, and completed by Nahum N. Glatzer in two precious volumes in 1958 and 1964, the presence of Adelheid loomed much larger by virtue of his inclusion of her letters to Philipp’s wife, Julie.6 Still omitted, though, were the many surviving letters between Leopold and Adelheid, triggered by occasional separations.7 Nearly all written after their marriage, these lengthy exchanges, penned over several days, were on the order of telephone conversations chronicling the experiences and impressions since the last contact. It is the dialogue of a couple entirely comfortable with each other, marked by candor and mutual respect, feelings of affection and longing. A profusion of emotion, especially by Adelheid, often interrupts the narrative flow. Toward the end of a long letter from Prague in 1836, Adelheid closes with a dream that has the ring of daily life: “You embraced me from behind and pressed me so tightly that it hurt and awakened me. Did you think of me intently on Saturday night around eleven?”8 Leopold, indeed, thought of his Mäuschen his little mouse, as he often endearingly called her in his salutations, all the time. Should a letter fail to arrive, he would become dispirited and perturbed. For a much-harassed scholar chary with his time, he composed expansive epistles that were a telling measure of his devotion and solicitude. To focus on Adelheid, then, not only does justice to someone critical to his well-being, but also provides an alternative lens through which to view him, a subject not unworthy of my former student Paula Hyman, whose pioneering corpus of research in gender studies has inspired the expansion of my own scholarly horizon. No third party arranged the engagement of Leopold and Adelheid on October 16, 1821 in Berlin. He was twenty-seven and she nineteen. They had met nearly two and a half years before, when neither was as yet a Prussian citizen, a status attained by Adelheid through the naturalization of her father on November 30, 1820, and by Leopold on June 8, 1821, a half year after his doctorate from the University of Halle. An official document executed by 4

Ibid., Einleitung, 28. Ibid., 46. 6 Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), Leopold and Adelheid Zunz (London: East and West Library, 1958), (hereafter Glatzer I); idem (ed.), Leopold Zunz, Jude – Deutscher – Europäer (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1964) (hereafter Glatzer II). 7 LBINY, Archives, Zunz Collection. 8 Ibid., Adelheid to Leopold, June 10, 1836. 5

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Julius Rubo, soon to become the syndic of the Berlin Jewish community, attests that the engagement took place in the home of the merchant Levy Moses Beermann, Adelheid’s father, and stipulates the terms of the agreement. The couple agreed to be married in Berlin in half a year according to Jewish law and to share equally the costs of the wedding. Most importantly, Beermann promised a trousseau to the groom, consisting of dresses, undergarments (Wäsche), linens and beds, and a dowry of 1000 talers, to be transferred three days before the wedding. Considering that an annual salary between 150 and 600 talers in the last quarter of the eighteenth century would have put one in the middle-income strata of Berlin society, the dowry was not ungenerous. On May 9, 1822, the day of the wedding, Leopold signed another document to the effect that Levy Moses had in fact fulfilled the terms of the dowry.9 That valuable dowry quickly proved its utility, for on September 13, 1822, Leopold dramatically resigned his post as Prediger (preacher) of the liberal Beer temple in Berlin, when the emerging gap between his religious intensity and the congregation’s apathy threatened to lead to his dismissal. The newly married couple surely drew on their dowry until Leopold found employment on January 1, 1824, as the editor of foreign news for one of Berlin’s two daily newspapers, where he would toil daily from eight to one for the next eight years.10 Germany offered slight comfort to that first cohort of Jewish university graduates who felt impelled to recast Judaism as a historical phenomenon. Tormented by the indifference of wealthy Jews, the contempt of German academics, and his own aversion to the rabbinate, Leopold had little choice but to eke out a living in an array of taxing jobs, mostly but not always related to the field of Jewish education. Had Adelheid not fully shared the cause of her husband, their home would hardly have been a haven. In her domesticity, she would prove to be an exceptional woman. Leopold and Adelheid enjoyed a romantic, companionate, and childless marriage. Indeed, their letters never allude to nor lament the absence of offspring, though Adelheid did seem to find a surrogate daughter in Julie Fischel, who as the teenage bride of Philipp Ehrenberg in 1847 quickly became a family intimate. Philipp’s father, Samuel, a modern pedagogue con-

9 The pertinent documents are in JNUL, ARC, 4° 792, C9, C16, while the income figures are drawn from Deborah Hertz, Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1988), 58. As to when Leopold and Adelheid first met, see Glatzer II, 461. On the determinative role of dowries among German Jews more generally, see Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 85–116. 10 S. Maybaum, “Aus dem Leben von Leopold Zunz,” Zwo˝lfter Bericht über die Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin (Berlin: Rosenthal, 1894), 10, 12; Glatzer II, 133. The paper was Die Haude und Spenersche Zeitung.

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versant with the classical texts of Judaism, had rescued Leopold from the shipwreck of an outmoded Jewish educational institution. Orphaned as an adolescent, Leopold flourished under Samuel’s wise tutelage to become the first Jew to graduate from the local Gymnasium and then to teach a wide range of subjects in the Samson Schule for five years, before heading off to attend the newly founded University of Berlin.11 The shared joys and travails of the following decades only strengthened the bonds. When Philipp came to Berlin to study, he found a home-away-from-home at the Zunzes. Years later a heartfelt condolence letter after the death of his daughter moved Samuel to thank Leopold and Adelheid “who love me like their father and spare no effort to bless my old age.”12 At Philipp’s request upon his father’s death in 1853, Leopold authored a biography worthy of the man in just three months.13 Not only did Leopold, along with his fellow scholar Solomon Judah Rapoport, officiate at the wedding of Philipp and Julie in Prague on August 11, 1847, but he had personally arranged for the couple to meet after the breakup of Philipp’s first engagement.14 Leopold had befriended Julie’s father, David Gabriel Fischel, a privileged Prague manufacturer, during his aborted stint as the Prediger of Prague’s Reform association in 1835–36.15 At nearly twice Julie’s age (thirty-five as opposed to eighteen), Philipp needed some convincing before agreeing to meet.16 So did Julie’s father, who, unannounced and disguised as a Viennese educator, visited Wolfenbüttel to finagle from Philipp a tour of his school.17 Prior to Philipp’s subsequent trip to Prague to meet Julie and her family, Adelheid sensitively counseled her not to be stampeded: Don’t enter a relationship to which your heart is not drawn. You are still unattached. There is nothing to break off or answer for […]. Don’t be unjust toward yourself or your Creator. You may not connect immediately, but the impression you make will linger. They will sense the depth you have to offer, your disposition which is always sunny, the knowledge and spirit behind your modesty. Always stay as you are, nothing else, that is, don’t force yourself to do anything […]. Be proud in your humility.18

Only once the coupling took hold could Leopold reveal to Julie the deeper resonance of the match for him: “What affects the Fischels and the Ehrenbergs affects me also. Now since the two of you have become one, I will sink

11

JNUL, ARC, 4° 792, C1. Leopold Zunz “Mein erster Unterricht in Wolfenbüttel,” JJGL, 30 (1937): 131–40; Isaak M. Jost, “Lebensabriss,” JJGL, 31 (1938): 224. 12 Glatzer I, 177. 13 Ibid., 256–57, 263–64. 14 Ibid., 187–88. 15 Glatzer II, 208. 16 Glatzer I, 145, 147, 148–53, 167. 17 Ibid., 165. 18 Ibid., 167.

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into a sea of love. Except for my soul mate Adelheid, I know of no other heart in which I would rather live than in the Ehrenberg-Fischel hotel.”19 Frequent correspondence, periodic visits, and mutual affection nurtured these bonds of extended family over several generations and surely enhanced the Zunzes’ diminutive nuclear family. Leopold and Adelheid were very much in love, intimately compatible, and content with little.20 They both took great pleasure in their pet canary and could afford the services of a Jewish maid, one of whom stayed with them for seventeen years.21 Leopold reported to Samuel in 1847, “Our life is as simple as ever. We do see people outside our home. But what we find most agreeable for body and soul is to be at home by ourselves. That is the good fortune of being in deep concord.”22 According to Adelheid, at day’s end after having gone their separate ways, the two of them would talk well into the evening. She describes for Julie shortly after her wedding the following scene: “I much prefer to be busy during the day, so I that I can stretch twilight into evening as I tuck my Zunz snugly into his easy chair – for otherwise he would yell ‘it is too soft’ – and myself on the footstool nearby, after which we listen to words of wisdom and sometimes even utter them ourselves.”23 With Zunz often reading to her out loud, they discussed and digested German, French, and English books of fiction, letters, history, science, philosophy, and religion, well beyond the normal fare.24 To Samuel, Adelheid confessed that “a good book is the purest joy I know, especially if I can then talk about it candidly with a friend.”25 For a change of pace, Leopold would teach her chess and even geometry. With a twinkle, Adelheid relates to Julie what she learned from the latter: “What delights me is that I grasp quickly, yet still can’t prove a thing or even carry on a conversation. All women and girls should study geometry, for then gossiping would soon cease. The subject allows for nothing extraneous.”26 The Zunz friendship circle complemented the emotional harmony and intellectual level of their companionship. Nor was the presence of Christians a rarity. In 1834, Adelheid informs Philipp that her current icons are Goethe 19

Ibid., 173. Glatzer II, 128. 21 LBINY, Archives, Zunz Collection, Leopold to Adelheid, July 20, 1847. The correspondence abounds with references to their canary, for example, Glatzer I, 140, 147, 225, 229. On the employment of Jewish servants prior to 1850, see Steven M. Lowenstein in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, ed. Marion A. Kaplan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 108. 22 Glatzer I, 195. 23 Ibid., 192. 24 Ibid., 62; Glatzer II, 178. 25 Glatzer I, 76. 26 On learning chess, see Glatzer I, 231. The quotation is on page 277. 20

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and Herder, in whose Faust and Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, she finds unimagined stimulation. It is a Christian friend who poses for her a challenging interlocutor: My Zunz helps me faithfully. But it is in my friend that I find resonance in the application. She is more systematic and pious than me. She’s a Christian brought up religiously, yet whose intelligence breaks through the limits set by orthodox faith and contests ingrained habits. You can imagine how often we disagree, since my greatest happiness comes from approaching God without an intermediary. There is a mine of feeling, intelligence and spirit in this woman and I must exert myself to be her friend.27

From her correspondence it is abundantly clear that on social occasions Adelheid did more than serve coffee and cake. On an October afternoon in 1847, Adelheid hosted a clutch of her female friends for a gathering at which conversation moved effortlessly from politics to literature to music.28 By 1851, the group, slightly altered, was still convening periodically at Adelheid’s. That year she also invited a mixed company to meet Karl Gutzkow, one of Germany’s acclaimed literary firebrands. A close friend of his recently deceased wife, Adelheid found him “milder and nicer than before. He spoke appreciatively and with deep feeling about his departed wife, while showing me the kind of warmth befitting a former friend.”29 Gutzkow, to be sure, was no stranger to the Zunz household. From 1824 to 1841, he had frequented their famous Saturday soire´es, and when Leopold went to Hamburg in 1841, he did not fail to visit him.30 It was the force of Leopold’s unique persona with its quick wit and acute mind, its radical politics and messianic fervor, its command of Jewish scholarship and intimate familiarity with general culture, that sustained this belated and exceptional salon off and on for some twenty-five years from 1825 to 1850.31 New friends replaced the old as they left town or became estranged: “You should only see,” Adelheid writes Philipp in 1834, “how many new members our Saturday evenings now have. You would not recognize them anymore. The old have left us […]. My guests, however, remind me that I must feed them and my domestic calls me to help her prepare a dish.”32 At first intended only for Leopold’s friends, even after they converted like Eduard Gans, the well-known legal scholar and disciple of Hegel, the salon

27

Ibid., 82–83. Ibid., 192–93. 29 Ibid., 233. 30 Glatzer II, 176, 215. 31 Glatzer I, 233. On the high-water mark of the salon in early nineteenth-century Germany, see Hertz. More generally, Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun (eds.), Jewish Women and their Salons (New York: The Jewish Museum/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 32 Glatzer I, 83. 28

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increasingly attracted Christin savants and intellectuals, so that by 1835 Leopold could boast to Philipp that it was now largely populated by Christians.33 There can be little doubt that this corner of cosmopolitanism held aloft the ultimate vision of integration that Leopold harbored for German Jewry, even as it offset ever so slightly his own unrelieved sense of isolation at the frontier of critical Jewish scholarship. In 1843, Adelheid vividly conveyed to a restless young Moritz Steinschneider in Prague the extent of Zunz’s academic loneliness: “You know that here [in Berlin] they are all idiots, Sophie SchroederDevrient sings her hymns but for selihot [the penitential poems that Zunz was collecting and studying] they have no ear, let along interest. Where will we find the young people who have the understanding, knowledge and love to appreciate and support path breaking scholarship and my Zunz.”34 Adelheid had a keen eye for the character of the people who crossed her threshold. She served as Steinschneider’s confidant no less than her husband, as the immensely talented Moravian cast about for a niche that would allow him to pursue his love of scholarship. During his first stay in Berlin from November 1839 to October 1841, Moritz often visited them. In 1842, Adelheid warmly recalls the times the two of them sat at the piano in midwinter as Moritz introduced her to the beauty of Italian music. She signs her letter “your student.”35 Yet Adelheid faults him for often assuming an off-putting cerebral exterior that belies the intensity of his inner feelings.36 She values his 33

Glatzer II, 181. See also ibid., 138–39, 141, 151, 176, 177. Gans converted in Paris on December 12, 1825 (Hans Gunther Reissner, Eduard Gans [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1965], 113). Zunz reacted to the news with disdain in a letter to his friend the Viennese Prediger Isak Noa Mannheimer: “Dr. Gans came back from Paris 23 days ago, and is still the same open, congenial and clever person, except that he is now wholeheartedly taken by that which he used to regard as his greatest nemesis” (M. Brann and M. Rosenmann “Der Briefwechsel zwischen Isak Noa Mannheimer und Leopold Zunz,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, neue Folge, 52 [1917], 295). But the friendship survived. In 1833 when Zunz was driven to consider a rabbinic post in Darmstadt, Gans, by then a full professor at the University of Berlin, sent its lay leadership a glowing letter of recommendation in which he dared to aver “that if the views regarding the appointment of Jews were not so shallow and mean-spirited, as they generally are, Dr. Zunz would long ago have found recompense for his unselfish efforts in a university career” (Maybaum, “Aus dem Leben von Leopold Zunz,” 28). In June 1836, Gans would be the first of their friends to happily welcome Adelheid back to Berlin from Prague, while Leopold tarried at a spa (LBINY Archives, Zunz Collection, Adelheid to Leopold, June 10, 1836). 34 Alexander Marx, “Zunz’s Letters to Steinschneider,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 5 (1933–34), 119. Though she was also an opera singer, Sophie Schroeder-Devrient’s (1781–1868) fame derived mostly from the tragic roles she played in the theater. 35 Ibid., 116. 36 Ibid., 143.

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poetic side.37 To counter her judgment, Moritz responds with an exuberant epistle announcing his decision to leave Prague: “I am actually not an uptight rationalist and have never wished to be taken for one. I simply prefer to keep my mouth shut when my heart opens wide. But here (in Prague) both run the risk of rusting on their hinges.”38 Meier Isler was another early member of the Zunz salon, who by 1831 had settled in Hamburg, where he befriended the physician, poet, and aspiring theologian Salomon Ludwig Steinheim. The fact that Isler’s father had married Samuel’s sister led to a lifelong correspondence with the Zunzes.39 Several years before the appearance of the first volume of Steinheim’s Die Offenbarung nach dem Lehrbegriffe der Synagoge (Revelation according to the Teaching of the Synagogue), Adelheid incisively cautioned Isler not to exaggerate his theological prowess: “I understand what you expect from Steinheim: that he might become your anchor to steady the tossing ship of your beliefs. On the basis of what I know of the doctor, I doubt it. Setting aside his good will and other virtues, he seems to me too much of a poet, who gives voice to the nicest theories, but leaves life untouched. Search for faith within yourself and work it through, only then will it be yours.”40 When that muchawaited volume did appear, it occasioned a vigorous articulation in a letter to Isler by Leopold of a basic postulate of his own faith: I can’t go along with that antagonistic dichotomy between revelation and paganism. I see rather everywhere the emanation of one and the same world spirit, opposites in the phenomenal world, even contradictions, which are, however, reconciled by philosophy. Away with all existing and exclusive hostility! I dare say that in our despair to ascribe some positive content to Judaism, we juxtapose it to its opposite, non-Judaism, that is, an apple does not taste like a non-apple. Nor do I acknowledge any act of providence that would restrict the evolution of the human spirit or ever wished to. A belief in revelation forged in a sense of exclusive aristocracy craves to project a polar opposite that must be eradicated.41

Adelheid left Leopold as little as possible, even when Julie needed her.42 Her presence calmed his sensitive and excitable temperament. When she did, though, her almost daily letters humored him with memorable aperc¸us. On a two-month trip to Teplitz, Bohemia, in 1847, where she stayed with Leopold’s cousin Rosa, Adelheid was visited by Zacharias Frankel and his wife. On an earlier trip in 1836, Adelheid had described for Leopold Frankel’s triumphant departure from his rabbinic post in Teplitz to his new one in Dresden.43 Though his grateful new community showered him with an attrac37

Ibid., 119. JNUL, ARC, 4° 792, G 23, letter no. 6. 39 Glatzer I, 382, n. 78. 40 Glatzer II, 147. 41 Ibid., 186. 42 Glatzer I, 248. 43 LBINY Archives, Zunz Collection, Adelheid to Leopold, June 1, 1836. 38

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tive apartment within the bounds of his rental allowance, sundry gifts, wreaths, and poems, he told Adelheid that he still envied Leopold for having extricated himself from working in the Jewish community.44 Destined to fray over their divergent conceptions of Jewish scholarship, the relationship was still intact in 1847.45 This time the Frankels heedlessly overstayed their welcome. At ten in the evening, after a seven-hour visit, Adelheid finally declared herself spent. Yet the next day she wrote Leopold that neither was bad company: “She is a splendid rogue and made us laugh often, and he is a lot more solicitous of women than I would have imagined from seeing him in your company. He spoke with me about his books and their reception or nonreception. And then about you, saying among other things that I respect Dr. Zunz not only as a great scholar, but still more as a great human being, who makes his way, irrespective of what might happen to him.”46 The lead figure, of course, in Adelheid’s script was Leopold, whom she loved beyond words and cared for with every fiber of her being. To Moritz, whom she was trying to woo back from Prague, she avowed that “the most interesting person in her circle is always my husband. If there were only another, that would make for a life!”47 While away, she would often imagine their nightly seances, a mixture of talk and tenderness. From Teplitz in 1847, she delicately described for Leopold what pleasure distance denied them: The above events constituted my outer life. My inner life came from your anticipated letter. It led me straight to your feet, putting my head on your lap, your hand on my forehead and listening to your beloved words, which you have uttered now for years and whose truth and applicability, alas still remain relevant. Indeed, that I can hear all this from you, including truths that gladden my heart, that lift my confidence, that give me courage to face the present and submit to the future – that is my good fortune. How hard do I lean and still harder press the hand which draws back the curtain from before eternity and the future. How readily would I jump over, if only I could rely on that hand –? But you declare: “What is, that is real!” and I am quieted.48

A few years later, Adelheid sketches yet another scene of their intimacy and interdependency. They had been away from Berlin for a full month in Dresden, Nuremberg, and Wolfenbüttel. When they returned, Adelheid was in pain and exhausted. In a letter to Julie in Wolfenbüttel, she conveyed what happened next: After much tossing and turning, I feel asleep, though toward eleven I awoke and because of my pain couldn’t find a comfortable position. Zunz heard my groaning, got up and bent over my bed and held me tightly in his arms until I fell asleep. May God reward him for his

44

Ibid., Adelheid to Leopold, June 6, 1836. Glatzer II, 217, 223. 46 LBINY Archives, Zunz Collection, Adelheid to Leopold, July 29, 1847. 47 Marx, “Zunz’s Letters to Steinschneider,” 126. 48 LBINY Archives, Zunz Collection, Adelheid to Leopold, July 16, 1847. 45

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love. He is so sad himself that tears often pour forth from his eyes. He has no one but me. We understand each other, we weep together over our bird (that just died), we lament being separated from you and the clear pure air of your garden and the love which surrounds us there. Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. I intend from now on to part from him, to leave him alone, even less than before.49

Adelheid appreciated like few others, despite her minimal Jewish knowledge, the degree to which Leopold stood apart from and ahead of his contemporaries. To be peerless meant a lonely existence, punctuated by requests of Zunz from the leadership of the Berlin Gemeinde to aid it in time of need or enhance its celebration of an anniversary. In 1865, Zunz obliged with a stirring address honoring the community’s renowned choir direction Louis Lewandowski, on the jubilee of his twenty-fifth year in office. He spoke broadly of the importance of music in worship but concluded on a cautionary note: “An improved service in the synagogue is not the cause of progress but its effect. Accordingly, a more beautiful life does not spring from an enhanced liturgy, but rather a stronger faith leads to a better rite. If Israel’s history is unknown and Jewish literature is neglected, if the Hebrew language is forgotten and Judaism devalued, then neither ancient texts nor new melodies will do much good.”50 In her comment on the event to Philipp and Julie, Adelheid highlighted the depth of Leopold’s performance: “Zunz spoke again so nicely. A deep perspective gave the man (Lewandowski) his proper due. Zunz’s thoughts are so lofty and all-encompassing that everyone is able to sense their nobility and prophetic quality. Yet very few are able to fathom their source, which alone leads to full comprehension.”51 Among those elite few, Adelheid stands out. Her range of interests, if not her body of knowledge, blessed Leopold with a soul mate. In addition to those already mentioned, the authors whose works surface in her correspondence include the theologians Friedrich Schleiermacher52 and August Theodor Stamm,53 the New Testament critic David Friedrich Strauss,54 the scientist Alexander von Humboldt,55 the English biographer of Goethe George Henry Lewes,56 the poets Lord Byron57 and Alphonse de Lamartine,58 and the saloniere Rahel Varnhagen.59 In 1850, Adelheid toured Berlin’s newly 49

Glatzer I, 241. Leopold Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Louis Gerschel, 1875–76), 2:142. 51 Glatzer II, 442. 52 Glatzer I, 300; Glatzer II, 178. 53 Glatzer I, 294. 54 Ibid., 333. 55 Ibid., 196. 56 Ibid., 287. 57 Ibid., 76. 58 Ibid., 236. 59 Ibid., 75. 50

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opened and stunningly beautiful Neues Museum, with its impressive exhibition of Egyptian antiquities, and took in a lecture by Germany’s most famous Egyptologist, Karl Richard Lepsius.60 Five years later she accompanied Leopold on a long-yearned-for research trip to the British Museum and the Bodleian Library. In London she happened to be visiting Sir Isaac Lyon and Caroline Goldsmid, while Leopold was at the British Museum, when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert dropped in unexpectedly to admire the flowers of the Goldsmid greenhouse. With her command of English up to the task, Adelheid impressed the royal couple in the rather intimate hourlong conversation that ensued.61 Her exceptional degree of political engagement surely owes much to Leopold’s years in journalism and to her own reading of such acerbic cultural and political critics as Bo˝rne, Riesser, Gans, and Heine.62 In 1827, just five days after the sudden death of George Canning, England’s short-lived liberal Tory prime minister and eloquent advocate of abolition and Catholic emancipation, Adelheid writes of her dismay to Leopold from Hamburg: What do you say to the terrible news, which circulated here yesterday, that Canning is dead? Kley (Eduard Kley, the Prediger of the Reform Temple in Hamburg, in whose home she was staying) related it at dinner and my desire to eat simply vanished. What will become of the hopes of the Catholics, the hopes of England itself? I was overcome with consternation. I believe the king must now act with a measure of independence.63

Leopold’s distress matched hers and suggests just how congruent were their radically liberal views: “On my way home I learned of Canning’s death, which utterly shattered me. Few of the people who sit on thrones or stand near them have touched me as deeply as this man, and now fate has snatched him away in mid-life, amid a thousand plans and looming wars, while thousands of knaves, monks and rotten judges stuff their fat bellies.”64 Zunz often vented his agitation in cynical barbs. In this selfsame letter to Adelheid, he returned twice more to the tragic loss. That she did not let it go unmentioned, indeed, that she was the first to raise the subject, pleased him no end. Adelheid’s religious sentiments also fell under the influence of Leopold, even as her entrance into his life manifestly strengthened his resolve to link his destiny to the welfare of his people. With a doctorate and fiance´e in hand, Leopold left Berlin in the late summer of 1821 with two like-minded friends to spend a few weeks in Hamburg in the Kley household. The visit turned out to be transformative. As he recounted to Adelheid in a letter flush with 60

Ibid., 231. Immanuel Bernfeld, “Zum Andenken an Leopold Zunz,” JJGL, 31 (1938), 233–34 (a description of the event in Adelheid’s own modest voice). 62 Glatzer II, 157. 63 LBINY Archives, Zunz Collectoin, Adelheid to Leopold, August 13, 1827. 64 Ibid., Leopold to Adelheid, August 18, 1827. 61

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exuberance, he was inspired by the economic profile, intellectual ferment, and religious vitality of the city’s Jews to rededicate his life to the reform of Judaism and the re-formation of its Jews: I am firmly convinced that no salvation can arise from the Jews until the present sclerotic and cowardly generation dies out, and one born in freedom awakens to fight for its heavenly kingdom. I hope when I return to Berlin to be active in behalf of the Jews. Don’t be puzzled, dearest, that in my letters I touch on this matter so often. My entire life is a text to this unending theme, though, the world hardly realizes it as yet […] It seems to me that the more eager I become to work for the salvation of my brethren, the more deeply do I love you.65

Leopold’s inspiration then stemmed from two sources, and Adelheid’s quick affirmation of his career choice tightened the linkage between his calling and his marriage: “I take up my quill again today to describe to you the satisfaction I felt at your enthusiasm for the reform of the Jews. I do hope that you, who are endowed with such courage, will, with God’s help, contribute modestly to alleviating the immense needs that prevail here and motivate those affected to be more sympathetic and active.”66 In the course of a fifty-twoyear marriage, Adelheid’s infinite solicitude would nurture Leopold’s celebrated steadfastness in an era fraught with stress. A pronounced universal thrust that is nevertheless averse to Christianity characterizes Adelheid’s expressed religious views. As the quotient of Jewish specificity fades, a resilient residue of ethnicity remains. In 1854, she gives Julie a taste of what she garners from Leopold in their daily coffee-hour confab: My doubts get resolved, my objections corrected. Religion and politics, the toughest of topics, are given preference. You ask “What is religion?” Believe me neither Judaism or Christianity nor any “ism,” because as the purest and holiest of feelings take on a firm exterior, they breathe their last and are replaced by missionary zeal, despotism and hypocrisy. But enough for today. I don’t have enough paper to analyze these evil spirits. Form deadens the spirit even as it deadens love! Thus between us no forms.67

For Adelheid it is the beauty of nature that supplants the ritual forms and theological claims of Judaism: My window is open [she writes to Julie three months later] and the wind wafts the aroma of orange blossoms my way. How beneficent is nature. How lovely is the reward that comes from being immersed in it. Since captivated by its wonders, I find my religion there, my God in every leaf. I am finished with abstract faith, doing and believing are one. I no longer know how to revert to fanaticism. I am a child of the world and feel only the heaven that surrounds me.68

65

Ibid., Leopold to Adelheid, August 31, 1821. Ibid., Adelheid to Leopold, September 4, 1821. 67 Glatzer I, 268. 68 Ibid., 270–71. 66

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On her Teplitz trip in 1847, Adelheid took long walks daily into the countryside. An unobstructed vista from a mountain top on a late Friday afternoon induced the following reverie: “This magnificent quiet [she tells Leopold], this Sabbath celebration in nature, this holy cathedral! And all for us tiny human beings? To pray we must climb mountains, for in beholding such grandeur our hearts expand and the divisions that still preoccupy us in the synagogue fade away. Here we love God and through him humanity.”69 And universalism entails for Adelheid a shift toward religious tolerance and mutual respect. In a letter some seven months later to the still grieving widow of Immanuel Wohlhill, Leopold’s erstwhile comrade in arms, Adelheid contends, in referencing a mutual Hamburg friend, “who still believes that the Jewish religion is the only one that is true, which is a view I hardly share. Rather I regard every religion as true for its adherents, for the divine manifests itself in all of them.”70 At times, though, Adelheid finds Leopold’s cynicism excessive. One of his cleverest epigrams fails to reconcile her to Strauss’s utterly negative theological swan song of 1872, Der alte und der neue Glaube (The Old and New Faith). To Julie she trashes the book on hearsay: “Zunz always asserts that we know nothing and that all faith is superstition (Glaube ist Aberglaube). But I dare say that my ancestor was an ape troubles me deeply! Yet Strauss, a theologian, embraces this theory. What would Ewald say to this?”71 Contrastingly, it is for ethnic reasons that the celebrated letters of Rahel Varnhagen, which began to appear shortly after her death in 1833, induced Adelheid to criticize the author to Philipp in a letter: Her religion is the weakest part of her book and quite contradictory. The feelings elicited in her by certain scenes in the Gospels reflect a sick disposition rather than a pious soul. The image of Mother Mary at the suffering of her son moves her [Rahel] to tears, while the degradation of her own people eludes her. How much better would it have been if she had never left them, thereby giving less credence to the fashion of the day. Please don’t regard me as a fanatic that I give voice to this wish. Don’t we betray ourselves when we become estranged from that which we took in with our mother’s milk? In consequence, our strength and fervor are diminished, and no amount of spirit can fill those gaps.72

A noticeable laxity in the couple’s practice accompanied the erosion of traditional belief. To be sure, the epistolary evidence is slight and incidental, but 69

LBINY Archives, Zunz Collection, Adelheid to Leopold, July 16, 1847. Bruno Italiener, “Briefe von Leopold Zunz an Immanuel Wohlhill,” in Festschrift zum hundertzwanzigjährigen Bestehen des Israelitischen Tempels in Hamburg, 1817–1937, ed. Bruno Italiener (Hamburg: Lessmann, 1937), 60. 71 Glatzer I, 333. Heinrich Ewald was a professor of Oriental languages at Go˝ttingen for most of his academic life. A political liberal but religious conservative, a prolific scholar but highly combative personality, he was a bitter critic of Strauss. Zunz despised him for his disdain of Jewish scholars. 72 Ibid., 75. 70

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cumulative. Thus, while Leopold himself seems never to have traveled on the Sabbath,73 he did plead with Adelheid in 1827 to leave Hamburg on a Saturday so that she would arrive back in Berlin by Monday.74 She eventually departed on a Wednesday, but not for religious reasons.75 Many years later in a letter to Julie, Adelheid made light of an excursion the two women took on a festival Sabbath.76 On intercity trips when traveling by postal coach and circumstances permitting, Adelheid set aside religiously dictated dietary restrictions. Without compunction, she related to Leopold that on her 1836 journey to Teplitz she treated herself to a non-kosher meal at the inn where the coach had stopped for the night: “I did not at first come to the dinner table. But considering that the night might be too long for my empty stomach, and there were neither monks nor Jews around, I ordered a piece of meat and bread, though I didn’t touch the butter.”77 After his mishap as Prediger in Prague in 1835–36, which inoculated him against the rabbinate for good, Leopold took a cure at a spa in Franzenbad to settle his nerves before returning to Berlin. The absence of Jews at the Berliner Hof, where he stayed and took his meals, which often included a meat dish, suggest that the facility was not kosher.78 Still, it seems that Leopold preferred to eat kosher outside the home whenever possible.79 And given the employment of a maidservant who would not go to the theater during the nine days of mourning before the fast day of Tisha B’Av, the dietary laws surely prevailed in the Zunz kitchen.80 As Leopold auditioned for the post in Prague, he became self-consciously more observant. He announced to Adelheid proudly that he had begun to wear a cap (Käppchen) daily, with another for the Sabbath.81 The meticulous dating of their letters, often penned over several days, readily confirms that in their early years at least, they did write each other on the Sabbath.82 An offhand remark by Adelheid implies rather clearly that she attended synagogue infrequently and then at least partially out of ethnic reasons. For 73

Ibid., 303–304; Glatzer II, 110–11. LBINY Archives, Zunz Collection, Leopold to Adelheid, August 20, 1827. 75 Ibid., Adelheid to Leopold, August 24, 1827 76 Glatzer I, 305. 77 LBINY Archives, Zunz Collectin, Adelheid to Leopold, May 31, 1836; also Adelheid to Leopold, June 9, 1836. 78 Ibid., Leopold to Adelheid, June 20, 1836. 79 Glatzer II, 458. 80 LBINY Archives, Zunz Collection, Leopold to Adelheid, July 20, 1847. 81 Ibid., Leopold to Adelheid, May 13, 1835. 82 Ibid., Leopold to Adelheid, May 13, 1835: “When you write me again, date nothing on Shabbat.” At the time Leopold was being considered for the post of Prediger in Prague. Also ibid., Adelheid to Leopold, June 10, 1836 and Leopold to Adelheid, June 25, 1836. 74

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Rosh Hashanah in 1852, she told Julie that she had gone alone to a branch synagogue in Berlin, where its rabbi, Michael Sachs, usually did not preach “in part out of feelings of thankfulness and in part to remind me that I still belong to the Jews.” The Zunzes had grown disdainful of Sachs’s insufferable sense of self-importance. To her utter surprise, however, a sermon by one Mr. Landsberg captivated her so that she brought him home and had him read it to Leopold, who liked it no less.83 In the face of an intermarriage in the family, Leopold espoused a viewpoint that privileged the present. In 1850, his cousin Rosa sought his advice in the matter of her son, who sought her approval to marry a Christian woman. Her anguish elicited a quick and humane response: You write that if she were Jewish you would gladly give your approval, from which I deduce that you have nothing against the girl and would even now give your approval, since both sides seem quite serious. I would not let this so-called Christian girl cause you to err. Drop any idea of coercion or any promise of future conversion. Ecclesiastical coercion has already made humanity miserable enough. If you, however, do give you approval, give it fully and lovingly. To tell your son get married and leave me alone, actually amounts to withdrawing your love, making both of you miserable. When confronting a situation that runs counter to our wishes but is unavoidable […], it is always preferable to work together in harmony and love to better it than to pull out and sulk in dissatisfaction, embittering yourself as much as those you love.84

In sum, Leopold belonged to no party. He wanted nothing more than to be himself.85 He respected Abraham Geiger, but detested Samuel Holdheim86 and scoffed at the undemocratic character of the rabbinical conferences of the 1840s.87 For the escutcheon of the Reform movement, he proposed a lit cigar with the word “Shabbes” inscribed on its wrapping,88 and for Frankel’s seminary in Breslau no doubt he would have drawn a tree sprouting the fruits of dogmatic scholarship (Glaubenswissenschaft).89 He realized sooner than most that the project of assimilation (to use Paula Hyman’s apt phrase)90 would require a transformation of communal structure, rabbinic education and authority, Jewish education and synagogue worship,91 but guided always by the insights of critical scholarship, his tool for interpreting the content of

83

Glatzer I, 243. Glatzer II, 320. 85 Ibid., 301. 86 Ibid., 174, 209. 87 Ibid., 238. 88 Glatzer I, 192. 89 Glatzer II, 364, 379. 90 Paula E. Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkley/ Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 31. 91 Glatzer II, 163, 339. 84

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ongoing revelation.92 He lamented the doleful fate of Hebrew as a harbinger of the eventual demise of Judaism and read the modern Hebrew weekly Hamaggid (published in Lyck, Prussia, 1857) to stay abreast of efforts to revive it in his day.93 Above all, his fierce loyalty to Judaism was rooted in his tragic view of its history: “The entirety of Jewish history consists of compulsion, resistance and suffering. And the more this is brought out, the more does it manifest the color of the religion of love.”94 His reaction to Gerson Wolf’s 1863 book on conversions in Austria was visceral: “I admit my abhorrence of this literature on the Jew-hatred of bigoted bureaucrats and clerics. As much as I value bringing these documents to light because they are part of the church history of this religion of love, you can’t expect me to stay long in these halls. Maimonides got it right. The gradual elimination of this illusion was the purpose of its existence.”95 The cost in human suffering paid by Jews over the millennia to establish the right to be collectively different is what denied emancipated Jews the freedom to denigrate Judaism. It was that deeply held conviction that moved Leopold in 1843 to publish his rousing defense of phylacteries. Questioned by Philipp, he explained: “I know full well that I cannot restore the laying of tefillin. In fact, do I even want to? Rather it was to silence the scoffers that I wrote, it being always better to embrace [anbinden] tefillin than heretics.”96 To formulate this composite and nuanced conception of Judaism was Leopold’s singular achievement; to help him sustain and disseminate it was Adleheid’s. Without her, his stability and stamina would never have endured. She divined his thoughts, eased his hurts, and buoyed his spirits to keep his talents focused on a noble cause. Thanking his many well-wishers in 1864 when he turned seventy, Leopold saw fit to enunciate Adelheid’s untold contribution to his revolutionary enterprise: I have been inwardly stirred and overjoyed by the overwhelming expressions of affinity and love that have come to me in tribute. Not least because of my dear wife, my beloved Adelheid, who for 42 years in joy and sadness has been my pillar and helper. Her insight, nobility and contentedness have enabled me to devote my life to scholarship.97

Her death ten years later revealed pitifully the full extent of Leopold’s indebtedness. His creative drive collapsed, never to revive. The entry in his diary recorded for posterity his inconsolable grief: “Adelheid first complained on

92

Ibid., 280. Ibid., 163, 180, 233, 399. 94 Ibid., 420. 95 Ibid., 425; G. Wolf, Judentaufen in Oesterreich (Wien: Herzfeld and Bauer, 1863). 96 Glatzer II, 226. 97 JNUL, ARC, 4° 792, C9. 93

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March 14, went to bed on the afternoon of April 4 and died on Tuesday, August 18 at 8AM. For 3/7th of a year she could not turn in bed. She has left me impoverished and orphaned, without any consolation. I have never known anyone like her.”98 In a less distraught moment, Leopold simply entered in his diary in Hebrew God’s promise to Moses: “I am sending an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place [that I have made ready]” (Exodus 23:20). Decoded, the Hebrew letters for angel (malakh) stood for Adelheid. By implication, as God had not abandoned Moses after Mount Sinai, so too had God provided Leopold with a guardian angel to realize his destiny. Bereft of her, he was fated to wander aimlessly in the wilderness for the last twelve years of his life.99

98 Glatzer II, 461. See also his anguished letter to Victor Ehrenberg, Philipp’s and Julie’s son, in Glatzer I, 341. 99 JNUL, ARC, 4792, C13, 36.

3. Moritz Steinschneider on the Future of Judaism after Emancipation I wish to revisit in this essay a run-in that I had with Gershom Scholem that turned on an older confrontation between Scholem and Moritz Steinschneider. Some 31 years ago I published an essay on the divergent approaches of Leopold Zunz and Isaac Markus Jost to the study of Jewish history in which I expressed doubt about the verisimilitude of the declaration attributed to the aged Steinschneider about the purpose of his life’s work.1 Repeated often by Scholem, the source of this declaration was Gotthold Weil, a young Orientalist who had studied with Steinschneider in his twilight years and admired him greatly. After Steinscheider’s death Weil was moved to dedicate an obituary to his teacher offering warm appreciation of his legacy. The piece was published in the official paper of the Zionist movement in Germany, irrespective of Steinschneider’s strong anti-Zionist stance. Weil, who was a staunch Zionist, had a close relationship with his teacher and opined that his worldview had been shaped in the revolutionary days of 1848. According to Weil, Steinschneider came to believe that the separate and singular history of the Jews ended in that year. For affect Weil recounted that once when in his office he saw Steinschneider sweep his hand over his vast library and declare that the purpose of his life had been to give the remnants of Judaism a decent burial.2 I had not met Scholem personally before the airing of my reservation and met him only once thereafter at an event in the faculty club of the Hebrew University. The president of the Leo Baeck Institute at the time, Rabbi Max Gruenewald, made the introduction and left, whereupon Scholem pounced on me as if we had known each other for years. He denounced me because I had dared to doubt his judgment and stressed that he had gathered a lot about Steinschneider from members of his family. After a moment’s consternation I responded meekly that I had the advantage of distance. Not long ago I discovered among Scholem’s books at the National Library of Israel a copy of my essay covered with marginal notes in his hand, leaving little doubt 1 Ismar Schorsch, “From Wolfenbüttel to Wissenschaft: The Divergent Paths of Isaak Markus Jost and Leopold Zunz,” Leo Baeck Year Book, 22 (1977), 109–28. 2 Gotthold Weil, “Moritz Steinschneider,” Jüdische Rundschau, 8 (Feb. 1907), 53–55.

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that he had read what I had written with some agitation. On occasion he even agreed with a few of my comments on the general subject of the wissenschaft movement. As a result of extensive research in the publications and papers of Steinschneider, I have to admit that Scholem did not err in his judgment. Moreover, I tend to think that Scholem’s global condemnation of German-Jewish Wissenschaft derived largely from his animosity toward Steinschneider. In contrast to Weil Scholem was unforgiving. In the unexpected bombshell of his “Reflections on the State of Jewish Scholarship,” he based his aversion to Steinschneider on Weil, though unlike Weil, he could not forgive Steinschneider for failing to believe in the possibility of any Jewish renewal, neither national nor religious.3 Since Scholem began his career as a student of Kabbalah with a large bibliographic work, he frequently consulted the works of Steinschneider and hence came to Palestine already with a good deal of ambivalence toward him.4 It is telling that there are quite a few marginal notes in the works of Steinschneider and in the essays by Alexander Marx on him in Scholem’s library, while in his volumes of Zunz and Geiger there are absolutely none. In truth, however, I have not come to deal with Scholem. My goal is to survey evidence in Steinschneider’s oeuvre that may shed light on his view about the place of Judaism and Wissenschaft des Judentums after emancipation, evidence that I came across in the course of my research. The material touches on three topics. One topic is what Steinschneider believed ought to be the practice of a local Jewish community in the era of equal rights. In 1873 Steinschneider backed the demand of Samson Raphael Hirsch of the Prussian government to free its Jewish citizens from the statute that required them to be registered as members of the Jewish community where they resided (das Parochialprinzip).5 Hirsch contended that to compel Orthodox Jews to be members of a community that fell into the hands of Reform leadership constituted religious coercion. Steinschneider agreed with him and ridiculed liberals who betrayed their own principles in whose name the likes of Gabriel Riesser and his cohorts in the past fought to free Jews from the shackles of the Middle Ages. He wrote in his bibliographic journal that the fate of an organized community that seeks to survive by means of religious coercion is destined for eventual dissolution. An institution that is unable to order itself in a free

3

Gershom Scholem, “Reflections on the State of Jewish Scholarship,” (Hebrew), Devarim be-Go, ed. Avraham Shapiro (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1976), 392–93. 4 Gerhard Scholem, Bibliographia Kabbalistica (Leipzig: W. Drugulin, 1927). 5 Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 19–21, 29–30.

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setting is unworthy of surviving.6 Eight years earlier in the framework of a literary review Steinschneider had alluded to the same view. Only a separation of Church and State could actualize emancipation in all aspects. In conjunction with internal arrangements, Jews must be granted the right to decide the extent to which they wished to be affiliated with or estranged from their Judaism.7 That same tolerant stance came to the fore in a highly personal matter. In 1885 Steinschneider had lost a son who was buried in Teplitz in Bohemia. On May 23 Steinschneider received a missive from the head of its Jewish community informing him that he had in his possession the German text of what Steinschneider wanted to inscribe on the tombstone of his son. But he still lacked a corresponding Hebrew inscription, which communal practice required to appear on every tombstone. Quite upset, Steinschneider replied immediately that the requirement was inappropriate and unnecessary, citing the fact that in the cemetery in Berlin there were hundreds of tombstones without any Hebrew inscription. In addition, he marshaled the opinion of the renowned former rabbi of the Jewish community of Prague, Shlomo Yehudah Rapoport, that the custom of Hebrew tombstone inscriptions reached Europe indeed quite late, not more than 1000 years ago. Steinschneider went on to give voice to the following principled view: A community enjoys the right to adopt regulations that forbid committing a transgression. But it definitely lacks the authority to compel someone to carry out a positive prescription. In conclusion, he averred his personal mission to fight for the right of every individual within the organized Jewish community just as he had fought for the rights of Jews within the society in which they live. Steinschneider insisted that this was a principle he had derived from his own scholarly studies and accordingly called on Teplitz to abrogate its misguided policy which offended the spirit of modernity.8 In matters pertaining to liturgy Steinschneider’s stance was also individualistic and pluralistic. In the early 1860s the administration of the Jewish community in Berlin sought his advice on what liturgy was appropriate for the new synagogue that was being built on Oranienburger Strasse and in particular to what extent it was permissible to deviate from the sanctioned format of the traditional prayerbook? In 1863 Steinschneider submitted his guidelines which he described as “eine conservative Reform,” that is a modest and balanced accommodation. This document, which I published more than 25 years ago, is an illuminating effort to apply the conclusions generated by 6 Hamazkir – Hebräische Bibliographie, ed. Moritz Steinschneider, 13 (1873), 101; 16 (1876), 54–55; idem, “Allgemeine Einleitung in die jüdische Literatur des Mittelalters,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 17 (1905), 149. 7 Moritz Steinschneider, “Aus der Literatur,” Jahrbuch für Israeliten, 12 (1865), 6. 8 Jewish Theological Seminary Library (hereafter JTSL), ARC 108, box 12.

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scholarly research (primarily that of Zunz) to urgent issues of the day. Steinschneider did not reject the traditional prayerbook, but rather strove to adjust it to the circumstances engendered by time and place. He wanted to retain the Hebrew of the prayerbook, its ancient and central prayers, its piyutim that could be taught to youngsters studying in the religious schools of the community and the practice of silent prayer. In contrast, he suggested to shorten the services, to adopt the triennial cycle for the reading of the Torah and to eliminate from the liturgy all prayers in Aramaic and all those that contradict the views of modern science such as Keter Malkhut (the divine crown) of Shlomo Ibn Gabirol. To be sure, Steinschneider also objected to the layer of kabbalistic prayers added in the last few centuries and to the pleas for the restoration of Temple sacrifices and the eventual national return to the land of Israel.9 In a lecture that Steinschneider delivered two years after he had submitted this brief he was even more forthcoming and radical. The topic of the talk took up the question whether a single prayerbook for all of German Jewry was possible and desirable, and indeed the very title of the lecture reflected the pride of the Berlin Jewish community in being the largest community in Germany and therefore entitled to propose for the totality of German Jewry a uniform liturgy for the synagogue. Steinschneider rejected that proposition with both hands. He praised the colorful nature of the various liturgical rites known and in existence and spoke at length on the intricate history of the prayerbook. He also used the occasion to speak on whence the idea of an obligation to pray daily and its development. He dated the obligation to the rabbinic period because it does not appear in the Bible. Personally he expressed his preference for prayers of supplication over mandatory prayers and contended that the essential power of prayer is always to be found in the tears of the distraught. Indeed, the most captivating psalms in the Book of Psalms are the personal ones. To his mind, obligatory prayer strangles the feelings of the individual who comes to pray. The ideal prayerbook, therefore, ought to be thoroughly individualistic. In altering the prayerbook we should ask ourselves if what exists still answers the needs of Jews praying today. For Steinschneider the essential reform is to forgo the idea of obligation in matters of praying altogether. If Berlin were to do that then it might induce other communities to emulate its bold initiative according to their needs and tastes.10 9 Ismar Schorsch, “Moritz Steinschneider on Liturgical Reform,” Hebrew Union College Annual, 53 (1982), 241–64. Steinschneider’s designation, 254 (“Soll dieser Standpunkt hier in Kürze gekennzeichnet werden, so dürfte es der einer conservative Reform sein, […].”). 10 Moritz Steinschneider, “Ist ein Allgemeines Gebetbuch möglich und wünschenswerth?” Vortrag gehalten in der Sabbatgesellschaft zu Berlin, Mai 1865, JTSL, ARC 108, box 15.

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Yet another set of documents that sheds light on Steinschneider’s view of the nature of Judaism after emancipation deals with his personal faith. At this stage of my research I would define him as an agnostic who based his skepticism on his consistently militant rationalism. While Zunz chose for his motto the conviction that genuine scholarship is generative,11 Steinschneider took pride in the idea that he pronounced in the introduction to his great study of the Arabic literature produced by Jews and prior to that which appeared as a handwritten inscription on a photogragh of him at age 70: “The frailty of our intellect, our weapon against all kinds of folly, does not warrant the rise of myths or figments of our imagination and certainly not the erection of institutions whose origins derive from some phony authority and customs which long ago lost their authority.”12 The sentence is typical of Steinschneider’s convoluted, baroque style that constantly irritated Scholem.13 Further still, in contrast to the positive sentiment of Zunz’s motto, that of Steinschneider’s is distinguished by its negativity. In that vein, Steinschneider composed his many personal letters as a persona free of all theology. In a lecture full of striking insights on the subject of superstitions that Steinschneder gave in 1863, he held forth on the proximity in German between the words for Glaube (faith) and Aberglaube (superstition), stressing the intimate connection that Der Aberglaube ist ein Aber des Glaubens, that is that superstition is always a deterioration of pure faith. The two forms of faith are contingent, and hence it is not rare that the adherents of one faith or at least its sages denigrate without exception other faiths as a collection of superstitions. Progress in our understanding of God and of religion in general, Steinschneider opined ironically, increases the gamut of superstitions in the world. The only shield we have against this human weakness is enlightenment, though Steinschneider admitted that in the end superstition is destined to persist forever, not unlike the image of the unfortunate Jew doomed to wander the earth against his will unable to die. Between the lines Steinschneider seemed to allude to his ultimate hope that someday religion generically would all but vanish from the earth.14 In his lecture on the prayerbook, Steinschneider also revealed his opinion that as a result of biblical criticism, which has inflicted wounds without remedy, the Torah could no longer serve as the foundation of the unity of the

11 Solomon Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 3, reprint (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1945), 117. 12 Moritz Steinschneider, Die arabische Literatur der Juden (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kauffmann, 1902), ix. Copies of Steinschneider’s photo portrait in JTSL, ARC PNT, G1495 and in the Leo Baeck Institute, N.Y. 13 Scholem, “Reflections,” 391. 14 Moritz Steinschneider, Der Aberglaube: Vortrag im Verein junger Kaufleute zu Berlin (1863), (Hamburg, 1900), 26–27, 30–31.

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Jewish people. By way of example, God’s command to Abraham to circumcise the flesh of his seed can be considered no more than a lovely midrash. Furthermore, he contended that emancipation destroyed the political unity of the Jews and nullified their shared expectations for the future. As long as Orthodox Jews continue to believe that at the end of days the world will accept Judaism and enlightened Jews labor for a time in which Jewish individuality will be merged into humanity as a whole, the only fundamental able to bridge the chasm between them will be their common past. It is that remembrance that must be preserved in our prayerbook as a firm component alongside the innovation of free speech.15 In a most revealing letter from February 1895, Steinschneider, who was then 77, rehearsed his extreme views once again. A rabbi whom he did not know had sent him a copy of his book in which he explained and justified Judaism’s dietary laws.16 After he leafed through the book, Steinschneider wrote candidly to the author that although the book found favor in his eyes, he is not the person to write a review of it. He clarified that he does not expect that the book will influence many and admitted that some years ago he gave up any hope that the young men who once were studying in yeshivot and now becoming doctors would “improve the health” of Germany’s cultured Jews. The influence of a good homily is short-lived. The author of the book, Steinschneider observed, is a rare bird whose destiny is to reach but a small circle of readers. Thereafter, Steinschneider apologized that he wished to seize the moment to express his adamant personal opinion that it was no longer possible to return to the Torah. The natural sciences and historical criticism have buried every religion based on some superior authority, and a book that claims to be the product of revelation is no longer viable. On the contrary, the currently existing religions were fashioned in different times and are not susceptible to artificial repair. “The different forms of assembly may be able to bind us together but surely not to redeem us.”17 Yet one more set of documents that I wish to present deals with Steinschneider’s view on what is the right institutional setting to advance the cause of Jewish scholarship. In Germany there were three possibilities for institutionalization: A Jewish theological seminary on the model of the rabbinical school in Breslau; a Jewish theological faculty at a university similar to the Protestant and Catholic faculties that educated clergy; or a chair of Jewish history or philosophy in a university philosophical faculty (that is the faculty that cultivated the humanities). In a letter dated January 1868 to his beloved uncle, Gideon Brecher, a highly honored physician and learned Jew who

15

Idem, “Ist ein Allgemeines Gebetbuch.” Adolf Wiener, Die jüdischen Speisegesetze (Breslau: S. Schottlaender, 1895). 17 JTSL, ARC, box 15.

16

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remained in Prossnitz (Moravia) his entire life (where Steinschneider was born), Steinschneider addressed the issue extensively.18 The letter may well have been a draft for an opinion piece that he published a year-and-a-half later, somewhat more moderate in tone, that bore the title “The Future of Jewish Studies.”19 In the second half of the 1860s, after years of inattention, the subject began to percolate again in Berlin and Vienna, and Brecher was asked by the Habsburg government to submit a brief and turned to his famous nephew for direction. At the time Steinschneider found himself in a period of transition. As he told his uncle he was hopeful that his post in the Berlin municipal court system as the official responsible for administering the special oath required of Jewish witnesses (more judaico) would soon end and was looking for a position more in line with his career as a scholar. He confessed that he was inclined to return to his birthplace in Moravia if he could garner an income that would meet his needs. In Berlin steps were afoot to create an institution for the training of rabbis and Steinschneider expected that those behind the initiative would seek to attract him. But Steinschneider doubted that he would find his place there, given his aversion to theology and his loathing of all clerics (das Pfaffentum). Against the background of these circumstances, Steinschneider composed his letter to his uncle. With his animadversions he sought to achieve three goals: First he was determined to imbue the rabbinate with a high degree of secular education. Accordingly, he demanded a Gymnasium Abitur (the commencement diploma) as a prerequisite for admission to rabbinical school. When in 1874 the first report of the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums came out, Steinschneider derided in his journal the fact that the report withheld the names of the students enrolled because most came from outside Germany, where they had received a high school education far inferior to what was customary in Germany.20 Second, he was adamant about keeping the rabbinate apart from the field of Jewish scholarship. Hence he advised that students be accepted to rabbinical school for a four-year program only after having completed a year or two of Bible and Talmud study while still in their final years in Gymnasium. Avoiding the use of the term seminary, Steinschneider insisted that any subject outside religious or professional courses should be taken at the univer18

Ibid., box 12. Partially published by Marie-Louise Steinschneider, “Moritz und Auguste Steinschneider,” Jahrbuch des Archivs Bibliographia Judaica, 2–3 (1986–87), 206. 19 Hebräische Bibliographie, 9 (1869), 76–78. 20 Erster Bericht über die Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Berlin, 1874). Hebräische Bibliographie, 14 (1874), 117. The insult prompted the five Hochschule students studying with Steinschneider to send him a letter on Feb. 18, 1875 in which they announced that they would no longer attend his lectures (JTSL, ARC 108, box 18).

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sity. For without a university affiliation, the fate of every rabbinical school is shrouded in darkness. It was his opinion that the seminary in Breslau already hovered on the brink of becoming a yeshiva. Third, Steinschneider opposed the formation of a faculty of Jewish theology on two grounds. He wanted to deny the rabbinate any form of state approval that might impair the freedom of action of a local Jewish community. As a certified official of the community, the rabbi would enjoy a degree of authority just short of that of a government official enabling him to impose his will. Steinschneider also shuddered at any arrangement that might isolate Jewish studies. He knew full well that a theology faculty was an independent educational body that administers a curriculum that does not easily interface with the faculty of philosophy and in contradiction to his own aspiration would create a new ghetto for Jewish studies. In the final analysis Steinschneider was prepared to consider but one option acceptable, a chair for Jewish history and philosophy in a faculty of philosophy, exactly what Zunz had sought twenty years before.21 To his mind this framework would forge the best conditions for a genuine integration with the humanities and free Jewish studies from any trace of the field of theology from which it originally sprang. At the heart of this preference loomed the grand enterprise of his life which was to prove that Jewish literature was not only written in Hebrew and certainly not only by rabbis functioning in a communal capacity. Steinschneider was the first scholar to identify a body of Jewish literature that was decisively secular in subject and spirit. To confine Jewish studies in institutions solely for the education of religious leaders, he feared was liable to alter for the worse the image of Jewish literature by making light of the rigors of critical scholarship. In consequence, Steinschneider in the 1870s twice turned down invitations to teach at new rabbinical seminaries in Berlin and Budapest.22 Steinschneider died in the spirit in which he lived. In his will he ordered that his body be cremated. After the ritual of purification performed by the burial society in Berlin, the cadaver was sent to Hamburg because Berlin as yet lacked a crematorium.23 There is little doubt that Steinschneider had abandoned his religious faith, perhaps already by mid-life. What did remain, however, was a deep loyalty to the fate of his people. He refused to convert as did his close friend of many years ago, Selig Cassel, who had early on while 21

Ismar Schorsch, The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hebrew), (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2000), 415. 22 Alexander Marx, “Steinschneideriana II,” Salo Wittmayer Baron and Alexander Marx (eds.), Jewish Studies in Memory of George A. Kohut (New York: The Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation, 1935), 518, 521. 23 “Beerdigungs-Anmeldung Moritz Steinschneider,” Stiftung Neue Synagoge BerlinCentrum Judaica, Archive; JTSL, ARC 108, file titled reports and information, no. 31217.

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still Jewish attained the stature of an outstanding historian of the Jews in the Middle Ages.24 By means of a simple baptismal ceremony, Steinschneider could have easily earned a university appointment, a respectable income, stability and honor. Like Zunz, his mentor from the previous generation, Steinschneider paid a high personal price for his dogged perseverance that, notwithstanding, created for his people a scholarly legacy of unique grandeur which contributed mightily to the spiritual and cultural renaissance that marked the generation to come.

24 Alexander Marx, “Zunz’s Letters to Steinschneider,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 5 (1933–34), 144–46.

4. Schechter’s Indebtedness to Zunz While Wissenschaft des Judentums (the academic study of Judaism) was born in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, by the second half it had definitely crossed the borders to the Dual Monarchy, Russia, France, and England, often in the guise of aspiring Jewish scholars trained at German universities in its tools and perspectives. A dramatic case in point was Solomon Schechter, who in 1882 accepted Claude G. Montefiore’s invitation to relocate from Berlin to London as his tutor.1 Still unpublished albeit thoroughly trained as a critical scholar after seven years of intensive study in Vienna and Berlin (though without a doctorate in hand), Schechter would soon emerge as an agent of cultural transfer, bringing to Albion’s shores the ethos of Wissenschaft des Judentums that he had come to embody. Until his arrival the English Jewish community seemed content in being untouched by critical scholarship.2 As early as 1885 in a lucid essay on the confounding subject of the Talmud, Schechter heralded the groundbreaking studies of modern scholars like Krochmal, Rapoport, Zunz, and Frankel and did not fail to excoriate his contentious Hungarian predecessor at Cambridge, Solomon Marcus Schiller-Szinessy, for intentionally omitting any mention of them in his entries on Midrash and Mishnah in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1875–89).3 The twenty years that Schechter was to spend in England were to be the most productive of his career both as a pioneering scholar and deft popularizer, infusing the largely dormant intellectual landscape of English Jewry with a dose of continental vitality, ferment, and gravitas.

1 Norman Bentwich, Solomon Schechter: A Biography, reprint (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948), 48. 2 Stefanie Stockhorst (ed.), Cultural Transfer through Translation: The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by Means of Translation (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 7–26. See also the introductory editorial of the first Jewish Quarterly Review, 1 (1888): 1–3. 3 Solomon Schechter, “On the Study of Talmud,” in Solomon Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 3, reprint (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1945), 143–93, 293 n. 14. As for the entries by Schiller-Szinessy, see Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th edition (1875–89), 16, Midrash, 285–8, Mishnah, 502–8. For a portrait of the man, see Raphael Loewe, “Solomon Marcus Schiller-Szinessy, 1820–1890,” Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 21 (1962–7), 148–89.

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Schechter brought with him the virtues of what England’s later Chief Rabbi Joseph H. Hertz called “the New Jewish Learning”.4 Since 1881, encouraged by Israel Lewy, Frankel’s brilliant disciple and till 1883 instructor in Talmud at the Anstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, Schechter was hard at work collecting manuscripts for a critical edition of Avoth de-Rabbi Nathan (The Fathers according to Rabbi Nathan), an intriguing minor tractate of the Babylonian Talmud. When published in 1887, it was the first critical edition of a rabbinic text and for many a decade the only one. A lasting testament to Schechter’s patient thoroughness, critical acumen, and rabbinic erudition, his edition was republished unchanged in 1997 by the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in honour of the centennial of Schechter’s recovery of the Cairo Genizah with a new introduction by Menahem Kister of the Hebrew University.5 The work highlighted just how corrupted normative texts of post-biblical Judaism had become through generations of transmission and widespread use. In addition, Schechter’s studies in Vienna and Berlin had equipped him with an acute sense of time. Schechter read the arresting title of Krochmal’s unfinished classic, Moreh Nebukhei HaZeman (Guide for those perplexed by Time), to suggest that Maimonides’s failure to do justice to the element of time in understanding Judaism rendered him unsuited to address the problems of the nineteenth century. “For, as Krochmal himself remarks, every time has its own perplexities and therefore needs its own guide”, and the overriding problem of his own era was to date texts correctly.6 The intention and meaning of a text were beyond recovery once ripped out of context. Of Schechter’s triumphs in this endeavour, none is more remarkable than his stunning identification in 1910 of the Fragments of a Zadokite Work that turned up in the Cairo Genizah as a sectarian forerunner of what forty years later was seen to constitute one of the sectarian documents emerging from the caves of Qumran.7 4

See Harvey Warren Meirovich, A Vindication of Judaism: The Polemics of the Hertz Pentateuch (New York/ Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary of American, 1998), 48. 5 Avoth de-Rabbi Nathan: Solomon Schechter Edition, Prolegomenon by Menahem Kister (New York/Jerusalem: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997). 6 Schechter, “Nachman Krochmal and the Perplexities of the Time”, Studies in Judaism, 1, 68. 7 Solomon Schechter, Documents of Jewish Sectaries I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910). See also Stefan C. Reif, “The Damascus Document from the Cairo Genizah: Its Discovery, Early Study and Historical Significance”, paper presented at the Third Orion International Symposium “The Damascus Document: A Centennial of Discovery”, 1998; see http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il/symposiums/3rd/papers/Reif98, accessed 1 February 2017; The Damascus Document: A Centennial of Discovery, eds. Joseph M. Baumgarten, Esther G. Chazan, and Avital Pinnick (Leiden/Boston/Cologne: Brill, 2000), 109–31.

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Schechter came to England to gain access to its unmatched collections of Hebrew manuscripts and rare books. With the shift from revelation to history, the heart of the Wissenschaft enterprise became the acquisition of new knowledge. It was the collection and collation of unknown manuscripts that enabled Schechter to discover a second, shorter version of the printed text of Avoth de-Rabbi Nathan that seemed cleaner and closer to what may have constituted the original.8 And, of course, it was Schechter’s identification in 1896 of a Hebrew fragment of Ben Sira that prompted his hurried trip to Cairo to bring back to Cambridge the accumulated discards of centuries that capped the ceaseless quest for unknown primary sources by three generations of Wissenschaft scholars.9 Integral to that quest was a shared determination to elevate the individual to the role of prime mover of the historical continuum. The turn to evidentiary history not only set God aside as the causative agent, but also rejected the rabbinic value of anonymity, which often preserved knowledge of a venerated religious work by title rather than by the name of its author. Thus Moritz Steinschneider in his unprecedented mid-century survey of Jewish literature assembled the names, dates, and places of residence of some 1,600 Jewish authors, while Zunz in his later trilogy on medieval liturgical poetry recovered the names of some 1,000 paytanim (authors of medieval liturgical poems, piyutim).10 No one articulated this ethos of reverence with greater pathos and beauty than Schechter in a 1901 address at Jews’ College: Every discovery of an ancient document, giving evidence of a bygone world, is, if undertaken in the right spirit – that is, for the honour of God, and not for the glory of self – an act of resurrection in miniature. How the past suddenly rushes in upon you with all its joys and woes! And there is a spark of a human soul like yours come to light again after a disappearance for centuries, crying for sympathy and mercy […]. You dare not neglect it and slay this soul again. Unless you choose to become another Cain, you must be the keeper of your 8

See Solomon Schechter, Avoth de-Rabbi Nathan, “Introduction,” vi–xxxi. Stefan C. Reif, A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: The History of Cambridge University’s Genizah Collection (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000). 10 Moritz Steinschneider, “Jüdische Literatur”, in Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, eds. Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1850); idem, Jewish Literature from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century: With an Introduction on Talmud and Midrash. A Historical Essay (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1857); idem, Index der Autoren und Personen nach der englischen Uebersetzung mit einer Concordanz der Seitenzahlen des Originals; zugleich ein selbständig zu benutzendes Verzeichnis von ungefähr 1600 jüdischen Gelehrten unter Angabe von Zeit und Vaterland (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kauffmann, 1893). See also Ismar Schorsch, “Moritz Steinschneider: The Vision beyond the Books”, Studies on Steinschneider: Moritz Steinschneider and the Emergence of the Science of Judaism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, eds. Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 4–36; idem, Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 196. 9

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brother and give him a fair hearing. You pray with him if he happens to be a liturgist. You grieve with him if the impress left by him in your mind is that of suffering, and you even doubt with him if the garb in which he makes his reappearance is that of an honest sceptic – souls can only be kissed through the medium of sympathy.11

In sum, Schechter brought with him to England the best of the Wissenschaft movement and it was no accident that photographs of Zunz and Geiger adorned his desk.12 But my purpose in this essay is not merely to recapitulate the evidence for his membership in that guild of scholarly pioneers, but also to show his indebtedness to the founder of critical Jewish scholarship, Leopold Zunz. Without awareness of that linkage, Schechter’s thought remains enigmatic. Of added interest, and testimony to Schechter’s independence, is his unease with the theological implications of Zunz’s legacy. There is no evidence that Schechter had any personal contact with Zunz while he studied in Berlin from 1879 to 1882. Whatever Schechter might have learned about Zunz would have come through his cherished disciple and friend, Moritz Steinschneider, with whom Schechter did study. And when Schechter wrote on 2 December 1881 from Berlin to Solomon Hayyim Halberstam in Bielitz, the learned Polish collector, to borrow a manuscript of Avoth de-Rabbi Nathan in his possession, it was Steinschneider who added a cryptic postscript to the letter vouching for Schechter’s character and competence.13 That manuscript of 339 pages, which Halberstam allowed Schechter to retain for the next five years, proved invaluable in enabling him to discern the existence of two distinct versions of the text.14 Not surprisingly in the introduction to his printed edition of 1887, Schechter cited first Zunz’s analysis of the nature of Avoth de-Rabbi Nathan as a composite text with high praise, although destined to depart from it.15 Stimulated by the announcement of an essay contest by the New York Jewish Ministers’ Association in 1889, Schechter chose to write on Zunz, perhaps in part because he had died aged ninety-one in 1886.16 In early 1889, Schechter inquired of Salomon Neumann, the founder and longstanding director of the Zunz Stiftung (foundation) in Berlin, whether he might be able to borrow Zunz’s major works to write his essay. By April he had received them along with a few other small related items that he had also requested.

11

Solomon Schechter, 1901 address, Isidore Harris (ed.), Jews’ College Jubilee Volume (London: Luzac and Avoth, 1906), cli. 12 Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 43–4. 13 Schechter to Halberstam, 2 Dec. 1881, in New York, Jewish Theological Seminary Library, Department of Special Collections, Solomon Schechter papers, Arc. Ms. 10297, no. 57. 14 Schechter, Avoth de-Rabbi Nathan, “Introduction”, xxix–xxx. 15 Ibid., vi. 16 Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 3, 279; Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 76.

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Again it was Steinschneider, this time as the key scholar of the Stiftung’s academic advisory board, who vouched for Schechter. Neumann also provided Schechter with some vital personal information about Zunz for which he had asked: At which university had he studied, and from which did he receive his doctorate? What was the subject of his dissertation? When did he marry and what was the maiden name of his wife? When did she die? And could someone copy for him the Hebrew and German inscriptions on their tombstones? By mid-May, Schechter had returned whatever he had borrowed, a pace that attested his familiarity with Zunz’s works prior to their arrival.17 Rather, he needed the books in hand to compose the synopses of four of them which could not be done from memory and which he incorporated in his essay. The longest of them, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden (The Synagogue Sermons of the Jews), ran for eleven pages.18 Indisputably, then, it was Schechter’s intention to introduce Zunz to England by means of a sympathetic account of his ideas and a survey of his research. The crux of Schechter’s presentation was Zunz’s conception of the synagogue as the sublime religious expression of Israel’s national identity in exile. It perpetuated the dialogue between God and Israel that marked its form of worship already in its ancient homeland, with God’s voice emanating from the reading of Torah and by extension Midrash and Israel’s voice uttered through the recitation of Psalms and by extension piyutim. It is that universal and dynamic conception of the synagogue that made it the protean national seedbed for two of the major streams of medieval Jewish literature in which the polarities of revelation and history, divine expectation and human frailty, the ideal and the actual interacted in conflict and consolation.19 Given the importance of Zunz to Schechter’s agenda of cultural transfer and the aptness of Zunz’s conception of the synagogue for an emancipated Jewish community in which it played a conspicuous public role, it is puzzling why Schechter never saw fit to publish the essay in his lifetime. His subsequent works were certainly redolent with evidence that he continued to value the centrality of the synagogue in forging articles of faith and reconciling differences. In Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, Schechter simply posited the synagogue to be the institutional setting for rabbinic thought expressed through the medium of Midrash.20 Indeed, throughout the rich discourse of his writings Schechter had recourse to a variety of resounding appellations 17

Schechter to Neumann, 17 May 1889, in Jerusalem, National Library of Israel, Arc., 4°, 792, Z12. 18 Schechter, “Leopold Zunz”, Studies in Judaism, 3, 84–142, 279–91. 19 Ibid., 108–15. Admittedly, Schechter’s exposition is oblique and skeletal, but definitely sympathetic. For a fuller account, see Schorsch, Leopold Zunz, 201–2. 20 Solomon Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, reprint (New York: Behrman House, 1936), “Preface”.

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for the dominance of the synagogue. So I am left with no better explanation than Schechter’s scholarly integrity. Intuitively he must have concurred with what Zunz confided to a young David Kaufmann, a graduate of Breslau and third-generation Wissenschaft scholar eager to learn more about the early years of the movement, that those who have read only my books hardly know me.21 Schechter was fully aware of Zunz’s papers in Berlin and probably realized that one could not do justice to the man without consulting his correspondence. Unable to return to Berlin to mine that trove, Schechter consigned his essay to the dustbin until wisely published posthumously in 1924 even though unfinished. Yet, for all the affinity to Zunz, Schechter was not a blind acolyte. In 1896 in the introduction to the first of his three volumes of Studies in Judaism, he struggled to draw out the theological core implicit in the practice of Wissenschaft des Judentums. Therein, in truth, he confronted head on the momentous shift launched by the scholarship of Zunz from Bible to Tradition. What gave Schechter discomfort with Midrash is that it framed the meaning of the Bible through the reading of history. It was no longer the revealed text of the Bible which was of primary importance to Jews but, rather, the secondary meaning as derived through Midrash, which mediated and refracted the historical circumstances of the moment. With the Oral Law superseding the Written Law, history had become the arbiter of Halakhah. Turning confessional, Schechter bristled at what he deemed a form of religious bimetallism: “Being brought up in the old Low Synagogue where, with all the attachment to tradition, the Bible was looked upon as the crown and the climax of Judaism, the old Adam still asserts itself in me, and in unguarded moments makes me rebel against this new rival to revelation in the shape of history.”22 But history bore with it the breakdown of cohesion, a prospect that troubled Zunz much less than Schechter. In fact, Zunz regarded the proliferation of divergent communal liturgical rites as justification for liturgical pluralism. Within the parameters of a basic structure, communities were free to give voice to their pain and sensibility in their own liturgical format and vocabulary. Zunz’s prodigious research vindicated the exercise of religious localism.23 Schechter, in contrast, feared diversity freezing into sectarianism and elevated the local synagogue into a mystifying conceptual abstraction to impede it. It would be “the Universal Synagogue” embodying “the collective conscience of Catholic Israel”, which as a “living body” would “determine the nature of the Secondary Meaning”.24 The centrality of the synagogue was Zunz, its grandious projection onto a universal plain was Schechter. Hence 21

Schechter, “Leopold Zunz”, 84. Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 1, “Introduction”, xx–xxi. 23 Schorsch, Leopold Zunz, 210–11. 24 Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 1, “Introduction”, xviii. 22

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on the validity of religious autonomy, Schechter parted company with his mentor, using his vocabulary ironically to rein in its abuse. To his credit, even as Schechter was set to propagate the findings of “the historical school” in his Studies, he dared to share his theological misgivings. History raised to the rank of Scripture threatened to sow chaos, despite the normative power of custom. In 1890, Schechter, following the death of Schiller-Szinessy, was appointed Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge.25 Like Zunz, Schechter had an aversion to earning his living in the active rabbinate.26 The achievement must have brought to mind the bitter disappointment of Zunz in failing to attain a comparable position at a German university. Despite its vaunted academic prowess, the institution remained decidedly Christian, convinced that the creativity and mission of Judaism had ended with the canonization of the Hebrew Bible. The incorporation of Jewish studies into German higher education would have signaled the end of Christian disdain for Judaism. Zunz was convinced that the political emancipation of Jews would be a plant without roots as long as Judaism was deemed to be a fossil from a bygone primitive age.27 Again in 1911, when Harvard University awarded Schechter its first ever honorary doctorate to a Jewish recipient, his thoughts must have revisited Zunz’s two-tiered conception of emancipation. Schechter accepted the degree as a tribute to the Seminary and its young, world-class faculty that he had recruited, which excelled in the fields of Midrash and piyut so assiduously pioneered by Zunz.28

25

Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 81–2. Israel Davidson, “Letters from Jewish Scholars to Solomon Zalman Hayyim Halberstam” (Hebrew), Studies in Jewish Bibliography and Related Subjects, in Memory of Abraham Solomon Freidus (1867–1923), ed. Israel Davidson (New York: Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation, 1929), 13. 27 Schorsch, Leopold Zunz, 169–70, 242. 28 Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 204. 26

5. Schechter’s Seminary: Polarities in Balance It is not a stretch to imagine that on Solomon Schechter’s week-long voyage to New York in April 1902 to become the president of the reconstituted Jewish Theological Seminary of America his thoughts often returned to the founding of Yavneh by Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai. After all, this vener˙ able foundation myth of rabbinic Judaism appeared prominently in Schechter’s edition of The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, which fifteen years earlier had unveiled his mastery of the medium of critical scholarship. Smuggled out of a Jerusalem besieged by the Romans and wracked by the Zealots, ben Zakkai gained access to the Roman commander Vespesian. When questioned what he sought, ben Zakkai declared a school: “I ask of you only Yavneh that I may go there and teach my students and create a liturgy and perform all the commandments.”1 In essence, at Yavneh an academy would revitalize a diminished Judaism bereft of Temple along the lines of study, prayer and praxis. Upon disembarking on April 14, Schechter seemed to invoke the spirit of Yavneh to the delegation of Seminary leaders that greeted him. What America required more than anything was “learning, learning, learning,” he said. Philip Cowen, publisher of The American Hebrew reported the gist of Schechter’s few remarks: “America had known some scholars, and he mentioned some known to him, the late Drs. Morais and Kohut, and he felt sure that in America especially, learning was needed, inasmuch as all centers had been broken up and new centers had to be established. It was necessary that the old traditions, he said, should be taken up, in order that the heritage of the Jew, which is immortalized in his literature, shall not be lost.”2 On the very next day, Schechter, atop one of the unpacked suitcases in his room, dashed off an urgent Hebrew letter to his friend in Warsaw, Samuel Abraham Poznanski, a scholar of rabbinic and geonic literature, pleading with him to accept a professorship at the Seminary. The reason was, he wrote, that both Poznanski and Schechter were of Russian extraction and it was a matter of life and death for the thousands of Russian immigrants to America

1 Shneor Zalman Schechter (ed.), Aboth de Rabbi Nathan, reprint (New York: Philipp Feldheim, 1945), 12. 2 The American Hebrew, April 18, 1902, 657.

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that a home for Jewish scholarship be set up for them.3 In the ensuing correspondence, which reverberates with the failed courtship of Poznanski by Schechter, Schechter often reiterated the need for a religious and academic center of gravity in a land where the future of the Jewish people would be determined. Though Yavneh went unmentioned, its paradigm as the key to Jewish survival in radically altered circumstances seemed ever present in Schechter’s mind. His knowledge of the past invigorated his sense of mission. Cowen surely expressed the exalted hopes of many, who greeted Schechter upon his arrival that Thursday morning, when he wrote that “Professor Schechter will prove a tonic to American Judaism.”4 Thirteen years later, Mordecai Kaplan, then the principal of the Seminary’s Teacher’s Institute, would proclaim in his diary on the occasion of Schechter’s funeral, the fulfillment of Cowen’s prediction: “The crowd of people that had gathered, though large (about 1500–2000), was by no means commensurate with the significance of Dr. Schechter to Judaism.”5 The history of the Seminary and Conservative Judaism over the next century would amply vindicate the courage of Schechter to relocate. Nor did the presence of his influence wane or vanish in the process. What I shall argue is that his conception of Judaism, which animated the institutions he founded, still does justice, after a century of breathtaking scholarship, to a Judaism more dynamic and diverse than even Schechter could have imagined.

I Schechter meant no less to the future of the Seminary than did ben Zakkai to Yavneh. He was the greatest Jewish scholar of his age, a polymath equal to the pioneers of jüdische Wissenschaft, of whom he always spoke with respect. The leaders of the old Seminary had not erred in their tortuous pursuit of Schechter: to reach for institutional greatness and endurance, they needed a paragon of the new learning. His ever-expanding body of work consistently displayed an intimate knowledge of the vast array of traditional literary sources combined with a sophisticated command of the methodology of critical scholarship. In addition, he was lavishly endowed with the scholarly intuition that often marks the difference between the pathfinder and the pedant. As others increasingly specialized, Schechter ranged with ease and authority over the major permutations of rabbinic Judaism. 3

Avraham Ya’ari (ed.), Iggrot Shneor Zalman Schechter el Shmuel Avraham Poznanski (Jerusalem: Bamberger and Wahrman, 1943), 18–19. 4 The American Hebrew, 656. 5 Mel Scult (ed.), Communings of the Spirit. The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, 1, 1913–1934 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 98.

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His scientific edition of The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, which appeared in 1887, the same year that he married Mathilde Roth of Breslau, provided early testimony of his promise. It remains in print, unsurpassed and invaluable. At the Seminary the text stamped the Schechter legacy. Louis Finkelstein, who held the Solomon Schechter chair in theology, taught it in class to rabbinical students and made it a focal point of his own research, while Judah Goldin, a Seminary product on the threshold of his own seminal career, translated it skillfully into English.6 Prof. Jacob Zussman of the Hebrew University, in a recent generous assessment of Schechter’s scholarship, classified it as the first truly scientific edition of any rabbinic text. What distinguished his edition was the assiduous collection of all surviving manuscripts of the text plus all known quotations of it in extant sources. On the basis of these variants and his philological expertise, Schechter could reconstruct a more reliable reading of the original text as well as a history of its genesis and transmission.7 Science had diminished the realm of conjecture. The success of his labor demonstrated that the task of Jewish scholarship reached beyond the publication of texts that had been lost to include the critical preparation of classical texts corrupted by their popularity and diffusion. Schechter dedicated his benchmark work to Claude G. Montefiore, his exceptional student and benefactor. In the preface he thanked him specifically for bringing him “to his blessed land of Britannia, to which the eyes of all Jewish scholars look longingly, because there the Torah is to be found in the libraries of Oxford and London with all the diverse commentaries on every one of its many facets in manuscripts and rare printed books.”8 I agree with Prof Zussman that the prospect of working in the midst of this treasure trove induced Schechter more than the stipend to accept Monefiore’s invitation in 1882.9 Along with a copy of the book, Schechter sent him a letter in which he gave poetic voice to his scholary vision: Professor Jowett has wisely said: “More often than we suppose, the great sayings and doings upon the earth, ‘thoughts that breathe and words that burn’ are lost in a sort of chaos to the apprehension of those that come after.” The older rabbinic literature is a

6 Louis Finkelstein, Mabo le-Massekhet Avot de-Rabbi Nathan (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1950); The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, trans., Judah Goldin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). 7 Yaakov Zussman, “Schechter ha-Hoker,” Madda’ei ha-Yahadut, 38 (1998), 218–219. I ˙ for bringing this essay to my attention. See also am grateful to Prof. Menahem Schmelzer Goldin, xxiv, and the prolegomenon by Menahem Kister to his reprint of Aboth de-Rabbi Nathan Solomon Schechter Edition (New York/Jerusalem: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997). 8 Schechter, Aboth, v. 9 Zussman, 217–18.

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striking illustration of the Professor’s dictum. Than it, there is no chaos more chaotic. To introduce a little order into this chaos, to modify the darkness, to track out the “lost thoughts” through the mazes of the labyrinth – this is the task which the modern rabbinic scholar must put before himself.10

In retrospect, the incomparable collections of the Bodleian, the British Museum and later Cambridge would serve as Schechter’s aquifer to restore the pristine beauty of the overgrown and ill-treated “orchard” of rabbinic Judaism. In the next decade, the most productive of his career, Schechter readied for publication a series of significant, unknown midrashic texts that would greatly enrich the related fields of the literary and legal exegesis of the Rabbis. Similarly, he set about recovering fragments of the Talmud Yerushalmi, even as he increasingly focused his attention on the possibility that a lost Hebrew original underlay the Greek text of the apocryphal book of Ben Sira. In brief, Schechter’s addiction to manuscripts had primed him to fathom quickly the importance of the hoard amassed in Cairo, when in spring 1896 his wealthy Cambridge friends and twin sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, showed him a sample manuscript acquired on their last trip. Schechter did not discover the Genizah in the Ben Ezra Synagogue; others like the collector Elkan Nathan Adler had preceded him.11 His historic achievement was to ransack it, an electrifying exercise of good judgment dictated by his intimate knowledge of rabbinics and well-honed appreciation of manuscripts. As he wrote to Mayer Sulzberger at the end of his plundering: “All I wanted was to empty the Genizah of which I wrote to you. In this I have succeeded well. It was a hard piece of work; for weeks and weeks I had to swallow the dust of centuries which nearly suffocated and blinded me (I am now under medical treatment) and the annoyance with those scoundrels of which I had to bakshish constantly.”12 Salvaging the inexhaustible contents of the Genizah not only immortalized Schechter’s fame, but also determined the rest of his career. The unforgettable photograph of him at Cambridge poring over Genizah fragments while seated at a table in a bare room cluttered with piles of them was em-

10 Joshua B. Stein, Lieber Freund, The Letters of Claude Montefiore to Solomon Schechter, 1885–1902 (Lanham/New York/London: The University of America Press, 1988), 61–62. Benjamin Jowett, the renowned Anglican Minister, taught classics at Oxford, where Montefiore had studied with him. 11 On Adler, the brother of the Chief Rabbi, Hermann Adler, see Sharon Lieberman Mintz et al., Great Books from Great Collectors an Exhibition, (New York: The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1996), 19. 12 Meir Ben-Horin (ed.), “Solomon Schechter to Judge Mayer Sulzberger,” Part 1, Jewish Social Studies, 25:4 (October 1963), 26–61.

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blematic of a life immersed in manuscripts.13 It also conveyed a sense of the talent and tenacity required to bring order out of such chaos. The revelations of the Genizah expanded Schechter’s scholarly canvas. He now published in quick succession a host of major finds related to the early history of the Jews under Islam, ever mindful as he confessed to Poznanski, of his ignorance of Arabic.14 Simultaneously, his uncanny intuition enabled him to identify, on the basis of a medieval manuscript, a Second Temple Jewish sectarian group in Palestine, whose library would be unearthed some four decades later in Qumran.15 Schechter’s lifelong zeal for bringing unknown documents to light attests to his profound awareness of just how incomplete was the available knowledge of the Jewish past. At the end of his second survey of the 100,000 odd fragments (by his count) that he had rescued from oblivion, he wistfully wrote: Looking over this enormous mass of fragments about me, in the sifting and examination of which I am now occupied, I cannot overcome a sad feeling stealing over me, that I shall hardly be worthy to see all the results which the Geniza will add to our knowledge of Jews and Judaism. The work is not for one man and not for one generation. It will occupy many a specialist, and much longer than a lifetime.16

In the meantime, he felt strongly that neither ideology nor dogmatism should be allowed to fill in the gaps, or even worse, distort the dots. Nothing is more off-putting to the non-scholar than archives and manuscripts. Were Schechter only an exemplar of the painstaking tedium of hard core Wissenschaft or the epitome of the austere scholar, he never would have ignited the fervor of the leadership of the old Seminary. But three noteworthy features of his public persona, beyond the scope of his scholarship, elevated him well above his peers. First, Schechter could tell his story as readily as unearth it. His popular works in English, which abound with knowledge and insight, are models of the narrative art. Aided by the literary and editing talents of Mathilde, Schechter came across as a genial raconteur who deftly delivers his point of view with style, wit and conviction.17 Like Graetz, Schechter not only con13

Stefan C. Reif, A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo (Richmond Surrey: Curzon, 2000),

87. 14

Ya’ari, 9, 14–15, 52. Solomon Schechter (ed. and trans.), Fragments of a Zadokite Work, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), Introduction. 16 Solomon Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 2, reprint (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1945), 29–30. For confirmation of Schechter’s premonition, see the essays in the Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 63 (1997–2001). 17 On the role of Mathilde, see Mel Scult, “The Baale Boste Reconsidered: The Life of Mathilde Roth Schechter (M.R.S.),” Modern Judaism 7:1 (February 1987), 10–11. Schechter also benefited from the assistance of his devoted Seminary secretary Joseph B. Abrahams. See the transcript of his interview done by the Seminary in 1956–57, tape no. 2, in the Ratner Center General Files for 1957. 15

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sciously lived the romance of recovering the past, but also commanded the ability to imbue his findings with pathos, dignity and humanity. His powers of empathy rendered the stones and struts of manuscripts and philology into architectural designs of arresting charm and lasting meaning. Second, at the heart of Schechter’s synthetic writings resonated a deep and abiding interest in religion. He deemed Judaism to be, above all, a religious phenomenon and labored to illuminate the character of both its normative and divergent expressions, without belittling one at the expense of the other. As he wrote to Richard Gottheil, his American Reform student in Berlin, after his unconventional essay on “Chassidism:” You will have observed from my paper on the Hasidim, I honor and admire every warm and inner faith. Without faith we belong to the Felix Adler religion, Ethical Science, or to the so-called historical Judaism, which is no less repugnant to me […]. Theology without God is unendurable. Every earnest man will seek to find a harmony between his thinking and his conduct.18

Schechter challenged the dominant rationalism of his age by writing with feeling about Jewish pietism and mysticism, and did not restrict his impressive knowledge of that literature to his essays on the subject. His pioneering Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology was also punctuated with passing reference to the ideas of medieval mystics. Schechter’s goal was not to turn the Rabbis into Greek philosophers. On the contrary, he stressed the unreflective and erratic nature of their religious quest. Rabbis and mystics were cut from the same cloth. Mysticism was not a foreign transplant: “Those who are at all familiar with old rabbinic literature hardly need to be told that the ‘sea of the Talmud’ has also its gulf stream of mysticism […].” Not as theosophy or occultism, “but as a manifestation of the spiritual and as an expression of man’s agonies in his struggle after communion with God, as well as of his ineffable joy when he receives the assurance that he has found it.”19 Judaism, in other words, was a single tapestry of spiritual profusion that deserved to be judged on its own terms, an act of equity, Schechter contended repeatedly, as yet unacknowledged by Christian savants. Hence the moment and advantage of the insider.20 No one appreciated Schechter’s rare capacity to do religion more incisively or earlier than Montefiore. Undeterred by the dedication to him of The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, Montefiore admonished Schechter

18 Norman Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, A Biography, reprint (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948), 71. 19 Solomon Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 1, reprint (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1945), xxiii. 20 Ibid, xxiv–xxv; Solomon Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, reprint (New York: Berman House, 1936), 151–52, 157–59.

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shortly after its appearance not to abandon himself to the arcane world of manuscripts: I cannot bear the idea of your devoting yourself to texts. You must train yourself to write, and you must write not only for the learned world. Not bibliography but theology, not antiquity but history, not archeology but religion, these are your themes. The peculiar texture of your mind is not revealed by editing a Hebrew classic; speak out you can, because you have no one to fear and no one to hurt. You have theological capacity. No other scholar that I know has it, and that is why I grieve when you have to work at manuscripts.21

When in the fall of 1901 Schechter informed Montefiore of his decision to leave Cambridge to assume the presidency of the Seminary, he again responded with mixed emotions. The growing corpus of occasional essays of a theological nature by Schechter over the years had only reinforced his judgment: I grieve that you should leave England with Aspects unpublished. It is a great pity that Weber still holds the field: He is criticized, but of what use is that? He is not supplanted […]. You have theological capacity. No other Jewish scholar that I know of has it, and that is why I grieve when you have to work at manuscripts and trivialities. The years pass; your strength wanes; and that which alone you could have done – a great systematic book on Jewish theology – is left undone. There may not be another Schechter for 75 years.22

The final ingredient of the Schechter mystique was the exceptional fact that his academic career had been spent at Cambridge. The Jewish scholars who had spearheaded the turn to history in the nineteenth century had always held that the suitable venue for their new discipline was the university. Their tools and perspectives embodied its ethos, though its halls were still home to the Christian views of Judaism that justified the perpetuation of Jewish disabilities. That rabbinical schools ended up as the institutional setting for most practitioners of jüdische Wissenschaft came as a bitter disappointment. Indicative of the aspiration was the manner in which Heinrich Graetz signed his laudatory 1890 letter of recommendation for Schechter to Cambridge: first came his appointment to the University of Breslau (unsalaried, part-time honorary professor) and only then his lifelong appointment (from 1854) to the Breslau Seminary.23 21

Bentwich, Schechter Biography, 266–7. Stein, 46. The reference is to Ferdinand Weber’s System der Altsynagogalen Palästinischen Theologie (Leipzig: Dörffling und Franke, 1880), which fell far short on expertise, empathy or insight. 23 Unfortunately, I no longer know in which archive I discovered my copy of the letter. Graetz had attended Schechter’s wedding on June 22, 1887 in London (Bentwich, 75). His complimentary letter reads as follows (translation mine): Mr. S. Schechter [he had no earned doctorate] is highly regarded by specialists as an accomplished student of talmudic and rabbinic literature. His mastery has shown itself in several published monographs. To his great credit is his critical edition of Aboth de Rabbi Nathan in which he turned a 22

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Thus Schechter’s original appointment to Cambridge in 1890, his promotion to Reader in Rabbinics in 1894, and his additional appointment as Professor of Hebrew at University College, London in 1897 (to ease his financial straits) added up to a resounding realization of a Wissenschaft dream. In 1889, in the same Hebrew letter in which Schechter reported to his friend, the eastern European scholar and collector, Solomon Zalman Hayyim Halberstam (whose library was later acquired for The Jewish Theo˙ logical Seminary by Mayer Sulzberger), that he was at work on an essay on Zunz (“of blessed memory”), he revealed that he had categorically “vowed never to take a pulpit, in consequence of which earning a living has become as hard for me as splitting the Red Sea.”24 The timing suggests that if not inspired by Zunz, whom he revered, the decision was certainly made in the spirt of Zunz. At great personal cost, Zunz had fought valiantly but futilely to gain admission for Jewish studies into the German university in the era of its ascendancy. To Schechter’s great credit, once in the university, he quickly became a part of it. Though he languished religiously (“You see I become mystical,” he wrote in 1897 to Sulzberger before Passover, “a feeling which overcomes me on the eve of our festivals which I must spend here among goyyim, without synagogue and without Jewish friends.”), its ambience steadily fertilized his sprightly worldliness.25 He and Mathilde regularly turned their home into a salon of sorts for Jewish students at the university. Perhaps most extraordinary of all in a period rife with religious polemics, Schechter enjoyed the respect and friendship of some prominent Christian members of the Cambridge faculty. Charles Taylor, an authority on early Christianity and editor of a scholarly edition of The Golden Bough, would accompany Schechter on long walks at least twice a week.26 After Schechter’s death, Mathilde observed that “their long friendship for each other was verily like that of David and Jonathan.27 Frazer’s encomium at the time not only proves the point, but also captures the aura of Schechter’s magnetic personality.

neglected text into a fertile primary source. Through personal contact with Mr. Schechter, I have had the chance to admire his deep learning in this field as well as his critical acumen. He fully possesses the knowledge and capability to teach rabbinic literature. (signed) Breslau 13 April 1890 H. Graetz Dr. phil. M.A. Prof. at Univ. of Breslau and the Jewish Theological Seminary, Member of the Royal Historical Academy in Madrid. 24 Israel Davidson, “Leqet Mikhtavim me-Hokhmai Yisrael le-Shlomo Zalman Hayyim ˙ Halberstam,” Studies in Jewish Bibliography and Related Subjects in Memory of Abraham Freidus (New York: The Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation, 1929), 13–14. 25 Meir Ben-Horin, “Schechter to Sulzberger,” 261. 26 Bentwich, 126. 27 Scult, 27.

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It would be difficult to say whether he was more admirable for the warmth of his affection or the generosity and nobility of his character, but I think it was the latter qualities even more than his genius which endeared him to his friends. It was a wonderful combination of intellectual and moral excellence, and the longer and the more intimately one knew him, the more deeply did one feel the impression of his greatness and goodness.28

Yet, Schechter was not blinded by the luster of the university. Both for personal and idealistic reasons, he was prepared to entertain the bold decision to step down from the pinnacle of the academic world rarely reached by any of his Jewish peers, for a parochial school in which he might train a rabbinic elite for the modern world.

II Though Schechter served as president of The Jewish Theological Seminary for only thirteen years, his imprimatur stamps the institution to this day. Long after his death, its detractors preferred to label it as “Schechter’s Seminary,” and in so doing they actually caught the spirit of the place. The longevity of Schechter’s influence is partially a tribute to his singular status and partially a function of the fundaments he laid down. To begin with, Schechter assembled a young faculty of Judaic that blended the learning of the east with the critical tools of the west. Their scholarly attainments over the next half-century would not only vindicate Schechter’s judgment, but quickly make JTS the standard bearer of the nascent field in America. In recognition of Schechter’s dual role as scholar and institution builder, Harvard bestowed on him an honorary doctorate in 1911, the first time the university so honored an exemplar of Jewish scholarship.29 And in 1936 when Harvard celebrated its tercentenary and wished once again to single out Jewish studies, its choice fell on Schechter’s brilliant prote´ge´ at the Seminary, Louis Ginzberg.30 In contrast to the old Seminary, the new Seminary was predominantly a graduate school. Admission to the rabbinical school required a B.A. Schechter wanted his rabbis to be as well educated secularly as their congregants. Moreover, he was convinced that knowledge of the classics would inculcate respect for antiquity and a conservative frame of mind. “Of course,” he said piquantly in 1904, “Greek and Latin are no guarantee against skepticism, but my experience has been that what the thoroughly educated man doubted first

28

Bentwich, 254. Ibid., 204. 30 Eli Ginzberg, Keeper of the Law: Louis Ginzberg (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966), 259–60. 29

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and last was his own infallibility.”31 By 1906, the rabbinical school had some twenty-one full-time students with another twenty-eight still short of the B.A., pursuing a dual program in a preparatory division.32 The “of America” which was absent from the nomenclature of the old Seminary meant to underscore the national mission of the new. Neither regional nor partisan, the Seminary was to be a beachhead for critical scholarship and a center for traditional Judaism for Jews across America. Schechter aspired to create a theological school with a soul, “a spot on the horizon where heaven and earth kiss each other.”33 He had long made it known to his suitors that “it is not orthodoxy which I wish to save but Judaism.”34 Schechter’s Judaism was to be largely recognized by its interior design, an emphasis that elegantly informed the Colonial architecture of the campus that came to house the Seminary in 1930. What went on inside defined the quality of the culture. From the outset, Schechter embarked on assembling a library that would facilitate the research of his faculty rather than the training of his rabbinical students. In this task he was fortunate to have by his side America’s preeminent collector of Jewish books, Mayer Sulzberger of Philadelphia, who embodied the continuity between the old and the new Seminary. In 1904, Sulzberger launched the library with the unprecedented gift of his rare books and manuscripts, along with a small collection of ceremonial art that would eventually proliferate into a full-fledged Jewish museum.35 For Schechter, these priceless remnants were not only objects of study, but also animate expressions of an ever-present past, as exemplified by his use in the Seminary synagogue of the ark from the Ben Ezra synagogue, given to him by the Cairo Jewish community in 1897.36 Within the confines of this well-equipped academy, Schechter hoped to educate literate rabbis, at home with the ever more teeming canvas of the Jewish past. To be sure, more than sixty percent of the curriculum was still devoted to the study of rabbinic literature, including the Talmud Yerushalmi. But modern rabbis had to be more than halakhic experts; they also had to serve their congregants as scholars-in-residence for whom nothing Jewish

31

Solomon Schechter, Seminary Addresses and Other Papers, reprint (New York: The Burning Bush Press, 1959), 60. 32 Mel Scult, “Schechter’s Seminary,” Tradition Renewed, ed. Jack Wertheimer, 2 vols. (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997), 1, 76. 33 Schechter, Seminary Addresses, 11. 34 Meir Ben-Horin, “Schechter to Sulzberger,” 256. 35 Julie Miller and Richard I. Cohen, “A Collision of Cultures: The Jewish Museum and JTS, 1904–1971,” Tradition Renewed, 2, 312. 36 Bentwich, 134; C. Davison, Out of Endless Yearnings (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1946), 77.

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was alien. While Schechter did not expect his graduates personally to advance the frontiers of Jewish knowledge, he groomed them to be able to discourse on the latest findings. More broadly, he wanted them, by virtue of their exposure to great scholarship, to transmit the feeling of awe that accompanies a moment of discovery. In his inaugural address, he shared with his audience the pathos that stirred him as he poured over the discarded fragments of the Cairo Genizah: […] the sensation of experience in our work is not unlike that which should accompany our devotions. Every discovery of an ancient document giving evidence of a bygone world is, if undertaken in the right spirit – that is, for the honor of God and the truth and not for the glory of self – an act of resurrection in miniature. How the past suddenly rushes in upon you with all its joys and woes! And there is a spark of a human soul like yours come to light again after a disappearance of centuries, crying for sympathy and mercy […]. You dare not neglect the appeal and slay this soul again. Unless you choose to become another Cain you must be the keeper of your brother and give him a fair hearing. You pray with him if the impression left by him in your mind is that of suffering; you fight for him if his voice is for the ardent partisanship, and you even doubt with him if the garb in which he makes his appearance is that of an honest skeptic – “Souls can only be kissed through the medium of sympathy.”37

These are the sentiments of a conservative, romantic spirit for whom history was not a tool to justify rational views reached a priori. Schechter fully shared the pathos with which Graetz had imbued his nationalistic history of the Jews. Such feelings made of the past a source of pride and and commitment, a force for continuity in an age of unimpeded free choice. Yet on the key occasion, Schechter quoted not Graetz but Zunz, who, to his mind, had done “far more good for Judaism [in his historical works] than any man in the nineteenth century.”38 Citing Zunz’s credo that “genuine scholarship is truly generative,” Schechter argued bitingly that “the usefulness of a minister does not increase in an inverse ratio to his knowledge – as little as bad grammar is especially conducive to morality and holiness.39 A long line of Jewish luminaries established the deep link between the life of the mind and leadership. The action he envisioned emanating from the Seminary would accord with the replenished reservoirs of Jewish memory. Later, in a decidedly unsympathetic essay on Abraham Geiger, he would declaim: “That history means remembrance, and that remembrance results in hope, which is the very reverse of absorption, was not foreseen by the few historians the Reform movement gave us.”40

37

Schechter, Seminary Addresses, 17–18. Idem, Studies in Judaism, 3, reprint (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1945), 114. 39 Idem, Seminary Addresses, 20. 40 Idem, Studies, 3, 71–72. 38

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In December 1906, Schechter publicly aligned his Seminary with the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha’am, to the consternation of his board. A few ˙ composed a Hebrew tribute to him on the celebration months before he had of his fiftieth birthday on behalf of a group of nine admiring Jewish intellectuals that included Louis Ginzberg and Alexander Marx. Had he not been abroad, Israel Friedlander also would have signed it. Schechter’s signature appeared first. The tribute saluted Ahad Ha’am for serving for more than a ˙ quarter of a century “as the spiritual center for this generation’s refugees and national elite who worry about the survival of the soul of Israel and its Torah. In all this time, you have stood forth as a mighty rock against all the winds that blow in our midst.”41 The pamphlet that followed made it clear just how seamless for Schechter the connection between Jewish history and cultural Zionism was. Nationalism had always been a valid and vital component of Judaism. Tisha b’Av did not celebrate Israel’s liberation from the sacrificial cult in the Temple but recalled the pain of its recurring defeat and degradation. What moved Schechter to embrace Zionism now was the misguided ideal of total assimilation through the loss of collective identity. To fortify Judaism and advance the cause of a Jewish state needed the regeneration of Jewish consciousness.42 Nevertheless, extreme nationalism had always been repugnant to Schechter. A bitter critic of imperialism, he weighed in against the British on the Boer War.43 His last public address some ten months after the outbreak of the First World War, in which nationalism had already run amok, was full of foreboding.44 In his correspondence with Ahad Ha’am, Schechter reiterated ˙ the institutions of Zionism had his deeply held view that above all in Palestine to be led by leaders steeped in Jewish life and learning, or else secularism would unhinge it from the religious moorings which validated and temporized it.45 Yet Schechter never retracted his allegiance. Instead, abetted by Mordecai Kaplan and Friedlander, he turned the Seminary into a bastion of cultural Zionism in America. Not to be overlooked in this assessment of Schechter’s institutional legacy is the founding of the Teacher’s Institute in 1909. The expansion did much more than add to the Seminary administration the young Kaplan as its principal. It eventually made of the Seminary a major catalyst in the chaotic field of Jewish education. As a rabbinical school alone, the Seminary operated at the apex of a pyramid that had no base. Without a network of feeders to provide proficient and motivated students, the Seminary constantly faced the 41

Bentwich, Iggrot Shneur Zalman Schechter le-Ahad Ha’am, Melilah, 2 (1946), 27–28. ˙ Studies, ˙ Schechter, Seminary Addresses, 91–104; also idem, 3, 75–80. 43 Bentwich, Schechter Biography, 103. 44 Schechter, Seminary Addresses, 246–47. 45 Bentwich, Iggrot, 28–29. 42

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prospect of diluting its curriculum or contracting its enrollment. In the decades to come, the Teachers Institute and its graduates would stand at the forefront of the shift away from communal to synagogue schools, of the embrace of summer camping as a venue of serious Jewish education and of the founding of Jewish day schools. Indeed, the increasing synergy between the Teachers Institute and the rabbinical school after 1930 on their newly shared campus at 3080 Broadway greatly enhanced the operation and impact of both. Teachers Institute graduates often made their way into rabbinical school. With Hebrew as its language of instruction, the Teachers Institute intensified the Hebraic and Zionist atmosphere of the entire Seminary. The Ramah camps, but an extension of the Teachers Institute, though often led by directors who had graduated rabbinical school, served as seedbeds for future rabbinical students and in time for an ever more literate and observant Conservative laity.46 Still less appreciated is the fact that the Teachers Institute opened the portals of the Seminary to women students making the institution after 1930 just about co-educational. There is no question that Schechter displayed a lifelong interest in the undervalued role of women in Judaism, triggered either by the formidable presence of Mathilde in his life, or his innate liberal frame of mind, or his persistent urge to enlarge the canvas of Jewish history. Before coming to America, he had broached the subject in two essays: “Women in Temple and Synagogue” and “The Memoirs of a Jewess of the Seventeenth Century.”47 The latter, an extensive review of the diary of Glückel of Hameln not long after it was first published, is testimony to Schechter’s acute antennae for fertile new primary sources. His introductory comment to the review, despite its saccharin surface, belied an agenda: I found much pleasure in writing it, as the diary is quite unique as a piece of literature, and bears additional testimony to the fact that our grandmothers were not devoid of religion, though they prayed in galleries, and did not determine the language of the ritual. Theirs was a real, living religion, which found expression in action and in a sweet serenity.48

In conjunction with his own interest, he encouraged Henrietta Szold, whom he first met on his trip to the States in 1895, to write on the topic of medieval Jewish literature for women and even urged The Jewish Publication Society in a generous letter of recommendation to commission the work.49 Hence, his decision to let Szold study as a non-matriculated student in 1902 in his new

46

For expansive and evocative treatments of the Teachers Institute, see the essays by Harvey E. Goldberg and Baila R. Shargel in Tradition Renewed, 1. 47 Schechter, Studies, 1, 13–25; 2, 126–47. 48 Ibid., 2, ix. 49 Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 247; Meir Ben-Horin, “Schechter to Sulzberger,” Part 2, 95–96.

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rabbinical school was as consistent as it was courageous. Nor did Schechter drop the cudgels after she left the Seminary. In addition to creating the Teachers Institute, he chose to use his keynote address at the founding of the United Synagogue in 1913 to make a plea for the extension of religious education to Jewish women.50 On a trip to England several years after Schechter’s death, his son Frank gathered information from people who knew him. His notes (courtesy of Prof. Mel Scult) record the following testimony, which resoundingly confirms the consistently liberal thrust of Schechter’s views on women: Prof. Alice Gardner of the University of Bristol, formerly of Newham College Cambridge, told me at Bristol on May 18, 1919 that Schechter was one of the first and hottest advocates of degrees for women at Cambridge, and spoke with much contempt and annoyance of “those superior young men, the undergraduates, who want the Universe all to themselves.”51

In retrospect, Schechter seemed determined to admit women gradually into that small portion of the universe over which he exercised some control. At services in the Seminary synagogue, men and women sat separately, without benefit of a mehizah, equidistant from the bimah. In the Teachers Institute, ˙ rabbinical school, rabbis-to-be and women took the same though not in the classes. During the week they socialized in the Seminary’s dining room and on Shabbat and festivals at services and communal meals. Many a rabbinical student found his mate in that congenial ambiance, often someone whose command of modern Hebrew exceeded his own. The appointment of Sylvia Ettenberg as the first female associate dean of the Teachers Institute in the late 1960s culminated this internal development, even as it heralded the growing leadership of women at every level of Jewish education throughout the Conservative movement.52 Schechter had not left Cambridge for naught. In but thirteen years, he forged out of the reorganized Seminary a unique center that joined the piety and learning of the east with the aesthetic sensibility and critical scholarship of the west. The mix was potent and stable. As the Seminary spawned a field of study and religious movement, its institutional culture would retain a remarkable degree of continuity. 50

Solomon Schechter, “The Work of Heaven.” Tradition and Change, ed. Mordecai Waxman (New York: The Burning Bush Press, 1958), 171. 51 I thank Prof. Scult for allowing me to quote the passage, which he was kind enough to share with me in a personal letter dated July 10, 1993. 52 C. Davidson, in her charming biography of her husband Israel Davidson, describes the formal yet intimate Shabbat services in the Schechter synagogue (“high silk top-hats and black frock coats or cutaways,” 77). Though she remained silent on the matter of seating arrangements, her warmth toward the whole experience leads me to conclude there was no mehizah to give a highly assimilated woman of German background a feeling of ˙ being excluded or discomforted. On Ettenberg, see Tradition Renewed, 1, 557 n. 22.

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III Schechter has often been criticized for failing to enunciate a coherent and cogent philosophy of Conservative Judaism. The fault is undeniable, partly because he tried to position the Seminary above the denominational fray and partly because of his preference for a theology that was neither consistent nor systematic.53 But that does not mean that he left the Seminary theologically rudderless. Schechter embodied rather than formulated the nature of Conservative Judaism, and a closer look at his larger-than-life persona, I think, will readily yield a vision of Judaism that is distinctly not Orthodox or Reform. Schechter had frequent contact with his students. He interviewed them when they applied, taught them while in residence and assisted them in their search for a suitable pulpit. Not surprisingly then, it was a student after Schechter died who penned one of the most incisive cameos of him that I know: Judaism was embodied in him; he was its incarnation. He was kin to the characters whom he interpreted in his Studies, and he understood them without effort, as a man knows himself. When he spoke, his utterances were the expression of all the centuries of Jewish life and experience, and we were awed, feeling that we heard the voice of Judaism speaking through him.54

What lends this portrait its ring of truth is that it highlights not only Schechter’s vast knowledge of Jewish sources and history, but also the spectrum of Jewish communities in which he had sojourned for years. His biography recapitulated the odyssey of his people. He had deep firsthand experience of the diversity of Jewish life in the Carpathian Mountains of Moldavia, German-speaking central Europe, England and America. He knew the fervor of a Judaism born of insularity and oppression as well as the anxiety-ridden Judaism evoked by partial emancipation. Schechter spoke effortlessly of the permutations of Judaism because he had absorbed them from books and in life. His experience of homelessness sharpened the insights of scholarship. In a growing age of specialization, Schechter was entranced by the totality of the Jewish religious experience. His early years spent in a part of the Jewish world still untouched by modernity imprinted him with the memory of just how truncated was its view of the Jewish past. Any reader of his three-volume Studies of Judaism (long a requirement for incoming JTS rabbinical students) is immediately struck by the bracing range of its topics. Schechter wrote with an impressive measure of expertise on the biblical, intertestamental, rabbinic, medieval and modern periods of Jewish history. His essays on Jewish mysti53 54

Schechter, Studies, 1, 231. Bentwich, Solomon Schechter, 197.

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cism, where he definitely broke new ground, were perhaps most noteworthy. Yet in general he roamed effortlessly from Ben Sira to Jesus to the Vilna Gaon, from rabbinic theology to social history to the history of Jewish studies in the nineteenth century. At the end of an extensive review of an anonymously published theological novel on Jesus, Schechter proposed an agenda that echoed his own: Those who are so anxious for the rehabilitation of Jesus in the Synagogue had best apply themselves to the rehabilitation of Israel in the Synagogue, that is to obtain a thorough knowledge of Judaism in all its phases of thought and all the stages of its history.55

The grasp for comprehensiveness attuned Schechter to the complexity of the phenomenon. The study of history constantly added to his appreciation of the fluidity inherent in the formation of Judaism. Against the backdrop of the profusion of plurality, Schechter came to personify a Judaism of polarities firmly held in balance. Time and again, he refused to cut the Gordian knot. Much like the nodes of a battery, the polarities generated the electricity that gave his Judaism its dynamism, his writing its vitality of expression. Though on occasion he yearned for the simplicity of his roots, where the Bible was looked upon as the “crown and the climax of Judaism,” he conceded that history was also an arena of revelation. The irony is that while Schechter overtly rejected the “religious bimetallism” of his Wissenschaft patrimony (i.e., revelation in the form of Torah and history), he embodied it existentially.56 His many-sided nature with its appetite for inclusiveness and its tolerance for differences infused the Seminary with its centrist ethos. A few examples should drive home the point: Schechter was neither a mystic nor a rationalist, but rather a man of independent mind who took what he deemed best from both. He read mystical works extensively and wrote on mystical subjects to a degree unmatched by any scholar of his time. It could well be that his interest had its roots in his own Hasidic upbringing to ˙ which his Hebrew name, Shneor Zalman, after the founder of the Lubavitch movement, bore witness. And yet in the midst of a fascinating and favorable essay on Nahmanides as a mystic, he felt obliged to reveal that he did not ˙ Maimonides: rank him above Some writers of a rather reactionary character even went so far as to assign to him a higher place that Maimonides. This is unjust. What a blank would there have been in Jewish thought but for Maimonides’ great work, on which the noblest thinkers of Israel fed for

55

Schechter, Studies, 3, 46. The barb against those Jews eager to rehabilitate Jesus was aimed at Montefiore. See Daniel R. Langton, “Claude Montefiore in the Context of Jewish Approaches to Jesus and the Apostle Paul,” Hebrew Union College Annual, 70–71 (1999–2000), 405–28. 56 Schechter, Studies, 1, xx–xxi.

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centuries! […]. None will persuade me that philosophy does not form an integral part of Jewish tradition.57

Obviously, then, Schechter’s relationship to mysticism was not unalloyed. In his completed study of rabbinic theology, he admitted candidly that he was repelled by the “idle spirituality,” the egotism of “sublime quietism” and the implicit “antinomianism” that possessed the mystics from time to time.58 As he wrote to Sulzberger in 1896 at the height of his productivity, “The little time I can spare I must reserve for reading of mystics whom I both hate and love too much to neglect them.”59 In the same vein, his sympathies for eighteenth-century Hasidism did not extend beyond the generation of its founder. ˙ institutionalization of the tzaddik as fraught with potential He regarded the abuse and corruption.60 Still, it is interesting that for all of Schechter’s ability to work himself into the life and thought of great minds he never wrote a biographical essay on a philosopher. Yet a second example of his binary conception of Judaism: Schechter verily bristled at the widely held notion of Moses Mendelssohn that Judaism was a religion without dogmas, with constraints that were solely of a behavioral and not intellectual order. His early essay on the subject was intended as a corrective based not on speculation but on an abundance of historical research, especially in medieval Jewish philosophy. With Maimonides’ thirteen principles of faith as his focal point, Schechter sketched a sweeping history of dogmas in Judaism. His conclusion: Judaism consistently exhibited an inviolable theological center of gravity. It was an historical travesty to classify Judaism “among the invertebrate species.”61 It is true that dogmatic propositions often reflected the challenges of the age in which they were formulated, but Judaism never tried to be infinitely adaptable. Schechter cautioned his own confidently rational age that Judaism is a divine religion with the universal mission to establish God’s kingdom on earth. It demanded of Jews that they invest their lives with holiness in thought and deed and never lose sight of their fallible and sinful nature.62 The polarities which gave this essay its resonance are dogma and development. Schechter was prepared to surrender neither. Qua historian, he recognized the pervasive reality of change and diversity; qua theologian, he moved beyond the evidence to avow the existence of God and an immutable core to Judaism. There is indeed development in the history of dogma, but Schechter never allowed it to become the solvent of all continuity. 57

Ibid., 1, 130–31. Idem, Some Aspects, 78–79. 59 Meir Ben-Horin, Part 1, 255. 60 Schechter, Studies, 1, 43–44. 61 Ibid., 150. 62 Ibid., 180. 58

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More broadly stated, we have here an incarnation of the polarity between the historian and the believer. What makes Schechter a figure of endless fascination is precisely this relentless effort to balance both dispositions. It was Schechter the historian who traveled to Cairo to advance the frontiers of Jewish knowledge, but Schechter the believer who spurned Cambridge to found in New York a fulcrum for the elevation of Judaism in America. It was Schechter the historian who buried himself in the drudgery of deciphering, transcribing and publishing lost manuscripts, but Schechter the believer who distilled the meaning of his research for a popular audience. In this regard he saw himself as heir to the legacy of Nachman Krochmal and Leopold Zunz, who served both truth and faith with equal fervor. The explosion of knowledge no longer allowed for the comfort of “saving ignorance.”63 At the end of his adulatory essay on Krochmal, he summed up their as well as his own twofold commitment: The only hope is in true knowledge and not in ignorance; and […] this knowledge can only be obtained by a combination of the utmost reverence for religion and the deepest devotion to truth.

Reconciliation rested on motivation: Such a knowledge, which is free from all taint of worldliness and other-worldliness, a knowledge sought simply and solely for pure love of God, who is truth – such a knowledge is in the highest sense a saving knowledge, and Nachman Krochmal was in possession of it.64

So the lodestars of Schechter’s firmament were truth and reverence. The Reform revered only that which was both rational and politically correct (in both cases categories essentially defined by outsiders). In recounting the protracted struggle in Breslau between Geiger, the epitome of the modern rabbi, and Solomon Tiktin, who still personified the pre-modern, Schechter came down squarely on the side of Tiktin. Here is how he saw the issue: The one insisted upon his right, as a son of the nineteenth century to unsparing criticism of Jewish institutions and the biblical sources of these institutions, whilst the other, a product of two thousand years of thinking and suffering, clung to the privilege of living in and dying for the law of the fathers.65

Likewise, Geiger fell afoul of Schechter for discarding the observance of Tisha b’Av. “Surely, self-denial will always be more admired than self-indulgence.”66 As Schechter had told Anglo-Jewry in his peroration, he far preferred “spiritual men” to a “spiritual religion.”67 Or as he declaimed soon 63

Ibid., 46. Ibid., 72. 65 Ibid., 3, 55–56. 66 Ibid., 53. 67 Ibid., 2, 189. 64

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after having arrived in America, the constant “Occidentalizing (of) our religion – as if the occident has ever shown the least genius for religion,” did enormous violence to that which Jewish history had sanctified.68 At the same time, Schechter took repeated aim at the Orthodox for their sacrifice of truth to reverence. “Artificial ignorance,” could no longer block out the light of new discoveries.69 “It is not by a perpetual Amen to every utterance of a great authority that truth or literature gains anything.”70 The educational system of that world put a premium on repetition, converting its young men into mere “studying engines.”71 The result was a leadership of weak authority by which Schechter meant “that phonograph-like authority which is always busy reproducing the voice of authors without an opinion of its own, without originality, without initiative and discretion. The real authorities are those who, drawing their inspiration from the past, also understood how to reconcile us with the present and to prepare us for the future.”72 But Schechter was not entirely at home either in the world of scholarship. He described “true science” as a skeptical frame of mind “which looks not at but into and if possible behind things.73 However, much of what passed for biblical scholarship in the university, he thundered, looked right past Judaism. It appeared intent on showing that the Bible contained nothing original or enduring. The operative assumption of Christian scholars still seemed to be the old theological doctrine that Christianity had superseded Judaism. The task confronting Jewish scholars was to produce a popular modern commentary for “the whole of the Bible (including the Apocrypha), that drew on the unbroken history of Jewish biblical exegesis as well as modern findings.74 By no means did Schechter reject biblical criticism outright. He accepted some of its conclusions and even made a contribution by showing that the Hebrew of Ben Sira from around 200 B.C.E. (which he helped recover), being much closer to mishnaic than biblical Hebrew, precluded the possibility of any of the Psalms dating from the Maccabean period, a theory that he himself once held.75 Rather it was the excesses that infuriated him. For Schechter, the question was no longer whether the statements of rabbinic tradition on the Bible could be defended in all their details, but whether they contained any

68

Idem, Seminary Addresses, 23. Ibid., 15. 70 Idem, Studies, 1, 164. 71 Ibid., 58. 72 Ibid., 212. 73 Ibid., 3, 157. 74 Ibid., 2, 200–201. 75 Ibid., 44, 69

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truth at all.76 The reason, I believe, that Schechter chose to exclude the study of the Pentateuch (the Torah) from the curriculum of the rabbinical school was not just the precedent set by the Breslau Seminary, where it was barely touched, but that no one quite knew how to teach it. The goal that Schechter had in mind required a Schechter to figure out the road to get there. It follows from Schechter’s dissatisfaction with his contemporaries that no institution existed which pursued scholarship in a spirit of utter truthfulness and deep reverence. This was to be the mission of the Seminary, an academy where the value of truth would keep minds open while the attitude of reverence privileged the past. The lodestars were linked: insight is a function of empathy. Schechter agreed with Zunz that scholars contemptuous of Judaism could never adequately write its history.77 Yet the past was not static. The commitment to truth reveals worlds obscured by ignorance. Schechter’s interests ranged beyond what he thought to be normative Judaism. From the dust bin of the Genizah, he personally brought to light documents vital to the history of Jewish sectarianism in the Second Temple and geonic periods. Indeed, his own scholarship chipped away at the cherished view of an unbroken and unilinear normative Judaism. The screen of our past was destined to show a narrative of untold subplots. To keep this creative polarity in balance, Schechter introduced the concept of “Catholic Israel as embodied in the Universal Synagogue.”78 The nomenclature derives from Zunz, who in his dazzling history of midrash (Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden), which Schechter heralded as his greatest work, had posited the synagogue as the arena in which the national character of the Jewish people found its most authentic expression, a portable homeland in exile.79 More abstractly, the synagogue functioned for Zunz as a conceptual construct that identified the purveyor of Jewish continuity and the arbiter for what is normative. It did so for Schechter as well, irrespective of the name change. Only a religious entity could serve as the bearer of authentic Judaism through the ages. The essence of the Jewish people itself was best refracted in a polarity that held the national and religious in tandem. In this long view of the synagogue as carrier and crucible, Schechter embraced a source of authority both old and new. If for the Orthodox the ultimate source of authority was God and for the Reform the individual, for Schechter it became the Jewish people itself as constituted in the synagogue. In Judaism the people had never been passive bystanders. The faith community had always determined which texts were to be accepted as revelation, even as it had always subordinated the freedom of the individual to the will of 76

Ibid., 39. Ibid., 3, 70. 78 Ibid., 1, xviii. 79 Ibid., 3, 112, 115. See also David J. Fine, “The Meaning of Catholic Israel,” Conservative Judaism, 50:4 (Summer 1998), 41–47. 77

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the group.80 The climate of nineteenth-century nationalism merely facilitated raising to consciousness the traditional unobtrusive centrality of Jewish peoplehood in forging the contours of Judaism. That is why Schechter and his soulmates found cultural Zionism compatible. They had been Zionists long before Zionism came on the scene. Cyrus Adler, who first met Schechter in 1890, and would succeed him as head of the Seminary, already then sized him up to a tee: “He is a devout Jew in his practice with a most liberal construction in his ideas.”81 The vignette conveys just how pronounced were the polarities that pulsated in the man: Historian and believer on the one hand, religious conservative and political liberal on the other. Judaism shared a responsibility with other faiths to better the human condition. Schechter often addressed issues of social justice with evident anger. Few traditionalists of his day could match his condemnation of imperialism, the overheated nationalism of the Boer War or his advocacy of women’s rights. Remarkably, as early as January 1913 at the dedication of the new campus of Hebrew Union College, he inveighed against the recurring massacre of Armenian civilians by the Turks without mentioning either by name: It is only sufficient to mention here the terrible atrocities perpetuated under the eyes of Europe in the Near East. Men, women and children, all non-combatants, are slaughtered by the thousands every day, their number amounting to half a million already […]. And yet, no real moral indignation is seen anywhere. We simply put away our papers and enjoy our breakfast as if nothing had happened. We have become so infatuated with the doctrine of the survival of the fittest that we have lost all sensibility to the great moral catastrophes which are passing before our very eyes. And the more philosophy, the more heartless we become.82

Years later in 1927, Louis Finkelstein, then a pulpit rabbi in the Bronx, a member of the Seminary faculty and about to become president of the Rabbinical Assembly, in a memorable reformulation merged the persona of Schechter with the essence of Conservative Judaism: “We are the only group in Israel who have a modern mind and a Jewish heart, prophetic passion and western science. It is because we have all these that we see Judaism so broadly […].”83 Put differently, Judaism has never turned on a single axis. But the legacy of Schechter’s bipolar perspective outlived those who knew him personally. After the Holocaust, none other than Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose tapestry of Jewish worlds experienced was almost as variegated as Schechter’s, incorporated the notion of polarities in the fabric of his own unique philosophy of Judaism. He perceived the deep structure of Judaism to 80

Schechter, Studies, 1, xix. Scult, Tradition Renewed, 1, 46. 82 Schechter, Seminary Addresses, 243. 83 Louis Finkelstein, “The Things that Unite Us,” Waxman, 323. 81

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consist of an almost endless series of polarities because its experience of God and the world could never be reduced to a cluster of single categories.84 His final two riveting works, in fact, turn on pairs of diametrically opposed religious personalities and constructions of reality – each written in the language of their disputes. The mystic and the rationalist, the lover of humanity and its unforgiving critic, individually entertain a perception which is at best only partial. To gain a full-bodied, three dimensional image, we need two lenses.85 Schechter personified this age-old culture of controversy, where illumination breaks forth from dialectic discourse, and the legacy of polarities in balance still nourishes the Seminary’s distinctive ethos of complementarity.

84 Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1956), 341–47. 85 Abraham Joshua Heschel, Torah min-ha-Shamayim be-Aspaqlariah shel ha-Dorot, 3, vols. (London/New York: Soncino, 1962); (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1990); idem, Koktzk, in Gerangel far Emesdikeit, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv: Hamenorah, 1973).

6. Scholem on Zunz: An Egregious Misreading The years have not attenuated the acerbic fury of Gershom Scholem’s 1945 essay on the legacy of German Jewish scholarship. In truth, the intent of his screed was less about the past than the future. It was the future of Jewish scholarship at the Hebrew University, not the stain of its German origins that weighed heavily on his mind. Yet to plot the road to come, one had to understand the road taken. Scholem’s judgment on the past was laden with angst, anger and ambivalence; he feared that Mt. Scopus augured not a rupture with what had preceded it in Europe but a mere replication. “We came to rebel but settled to continue,” he lamented in closing.1 To bestir his colleagues, Scholem depicted the failings of Wissenschaft des Judentums as a cautionary tale in the overheated rhetoric of a prophet of doom. Among the targets of Scholem’s wrath was Leopold Zunz, who had pioneered the turn to critical Jewish scholarship in 1818 with a riveting bibliographic essay and then went on in a tortuous career of nearly six decades to produce a surfeit of new knowledge, insights and conceptualizations about the Jewish past according to the highest standards of German scholarship at the time.2 Yet, given the weight of Scholem’s authority, it is nigh impossible to do justice to Zunz’s singular achievement; his indictment looms ominously in the way unassailable and beyond appeal. Since publishing my biography of Zunz in 2016, I have often pondered the actual nature of Zunz’s legacy.3 But to encounter the real Zunz, one must first clear away the rubble of Scholem’s animus. From the get go his contention was that the dialectic of German Jewish scholarship was driven by deep-

1 Gershom Scholem, “Mitokh hirhurim al homat yisrael,” idem, Devarim be-go (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1975), 402. On the confusing genesis of this address/essay, see Peter Schäfer, “Gershom Scholem und die ‘Wissenschaft des Judentums,’” Gershom Scholem. Zwischen den Disziplinen, eds. Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989), 123, 152 n. 8. For an English translation, see Gershom Scholem, On the Possibility of Mysticism in Our Time, ed. Avraham Shapira, trans., Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), 51–71. 2 Leopold Zunz, “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur,” Gesammelte Schriften, 3 vols. (Berlin: Louis Gerschel, 1875–76), 1, 1–31. 3 Ismar Schorsch, Leopold Zunz. Creativity in Adversity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

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seated contradictions only dimly realized by its practitioners. Their claim of objectivity was confounded by their political agenda to achieve emancipation. Apologetics pre-determined and distorted their construction of the Jewish past. Likewise, their turn to history was borne aloft by German romanticism, even as that pervasively anti-Jewish movement threw them into conflict with their own rational roots in the Enlightenment. Finally, the scholars of Wissenschaft were torn apart over what to do with the new knowledge they unearthed. Was it meant to inspire or discard? Did they come to rebuild Judaism or free themselves from it? These sweeping contradictions set the tone and context for Scholem’s condemnation of Zunz and Steinschneider whom he rightly lumped together. He admired the asceticism and specificity which imbued their scholarship, but was repelled by its lack of feeling, narrative structure and meaning. Switching to the language of metaphor, Scholem handed down a withering denunciation: Suddenly in the midst of reading them, you are, as it were, staring at the face of Medusa and something entirely inhuman stares back at you, turning your heart into stone with half sentences or a tangential note. What a hatred of this world, what a grandiose cynicism. And the stage changes and you see before you giants who for reasons known only to them have turned themselves into undertakers, embalmers and even eulogizers, who have disguised themselves as dwarfs gathering grass in the fields of the past, drying them till utterly bereft of all life-giving fluid and then putting them in something that is half-book, halfgrave.4

There is not a word of critical engagement about neither their methodology nor their influence, only a sprinkling of kabbalistic terms to sharpen the sting. In short, there could be no future to Zionist scholarship in Jerusalem if done in the funereal guise that marked its birth in Germany.

4

Scholem, “Mitokh hirhurim,” (my translation). 392. In 1960 Scholem reiterated his critique of Wissenschaft in German in a more restrained fashion, though no less negative. For an English translation of that later essay, see idem, “The Science of Judaism: Then and Now,” The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1971) 304–13. My reading of the older essay differs fundamentally from that of David Biale in his still penetrating biography of Scholem. Unlike Biale, I take Scholem’s denunciation of Wissenschaft des Judentums at face value and do not soften its fury to salvage a concealed motif that might morph dialectically into something constructive. Nor can I ignore the veneration in which Zunz was held by his contemporaries and acolytes that simply does not comport with Scholem’s ex cathedra judgment, which he was never tired of repeating (David Biale, Gershom Scholem. Kabbalah and Counter-History [Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1979], 1–12, 189–205). In his intriguing new biography, Biale’s interpretation is briefly reiterated unchanged (David Biale, Gershom Scholem. Master of the Kabbalah [New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2018], 151–52). To my mind, the pitch at which Scholem’s essay was written sheds more heat than light.

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I But this was a view of the landscape from an elevation of 30,000 feet beclouded by ideology. To test the accuracy of Scholem’s depiction, we need to put our feet on the ground. The image of Zunz that emerges when we come up close is the antipode of Scholem’s construct: someone who is not out to inter Judaism but to enhance it with an undreamt body of literature of absorbing individuality, creativity, beauty and meaning. Scholem propelled the field of Jewish studies in the twentieth century with the restoration of Kabbalah, and Zunz did precisely the same for the nineteeth century and beyond with the recovery of midrash. Each man unearthed a trove of new documents and forged a critical methodology to date and interpret them, and in the process inspired an ever larger circle of ardent disciples.5 Perhaps most astonishing, both men ended up balancing a religion anchored in law and ritual with bodies of spiritual literature that atomized biblical texts to abound with conceits of imagination, bold mythical thrusts and daring flights of non-rational speculation. The evidence for this correction of Scholem’s faulty reading is of two sorts, quantitative and qualitative. The first sort is the striking fact that by the beginning of the twentieth century Zunz’s 1832 study of midrashic literature had given rise to the largest sub-field of Judaica. In that book Zunz had given form to matter by putting into elegant order a vast body of interpretive biblical literature that reached from the pages of the Bible itself to the sermons of the nineteenth century synagogue. Zunz showed that coherence and development inhered in what till then had been a beloved but chaotic literature by scrutinizing a welter of individual midrashic texts, known and unknown, in terms of genre, dating and provenance with a few incisive descriptive words about the nature and content of each one.6 Zunz’s Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden was no less seminal than Scholem’s 1941 Major Trends of Jewish Mysticism, and no less impactful.7 Thus the combined entries for “Midrash Haggadol” and “Midrashim Smaller” in the multi-volume Jewish Encyclopedia, the summation of nineteenth century Jewish scholarship, that came out in New York in the first decade of the twentieth century, exceed by three and a half pages the printed space allotted to the entry for “Talmud.” Like Zunz, Julius Theodor, their 5

What Martin Buber once said of Scholem that “all of us have students, some of us have even created schools, but only Gerschom Scholem has created a whole academic discipline,” could just as well be said of Zunz (Biale, Counter-History, 206). 6 Leopold Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt (Berlin: A. Ascher, 1832). 7 Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1941).

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author, organized his material by genre and text, covering some 25 separate works in a comprehensive survey. Destined to become the most exacting midrash scholar of his generation with his critical edition of Bereishit Rabbah, Theodor had been recruited to write the entries by Solomon Schechter. An earlier solicitation by another editor had failed. But in a letter to Schechter dated February 2, 1903, Theodor succumbed to Schechter’s charm and praise and irresistible offer of a total of 10,000 words.8 A poignant letter by Zunz from November 13, 1871 provides yet a second attestation of the field’s rapid growth. Interest in England in bringing out an English translation of Zunz’s gottesdienstliche Vorträge had prompted a request that in collaboration he consider preparing a second edition. While pleased by the prospect of such an edition to which he readily consented, he declined to undertake the necessary revisions: I regret that for a new edition of my gottesdienstliche Vorträge – which I have been repeatedly encouraged to do for the last 16 years – I can be of no help. In the past 40 years [since 1832] the scholarship [in midrash] has grown in scope and depth [to the point] where a new edition would cost [me] more time and work than that required by the first.9

Nor could Zunz, according to Steinschneider, even bring himself to agree to a republication of the first edition, given that the handwritten notes to his personal copy simply rendered it outdated. When finally in 1892 (six years after Zunz’s death) Steinschneider succeeded in midwifing a second edition based on Zunz’s marginalia, he contended that the original structure, conception and analysis of Zunz’s first edition had lost none of their cogency.10 Progress had not transformed a milestone into a relic. Yet a third verification of the robust expansion of the field of midrash comes from a magnificent three-volume anthology of Jewish literature published in 1894–96. Edited by Jakob Winter, a graduate of the Breslau seminary and the rabbi of the Jewish community in Dresden, and August Wünsche, the zealous Christian translator of midrashic works into German who taught at the city high school for girls in Dresden, the anthology attracted a cluster of Jewish scholars to cover the stunning diversity of Jewish literary

8 Jewish Encyclopedia, 12 vols. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–6), 8, 550–69, 572–80; 12, 1–27. While the entry for Talmud also runs to 27 pages, it includes 3 1/2 pages of illustrations. For the Theodor letter see, Jewish Theological Seminary Library, Schechter archives, box 7/17. Schechter joined the editorial board of the JE upon arriving in the United States in April 1902 (Shuly Schwartz, The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America [Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1991], 94). 9 Yom Tov Lipmann Zunz, Ha-derashot be-yisrael, ed. Chanokh Albeck, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1954), 20; photo copy of Zunz’s letter, 24. 10 Leopold Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, 2nd ed., rev. by Nehemias Brüll (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kauffmann, 1892), “Vorrede zur zweiten Auflage,” Moritz Steinschneider, xv.

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creativity by genre, title and source or author from the Hasmonean period deep into the nineteenth century. Each entry bore far more than a snippet of translation of the original text accompanied by a scholarly introduction to contextualize it.11 Though Winter and Wünsche devoted volume one to the Geschichte der jüdisch-hellenistischen und talmudischen Litteratur, the vast bulk of the literature treated was talmudic and midrashic in nature, and not the literary legacy of Greek-speaking Hellenistic Jewry. Especially noteworthy was the conspicuous fact that the space given to the nearly 40 midrashic tracts individually presented fully matched the space set aside for the samples cited from the talmudic corpora produced in Palestine and Babylonia, although the passages drawn from them were often also midrashic and aggadic in nature. The editors acknowledged their apologetic intent to counter the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the newly founded Second Reich. The recurring defamation of the Talmud in the public arena necessitated an anthology to demonstrate “that Jewish literature also occupies a place of honor in world literature.”12 The guiding hands of Winter and Wünsche clearly suggested that the accumulated treasures of midrashic texts served as an invaluable aid in their campaign to enlighten Jews and Christians alike. Overall then the numbers do not show that the field of midrash was languishing, its death knell having been sounded. On the contrary, its ever greater prominence pointed to the salient impact of a classic work crafted by a genius rather than a demon. Moreover, the abundant personal testimonies by younger scholars inspired to walk in Zunz’s footsteps confirm qualitatively what appears to be an indisputable link.

II The first to exhibit Zunz’s direct influence was Michael Sachs, who had become Berlin’s associate rabbi and preacher in 1844. A well trained philologist and gifted preacher, Sachs had already collaborated with Zunz on the production of a new German translation of the Hebrew Bible that came out in 1838. He was also an assiduous student of midrash, and in his justly celebrated anthology of German translations of “golden age” Spanish Hebrew poets in 1845, Sachs demarcated the end of the midrashic mentality that had given the Rabbis an intuitive grasp of the multiple possible meanings of

11

Jakob Winter und August Wünsche (eds.), Die jüdische Litteratur seit Abschluss des Kanons, 3 vols. (Trier: Sigmund Mayer, 1894–96). The three volumes totaled some 2,400 pages of texts in translation with substantial introductions. 12 Ibid., 1, viii (Vorwort).

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biblical texts with the rise of Islam and the recovery of Greek science and philosophy. Sachs closed his selection with an exquisite theological poem on the life journey of the human soul by Nachmanides (d. 1270) but needed the extensive help of Zunz to unravel its pervasive kabbalistic content.13 In 1853 Sachs amplified and popularized his conception of midrash as the quintessential mode of rabbinic thought with a remarkable anthology of evocative midrashic tales, kernels of wisdom and biblical interpretations, each rendered in the form of a felicitous German poem. The prominence of the word “voices” in the title Stimmen von Jordan und Euphrat (Voices from the Jordan and Euphrates) was meant to convey that oral transmission served as the medium in which rabbinic ingenuity passed from rabbinic academies to lay audiences in synagogues throughout ancient Palestine and Babylonia. Bestired by Zunz, Sachs tried in a pocket-size volume of nearly 400 pages to recapture for the modern Jew the ingenious wisdom of a once dominant rabbinic discourse.14 Another young contemporary of Zunz who advanced the study of midrash into the field of Kabbalah was Adolph Jellinek. A yeshiva prodigy from Moravia, he burst onto the German scene in the early 1850s with a series of bold monographs on kabbalistic texts prior to the Zohar. He contended confidently that Kabbalah predated the Middle Ages, that its roots were to be found in the midrash and that Moses de Leon and not Abraham Abulafia was the primary author of the Zohar.15 In 1853 he began to edit at intervals a Hebrew periodical called Beit ha-Midrash, which in the 24 years of its existence would publish the originals of 89 little know midrashic texts, many of which bore the trademarks of Kabbalah. Jellinek accompanied each text with a succinct, incisive and unapologetic introduction. For my purpose, it is Jellinek’s full-throated dedication to Zunz in volume one of Beit ha-Midrash that warrants his inclusion in my list of Zunz acolytes. In florid Hebrew Jellinek begins: “To the honor of the man who is greater than his brothers in knowledge and wisdom, may his hands be emboldened to redeem in joy those mired in darkness and imbue with knowledge those [left behind] in every corner. Who can count the stars of his celestial spirit?” There follows a long list of references to Zunz’s publications after which Jellinek concludes by finally mentioning the honoree’s name: “Our teacher and rabbi, Rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann, before whom I will bow and prostrate myself. May the Lord of Heaven sustain and preserve him.”16 13

Michael Sachs, Die religiöse Poesie der Juden in Spanien (Berlin: Veit, 1845), 148–64,

329. 14

Idem, Stimmen von Jordan und Euphrat (Berlin: Veit, 1853). Adolph Jellinek, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kabbala, 2 vols. (Leipzig: C.L. Fritzsche, 1852), 1, 19–22; 2, 31–2, 71–2. 16 Idem, Beit ha-Midrash, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Bamberger/Wharmann, 1938), 1, dedicatory page. 15

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In the first of his German introductions, Jellinek informed his readers that he is not going to repeat what Zunz had to say on each of the tracts that he is about to publish: he simply makes the assumption that every serious student of midrash will have a copy of Zunz’s masterpiece in hand. Nevertheless, he could not refrain from one parting word of praise: “One can only come to truly appreciate this grand work when one enters into its details, for it is only then that one comes to marvel at the care and deep knowledge with which the master works.” Jellinek’s incisive encomium helps to account for the exceptionally long shelf-life of Zunz’s book.17 No other issue of the six that constituted the full run of Beit ha-Midrash bore a similar dedication, as if to say that Zunz stood alone as the progenitor of the turn to midrash. But others supported Jellinek as he sought to shift interest to Kabbalah. He dedicated the first of his two slim volumes of 1852, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kabbala (Contributions to the History of Kabbalah), to Bernhard Beer of Dresden and the second to Samuel David Luzzatto of Padua. Both scholars had enabled his research in the thirteenth century with kabbalistic manuscripts from their private collections. Jellinek’s avowed intent in these essays was to arouse more interest in a field of the greatest significance for the history of philosophy and theology, which is scarcely sensed let alone grasped by many scholars. The kabbalists count among their ranks men who tower over the throng of rationalists influenced by Maimonides in terms of the depth of their thoughts and the implications of their ideas […]. If I might induce the release of manuscripts being held in libraries, then I would feel richly rewarded for my efforts that are solely devoted to enhance the sanctity of scholarship.18

From the effusive Hebrew dedication to Beer in volume one of his Beiträge, it is evident that the two men were on intimate terms. They shared an admiration for Zunz as well. Born into a family of former court Jews in Dresden in 1801, Beer combined deep Jewish learning with extensive secular education. By 1834 his writings earned him an honorary doctorate from Leipzig University. Endowed with a proud sense of place, Beer never left Dresden, He headed its beleaguered Jewish community for 30 years, lobbied the Saxon government bravely for the elimination of Jewish disabilities and led the way to the construction of the famous Semper synagogue in 1840.19 In 1833 Beer published a collection of religious addresses that he had delivered annually since 1826 on the anniversary of the founding of Dres17

Ibid., 1, xiii (Einleitung). Jellinek, Beiträge, 2, “Vorwort.” For a fuller treatment of Jellinek’s approach to aggada, see Maren Niehoff, “Tefisat ha-aggada shel Jellinek,” Mada’ei ha-yahadut, 38 (1998), 119–27. 19 Jüdisches Lexikon, 5 vols. (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1927–30), 1, col. 785; Zacharius Frankel, “Nekrolog,” Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (hereafter MGWJ), 10 (1861), 318–20. 18

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den’s Jewish hospital in 1807. His goal was to show the public that the synagogue, where the addresses were always held, was amenable to well-rounded German sermons.20 To document the antiquity of the sermon, Beer cited in a footnote, Zunz’s just published gottesdienstliche Vorträge, quite possibly the earliest reference to the work.21 And in his forward (Vorrede) he clearly adopted Zunz’s conception of midrash as a body of ancient synagogue sermons by rabbinic sages to edify a laity eager for words of Torah.22 Still earlier in 1830 in a defense of the Talmud against its Christian detractors, Beer quoted Zunz by name when employing his definition of the Talmud as a monument to Judaism rather than as its source.23 In time a high degree of affinity tightened the relationship of the two men. When Zunz and his wife visited Dresden, they would stay with the Beers, and whenever Beer traveled on business he purchased for his collection of rare Jewish books and manuscripts midrashic texts and piyutim of value to Zunz’s research.24 Beer was a productive scholar as well as a discerning collector. In 1856 he pushed the study of midrash into the literature of the apocrypha with an investigation of its interaction with the Book of Jubilees and a year later into the Church Fathers with the discovery of a midrash on Eldad and Medad (Numbers 11:26–7) embedded in the writings of St. Jerome.25 No less groundbreaking were his biographies of biblical figures like Aaron (1855), Abraham (1859) and Moses (1861) as seen through the lens of their treatment in midrash. Though modest in scale, Beer’s forays in new directions anticipated important midrashic research to come.26 The web of Zunz admirers soon went beyond the borders of Prussia and Saxony, In 1868 Salomon Buber in Lemberg published for the first time a text of Pesiqta de Rav Kahana. Hebrew was his medium of expression and his edition bore the imprint of Meqitzei nirdamim (those who awaken the slumbering), a small international group of Hebrew book lovers founded in 1862

20 Bernhard Beer, Imre joscher, Religiös-moralische Reden (Leipzig: A. Fest’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1833), xxii. 21 Ibid., xx. 22 Ibid, xix–xx. 23 Idem, Denkwürdigkeiten für Sachsen. Eine Zeitschrift, 1830, 380. 24 Schorsch, Leopold Zunz, 144, 154; see also Beer’s correspondence with Zunz, National Library of Israel, Archiv, ms Var 236/57. 25 Bernhard Beer, Das Buch der Jubiläen und sein Verhältniss zu den Midraschim (Leipzig: Wolfgang Gerhard, 1856); idem, “Eldad und Medad im Pseudojonathan,” MGWJ, 6 (1857), 346–50. 26 Idem, “Aaron, der Hohepriester und Friedenstifter,” Jahrbuch für Israeliten, 5616 (1855–56), 1–17; idem, Leben Abraham’s nach Auffassung der jüdischen Sage (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1859); idem, Leben Moses nach Auffassung der jüdischen Sage (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1863).

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to bring out unpublished rare Jewish texts.27 A wealthy banker and long-time leader of his Jewish community, Buber wielded prodigious traditional learning with a critical eye. The title page of his Pesiqta listed him as a member of the German Oriental Society in Halle and Leipzig. He was also an assiduous collector of manuscripts who would go on to edit and publish still other precious editions of midrashic texts, each with a Hebrew introduction and notes. Zunz had surely set him on his life’s course.28 What made of Buber’s Pesiqta a landmark is that it dramatically confirmed Zunz’s painstaking ingenuity. When he devoted an exhaustive chapter to its reconstruction in 1832, no copy was known to be extant. With an indepth knowledge of medieval rabbinic works that mentioned and quoted from it and a penetrating analysis of two other midrashic collections that also bore the name Pesiqta and a thorough scrutiny of later midrashic collections that cited passges from it, Zunz was able to identify the Pesiqta de Rav Kahana as a Palestinian midrash from the end of the seventh century arranged according to the order of the festival calendar.29 Moreover, in the light of more than 200 passages that Zunz had salvaged from medieval authors and later midrashim, he scrupulously conjectured as to the order and content of its 29 separate sections (parshiyot).30 Though by Buber’s count the Pesiqta had 31 sections ordered somewhat differently from Zunz’s arrangement, his manuscript resoundingly vindicated Zunz’s unprecedented resurrection of a lost text and Jellinek’s awe at Zunz’s expertise.31 At the end of his long introduction, Buber offered Zunz a fitting word of praise: Before I finish I must thank the great reconnoiterer, rabbi and scholar extraordinaire, morenu-ha-rav Lipmann Zunz, may his flame continue to burn brightly, who served as my eyes in several matters. Notwithstanding that in some places he missed the mark, because hearing is not the same as seeing, and the old Pesiqta eluded the sight of this great scholar whereas it lies before me today, I will sing his praises with a full heart, for it is entirely proper. A scholar is to be preferred to a prophet. He was the first to point out the existence of a Pesiqta text which had disappeared completely until then. I am sure that he will celebrate the reemergence of this treasure into the light of day as he beholds it with his own eyes.32 27

Shlomo Buber, Pesiqta, ve-hi aggadat eretz yisrael meyuheset le-rav kahana (Lyck: Mekitzei nirdamim, 1868). 28 Jüdisches Lexikon, 1, cols. 1191–92. 29 Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge, 1st ed., 195–96. 30 Ibid., 202–26. 31 Buber, Pesiqta, “mafteah.” 32 Ibid., xlx. The year 1868 also saw the publication of the magnificent critical edition of the traditional prayer book by Seligmann Baer. In his introduction, Baer singled out Zunz for special mention, “who put me on the right track not only with his splendid books, but also with his precious answers to my personal questions” (Seligmann Baer, Seder Avodat Yisrael [Rödelheim: J. Lehrberger, 1868], ix. I am indebted to Prof. Menahem Schmelzer for this reference).

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When Jellinek left Leipzig for the pulpit in Vienna in 1856, he took his scholarly agenda with him. In 1862 he secured the funding to create an institute of three rooms and a library in a community center near the city’s new Temple in Leopoldstadt for the study of rabbinic literature and the preparation of students for the rabbinate.33 Among his faculty were Isaac Hirsch Weiss who hailed from Moravia and Meir Friedmann (Ish Shalom) from Hungary. Together they turned Vienna into an emporium for midrash via the pulpit as well as the institute (also called Beit ha-Midrash). In 1862 Weiss finished a handsome edition of the Sifra (the tannaitic halakhic midrash on Leviticus) with an extensive commentary by the twelfth-century Talmudist Abraham ben David of Posquieres and in 1865 an early edition of the tannaitic Mekhilta ascribed to Rabbi Yishmael.34 Years later Weiss would acknowledge proudly in his memoirs (1895) that he pored over Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge “as assiduously and carefully as I was wont to study the Talmud and Poskim (its decisors).”35 And the repeated references to Zunz’s scholarship in his 40 page chapter on midrash in his pioneering multi-volume history of rabbinic culture provided yet another authoritative illustration of just how central Zunz was to the development of the whole field.36 Weiss’s younger colleague Meir Friedmann, with the publication of five midrashic texts in his lifetime and one posthumously in 1915, stood modestly at the forefront of his beloved field.37 He was particularly enamored of his 1902 edition of Seder Eliahu Rabbah und Seder Eliahu Zuta, a Babylonian text whose ethical loftiness, literary beauty and love for Torah and Israel was unsurpassed in the ever growing library of midrashic collections. Though he tended to dispute Zunz’s late tenth-century dating, he still saw fit to quote at

33

M. Rosemann, Dr. Adolf Jellinek. Sein Leben und Schaffen (Vienna: Jos. Schlesinger, 1931), 77, 95. 34 Isaac Hirsch Weiss, Sifra de-ve rav (Vienna: Defus shel Y. ha-Kohen Schlosberg, 1865); idem, Mekhilta (Vienna: Defus Y. ha-Kohen Schlosberg, 1865). 35 Idem, “Leopold Zunz,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 7 (1895), 374–75. In the Hebrew original, Weiss, Zikhronotai (Warsaw: Schuldberg, 1895), 137–38. 36 Idem, Dor dor ve-dorshav, 5 vols. 6th ed. (Vilna, Joseph Zawd’ski, 1911), 3, 223–62. Toward the end of his chapter, Weiss commended Zunz, the scholar, “who passed judgment on the midrashic collections we have looked at honorably and incisively without deviation or prejudice. And even though we have come to see that a few of his conclusions are unacceptable to us, we cannot deny that in every case his intensions were honorable” (261). 37 Günter Stemberger, “Meir Friedmann – a Pioneering Scholar of Midrash,” in Modern Jewish Scholarship in Hungary, eds. Tama´s Tura´n and Carsten Wilke (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2016), 283–94.

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length Zunz’s own warm praise of its exceptional quality.38 As the old century faded into the new, Zunz’s influence continued to reign supreme. An outstanding scholar of midrash to emerge from Jellinek’s wellspring was Solomon Schechter, who in the 1870s spent three years under the tutelage of Weiss and Friedmann. In later years he would celebrate the career of each man with a highly appreciative essay.39 His painstaking edition of Aboth deRabbi Nathan in 1887, the first critical edition of any rabbinic text and indeed a midrashic one, given the lure of the genre, was the result of a formative conversation Schechter had in Berlin with Israel Lewy, Zacharius Frankel’s prize student and soon to be heir apparent in Breslau.40 But the greatest influence on Schechter emanated from Zunz. A single calling card survives among Zunz’s collection of calling cards to offer scant evidence that Schechter visited Zunz more than once when he came to Berlin in 1879, though no assurance that Zunz was in to receive him. Yet when Schechter came to England in 1882 he brought with him Zunz’s conception of the synagogue as the crucible of Jewish consciousness. And three years after Zunz’s death in 1886, Schechter composed a long prize essay devoted to the character and career of Zunz to which he appended a lengthy synopsis of the content of Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge, as if intending to introduce this lodestar of midrash to English speaking Jewry.41 Just prior to his departure for the presidency of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, he rushed into print in 1902 at the behest of impatient colleagues a first edition of a highly instructive fourteenth-century Yemenite midrashic anthology on Genesis, which borrowed extensively from countless older sources that Schechter labored to identify.42 In a glorious tribute to the revolution in Jewish scholarship set off by Schechter’s ransacking of the Cairo Geniza, the Seminary he headed from 1902 to 1915 published in 1928–29 three volumes of Ginzei Schechter (that is treasures from the Geniza), the first of which edited by Louis Ginzberg con38 Meir Friedmann, Seder Eliahu rabba und Seder Eliahu zuta (Vienna: Achiasaf [Warsaw], 1902), “Vorwort,” v; Stemberger, 293; Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge, 1st ed., 112–13. 39 Solomon Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 3 vols., reprint (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1945), 1, 182–212; idem, Seminary Addresses and Other Papers, reprint (New York: The Burning Bush Press, 1959), 135–43. 40 Idem, Aboth de-Rabbi Nathan, reprint (New York: Philipp Feldheim, 1945), v, (Hakdamah). 41 The printed calling card identified Schechter as “Salomon Schechter stud. phil.” with “aus Rumänien” added by hand. At the time Schechter was studying at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums and the University of Berlin (Leo Baeck Institute, NY, AR3648/MF 1053); Schechter, Studies, 3, 84–142; Ismar Schorsch, “Schechters’s Indebtedness to Zunz,” Jewish Historical Studies, 48 (2016), 9–16. 42 Shneur Zalman Schechter, Midrash haggadol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902).

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sisted of 37 Geniza fragments pertaining to midrash and aggada to highlight the centrality of midrash in Schechter’s oeuvre.43 The center of midrash research gradually shifted from Vienna to the Breslau seminary, Within two years of each other, the institution founded by Frankel in 1854, ordained two young scholars destined to rise quickly to preeminence in midrash, an interest both of them attributed to Zunz. Ordained in 1876, Wilhem Bacher, who would spend his entire career at the Budapest Rabbinical School, an offshoot of Breslau, published in 1878 already the first installment of his multi-volume preparatory work to a history of aggada. At this stage Bacher assembled and analyzed in chronological order the aggadic statements attributable to individual Babylonian Amoraim. His introduction singled out Zunz “who for all time has shown us the way to understanding aggada, even though the smaller and larger works of the past 45 years have added innumerable contributions to broadening and deepening that understanding.”44 In 1884 Bacher greatly expanded his research with a substantial study of the earlier Tannaim from Hillel to R. Akiva. His reverence for Zunz undiminished, he dedicated the volume again “to Dr. Zunz, the grandmaster of Jewish scholarship on his 90th birthday.” The volume came out again in 1902 in an enhanced second edition still “dedicated to the blessed memory of Zunz by all those who cherish the success and honor of their academic work.”45 Julius Theodor graduated from Breslau in 1878 and spent most of his rabbinic career in the small Posen Jewish community of Bojanowo to maximize the time he could devote to his immersion in midrash. In a series of searching essays in Breslau’s academic journal (Die Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums), Theodor profoundly deepened the internal analysis of early midrashic works, showing their structure, the degree of their dependence on older sources, the role of their unknown editors and their unmistakable Palestinian provenance.46 The exhaustiveness of his research matched that of Zunz for whom on the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1894 Theodor expressed unbounded reverence. Three of his achieve-

43 Louis Ginzberg and Israel Davidson, (eds.) Ginzei Schechter, 3 vols. (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1928–1929), 1, Kit’ei midrash ve-haggadah min ha-geniza she-be-mitzrayim. 44 Wilhelm Bacher, “Die Agada der babylonischen Amoraer,” in Jahresbericht der Landes-Rabbinerschule in Budapest (Budapest: Kön. Ung. Univers-Buchdruckerei, 1878), x–xi. 45 Idem, Die Aggada der Tannaiten, 2 vols. (Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner, 1884), 1; idem, Die Agada der Tannaim, 2nd ed. (Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner, 1903), viii. 46 Tamar Kadari, Minha le-yehudah. Julius Theodor and the Redaction of the Aggadic Midrashim of the Land of Israel (Jerusalem: Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies/Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem, 2017).

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ments he deemed to be irreversible: “That which he demolished will never be restored and that which he proved will never be undone and most significantly, the revolution he inaugurated in scholarship has few parallels in the entire history of scholarship.”47 His monumental edition of Bereishit Rabba, of which he had completed 80 percent by his death in 1923 elevated the standard for editing midrashic texts to a new high. By 1936 Chanoch Albeck had rendered invaluable service by finishing the task.48 By the beginning of the twentieth century then the field of midrash was burgeoning to include an ever larger terrain with permeable borderlines and vistas beckoning in many directions. August Wünsche had translated competently thousands of pages of mainstream and minor midrashic collections into German;49 Max Grünbaum had initiated the study of midrash from the perspective of folklore;50 and Louis Ginzberg deepened the exploration of the Church Fathers launched by Heinrich Graetz in 1854–55 and continued by his student Moritz Rahmer not only to find lost midrashic fragments but to identity instances of mutual influence wrought by a shared allegoric discourse.51 Given the scholarship of three generations now that terrain was ever more visible and accessible. Thus it is not entirely surprising that in the first decade of the new century fresh ideological currents led to an eruption of encompassing midrashic anthologies by Hayim Nahman Bialik and Jehoshua Hana Rawnitsky in Russia, Micha Berdyczewski in Germany and Louis Ginzberg in America.52 Though separated by geography, ideology and meth47 Julius Theodor, “Das Zunz’sche Buch über die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge und der heutige Stand der Midraschforschung, MGWJ, 38 (1894), 514–23. 48 Julius Theodor, Bereschit rabba (edited and completed), Chanoch Albeck, 3 vols. (Berlin: Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1903–29); Kadari, 36. 49 August Wünsche, Bibliotheca rabbinica, 12 vols. (Leipzig: O. Schulze, 1880–85); idem, Der babylonische Talmud in seinen haggadischen Bestandtheilen, 3 vols. (Leipzig: O. Schulze, 1886–89); idem, Aus Israels Lehrhallen: Kleine Midraschim, 5 vols. (Leipzig: E. Pfeiffer, 1907–10). 50 Max Grünbaum, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sprach-und Sagenkunde, ed. Felix Perles (Berlin: S. Calvary, 1901). 51 Louis Ginzberg, Die Haggada bei den Kirchenva´tern (Amsterdam: 1899), idem, Die Haggada bei den Kirchenvätern und in der apokryphischen Litteratur (Berlin: S. Calvary, 1900). Heinrich Graetz, “Hagadische Elemente bei den Kirchenvätern,” MGWJ, 3 (1854), 311–18, 352–55, 381–87, 428–31; 4 (1855), 186–92. Moritz Rahmer, “Die hebräischen Traditionen in den Kommentarien des Hieronymus,” MGWJ, 14 (1865), 216–24, 460–70; 16 (1867), 103–8; 17 (1868), 419–27; 41 (1897), 625–39, 691–2; 42 (1898), 1–16, 97–107; idem, Die hebräischen Traditionen in den Werken des Hieronymus (Berlin: Schletter’schen Buchhandlung, 1861). 52 Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Rawnitzki, Sefer ha-aggadah, 3 vols. (Krakow: Y. Fisher, 1907–11); Micah Joseph Berdichevsky, Der Born Judas. Legenden, Märchen und Erzählungen, 6 vols. (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1924); Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols., reprint (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946–54).

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odology, all three set out to transmute scholarship into a reservoir of meanings for Jewish communities buffeted by the howling winds of change. Zunz can hardly be credited to have inspired any of these transformative projects directly, yet there is no doubt that the fertile influence he had exerted on the study of midrash in the nineteenth century had readied the soil for the bounty of new plantings. The view up close thus shows that Scholem’s depiction of Zunz as a demonic figure mesmerized by forebodings of havoc bears no resemblance to reality. Zunz’s indisputable legacy was a profusion of new research in a neglected field by gifted acolytes pushing in directions that yielded a plenitude of non-rational literature capable of sparking the religious lives of a receptive laity. In the opinion of Schechter, the finest expositor of that literature of his age, the Rabbis were not Greek philosophers but soulful pietists who seem to have thought that the true health of a religion is to have a theology without being aware of it: and thus they hardly ever made – nor could they make – any attempt towards working their theology into a formal system, or giving us a full exposition of it. With God as a reality, Revelation as a fact, the Torah as a rule of life, and the hope of Redemption as a most vivid expectation, they felt no need for formulating their dogmas into a creed, which, as was once remarked by a great theologian, is repeated not because we believe, but that we may believe. What they had of theology, they enunciated spasmodically or ‘by impulses.’53

While Zunz’s achievement merited a continuity of effort, Scholem demanded rupture. But not even in Jerusalem did all buy his harsh judgment. Two years after Scholem’s thunderbolt, Chanoch Albeck produced a splendid Hebrew edition of Zunz’s gottesdienstliche Vorträge for a new generation of Sabras drawn to the lure of midrash and in 1954 Yitzhak Heinemann published his comprehensive Hebrew study of how midrash actually worked. In truth, Zunz and Heinemann were book ends. Equally comprehensive in scope and awesome in detail, Zunz mapped the external side of midrash whereas Heinemann illuminated its mode of operation and religious creativity.54

53

Solomon Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology, reprint (New York: Berman House, 1936), 12. 54 Albeck, Ha-derashot be-yisrael; Yitzhak Heinemann, Darkhe ha-aggadah, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1954).

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III The history of modern midrashic scholarship thus exhibits its own inner dialectic that rebuts Scholem’s projection, leaving us with the conundrum to explain how a scholar of his vast learning, originality and integrity could be guilty of such an egregious misreading. The key to understanding Scholem’s animus toward Wissenschaft des Judentums is the date when it first took hold of him. In a tangential comment in his book on his deep friendship with Walter Benjamin, Scholem admitted that his views on the subject had crystallized by the early 1920s. Benjamin was so captivated by them that he urged Scholem to write them up in an essay for publication in his planned cultural journal soon to appear. In recording his demurral, Scholem added that he was pleased that he did not unfurl his critique before an ill-informed German audience.55 The comment, therefore, makes clear that Scholem harbored his critique before he departed for Palestine in 1923 and that in effect it represented a bill of divorce. Within that context it is possible to identify the sources that fed his repudiation. Scholem’s embrace of Zionism was as total as his rejection of bourgeois German Jewish society and culture, an existential agenda that drove him to return to the sacred national language, literature and land of the Jewish people. Accordingly, the bitter critique of Wissenschaft des Judentum emanating from Odessa in the Hebrew cultural journal Ha-Shiloah of Ahad Ha’am from 1896 on must surely have reverberated in his mind. Ha-Shiloah despised Wissenschaft because it was a glaring instance of “bondage in freedom.” Its practitioners had abandoned Hebrew, written for Germans and reduced Judaism to the four walls of the synagogue. Both elitist and apologetic, their scholarship asked the wrong questions and offered nothing to revive and fortify the spirits of a persecuted people.56 In 1923 Bialik brought that antagonism to fever pitch with a passionate letter of endorsement to the editors of Devir, Wissenschaft’s brave new Hebrew journal, that bristled with a denunciation of a century of German Jewish scholarship gone awry. Writing in a language alien to Jews, huddled in “factories” for the production of rabbis and utterly uninterested in either the present or future state of the Jewish people, Wissenschaft des Judentum loomed as a specter of death helplessly attending an assimilated Judaism on the brink of an abyss.57 The fury, images and critique of Bialik would recur 22 55

Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin – Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1975), 139–40. 56 Hashiloah, 1 (1896–97), 3–4, 326–28; 3 (1898), 538–46. Shaul Pinhas Rabinowitch, R. Yomtov Lipmann Zunz, hayyav, zemano u-sefarav (Warsaw: Achiassaf, 1897), 35–36. 57 Devir. meassef iti le-hokhmat yisrael, 1 (1923), viii–xiii; reprinted in Kol kitvei H.N. Bialik (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1951), 221–24. For a recent corrected German translation, contex-

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years later in Scholem’s vituperations. The evidence strongly suggests that Scholem brought Odessa to Berlin and then to Jerusalem. But Scholem’s thoughts in 1921 on the practitioners of Wissenschaft des Judentums as the “liquidators of Judaism” were also influenced closer to home.58 Benjamin’s journal would bear the name Angelus Novus and display on its cover the 1920 painting Angelus Novus by Paul Klee, which he had just acquired. He cherished that enigmatic sketch of an angel because it came to symbolize for him his dark view of history, as he would later write. Progress came at a terrible cost: His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what was smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.59

It is therefore no surprise that Benjamin was struck by the structural similarity of Scholem’s disdain for his German progenitors. Both men conceived of the past in terms of destruction and the present as fraught with the terror of an uncertain future. Scholem’s essay would have accorded well with the rebellious thrust of Benjamin’s journal and had it been written, perhaps the journal might actually have appeared. By 1944/45 Scholem had fully merged the influences of Ahad Ha’am, Bialik and Benjamin into a potent time-bound construct that had little to do with the nineteenth century. But ideology is a poor substitute for research. The evidence on the ground resoundingly confirms Zunz’s favorite epigram and deep faith that “genuine scholarship is truly generative” (echte Wissenschaft ist taterzeugend).60 The price that Scholem would pay for his inattentualized and annotated, see Robert S. Schine, Die “Wissenschaft des Judentums.” Eine Bestandsaufnahme, eds. Thomas Meyer and Andrea Kilcher (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), 139–57. 58 Scholem’s term: Scholem, Walter Benjamin, 117. 59 Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 61. For the latest consideration of Scholem’s use and conception of the term “demonic,” see Vivian Liska, German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife. A Tenuous Legacy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 114–24. As for Noam Zadoff’s fascinating new biography of Scholem that begins with his aliyah in 1923, I think it is misguided to confine the interpretation of Scholem’s essay entirely to the context of the 1940s, without even an allusion to its genesis when Benjamin’s influence on him was at its peak. (Noam Zadoff, Gershom Scholem. From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back [Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press], 75–94). For a review essay of four new biographies of Scholem, see Steven E. Aschheim, “The Secret Metaphysician,” Jewish Review of Books, 9:3 (Fall 2018), 9–12. 60 Schechter, Studies, 3, 117; Schorsch, Leopold Zunz, 243.

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tion to the profusion of midrashic scholarship by his nineteenth-century forerunners is that unlike the best of them from Zunz to Jellinek to Schechter, he failed to recognize midrash as the internal seedbed for Kabbalah.61

61

Moshe Idel, “Rabbinism versus Kabbalism: On G. Scholem’s Phenomenology of Judaism,” Modern Judaism, 11: 3 (Oct. 1991), 281–96; idem, “Subversive Catalysts: Gnosticism and Messianism in Gershom Scholem’s View of Jewish Mysticism,” The Jewish Past Revisited. Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, eds. David N. Meyers and David B. Ruderman (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1998), 39–76. Not to be overlooked is the fact that Scholem did not give sustained attention to the presence of kabbalistic fragments in rabbinic literature until after he had completed his monumental study of Shabbatai Zevi and his movement (Gershom Scholem, Shabbatai Zevi, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, Am Oved, 1957); idem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism and Talmudic Tradition (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1960). His discomfort with what he perceived to be the desiccation and impotence of rabbinic ritual surely impeded his appreciation (Gershom G. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (trans.), Ralph Manheim [New York: Schocken Books, 1965], 120–21). Still, in his one-hundred-column entry on “Kabbala” in the ninth volume of the Encyclopaedia Judaica (Berlin: Eschkol, 1932), 630–732, Scholem had treated the rabbinic period elliptically as a precursor to the history of Jewish mysticism, though bearing distinctive marks of external influence (633–41).

7. Missing in Translation: The Fate of the Talmud in the Struggle for Equality and Integration in Germany Mendelssohn’s groundbreaking translation of the Torah (Pentateuch) in 1783 certainly raised the need for Jews living in German speaking lands to master German. No less consequential, it augured a paradigm shift in which the Hebrew Bible would soon replace the Babylonian Talmud as the basic text of German Jewry’s educational curriculum and religious life. Emblematic of that rupture in the Ashkenazic world was the floodtide to come of some twelve German Bible translations between 1783 and 1937, an intensity of effort unmatched by any other emancipated Jewish community.1 During that same span, the Talmud was conspicuously missing in translation until 1896 when a rank outsider, a product of a Lithuanian yeshiva, undertook the task. Though the final volume of Lazarus Goldschmidt’s first edition did not come out until 1935, by 1912 he had singlehandedly completed, though not yet published, nearly the entire translation.2 The omission is worth pondering 1

Georg Salsberger, “Die neue deutsche Hausbibel,” Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt, December 1934, 133–34; Schalom Ben-Chorin, “Jüdische Bibelübersetzungen,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 4 (1959), 311–33; Gunther W. Plaut, German-Jewish Bible Translations: Linguistic Theology as a Political Phenomenon, Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture, 36 (1992); Hans-Joachim Bechtoldt, Jüdische Bibelübersetzungen vom ausgehenden 18. bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2005). With his customary ingenuity, Heine in 1834 boldly articulated the import of the shift: “Just as Luther toppled the Papacy so did Mendelssohn the Talmud and indeed in the same way, by tossing out tradition. He declared the Bible to be the source of religion and translated its most important sections. He thereby destroyed the Catholicism of the Jews as Luther had that of the Christians. In truth, the Talmud is the Catholicism of the Jews.” (Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland. Gesammelte Schriften, 4 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 1968), 2, 113). On the dominance of the Talmud in the curriculum of rabbinic culture in Eastern Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, see Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 2 Eliezer Goldschmidt, “The Translation of the Babylonian Talmud into German,” (Hebrew), Areshet 2 (1960), 309–30. The best essay on the translation to date is by Adam Mintz, “The Talmud in Translation,” in Sharon Mintz and Gabriel M. Goldstein (eds.), Printing the Talmud from Bomberg to Schottenstein (New York: Yeshiva University Museum, 2005), 115–55.

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because Talmudic law continued to govern much of the communal affairs of Jewish communities across Germany. In 1899 Erich Bischoff, a rare Christian student of Talmud at the time, in an invaluable critical survey of all partial translations of the Talmud into European languages since the Reformation chided German bureaucrats for not funding a collective effort to translate the Talmud into German according to the standards for which German scholarship was renowned, a project that he estimated would cost about one million marks.3 What is know as the Babylonian Talmud is largely the discursive achievement of the rabbinic academies in Persia in the mid-centuries of the first millennium. Encyclopedic in scope and transmitted orally, it gradually became the foundational text of Jewish communities throughout the Jewish Diaspora during the unifying reign of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad.4 Before the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and their forced conversion in Portugal in 1497, individual tractates had already been printed in both countries, and thereafter in the 1520s and 30s by Daniel Bomberg, a devout Christian printer from Antwerp, who published in quick order at least three full editions in Venice. Indeed, from the individual tractates first published by Joshua Solomon Soncino in the town of Soncino in the Duchy of Milan in 1484, to the Romm press in Vilna in the 1880s, which is still the standard text of today, some 50 complete and partial editions of the Talmud were printed, including a full one in Berlin from 1862–1868.5 The dominance of Talmud study in the curriculum of the institutions of advanced learning in the traditional world of Eastern Europe helps account for the astounding publishing history of a monumental text of 63 tractates (of which some 36 1/2 have Gemara) and some two-and-a-half million words.6 For more than two millennia Judaism has been structurally a binary religious system consisting of two canons, one written and closed, the other oral and open. While it was axiomatic that both were revealed, the latter served as commentary to explain, concretize, enliven, apply and modify the former. Inseparably intertwined, the commentary made for an intergenerational conversation that imbued Scripture with enduring malleability and relevance. In consequence, Judaism exhibited a deep conundrum: its wideranging commentary to Scripture overshadowed Scripture itself, that is the

3 Erich Bischoff, Kritische Geschichte der Thalmud-Uebersetzungen aller Zeiten und Zungen (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kauffmann, 1899), 87–88. 4 Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1998), xix–xxi, 147–170; cf. Talia Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) 5 Printed by Julius Zittenfeld in Berlin, the set included 16 folio volumes. The Jewish Theological Seminary library has a copy of the complete set (call number BM499 1862). 6 Marvin J. Heller, Printing the Talmud (Brooklyn: Im Hasefer, 1992), 400–401.

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Talmud which was studied daily became more authoritative than the Torah, which was read but weekly in sequence from beginning to end in the synagogue in the course of an annual cycle. It was Talmud that dictated what Jews actually practiced and believed. Thus the long delays in the translation of the Talmud alludes to a hurdle more formidable than its mere size. By way of contrast, in the United States today there are three full translations of the Talmud in English, with two more in progress. Four of them are a product of the last three decades.7 Moreover, a good many colleges and universities offer courses in Talmud and rabbinic literature as a component of Jewish studies. In Germany, however, by the time of Mendelssohn the Talmud had been thoroughly discredited by centuries of Christian defamation, papal censorship and public pyres of countless confiscated copies. By the middle of the thirteenth century in Europe the Church had diminished its sufferance of Jews. Spearheaded by the mendicant orders of the Dominicans and Franciscans, it altered its strategy to convert the Jews, who remained the sole nonChristian minority in Western Europe. Whereas in its first millennium the Church had focused its fire on the Old Testament to highlight the many passages it believed foreshadowed the redemptive drama of the New, it now redirected its fire against the Talmud as the subversive, depraved and blasphemous text that blinded Jews to the truth of the Gospels. The blindfold that covered the eyes of the female figure of the synagogue with her broken staff that decorated the architecture of medieval cathedrals visualized for the faithful the willful ignorance of Jews addicted to the study of Talmud. In 1239 for the first time the Pope ordered the archbishops and monarchs of Western Europe to confiscate all Jewish books in their realms. A year later in Paris both a public disputation and a clerical court found the Talmud to be riddled with doctrinal errors, despite vigorous rabbinic defense in each case. In 1242 the French king Louis IX, the only monarch to comply with the edict of the Papacy, had 24 wagon loads of manuscripts burned in a public square in Paris. During the next 500 years Church and State would often join forces to reenact the brutal desecration of the Talmud legitimized by the sacrilege committed in Paris.8 7

The complete editions are Isidore Epstein, The Babylonian Talmud, 34 vols. (London: Soncino Press, 1935–1948); Jacob Neusner, The Talmud of Babylonia: An American Translation, 36 vols. (Atlanta: Scholars Press for Brown Judaic Studies, 1984–1995); The Schottenstein Edition of the Babylonian Talmud, 73 vols. (New York: Mesorah Publications, 1990–2004). The unfinished editions are both by Adin Steinsaltz based on his Hebrew translation of the Bavli (Jerusalem: Makhon ha-Yisre’eli le-Firsumim Talmudiyim, 1967–2010): Random House scheduled to be 24 volumes (1989–) and Koren, to be 42 volumes (2012–) 8 Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Semitism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1982), 51–76.

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To prepare Christian disputants in their campaign against Jews and Muslims, the Dominicans opened schools in the middle decades of the thirteenth century for the study of Hebrew and Arabic and in 1278 Raymond Martini, who spearheaded the initiative, completed a massive source book of biblical and rabbinic passages called Pugio fidei (A Dagger of Faith) to employ in countering the impiety, perfidy and impudence of Jews toward Christianity. With each passage quoted first in Hebrew or Aramaic and then followed by a Latin translation, the collection proved to be an invaluable and accessible weapon for religious combat undulled by frequent use.9 The Reformation for all its seismic effects did not lessen the contempt for the Talmud. Much more impactful and lasting than the sympathetic study of rabbinic literature by a cluster of Christian humanists was the Protestant equivalent to Pugio fidei amassed by Andreas Eisenmenger and published posthumously a second time in 1711 in Konigsberg. After a nineteen-year study of rabbinic literature in Amsterdam and elsewhere, he composed an encyclopedia of more than 2000 pages of well-ordered Hebrew and Aramaic excerpts stitched together by his exposition to show the allegedly primitive, irrational, subversive and misanthropic nature of Judaism. Its very title Entdecktes Judentum (Judaism Revealed) heralded that for the first time Germans could acquire authentic information about the abhorrent character of Judaism that its leadership had consistently concealed from view, a religion that truly imperiled the welfare of Christian society. Eisenmenger organized his voluminous material for easy use. Like Pugio fidei, the passages were cited in Hebrew or Aramaic, though translated this time into German, making them far more accessible. Toward the same end, they were organized thematically and provided with a meticulous index. The upshot of his bill of particulars was that any rabbinic dictum once uttered remained in force forever.10 The republication of Entdecktes Judentum in 1893 in Dresden for 9 Ibid., 103–169; idem, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jews in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 23–71, 317–363. 10 Heinrich Graetz classifed Eisenmeger as one of those creatures “who could draw poison from flowers.” (Geschichte der Juden, vol. 10 [Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1868], 305–306.) Under pressure of a coalition of wealthy Jews from Frankfurt am Main and Vienna, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I in Vienna had Eisenmenger’s first edition (probably printed in Frankfurt am Main in 1700) confiscated, hence the necessity for a second edition permitted by Frederick I of Prussia (Graetz, Geschichte der Juden 10, 306–212, quotation 305–306). As for the nature and import of Eisenmenger’s work, see Jacob Katz, “Eisenmenger’s Method of Presenting Evidence from Talmudic Sources” (Hebrew) Proceedings of the Fifth World Congress of Jewish Studies, 2 (Jerusalem: 1972), 210–16. Stefan Rohrbacher, “‘Gründlicher und Wahrhafter Bericht:’ Des Orientalisten Johann Andreas Eisenmengers Entdecktes Judenthum (1700) als Klassiker des ‘wissenschaftlichen’ Antisemitismus,” Peter Schäfer und Irina Wandrey (eds.), Reuchlin und seine Erben (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2005), 171–188.

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the first time in 182 years, minus the Hebrew or Aramaic original text and somewhat abridged but still coming to 591 pages, clearly attested that its vitriol was still in demand. It is not an exaggeration to assert that Eisenmenger supplied much of the firepower for the forces of German anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.11 Given that unabated debasement of the Talmud in the medieval and early modern periods in Europe, it is not surprising that it remained a bitter bone of contention in the emancipation era. The process of secularization did not eliminate the animus, it merely altered the rhetoric.12 And the perennial ambivalence of German governments toward complete emancipation for all Jews perpetuated the controversy. For opponents the Talmud accentuated the alienness of the Jews. It accounted for the disloyalty, addiction to money, adherence to a double standard of ethical practice, degenerate moral code and a conception of religion that stressed law over spirit. Emancipation could not correct these flaws because they were not the product of Christian persecution, but were innate to Judaism itself. Accordingly Fichte called for extending citizenship to Jews only after cutting off their heads, the source of all their incompatible ideas.13 Similarly Jakob Friedrich Fries, a professor of philosophy in Heidelberg, demanded in 1816 that Jews must first renounce completely the abomination of their ceremonial law and rabbinic culture and be guided in theory and practice by reason and justice, so that they might merge with their fellow Christians in a civic union. And if not, they ought to be expelled as they once were from Spain.14

By the late 1870s when Ferdinand Weber, a young Protestant scholar bent on converting the Jews, was compiling the evidence and crafting the structure for his systematic theology of rabbinic Judaism, the antagonism had grown only more intractable. Though grounded in an impressive command of rabbinic sources, his eventual construct published posthumously in 1880 portrayed a soulless religion mired in a surfeit of law and addicted to its letter. From a Lutheran perspective allegiance to the Talmud with its legal minutiae and this-worldly orientation deeply offended a society for whom salvation was solely a matter of faith.15 11

Franz Xaver Schieferl (ed.), Joh. Andr. Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes Judentum (Dresden: Otto Brandner, 1893). 12 Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Frank E. Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 13 Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, 57. 14 Jakob Friedrich Fries, Ueber die Gefährdung des Wohlstandes und Charakters der Deutschen durch die Juden (Heidelberg: Mohr und Winter, 1816), 23. 15 Ferdinand Weber, System der altsynagogalen palästinischen Theologie (Leipzig: Dörffling und Franke, 1880).

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There were voices within the Jewish community that concurred. For example, Isaac Markus Jost, who published a comprehensive history of the Jews in a multi-volume work in the 1820s, drew a negative portrait of rabbinic Judaism and its medieval Ashkenazic reincarnation that would have pleased Voltaire. The very title of his history, Geschichte der Israeliten, conveyed his staunch preference for the religion of Moses, even though his narrative began long after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE and should rightly have been called Geschichte der Juden.16 Irrespective of such internal concurrence, the Talmud throughout the century and a half to come was repeatedly subjected to withering attacks from outside. To be sure, it was no longer confiscated and burned, but the polemical discourse never subsided. In 1871 August Rohling, a Catholic priest with a patina of academic training in the Old and New Testaments, authored a pamphlet of 100 pages entitled Der Talmudjude that recycled Esienmenger in palatable form. The titled meant to disqualify Jews from German citizenship; they still abided by a reprehensible body of foreign law. By the 1880s it rode the tidal wave of a resurgent anti-Semitism, both popular and elitist, that had thrown the political arenas of Germany and Austria-Hungary into turmoil. By the eighth edition in the early 1880s it had grown to 144 pages with 72 devoted entirely to passages in German lifted from Eisenmenger and arranged thematically.17 The Talmudic sources of each passage were duly noted, as if the product of his own research. A handful of distinguished and authoritative Christian professors testified against Rohling’s meretricious work, showing the degree to which it unabashedly exploited the Eisenmenger legacy.18 Eventually, Rohling’s refusal to appear in court to demonstrate that he could read a page of Talmud sight unseen proved in stinging fashion that he was an utter fraud.19 Still the poison did not cease to flow. By 1922 Der Talmudjude had gone through 17 editions with each run circulating many thousands of copies. Similar defamatory tracts from other quarters reinforced the campaign of defamation.20

16 Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover/London: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 237–42. 17 Isak Arie Hellwing, Der konfessionelle Antisemitismus im 19. Jahrhundert in Österreich (Wien: Herder, 1972) 85–88. 18 The most thorough, reliable and damning early expose´ of Rohling’s Talmudjude was composed by Franz Delitzsch: Rohling’s Talmudjude beleuchtet (Leipzig: Dörffling und Franke, 1881). 19 Joseph Samuel Bloch, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (Wien/Leipzig: R. Löwit, 1922), 120–30. 20 Hellwing, Der konfessionelle Antisemitismus, 90.

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More germane to my interest are the spate of reactions, not all Jewish, to the reverberations set off by Rohling’s assault. Their substance betrays a determined recourse to scholarship to blunt the baleful effects of a millennial hatred of the Talmud. In 1886–87 August Wünsche in Dresden came out with two German tomes that translated for the first time the rich aggadic material from the first two divisions of the Babylonian Talmud. A Christian Hebraist trained by Franz Delitzsch, who had decisively testified in court against Rohling, and Julius Fürst, Leipzig’s long standing Judaica adjunct, he forged close ties to the young Jakob Winter who had recently graduated from the Breslau Seminary and settled in Dresden as its rabbi. Since 1880 Wünsche had in fact rendered into German with enormous diligence a vast selection of midrashic literature, with more than 3000 pages of translation. In the introduction to his later volume of talmudic aggada, he summed up the universal disdain in which the Talmud was still held. Some people, he wrote, regarded its norms on non-Jews as unethical, others its religious imagination as primitive and still others its many separatistic injunctions against idolatry as meant for Christians.21 In the same vein of demystification was Hermann Strack’s Einleitung in den Talmud (Introduction to the Talmud) which appeared in 1887, packed full of invaluable information on every aspect of the Talmud. But 76 pages in its first iteration, the handbook expanded to 233 pages by its fifth edition in 1921 to become the standard introduction to rabbinic literature in any language. Strack was indisputably the leading Christian textual scholar of Judaism in his day and came to its defense publicly more than once.22 On the Jewish side, David Hoffmann, a Hungarian born Talmudist and docent at the modern Orthodox rabbinical seminary in Berlin, felt compelled

21 August Wünsche, Der Babylonische Talmud in seinen haggadischen Bestandtheilen, 1 (Leipzig: Schulze, 1886). Wünsche dedicated the volume to Theodor Nöldeke. Volume two (Leipzig: 1887) contained aggadic selections from the third division (Seder Nashim) of the Talmud. Between 1880–1885 Wünsche had translated and published in separate volumes all of the midrashic collections to the Pentateuch and the five Scrolls assembled in Midrash Rabba. In 1887 Wilhelm Bacher, a graduate of the Breslau Seminary and one of the founders of its offspring, the Budapest Seminary, wrote a lengthy review of the five volumes of talmudic aggadot for the MGWJ, 35 (1886), 82–93, 122–143; 36 (1887), 184–189. Despite many reservations on details, Bacher appreciated the intent and achievement of Wünsche’s contribution: “He who translates the Talmud into German today performs not only a purely literary service. He also offers the public, whose curiosity has been aroused by a vicious agitation that appears to be declining though is far from over, a chance to inform itself about the literature itself that is also the arsenal for the charges leveled by the agitation” (ibid., 84). 22 Hermann Leberecht Strack, Einleitung in den Talmud (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1887); idem, Einleitung in Talmud and Midrasˇ (München: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1921).

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to author some 20 articles in 1884 in the movement’s Jewish paper, Die jüdische Presse, to dispute the proliferating trashing of the Talmud. Bespeaking the urgency of the moment, Hoffmann assembled his articles into a book the same year under the lengthy title Der Schulchan-Aruch und die Rabbiner über das Verhältniss der Juden zu Andersgläubigen (The Shulchan-Aruch [the authoritative sixteenth-century code of Jewish law] and the Rabbis on their Relationship to Persons of Other Faiths). In 1894 it came out again in a revised edition. What Hoffmann did was to apply historical method to the study of halakha and thereby to contextualize the rabbinic pronouncements and injunctions against idolators. They were operative only in the GrecoRoman world in which they were enunciated, though even then not applicable to individuals who adhered to the minimal standard of morality which the rabbis designated as the seven ethical commandments to which God had obligated Noah and all its descendants. Hoffmann showed in fact that this was the halakhic view of a highly respected Sephardic Talmudist of the late thirteenth century, R. Menahem ben Solomon of Perpignan, who had formulated the striking general principle that “anyone belonging to a nation governed by laws of justice and a belief in God, though different than ours, is to be treated as a Jew.” To buttress that position, Hoffmann went on to cite other basic rabbinic values that overrode the retention of ancient legal expressions of contempt.23 No less linked to the anti-Semitism roiling German speaking Jewry was the three-volume anthology of surveys and texts edited by Winter and Wünsche in Dresden and published in 1894–96. Bold in conception and sweeping in scope with a total of 2400 pages, the project was designed to offer a corrective to the bizarre and malicious view of rabbinic literature poisoning the public domain. The intended primary audience, as in the case of Hoffmann, was neither decent Christians nor bigoted anti-Semites but rather the rank and file in the Jewish community whose self-esteem and loyalty to Judaism were battered by the unremitting denigration of Judaism. With a team of participating scholars, the project covered the depth and diversity of Jewish literature from the close of the biblical canon to the sermonic literature of the nineteenth century with a generous sampling of each genre in translation. Volume one devoted to rabbinic literature did not shortchange selections from the Apocrypha, Targumim (Aramaic translations and expositions of biblical texts), Mishna, Tosephta, Yerushalmi, Bavli, and midrashim with a noticeable preference for aggada over halakha and ritual law over civil or criminal. The surveys unfurled the maturation of Jewish scholarship since 1818 in terms of primary sources, emergence of sub-fields and methodolo-

23 Hoffmann, Der Schulchan-Aruch und die Rabbinen über das Verhältniss der Juden zu Andersgläubigen (Berlin: Verlag der Jüdischen Presse, 1894), 5–6.

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gical sophistication. Overall with Winter at the helm, the undertaking heralded the spirit of the Breslau Seminary.24 Finally, the completion by Jacob Levy of his four-volume dictionary of Talmud and midrash in 1889 certainly made the study of rabbinic literature more accessible. Levy had studied with Wilhelm Gesenius in Halle and his dictionary was firmly grounded in the best of German philology. Inspired internally rather than externally, it was also richly endowed with examples of rabbinic usage of Hebrew and Aramaic words and idioms in German translation as well as greatly enhanced by the extensive philological addenda to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet except the last by Heinrich Fleischer, German’s preeminent scholar of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.25 In retrospect, the long-running Rohling imbroglio did not precipitate a collective effort as urged by Bischoff to translate the entirety of the Babylonian Talmud into German. To be sure, during those unsettling years and beyond, stray translations of tractates did appear. The most substantial since Pinner was a translation of the legal tractate Bava Metzia in 1876 by Ascher Sammter, an independent rabbinic scholar living in Berlin. His folio edition included not only the Hebrew-Aramaic text but also a running commentary explicating its dialectic intricacies along with lengthy addenda to provide context and background.26 Victor Meyer Rawicz, a graduate of the Breslau Seminary serving in small pulpits in Baden, put out five tractates in translation from 1883 to 1908. Without the Hebrew-Aramaic text and short on introductions and explanatory notes, each octavo volume was little more than a pony. Their modesty reflected the indifference of the Jewish market to the Talmud. In the introduction to Megilla, his first translation in 1883, Rawicz lamented:27

24 Jakob Winter und August Wünsche (eds.), Die jüdische Litteratur seit Abschluss des Kanons, 3 vols. (Trier: Sigmund Mayer, 1894–96). 25 Jacob Levy, Neuhebraisches und chaldäisches Wo˝rterbuch über die Talmudim und Midrashim, 4 vols. (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1876–89). 26 Asher Sammter (trans.), Talmud Babylonicum Tractat Baba Mezia (Berlin: Benzian, 1876). I thank Prof. Menahem Schmelzer for bringing this translation to my attention. 27 See Georg Herlitz und Bruno Kirschner (eds.), Jüdisches Lexikon 5 vols. (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1927–30), 4, 1256; Meyer Rawics (trans.), Der Traktat Megilla, (Frankfurt a.M.: Kauffmann, 1883), “Einleitung.” The vanishing of Talmud study among German Jews was a recurring lament throughout the nineteenth century among those who cared. Thus in a timely essay of 1883 entitled “The Fight Against the Talmud,” Nehemias Brüll, a critical scholar of Talmud, pulpit rabbi and talented journalist, picked up on an obituary for Zacharias Frankel written at the time of his death in 1875 which spoke of him as the last Talmudist in Germany. The moniker, Brüll averred, was essentially correct. Germany was bereft of Talmudists. Even rabbis no longer study Talmud regularly. Their jobs don’t require it, their congregants don’t demand it and many don’t even know how to study it properly. And this is not just a deficit of our Reform rabbis. “Our modern Ortho-

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Our coreligionists have turned away from the Talmud. They regarded it as outdated and threw it overboard in their belief that it would advance their auto-emancipation. But that was a prodigious mistake.

These desultory translations in fact highlight the prevailing consensus that to translate the Talmud would do more harm than good. No translation would dissipate the suspicion with which Christians continued to view the Talmud, irrespective of nearly a century of social acculturation, religious reform and critical scholarship. On the contrary, given the utter foreignness of the literature, a translation would be subject to rampant misunderstanding and malicious abuse, which would simply fuel the suspicion. To translate meant to lose control of the text and prompted German Jewish leadership to prefer a strategy of self-censorship as often pursued by vulnerable Jewish communities in the Middle Ages. It was that aversion and inaction in the face of repeated provocations that finally set the stage for an outsider to break the silence. In contrast, in the early days of the turn to Wissenschaft Jewish scholars were not averse to translation. When Zunz and Jost in 1830 rebutted the frontal assault on the Talmud by Luigi Chiarini, an Italian priest from Warsaw, they exhibited no fear of a translation, as Chiarini intended, as long as it met the highest standards of critical scholarship, which his samples with their heavy reliance on Eisenmenger most certainly did not.28 What induced a reconsideration was the bombastic announcement in 1832 by Ephraim Moses Pinner of his design to publish a complete translation of both the Bavli and Yerushalmi with traditional commentaries in 28 folio volumes in Amsterdam on fine paper. The vehicle for the announcement was a modest compendium packed with a few annotated sample translations and an abundance of information only loosely related to the project. At the time Pinner was an unknown 29-year-old Ph.D. from Posen who fortified his compendium with an eloquent dedication to David Friedlander, the venerated elder of the Berlin Jewish community, and a preface that carried a strong endorsement by the highly respected Johann Joachim Bellermann, the former long-term director of the city’s famous gymnasium Graues Kloster and a professor of theology

dox are in this regard veritable exemplars for progressive Reformers. ‘Lernen’ has become secondary and anyone who takes it too seriously or too far can run into trouble. ‘Lernen’ [superficial knowledge] is a religious task that is tolerated as one of the usual ceremonial duties, a necessary accessory. But ‘Wissen’ is excess furniture” (Nehemias Brüll, “Kampf gegen den Talmud,” Popular-wissenschaftliche Monatsblätter zur Belehrung über das Judentum für Gebildte aller Confessionen, 3/2 [1883], 25–26). 28 Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 296; Isaak Markus Jost, Was hat Herr Chiarini in Angelegenheiten der europäischen Juden geleistet? (Berlin: Hayn, 1830), 49.

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at the University of Berlin. Pinner’s own introduction made it amply clear that his grand project was inspired by Chiarini’s assault.29 The compendium, however, aroused strong opposition. A quick look at it by Samuel David Luzzatto in Triest for the holidays convinced him that Pinner lacked the Hebraic, talmudic and critical expertise to succeed.30 Others contended that a correct and comprehensible German translation bordered on the impossible. Even if done by competent scholars such a translation given the cultural chasm between then and now would do Judaism no good.31 The first folio volume finally appeared in 1842 self-published by Pinner in Berlin. A translation of the Bavli’s opening tractate of Berakhot, it came with an extensive apparatus of traditional and critical commentaries to facilitate its use. For special recognition with a gushing dedication, Pinner singled out Tzar Nicholas I of Russia who had purchased prior to publication 100 copies. Pinner claimed that the Tzar’s earlier support of Chiarini’s French translation and now his own German translation attested the Tzar’s commitment to the dissemination of scholarship and literature. Four full pages of other prepublication subscribers, including the kings of Prussia, Holland, Belgium and Denmark, Prince Metternich of Austria, lesser dignitaries and upper clergy and a geographic sweep of citizens and subjects, both Christian and Jewish, from Vilna and Brody in the east to Paris and Dublin in the west, speak volumes of the extent to which Pinner went to fund and create a European market for his adventure. Again it was an external threat that fueled Pinner’s labor, this time the recrudescence of the blood libel in Damascus in 1840 to which French authorities gave all too much credence. As so often before, the inaccessibility of the Talmud stripped its defenders of the means to refute the age-old accusation that it actually commanded the misanthropic practice:32 29 Moses Pinner, Compendium des Hierosolymitanischen und Babylonischen Thalmud (Berlin: Katzman, 1832). 30 David Cassel, Die Cultusfrage in der jüdischen Gemeinde von Berlin (Berlin: Adolf, 1856), 47–48. 31 Unsigned review, probably by Julius Furst, of a Latin commentary to an untranslated edition of tractate Makkot by H.S. Hirschfeld, Literaturblatt des Orients 1843, no. 21, cols. 371–376. The reviewer contended that this format, clearly reserved for a select audience, was preferable to a full translation of the talmudic text into German. 32 Moses Pinner, Talmud Babli. Babylonischer Talmud. Tractat Berachoth (Berlin: Eigenthum des Verfassers, 1842) the list of pre-publication subscribers, 1–5; the quotation, “Vorrede.” For fuller treatment, see Mintz, “Words, Meaning and Spirit: the Talmud in Translation,” Torah u-Madda Journal, 5 (1994), 115–55; also Leiman, “Hatam Sofer’s Retraction of his Approbation to the Pinner Talmud,” Seforim blog, February 19, 2008 and idem, “Some Notes on the Pinner Affair,” Seforim blog, February 25, 2008.The history of Jewish-Christian relations is rife with reverberations from claims and suspicions of secrecy, see Elisheva Carlebach, “Attributions of Secrecy and Perceptions of Jewry,” Jewish Social Studies, New Series, 2:3 (Spring – Summer, 1996), 115–136.

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And why should not the Talmud contain such a law? because it has until now remained hidden from view and is utterly inaccessible to the world. Any fabrication can be attributed to the Talmud, for what can’t be laid at the door of a secret realm? Were not the Old Testament as yet translated and its contents like those of the Talmud still foreign to the world, why anything could then be imputed to it […].

But Pinner’s intense effort earned him neither recognition nor recompense and no other volume was ever forthcoming. Indeed, his volume put the prospect of translating the Talmud into deep freeze. The voices of those opposed grew louder, arguing either that it can’t be or shouldn’t be translated, and certainly not by one person. Some felt that the preparation of a Latin commentary for each untranslated tractate was sufficient to serve the needs of scholarship.33 Zacharias Frankel and David Cassel soon came out against and were joined in the 1880s by Moritz Steinschneider and Meir Ish Shalom in Vienna.34 In 1885 Graetz added his name to their ranks forging a formidable phalanx of scholars rarely in agreement who opposed the wisdom of translating. That year Graetz published an essay sketching the many hostile initiatives taken by the Church against the Talmud from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. In closing he unequivocally rejected the palliative of a full literal translation to alleviate the baggage of ages. Rather what the turbulent moment called for and in fact was doable was a presentation of the ethics of the Talmud, a kernel of an idea that would come to fruition only after World War One in a grand five-volume anthology arranged dogmatically and ethically with texts, exposition and bibliography entitled Die Lehren des Judentums (The Teachings of Judaism).35 Der Verband der deutschen Juden, a large non-denominational association of communities and organizations founded in 1904, published and distributed the set. The editors pointedly omitted any treatment of Jewish law or what had become known as “das Zeremonialgesetz.”36 It is striking that throughout the decades-long debate over the wisdom of a translation the question turned entirely on external, defensive considerations. No one every contended that such a translation might open the Talmud for Jews who might wish to study it or perhaps to counter the prevailing apathy among them toward it that many bemoaned. To keep the Talmud out 33

See note 30. For Frankel, “Tagesbegebenheiten,” Zeitschrift für die religiösen Interessen des Judenthums, 1 (1844), 39; for Cassell, Cultusfrage, 48; for Steinschneider, Jahresberichte der Geschichtswissenschaft, 6 (1883), 42; for Meir Ish Shalom, Davar al odot ha-Talmud (Pressburg: Löwy und Alkalay, 1885). 35 Graetz, “Die Schicksale des Talmud,” Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, 34 (1885), 541. 36 Simon Bernfeld und Fritz Bamberger (eds.), Die Lehren des Judentums. 5 vols. (Leipzig: Gustav Engel, 1920–24). The omission is acknowledged explicitly in the “Vorwort” to volume one. 34

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of the hands of our enemies outweighed putting it in the hands of our young.37 In the same vein wrote Markus Brann, Graetz’s successor in the Breslau Seminary, in 1900 in his review of Bischoff’s recently published book. Whom would a translation of the Talmud serve, he asked innocently and narrowly? The Talmud ought to be taught and studied at the university, where all sorts of exotic languages, texts and cultures were being brought into the purview of the West. Thus not surprisingly when the young Gershom Scholem in 1913 sought to find a Talmud class in one of the religious schools of the Berlin Jewish community there was none to be had. Fortunately, he and a few of his Zionist friends found Dr. Isaak Bleichrode, a learned Talmudist and gifted pedagogue, who would teach them every Sunday for five to six hours for four years, provided they refrained from paying him. Not only was Scholem eternally grateful to him, but when in that first year on an April Sunday he could figure out a page of Talmud on his own and understand Rashi’s comment to the first verse of Genesis, he came close to having one of the only religious experiences of his life.38 Lazarus Goldschmidt was born in 1871 in Lithuania and had gained his talmudic proficiency at the renowned yeshiva of Slobodka where he studied until age 18. Like many other talented young Eastern European Jews he made his way to Berlin to expand his intellectual horizon. After learning German and attaining his Abitur, he majored in philology and Semitic languages in Berlin and Strassburg and soon began publishing Ethiopian texts with German translations. In 1895 as a new wave of anti-Semitism surged across Germany, friends urged him to undertake a translation of the Talmud. Enamored by the challenge, he threw himself into the project and by 1896 saw the first quires coming off the press. Goldschmidt chose to base his translation on the uncensored first edition of Bomberg and the one uncensored complete manuscript of the Bavli from 1343 in Munich in order to lay to rest the frequent anti-Semitic charge that the reason the printed Talmud text did not show the anti-Christian blasphemies that it allegedly contained was because the Jews duplicitously edited them out.39 Notwithstanding the nod to a critical text, the translation immediately evoked a withering review from David Hoffmann which Goldschmidt repudiated in kind just as swiftly. While Hoffmann stressed the almost unsurmountable difficulty for a single scholar to produce both a critical text and a comprehensible translation at the same time, it is noteworthy that he never once objected to the larger issue of translating the Talmud into German.40 37

Markus Brann, “Besprechungen,” MGWJ, 44 (1900), 287. Scholem, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), 63–67. 39 Eliezer Goldschmidt (= Lazarus), “The Translation of the Babylonian Talmud into German,” (in Hebrew), Areshet 2 (1960), 309–10. 40 David Hoffmann: “Recensionen,” Zeitschrift für hebräische Bibliographie, 1 (1896), 38

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Whatever the depth of Hoffmann’s reservations, which induced Goldschmidt to undertake a revised edition of volume one, his gumption could also elicit an exuberant reaction.41 Early in 1896 Maximilian Harden, a provocative and fearless editor who as an adolescent had converted to Christianity, published in his widely read journal Die Zukunft a one-page review simply entitled “Der Talmud.” Though unsigned the piece, according to Goldschmidt, was written by a Russian woman writer and artist friendly with the Calvary family, Goldschmidt’s publisher, and with Harden himself. Elsa von Schabelski saluted and celebrated the cultural significance of the translation, praised the handsome format of the first volume and lauded Goldschmidt’s regimen of long hours and self-preservation:42 In play [in this project] is surely a bit of ambition that is not so much benevolent as vainglorious. Nevertheless, Mr. Goldschmidt belongs to those special sons of Shem who, like Marx, combine an exceptional disdain for worldly goods with a penetrating mind and tenacious diligence.

Given the resonance of the venue, the review put Goldschmidt on the cultural map of Germany. By 1900 Goldschmidt had completed volumes one and three of his projected nine volumes, a milestone that prompted Calvary to persuade Simon Bernfeld, a prolific independent scholar of Judaica, to author a slim one-volume introduction to the “nature, meaning and history” of the Talmud that would culminate with a full-throated endorsement of Goldschmidt’s translation. A full-page advertisement of the two volumes already out followed the final page of Bernfeld’s disquisition.43 Clearly, Calvary was seeking to create a public for his investment. By 1912 Goldschmidt had translated carefully and literally nearly all of the Bavli text along with a scattering of textual variants and an assortment of philological and historical notes,44 and by 1922 eight folio volumes had been published, four by S. Calvary in Berlin, including the first ill-fated edition of volume one, and five including the second edition of volume one by Otto Harrassowitz in Leipzig, a major publisher of

67–71, 100–103, 152–55, 181–85; Goldschmidt, Die Recension des Herrn Dr. D. Hoffmann über meine Talmud-Ausgabe im Licht der Wahrheit (Charlottenburg: A. Gertz, 1896). 41 Lazarus Goldschmidt, Der Babylonische Talmud, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1906). 42 Die Zukunft 15 (1896), 144. In his autobiographical essay, Goldschmidt identified the author and reprinted her Zukunft article (Goldschmidt, “The Translation of the Babylonian Talmud into German,” 313). 43 Simon Bernfeld, Der Talmud (Berlin: Calvary, 1900), 116–17. The advertisement for volumes one and three of Goldschmidt’s translation appears on the first of four supplementary pages of advertisements. Unlike the other ads, Goldschmidt’s has the whole page to itself. 44 Goldschmidt, “The Translation of the Babylonian Talmud into German,” 317.

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Oriental studies.45 The pagination of each of the folio volumes resembled the standard Talmudic layout with the Hebrew and Aramaic text on the inside of the page and the translation running along the outside. Juxtaposing the text and translation with notes at the bottom of the page made for easier selfstudy. In his Hebrew introduction to volume one Goldschmidt wove a tale that limned the fate of the Talmud in a hostile environment: A traveler came upon a plaza with a palace in the middle that he was admonished not to enter. Outside it was guarded by monsters and inside beset by ghosts. The palace was in an advanced state of decay, full of detritus and vermin. When the traveler asked the man taking him around if he had ever set foot in the placed, he admitted that he had kept his distance, but others had and everyone knew what was concealed inside. Still skeptical, the traveler continued to pry how people came by their knowledge. Long ago, he was told, someone did go in and brought out samples of frightening refuse. Unconvinced, he demanded some eye-witness verification from someone living who had actually entered the precincts of the palace. At last people took him to its aged owner whom they did not really trust because he spoke unfailingly of the palace and its contents in glowing terms. Once the owner admitted the traveler to the palace he was astounded by what he saw and pressed the owner to open it to the public for all to see, to no avail. The owner lamented that he was too old and infirm to do the work required to restore the palace to its former glory. Someday, though, a young zealot would come along who was eager and able to tackle the task. Whereupon, the traveler from abroad exclaimed, “I am that man!”46 The remarkable publication history of Goldschmidt’s translation defied all expectations. He left Germany in 1933 for London where he completed his translation of the Bavli.47 Two years later volume nine of the folio edition finally came out as well as the last two volumes of the quarto-size set of twelve volumes in 1936, which from the beginning included only translation and numerous notes. Less well known, however, were still two other folio editions produced photographically, the first by the publishing house of Benjamin Harz in Berlin and Vienna in 1925, which divided the eight volumes of the original into eighteen for easier use and the second by Marinus Nijoff in Haag in nine volumes from 1933–35. In truth, the first eight volumes of the Dutch set were all dated 1933 and only the last bore the year 1935. According to the fine print on the last page of each volume, everyone was incredibly still

45

S. Calvary published volumes 1 (1st ed.), 2, 3, 7, and Otto Harrassowitz 1 (2nd ed.), 4, 5, 6, 8. 46 Goldschmidt, Der Babylonische Talmud, 1 (2nd ed.), opening page. 47 Hans-Joachim Bechtoldt, Jüdische Bibelübersetzungen, 589.

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printed in Germany, the first eight in Leipzig by F.A. Brockhaus and the last in Berlin-Charlottenberg by Victoria.48 The publisher of the smaller twelve-volume set, except for the first volume of 1929, was the tireless Zionist publishing house Jüdischer Verlag in Berlin. With volume two in 1930 it took over the project from Biblion and by volume three in 1930 began printing the remaining nine volumes of the set in Czechoslovakia. It was that smaller set that Sigmund Freud acquired in his final years in Vienna.49 According to Ernest Jones, at the last meeting of the board of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on March 13, 1938 two days after the Anschluss, Freud’s valedictory suggested that he had found some solace by identifying with the rabbinic sage Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai as he took flight from Jerusalem in the face of the ever tightening siege of the Roman legions. A version of that oft-told tale appeared in Goldschmidt’s translation which Freud condensed greatly and garbled slightly:50 After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Titus, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai asked for permission to open a school at Yavne for the study of Torah. We are going to do the same. We are, after all, used to persecution by our history, tradition and some of us by personal experience.

By opening the sealed palace of the Talmud with his translation and making it readily accessible through four separate editions, Goldschmidt performed a service of existential import that enabled German speaking Jews to embark on a return to a Heimat from which they had been estranged for 150 years.

48

The Leo Baeck Institute has a complete set of each of the three folio editions, except for volume nine of the first. Only the set published in Haag actually has the final volume. I suspect that given its 1935 publication date not many copies reached their destination to complete the first folio set. The volume is quite rare. I have yet to lay my hands on a volume nine of the first set and suspect given the dire circumstances that Goldschmidt may have been happy to settle for a single printing of volume nine for the Haag set. All eight volumes of the first set were bound in black leather with a different Art Nouveau design, including a few Jewish symbols, on each cover. I wish to thank Ms. Renate Evers, the LBI’s Director of Collections, for assembling the different sets for me and helping me figure out their publication history. 49 Rice, Freud and Moses (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 94. 50 Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1953–57), 3, 221. The story of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai is to be found in vol. 6, page 376 of the quarto-size set.

8. Unity amid Disunity: The Emergence of the German-Jewish Einheitsgemeinde As German-speaking Jews in central Europe in the nineteenth century progressed toward equal rights and social integration, the communal constraints that Jewish communities exercised on their members decreased in rigor. Disaffected members used the greater freedom to express their personal views and to act on them. Judaism qua religion soon became an internal force more divisive than cohesive. Early efforts at liturgical reform of an ideological nature, for example, quickly elicited principled responses from angry traditionalists. Among those to condemn the creation of the Hamburg Temple Association of 1817–18 was Moses Schreiber (the Hatam Sofer), born in Frankfurt am Main in 1763 and founder in 1806 of a yeshiva in Pressburg destined to spearhead the Orthodox repudiation of Reform in central Europe. Only partially published at the time, his denunciation when fully released in 1861 called upon his followers to withdraw from any Jewish community (Gemeinde) wherever possible when governance fell into the hands of non-observant Jews. Thus at the very outset of a long century of religious conflict the Hatam Sofer anticipated and advocated the rupture of Jewish communal unity when deemed necessary.1 And indeed when achieved, emancipation triggered a bitterly contested reorganization of traditional forms of Jewish self-government. In Europe, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and the wars of religion in the seventeenth unleashed the power of religion to decimate civil society. The authors of the American constitution were exceedingly mindful of that bloody history and crafted a political system designed to keep religion out of the political arena. Within the Jewish world, the dramatic appearance of Shabbetai Zvi in the 1660s in the Ottoman Empire spawned a worldwide messianic movement that fractured Jewish communities for the

1 Matthias Morgenstern, Von Frankfurt nach Jerusalem (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1995),112–13; Samson Raphael Hirsch, Gesammelte Schriften, 6 vols., ed. Naphtali Hirsch (Frankfurt a.M.: I. Kauffmann, 1902–1912), 4, 401–02. By way of introduction to the impact of modernity on Jewish communal unity, see Michael Brenner and Derek J. Penslar (eds.), In Search of Jewish Community (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

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next century. And in the last quarter of the eighteenth century in the Russian empire an upsurge of mysticism split Russian Jewry so deeply that in 1804 the Tsarist government stripped local rabbinic authorities of their power to excommunicate religious dissidents (i.e. Hasidim), granting the latter the right to organize independent synagogues where their numbers warranted.2 In other words, when German-speaking Jews confronted modernity in the nineteenth century they were not without some knowledge and experience of the divisive impact religion could have on a fairly tight-knit Jewish community. Though a hallmark of modernity, religious fragmentation in truth had bedeviled Jewish life since the hoary days of the Bible. What intensified its centrifugal force in the era of piecemeal emancipation was a convergence of new factors: rampant individualism, the quest for assimilation, a cluster of newly-felt religious sensibilities and the unrelenting external pressure mounted by the political opponents of emancipation. It is my contention in this context that the unique achievement of German Jewry by the twentieth century was the retention of the local Einheitsgemeinde, a hard-fought political reconfiguration that offset the religious passion to sever and sunder for the sake of communal unity. The model pioneered by German Jewry held out the possibility of structural unity in an age of fractious disunity. Moreover, the minimal use made by German Jews in the Weimar period to exercise the right to withdraw officially from their local Gemeinde, when it had become exceedingly easy to do so, suggests that the achievement of communal unity had moved many to internalize the value and guide their personal decision by it. Given its singularity, I deem it worthwhile to reflect on the stages by which communal unity triumphed over denominational purity. First and foremost, the Prussian government made membership in a Jewish community compulsory. Since 1700 at least, it had required of all its Jewish subjects to belong to the Jewish community in the area where they lived. Clearly an instrument of social control, the government required the same of Protestant and Catholic subjects.3 In the case of the Jews, the Prussian law accorded with the dictates of Jewish law itself which required for the practice of much of Jewish ritual an aggregate of at least ten adult males. At the same time, in circumstances still decidedly medieval, compulsory membership endowed the local

2 Simon Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volks, A. Steinberg (trans.), 10 vols. (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1925–29), 8, 393–94; Antony Polansky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, 3 vols. (Oxford/Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010–12), 1, 346–47. 3 Ismar Freund, Die Rechtstellung der Synagogengemeinden in Preussen und die Reichsverfassung (Berlin: Philo-Verlag und Buchhandlung, 1925), 11–12; Gabriel E. Alexander, The Jews of Berlin and their Community during the Weimar Republic (1919–33), (Hebrew), (Hebrew University dissertation, 1995), 72.

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community with the power to tax and govern the behavior of its members, and to face its external adversaries with a measure of financial strength.4 The last Prussian effort at a comprehensive Jewry law in 1847 terminated the unequal status of the local Jewish community as a mere tolerated religious association by granting it for the first time recognition as a corporation in public law with the right to tax its members and govern itself. Though compulsory membership remained operative, the government displayed not the slightest interest in helping the Gemeinde resolve its internal conflicts arising from the growing tide of religious denominationalism. What the law of 1847 did allow was for the discontents to form an independent group within the Gemeinde to conduct their religious affairs and even build their own synagogue, but without relieving them of the dual financial burden of paying taxes to the Gemeinde and to their group. A brief interlude of political liberalism in Prussia during the revolution of 1848 seemed to end the requirement of all Jews in a given locale to register as members of its extant community. Promptly, many withdrew and ceased paying their communal taxes, with the Gemeinde’s budget taking an immediate hit. Hence in Berlin on August 24, 1848 the Gemeinde board made the decision to close its teachers’ seminary led by Leopold Zunz since its opening in 1840. Three weeks later the full membership of the Berlin Gemeinde met to elect a committee of nine respected delegates (including Zunz) to draft a new set of by-laws based on the principle of voluntarism. In its public announcement the committee avowed to preserve the venerated historical institutions of the Gemeinde while ready to address changes in practice dictated by integration. By the early 1850s, however, the Prussian government had reinstituted compulsory communal membership and the Gemeinde’s numbers quickly rebounded as did its annual revenue. By 1855 the board resumed its episodic efforts to erect a long-overdue new synagogue and by 1860 the government finally granted its approval of the Gemeinde’s revised communal statutes.5 In sum, then, compulsory membership with its implicit benefit of communal unity remained the legal framework of German Jewry till its fateful

4

Ismar Freund, “Staat, Kirche und Judentum in Preussen,” Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur, 14 (Berlin, 1911), 109–38. Despite the nominal equality of Jews in the Second Reich, Freund protested against the overt discrimination of Judaism by the Prussian state. Tellingly, he brought this packed essay to a close with the declaration that “the way to completing the emancipation of the Jews still requires the emancipation of Judaism” (138). 5 Leo Baeck Institute, New York, Archive, Zunz library, vols. 26–23, 33–22, 28; Ludwig Geiger, Geschichte der Juden in Berlin, reprint (Berlin: Arani, 1988), 197–205; Ismar Schorsch, Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 175.

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end, irrespective of several legislative initiatives to ease the procedure by which individual Jews could resign from the ranks of Gemeinde membership. The framework imbued communal leadership when hit by denominational crises in Hamburg, Breslau and Berlin in the first half of the nineteenth century and in Frankfurt am Main in the second half with a spirit of pragmatism and sagacity willing to protect the value of communal solidarity.6 The German context militated against the counsel of secession enunciated by the Hatam Sofer in 1819 from ever becoming a widespread reality. Despite the unrelenting, virulent campaign of Samson Raphael Hirsch, German Jewry failed to follow the lead of Hungarian Jewry which in 1868 had split into two legally separate and hopelessly irreconcilable Jewish communities at both the national and local levels.7 In contrast, in Germany religious disputes unexpectedly transmuted the German policy of Parochialzwang (enforced membership in the local religious community) into the Jewish ideal of communal unity. Secession never became the overriding ideological force that it did in Hungary. The second factor at work favoring communal solidarity was the diminished status of the rabbi legislated by the Judengesetz (the Jewry law) of 1847. Years of lobbying by liberal Jewish spokesmen had persuaded the Prussian government that a rabbi exercised far less ecclesiastical authority than either an Evangelical pastor or Catholic priest. His presence at rites of passage was not dictated by Jewish law. In consequence, the legislation referred disparagingly to the individual fulfilling clerical duties within the Jewish community simply as a Cultusbeamte, that is a religious employee hired by the board. While the employment of a Religionslehrer (a teacher of religion) to teach the young was explicitly mandatory, the law did not require a community to hire a rabbi. After much internal deliberation, the Prussian legislators did finally agree to call the polity of the local Jewish community a Synagogengemeinde, though in truth the organization as depicted was a political body governed by elected lay leaders. At best the rabbi excluded from sitting on the board was no more than a consultant on matters pertaining to religious practice.8 In 6

Mordechai Breuer, “The Hamburg Community – Nation or Congregation,” “Den Himmel zu pflanzen und die Erde zu gründen,” Miriam Gillis-Carlebach and Wolfgang Grünberg (eds.), (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1995), 30–41; Michael A. Meyer, “Rabbi Gedaliah Tiktin and the Orthodox Segment of the Breslau Community, 1845–54,” Michael: On the History of the Jews in the Diaspora (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1973), 92–107; Ludwig Geiger, Geschichte der Juden in Berlin, 193; Robert Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context (Westport, Conn./London: Greenwood Press, 1985). 7 Jacob Katz, A House Divided: Orthodoxy and Schism in Nineteenth-century Central European Jewry (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998). 8 Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context (Hanover, N.H./London: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 32–39; Andreas Brämer, Rabbiner und Vorstand 1988) (Wien/Köln/Weimar: Böhlau, 1999).

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1922 there was but one community in all of Germany where the local rabbi was a member of its board, and from 1934 to 1938 Max Guenewald in Mannheim was the only rabbi in Germany ever to serve as both the rabbi of his community and chairman of its board.9 Clearly the intent of the Prussian government and its Jewish confidants in subordinating the role of the rabbi was to reduce the idealogical intensity at play in the religious conflicts jeopardizing the structural unity of the Gemeinde. By the end of the nineteenth century the Jewish community had indeed morphed into a recognizable political entity. As its numbers grew in the wake of the massive migration of rural Jews to the city and its administrative responsibilities expanded into ever new sectors of communal life and its financial burdens escalated, the Jewish community managed ever more institutions that had little to do directly with its religious life. It mattered little whether the community went by the name of Kultusgemeinde, stressing its essentially religious core, or Volksgemeinde, stressing its ethnic identity, it functioned as a body politic in which contending parties fought bitterly over control of the board and the budget. Increasingly secular in spirit, the board gradually negotiated an internal separation of state and religion which enabled it to fund fairly equitably the religious needs of its multiple religious constituents while remaining religiously neutral. To mollify Orthodox members leaning toward secession, community leadership was even prepared to commit itself to preserving Orthodox standards for institutions indispensable to the religious life of traditional Jews, but funded by the community.10 Attesting to its secular ethos, many a Jewish community in the 1920s extended to women the rights to vote and be elected to office in communal elections, in contrast to the nascent Zionist polity in Palestine where such rights at the time were bitterly opposed by the ultra-Orthodox.11 As a result of this adroit transformation in spirit and structure, the major Jewish communities of Berlin and Vienna and many smaller ones did not break apart in the face of denominational pressures. For example, in Hamburg when the city government finally decided in 1864 after decades of religious dissension that membership in the Jewish community (Gemeinde) henceforth would be voluntary, only about 1.2 percent actually withdrew. To

9 Max Gruenewald, “The Modern Rabbi,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 2 (1957), 90; Volker Keller, Jüdisches Leben in Mannheim (Mannheim: Edition Quadrat, 1995), 92. 10 Alfred Wiener, “Gemeindeorthodoxie und Separatismus,” Der Jude, 8 (1924), 79–89; Ahron Sandler, “The Struggle for Unification,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 2 (1957), 65–84. 11 Alexander, 79; Ahron Sandler, 79, 81; Moshe´ Burstein, Self-Government of the Jews in Palestine Since 1900 (Tel Aviv: n. p., 1934), passim; David Ellenson, After Emancipation (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2004), 344–66.

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be sure, the loss of burial rights in the Jewish communal cemetery acted as a deterrent.12 Similarly, a dozen years later Prussian officials informed the Habsburg monarchy, considering a uniform Jewry law for its own sundry crown lands, that thus far the number of Jews who had exited from their local community was negligible, despite the protection of their burial rights by the legislation of 1876. To date no beneficial results had materialized and there was even reason to doubt that a need ever existed to accommodate religious discontents.13 In 1890 Vienna enacted a comparable piece of legislation that coupled compulsory membership with a limited right to secede, which the Hungarian bloc in the capital repeatedly threatened to invoke in the interwar period.14 Weimar facilitated secession still further by relieving the applicants of the need to inform the court of the reason for their withdrawal, thereby worsening the Gemeinde’s financial instability. In addition to the religious malcontents, Communists and Social Democrats, given their disdain for religion, withdrew on principle. Personal grievances motivated others while intermarriage often ended in secession. Still others resented the Gemeinde’s power to tax its members, for example, in Berlin in 1927 at the rate of 10 percent of their state tax, although that tax in turn could reduce their state tax by as much as much as 40 percent.15 And yet secession never constituted the mortal threat after the easing of the procedure for withdrawal in 1918 and 1920 that Ismar Freund, Prussian Jewry’s preeminent legal historian, feared.16 By 1927 there were only four secessionist Orthodox communities in Germany.17 Noticeably the one in Frankfurt am Main attracted only a fraction of the voluntary membership of Hirsch’s original Israelitische Religionsgesellschaft and those who had heeded his urgent calls to secede were not the indigenous residents of Frankfurt but recent newcomers from the countryside.18 In 1885 the Prussian government also granted independence and autonomy to the secessionist community founded by Esriel Hildesheimer in Berlin, though its membership never 12

Breuer, 36. Salo W. Baron, “Freedom and Constraint in the Jewish Community,” Essays and Studies in Memory of Linda R. Miller, ed. Israel Davidson (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1938), 9–23. 14 Harriet Freidenreich, Jewish Politics in Vienna, 1918–38 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 116–18, 121, 161–64. 15 James Silberstein, “Die Austritte aus Gemeinde und Judentum,” Jüdisches Jahrbuch 1930, (Berlin: Jüdisches Jahrbuch, 1930), 48–52. As for tax ramifications, see “Die Berliner Jüdische Gemeinde im Jahre 1927,” Jüdisches Jahrbuch für Gross-Berlin 1929 (Berlin: Fritz Scherbel/Teilh., 1928), 51. 16 Freund, “Die Rechtstellung,” 17. 17 Jüdisches Lexikon, 5 vols. (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1927–30), 1, col. 606. 18 Liberles, Religious Conflict, 212–25; Morgenstern, Von Frankfurt, 147–50. 13

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exceeded more than 400. The Reform association in Berlin which had emerged in the 1840s with a membership of 400 never secured a corporate status separate from that of the Gemeinde.19 By Weimar, Jewish unity had settled into the psyche of German Jewry as a shared value. Intermarriage and conversion out, especially among those between the ages 20–40, undermined the viability of the Gemeinde far more than secession.20 Whereas in 1910 in Berlin only 18 Jews chose to exit from the city’s Jewish community, by 1923 the number had risen to 152, a total still less than half the number of those who left by virtue of intermarriage and/or conversion.21 Moreover those who severed their ties with the Gemeinde could always reconsider and return. In 1895 Walter Rathenau declared before a court his intention to abandon Judaism. Yet notwithstanding his public remonstrance against German Jewry and Judaism, he remained a member of the Berlin Gemeinde, never acting on his declaration to leave.22 In 1924, 11 percent of those who had distanced themselves from the Berlin Gemeinde reentered, while by 1930 the percentage had risen to 27 percent.23 Those who did exit from the community without converting or intermarrying were largely motivated by the desire to avert the tax which went with Gemeinde membership. The vast majority, however, was willing to bear the cost of Jewish identity for the common good. The legacy of government imposed communal unity, along with the muted status of rabbinic leadership plus the functional equivalent of an internal separation of state and synagogue had converged to elevate communal unity to an ideal within collective reach. The torturous path to the achievement of full emancipation had reinforced in a new key the old rabbinic adage of Hillel not to withdraw from the community.24 The whole remained greater than the sum of its parts because it still nourished the sacred seedbed of ultimate meaning. Above all, it forged an arena where a robust clash of convictions did not wreck the viability of a cohesive Jewish community.

19

Alexander, 73, 75; Moritz Türk, Das erste Gemeindestatut und die Genossenschaft für Reform im Judentum,” Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstage von Moritz Schaeffer (Berlin: Philo, 1927), 241–57. 20 Bruno Blau, “Die Austritte aus dem Judentum in Berlin,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden, vol. 3 (1907), 145–53. 21 Jüdisches Lexikon, 1, 606. 22 Peter Honigmann, Die Austritte aus der Jüdischen Gemeinde Berlin 1873–1941 (Frankfurt am Main/Bern/New York/Paris: Peter Lang, 1988), 14–15; Shulamit Volkov, Walther Rathenau. Weimar’s Fallen Statesman (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2012), 45–53, 105–107. 23 Honigmann, Die Austritte, 27. 24 Mishnah, Tractate Avot, 2:4.

Part III

The Hebrew Bible

9. Leopold Zunz on the Hebrew Bible Leopold Zunz’s three-volume edition of his Gesammelte Schriften came out in 1875–76. The last contribution to that invaluable collection was a fiftythree-page essay bluntly titled “Bibelkritisches” – a study of selected books of the Hebrew Bible from a critical perspective. There Zunz focused his philological microscope on Deuteronomy, Ezekiel, Leviticus, Esther, Exodus, Numbers, and Genesis, in that baffling order, with a view to dating each text. Zunz published the first half of the essay (through Esther) in 1873 in the journal of the German Oriental Society, Die Zeitschrift der Deutschen-Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, where in the previous three years he had published a spate of four short studies on biblical philology.1 The second half, however, met editorial resistance and appeared belatedly only in his collected works.2 Thus, as Zunz approached eighty, having finished his invaluable trilogy on medieval religious poetry (1867),3 he concluded his scholarly career with a compact, dense, and highly provocative statement of his views on the gamut of biblical criticism. To be sure, most of these views were not entirely novel to

1 Leopold Zunz, “Bibelkritisches,” Die Zeitschrift der Deutschen-Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (hereafter ZDMB), 27 (1823), 669–89. The four essays were republished in his Gesammelte Schriften, 3 vols. (Berlin: Louis Gerschel, 1875–76), 3, 31–76. 2 With the publication of volume 27 (1873) of the ZDMB, Professor Ludolf Krohl of Leipzig stepped down as editor to be followed by Professor Otto Loth, also of Leipzig (ZDMB, 28 [1874]: v–vi), and it was to the latter that Zunz submitted the second half of his essay on biblical criticism. In a letter dated February 21, 1874, Loth promised Zunz to publish it in the second number of the journal for 1874, because the first was already accounted for. In a subsequent letter dated July 16, 1874, and addressed to “Oberrabbiner Zunz,” Loth informed him uncomfortably and regretfully that for the time being he was unable to find space for his essay. If Zunz had another option to expedite publication, Loth offered to return the essay. In his response, written the next day, Zunz announced that he was not prepared to wait until 1875 and asked that the essay be returned, adding pointedly that he was not an “Oberrabiner” and attributing the rejection of his essay to Heinrich Ewald. The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem (hereafter NLI), ARC, 4° 792, G17. 3 Leopold Zunz, Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1855); idem, Die Ritus des synagogalen Gottesdienstes (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1859); idem Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie (Berlin: Louis Gerschel, 1865); idem, Nachtrag zur Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie (Berlin: Adolf Cohn, 1867).

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the world of Christian scholars of the Old Testament.4 In his patronizingly harsh review of Zunz’s abbreviated essay in the Zeitschrift, Heinrich Ewald of Göttingen, long a nemesis of modern Jewish scholarship, boasted that Christian savants had been scouring the pages of the Old Testament critically for some three to four hundred years and had nothing to learn from callow Jewish scholars just now broaching the field.5 Still, within the ambience of German Jewish scholarship, Zunz’s unvarnished embrace of biblical criticism was a milestone. Until then, except for Samuel David Luzzatto of Padua, no other Wissenschaft scholar had done more than tentatively and tangentially taken up the subject of biblical criticism, and absolutely no one had dared to author as comprehensive a reckoning of its findings, especially as they pertained to the Pentateuch.6 As we will see, once Zunz entered the minefield, others in reaction or independently immediately took up the challenge to significantly expand the scope of Wissenschaft des Judentums. At the end of the century, then, Ahad Ha-am’s denunciation of German Jewish Wissenschaft for skirting the study of the Bible, which he considered 4

On July 13, 1874, Abraham Geiger wrote to Theoldor Nöldeke: “You surely have read the essay by Zunz (the one in the ZDMG). It doesn’t offer much that is new. But it does put things together effectively, concisely – often too concisely – and very candidly. It is indeed welcome that this is done by a man who till now has held himself aloof from all religious movements and spent a lifetime immersed in serious study.” Ludwig Geiger (ed.), Abraham Geiger’s Nachgelassene Schriften, 5 vols. (Berlin: Louis Gerschel, 1875–78), 5, 364. 5 Heinrich Ewald, “Zunz, Bibelkritisches,” Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen (1875), 1, 395–402. Full of condescension, the seven-page review of a twenty-page essay confirms Zunz’s hunch that Ewald was behind the quashing of his essay. Ewald was admired as much for his liberal political leanings and courage as for his wide-ranging Semitic scholarship. But he was also a pugnacious personality with an inflated sense of self, who as early as 1860 had seen fit gratuitously and publicly to attack Zunz’s vaunted scholarship on Jewish liturgy. See Ludwig Geiger, “Ein ungedruckter Aufsatz von Leopold Zunz,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (1916): 437–38. For an overview of his career, see Lothar Perlitt, “Heinrich Ewald: Der Gelehrte in der Politik,” Theologie in Göttingen, ed. B. Moeller (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck/Ruprecht, 1987), 157–212. 6 Hans-Joachim Bechtoldt, Die jüdische Bibelkritik im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1995); Yaakov Shavit and Mordechai Eron, The Hebrew Bible Reborn: From Holy Scripture to the Book of Books (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007); Ran HaCohen, Reclaiming the Hebrew Bible: German-Jewish Reception of Biblical Criticism (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010). Lawrence Kaplan not only considers Luzzatto “to be the outstanding Jewish biblical scholar of the nineteenth century” but also one whose “approach to the Bible” may be characterized unconventionally “as a scholarly, non-traditional fundamentalism.” See Lawrence Kaplan, “Scholarly, Non-traditional Fundamentalism: On Samuel David Luzzatto’s Approach to the Bible,” Conservative Judaism 34 (1982), 15, 22. Also the more recent illuminating study by Shmuel Vargon, “Luzzatto’s Attitude towards Higher Criticism” (Hebrew), Shnaton: An Annual for Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies 13 (2002), 271–304. As we will see, on the subject of biblical criticism, Zunz and Luzzatto were polar opposites.

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the heartbeat of Judaism, was thus only partially correct.7 The primary purpose of this essay is to argue that Zunz’s belated foray into biblical criticism was not an odd appendage to a corpus of scholarship focused on postbiblical Jewish literature but rather a culmination of a life-long study of the Hebrew Bible. A scan of his career readily highlights the degree to which the subject absorbed him. Beyond its biographical import, “Bibelkritisches” also represents a historiographical watershed in the confrontation of Wissenschaft des Judentums with the challenge of the nineteenth-century Protestant biblical criticism. In once again discarding the blinders of dogmatic constraints, Zunz was no less a pioneer in 1873 than he had been in 1818 in the study of Jewish history. Recent scholarship on the history of biblical criticism in modern Judaism has tended to overlook this achievement because of its penchant to compare Zunz to his Christian counterparts rather than his Jewish peers, among whom he had no equal. Accordingly, the first two-thirds of my essay will trace the trajectory of Zunz’s oeuvre up to 1873, while the last third will place his bombshell within its Jewish context.8 In his late turn to the bible, Zunz closed his scholarly career with a touch of symmetry. In 1832, some forty years earlier, he had firmly planted his survey of midrashic literature in the soil of Scripture. He had shown with stirring erudition how the instrument of creative exegesis spawned a vast and disordered body of literature that kept the received text of the Bible ever open to reinterpretation. Midrash served to reconcile textual rubs, to allow for new wine in old bottles, and to facilitate the quest for meaning. Not only did Zunz succeed in dating the largely anonymous midrashic works of many generations but he imbued them with an undetected degree of organic unity. In his picturesque words: The [1500-year] expanse from [the book of] Chronicles to the literature of European Jewry is not a wasteland whose unexpected forms [such as] Talmud, Midrash, Targum, Masorah and Kabbalah frighten rather than guide the wanderer, but an immense road of development, strewn with innumerable works and remnants, the testimony of great passion, strident interest and inspired thought.9

Indeed, the roots of midrashic thought were to be found in the pages of Scripture itself. Zunz’s classic began, in fact, with a memorable exercise in biblical criticism. Midrash presupposes the existence of a canon. According to Zunz, the first two divisions of the Hebrew Bible, the Pentateuch and the 7

Ahad Ha’am, Al parashat derakhim, 4 vols. (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1921), 1, vi. Both HaCohen, Reclaiming the Hebrew Bible, 195–96, and Shavit and Eron, The Hebrew Bible Reborn, 124, give short shrift to Zunz’s landmark essay. In contract, Menachem Soloweitshik and Zalman Rubashaw were far more generous in their appreciation in A History of Biblical Criticism (Hebrew), (Berlin: Devir, 1925), 136–38. 9 Leopold Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden (Berlin: A. Ascher, 1832), 307–8. 8

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Prophets, achieved canonization long before the third, with the result that specimens of midrash abound in the Writings, with their expansion or subversion of sacred texts through interpretation. In particular, Zunz boldly contended that the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles constituted a single tract authored between 312 and 260 BCE, which turned on the phenomenon of midrash. Or in Zunz’s more bracing formulation: One dressed up history, which itself already offered up legends, with new legends, the heroic lives of kings and prophets with new glory. One discovered one’s own opinion in the words of the ancients and [one’s own] religious application in their laws. Through exegesis one [shed light] on what had grown dark. Ezra and the Levites step forward as interpreters of the law. The Chronicler relies on the utility of midrash, that is of interpretation and reworking. Daniel is put forth as the official interpreter of Jeremiah. Thus we find already in Scripture at the time of the scribes (soferim) the basic outlines of that exegetical system which, both venerating and modifying the received word, breaks new ground and creates new institutions.10

Furthermore, Zunz’s philological scrutiny assigned two major biblical books to the Second Temple period. The Psalms he regarded as a composite work arranged chronologically in five books, with only the first two largely though not entirely of Davidic provenance. The psalms of the third he ascribed mainly to Levitical authors, though still from the First Temple period. In contrast, the psalms of the final two books often lack any superscription, and where one does appear, it is often at odds with the content of the psalm that follows and was probably added later. In consequence, Zunz deemed these latter books to be a unified text that preserved the festival sacrificial hymns of the Second Temple cult.11 Zunz took up Ezekiel briefly by way of introduction to his chapter on midrash as an instrument of mysticism. In the hands of the rabbis, according to Zunz, the function of midrash was to address the exigencies of the present; in the hands of the mystics, it was to lift the veil on the future. On the basis of Ezekiel’s extravagant visions, the Aramaic coloration of his language, and its novel Hebrew vocabulary, Zunz was ready to shift the prophetic book’s tenure from the Babylonian to the Persian era. In the process he also dated 10 Ibid., 31–36. The quotation is on 35–36. Zunz was the first scholar to propose that a single individual had authored the last four books of the Hebrew Bible. See Menahem Haran, “Book-Size and the Devise of Catch-Lines in the Biblical Canon,” Journal of Jewish Studies 36 (1985), 5–6. Though widely accepted for more than a century, Zunz’s view has been vigorously contested since 1968 on the basis of an abundance of linguistic and terminological differences between Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah. See Sara Japhet, “The Supposed Common Authorship of Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemia Investigated Anew,” Vetus Testamentum, 18 (1968): 330–71. On Zunz’s place in the subject of inner biblical exegesis, see Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 5. 11 Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge, 15–17.

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the book of Job to the time of the prophet Zechariah in the late sixth century B.C.E.12 By the comingling of rabbinic and biblical literature, Zunz mounted a case for the unity of Jewish history. The destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. had not ruptured the continuity between the ancient Israelites of the First and the Jews of the Second Temple. The gradual formation of a canon did not constitute a caesura between the two commonwealths, as Zunz’s erstwhile friend and fellow historian Isaak Markus Jost had asserted at length in his Geschichte der Israeliten, but rather the canon was an organic corpus bridging two eras.13 Midrash preserved access to the wellspring of revelation, nurturing its twin aspects of structure and spirit, discipline and imagination. Zunz’s summation stressed the dialectic: From the body of aggada we now turn to its spirit, its political-religious content. Law and freedom in the body politic are equivalent to the head and heart of an individual. Both the head and the law give rise to rules that are firm and cold; their applications and exceptions are the work of freedom and a warm heart. In the Hebraic state it was the legal system and the priestly class that maintained the law and the ark of the covenant, the visible expression of its national character. But the prophets and their message guarded the fire of freedom and the original idea, which was not literally transmitted from generation to generation, but rather rekindled directly in every age at the flame of divine inspiration.14

While midrash then cultivated both the legal and ethical legacies of the first commonwealth, it was to the imagination of the latter with its prophetic freedom that Zunz was particularly drawn. The identity of aggada as the offspring of prophecy obviated for Zunz any perception of rupture, as did the institution of the synagogue, which, with the loss of statehood, became the locus of midrash and the medium of continuity. The public reading and interpretation of Torah replaced the immediacy of prophetic address. Without trying to uncover the elusive origins of the synagogue, Zunz insisted that it would soon give expression to the nationality of its members even as it served to reinvigorate their faith. In sum, Zunz’s first book-length demonstration of the power of critical scholarship ordered a chaotic plethora of aggadic texts within a biblical paradigm, which was still in formation. All the synagogue lacked at this juncture in Zunz’s conceptualization was its dialectic character which would transform it into a venue of religious dialogue. 12

Ibid., 157–62. Isaac Markus Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten, 9 vols. (Berlin: Schlesinger, 1820–28), 1, 39–43, 3, 19–28. See also Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context (Hanover, N.H., Brandeis University Press, 1994), 239–40, and HaCohen, Reclaiming the Hebrew Bible, 49–71. 14 Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge, 321–22. On the linkage between prophecy and midrash (i.e., aggada), see the searching essay by Maren R. Niehoff, “Zunz’s Concept of Haggadah as an Expression of Jewish Spirituality,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 43 (1998), 3–24. 13

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But the deficiency would be short-lived, because Zunz continued to occupy himself with the study of the Bible. From December 1834 to April 1835, he gave a course on the book of Psalms (some thirty-four lectures), open to the public.15 As he wrote in Hebrew on January 2, 1835, to his learned friend and indispensable book collector in Hamburg, Heimann Joseph Michael: “For six weeks now I have been lecturing publicly on the book of Psalms and its language, twice weekly on Monday and Thursday evenings, and whatever time is left I spend at the threshold of our sacred book. As a result I have lost touch with the [current] authors of Israel and am unfamiliar with their works.”16 Though cryptic and fragmentary, the extensive preparatory notes preserved among his papers attest to the intensity of Zunz’s engagement. By the course’s end, Zunz still held the attention of twenty-two close friends and prominent Berlin Jews.17 The subject of Psalms gave Zunz the chance to flesh out his biblical paradigm. The notes foreshadow the eventual two-dimensional concept of the synagogue that he would dramatically unfurl in his 1855 Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters. In his lecture on January 1, 1835, he apparently contrasted the genres of biblical prophecy and psalmody, with the latter voicing human rather than divine concerns. On April 6, he construed the figures of Moses and David as the archetypes of each genre, epitomizing the biblical dialogue between God and Israel. Within the confines of the synagogue, that dialogue would continue in the form of instruction and prayer, along the coordinates of Torah reading and psalm recitation. While the focus of the psalms is often a national calamity, the form is frequently poetic, which Zunz saw as expressing feelings that are infinite, in words that are finite.18 No doubt by the time Zunz finished, he had advanced significantly toward rendering the synagogue in spirit a wholly biblical institution. Not long thereafter, Zunz assumed the editorship of a new German translation of the Hebrew Bible, which came out in 1838. The idea may not have been his and he translated no more than Chronicles.19 But as his lecture notes on the Psalms make abundantly clear, he had immersed himself in many

15 Ismar Elbogen, “Von Leopold Zunz’ Psalmen-Studien,” Festschrift Armand Kaminka zum 70.ten Geburtstag (Wien: Verlag des Wiener Maimonides-Institut, 1937), 25–31. Zunz’s notes on his lectures are preserved in NLI, ARC, 4° 792, D14/1, D22/3. 16 Abraham Berliner (ed.), Briefwechsel zwischen Heimann Michael and Leopold Zunz (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kauffmann, 1907), 31–32. 17 NLI, ARC, 4° 792, C13, Das Buch Zunz, 64. 18 Elbogen, “Von Leopold Zunz’ Psalmen-Studien,” 27–28. 19 The correct date of publication is 1838 and not 1837 as in Bechtoldt, Die jüdische Bibelkritik, 192; see Moritz Steinschneider, Schriften des Dr. L. Zunz (Berlin: A. Friedlaender, 1857), 7. Moreover, in his diary Zunz recorded that it took him from March until October 1838 to translate Chronicles (NLI, ARC, 4° 792, C13, Das Buch, Zunz, 70).

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other books of the Bible to sharpen his philological and comparative tools. Moreover, the viability of the project benefited enormously from a committed publisher in Moritz Veit and in three competent and compatible colleagues in Heymann Arnheim, Michael Sachs, and Julius Fürst. The goal was to replace the famous, unfinished, and by now dated (though not out of print) Mendelssohn Bible with a literal, readable translation that would adhere to the masoretic text, take into account currently philological research, and heed good German usage.20 As editor, Zunz reviewed every line with a view to assuring clarity and correctness, to shun translations that might give offense, and to achieve a maximum degree of stylistic uniformity. He also appended a painstakingly worked out fourteen-page-long chronological table, dating the persona and events in the biblical narrative down to Alexander according to both the Gregorian calendar and the traditional Jewish calendar of creation.21 Perhaps to counter the widespread notion that the Bible redounded with myth, the specificity of the table lent a sheen of historical veracity to the narratives. What motivated Zunz to throw himself into the translation seems to have been a desire to dissipate the apathy among Jews towards the Bible itself, as he stated in 1836 in his review of Sach’s earlier poetic translation of Psalms: The work of Mr. Sachs will hopefully contribute to injecting into the study of the Bible, which is somewhat neglected among Jews, a renewed interest in all its aspects. Such a stirring in turn might even become visible in other literary endeavors, especially in the field of Jewish theology.22

20 A copy of the prospectus is in the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, Klau Library, Kirschstein Collection 6/9. By the second half of the eighteenth century, German Christian scholars had increasingly attacked the reliability and restrictiveness of the Masoretic text. In response, Mendelssohn reaffirmed its inviolability and made it the basis of his own translation. Edward Breuer, The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies, 1996), 96–101, 159–73. For a summary of the many editions of Mendelssohn’s Bible, see Steven M. Lowenstein, “The Readership of Mendelssohn’s Bible Translation,” Hebrew Union College Annual 53 (1982), 186–87. 21 Leopold Zunz (ed.), Die vier und zwanzig Bücher der heiligen Schrift, 14th ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kauffmann, 1898), “Vorwort,” “Zeittafel.” 22 Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, 3:121. Destined for acclaim as a superb translator of sacred Hebrew texts into German, Sachs combined philological rigor with poetic talent. His translation of the Psalms gave ample evidence of both: Michael Sachs, Die Psalmen: Übersetzt und erläutert (Berlin: Veit, 1835). A year earlier he had attended Zunz’s course. Thus, it is far more likely that Zunz may have piqued Sach’s interest than vice versa. In any case, translations of Psalms pervaded German culture. Margit Schad in her rich and empathic biography of Sachs identified some twenty-seven such translations between 1784 and 1831, including those by Johann Gottfried Herder and Mendelssohn, both of which came out in 1783. In the second half of the 1830s, scholars of stature like Heinrich Ewald, Ferdinand Hitzig, and Friedrich M. Koster added their own editions to the corpus. See

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Zunz could hardly have dreamed of his success. Designed for use at home and in schools, this compact volume, minus the Hebrew text, known as the Zunz Bible, would go through seventeen unaltered printings by 1935, becoming a veritable folk book and making his name a household word.23 Zunz’s critical engagement with Chronicles and Psalms was surely stimulated by his exposure to Berlin University’s professor of theology, Wilhelm Martin Lebrecht de Wette, the seminal pioneer of his age in biblical criticism, whose liberal political and religious views soon fell afoul of the changed political climate, leading to his dismissal in 1819.24 In the spring of 1816, Zunz took a course with him in the book of Daniel and returned in the following winter semester for an introduction to the Old Testament. As he noted in his diary at the time, he also visited de Wette several times in his home.25 After a hiatus of two decades, Zunz turned to him in 1838 for a letter of recommendation to help him secure the directorship of a planned Jewish teachers’ seminary in Berlin. Zunz affirmed that although their distant contact had been brief, de Wette’s impact on him had been lasting. “For I owe you my understanding [die Einsicht] of biblical criticism, and indeed to you and Friedrich August Wolf [with whom he had taken three courses in the classical world] whatever I acquired of a scholarly perspective.”26 In his 1805 doctoral dissertation, de Wette had been the first scholar to identify an early version of Deuteronomy with the book found by King Josiah’s high priest in 622 B.C.E. Margit Schad, Rabbiner Michael Sachs: Judentums als höhere Lebensanschauung (Hildesheim/Zurich/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2007), 319, 321, n. 9, 323. Writing to his close friend Meier Isler in Hamburg a few months after finishing his course, Zunz confided: “I’ve looked fleetingly at Ewald’s Psalms. It hasn’t stripped my lectures of all their value. Perhaps I’ll decide to rework them for a larger audience, if only I had a publisher who would pay decently.” In Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), Leopold Zunz, Jude – Deutscher – Europäer (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1964), 182. Regrettably, the idea never came to fruition (ibid.). 23 David Rosen, “Die Zunz’sche Bibel,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (hereafter MGWJ), 38 (1894), 513; Bechtoldt, Die jüdische Bibelkritik, 205. 24 Hans-Joachim Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Forschung des Alten Testaments von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart (Neukirchen: Neukirchen, 1956), 162–75; John W. Rogerson, W.M.L. de Wette: Founder of Modern Biblical Criticism (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992), 87–159. 25 NLI, ARC, 4° 792, C13, Das Buch Zunz, 26, 28. Also Fritz Bamberger (ed.), Das Buch Zunz (n.p., n.d.), 20. David Kaufmann in his biographical essay also speaks of more than one visit, reflecting obviously what Zunz told him, in David Kaufmann, “Leopold Zunz,” Gesammelte Schriften, 3 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kaufmann 1908–15), 3:336. In a letter to his beloved teacher S.M. Ehrenberg from July 11, 1817, Zunz reports that among his professors, he has the warmest relationship with de Wette. Glatzer, Leopold Zunz, 86. 26 Ludwig Geiger, “Zunz im Verkehr mit Behörden und Hochgestellten,” MGWJ, 60 (1916), 258. As for the number of courses that Zunz took with Wolf, see NLI, ARC, 4° 792, C13. Das Buch Zunz, 25, 28, 29.

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in the Jerusalem Temple, a view that Zunz would espouse in 1873. De Wette’s contention made Deuteronomy the linchpin for the dating of the other books of the Pentateuch.27 More germane for our purposes, in 1806–7 de Wette published a two-volume introduction to the Old Testament, using a searching study of Chronicles as a vantage point to identify its mythic components and to date other books of the Hebrew Bible including the Pentateuch. De Wette, however, did not hold Ezra to be the author of Chronicles, a work he regarded as a mere compilation put together long after Ezra.28 It is not implausible, therefore, to attribute Zunz’s interest in Chronicles to de Wette’s focused research. More noteworthy still, Zunz departed from some of the views of his teacher. He argued cogently, as we have seen, for Ezra as the single author of the last four books of the Hebrew Bible and he converted the category of myth to midrash, that is, what de Wette identified as the subjective reworking of an older text in quest of existential truth, Zunz treated as midrash. Both concurred, however, that in either case the passage in question told us more about the mindset of its author than about the deeper meaning of the text about which he purported to speak.29 It is also quite possible that de Wette’s study of the Psalms prompted Zunz to take up the subject in his lectures. Although the first edition had come out in 1811, two subsequent editions followed in 1823 and 1829. By 1822, de Wette had found an academic haven in the peripheral University of Basel. In the foreword to his third edition, de Wette lamented the growing threat posed to academic freedom in matters theological by a resurgent orthodoxy, a sentiment axiomatic of his career.30 Aside from referencing de Wette’s com27 Alexander Rofe´, Introduction to the Literature of the Hebrew Bible (Hebrew), (Jerusalem: Karmel, 2006), 58–60; Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, 1, 224. 28 Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament, 2 vols. (Halle: Schimmelpfenning, 1806–7), 1, 47. Apparently Johann David Michaelis and J. G. Eichhorn had argued unconvincingly for a single author, a view which found no favor in de Wette’s eyes (ibid., 46). To his credit, de Wette read Zunz’s Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden after its appearance and by 1840 noted Zunz’s divergent views on Ezekiel, Chronicles, and the Targums (ancient Aramaic translations of Scripture) in his own Lehrbuch der kritischen Einleitung in die Bibel Alten und Neuen Testamentes, 2 vols. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1840–48), 1, 89, 92–95, 248–49, 264, 269, 270, 318. In contrast, Wilhelm Vatke as early as 1835 was inclined to accept Zunz’s argument for a single author for Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah (Die Religion des Alten Testaments [Berlin: G. Bethge, 1835], 350, n. 3). In consequence, both men served to bring Zunz’s contribution to the attention of Christian scholars of the Hebrew Bible, who still dominated the field. 29 De Wette, Beiträge, 1, 50–132. More generally, John W. Rogerson, Myth in Old Testament Interpretation (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 16–24. 30 Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, Commentar über die Psalmen, 3rd ed., (Heidelberg: J.C.B. Mohr, 1829), vii. Years later in his memorial calendar, Zunz would remember de Wette as a scholar in whose work “an independent mind does battle with lifeless fundamentalism.” Die Monatstage des Kalenderjahres: Ein Andenken an Hingeschiedene (Berlin: M. Poppelauer, 1872), 34.

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mentary on Psalms, Zunz adopted his conclusions that the psalms are lyrical poetry sung to music, that they do not derive from prophecy and serve no pedagogical function, and that they often give searing expression to national calamities.31 Indeed, as we will see, de Wette’s characterization of these national laments anticipates uncannily the main thrust of Zunz’s own understanding of medieval liturgical poetry. According to de Wette: The rich class of psalms of lament includes many that are imitative. How else can we explain that most of them have the same format, tone and content? The answer […] is that they relate to the national misfortunes of the Hebrews, their oppression and persecution by foreign enemies. How many Jews in different times found themselves in the same unfortunate predicament! They sought consolation by expressing their grief in prayer and song. They seized eagerly the songs of older poets in similar straits and reworked them in adoration to suit their own plight, mood and taste.32

The noticeable shift in de Wette’s language from Hebrews to Jews suggest that precariousness and suffering were a constant in the dark fate of the Jewish people, a view that Zunz surely held dear. In 1855, Zunz published his synagogale Poesie, which would prove to be the first of three exhaustive studies of medieval liturgical poetry. It was a companion volume to his gottesdiestliche Vorträge in two ways: First, it again brought order out of a vast and chaotic field of Jewish creativity, whose scope, evolution, diversity, and quality were nearly universally unappreciated. And second, it firmly anchored the mode of religious expression in the sacred space of the synagogue. Because such a large portion of the poety that Zunz passed in review came from unknown sources, Moritz Steinschneider, his disciple, colleague, and friend, was not far off when he quipped that Zunz had written the history of a literature that did not yet exist.33 At the time Steinschneider was cataloguing the older Hebrew books of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and it is no accident that the extent of his assistance is manifest in many a footnote. With the publication of this volume Zunz completed his magisterial portrait of the synagogue as “the expression of Jewish nationality and the guarantor of its religious existence.”34 Critical to that portrait was the antiquity of the institution. In the opening chapter, Zunz drew the biblical paradigm that informed and sustained it. The

31 Elbogen, “Zunz’ Psalmen Studien,” 27, 32. I have also benefitted from an unpublished essay by Maren R. Niehoff, “Aggadah as Poetry: Leopold Zunz, Michael Sachs, und Heinrich Heine,” which she was kind enough to share with me in 1996. 32 De Wette, Commentar über die Psalmen, 18. 33 Ismar Elbogen, “Leopold Zunz zum Gedächtnis,” in Fünfzigster Bericht der Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Berlin, 1936), 25–26. 34 Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge, 454. As for the cumulative evidence of Steinschneider’s help, see the footnotes in Zunz, Die synagogale Poesie on pages 60, 61, 73, 110, 116, 123, 220, 343, 348.

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synagogue now reverberated with the words of the prophets and the psalms, a place where human need encounter divine compassion. In Zunz’s impassioned language: Gradually, prophecy and psalmody came to be personified in the two figures of Moses and David. Just as the former brought God’s word to Israel, so did the latter bear Israel’s word to God. As the former is an unaltered legacy of the past, so the latter remains a firm commitment to the future. After the Temple fell, their combined elements imprinted themselves onto the synagogue; the [Torah] readings transmitted the law and sermons of the prophets while prayer [took on the form] of psalms or verses from psalms.35

Zunz thus projected the synagogue as not only a forum of sacred dialogue but also an institution that minimized the rupture of the Babylonian exile. Israel remained essentially unchanged, despite the loss of sovereignty and temple. In light of its rich legacy of midrash and piyut (liturgical poetry), the synagogue loomed as a force of creative renewal rather than a vestige of religious petrification. Its literature was novel in substance but not essence. Zunz’s conception of the synagogue countered the notion of rupture and subverted the conventional dichotomous distinction of Christian scholars between First Temple Israelites and Second Temple Jews, which Jost had so readily incorporated while writing, ironically, under the title of a history of the Israelites a history of the Jews.36 Once again Zunz’s power of conceptualization had given a sprawling canvas an elegant frame. In the format of a local medieval Memorbuch, with the catalogue of suffering at the beginning followed by the paytanic expressions of grief, Zunz first chronicled the unrelenting assaults on Jewish life from Constantine to Emperor Charles V prior to presenting the liturgical works of pain and protest to which they gave rise.37 The lugubrious tone of the piyutim and penitential prayers (selihot) mirrored the insecure fate of exile and the longing for redemption. Thereafter the analysis of the poetry was unapologetic. Zunz, in fact, translated some 226 piyutim and selihot into a felicitous German that often preserved the rhyme and meter of the original without 35

Ibid., 4–5. Ibid., 5. On the dichotomy, see Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, Lehrbuch der Hebräisch-Jüdischen Archäologie (Leipzig, Vogel, 1814). 3, where the distinction is casually enunciated as a staple of Christian historiography: “Hebrews we call the Israelites in their natural setting before the exile; Jews those in their artificially restored setting after the exile, in which they exhibit a totally different character.” See also the illuminating essays by James Pasto, “W.M.L. De Wette and the Invention of Post-Exilic Judaism,” Jews, Antiquity and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, eds. H. Lapin and D.B. Martin (Bethesda, Md.: University Press of Maryland, 2003), 33–52; and Marc Zvi Brettler, “Judaism in the Hebrew Bible? The Transition from Ancient Israelite Religion to Judaism,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61:3 (1999): 429–47. 37 Zunz, Die synagogale Poesie, 9–58. On the format of a Memorbuch, see Schorsch, From Text to Context, 338–39. 36

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softening their raw emotion and bitter sentiments. History was the key to understanding the poetry: The harsh words in these Jewish psalms, which have yet to cost any Christian his life, are the desperate, bloody cry of hundreds of thousands [of Jews] rising form the earth, and can be absolved only through love and not sneering, through justice and not oppression.38

Any student of medieval Hebrew poetry needs to be a master of biblical Hebrew, the basic language of the genre, especially in Spain. But Zunz was no advocate of Sephardic classicism. He rejected Abraham Ibn Ezra’s widely shared denunciation of Elasar ben Kallir’s impenetrable and ungrammatical Hebrew. Without innovation, a language dies, and for the liturgical poet Hebrew was vitally alive. Zunz contended that grammarians, poets, and Karaites all employed and coined new words and forms. It was only that Kallir outranked them in agility and creativity. Indeed, he ventured to suggest that many a Kallir creation deserved to be incorporated into the vocabulary of contemporary Hebrew. But Zunz went beyond rhetoric. He studied the manner by which the paytanim enriched the language: the rabbinic vocabulary they appropriated and where it came from, the novel grammatical forms they forged and the nomenclature they used when speaking about their enemies. Ever the philologist, he sorted and listed these results in twenty-six extensive tables as an appendix to the book, always citing the piyut and its author where the form, word, or phrase was to be found.39 Nor is it surprising that immediately upon the publication of his book, Zunz submitted an essay to the ZDMG calling for the compilation of a Hebrew dictionary that would for the first time encompass the vocabulary of its entire literary corpus. The biblical lexicon of 1609 by Johannes Buxtorf the elder and especially the Aramaic one of 1640 completed by his son were hopelessly flawed and outdated.40 The lexicographical foundation laid by Zunz in his incomparable supplementary tables enabled him to anticipate the heroic project that would be undertaken by Eliezer ben Yehuda in the final decades of the nineteenth century, and deservedly ben Yehuda, in the long introduction to the first volume of his Milon ha-lashon ha-‘Ivrit (A Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew) in 1909, quoted liberally from Zunz’s prophetic call.41 38 Zunz, Die synagogale Poesie, 58. Within the liturgy, Zunz again distinguished between prophecy and psalmody. The ultimate pedigree of the piyutim, with their midrashic content, derived from prophecy, while the selihot, saturated with the anguish of collective suffering, derived from the psalter. Thus within the liturgy as within the synagogue, the discourse consists of point and counterpoint, ibid., 83, 126–51. 39 Ibid., 117–22, 367–485. 40 Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, 3, 14–30. 41 Eliezer ben Yehuda, A Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew (Hebrew) 8 vols. (New York/London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), 1:19.

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In a public lecture in 1870, Zunz delivered a concise formulation of his vision of the synagogue in which three elements conjoined to interact with God. Israel betokened what was universal and immortal, worship released the soul from human bondage, while poetry kept progress alive by holding the ideal aloft. In historical terms the period of prophetic ascendency declined with the loss of political independence and the Temple. Texts and teachers began to replace the spontaneity of prophetic inspiration. And by the end of the Second Temple period, a worship service was clearly in formation, consisting of a divine message transmitted by the words of a teacher of Torah and the response of a community via biblical psalms sung in unison. With the teacher in the role of the prophet and the precentor in the role of the psalmist, the service resounded in dialogue. In the evocative prose of Zunz: The intermingled tones of this duet, the combination of divine solace with human pleading embedded in the age-old covenant between God and Israel renews itself poetically as the love-bond between bridegroom and bride, between husband and wife, and as such is interwoven into the poetry of the liturgy. How much loftier is this love of the Creator of the world for a people destined for ethical nobility than the love of the gods of mythology for beauty that perishes.42

In retrospect, Zunz’s scholarship bestowed on the Moorish synagogues rising across Europe in his day a theory worthy of their architectural prominence. What is more, it granted the emerging modern rabbi a prophetic patrimony and critical scholarship the task to protect the institution from superstition, mysticism, and fundamentalism. As he declaimed: Poetry without authentic knowledge threatens to become an open road to fantasy and illusion. History offers countless examples that barbarians and murderers can also sing.43

Zunz sounded the same apodictic cautionary note at the end of his first essay on biblical criticism: “As long as poets and priests work for effect, historians and philosophers must not tire of investigating the causes.”44 In accordance with that mandate, the two essays are a frontal assault on a battery of traditional Jewish views of the Bible written in the language of philology. The goal was to date the books and their component parts, not to reconstruct the history of Israelite religion. Without doubt, the Pentateuch for Zunz is neither Mosaic nor unitary, though he falls short of speaking in terms of four distinct underlying sources. Nor does he dwell on the centralization of the cult, which is the distinguishing feature of Deuteronomy and a linchpin of the emerging documentary hypothesis. Yet no book of the Pentateuch escapes his scalpel.

42

Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, 1, 129–30. Ibid., 1, 132. 44 Ibid., 1, 242. 43

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A few samples will suffice to convey a sense of Zunz’s radical independence. Deuteronomy consists of three sections with only the first two plus chapter 28 found in the Temple in 622 B.C.E. by Josiah’s high priest.45 The oldest part of the book is Moses’ alleged closing blessing of Israel in chapter 33, dating from an eighth-century poetic corpus.46 Zunz dates the book of Ezekiel to the last half of the fifth rather than to the early decades of the sixth century B.C.E. as stipulated by the text itself.47 His name was unknown to the author of Chronicles and for that matter to anyone between Nebuchadnezzer and Ezra. Traces of Persian influence and distinctive vocabulary also suggest a late date.48 Most far-reaching, Zunz places Leviticus after Ezekiel, that is, at a Second Temple juncture when an established priesthood and full-blown sacrificial system are in operation.49 Its closing blessings are drawn from Ezekiel and the curses from Deuteronomy.50 In the scapegoat ceremony, Zunz detects again Persian influence.51 Finally, on the basis of a three-stage cultural model of myths, sagas, and historical works, Zunz finds no line of the Pentateuch older than the year 900 B.C.E.52 and gives no historical credence to its narrative portions. Genesis he dates to the eighth century B.C.E.53 and of the eighty-eight chapters from the Song of Moses (Ex 15) to the end of Numbers he declares sweepingly that [they] give the impression of a code put together from poetic and historical works, from laws and priestly institutions by different hands in different settings. Contradictions and repetitions commingle with a host of corrections, lacking all coherence and defying comprehension. [The whole] contains as little genuinely Mosaic material as does [the book of Samuel] Davidic [material].54

Within the context of Zunz’s scholarly career, his outburst on biblical criticism cannot be dismissed as an aberration. The study of the Bible was never far from his research and thought. In public lectures in Berlin in 1852 and 1853 on the subject of Wissenschaft des Judentums, Zunz had already drastically minimized the historicity of the narratives of the Pentateuch and the early books of the Prophets, dating the bulk of them, including Ezekiel and Leviticus, to the Persian period. Not only did he regard their stories as myths and sagas but as he wrote to his writer friend and political compatriot Aron

45

Ibid., 1, 224–25. Ibid., 1, 226. 47 Ibid., 1, 241–42. 48 Ibid., 1, 230, 1:232. 49 Ibid., 1, 237. 50 Ibid., 1, 234–35. 51 Ibid., 1, 236. 52 Ibid., 1, 243. 53 Ibid., 1, 270. 54 Ibid., 1, 262. 46

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David Bernstein in 1871, the only figure in Genesis to possibly pass muster as historical is Nimrod.55 But these views had not yet been disseminated in writing and when they were, they came across without an iota of empathy. The essay was written in a purely deconstructive mode. Bereft of any framework, the parts were never reassembled into a meaningful whole. In his massive studies of midrash and liturgy, by way of contrast, the welter of details was always harnessed to an overarching idea resonant with meaning. On their own, the details were just a cluster of chess pieces in search of a board. It is noteworthy that Zunz submitted his findings at the outset to a nonJewish forum, where after a hiatus of fourteen years he had published from 1870 to 1872 a spate of short philological pieces.56 All spoke for themselves without benefit of packaging. The forum may have militated against conceptual exposition. Was his intent to convince the world of German Bible scholars that Wissenschaft des Judentums had matured sufficiently to reclaim the field as part of its own domain? And to do so, was he prepared to forgo any argument for significance? If so, the Zeitschrift’s refusal to publish the concluding half must have been a doubly painful rebuff. Raw and undigested, Zunz’s foray into biblical criticism troubled even those closest to him. David Kaufmann, destined for scholarly greatness, though in the early 1870s still an aspiring rabbinical student at the Breslau Seminary and a promising Orientalist at the universities of Breslau and Leipzig, pressed Zunz for clarification. By then Kaufmann had gained Zunz’s friendship by dint of his persistence and admiration. Over the course of their correspondence on the essay, Kaufmann admitted that for him Judaism rested on practice, such as the observance of the Sabbath, rather than on the age of its foundational texts. A religion grounded in philology was inherently unstable. But Kaufmann feared that Zunz’s elliptic style and penchant for lists served to undermine faith, as his critics contended.57 At first Zunz insisted that he wrote without ulterior motive. Whether something is true or not was the only question. While he was powerless to effect change among the obscurantists, his whole life attested to his determination to stand up for Jews and Judaism. Beyond protesting his indiffer-

55 See especially the notes to Zunz’s lectures in NLI 4° 792, D33, 15–18. The letter to Bernstein is in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, 1893, 90. On Bernstein, see HaCohen, Reclaiming the Hebrew Bible, 200. 56 Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, 3, 31–79. 57 Markus Brann, “Mitteilungen aus dem Briefwechsel zwischen Zunz und Kaufmann,” Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur, 5 (1902), 159–209; 6 (1903), 120–57. Brann published only a selection from this treasure trove, consisting mainly of Zunz letters. In contrast, Mirjam Thulin, on the basis of exhaustive archival research, has recovered Kaufmann’s voice. See Mirjam Thulin, “Kaufmanns Nachrichtendienst: Ein jüdisches Gelehrtennetzwerk im 19. Jahrhundert” (Ph.D. dissertation, Leipzig University, 2011), 381–84.

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ence to the mounting criticism in the Jewish press, in a letter dated May 27, 1875, Zunz at last touched on his own religious posture. It would be his most revealing word on the matter: What counts in research is less the [validity] of every single assertion than the grounding of the whole. In that regard, I calmly face the opposition to my irrefutable critical results, untroubled by windbags and hypocrites. I have no religion other than defending the human rights of its adherents. I consider the form a religion takes to be solely the outcome of deeds and suffering, to which the existence and human welfare of a nation is bound but not to which it is subordinated or to which it should surrender. Opinions about books do not constitute religion. Moreover, I did not weigh just words, but also identified the origins of laws and institutions, subverted stories filled with legends and demolished a hoary past crafted by the poetic imagination.58

Kaufman chose to back off and accept Zunz’s statement of principle. In his subsequent review of volume I of Zunz’s Gesammelte Schriften, he even saw fit to defend the inclusion of the full essay. The dismay of many was no reason to distort the character of the man. With his own discomfort in tow, Kaufmann wrote: In the portrayal of the man, we must not omit his uncompromising scholarly ethos. This essay is a model of academic propriety. With the calm of a physician, the critical scalpel is here applied to our love for the Old Testament, even though the cut causes pain to the beliefs of many. Here there is no trace of pandering to the masses out of fear of the experts. The research is marked by an austere passion for truth. If it is wrong, scholarship will refute it; the essay is not intended for the market place.59

In the end, despite his ambivalence and reservations, Kaufmann came down on the side of Zunz. The unfettered pursuit of truth lay at the heart of the scholarly enterprise. Some years prior to this exchange, Luzzatto, though a proud traditionalist still the greatest Jewish biblical scholar of his age, had already surmised that Zunz was a free thinker and broke off their relationship. By September 1861, Luzzatto had overcome his qualms and resumed the correspondence, though not without first unburdening himself. Exactly five years before, on September 23, 1856, Zunz had sent Luzzatto a letter in which he briefly disputed Luzzatto’s well-known preference for traditionalists over rationalists. Luzzatto deduced from that critique that Zunz no longer believed the Torah to be revealed and that in fact the truth lay in the hands of the rationalists. What 58

Brann, “Briefwechsel,” 5 (1902), 168–69. Markus Brann (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften von David Kaufmann, 3 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kauffmann, 1908–15), 1, 366–67. Zunz was embarrassed by Kaufmann’s kudos and grateful for the concurrence on principle. He wrote in his customary pithy, taut style: “You lament that so few can bear the free exchange of ideas. Say rather that few can endure the truth. What have the plebians (vulgus) not already deemed to be unshakeable! From Saturn to Pius, from Adam to sacre´ Coeur. Love is extended and preserved, truth, demolished and discarded.” See Brann, “Briefwechsel,” 5 (1902), 169. 59

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grieved Luzzatto further was to learn that Zunz spoke of his much admired adherence to Judaism dismissively as a caprice (Grill). But, alas, Luzzatto railed, Jews will not long survive on the basis of caprice. Better they should die as martyrs than choose to disappear through assimilation. To stanch that attrition, he had devoted his life to firming up faith in the Torah and refusing to help anyone who worked against that goal. Age, however, had muted his dismay: With the passing of many days and my advancing years and ignorant about when I will die, I decided to bare my soul to you and let you know what is in my heart, and then inform you that your wisdom and steadfastness in your holy work are as precious to me now as ever. Moreover, I am ready and willing to assist you again in whatever way I can to increase and enhance Torah, because the voices of the paytanim call out to me from the grave.60

Zunz’s flawed finale then remained without a word of reconciliation. Still, it marked a milestone of sorts because its bluntness broke a barrier. Biblical criticism could no longer be excluded from the workshop of Wissenschaft des Judentum. As he had paved the way in 1818 to subjecting Judaism to historical inquiry, so in 1873–75 he both prompted and epitomized the wrenching application of critical method to the Hebrew Bible that was to come. In Zunz’s wake, a stream grew into a river, though its water rarely had his austere purity of purpose. Religious sensibilities tended to predetermine the outcome.61

60 Eisig Gräber (ed.), S. D. Luzzatto’s Hebräische Briefe, 9 vols. in 2 (Przemysl: Zupnik/ Knoller; Krakou: Josef Fischer, 1882–94), 1377–78. This precious letter was brought to my attention by the essay of Shmuel Vargon, “The Date of Composition of the Book of Job in the Context of S. D. Luzzatto’s Attitude to Biblical Criticism,” JQR 91 (2001), 394. The reference to Zunz’s caprice comes from an essay by Heinrich Heine in 1844 on Ludwig Marcus at his death. Years before both had been members of the short-lived Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden led by Eduard Gans and Zunz. Heine’s generous tribute to Marcus turned into a meditation on the fate of the Verein, in which he singled out Zunz’s heroic steadfastness to its vision of a life of self-sacrifice born of a noble caprice (der grossmütigen Grille seiner Seele) in Heinrich Heines sämtliche Werke, 12 vols., ed Stephan Born (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1886), 9, 194–206, esp. 197–98. The valence Zunz attributed to Luzzatto’s change of heart is evident in his quick and pathos-laden response. Skirting issues of faith, Zunz voiced his hurt at being ignored for more than five years and stressed his fifty years of labor in the field of synagogue liturgy. So much is yet to be done and so few are left to help him. His need of Luzzatto was greater than ever (NLI, ARC, 4° 792, F3–5.8). Had Zunz published his “Bibelkritisches” while Luzzatto was still a live (he died in 1865), it would surely have ruptured their relationship permanently. 61 My intent is not to duplicate the rich surveys by HaCohen, Reclaiming the Hebrew Bible, and Yaacov Shavit and Mordechai Eron, The Hebrew Bible Reborn. I wish merely to demonstrate what has been overlooked, namely, the extent to which Zunz’s hard-hitting essay served as a watershed.

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To be sure, a few intrepid scholars had dared to tread on sacred soil before him. In theory, Jost in the 1820s had fully embraced the prevailing notion of a raft of fragmentary sources underlying the texts of the Torah, in particular Genesis, though he never applied it in his histories.62 Abraham Geiger in his pathbreaking Urschrift und Uebersetzungen der Bibel (1856) had already made a credible case for the early fluidity of the Torah’s text, which allowed for emendations to accommodate a change in sensibilities or imperatives.63 Arguing in the same vein, Julius Popper in 1862 claimed on the basis of the twice told report in Exodus of the construction of the Tabernacle after Sinai that the text of the Torah was susceptible to interpolations both large and small as late as the third century B.C.E.64 With the 1870s the pace quickened. The imminent appearance of Julius Wellhausen’s Geschichte Israels (1878) with its elegant historical construct reinforced much of Zunz’s date. More importantly, it ordered the unfolding details in the value-laden terms of development, a notion that may have been implicit in Zunz’s analysis, but never articulated.65 Heinrich Graetz, back from a trip to the Holy Land and hard at work on the final two volumes of his grand Geschichte der Juden, which actually covered the biblical period, spearheaded the Breslau counterattack. As early as 1874, he staunchly defended the traditional exilic date of Ezekiel and rejected the existence of sundry documentary sources for Genesis.66 In time, he drew a fundamental distinction between the Pentateuch and the rest of Hebrew Scripture, affirming the unity and pre-exilic canonization of the former while subjecting the latter to both lower and higher biblical criticism.67 The Reform response also came from its new institutional base at die Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums founded in 1872, where Geiger during the last two years of his life composed and delivered an elegant introduction to the Hebrew Bible. In the first half devoted largely to lower 62

Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten, 3, 120–36 (Anhang zum zehnten Buche). Abraham Geiger, Urschrift und Uebersetzungen der Bibel, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag Madda, 1928). Also Nahum Sarna, “Abraham Geiger and Biblical Scholarship,” in Sarna, Studies in Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2000), 168–69. 64 Julius Popper, Der biblische Bericht über die Stifthütte (Leipzig: Heinrich Hunger, 1862). 65 On Wellhausen and his forerunners, see Kraus, Geschichte der historischen-kritischen Erforschung, 222–49. 66 [Heinrich Graetz], “Die Echtheit des Buches des Propheten Ezechiel,” MGWJ, 23 (1874), 433–46, 515–25. 67 [Heinrich Graetz], “Die allerneueste Bibelkritik, Wellhausen-Renan,” MGWJ, 35 (1886), 193–204, 233–51. On the extent of Graetz’s oeuvre on the Hebrew Bible, see Reuven Michael, Heinrich Graetz: The Historian of the Jewish People (Hebrew), (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik/The Leo Baeck Institute, 2003), 130–60. 63

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criticism, Geiger marshalled abundant evidence to buttress his thesis about the early textual fluidity of the Torah. In the second, where historical interests prevailed, Geiger read the narratives of Genesis and Exodus conventionally as reflecting the political and religious struggles of the later period in which they were written. It is worthy of special mention, though, that he continued to abide by the prevailing view of the time that the bulk of Leviticus predated Deuteronomy.68 Sigmund Maybaum was Geiger’s colleague at the Lehranstalt and the later author (1894) of a rich biography of Zunz’s early hardships. In two books on the priests (1880) and the prophets (1883), which both employed the word “development” (Entwickelung) in their titles, Maybaum crafted a smooth and edifying evolutionary reconstruction of ancient Judaism.69 In contrast to Geiger, Maybaum believed it was possible to tease out from biblical documents some information about the period they purport to write about. Though he disputed many points of the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis along the way, he incorporated its dichotomy between priest and prophet; A watershed in this development dates to the separation of prophecy from priesthood, that is, with the freeing of thought from form and the spirit from substance. The struggle that breaks out as a result between these two factions that were originally united in our religious life signifies the most important turning point in the religious consciousness of our people.70

Equally consequential, Maybaum called for the application of a developmental model to the study of the Bible, in the same manner in which it had already been deployed to illuminate the emergence of rabbinic Judaism.71 Likewise institutionally based at the new Rabbinerseminar in Berlin, David Hoffmann spoke up immediately and often for the Orthodox against Graf-Wellhausen. Calmly, substantively, and thoroughly, he sought to dismantle the textual underpinnings of the construct. Hoffmann’s command of rabbinic literature facilitated his analysis because many of the textual problems had already drawn the attention of the rabbis and their resolutions were not always unworthy of consideration. The great contribution of Hoffmann to this debate is that he joined it. By so doing he showed that his seminary was not opposed to critical scholarship on dogmatic grounds. Graf-Wellhausen simply failed to pass critical muster.72 68

Geiger, Nachgelassene Schriften, 4, 3–279. For his dating of Leviticus, see 260. Sigmund Maybaum, Die Entwickelung des altisraelitischen Priesterthums (Breslau: Wilhelm Koelner, 1880); idem, Die Entwickelung des israelitischen Prophetenthums (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1883). 70 Idem, Die Entwickelung des Priesterthums, 125–26. 71 Ibid., 124–26. 72 David Hoffmann, Die wichtigsten Instanzen gegen die Graf-Wellhausen Hypothese (Berlin: H. Itzkowski, 1904). 69

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A book of an entirely different order was that by a young Ignaz Goldziher in Budapest, institutionally still unaffiliated and religiously liberal. The intent of Der Mythos bei den Hebräern und seine geschichtliche Entwickelung, which was published in 1876 and translated into English a year later, was to recover the mythological motifs buried beneath the historical narratives of the Pentateuch and the early books of the Prophets. Myths were the language by which the primitive mind made sense of the natural world in which it was set and preceded the emergence of religion. The rage of the second half of the nineteenth century, the study of comparative mythology confidently assumed a universal three-stage evolution of the human mind, a model which Zunz himself had briefly invoked in his discussion of Exodus and Numbers. On a grand scale, Goldziher adroitly wielded his philological tool chest to unearth an astonishing layer of universal nomadic symbols and myths, destined to be recast into historical tales about national heroes and ancestors by the eventual emergence of a collective Israelite consciousness. The upshot of the book was to show that like the ancient Aryans, Greeks, and Romans, the ancient Israelites also possessed a fertile mythological imagination. Along the way, Goldziher averred the composite nature of Genesis, a postexilic date for Leviticus, and more generally the developmental model of Graf in which monotheism evolved out of polytheism. Interestingly, he noted that “Zunz on Leviticus appears to have labored independently of Graf, but arrives at almost the same results.”73 The absence of Graf from Zunz’s sparse footnotes, which are largely restricted to works of biblical criticism from the first half of the century, may explain why he had not yet bought into a rigidly developmental model. The omission, however, points forward as well as backward. The crux of what would soon become the regnant Graf-Wellhausen construction of ancient Israelite religion was its progressive trajectory of ascent over decline. A development scheme could readily be subverted to sustain, wittingly or unwittingly, the long dominant Christian axiom of religious supersession in secular garb. By 1902, when Markus Brann, Graetz’s successor at Breslau, published his revision of volume 2 of Graetz’s history, the air was charged with polemics. The volume dealt with the period from Solomon to Judah Maccabee, and Brann felt obliged to incorporate into one of the excursuses at the end of

73 Ignaz Goldziher, Mythology among the Hebrews (trans.), R. Martineau (London: Longmans Green, 1877), xxvi, 212, 242. The quotation is on 242. On Goldziher’s debts, see Rogerson, Myth in Old Testament Interpretations, 37–39. The book cost Goldziher a sorely needed appointment to the newly founded Landesrabbinerschule in Budapest, a rejection for which he bitterly blamed David Kaufmann. See Alexander Scheiber (ed.), Ignaz Goldziher, Tagebuch (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 86–89.

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the volume much of Graetz’s refutation of Wellhausen-Renan that had appeared in 1886. In the foreword to the book, he justified the inclusion: The conviction is increasingly breaking through that the modern [ideology] of evolution [Evolutionismus] impedes an unprejudiced appreciation of the Bible no less than rationalism once did in its day.74

And it is for this reason that Yehezkel Kaufmann in 1937 would defiantly open the first volume of his monumental challenge to Graf-Wellhausen, Toldot ha-emunah ha-yisraelit, by rejecting the axiomatic assumption that biblical monotheism is the achievement of a gradual evolution out of polytheism. On the contrary, he exclaimed that it was the organic embodiment of a fundamental idea whose embodiment is its development. Israelite monotheism was not an opinion or viewpoint or theological-philosophical dogma, but rather the fundamental idea of a folk culture, the comprehensive world view of a nation. This idea was given in a single transmission, like every expression of a cultural idea. It was a primary and novel intuition.75

It may be said, then, of Zunz’s impolitic essay that it bore a twofold significance in the history of Wissenschaft des Judentums: It heralded the need to confront biblical criticism and cautioned against an automatic acceptance of an evolutionary scheme. In line with that breakthrough and perhaps indebted to it, Kaufmann made of modern biblical scholarship a permanent field of Jewish study by creating a plausible and powerful construction that rested firmly on the documentary hypothesis without turning wholly on the paradigm of development.

74

Heinrich Graetz, Geschichter der Juden, 11 vols. (2nd – 4th ed.; Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1900–09), 2, erste Hälfte, M. Brann (ed.), “Vorwort.” Note 6 includes a large chunk of the 1886 essay against Wellhausen-Renan. 75 Yehezhel Kaufmann, The History of the Israelite Religion, 8 vols. (Hebrew), (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1956–57), 1, 11. On the affinity of Kaufmann’s notion of a spontaneous eruption of monotheism at the time of Moses to the traditional belief in revelation, see Moshe Greenberg, Studies in the Bible and Jewish Thought (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 184. On the evolution of Kaufmann’s work, see Thomas Krapf, Yehezkel Kaufmann: Lebens-und Erkenntisweg zur Theologie der hebräischen Bibel (Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 1990). Sarna had pointed out that Geiger’s non-developmental view of monotheism anticipated Kaufmann’s rejectionist stance. Sarna, “Abraham Geiger and Biblical Scholarship,” 167.

10. In the Shadow of Wellhausen: Heinrich Graetz as a Biblical Critic I It is well known that Heinrich Graetz completed his monumental eleven-volume Geschichte der Juden with the publication of volumes one and two ( in two parts) in three consecutive years from 1874 to 1876.1 Though the last to appear, these three volumes covered the ancient history of Israel from its elusive origins to the Maccabean period. Prior to composing them, Graetz visited Palestine in the company of two friends in March 1872 to fulfill a long-cherished dream.2 Two years later he would write in the forward to volume 1 that to truly understand the text of the Bible, one had first to tour the land with the Bible in hand in order to view its largely unchanged landscape through its own words.3 With these densely packed volumes, Graetz thrust himself into the field of biblical scholarship, which had been the domain of Protestant savants since the Reformation. Less appreciated is the unexpected fact that until his death in 1891 it would remain his primary field of research. Indeed, if we begin our count from 1871 when Graetz published two separate book-length monographs on Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, we may assert that he devoted the last twenty years of his life to the study of the Hebrew Bible.4 As he confided in a letter to his close friend Raphael

1 Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, vols. 1 and 2 (in two parts) (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1874–76). 2 Reuven Michael, Heinrich Graetz: The Historian of the Jewish People (Hebrew), (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik and The Leo Baeck Insitute, 2003), 124–29. 3 Graetz, Geschichte, I (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1908), viii. 4 M.Brann, “Verzeichnis von H. Graetzens Schriften und Abhandlungen,” in Heinrich Graetz: Abhandlungen zu seinem 100. Geburtstage (31. Oktober 1917), ed. M. Brann (Wien/Berlin: R. Löwit Verlag, 1917), 138–60. Two exceptions to this inattention are N. Porges, “Graetz als Exeget,” in ibid., 47–64, and Michael, Heinrich Graetz, 130–60. In his recent insightful study of Graetz, Marcus Pyka does not go beyond Graetz’s Geschichte. To his credit, though, he makes extensive use of his diary to understand the formation of his identity (Marcus Pyka, Jüdische Identität bei Heinrich Graetz [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2009]). Edward Breuer and Chanan Gafni, “Jewish Biblical Scholarship between Tradition and Innovation,” and Jean Louis Ska, “‘The History of Israel:’ Its

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Kirchheim in January 1872, “I have pretty much left off doing history, undertaking no new research. Now I am mainly focusing on biblical exegesis.”5 The sheer quantity of Graetz’s scholarship on the Hebrew Bible during those two decades was massive, with much of it published in the Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, the flagship journal of the Breslau Theological Seminary. Graetz had become its editor in 1869 and would remain at its helm for the next nineteen years.6 In consequence, its pages brimmed with essays both wide-ranging in scope and meticulous in detail that pursued biblical research on many fronts. Thus while the Monatsschrift gave Graetz a handy vehicle for developing and disseminating his views, it was his teaching of Bible at the seminary from 1854 and the University of Breslau as an honorary professor from 1870 that nourished his interest and expertise on the subject. In addition to teaching annually a heavy course load of Talmud, Jewish history, and Hebrew grammar at the seminary, Graetz regularly also taught courses on biblical books from all three divisions of the Hebrew Bible.7 Hence his emergence in the 1870s as a biblical critic was long in formation. Graetz’s biblical scholarship was neither narrow nor repetitive. Produced at a torrid pace, its quantity transmuted into a corpus of expansive scope. He firmly believed, for instance, that lower criticism was the indispensable first step of higher criticism, and a good portion of his grammatical studies and line by line commentaries on Psalms and Proverbs were intended to help him recover a text that made sense. Toward that end he made extensive use of ancient Aramaic, Syriac, and Greek translations in the belief that they preserved an alternate or even better version of the original Hebrew text in question. In reviewing Benjamin Szold’s Hebrew commentary of Job in the Monatsschrift, he chided its author for his uncompromising deference to the Masoretic text. Job’s Hebrew was too corrupt to be illuminated solely by grammatical tools, the principles of biblical parallelism, and poetic figures of speech. Or as he told Szold respectfully in a letter in August 1886, “All

Emergence as an Independent Discipline,” Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. The History of Its Interpretation, 3, pt. 1, ed. M. Saebø (Go˝ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2013), both make short work of Graetz (289, 345). 5 Reuven Michael (ed.), Heinrich Graetz: Tagebuch und Briefe (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1977), 316. 6 Michael, Tagebuch, 292, 435. 7 M. Brann, Geschichte des Jüdisch-Theologischen Seminars in Breslau (Breslau: Th. Schatzky, n.d.), Beilage 2, xix–xxiv; Michael (ed.), Tagebuch, 299–300.

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exegetical tools are useless if we don’t admit that the text is in a faulty state. The primary goal is to get the text right.”8 Put differently, Graetz’s practice of close reading constituted a determined campaign to enhance a sense of appreciation for the plain meaning of the Hebrew Bible. To be sure, many of its textual conundrums derived from a copyist’s slip. Graetz devoted an entire essay to identifying multiple instances of dittography whose absence in ancient translations suggested an inattentive copyist as the source.9 On a deeper level, however, it was the ingrained, venerable predilection for the nonliteral reading by Jews and Christians alike that distorted the authorial intent of the original. The figurative, allegorical mode of interpretation of the New Testament and the Church Fathers no less than that of the rabbis of Midrash and Kabbalah imbued words with ever more far-reaching new meanings without tampering with their orthography. The words of Scripture should not be made to bear an infinity of meanings, and in Graetz’s mind it was incumbent upon Jews to rid their sacred books of figments of imagination devoid of verifiable substance for both internal and external consumption. The misreading of Scripture, Graetz declaimed, readily gave rise to or reinforced prejudice.10 The upshot of Graetz’s preoccupation with lower criticism was a profusion of emendations dispersed throughout his research; they were collected by him and brought out immediately after his death by his former student Wilhelm Bacher, a pillar of rabbinic scholarship at the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary since its founding in 1877. Published in three installments totaling 138 pages, the emendations offered textual corrections to nearly every book of the Bible from Genesis through Proverbs.11 Though Christian exegetes had long sought to improve the plausibility of the text by recourse to emendations, no Jewish Wissenschaft scholar in Germany of his era came close to matching his drive to emend. Graetz generally disdained the emendations of Christian scholars, especially those of Heinrich Ewald, the brilliant but erratic and irascible dean of Semitic languages at Gottingen in the generation prior to Julie Wellhausen, and Wellhausen’s teacher.12 As early as 1861 Graetz summoned Jewish scholars with what he 8 Michael, Tagebuch, 416. The brief review was in the Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (henceforth MGWJ), 35 (1886), 515–16. 9 Graetz, MGWJ, 35 (1886), 219–27, 266–73, 367–76, 504–8, 543–57. 10 Graetz, MGWJ, 27 (1878), 1–13; Graetz, MGWJ, 35 (1886), 220. 11 Emendationes in plerosque Sacrae Scripturae Veteris Testamenti Libros: Ex relicto defuncti auctoris manuscripto [H. Graetz], ed. G. Bacher (3 vols., 1892–94). 12 Graetz, MGWJ, 33 (1884), 146. In 1852 Wilhelm Martin Lebrecht de Wette said of Ewald, “The study of the historical books of the Old Testament in the last few years has advanced impressively. It is sad that Ewald […] has put forth so many conjectures without sufficient support, apparently even unable to generate it” (Lothar Perlitt, “Heinrich Ewald: Der Gelehrte in der Politik,” Theologie in Göttingen, ed. B. Moeller [Göttingen:

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deemed their superior knowledge of Hebrew, the Bible, and the language of the Midrash to place the exegesis of the Bible on a truly scientific footing.13 Underlying Graetz’s unfettered penchant for emendations was his principled rejection of the Tanakh’s Masoretic text as a precise and reliable witness. The issue had long been a bone of contention pitting Christian students of the Hebrew Bible against Jewish ones. To reaffirm the sanctity of the Masoretic text of the Pentateuch in the face of Christian devaluation was at least part of the motivation that inspired Moses Mendelssohn’s pioneering German translation of the Torah in Hebrew characters between 1781 and 1783.14 But by the time Graetz threw himself into biblical scholarship, he no longer held that conviction. His own energetic study of the emergence of the Masoretic editors of the Bible’s received Hebrew text led him to conclude that the Masoretes were actually Karaites and not Rabbanites, that their labors were hobbled by countless internal squabbles, and that, above all, their effort to finalize and annotate the official language in all of its endless details came along much too late in the millennial transmission of the original text. By the time the Masoretes got to work in the ninth and tenth centuries, the text of the Tanakh had been repeatedly damaged by the vicissitudes of Jewish history. Moreover, the belatedness of systems of vocalization and diacritical punctuation, coupled with a less rigorous mode of transmitting the Prophets and the Writings, resulted in a confusing panoply of variant readings. In short, the Masora was not authoritative.15 Interestingly, this was not Graetz’s opinion in 1860 when he published volume 5 of his Geschichte, which dealt with the geonic period. Therein he did

Vandehoeck und Ruprecht, 1987], 174, n. 82). For his part, Wellhausen regarded Ewald as an ingenious scholar but autocratic teacher, whose scholarship actually impeded the advances registered by de Wette and Wilhelm Vatke (Thomas Römer, “‘Higher Criticism’: The Historical and Literary-critical approach,” Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, 3, pt. 1, 412, n. 133). 13 Graetz, MGWJ, 10 (1861), 21. Graetz did accept some of the emendations put forth by Abraham Krochmal. On Galicia as a seedbed for biblical scholarship at midcentury, see Eran Viezel, “Radical Jewish Study of the Masoretic Text during the Enlightenment Period: Joshua Heschel Schorr, Abraham Krochmal and Elimelech Bezredki,” European Journal of Jewish Studies, 10 (2016), 50–78. 14 Edward Breuer, The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies, 1996). 15 Graetz MGWJ, 20 (1871), 1–12, 49–59; 34 (1885), 97–109; 35 (1886), 377–88; 36 (1887), 425–51, 473–97. In 1538 Elias Levita, the leading Hebrew grammarian of his age, had mounted a cogent argument in his Masoret ha-masoret for the late introduction by the Tiberian Masoretes of the symbols for the vowels of the Hebrew alphabet, without garnering the approval of Jewish scholars for another 250 years (see Breuer, Limits of Enlightenment, 43–45).

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no more than mention that the Masoretic enterprise originated with the Karaites.16 But the mid-decades of the century witnessed a spurt of manuscript publications that revealed more clearly the identity, nature, and scope of the Masoretic project. Graetz’s essays followed these developments carefully, and by 1882 when he published the first volume of his commentary to Psalms, he laid out his case at length on the fluidity of the biblical text.17 As a parting shot in 1909 in the fourth revised edition of volume 5, Graetz vigorously reiterated his argument for the need to emend: Unfortunate times and sheer unscrupulousness had already inflicted extensive devastation on the text and the Masora could only attest the state of the text as it appeared at the time […]. [The Masoretes] could only prevent future distortions, but not repair the damage of centuries. Nor did they have any inkling of the ruin effected internally.18

Despite the allegedly deplorable state of the Masoretic text, Graetz to his credit, did formulate rules that helped him identify textual corruptions. In his well-ordered introduction to Psalms, he spelled out some eight types of errors to which copyists were prone.19 Adding to their number was the fact, according to Graetz, that the copyists of Psalms tended to be teachers of young children unsupervised by rabbinic authority.20 Without doubt, however, Graetz exceeded in practice the freedom claimed in theory. His study of Job alone generated nearly three hundred emendations.21 Innumerable emendations were simply conjectures unwarranted by any ancient witness or the appearance of the word elsewhere in the Bible or the parallelism in which the word was set. Graetz bristled at words that defied his comprehension and was often impelled to render them plausible, even if that meant replacing a common word with one that was rare. And many an emendation derived arbitrarily from instances where the received text offended Graetz’s refined sense of biblical Hebrew. The Breslau lore – that when Graetz recited a haftarah in the Seminary synagogue, Frankel would repeat it without emendation – gains a measure of credence when one weighs the abandon with which Graetz emended the Masoretic text.22

16

Graetz, Geschichte, 5 (Magdeburg: Albert Falckenberg, 1860), 207, 552–57. H. Graetz, Kritischer Commentar zu den Psalmen, 2 vols. (Breslau: S. Schottlaender, 1882–83), 1: 97–121. On the history of Masora scholarship, see Emanual Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press/Assen Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1992). 18 H. Graetz, Geschichte, 5 (4th rev. ed.; Leipzig, 1909), 192–93. 19 Graetz, Kritischer Commentar zu den Psalmen, 1, 121–48. 20 Ibid., 145. 21 Porges, “Graetz als Exeget,” 52–53. 22 A striking example of Graetz’s arbitrariness was Daniel 1.4, where he emended “and teach them the writings and language of the Chaldeans” to “the book and language of the Greeks” in order to get the passage to comport with his Maccabean dating of the book 17

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II Graetz plunged into the minefield of higher criticism with similarly purposeful vigor. In the course of preparing, composing, and following up his history of ancient Israel down to the Maccabees, he touched on every book of the Hebrew Bible, often at great length. To convey a sense of his conclusions and the self-confidence with which he propounded them, I think it preferable to treat the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible in reverse order of their arrangement in the canon. Only then will we be able to detect the motivation that drove his dedication and to assess its results. Graetz negotiated the enormous chronological shift from the final volume of his history ending in 1848 to volume 1 beginning in 1500 B.C.E. by focusing first on some of the late books of the Hebrew Bible. Thus in 1871 he came out with extensive studies of Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Daniel and a preliminary one on Esther.23 Since for the historian Graetz, the meaning of a text derived ineluctably from the context in which it was composed, his overriding objective was to date the text he was studying. Thus the evidence in Ecclesiastes of Greek, Latin, and especially Aramaic words convinced Graetz to date the book to the period of Herod. He dismissed the Solomonic attribution of the book’s opening line, contending rather that the king profiled therein was Herod, whom the author cast as a sober philosopher of life equally contemptuous of religious fanaticism and unadulterated hedonism. The author’s ethical intent was to stanch the decadent lifestyle of an age mired in an excess of wealth, materialism, and infidelity.24

(MGWJ, 20 [1871], 338). For confirmation of the Breslau lore, see Mordechai Breuer, Jüdische Orthodoxie im deutschen Reich, 1871–1918 (Frankfurt a.M.: Jüdischer Verlag bei Athenäum, 1986), 370, n. 72. 23 H. Graetz, Kohelet oder salmonische Prediger (Leipzig: C.F. Winter’sche Verlagshandlungen, 1871); Graetz, Shir-ha-Shirim, oder, das salomonische Hohelied (Wien: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1871); Graetz, “Die Kanonizität des Buches Esther in den älteren synagogalen und kirchlichen Literatur,” MGWJ, 20 (1871), 502–11; Graetz, Der historische Hintergrund und die Abfassungszeit des Buches Esther und der Ursprung des Purimfestes,” MGWJ, 35 (1886), 425–42, 473–503, 521–42, reprinted as Der historische Hintergrund des Buches Esther (Krotoschin: B.L. Monasch und Co., 1886). In 1871 Graetz had also published a study of Daniel (see above, note 22), “Beiträge zur Wort- und Sacherklärung des Buches Daniel,” MGWJ, 20 (1871), 337–52, 385–406, 433–49. He regarded the book as a single, coherent work authored by a pietist in the face of the Syrian oppression of Antiochus IV in Judea. Its prophetic assurance that Antiochus would fail offered comfort to his religious resisters and martyrs (see also Graetz, Geschichte, 2, pt. 2, [Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1906], 306–11). 24 Graetz, Kohelet, 15–16.

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To accommodate his late dating of Ecclesiastes, Graetz propounded a three-stage process of canonization that would long shape the discourse on the subject. Canonization required an authoritative body. Graetz identified three: Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Men of the Great Assembly, who collectively canonized the Prophets; that of the sages dominated by the militantly antiRoman followers of Shammai prior to the first rebellion against Rome in 66 C.E., who admitted most of the Writings into the canon; and finally that of the rabbinic assembly that met at Yavneh some twenty years after the destruction of the Second Temple, which sealed the canon with the acceptance of Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs.25 Song of Songs squeezed in under the wire not because it was read as a theological allegory but rather as a didactic poem celebrating the purity of love without sex. Graetz found equally offensive Ernst Renan’s early dating as a secular evocation of physical love in a natural setting or the later rabbinic interpretation of a love that united God and Israel in an eternal bond of fidelity. A serious student of Christian Bible scholarship, Graetz adopted Ewald’s moral reading of the tract and Anton Theodor Hartmann’s detection of Aramaic usage in its language to suggest a post-exilic date: Graetz dated the composition to the years 230–218 B.C.E. when the Tobiad clan rose to power as tax collectors for the Egyptian court in Palestine and Alexandria. He averred, in addition, that the book was the poetic achievement of a single gifted writer who knew the language, literature, and customs of the Hellenistic world. The Hebrew term apiryon (Song 3.9 palanquin) was definitely of Greek origin, despite Ewald’s contortions to come up with an Arabic cognate (Graetz scoffed at the practice to search for possible Arabic cognates to explain difficult Hebrew words). The poet chose Solomon’s opulent court and urban ostentation as the setting for his cautionary tales because they resembled a culture morally unmoored. The lovers he heralded embodied the wholesome simplicity of young folks nurtured in the pristine surroundings of nature.26

25 Graetz, Kohelet, 147–73. On the longevity of Graetz’s canonization thesis, see Marc Zvi Brettler, How to Read the Bible (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2005), 274–75. 26 Graetz, Shir-ha-Shirim, 54 (on Ewald’s preference for Arab cognates). Still Graetz acknowledged Ewald’s pioneering contribution to the understanding of the book: “Despite his contrariness, Ewald [in 1826] opened a new direction for Hebrew exegesis by giving Song of Songs a sound philological basis, against which one can easily identify the failings of his interpretations and correct them” (122).

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What seemed to take Graetz often far afield from the plain meaning of a text was the basic assumption with which he approached the entire corpus of the Writings. To his mind they were all tendentious in character, that is, engendered and forged by a message or point of view other than the surface language used to express it. The task of the historian qua exegete was to strip away the layers of camouflage that concealed the author’s actual intent. Once his philological toolkit suggested a plausible context, however, his fertile imagination weighed in with a trove of supporting details often more speculative than evidentiary.27 A prime example of this strength as weakness was the book of Esther, a work Graetz thought a fiction composed during the Maccabean uprising alongside the book of Daniel. Both were intended to bolster the fainthearted. While Daniel with its affirmation of a belief in life after death and its messianic motifs was aimed at a religious readership, Esther, bereft of even a single reference to God, was aimed at a “secular” one. Proof positive that Esther was written by a resident of Palestine was its language; diaspora Jews did not wield sufficient command of Hebrew to express themselves fluently in their ancestral language.28 But the text brimmed with allusions to its Hellenistic dating. Prior to Alexander one could not speak of Jews as “scattered and dispersed” or “whose laws are different from those of another people” (Esth 3.8). The traits of Ahasuerus were meant to limn the figure of Antiochus, especially his preoccupation with the revenue of his realm. Haman promised to reimburse the royal treasury with 10,000 talents of silver for permission to rid the realm of all its Jews (3.9). And his unexpected fall sought to reassure less pious Jews that God’s benevolence operated even when undetected. Perhaps most farfetched was the terminology and ritual of Purim, which Graetz tied to a widespread Greek practice of celebrating their annual grape harvests with two days of levity. The author’s ploy here was to anchor the annual commemoration of Israel’s rescue from Haman’s vengeance in a captivating ritual. In the end, Graetz’s ingenuity seemed not only to undercut the traditional veneration of Esther’s historicity, but also to erode confidence in the existential purposefulness that he himself attributed to the text.29

27

Graetz, Der historische Hintergrund des Buches Esther, 5, 26–27. Ibid, 10. 29 Ibid, 18–68. 28

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Graet’z two-volume translation and commentary on Psalms, the most critical of its kind to date by a Jewish author, came out in 1881–82. To be sure, Christian scholars of the stature of Wilhelm de Wette, Ewald, and Justus Olshausen had preceded him with pioneering works. Like them he deemed the Masoretic text deeply flawed and attributed none of the Psalms to David. In contrast, the aesthetic sensibility of Herder was missing. Graetz’s approach was primarily historical. The seven genres of Psalms that he identified he ordered into five chronological divisions: pre-exilic, exilic, post-exilic, Maccabean, and post-Maccabean.30 Graetz assigned only ten of these psalms to the Maccabean period31 and psalms 134–136 later still in conjunction with the harvest festival of Sukkot, whose libation ceremony in the Temple allegedly took place at night.32 When a Psalm was filled with references to idolatry, Graetz tended to date it to pre-exilic times when idolatrous beliefs and practices still prevailed throughout the two kingdoms.33 In contrast, psalms saturated with a sense of guilt expressed for Graetz the mood of the exiles in Babylonia.34 No matter how intensely personal, Graetz insisted, the voice of the psalmist was always collective and national.35 Characteristically, he expended a good part of his individual commentary on each psalm, ferreting out tenuous evidence for its dating and often slipping into conjectures readily disputable. More generally, Graetz tried his hand at unraveling the often confounding superscriptions of the psalms and was able to identify some of the musical instruments with which the psalms were rendered in the Temple.36 30

Graetz, Kritischer Commentar zu den Psalmen, 1:39. The translation and commentary of Psalms by Salomon Herxheimer that had come out in 1848 was a work of a different order. Herxheimer was the provincial rabbi (Landesrabbiner) of Anhalt-Bernburg and a moderate reformer who attended all three of the rabbinical conferences of the mid-1840s. His compact edition of Psalms comprised a dexterous balance of popular and critical comments, decidedly conservative in tone. Though he cited the critical studies of nineteenth-century Christian scholars throughout, he did not ignore the insights of medieval Jewish exegetes. He consistently avoided recourse to textual emendations and rejected the dating of any psalms to the Maccabean period. For him the canon had closed by then, making the psalms composed in the period of Nehemiah and Malachi the latest in the Psalter. Like Mendelssohn, he adhered to the Masoretic text and translated accordingly. In short, Graetz’s secular tone, historical bent, and unfettered treatment of the Hebrew text were quite alien to Herxheimer’s temperament (Salomon Herxheimer, Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim: Die vier und zwanzig Buecher, vol. 4 [Berlin: Lewent, 1848], vi., 32, 36, 37, 41, 131, 159). 31 Graetz, Kritischer Commentar zu den Psalmen, 1:45. 32 Ibid, 1, 49; 2, 658–59. 33 Ibid, 1, 158, 161, 164, 186. 34 Ibid, 1, 41, 167, 188. 35 Ibid, 1, 6–7, 15. 36 Ibid, 1, 78–95.

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The high water mark of the literature in the pre-exilic era for Graetz was the reign of Hezekiah in Jerusalem at the end of the eighth century, who cleansed the Temple of all idolatry and restored the Levites to oversee its cult. Israel’s monotheistic faith flourished briefly again as Isaiah inspired his royal prote´ge´, endowed with a pious disposition and poetic talent, to compose personal and royal psalms that were deeply religious.37 True to his professional ethos, Graetz grappled with the historical question of who wrote the Psalter and assembled a large body of circumstantial evidence to identify an organized cadre of devout Levites. Landless victims of poverty and abuse, they embodied the ascetic social ideal of Israelite religion. Graetz proposed that they stood behind the oft-repeated vague nomenclature of anavim, evyonim, and aniyim (those who are humble and impoverished) that recurs in the literature of the Prophets and Psalms. Often organized as disciples of prophets, they recorded and transmitted their messages and composed and put to music psalms for rendition in the Temple. On occasion a prophet such as Jeremiah would arise in dark times from their midst. Inured to hardship and setbacks, they sustained after 586 B.C.E the allegiance of the exiles to God, his prophets, and their ancestral homeland. Not surprisingly, the book of Job came from their circle as well. In sum, Israel owed its survival to an identifiable and idealistic subset of Levites, who transformed Judaism in the face of adversity as they turned prophecy into a literary force.38 Graetz did not exercise any greater constraint when it came to analyzing the division of the Prophets. His defense of the traditional dating of the prophet Ezekiel to the Babylonian exile and the unity of his literary legacy was indeed atypical of Graetz’s freewheeling analytic scalpel. His 1874 essay on the authenticity of the book was a repudiation of Zunz’s belated foray into biblical criticism, in which he had reassigned Ezekiel to the Persian period between 440 and 400 B.C.E., rather than the scholarship of Wellhausen. Graetz argued that Ezekiel contained no trace of Persian content, that the imagery of the book betrayed Assyrian-Babylonian influence and not Persian, and that the apocalyptic battle between Gog and Magog echoed the eruption of the Scythian terror. Entirely implausible for Graetz was dating Ezekiel after Ezra, whose revolutionary impact left no trace on him.39 In

37

Ibid, 1, 28–30; Graetz, Geschichte, 2., pt. 1 (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1902), 439–46. Ibid, 1, 24–37. More fully, Graetz, “Die Ebjoniten des alten Testaments,” MGWJ, 18 (1869), 1–20, 49–71, 115–16 (on Jeremiah, 18, on Job, 70). The weakness of this constructive essay was that Graetz failed to cite a single instance where evyonim are identified as Levites. The crux of his identification rested on their landless status, which doomed them to poverty. 39 H. Graetz, “Die Echtheit des Buches Ezekiel,” MGWJ, 23 (1874), 433–46, 515–25. On Zunz, see Ismar Schorsch, “Leopold Zunz on the Hebrew Bible,” JQR 102.3 (2012), 445–46. 38

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contrast to Zunz’s laser-like philological scrutiny of Ezekiel’s language, Graetz’s argument tended to be largely contextual and comparative. Overall, Graetz divided the three major and twelve minor literary prophets of the Hebrew Bible into three chronological periods. In the process many a prophetic book was disassembled into blocs and fragments that derived from different figures at different times. Thus Graetz posited that the book of Hosea contained the prophecies of two distinct prophets by that name separated by decades. The first three chapters of the book, rich in figurative language, preserved a cutting indictment of the Northern Kingdom during the prosperous reign of Jeroboam II in the first half of the eighth century B.C.E., while the last eleven chapters emanated from a prophet distressed by the looming destruction of the realm by Assyria in 722.40 Similarly, Graetz identified the words of at least three different prophets bearing the name Zechariah. In fact, the final chapter of the book seemed to date from sometime after Ezra and constituted yet a fourth separate prophecy reflecting a Persian assault on Jerusalem in the reign of Artaxerxes III, unnoticed by historians until Graetz proudly made the connection.41 Even the book of Isaiah did not escape a measure of source-critical analysis by Graetz. He accepted the view that had come to prevail among Jewish scholars since Nachman Krochmal, despite the strident opposition of Samuel David Luzzatto, that chapters 40 through 66 were the stirring language of imminent redemption from captivity on foreign soil and the uncompromising repudiation of polytheism in the form of Zoroastrianism by a prophet in exile, whom scholars haplessly named simply Second Isaiah. But the exceptional poetry of his words and the power of his ideas invigorated faith in the days of despair. In keeping with his own deep reserve of national feelings and in defiance of Christian typology, Graetz understood Second Isaiah’s arresting image of a suffering servant to stand not for a single individual but for the entire nation of Israel. The oppression of Israel in exile served to atone for the sins of the rest of humanity, even as restoration to its homeland epitomized the innate capacity of national renewal.42 Moreover, the convergence of his40

Graetz, Geschichte, 2, pt. 1, 85–88, 396–99. Graetz, “Biblical Studies: The Last Chapter of Zecharia,” JQR, 3 (1891), 208–19; Graetz Geschichte, 2, pt. 1, 398–99. 42 Graetz, Geschichte, 2, pt. 2, 57. Graetz, “Die Verjüngung des jüdischen Stammes,” Jahrbuch für Israeliten, eds. J. Wertheimer and L. Kompert, 10 (1864), 1–13. It was Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem (1862) that inspired Graetz to forge a striking historical analogy to Hess’s proto-Zionist argument for Jewish national renewal. The Orthodox quickly denounced Graetz’s depiction of Second Isaiah as a violent departure from Judaism’s fundamental belief in the coming of a single Davidic redeemer. In Vienna, the government prosecuted Graetz’s essay for defaming both Orthodox Judaism and the Catholic Church and fined Leopold Kompert, as editor of the yearbook published in Vienna in which it appeared, the nominal sum of 40 gulden for failing to carry out his editorial duties prop41

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tory with prophecy in the triumph of Cyrus and the fall of Babylonia cured Israel of the temptation to resume any idolatrous practice. The postexilic prophets no longer inveighed against idolatry.43 Yet what remained of First Isaiah was not entirely his own either. Graetz determined that chapters 13–14 preserved the consolations of another nameless exilic prophet, whereas chapters 24–27 coincided with the preaching of Zephaniah and predated Jeremiah. Finally, Graetz removed chapters 34–35 from the corpus of First Isaiah. Dissimilar and unrelated, these two chapters were not of the same provenance, with 35 being a misplaced integral part of Second Isaiah and 34 a prophecy uttered shortly after the exiles were permitted to return to their homeland. Arbitrarily, Graetz emended the reference in Is 34.16 from “the scroll (sefer) of the Lord” to “the scroll of Jeremiah,” thereby urging the prophet’s listeners to confirm for themselves the degree to which his condemnation of Edom and other nations came true.44 Graetz’s obsession with the dating of Psalms and Prophets was not an end in itself. Once dated, a passage, poem, or prophecy could be assigned to its appropriate place in his narrative as a vital fragment of social history. Unhurried and meticulous, his history of the biblical period down to the Maccabees incorporated its literature as well as its history. Often quoted at length, the literature provided not only abundant evidence of ancient Israel’s religious creativity and theological distinctiveness but also rich material to depict the social fabric, public morality, and fidelity (or infidelity) to its religious mission. The unequalled sweep, specificity, and drama of Graetz’ work produced a grand history and literature of ancient Israel that largely adhered to its biblical sources. The final volume of Graetz’s biblical history came out in 1876. Two years later it would forever be overshadowed by the publication of Wellhausen’s Geschichte Israels. Whereas Graetz had made his study of the sources subordinate to his narrative, Wellhausen made the eventual construction of his historical superstructure subordinate to his laser-like study of the sources, as the altered title of the 1883 second edition of his book Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels underscored.45 In 1886 Graetz countered with a blistering erly. In the ensuing intra-Jewish war of words, Esriel Hildesheimer, at the time rabbi in Eisenstadt, issued a proclamation signed by 166 rabbis declaring Graetz’s view heretical (see Josef Meisel, Heinrich Graetz [Berlin: Louis Lamm, 1917], 83–86; also Michael, Heinrich Graetz, 103–5). On the controversy over Second Isaiah among Jewish scholars, see Shmuel Vargon, S.D. Luzzatto: Moderate Criticism in Biblical Exegesis (Hebrew) (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2013), 285–307. 43 Graetz, Geschichte, 2, pt. 2, 65; Graetz, “Die Auslegung und der historische Hintergrund der Weissagung in Jesaja, Kap. 24–27,” MGWJ, 35 (1886), 3. 44 Graetz, “Die Auslegung,” 1–23, Graetz, “Isaiah 34 and 35,” JQR, 4.1 (1892), 1–8. 45 Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, 2nd ed. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1883). On Wellhausen, see Moshe Weinfeld, “The Scholarship of Julius Wellhausen: A New

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review in the Monatsschrift, a good part of which was reprinted later in volume 2, part 1 of his 1902 revised second edition of his biblical history.46 That thirty-one-page endnote (in small print) titled “Composition der Thora oder des Pentateuchs” became the official Breslau Seminary rejection of the documentary hypothesis. Graetz’s second effort, no less antagonistic than his first, was more systematic and fundamental. Opening with an instructive historical survey of biblical criticism, Graetz scoffed at the claim that divergent names for God in Genesis and the early chapters of Exodus implied discrete sources. He reviled the mosaic of sources posited by Christian scholars on the basis of the “disordered” nomenclature of God’s names47 and rejected the contention that variations in style and language attested different sources.48 More broadly, Graetz posited that the narrative unit that joined Genesis with Exodus was punctuated with didactic purpose, which permitted him to exercise his homiletic prowess. Thus once Jacob and Esau were briefly reunited after years of estrangement, they went their separate ways: Esau to a settled life of comfort in Seir or Edom and Jacob to end his days in Egypt, where hardship would steel his descendants for the task of statehood in a land of their own. To tear such stories apart into different sources was an act of ethical and aesthetic obtuseness.49 Creative exegesis also enabled Graetz to affirm the order, unity, and early dating of the last third of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. He denounced a post-exilic date for Leviticus and deftly gathered evidence from Hosea (8.12 with an emendation), Micah, and Isaiah to suggest that these literary prophets were already aware of the final four books of the Pentateuch, as had Prussia’s leading conservative Bible critic, Ernest Wilhelm Hengstenberg, already contended in 1836.50 Nor would he countenance the bias that the Bible’s embrace of codified law was a product of a religion estranged from nature. Finally, he rebutted Wellhausen’s contempt for the ritual religion of the Priestly Code by heralding the lofty ethics and humanity of chapter 19 of

Evaluation on the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of his Book, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels” (Hebrew), in Yearbook for Bible and the Ancient Near East 20 (1980), 62–93; Moshe Weinfeld, The Place of the Law in the Religion of Ancient Israel (Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 204) (I am indebted to Prof. Benjamin D. Sommer for this reference); and Steven Weitzman, The Origin of the Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 101–38. 46 Graetz, “Die allerneueste Bibelkritik Wellhausen-Renan,” MGWJ, 35 (1886), 193–204, 235–51; Graetz, Geschichte, 2, pt. 1, 408–39. 47 Graetz, Geschichte, 2, pt. 1:411. 48 Ibid, 2, pt. 1, 410–14. 49 Ibid, 2, pt. 1, 219. 50 Ibid, 2, pt. 1, 424–25; Römer, “Higher Criticism,” 402.

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Leviticus, which veritably constituted the moral bedrock of European civilization.51 Deuteronomy for Graetz was not the first but the last of the books of the Pentateuch and definitely presupposed Leviticus. Its general thrust was to imbue ritual with ethics, even as it filled in legal gaps left by other corpora. Undoubtedly, it was Deuteronomy that was uncovered in the Temple in the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign in Judah that triggered his national religious form.52 But the year in which it was read to the king and the public was not necessarily the year in which it had been written. To defend the Mosaic authorship of the entire Pentateuch, Graetz drew a sharp distinction between when the book was written and when it was revealed to the public. As long as it was not disseminated publicly by priest or prophets, who transmitted and guarded the Torah, the public remained oblivious of its existence and contents. According to Graetz’s reconstruction, it was not until the failed reign of Ahaz in Judah (739–725 B.C.E.) that circles of priests and prophets (Graetz was not sure) began to circulate the Torah publicly in order to stiffen the resolve of its subjects in the face of royal decadence and incompetence. Until then people had come to know only snippets of the Torah.53 The distinction between composition and publication enabled Graetz to preserve the Mosaic authorship of the Torah while giving a nod to its allegedly belated evidentiary acknowledgement. Despite his hostility to Wellhausen and his defense of the sanctity of the Torah, Graetz did not rule out critical scholarship on principle. In the foreword to volume I, he conspicuously validated its usage: “Far from losing, biblical history gains certainty, grandeur and wondrousness through a critical approach […]. Critical scholarship accentuates impressively the unique character of the nation, its teaching, history and poetry and explains effectively how this legacy deeply influenced the education of humanity.”54 What separated the two men was where they chose to start their work. Wellhausen wrote history from the bottom up after prolonged consideration of all relevant sources. Graetz, in contrast, wrote his history from the top down, treating his biblical narrative as historicity in need of an occasional correction or enhancement. Graetz recognized the importance of distinguishing between the surface and deeper meaning of a text, called in his day tendency criticism, when it came to the book of Chronicles, for example, or other Second Temple books, but dogmatically refused to apply the insight to the Torah, with the result that the critical scholarship of his extensive endnotes on the Torah was rather small scale. With the Torah, he chose to assume that 51

Ibid, 2, pt. 1, 426–27. Ibid, 2, pt. 1, 61, n. 3, 424. 53 Ibid, 2, pt. 1, 51–52, 144–45. 54 Ibid, 2, pt. 1, ix–x. 52

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the event and the witness were most often coterminous and hence congruent and contested the proposition that a bevy of later witnesses existed with an alternative point of view that threw the text’s historicity into question.55 Graetz began his narrative with the pastoral tribes of Israel crossing the Jordan River “on a sunny spring day,” highlighting the turning point that he deemed to be the onset of national consciousness.56 He introduced the historical episodes of Genesis and Exodus as flashbacks of collective memory and rendered them with as few miracles as possible.57 Along the way he paused infrequently for theological animadversions. Thus prophecy turned on the capacity of exceptional individuals to conceive truths beyond the senses.58 The revelation of Sinai for Graetz was an experience of sublimity mediated rationally that conveyed the lodestone of conscience as well as the essence of Judaism in language accessible to all.59 Graetz disputed the idea that Judaism evolved. The patriarchs had already grasped its nature fully. What did occur over time was an erosion in the loyalty to that revelation, leaving its transmission in the hands of a faithful remnant.60 Upon completing Joshua’s partial conquest of Canaan, Graetz interrupted his narrative to break forth into a lengthy celebration of the uniqueness of the land. His euphoric tone suggested that of an unadulterated romantic. The land’s captivating beauty, stunning topographic diversity, range of climate, rich fertility, and inescapable compactness were immovable factors destined to impinge on the religion and culture of its fortunate inhabitants. Graetz was convinced that Judaism’s spiritual religion, like its exquisite nature poetry, emerged from the Land of Israel, whose geographic features encourage selfrestraint, balance, and order. Clearly the distillation of his 1872 trip to Palestine, his glowing tribute to the perfect suitability of the land to Israel’s moral mission, gave voice to his deep-seated nationalist feelings.61 Though not an accomplished theologian, Graetz had made one seminal contribution to the field back in 1846, when he dared to proclaim publicly that the essence of monotheism was its idea of transcendence rather that its numerical reduction of many gods to one God. Unlike paganism, which venerated its gods as immanent forces of nature susceptible to a ritual based on images, the God of Judaism reigned supremely and omnipotently over and above nature, inaccessible to sight and thus hostile to a worship of im-

55

Ibid, 2, pt. 2, 384–99; the date for Chronicles, 390. Ibid, 2, pt. 1, 1. 57 Ibid, 2, pt. 1, 6, 18, 30. 58 Ibid, 2, pt. 1, 20. 59 Ibid, 2, pt. 1, 35–43. 60 Ibid, 2, pt. 1, 7, n. 3, 23, n. 1. 61 Ibid, 2, pt. 1, 66–79. “The religion of spirit like genuine nature poetry sprang from the soil of this holy land” (78). 56

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ages. Graetz’s bold formulation unsettled Zacharias Frankel sufficiently to exercise his editorial discretion in a long critical note. Graetz had failed to grasp that the concept of God’s oneness included God’s transcendence.62 By the 1870s Graetz’s rhetoric had shifted from transcendence to ethics. It was now only a sense of duty and reverence for law as indispensable components of monotheism that could domesticate the beastly impulses of humanity and compelled Judaism to elevate morality over aesthetics.63 Accordingly in his Geschichte and related biblical essays, the idea of God’s transcendence as the essential mark of monotheism made only an occasional appearance.64 But given its originality, it was destined to be revived – in 1919 by Hermann Cohen in his Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, and in the 1930s by Yehezkel Kaufmann in his emerging Toldot ha-emunah ha-Yisraelit.65 It is indeed noteworthy that in 1969, Hans-Joachim Kraus, professor at the University of Hamburg, in the second revised edition of his masterful survey of the history of biblical criticism since the Reformation, allotted Graetz a lengthy note in which he (erroneously) singled out Graetz’s 1846 God-concept as the fundamental and formative idea of his later eleven-volume history. Although on the level of detail there was much to criticize in Graetz’s work, Kraus credited its God-idea as rendering a unique contribu-

62 Heinrich Graetz, The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays (trans., ed. and introd.), I. Schorsch (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1975), 66–71, 304–5. To be sure, Graetz’s stress on God’s transcendence resembled Hegel’s final negative critique of God’s sublimity and inaccessibility in Judaism, except that for Graetz this apartness from and supremacy over nature epitomized God’s absolute sovereignty (see Emil L. Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought [Boston: Beacon Press, 1967], 117–59). 63 Graetz, Geschichte, 1, 7. See also Meisel, Heinrich Graetz, 88–91. Pyka agrees that “Sittlichkeit als Wessen des Judentums” was Graetz’s final position (Jüdische Identität, 357–70). 64 Graetz, Geschichte, 1, 77, 105. 65 Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Leipzig: Gustav Fock, 1919), 41–67; Cohen, “Graetzens Philosophie der jüdischen Geschichte,” Hermann Cohens jüdische Schriften, 3 vols. (Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke, 1924), 3, 203–20. Writing in 1917 in honor of the hundredth anniversary of Graetz’s birth, Cohen found Graetz’s 1846 assertion of the primacy of transcendence ill-considered and preferred Frankel’s more inclusive formulation of monotheism (206–7). For Kaufmann on transcendence, see Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel, translated and abridged by Moshe Greenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 21–23, 60. An alternate genealogy of Kaufmann’s conception of monotheism may be found in Benjamin D. Sommer, “Yehezkel Kaufmann and Recent Scholarship,” in Yehezhel Kaufmann and the Reinvention of Jewish Biblical Scholarship, eds. J. Y. Jindo, B.D. Sommer, and T. Stauble (Fribourg: Academic Press, 2017), 205–6. I thank Prof. Sommer for sharing his illuminating essay with me.

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tion to the field of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century.66 As for the rest of Graetz’s pulsating narrative, I deem it to be a maximalist reading of the biblical text as history never to be replicated in its fidelity, specificity, and exuberance. An informed review of Graetz’s first volume of biblical history by Emil Kautsch in the first year of the Theologische Literaurzeitung, inspired by Albrecht Ritschl and founded by Emil Schürer and Adolf Harnack in 1876, revealed the chasm that separated Graetz from the guild of Protestant scholars on the Hebrew Bible. Trained in Leipzig by Franz Delitzsch and Heinrich Fleischer, Kautsch was a thirty-five-year-old Orientalist in Basel with a deep interest in the grammar and text of the Hebrew Bible. He judged Graetz to have utterly failed to meet the standards that govern the current practice of biblical scholarship and made light of the scholarly value of a quick trip to Palestine. According to Kautsch, what Graetz meant by critical scholarship was no more than a retelling of the narrative of the Bible on the basis of dispersed related texts, the avoidance of speculative hypotheses, and a series of noteworthy textual emendations. To his credit, he granted, Graetz did muster some useful historical material in his endnotes.67 Kautsch faulted Graetz for not taking up important questions such as the origins of the Hebrew tribes and the relationship of their language to that of the Canaanites and other nations of the ancient Near East. Graetz also consistently avoided scrutinizing his sources critically. He made no distinction between historical and mythical material, and when using a sample of the latter, he usually introduced it with a verbal sleight of hand indicating his own doubts about its historical veracity. Above all, Kautsch censored him for regarding the different names of God as a wild theory rather than a long-established key to identifying different sources that underlay the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch. Finally, Kautsch criticized Graetz for minimizing the ritual and sacrificial system of the Sinaitic revelation. To sanitize Moses’ religion as primarily if not solely a quest for justice and righteousness required Graetz to read the Prophets into the legacy of Moses. Despite the quantity of Graetz’s biblical scholarship, it failed to match the penetrating cogency of the contribution of Abraham Geiger to the field. Indeed with the publication of his Urschrift und Uebersetzungen der Bibel in Ihrer Abhängigheit von der inneren Entwickelung des Judentums in 1857, Geiger preceded Graetz in challenging the reliability of the Masoretic text. More66 Hans-Joachim Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments, 2nd ed. (Neukirchen-VLuyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1969), 273–74. The note on Graetz is missing from the first edition (1956). 67 Die theologische Literaturzeitung I (1876), cols. 664–66. On the history of this major organ of Protestant Scholarship, see Gerhard Karpp, Die theologische Literaturzeitung (Cologne: Greven, 1978).

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over as the title of the book asserts, textual variants were not random vestiges of external events but evidence of conscious acts of evolving spiritual sensibilities. Working comparatively with ancient versions and translations, Geiger boldly contended that in an early stage of transmission the altering or eliminating of passages that had been rendered troublesome by time was entirely licit because the underlying consonantal text remained fluid. In 1868 Theodor No˝ldeke, Germany’s outstanding Orientalist, declared Geiger’s book a work of “epoch making” proportions.68 In 1872 with the founding in Berlin of his own rabbinical seminary, Geiger embedded biblical criticism in the heart of its curriculum with a two-year cycle of tightly crafted and richly illustrated lectures on lower and higher criticism that immeasurably deepened and expanded his Urschrift.69 When death cut short his seminal career two years later, Geiger had nearly completed a legacy of untold power and promise. In sum, if Graetz’s fertile intuition was a force of nature to be admired but not readily duplicated, Geiger’s rigorous use of sophisticated methodology was a skill that could be emulated.

III Like Geiger, Graetz worked until his death. Kautsch’s criticism neither halted nor modified his biblical studies. 1891, the year of his death, was still marked by the appearance of four short journal essays. The question to be asked is not whether Graetz could pass muster as a biblical critic if he fell short of Wellhausen or Geiger. With his attack on the reliability of the work of the Masoretes, his readiness to emend biblical texts, his dating of biblical books and psalms, his division of prophetic books into multiple authors, and his zeal to contextualize, Graetz certainly broke free of traditional Ashkenazi constraints on many fronts. The appropriate question to ponder is this: what motivated him to devote twenty years to a sacred field as yet seldom furrowed by Jewish plowshares? Why the urgency to break new ground? A number of crucial factors converged to fuel Graetz’s zeal. Most generally, he was determined to reclaim the Hebrew Bible as a legitimate concern

68

Richard D. Weis, “‘Lower Criticism’: Studies in the Masoretic Text and Ancient Versions of the Old Testament as Means of Textual Criticism,” Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, vol. 3, pt. 1, 350–58. 69 Abraham Geiger, “Einleitung in die biblischen Schriften,” Nachgelassene Schriften, 5 vols., ed. Ludwig Geiger (Berlin, 1875–76), 4, 3–279; Nahum M. Sarna, “Abraham Geiger and Biblical Scholarship,” Sarna, Studies in Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2000), 161–72.

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for Jewish scholarship.70 In 1818, when Zunz had brilliantly conceptualized the gamut of Wissenschaft des Judentums, he defined it as a largely rabbinic and medieval discipline. Given the prominence of the study of the Hebrew Bible in the theological faculty of Prussian universities, he implicitly abdicated its study to Protestant scholarship. Pride and truth motivated Graetz to rectify the understandable omission. The Bible was the foundational text of Judaism and no scholars were more qualified to fathom its meaning than Jews with the uninterrupted tradition of Jewish biblical exegesis. More specifically, Graetz was a staunch advocate for the restoration of the Bible’s plain meaning (peshat) to the heart of the enterprise. Many centuries of allegorical interpretation by both Jews and Christians had hopelessly obscured and distorted any semblance of authorial intent. Toward its recovery Graetz employed, in addition to the best philological tools of his day, a relentless effort to identify the author’s time and place. But be it noted that in so doing Graetz treated Scripture as history, a composite of human agency and external influence. To preserve the religious if not revelatory tenor of his biblical texts, Graetz constantly imputed to them, even to the Song of Songs, a pervasive ethical message. Though increasingly secular in spirit, Graetz’s study of the Bible was thoroughly Jewish, yielding precious moments for Graetz to break out in exultation. He was also eager to correct Christian misreadings of a passage due to ignorance or ill-will that defaced the image of Judaism. Thus verses 6–19 of Psalm 109 were not the bitter words of the psalmist wishing the worst on his enemies but rather the slander of his accusers against the psalmist. The passage was not a horrifying instance of Jewish misanthropy.71 True, the goal to defend Judaism readily exposed Graetz’s scholarship to the slippery slope of apologetics, where the outcome of research tended to be predetermined by non-scholarly considerations. Ideological combat is not the ideal setting for value-free scholarship. But given the disdain and hostility by which Judaism found itself assaulted, Jewish scholarship was often called upon to serve as an instrument of anti-defamation. The late dating of books such as Ecclesiastes, Esther, and Song of Songs by Graetz was driven in part by his desire to show that the period of the Second Commonwealth had not been desiccated by a surfeit of law and ritual. The very term Spätjudentum that Christian scholars loosely applied to

70

I thank Prof. Sommer for directing my attention to his recent essay “Reclaiming the Bible as Jewish Book: The Legacy of Three Conservative Scholars (Yochanan Muffs, Moshe Greenberg and Jacob Milgrom),” Zeramim.org, vol. 1, issue 3. 71 H. Graetz, “Der Gedankeninhalt des Psalmes 109,” MGWJ, 27 (1878), 1–13.

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the post-exilic period clearly implied a Judaism in senescence.72 In defiance, Graetz avowed that Hebrew continued to be a living language in which gifted Jews could write great literature, and his late date for the final stage of the canonization process (90 C.E.) of the Tanakh meant that a few of their works could even gain entry into the canon. The full import of the concept Spätjudentum, if not yet the term itself, was unabashedly enunciated in 1843 by Heinrich Ewald in the title of his threevolume Geschichte des Volkes Israel bis Christus, that is, the history of the Jewish people destined to come to an irreversible end with the appearance of the Christian Messiah. In the opening lines of his book, Ewald spelled out the significance of the periodization: The history of the ancient people Israel lies far behind us as a totally closed chapter of human events. The last page of its book was written 1800 years ago. And those capable of reading it or better know how to decipher its barely legible lines have no expectation that the future will [produce] yet a new page to bring this segment of history to a close.73

It is above all against this entrenched supersessionist perspective that Graetz wrote his biblical history. The resonant opening lines of his introduction to volume I took direct aim at Ewald and not Wellhausen: We are about to narrate the story of a people’s birth, a people that stems from ancient times, endowed with stubborn perseverance, that since its entrance on the stage of history more than 3000 years ago, has never departed. This people is therefore both old and young. While from its countenance the lines of hoary antiquity cannot be effaced, the face is as fresh and youthful as if born yesterday.74

The extraordinary survival of the Jewish people, the unbroken continuity of its endurance and creativity, then, was both the source and repudiation of the intolerant German view that once a nation had played its role in the human drama, its obligation was to exit from the stage. For the Jews, according to

72 The term Spätjudentum is of Christian provenance, intended to serve as a chronological moniker, but laden with theological bias. Its history has yet to be studied. The term appears already in Vatke’s Biblical Theology (1835), though his treatment of Judaism in the Greco-Roman period remains free of decadence (Römer, “Higher Criticism”, 409–10). 73 Heinrich Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel bis Christus, 3 vols. (Göttingen: in der Dieterich’schen Buchhandlung, 1843–52), 1, 3. By the third edition (Göttingen: Dieterichs Buchhandlung, 1864–68), the title had been shortened to Geschichte des Volkes Israel. 74 Graetz, Geschichte, 1, xviii. In striking contrast to Graetz, further east the appreciation of Ewald’s history among Jewish intellectuals was far more positive. In the first volume of Ahad Ha’Am’s cultural journal Ha-Shiloach, Shimon Bernfeld, who was to write therein extensively and critically about the practice of Jewish scholarship in Germany, waxed eloquent about what he deemed Ewald’s deeply learned, empathetic treatment of Israel’s ancient history and literature down to the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. (Shimon Bernfeld, “Ernest Renan,” Ha-Shiloach 1 [1897], 25, 103, 105).

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Graetz, the Bible was never a closed book. By constantly nurturing their sense of mission, it enabled them to surmount the fate of a persecuted minority. But the Christian paradigm was not yet susceptible to modification. In 1881 Wellhausen, in a compact and forceful essay on the history of ancient Israel in the Encyclopedia Britannica, concluded with a gratuitous prediction about the inevitable demise of Judaism after emancipation.75 Regardless of that German Protestant intransigence, Graetz had succeeded in making the Hebrew Bible part of Jewish scholarship to the lasting benefit of Jewish consciousness and the study of the Bible.76

75

Reprinted in Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 548. 76 Nor would that intransigence give way during the four decades from Graetz’s death to the Nazi seizure of power. The asymmetrical discourse between Protestant and Jewish scholars on the Hebrew Bible and ancient Judaism remained an unaltered fixture of German academic life (see Christian Wiese, “Ein ‘Schrei ins Leere’? Die Wissenschaft des Judentums und ihre Auseinandersetzung mit protestantischer Theologie und ihren Judentumsbildern als Kontext des Werkes Benno Jacobs,” in Die Exegese hat das erste Wort: Beiträge zu leben und Werk Benno Jacobs, eds. Walter Jacob and Almuth Jürgensen [Stuttgart: Calwer, 2002], 49–69).

11. Coming to Terms with Biblical Criticism I Silent revolutions, without barricades or bloodshed, are more likely to effect lasting change. Because they go unnoticed, they evoke little resistance. By the time they are detected, the change wrought is too ensconced to reverse. In recent memory, the best example I can think of is the study of Talmud by women in Orthodox Judaism. In little more than a generation, since the SixDay War and the onslaught of feminism, nearly every sector of the Orthodox world has quietly abandoned the age-old inhibitions of introducing women, as children or adults, to the rigors of the Oral Law.1 An equally far-reaching and unnoticed accommodation in the orbit of Conservative Judaism, and the focus of this essay, is the manner in which its flagship institution, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, came to terms with the dictates of modern biblical criticism in the study of Torah within the short span of two decades, from 1950 to 1970. Without fanfare, one mindset replaced another under the aegis, ironically, of an administration with a pronounced traditional bias. Though at the time oblivious to the transformation underway, I experienced it. Only in retrospect have I come to appreciate the contours of this intriguing sea change. What stands out for me is the frequency with which I came across the work of Yehezkel Kaufmann while I was a rabbinical student at JTS from 1957 to 1962. In a series of mind-expanding courses with Professors Shalom Spiegel on Jeremiah, Gerson D. Cohen on Greco-Roman Jewish history, and H. Louis Ginsberg on Second Isaiah, Seminary rabbinical students were assigned to read the relevant chapters from Kaufmann’s monumental eight-volume Toldot ha-emunah ha-yisra’elit (The History of Israelite Religion, 1937–1956). Moreover, it was de rigueur for us to acquire for our own libraries a set, which by 1957 was available in four stout, compact volumes.2 1

“Symposium on Women and Jewish Education,” Tradition, 28, 3 (Spring 1994), 5–38. For the older norm, see Don Seeman, “The Silence of Rayna Batya: Torah, Suffering and Barukh Epstein’s ‘Wisdom of Women’,” The Torah U-Madda Journal, 6 (1995–96), 91–128 and Dan Rabinowitz, “Rayna Batya and Other Learned Women: A Reevaluation of Rabbi Barukh Halevi Epstein’ Sources,” Tradition, 35, 1 (Spring 2001), 55–69. 2 Yehezkel Kaufmann, Toldot ha-emunah ha-yisra’elit, 4 vols. (Jerusalem/Tel Aviv: Mosad Bialik [Devir], 1955–56).

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In Ginsberg’s two-semester history course on ancient Israel from Genesis to Jeremiah, which I did not take (but a copy of whose cribbed and widely circulated lecture notes from 1965–57 I managed to secure), Kaufmannian views abounded. No other biblical scholar was mentioned by name nearly as often. Like Kaufmann, for example, Ginsberg eschewed an evolutionary approach in attributing to Moses the articulation of a full-blown conception of monotheism: It was Moses who first harbored the notion of a God who has always existed, has created everything, and is limited by no power outside himself (viz., other gods, magic, fate). It did not come to him from any other man. One can speak of it as a flash of intuition or, in the language of faith, as a revelation.3

Similarly, Ginsberg adopted Kaufmann’s hard-fought contention that the Bible consistently misconstrued paganism as fetishism: Israel abjured the worship of all gods but YHWH [in the covenant at Sinai]. Subsequent generations of Israelites simply did not know of any other gods: They only knew of idols of heavenly bodies, which they themselves often worshiped; but only as fetishes, not representatives of real gods.4

Finally, as to the dating of the documents underlying the Torah, Ginsberg came down squarely on the side of Kaufmann: “There can be no doubt that P and JE were composed at least as early as D, and their laws are older than those of D.”5 Relatedly, he argued that neither the Torah nor the Early Prophets exhibited the slightest trace of legal or theological influence from the literary prophets, a key point in Kaufmann’s case for the early dating of the Priestly Code.6 Again, a la Kaufmann, it was Ezra, moved by guilt and contrition, who assembled and canonized our composite version of the Torah and who immediately launched into a reconciliation of its many disparities via a legal discourse that became known as midrash halakhah.7 In Ginsberg’s class, then Seminary rabbinical students were treated to a sweep of Israelite religion that bore the contrarian lineaments of Kaufmann’s thoroughgoing revisionism. In 1960 Professor Moshe Greenberg published his elegant abridgment and translation of Kaufmann’s opus (minus volume 8), The Religion of Israel, which for the first time gave me a breathtaking sense of the virtuousity of the latter’s architecture.8 In addition I had been made aware by Cohen on several 3 H. L. Ginsberg, “History of Israel” (unpublished lecture notes – A, 9); Kaufmann, vol. 1, introduction, chapter 1; vol. 2, chapters 2–3. 4 Ginsberg, 13; Kaufmann, vol. 1, chapter 10. 5 Ginsberg, 40; Kaufmann, vol. 1, chapters 4–5. 6 Ginsberg 47; Kaufmann, vol. 1, chapter 2. 7 Ginsberg 41; Kaufmann, vol. 4, chapters 7–8. 8 Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel, translated and abridged by Moshe Greenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

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occasions that Kaufmann had authored an earlier four-volume interpretation of the full expanse of Jewish history, Golah ve-nekhar (Exile and Alienation, 1928–32), that was must reading for any serious student of the subject.9 Though it would take several decades before I accomplished that assignment, I graduated from the Seminary, like many a JTS product, a confirmed Kaufmannian, I suspect the evocative description of Kaufmann’s impact on the uninitiated by Professor Stephen A. Geller, another Seminary graduate from the era, speaks for him as well as for me: No brief summary can do justice to the power of Kaufmann’s arguments, which comes from their number and their array, range upon range like the Himalayas. Those who, especially when young, have encountered them in the original can attest to their almost hypnotic appeal.10

II The Seminary never awarded Kaufmann an honorary doctorate. Given its degree of indebtedness to him, it should have. His frontal assault on the seemingly impregnable citadel of biblical criticism erected by Julius Wellhausen enabled the Seminary to accept its critical foundation, the documentary theory, without embracing its historical superstructure. Had Kaufmann’s work not fertilized the culture of the Seminary, its eventual reconciliation with the canons of modern scholarship on the Hebrew Bible would have been more protracted and contested. The influence of figures like Ahad Ha-am and Simon Dubnow on the discourse of the Seminary has long been recognized.11 Unappreciated as yet is the affinity which JTS manifested toward the seminal thought of Yehezkel Kaufmann, a polymath of fierce independence. Indeed, the Seminary served no less than his point of entry into America. The roots of the Seminary’s resistance to biblical criticism ran deep, all the way back to The Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, its spiritual progenitor, which was founded in 1854. Though Breslau pioneered in applying the tools of philology and history to the study of the Talmud, in biblical scholarship it did not advance much beyond reviving the long aborted medieval quest for the plain meaning of the text (p’shat). Toward that end, the

9

Yehezkel Kaufmann, Golah ve-nekhar, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1928–32). Stephen A. Geller, “Wellhausen and Kaufmann,” Midstream, 13, 10 (December 1985), 41. 11 Baila Round Shargel, Practical Dreamer: Israel Friedlaender and the Shaping of American Judaism (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1985), 86–99; Mel Scult, Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 309–12. 10

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methodology and insights of modern philology were admissible. But in truth, the heavy concentration on Tanakh in the first three years of the seven-year curriculum for rabbinical students stressed biblical grammar, the ancient Aramaic translations and, above all, the medieval commentaries. Most revealing is the fact that in the first dozen years of Breslau, the only member of the faculty to teach Humash was Zacharias Frankel, its founder and re˙ nowned Talmudist. Heinrich Graetz, much more of a free spirit, taught Hu˙ mash in those same years only to students in the educational track. To rabbinical students, besides an ample dose of Jewish history, he taught only the Later Prophets. Only when Frankel relinquished control of teaching the Pentateuch in 1868 did Graetz replace him. But all these courses were largely philological and exegetical, a field which, Graetz declaimed, should be dominated by Jewish scholars because of their superior knowledge of Hebrew and its history.12 Some three decades after the founding of Breslau, at the opening exercises of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York on January 2, 1887, Sabato Morais expressed his loathing of the biblical criticism of European academics: I do not presume too much when I declare in the name of its founders, that the icy cold criticism of the German and Dutch schools of modern times shall not be permitted to blight the growth of religious enthusiasm in the hearts of our pupils.13

Still, the Seminary, with its Sephardic orientation, privileged the study of Bible. Born in Italy, Morais had never studied personally in Padua with Samuel David Luzzatto. But he came to admire his work and translated into English from Italian his “Introduction of the Pentateuch.”14 Luzzatto’s awesome mastery of the multi-layered history of the Hebrew language equipped him to become the nineteenth-century’s most serious and illuminating Jewish Bible commentator. In an age when most Jewish scholars touched on the Bible only tangentially, Luzzatto, a proud heir of the medieval line of Sephardic exegetes, focused intensively, though not exclusively, on the philological study of the entire Tanakh.15 Had Morais lived longer, it is conceivable that, in the spirit of Luzzatto, the Seminary could have forged a distinctively 12

Markus Brann, Geschichte des Jüdisch-Theologischen Seminars in Breslau (Breslau: Th. Schatzky, n. d.), Beilagen, viii–ix, xvii–xxiv; Heinrich Graetz, “Zur hebräischen Sprachkunde und Bibelexegese,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, 10 (1861), 20–21. 13 Robert E. Fierstein, A Different Spirit: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1886–1902 (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1990), 72. 14 Sabato Morais, Italian Hebrew Literature, ed. Julius H. Greenstone (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1926), 78–152. 15 Morris B. Margolis, Samuel David Luzzatto: Traditionalist Scholar (New York: Ktav, 1979), chapter 4.

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Jewish approach to Bible study that incorporated the best of the medievals with the moderns. Solomon Schechter’s dismissal of German Protestant biblical scholarship in 1903 as a form of higher anti-Semitism can only be understood in light of the renewed attack upon Jews and Judaism across Europe that darkened the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In Germany the heightened tensions between Jews and Protestants, who shared much the same cultural ambience, erupted periodically in violent political and intellectual collisions. The need to differentiate was fueled by pervasive commonality.16 Wellhausen was no more anti-Semitic than Kant or Hegel. For all their independence from traditional Christian beliefs, all three continued to conceptualize in a matrix shot through with Christian constructs and biases. Schechter’s outburst was unquestionably triggered by an overheated atmosphere. What it left behind, unfortunately, was a legacy for JTS that branded as taboo the bracing achievement of a century of painstaking scholarship. Schechter recognized that it was as urgent for modern Jews to produce their own commentary to Scripture as their own translation. But neither he nor Israel Friedlaender, whom Schechter brought to the Seminary to teach Bible, could offer any guidelines. The best that Schechter’s direction inspired was the Hertz Humash between the World Wars, under the general editorship ˙ who had been the Seminary’s first rabbinic graduate in 1894 of Joseph Hertz, and had risen to the office of Chief Rabbi of the British Empire in 1913. While his commentary cautiously acknowledged development in the emergence of rabbinic Judaism, he heatedly contested the source analysis that undergirded the Wellhausen system. On occasion, he did invoke the findings of archaeology to confirm a biblical detail.17 The appointments of Professors H. L. Ginsberg and Robert Gordis to the Seminary faculty in the final years of the presidency of Dr. Cyrus Adler bespoke greater respect for specialization and heralded a promise of change.18 The key figure, however, in dislodging Schechter’s baneful legacy during the first decade of the vigorous presidency of Dr. Louis Finkelstein (1940–72) was an outsider, Professor William Foxwell Albright of John Hopkins University, the devoutly Christian dean of biblical studies in America at mid-century. As early as 1943, Finkelstein invited him to deliver a lecture at the Seminary, under the auspices of its Institute of Biblical and Post-Biblical 16

Solomon Schechter, “Higher Criticism – Higher Anti-Semitism,” Seminary Addresses and Other Papers, reprint (New York: The Burning Bush Press, 1959), 35–39; Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany (Ithica/London: Cornell University Press, 1975), chapter 4. 17 Harvey Meirovich, A Vindication of Judaism: The Polemics of the Hertz Pentateuch (New York/Jerusalem: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1998). 18 Jack Wertheimer (ed.), Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological of America, 2 vols. (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1997), 1, 138.

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Studies, on “The Role of Palestine in Ancient Civilization.” A year later under the same auspices, Finkelstein had Ginsberg lecture on “The Present Position of Comparative Biblical and Ugaritic Studies.”19 Clearly, the Institute served Finkelstein as a cover to begin the process of contextualizing the study of the Hebrew Bible at JTS outside the framework of the curriculum of the rabbinical school. In 1949, Albright’s unfolding relationship with Finkelstein resurfaced more substantively, though it was still marginal to the core mission of JTS. Albright authored the opening essay on “The Biblical Period” in Finkelstein’s brilliantly edited four volume compendium of essays by an array of different scholars entitled The Jews: Their History, Culture and Religion. The encompassing vision and high academic standards of the set required a critical, unapologetic treatment of Judaism’s emergent phase. Albright responded with a magisterial sixty-page survey that staunchly defended the historicity of Scripture and repeatedly cited abundant archaeological evidence to confirm the accounts of the Patriarchs, Joseph, Moses, the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan. He did not contest the low state of religion in Egypt and Canaan mirrored in the Bible and he credited Moses with “the beginnings of organized Israelite monotheism,” influenced only indirectly by Akhenaten.20 In general, his view of monotheism was non-developmental. Its fullest expression was not found in the literary prophets; Samuel long before them had already championed monotheism.21 It is especially noteworthy that Albright did not conceal his allegiance to the theory of multiple authorship of the Torah. He attributed JE to the period of the united monarchy and Deuteronomy to the end of Judah, though he believed that a prototype of the text had originated in Israel, and was brought to Jerusalem after the fall of Samaria in 722 B.C.E.22 As for P, it was edited in exile after 586 B.C.E. but did contain “some very early material.” Thereafter, it was Ezra who induced the returnees in Jerusalem to accept the final edited version of the Torah and “who is largely responsible for the way in which its archaic practices were adjusted to actual ritual usage in the Temple.”23 Albright’s luminous chapter impressed Finkelstein enough to invite him to spend two years in residence at JTS, from 1957 to 1959, as a visiting research professor in biblical literature.24 By then, Albright had retired from 19

The Jewish Theological Seminary Register 1944–45, 42. William Foxwell Albright, “The Biblical Period,” Louis Finkelstein (ed.), The Jews, Their History, Culture and Religion, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1960), vol. 1, 9, 11. 21 Burke O. Long, Planting and Reaping Albright: Politics, Ideology, and Interpreting the Bible (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 38, 43. 22 Albright, 45. 23 Ibid., 54. 24 Finkelstein, v. 20

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Johns Hopkins and Finkelstein urged him – as he did Professor Elias Bickerman of Columbia, who had contributed the second chapter to The Jews on the Hellenistic period – to enlarge his chapter into a book.25 What must have appealed to Finkelstein was Albright’s rare combination of religious conservatism and scientific rigor. Albright did not consider Wellhausen to be the epitome of biblical scholarship. Archaeology disputed much of the skepticism and speculativeness that informed the German’s narrative superstructure, rendering much of it unscientific and outdated.26 Indeed, Finkelstein encouraged Albright to offer a seminar each semester open to rabbinical students, two of which I participated in. But Albright came to the Seminary to learn as well as to teach and write. His modesty and diffidence matched his erudition and scholarship. Albright sought access to the prodigious oeuvre of Kaufmann, little of which had as yet appeared in English, insofar as it bore on his own project. My then classmate and later professor of Bible at the Hebrew University, Shalom Paul, who came to rabbinical school from the University of Pennsylvania with a good command of Kaufmann, was asked to delve into Kaufmann with Albright, who years before had taught at the Hebrew University in 1929.27 In other words, to study Kaufmann in the United States, one came to the Seminary. The school had become identified with a serious Jewish alternative to Wellhausen. Though originating from utterly contrasting worlds, Albright and Kaufmann shared an antipathy to Wellhausen that made the Seminary hospitable to both. By 1948–49, the Seminary Register for the first time described the Bible courses expected of its rabbinical students in each of their four years as consisting “of the study of the Hebrew Text in light of ancient and modern commentaries and other aids, supplements by lectures on Biblical History, Geography, Archaeology and Canaan.”28 And by the summer courses of 1952 for rabbinical students and other alumni working toward a doctorate in Hebrew literature, Professors Ginsberg and Mordecai Kaplan were listing in the readings for their respective courses large chunks of Kaufmann’s Toldot.29 His avowed reverence for Schechter notwithstanding, Finkelstein had deftly maneuvered the Seminary away from Schechter’s impassioned rejection of higher biblical criticism.

25

Shalom Paul, “Remarks at Hebrew University Tribute,” May 20, 2004; also Elias Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1988), Foreword. 26 Long, 37–38. 27 Paul, “Remarks at Hebrew University Tribute.” 28 Jewish Theological Seminary Register 1948–49, 24. 29 Jewish Theological Seminary Register 1952, 60.

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III The penetration of Kaufmann into the Seminary overlaps with the dissemination of Kaufmann in America. In truth, the two phenomena intersect in three ways. The first instance, not surprisingly, was embodied in the advocacy of H. L. Ginsberg, who in 1950 in Commentary magazine published an essay on “New Trends in Biblical Criticism.” Concise, lucent and trenchant, the essay argued that “the gradual emancipation from the spell of Wellhausen is one of the most striking developments of the past thirty years.”30 To illustrate the trend, Ginsberg provided elegant summaries of the divergent research of the “German Protestant Albrecht Alt, […] and the Israeli Jew, Yehezkel Kaufmann,” with the last two pages of his essay devoted to Kaufmann.31 By way of introduction, Ginsberg referred “to his monumental Golah ve-nekhar (Exile and Alienation), which should be read by every cultured Jew.”32 Ginsberg singled out for praise in both of Kaufmann’s tomes (Golah and Toldot) his focus on religion, without being “an apologist for Biblical fundamentalism.”33 Ginsberg concluded with a ringing endorsement: “I am convinced that Kaufmann is absolutely right in all of his major theses about the Pentateuch and earlier Prophets […]. I also believe Kaufmann to be right in most of his original interpretations of the genesis and pre-exilic history of Israel […].”34 The larger point of Ginsberg’s essay was to espouse the return of Jews to the critical study of their own primary heritage. Dogmatism and apologetics had by default conceded the field to a handful of top-flight Christian Old Testament scholars (as opposed to “Orientalists who only indirectly or incidentally enrich Bible scholarship”).35 Ginsberg was hopeful at the time that Israel rather than America would raise a generation of worthy Jewish Biblicists in the mold of Kaufmann. Indubitably, the comeback would enhance Jewish pride and faith: The more the Bible is studied critically – in the perspective of earlier, contemporary, and subsequent events, conditions, institutions, and cultures in the Near East and on the borders – the more meaningful and impressive a library it becomes of invaluable records, glorious literature, and immortal religious teachings.36

30

H. L. Ginsberg, “New Trends in Biblical Criticism,” Commentary, September 1950,

278. 31

Ibid., 279. Ibid., 282. 33 Ibid., 283. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 284. 36 Ibid. 32

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In the early 1960s, the Seminary demonstrably identified itself with Ginsberg’s views by publishing in pamphlet form a considerably revised version of his essay for wide distribution.37 The second time the trajectories of Kaufmann and the Seminary crossed was in the nascent career of Professor Moshe Greenberg. In April 1950, toward the end of his senior year at the University of Pennsylvania, Greenberg sent Kaufmann a distillation of his undergraduate thesis on Kaufmann’s contribution to biblical studies. His mentor, Professor E. A. Speiser, had urged him to rework it for publication. When it appeared later that year in the Journal of the American Oriental Society under the title “A New Approach to the History of the Israelite Priesthood,” it was not only Greenberg’s scholarly debut but also Kaufmann’s in English. In his letter Greenberg informed Kaufmann that he had been a serious student of the Tanakh for the past five years, during which he resisted mightily the perilous undertow of Christian scholarship. What saved him was stumbling upon a set of Kaufmann’s volumes in his father’s library.38 It is that revealing tidbit that underscores for me again the affinity between JTS and Kaufmann. Rabbi Simon Greenberg, Moshe’s father, was not only a highly respected member of the Conservative rabbinate, but also a seminal figure in the administration of the Seminary, who had studied at the Hebrew University as a visiting rabbinical student from JTS the year it opened.39 When Kaufmann responded that he wanted to have Toldot translated into English, Greenberg jumped at the idea. For the next ten years he assiduously set himself to the task, while earning rabbinic ordination at the Seminary and a doctorate at Penn. Greenberg astutely followed up his dense essay on Kaufmann’s arguments for the early dating of P with the translation a year later of a synoptic essay by Kaufmann on his radical treatment of polytheism in the Bible.40 Adding flesh to these bare bones was Greenberg’s translation of Kaufmann’s major contribution to the field, published as “The Biblical Age” in the 1956 gem-of-a-volume edited by Leo W. Schwarz under the title Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People.41 With The Religion of Israel in 1960,

37 Essays in Judaism Series, no 4 (no date, but mentions in a note [p. 13] the 1960 translation by Greenberg). 38 Moshe Greenberg, “Personal Impressions of Yehezkel Kaufmann” (Hebrew), Mada’aei ha-yahadut, organ of the World Union of Jewish Studies, no. 31 (1991), 81–82; idem, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 70 (1950), 41–47. 39 Wertheimer, Tradition Renewed, 1, 181; Pamela S. Nadell, Conservative Judaism in America (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 121. 40 Greenberg, “Impressions,” 82; Yehezkel Kaufmann, “The Bible and Mythological Polytheism,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 70 (1951), 179–97. 41 Leo W. Schwarz, Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People (New York: Random House, 1956), 3–92.

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Greenberg brought his project to full fruition. By placing Kaufmann’s profile of Israelite religion prior to his analysis of its literary sources and historical reconstruction, Greenberg actually made the original more accessible.42 Greenberg’s unusual devotion to Kaufmann, in retrospect, seems to have been sustained by more than academic enthrallment. One senses a measure of existential angst, a need to square faith with truth. In 1953, while still a rabbinical student, Greenberg produced a mature essay on why Judaism could no longer ignore the findings of biblical criticism. The problem was not his alone, but that of the whole Seminary. The context sharpened his thinking. In the end, he embraced a form of progressive revelation: The gradual process of God’s self-disclosure to man, made evident by modern scholarship, has not diminished the Bible, it has rather enlarged our confidence that this process has not yet ceased; that that spirit which has attuned itself to the Divine will not be denied a corresponding self-disclosure.43

The third intersection of Kaufmann and the Seminary is to be found in its Melton Research Center in Jewish Education, created in 1960 by a generous gift from Samuel and Florence Melton of Columbus, Ohio. With the avowed goal of revamping the curriculum of the congregational school in the Conservative movement, the Center, under the dynamic leadership of Professor Seymour Fox, quickly emerged as a cauldron of intellectual ferment. From the outset, it faced head-on the teaching of Bible because it was the heart of the normally five-year pre-bar- and bat-mitzvah course of study. To its great credit, the Center started conceptually and soon became the forum for thinking through the Seminary’s own unfinished transformation.44 These deliberations yielded two significant publications by young Seminary Kaufmannians on how to assimilate biblical criticism without demolishing the sanctity of the Torah. Irrespective of their differences, their scholarship was a conscious illustration of theology in action. Both books conspicuously bore the word “understanding” in their titles: Understanding Genesis by Professor Nahum M. Sarna in 1966 and Understanding Exodus by Greenberg in 1969.45 The term, I suspect, goes back to Greenberg’s 1953 Commentary essay in which he defined the phrase “understanding the Bible” (italics in the original) to mean: 42

In Toldot, Kaufmann devoted the first volume to the literary sources and the second volume to the comparison of monotheism to polytheism. It is interesting that in an outline of Toldot by Kaufmann from some time beween 1930 and 1933, he originally intended to place the comparison before the source analysis (Thomas Krapf, Yehezkel Kaufmann: Ein Lebens-und Erkenntnisweg zur Theologie der Hebräischen Bibel (Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 120–22). Greenberg’s reordering was a triumph of empathetic scholarship. 43 Moshe Greenberg, “Biblical Criticism and Judaism.” Commentary, March 1953, 304. 44 Wertheimer, Tradition Renewed, 1, 203, 617–18, 629 n. 112. 45 Nahum M. Sarna, Understanding Genesis (New York: Schocken Books, 1966); Moshe Greenberg, Understanding Exodus (New York: Berman House, 1969).

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The appreciation of its authors’ intentions, the recognition of the truly heterogeneous nature of the book, a real grasp of historical truth, and a tenable theory of the function of revelation […].46

Sarna, with a minister’s diploma from Jews College in London and a doctorate from Dropsie College in Philadelphia, taught Bible at JTS from 1957 to 1963.47 By 1966, he had moved to Brandeis University. While still at JTS, Sarna displayed his empathy for Kaufmann in 1961 with an elegantly crafted review essay of Greenberg’s abridged Religion translation, which placed Kaufmann’s conclusions squarely within the history of modern biblical criticism.48 Years later Professor Uriel Simon of Bar Ilan University would indirectly challenge Sarna’s claim as to the “all-pervasive impress” of Kaufmann’s work on the multi-volume Hebrew Encyclopedia Biblica, published by the Hebrew University. On the contrary, Simon contended that the secular Zionist spirit which stamped that vast enterprise of biblical scholarship (1950–1988) resisted the import of Kaufmann’s writings. The Encyclopedia devoted few entries to religion, theology or literature and restricted the scope of p’shat to marshalling the pertinent realia, archaeology and practices of the ancient Near East.49 Indubitably, the Seminary came to value Kaufmann before the Hebrew University, where his own long-delayed appointment in 1949 at the age of sixty in no way signaled an acclamation of his approach.50 In the spirit of Greenberg’s 1953 charge, Sarna’s book boldly and skillfully put on display the Seminary’s expanded view of biblical studies. The Book of Genesis could be understood only within the context of the ancient Near East. A thoroughgoing comparative perspective alone would highlight what was shared and what was unique in the narratives. On the one hand, archaeological excavations tended to confirm in general the historicity of the patriarchal age;51 on the other, the binary thinking of Kaufmann on the world polytheism enabled Sarna to consistently defend the superiority of Israelite monotheism.52 Like Kaufmann, he depicted the God of the Bible as above nature and beyond reduction to mythology and magic, but rather universal, uncapricious and acting in accord with the principle of justice and righteous-

46

Greenberg, “Biblical Criticism and Judaism,” 302. S. David Sperling, Students of the Covenant, A History of Jewish Biblical Scholarship in North America, Atlanta (GA: Scholars Press, 1992), 97, 105. 48 Nahum M. Sarna, “From Wellhausen to Kaufmann,” Midstream, 1961 (Summer), 64–74. 49 Sarna, 64; Uriel Simon, “The Study of Bible at Bar Ilan University” (Hebrew), Deot, 49 (1984), 231; idem, “The Place of the Bible in Israeli Society: From National Midrash to Existential Peshat,” Modern Judaism, 19:3 (October 1999), 225. 50 Krapf, 78. 51 Sarna, Understanding Genesis (Schocken paperback, 1976), 85–93, 129, 138, 188. 52 Ibid., 3,9–12, 21–24, 31. 47

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ness.53 Nor was this conception of the supreme deity the end result of a long evolutionary process. The rupture with paganism, in fact, was so sudden and complete that the Bible itself no longer comprehended the actual nature of pagan religion.54 In short, Understanding Genesis turned out to be a splendid popular version of Kaufmann, integrating ancient Israel into its surroundings without effacing its originality. Though Sarna largely skirted any analysis of Genesis in terms of its underlying documentary sources (as opposed to Speiser, for example, in his Anchor Bible commentary of Genesis), he did confront the issue candidly in the course of his introduction on the conflict between “scientism” and “pietism” (his terms).55 He acknowledged unflinchingly that the multiple authorship of the Pentateuch was “one of the finalities of biblical scholarship,” though not necessarily “destructive of faith and inimical to religion:” [For] is it not to circumscribe the power of God in a most extraordinary manner to assume that the Divine can only work effectively through the medium of a single document, but not through four? Surely God can as well unfold His revelation in successive stages as in a single moment of time.56

What united these disparate sources was the conviction that “God’s existence is as self-evident as […] life itself […]. The whole of biblical literature is really the attestation of the experiences of individuals and of a nation with the Divine.”57 Put differently, the authenticity of the experience was not to be gainsaid by the embellishment of the narrative. The aspiration of Melton was to teach Torah honestly, in line with what we know as well as what we believe. Too much that was learned as a child had to be unlearned as an adult. Echoing that ethos, Sarna inveighed against the status quo: The childish image of the Scriptures, imparted at an early age, is well-nigh ineradicable. For this reason, the teaching of the Bible in the religious schools has, more often than not, become a self-defeating exercise in futility.58

The challenge would be to create a teaching corps capable of handling the complexity of the task. In any event, Melton had not yet settled on a single approach. Greenberg’s Understanding Exodus was as different a book from Sarna’s Understanding Genesis as Exodus is from Genesis. Despite his command of Kaufmann’s corpus, Greenberg made only sparing use of him, as he did of archaeological material in general. His focus was internal rather than 53

Ibid., 143–51, 217. Ibid., 9–10, 53–54, 193–94. 55 E. A. Speiser, Genesis: The Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday), 1964. 56 Sarna, xxiv. 57 Ibid., 10. 58 Ibid., xxii. 54

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comparative – that is, a close reading of the biblical text. For that purpose Greenberg was as ready to enlist the long history of Jewish biblical exegesis as the fruits of modern scholarship. In comparison to Sarna, the extent to which he employed the insights of rabbinic midrashim and medieval exegetes was truly astonishing, and invaluable in forging a paradigm for contemporary Jewish scholars. Biblical criticism wielded no monopoly over the domain of p’shat. The balance he achieved would not be lost on the editors and contributors to The JPS Torah Commentary some years later, all of whom were directly affected by the spirit of the Seminary.59 Greenberg succeeded in commenting on little more than one quarter of Exodus, but rarely has an unfinished work borne more promise or significance. In a profound excursus, Greenberg addressed the historicity of the events recounted in the Book of Exodus. He reiterated his working supposition that the narrative consists of a composite of distinct traditions. These units originated as sagas in Martin Buber’s sense of the term, defined by Greenberg as the “enthusiastic relation of great events by participants in them. Already in this primary stage the message conveyed was more of the event’s impact than of the detail of its occurrence.”60 In their subsequent transmission, these sagas were enriched by artifice inspired by the impact they made on later generations, a process that reached its culmination in the work of the redactor. The final literary document, therefore, is an amalgam of testimony and imagination, fidelity and freedom, in which one should not “expect a close relation between every detail of the narrative and actual events.”61 Inherent in this multi-layered analysis was a basic reconceptualization of the purpose of biblical narrative as a literature of edification, celebrating events in which the saving power of God was made manifest. The intent of the authors was not to convey an exact replica of events but rather an impression of their cumulative effect and meaning.62 From this perspective the question of historicity becomes tangential.

IV Sooner or later JTS would have overcome Schechter’s legacy and made its peace with biblical criticism. An institution committed to the critical study of Talmud could not exclude the critical study of the Bible without doing violence to its integrity. The practice of willful ignorance did not comport with

59

Sperling, 153. Greenberg, Understanding Exodus, 194. 61 Ibid., 196. 62 Ibid., 193, 204. 60

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an ethos of non-dogmatic scholarship. My contention has simply been that this transition was greatly eased by the formidable work of Yehezkel Kaufmann. His construct legitimized the application of the tools, knowledge and perspectives of modern scholarship to the Bible and found a uniquely receptive following at the Seminary. The kinship sprang from at least two other shared values. First, Kaufmann and the Seminary were joined by a deep and abiding interest in the history of Judaism. It was religion that drove the Jewish odyssey and determined its destiny. Exile and Alienation and The Religion of Israel were part of a single teeming tapestry that depicted the origin, nature and history of Judaism. The former, which despite its size was essentially an essay, focused entirely on the question of how the Jews came to preserve their ethnic identity as a tiny minority in endless exile. The root of their alienation wherever they settled, Kaufmann answered, was their religion, which allowed them to assimilate without dissolving their sense of apartness.63 With true erudition, he went on to show that regardless of the period and its peculiar give-and-take, the constancy of Judaism as the decisive factor in preserving Jewish identity remained unwavering until the era of emancipation. If Exile and Alienation turned out to fully anticipate the conclusions of The Religion of Israel, it is because Kaufmann had begun his research on the latter long before finishing the former. The sequence of their appearance did not reflect the order of their conceptualization. In 1926, two years before the publication of the first half of Exile and Alienation, Kaufmann asked the Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin for financial support to finish “a comprehensive work on the history of the Israelite-Jewish religion” from its origins to the rise of Christianity. He went on to declare that “I have already written down a large part (in Hebrew) and the rest in notes and drafts.” The reason, he stated, that he had published so little as yet in the field of Bible was that he wanted to give his critical findings the benefit of an overarching, systematic presentation – exactly what The Religion of Israel eventually did. In sum, Kaufmann did not veer off into biblical studies in his forties. The study of religion, past and present, had always been at the heart of his intellectual life.64 Kaufmann was not a religious man, but in an age overrun by disbelief, he affirmed the potency of religion in the formation and fate of nations. Time and again, he vigorously contested what he perceived to be Ahad Ha-am’s biological concept of an innate national desire in the Jewish people to survive (hefetz ha-kiyyum) with his own espousal of a historical concept of Judaism. ˙ “Religion has always been the divide that has separated Israel for the nations,

63 64

Yehezkel Kaufmann, Golah ve-nekhar (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1930, 1954), vol. 1, chapter 4. Ibid., chapters 5 and 6; Krapf, 117–19.

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and whoever crossed that divide was swallowed up by the nations.” What further enhanced his appeal to the Seminary was his attribution of monotheism in its full complexity to Moses and his claim of its quick and total adoption by the nation he led out of Egypt. To be sure, Kaufmann’s views derived from his antagonism to the regnant ideologies of his day, but in their spurning of explanations based on empirical causality, they resembled traditional views of what happened at Mount Sinai. Kaufmann’s avowed eruption of genius in the form of a “monotheistic revolution” readily lent itself to the vocabulary of revelation.65 Second, Kaufmann was a Zionist. In his late teens, he spent three formative years in Odessa, in the modern yeshiva of Chaim Tchernowitz (Rav Zair), with whom he developed a life-long friendship.66 Its unconventional curriculum designed to ordain Zionist rabbis exposed Kaufmann to the likes of Ahad Ha-am, Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Yosef Klausner. In due course, ˙ ˙ Kaufmann emerged as a tenacious, independent Zionist thinker and polemicist who wrote scathingly on what passed for Zionist thought in an era rife with clashing ideologies.67 The crux of Exile and Alienation was to show that with the erosion of Judaism in the face of modern secularism only a sovereign Jewish body politic stood a chance of perpetuating Jewish identity, though Kaufmann regarded the large number of Arabs in Palestine as a serious impediment to that goal.68 Still, he made aliyah in 1928, never to leave.69 A year after Kaufmann’s death in 1963, Professor Abraham S. Halkin, the Seminary’s ranking historian, wrote an essay in Hebrew that engaged Kaufmann’s views on the Diaspora as spelled out in Exile and Alienation. Not uncritical, the essay was nevertheless marked by empathy and respect. Clearly, Halkin had kept company with Kaufmann’s book for years. The essay treated the reader to a dialogue between companions bound by a love of Hebrew, Israel and Judaism. Halkin, I dare say, represented the Seminary’s orientation.70 Professor Neil Gillman reports that in his student days at JTS 65

Ibid., 190–99; quotation 199. Moshe Greenberg, Studies in the Bible and Jewish Thought (Philadelphia/Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 184. On the influence of Hermann Cohen on Kaufmann’s thought, see Peter Slyomovics, “Y. Kaufmann’s Critique of J. Wellhausen: A Philosophical – Historical Perspective” (Hebrew), Zion 49:1 (1984), 61–92. 66 Krapf, 27. Upon Rav Zair’s death, Kaufmann penned a revealing Hebrew tribute in Bizaron, 10 (Sivan-Tamuz 1949), 155–57. 67 Kaufmann, Golah ve-nekhar, vol. 2, chapters 6–11; idem, Be-hevlei ha-zeman, Tel Aviv: Devir, 1936; idem, Bein Netivot (Haifa: Beit Sefer Reali, 1944).˙ 68 Kaufmann, Golar ve-nekhar, 2, 470. 69 Krapf, 67. 70 Abraham S. Halkin, “Kaufmann’s View on Galut” (Hebrew), Bizaron, 50 (TamuzAv, 1964), 90–99. The subsequent offprint was revised and enlarged, but the tone remained unchanged.

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in the fifties, Mordecai Kaplan would read sections of Exile and Alienation with his students in class upon their request.71 The romance of Kaufmann and the Seminary, according to my storyline, ends where it started: with H. L. Ginsberg, who back in 1950 had made the initial introduction. By 1982, Ginsberg was no longer a Kaufmannian. In that year, he published a modest volume of less than 150 pages entitled The Israelian Heritage of Judaism, which Professor Baruch A. Levine, his admiring disciple, called “perhaps the most seminal study of the Deuteronomic question since Julius Wellhausen’s History of Israel, volume I first published in 1878,” which had revolutionized the field.72 Ginsberg coined the term “Israelian” to designate those biblical writings that had originated during the First Temple period in Northern Israel and were brought to Jerusalem after the fall of Samaria in 722 B.C.E. to decisively alter the course of religious developments – first in Judah and later in Judaism. In particular, Ginsberg traced the key innovation of Deuteronomy in the last quarter of the seventh century, namely to replace all local sanctuaries with a single national shrine, to ideas propounded by the prophet Hosea in eighth-century Samaria. Ginsberg thus repudiated one of the classic tenets of Kaufmann’s system, that the Torah and Early Prophets were untouched by later prophetic influence. That absence had convinced Kaufmann that the underlying documents, especially the priestly code, had become immutably sacred prior to the ascendancy of prophetic ideas in the Babylonian Exile. In a related line of analysis, Ginsberg took careful aim at the documents of the Pentateuch in terms of their respective festival calendars. With penetrating subtlety, he reconstituted distinct stages in the evolution of the pilgrimage festivals, leading him to date P, like Wellhausen, as post-deuteronomic. Ginsberg’s spare and pristine scholarly tone belied the polemical thrust which animated the book – taking leave of Kaufmann. Three decades of unremitting research and reflection had impelled Kaufmann’s original benefactor to revert back to the latter’s nemesis, a pristine instance of value-free scholarship. Paradoxically, nothing could have been more important for the Seminary, under whose imprimatur the book was published. The reversion to Wellhausen signaled that one did not have to be an adherent of Kaufmann to do biblical criticism at JTS. The critical study of Torah was to be governed by the standards of scholarship and not the constraints of ideology. Moving beyond 71

In conversation, January 15, 2004. H. Louis Ginsberg, The Israelian Heritage of Judaism (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1982). Levine’s review appeared in the AJS Review, 12:1 (Spring 1987), 143–57; the quotation, 143. In his crisp and lucid historiographical study, Ernest Nicholson, The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Clarendon press, 1998) makes no mention of Ginsberg and short shrift of Kaufmann, 218–20. 72

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Kaufmann averted the installation of a new orthodoxy. The sanctity of Scripture demands of the faithful nothing less than the vigilant retention of an open mind to unlock its meaning. In the quest for p’shat, truth and faith are not bitter adversaries but wary allies, a set of polarities to be held in creative balance.

Part IV

Orientalism

12. Converging Cognates: The Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in Nineteenth Century Germany To no other field of study in nineteenth-century Germany did Jews, baptised or unbaptised, contribute more signifcantly than to the study of Islam. Their embrace of a preference for Sephardic as opposed to their own Ashkenazic Judaism in the first half of the century had predisposed them to take up the study of Jews under Islam in the second half of the century when a trove of new Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic sources surfaced from public archives and private collections across Europe, nourishing their pride and vindicating their predilection. By the end of the century with the appearance of manuscripts from Yemen and untold treasures from the Cairo Geniza, the study of Jews under Islam dominated the field of Jewish studies.1 This remarkable role was not solely the consequence of internal Jewish factors. Rather the simultaneous emergence in Germany of Islamic studies engendered a somewhat symmetrical discourse between Jewish and Christian scholars of Islam. It was this rare instance of reciprocity that reinforced Jewish interest in Islam and created one islet in the German academic archipelago in which German scholars related to the practitioners of Wissenschaft des Judentums with a degree of mutual respect and a spirit of collaboration. New archival research suggests that this interaction was the singular achievement of Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, Germany’s premier Arabist for more than four decades at mid-century. By founding Germany’s first and leading Oriental society, Die Deutsche-Morgenländische Gesellschaft (hereafter DMG) in 1845, Fleischer institutionalized without loss of vigour or clarity his vision of an interdisciplinary partnership for the advancement of the study of Islam. In the pages of its journal Die Zeitschrift der DeutschenMorgenländischen Gesellschaft (henceforth ZDMG), Jewish scholars found a receptive academic forum, unmatched in openness by any other learned German periodical. 1 Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context. The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover/London: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 71–92; Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (eds.), Orientalism and the Jews (Hanover/London: Brandeis University Press, 2005); Noah Gerber, The Cultural Discovery of Yemenite Jewry: Between Ethnography and Philology (Hebrew), (Ph.D. thesis, Hebrew University, 2009).

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Three foci constitute the organization and progression of this essay: first, a sketch of just how parallel the developments of Jewish and Islamic studies in Germany were; second, a profile of Fleischer as a bridge builder by virtue of his close ties to Jewish students and scholars; and third, the ethos of Fleischer as embodied and perpetuated in the practice of the DMG. In the end, I hope the fact that this study was done by an outsider, a student of Wissenschaft des Judentums and not an Islamicist, will not detract from the discovery of an unappreciated dialectic in the history of modern Oriental studies.2

I The process by which Judaism and Islam were historicized, that is reconceptualized as historical phenomena, in the nineteenth century is strikingly similar for the two fields. Both subjects were encumbered with a formidable legacy of explosively negative images. A long history of conflict with Judaism and Islam, often violent, always ideologically fraught, had inoculated Christian Europe with deep-seated feelings of suspicion, trepidation and contempt for each. Although in the Middle Ages the mission to convert Jews and Muslims to Christianity had given rise to schools and chairs to teach Hebrew and Arabic, and in the early modern period the zeal of Christian humanists had increased the corpus of sacred texts of both religions available to Europeans, rarely did greater knowledge serve to alter the underlying adversarial relationship.3 By the end of the seventeenth century, the hostility on both fronts still bristled with undiminished intensity. The threat to Europe from the East was real. In 1645, the feared Ottoman Turks had resumed their assault on the West. In 1669 they conquered Crete and in 1672 forced the Poles to cede Ukraine and Podolia. By the summer of 1683, they were again besieging Vienna, the seat of the German emperor. To be sure, they lost that battle and the town of Buda three years later, forcing them out of Hungary after a century of conquest; in the treaty of Carlowitz

2 In the process, I hope that I have also refined our understanding of the disproportionate contribution of Jewish scholars to the study of Islam, a phenomenon that Sabine Mangold says awaits systematic treatment (Die deutsche Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert, [Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004] 104 n. 507) and that Suzanne L. Marchand touches on frequently (German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 113–123, 222–223, 321–322). As a tribute to Bernard Lewis’s early essay on the subject (‘Pro-Islamic Jews’, in Judaism, 17 [Fall 1968], 391–404), Martin Kramer raised the topic afresh forcefully in The Jewish Discovery of Islam, (Tel Aviv: The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 1999). 3 Hartmut Bobzin, Der Koran im Zeitalter der Reformation (Beirut: in Kommission bei Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1995).

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(1699) they had to submit for the first time to the will of a Christian sovereign.4 Yet long thereafter, Christians asked of God in their prayers to save them from the “terror of the Turk”.5 In contrast, the threat to Europe posed by its miniscule Jewish population was imagined, if no less charged. In the very years that the Turks alarmed a sorely divided Christendom, Johann Andreas Eisenmenger, a Protestant theologian, studied assiduously with Jewish teachers in Amsterdam and Frankfurt am Main to compile his venomous indictment of Judaism. Titled to allure and written in German to be read, the two tomes of Entdecktes Judenthum (Judaism Revealed) accused Jews wholesale of holding primitive theological views, blaspheming Christianity and its founder and living by an ethical double standard. While the charges were not new, the mountain of textual evidence drawn from nearly two hundred primary sources to back them was. Arranged thematically in forty-one chapters that sprawled over more than two thousand pages, the passages quoted in Hebrew or Aramaic and translated into German were unfailingly accurate. However, since Eisenmenger never bothered to contextualize them historically or in view of the Halakha (i.e. within the ongoing dialectic of Jewish law), he maliciously conveyed the impression that they were all still valid and obligatory. Each volume also came with its own carefully compiled index for easy referencing. Vienna’s court Jews managed to delay the publication of Eisenmenger’s work for a decade, though not his appointment to a professorship in Oriental languages at Heidelberg. The book finally appeared in 1711, some seven years after his death. Endlessly recycled, its defamatory contents would lend generations of German anti-Semites an inexhaustible arsenal of lethal firepower.6 The parallels in the coming of age of modern Jewish and Islamic studies continue to emboss the nineteenth century. Multi-volume, comprehensive histories of the Jews by Isaak Markus Jost in Berlin (1820–28) and of the Ottoman Turks by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall in Vienna (1827–35) began to challenge long-held biases and stereotypes. Though the latter was far more sympathetic to his subject matter and brought to it many more unpublished

4 Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 3 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959–69), 2, 84–85; Paula Sutter Fichtner, Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526–1850 (London: Reaktion, 2008), 21–72. 5 Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 126. 6 Johann Andrea Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, 2 vols. (Königsberg [actually Berlin]: mit einem Königlichen Majestät in Preussen, 1711); Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. 10, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Oscar Leiner, 1897), 280–86; Jacob Katz, “Eisenmenger’s Method of Citing Proofs from Talmudic Sources” (Hebrew), Papers from the World Congress of Jewish Studies, 2, (Jerusalem: 1972), 210–16.

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sources, both forged a new historical approach to their fields.7 Their most notable weakness was an absence of philological rigour, which set them apart from Leopold Zunz and Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, who each delivered at about the same time a powerful fillip for the critical role of philology in the writing of creditable history. In his Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden of 1832, Zunz wielded the tools of philological analysis to endow the vast and disordered body of rabbinic exegetical and homiletical literature (midrash) with a sparkling semblance of coherence and development, whereas Fleischer in his Samachschari’s Goldene Halsbänder of 1835 levelled a confrontational critique of Hammer-Purgstall’s philological dilettantism.8 If philology was to reign supreme, however, in the domain of history, Hebrew and Arabic had first to be emancipated from their ancillary role as aids in the interpretation of Scripture. That dependency was signified by their location in the theology faculty, which educated the pastors for Protestant Germany (Catholic priests still being shielded and nurtured in seminaries), and wherein they were exposed to a smattering of Hebrew, Chaldaean, Aramaic and Arabic. A recent graduate of Leipzig’s theology faculty, Fleischer described its curriculum in 1823 as an intellectual wasteland.9 In Paris from 1825 to 1828, Fleischer studied Arabic (classical and spo´ cole Special des Langues Orientales Vivanken), Persian and Turkish at the E tes and the Colle`ge de France with Sylvestre de Sacy and Caussin de Perceval. De Sacy was not only the incomparable master of Arabic grammar and literature of his era, but also a magnetic personality and strong administrator, who took both schools to new heights.10 When Fleischer’s long desired appointment to Leipzig finally came, it was to the philosophical faculty, where he immediately had to combat an internal effort to relocate his chair to theology. Though he frustrated this move, he still had to teach twenty percent of his course load in his first six years on books from the Hebrew Bible, of 7

Isaak Markus Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten, 9 vols. (Berlin: Schlesinger, 1820–28); Joseph von Hammer, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, 10 vols. (Pesth: C.A. Hartleben, 1827–34). 8 Leopold Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, (Berlin: A. Ascher, 1832); Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, Samachschari’s Goldene Halsbänder, (Leipzig: 1835). Regarding the harshness of his critique of Hammer-Purgstall, Fleischer confided to his close friend Konrad Dietrich Hassler as follows: “I hope to show the whole world clearly that even a man full of spirit and learning, as long as he holds grammar and logic to be unnecessary, will concoct the greatest nonsense, indeed must. The matter is both infuriating and laughable and I have strummed on both strings in my booklet.” (C.F. Seybold [ed.], Fleischers Briefe an Hassler aus den Jahren 1823–70, [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (P. Siebeck), 1914], 64). 9 Mangold, 52–64; Marchand, 36, 53–101; Seybold, 3. 10 Johann Fück, Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts, (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1955), 148.

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which he had a firm linguistic command, because as late as 1838, thirty percent of the students at Leipzig were still enrolled in theology.11 But Fleischer begrudged the time wasted on theology students, whom he found illequipped and uninterested, much preferring the growing number of students who came to him to study Arabic and the Koran for their own sake. By 1842 their number enabled him to discontinue his service to theology.12 In short, the transfer of Arabic, if not Hebrew, to the philosophy faculty, where the practice of philology drove the research imperative, heralded a critical and non-theological approach to the unravelling of ancient texts. A shared methodology united the fields of Greco-Roman and Semitic studies in a single faculty now atop the academic pyramid. By 1830 half of Germany’s universities had a competent Arabist in philosophy,13 and when Berlin University finally decided in 1860 to appoint one, they turned to Fleischer, although the Saxon Minister of Culture quickly matched the offer to enable him to stay happily in Leipzig.14 No institution in Germany was more immune to change than its universities.15 The failing forced the institutionalization of Wissenschaft des Judentums to occur entirely outside its confines, leaving the field isolated and suspect. Nor was it an accident that when the Federal Republic created the first chair in Jewish studies in 1964, it would be at the new and less hidebound Free University of Berlin in Dahlem. Despite the rapid growth of Jewish students at German universities during the nineteenth century and the high calibre of the research of the best of the Wissenschaft scholars and the periodic requests submitted by them for a chair in their field, before 1964 German universities never freed biblical Hebrew and history from their ancillary status nor deemed post-biblical Hebrew and Jewish history as worthy of inclusion in their academic discourse.16 It is a fact full of irony that Heinrich Fleischer, whose promotion of value-free scholarship was such a striking exception and hence the focus of this essay, taught at a confessional university – by statute appointing only Lutherans to its professoriate.17 11

For courses taught by Fleischer, see https://histvv.uni-leipzig.de/dozenten/fleischer h l.html. Ulrich von Hehl, Uwe John, and Manfred Rudersdorf (eds.), Geschichte der Universität Leipzig 1409–2009, 4.1 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2009), 57. 12 See especially Fleischer’s letter to his father dated 26 May 1839, also those dated 7 June 1838, 26 Feb. 1839, 19 Nov. 1839 in Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Sondersammlungen, 267.6.11 (Fleischer Nachlass) (hereafter UBL, FN). 13 Mangold, 132. 14 UBL, FN, 267.6.5. 15 Gordon A. Craig, The Germans (New York: Putnam, 1982), 170. 16 Peter Schäfer, “Judaistik-jüdische Wissenschaft in Deutschland heute. Historische Identität und Nationalität,” in Spaeculum, 42 (1991), 199–216. 17 Katharina Vogel, ‘Der Orientalist Julius Fürst (1805–1873): Wissenschaftler, Publizist und engagierter Bürger’, in Bausteine einer jüdischen Geschichte der Universität Leipzig, ed. Stephan Wendehorst (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006) 44–49.

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By 1880 Wissenschaft des Judentums had taken refuge in five rabbinical seminaries in Breslau (1854), Vienna (1862), Berlin (1872, 1873) and Budapest (1877). Their differences in religious ideology and practice notwithstanding, they all embraced the research imperative and critical scholarship of a philosophy faculty. For admission, they required of their students a Gymnasium diploma (the Abitur) or its equivalent and encouraged them to pursue a doctorate while in residence. From their faculty, they expected a field of expertise, a conversancy with all aspects of Judaica and especially a level of scholarship governed by the canons of the university, that is based, if possible, on unpublished texts subjected to philological scrutiny and contextual interpretation. Excluded from the academic fraternity, Wissenschaft des Judentums transformed the rabbinical seminaries into extensions of the university, whose brightest students often stayed to teach or went abroad to staff the emerging rabbinical schools of Britain and the United States.18 Thus by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Germany stood indisputably at the forefront of the fields of Jewish and Islamic studies. In a single generation, France had lost its pre-eminence in the latter, primarily due to the stature of Fleischer.19 De Sacy had sensed his promise from the start and treated him solicitously. When Fleischer began to copy the lengthy manuscript in the Bibliothe`que nationale of Al-Baydawi, the thirteenth-century Sunni compiler of a commentary to the Koran, whose text he would eventually bring out in two volumes in 1846 and 1848, de Sacy borrowed it from the library in his own name for the winter of 1826–27 to give to Fleischer to take home, sparing him from having to sit in its unheated reading room.20 Before Fleischer left Paris in 1828, de Sacy tried to secure a job for him as an Orientalist in St. Petersburg.21 Back in Germany marking time as a Gymnasium professor, he wrote to his father on Easter 1833 about an uplifting letter that

18 Christian Wiese, Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie in wilhelminischen Deutschland (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 81–99. 19 Mangold, 95. 20 Seybold, 40. A letter from 16 March 1827 by Fleischer to his former Leipzig roommate Diaconus Jacob shortly after he had resumed his formal studies in Paris spotlights the passion with which he pursued them: “Now, my dear brother, am I not a true martyr for Oriental orthodoxy? Indeed, what I have once come to love, I love steadfastly. My enthusiasm for my studies is a flame that feeds itself, that nothing will stifle or extinguish. Remember how often in Leipzig late at night I would enthusiastically pore over my Koran or with iron will copy my thick Golius. I give you my word that were you to come into my room now you would still see me reading my Arabic and Persian poets with the same enthusiasm or working with the same tenacity on my lexicographic collection.” (Fleischer was contemplating doing an Arabic dictionary.) UBL, FN, 267.1.4.4; H.O. Fleischer, Beidawi. Commentarius in Coranum, 2 vols. (Lipsiae: Sumptibus F.C.G. Vogelii, 1846, 1848). 21 Seybold, 48.

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he had just received from his revered teacher. Fleischer had suggested a number of corrections to an Arabic book that de Sacy was editing; after indicating his pleasure with the suggested alterations, he went on to say that “he regards it as one of his greatest services to the field of Oriental literature to have educated students like me, of whom admittedly there were not many [...] [and that] he permits me to make whatever use I wish of his letter”.22 Whereas in the first third of the nineteenth century the talents of de Sacy had made Paris a Mecca for students of the key languages of Islam from all over Europe and the Middle East, including nearly all the young Germans who would soon become the leading Arabists at home, Fleischer singlehandedly redirected the flow. As early as November 1843, he informed his widowed father, to whom he wrote faithfully, that he had his first student from Paris, a young man of good stock who came with a letter of recommendation from the librarian of the royal library, who was none other than the son of his teacher de Sacy.23 A year-and-a-half later, he related with evident glee, that last week I received a letter from Professor [Joseph] Reinaud from Paris [de Sacy’s student and successor at the Ecole special des langues orientales vivantes] in which he informed me that since last November [1844] in the very same school of Oriental languages, where 20 years before I first became acquainted with my author [Al-Baydawi, whom Fleischer liked to call his Muslim Church Father], he was using my edition [Reinaud had evidently gotten advanced quires from Fleischer as they came off the press]. How elated would Father de Sacy have been had he lived to witness this [he had died in 1838]!24 By the time that Ignaz Goldziher arrived in Leipzig from Hungary in1869, the twelve students in Fleischer’s Arabic colloquium were from six different countries.25 Not for naught did his students endearingly dub him “the Sheikh of Sheikhs”.26 Proof positive of Germany’s preeminence in Islamic studies at the turn of the twentieth century is also manifest in its lead role in the production of the Encyclopedia of Islam, whose first massive volume appeared just before the war in German (1914), French (1913) and English (1913). Often delayed, dauntingly complicated and consistently underfunded, the encyclopaedia was a triumph of international collaboration inspired at first by Robertson

22

UBL, FN, 267.6.11. UBL, FN, 267.6.11, letter dated 30 November 1843. 24 Ibid, letter dated 10 March 1845. The designation of Al-Baydawi as his Muslim Church Father is in a letter to his father dated 12 Dec. 1843 (ibid.). 25 Ignaz Goldziher, “Fleischer: Heinrich Leberecht,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 48, Leipzig 1904, 591. 26 Siegfried Wagner, Franz Delitzsch. Leben und Werk (München: Kaiser, 1978), 33, n. 37. 23

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Smith of Cambridge and then after his death by Goldziher. Its nine-man executive committee headed at the outset by Leiden’s Michael Jan de Goeje and thereafter by Christian Snouck Hurgranje included four members who published largely in German and three who had still studied with Fleischer. In his capacity as the committee’s editorial supervisor, Goldziher estimated that four-fifths of the entries would be written in German.27 Indeed in their correspondence, Goldziher and Theodor Nöldeke lamented the stagnation that had overtaken Islamic studies in Paris.28

II If, then, the emergence of Jewish and Islamic studies displayed similar trajectories, their common chronological, disciplinary and institutional features did not automatically signify either proximity or interaction. The convergence of the fields in Germany was brought about primarily by the enlightened leadership of Heinrich Fleischer. After his death in 1888, Goldziher caught the quintessence of his teacher and dear friend, whose 52-year tenure had catapulted Leipzig to the forefront of Islamic studies: “He was one of the few learned men of our time whose academic influence was inseparable from the moral beauty that adorns a man’s character.”29 This rare combination of expertise and humanity is what attracted students, sustained his enrolment and gave him lifelong disciples. His lodestar was to serve scholarship by advancing the work of others, often at the expense of his own, and his vast correspondence is testimony to the generosity with which he shared his knowledge and critical acumen with scholars irrespective of whether they had once studied with him or not.30 At his funeral Franz Delitzsch, Germany’s greatest Christian Hebraist and one of his very first students and much later close colleague for two decades on the Leipzig faculty, waxed poetic in his eulogy in celebrating the magnanimity of the man toward his students: 27

Mangold, 286–89; Orientalistische Litteratur-Zeitung, 1914, cols. 182–5; Ignaz Goldziher, “Real-Encyklopädie des Islam,” Gesammelte Schriften, 6 vols., reprint (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967–73), 4,129–132. 28 Robert Simon, Ignaz Goldziher, His Life and Scholarship (Budapest/Leiden: Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and E.J. Brill, 1986), 249, 258. Whereas the letters by Goldziher and Nöldeke date from 1904, Hungronje expressed that same dismissive opinion in a letter to Goldziher as early as 1886 (P. Sj. Koningsveld [ed.], Scholarship and Friendship in early Islamwissenschaft: The letters of C. Snouck Hurgronje to I. Goldziher [Leiden: Documentatiebureau Islam-Christendom, Faculteit der Godgeleerndheid, Rijksuniversitateit, 1985], 62). 29 Simon, 37 (slightly revised). 30 Jewish Theological Seminary Library (hereafter JTSL) ARC 108, Fleischer file, letter to Moritz Steinschneider dated 2 March 1852.

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His untiring work in the service of scholarship bore within it a touch of the eternal, and this element was love, pure love, which is the polar opposite of selfishness. Love is life and absorption (Aufgehen) with another. He was a teacher who lived entirely for and was absorbed with his students. Whoever had the good fortune to be primarily his student would be gently led and lifted by his love. He would help him over his troubles, worry about his future as his own. Like a father he watched over him, and cared for him like a mother. Never taking his eye off him, he shielded him beneath his wing.31

Notwithstanding the poetic licence, it is evident that Fleischer, who had once considered becoming a missionary, taught his students with a sense of vocation.32 What made him a nexus between the fields was the fact that he did not exclude Jewish students from his pedagogic embrace. The late Professor Holger Preissler of Leipzig University, himself an Arabist, already pointed out the large number of Jewish students who gravitated to Leipzig to study with him, many of whom would go on to distinguish themselves in both fields. Preissler’s meticulous and suggestive research, for example, uncovered that of the 131 doctoral candidates on whose work he rendered a written opinion from 1866 to 1886, 52 (that is nearly 40 percent) came from Jewish homes.33 Not all had actually sat at his feet, because Leipzig, like other German universities, permitted external candidates to seek Ph.D.s on the basis of work done elsewhere. Still the number is staggering and lends credence to the acerbic comment of 1869 by Moritz Steinschneider, himself an Arabist and Hebraist of renown, that classes in “Semitic literature would be practically empty” without their Jewish students.34 A deeper look into Fleischer’s unpublished correspondence, research that Preissler had initiated, yields qualitative insight into his inclusive stance.35 Tellingly, his first student and assistant (Famulus), Carl Caspari, was a Jew from Dessau, who as a rabbi-to-be in 1836 wanted to concentrate on the Hebrew Bible and the Koran.36 Within two years he had undergone a conversion experience, perhaps influenced by Delitzsch, his close friend and fellow student, who at the time had already embarked on his mission of bringing the Gospel to Jews. Fleischer attended the baptism in a village church outside of Leipzig and described the event to his father at some length. Though not mentioned by name, Delitzsch seems to have been one of the two witnesses. The pastor noticeably moved Caspari with his words. Absent, 31

UBL, FN, 267.7.5. Heinrich Thorbecke, ZDMG, 42 (1888), 696. 33 Holger Preissler, “Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer. Ein Leipziger Orientalist, seine jüdischen Studenten, Promovenden und Kollegen,” Stephan Wendehorst (ed.), Bausteine 266. 34 Hebräische Bibliographie, 9 (1869), 77 (hereafter HB). 35 Preissler, 251 n. 21. 36 Ibid. 32

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however, from Fleischer’s letter is any note of triumphalism or snide comment about Judaism. To be sure, he deemed the ceremony worth recounting, but in a strictly matter-of-fact way.37 Fortunately, Fleischer’s letters abound with evidence of a more overt and conclusive nature, allowing us to glimpse him through the lens of his Jewish correspondents. On the seventieth birthday of Shlomo Yehuda Rapoport, then chief rabbi of Prague, Fleischer paid him a glowing tribute that gave voice to the ethical core of his own scholarly ethos. With his dense biographical essays of the 1820s, Rapoport had dramatically implanted the practice of critical history in the backwater of Galicia. Fleischer’s letter not only betrays familiarity with Rapoport’s Hebrew oeuvre, but documents his command of post-biblical Hebrew: Since the days when I [first] got to know you from your work and then later to my great pleasure personally, I have always felt myself sympathetically drawn to you, perhaps because you [exhibit] so fully a combination of the deepest and most earnest scholarship with the most gentle humanity, as I saw united in my blessed teacher de Sacy, who hence became my ideal. May the example you project in both cases, for many already a lodestar, remain so for years to come. May not only the great but also the good Rapoport inspire young scholars to emulate him, and thereby banish selfishness, arrogance, presumptuousness, envy and the impulse to belittle from the pure temple wherein research [rests] on truth [Wahrheitsforschung].38

Most important, Fleischer’s letter of tribute was unsolicited, an unalloyed expression of esteem for a Jewish scholar whose character matched his learning. Fleischer’s own revered mentor had displayed the same nobility. The high regard for Rapoport as a kindred spirit was not restricted to Fleischer. In the institutional extension of his ethos, the ZDMG (of which more below), Richard Gosche, formerly the curator of Oriental manuscripts at the Royal Library in Berlin and now professor of Oriental languages at Halle, penned an obituary taking direct aim at the discriminatory culture of the German university system that denied access to Jewish scholars of stature: If our academies and universities would only be based on the principle of scholarship and have designated a Jewish faculty alongside their Evangelical and Catholic faculties, then Rapoport, not to speak of the living, would have played an extraordinary role in the renown of any such institution in Europe. Instead, to appropriate Steinschneider’s mordant and telling comment: “The Prague rabbinate needed 27 years to consume a rare genius.”39

37

UBL, FN, 267.6.11, letter dated 7 June 1838. Royal Library Copenhagen, Ny kgl. Sam. 4o 2969 (hereafter RLC, Fleischer papers), Rapoport file, draft dated 9 June 1860. 39 ZDMG, Supplement zum 24. Bande, Wissenschaftlicher Jahresbericht für 1862 bis 1867 (Leipzig: 1871), 37. In an earlier review, Gosche expressed dismay at the disparity in treatment meted out to Jews in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the Turks in the 38

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By implication, the multiple pressures of the pulpit were better suited to apologetics. The exclusion of Rapoport cost both German and Jewish scholarship dearly, even as it called into question the integrity of the academic enterprise. Salomon Munk left Germany in 1827 for Paris without a doctorate in hand precisely because he could not envision an academic career for himself as a Jew in his homeland. On the way he had spent one semester in Bonn studying with Georg Wilhelm Freytag, another German student of de Sacy, who had turned the new university, founded in 1818, into the German Center for Arabic prior to Fleischer’s ascendancy. In Paris under arduous circumstances, Munk would become the most important student of medieval Jewish philosophy of his generation and its finest Arabist. By 1835 he had embarked on the daunting project of publishing for the first time the Arabic original of Maimonides’ classic Guide of the Perplexed and accompanying it with a French translation and notes, all of which came to fruition in the last decade of his life, long after he had gone blind. In December 1864 the French government rewarded him with an appointment to the chair in Hebrew at the Colle`ge de France after controversy had forced Ernst Renan to vacate that position.40 Fleischer met Munk in 1828 shortly after he arrived in classes taught by de Sacy. Munk’s facility with Arabic and familiarity with Jewish philosophy impressed him sufficiently to mention him twice in letters to his Leipzig classmate and clergy friend Konrad Dietrich Hassler, each time stressing his promise. More relevant is Fleischer’s perception of Munk’s Jewishness: “His Judaism is a kind of Philonism [Philonianismus], gnosis mosaica. One can no doubt expect something from him. However, he is not entirely free of Jewish pride and stubbornness.”41 Whatever the first opaque sentence may mean, the last is surely an implicit generalization about an innate or acquired character flaw. My contention here is not that Fleischer held no conventional prejudices about Jews, though his corpus is remarkably free of them, but solely that he never allowed them to compromise his devotion to scholarship. Fleischer’s correspondence preserves two letters dictated by Munk from 1853 and 1857 that expressed his gratitude for Fleischer’s high regard of his

East and Christians in the West: “The Christians knew only how to make use of the Jews’ purse, while the Mohammedans [used] their talents. Indeed, there is little in the books [just spoken of] that brings us credit.” (ZDMG, Supplement zum 20. Bande. Wissenschaftlicher Jahresbericht für 1859 bis 1861 (Leipzig: 1868), 211. 40 MoιÈse Schwab, Salomon Munk. Sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Ernest Leroux, Libraire, 1900), 17–18, 67–68, 165. 41 Seybold, 49. The second mention of Munk occurred three months later ( 52). Together the passages suggest that the exchange between the two aspiring Orientalists was more than casual.

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edition of Maimonides. In the first letter, Munk must have sent him some advanced quires of volume one (either the Arabic or French or perhaps both) and in the second, the volume itself (two parts), which appeared in 1856 (volumes II and III, again each in two parts, came out in 1861 and 1866). Not clear is whether they had corresponded over the years or if Fleischer remembered him from 1828. What is evident, however, in Munk’s words is that Fleischer was no less concerned about his well-being than his work. His 1853 letter conveys the degree of empathy and support that Fleischer voiced in each of his letters: Your heartfelt words stirred me deeply, and I assure you that your warm concern for my present condition truly comforted me. If anything is able to strengthen my resolve to persevere in my arduous efforts, it is the encouragement offered by men like you. [Moreover], your favourable opinion of my work is of supreme importance to me. Given how much stock I put in your judgment, I have reason to hope that my edition and translation of the Guide will not be unworthy of the attention of Orientalists, theologians and philosophers.42

Again the ZDMG in 1860 amplifed and publicized Fleischer’s enthusiasm for Munk’s achievement with an eighteen-page review by Abraham Geiger of volume one as well as of Munk’s electrifying publication of some extracts from and French translation of Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s Meqor Hayyim (Fons Vitae), long held to be the work of an alleged Muslim philosopher named Avicebron.43 Similarly, when Munk died in 1867, Gosche devoted three pages to his career in the same majestic overview of recent Oriental literature in the ZDMG in which he had memorialized Rapoport. Gosche did not hesitate to put him in Rapoport’s class as one of the founders of Wissenschaft des Judentums.44 Geiger had rejoined the DMG in 1857, perhaps after finishing his monumental reconstruction of the emergence of rabbinic Judaism, Urschrift und Uebersetzungen der Bibel, which would forever challenge students of the subject.45 His communal role as leader of the nascent Reform movement in Ju42 RLC, Fleischer papers, Munk file, letter of 17 Aug. 1853; see also Munk’s letter of 25 Aug. 1857. 43 ZDMG, 14 (1860), 722–740. On Munk’s significance, see Alfred L. Ivry, “Salomon Munk and the Science of Judaism Meet Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed,” in Görge K. Hasselhoff and Ottfried Fraisse (eds.), Moses Maimonides (1138–1204). His Religious, Scientific and Philosophical Wirkungsgeschichte in Different Cultural Contexts (Würzburg: Ergon, 2004), 479–489. 44 Gosche, ZDMG, Supplement zum 24. Bande, 42–44. During the last 26 years of his life, Gosche taught at Halle, where he was a staunch supporter of Jewish doctoral candidates in absentia (mostly rabbis or rabbinical students) and an ardent advocate of Jewish scholarship (see Carsten Wilke, “Rabbinerpromotionen an der philosophischen Facultät der Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 1845–1895,” Minima Judaica, 7, [Berlin: 2009], 279–295). 45 DMG 1845–1895. Ein Ueberblick, Leipzig 1895, 63; Abraham Geiger, Urschrift und

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daism and prominent pulpit rabbi never seemed to impede a scholarly career of tremendous range and productivity. As a young student of Freytag, in 1833 he had already authored a prize-winning book on Judaism’s influence on the Koran (Was hat Muhammed aus dem Judentume aufgenommen?) without belittling the figure of the Prophet.46 The audaciousness of his question and the import of his research quickly induced other young Jews like Lion Ullmann in 1840 and Gustav Weil in 1845 to follow suit.47 Though engaged thereafter primarily in rabbinics, Geiger retained an abiding interest in Jewish creativity under Islam. Fleischer did more than offer a passing comment on Geiger’s book in the literary supplement of Julius Fürst’s Orient. An unpaid adjunct in Hebrew at Leipzig, Fürst had probably solicited the review. Its hefty length paid tribute to the importance of the book, which Fleischer deemed to be a work of true scholarship. Nevertheless, he found that Geiger’s command of Arabic and its literature did not match his knowledge of Hebrew and its literature. Doubting that one scholar could actually master both fields sufficiently, Fleischer corrected a host of his translations and etymologies. The subtext of his review may well have been Fleischer’s Bonn competitor Freytag, who failed to flag Geiger’s mistakes in the first place. Regardless, the review displayed Fleischer’s fierce commitment to sound philology, of which many a purported Arabist would run afoul. At the same time, it should not go unmentioned that Fleischer did not express a single reservation about Geiger’s central thesis of the Koran’s indebtedness to Judaism. He seemed entirely unfazed by the

Uebersetzungen der Bibel in ihrer Abhängigkeit von der inneren Entwickelung des Judentums (Breslau: Julius Hainauer, 1857). On that work’s enduring significance, see Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 46 Bonn 1833; see Susannah Heschel, “Abraham Geiger and the Emergence of Jewish Philoislamism,” Dirk Hartwig, et al. (eds.), “Im vollen Licht der Geschichte” (Würzburg: Ergon, 2008), 65–86. 47 Lion Ullmann, Der Koran (Crefeld: J.H. Funcke, 1840). Whereas Ullmann, a pulpit rabbi, dedicated his translation to Freytag “his esteemed teacher,” Geiger’s perspective pervaded his notes: “The advantage of this translation over others is the careful attention to and demonstration of everything that Muhammad borrowed from Judaism. Since I assume that what Dr. Geiger has brought forth in this regard in his learned work […] is well known, I will only allude to in my notes.” (Einleitung. By way of example, see notes on pp. 7, 30, 47 and 306). Simultaneously, Ullmann was at work on a book contextualizing the founder of Islam, which his premature death in 1843 left unfinished. By 1857 his translation had gone through four editions, to the chagrin of Gosche (ZDMG, 17 [1863], 167). Gustav Weil, Biblische Legenden der Muselmänner, (Frankfurt a.M.: Literarische Anstalt, 1845). In an 1866 lecture on Islamic lore, Fleischer acknowledged Weil’s thesis of indebtedness to Jewish sources (Bibliothek der DMG, Halle, Nachlass Fleischer, 2.5).

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proposition and gave no hint of suspecting Geiger of having an apologetic intent.48 Nor did the critique estrange the two. At the academic conference of 1844, at which the decision was made to found the DMG, Geiger spoke second on the language of the Mishnah, an honour that would never have been accorded him without Fleischer’s initiative or approval.49 Even so, Geiger ended his membership in 1848 because, as he wrote to Fleischer, he feared that the society’s agenda and his own were diverging and he did not relish being reduced to a passive bystander.50 Yet in 1857 he chose to rejoin and in the next eighteen years, till his death in 1874, he contributed some forty essays, reviews and notes of wide ranging scope to the Zeitschrift. He often seemed to have been the reviewer of choice for books on Jewish subjects, as was the case with Munk. The surviving correspondence with Fleischer is full of substance, friendship and mutual respect. Geiger turned to him often for textual assistance or help in getting his Urschrift reviewed, which Fleischer extended, or to explain his departure from Breslau to Frankfurt am Main, or to speak of visiting him. Thus when Geiger’s son Ludwig was about to leave home to study at Leipzig, Geiger felt close enough to Fleischer to ask him to open his home to him.51 In contrast to Munk, Rapoport and Geiger, Steinschneider actually studied with Fleischer, though only briefly for three months in the summer of 1839.52 A native of Moravia, he had come as an advanced student after nearly six years of study in Prague and Vienna. But a clouded career path soon prompted him to move on to Berlin, where he quickly won the esteem, guidance and friendship of Zunz, as he had that of Fleischer in Leipzig. When Steinschneider finally decided to settle permanently in Berlin in 1845, after yet another three-year stint of teaching in a Jewish school in Prague, Fleischer breathed a sigh of relief: “Your future appears to me in a more auspicious light now that I know you are with Zunz. There are people in whom I have an instinctive and unshakable confidence, without having been able to take their measure. Zunz is one of them and the two of you belong together.”53 48

Literaturblatt des Orients, 1841, nos. 5, 6, 8, 10, 12. Verhandlungen der ersten Versammlung deutscher und ausländischer Orientalisten in Dresden, 1844 (Leipzig: 1845), 78. 50 DMG 1845–1895. Ein Ueberblick, 63; RLC, Fleischer papers, Geiger file, letter dated 23 April 1850. 51 Ewald Wagner (ed.), Generalindex zur ZDMG, Band 1–100, Wiesbaden 1955, 31–32; RLC, Fleischer papers, Geiger file, letter dated 15 April 1865. 52 JTSL, ARC 108, box 15, “Ueber meine Vorbereitung für das Schulfach”. 53 Ibid., Fleischer file, letter dated March 10, 1845. On the relationship between Zunz and Steinschneider, see Alexander Marx,”Zunz’s Letters to Steinschneider,” in Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 5 (1933–34), 95–153. In a biographical vein, idem, “Moritz Steinschneider,”in Essays in Jewish Biography (Philadelphia: Jewish 49

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A year before Fleischer had honoured Steinschneider with an invitation to deliver the closing lecture at the founding conference of the DMG in Dresden. Though the only speaker without a doctorate, he obliged his mentor with a dazzling philological brief for Hebrew as a vital repository of linguistic remnants from the many languages in whose cultural orbit Jews had once lived, hence of value to students of those cultures. When published in 1845 as a monograph, Steinschneider dedicated it to his two mentors, Zunz and Fleischer, “my highly respected teachers and friends”. In addressing the latter, he thanked him especially for his steadfast friendship.54 A few years later that friendship and its underlying esteem would extricate Steinschneider from an embarrassing predicament. In 1848 Oxford’s Bodleian Library had offered him the chance to catalogue its substantial collection of Hebrew books printed before 1732. Not only was Fleischer overjoyed by the break, but he wrote letters of introduction for him to five of England’s prominent Orientalists. On 7 March 1851, after his first visit the previous summer, Steinschneider informed him from Berlin that he was in desperate need of a doctorate. The Bodleian staff assumed all along that he had one and he feared jeopardizing his job by disabusing them of the idea. By 14 April, Fleischer had arranged for Leipzig to award Steinschneider a doctorate in absentia on the basis of his extensive publications to date, in particular for his stunning book-length survey of Jewish literature, which had just appeared in the latest volume of the highly touted Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste (General Encyclopedia of Science and the Arts, widely known then as Ersch and Gruber after its founding editors).55 Fleischer could render an authoritative opinion for the faculty committee because Steinschneider had consistently sent him copies of his work, often asking him to review his Arabic texts and philology prior to publication: If I had to single out [a shortcoming] alongside the originality of his reach [Geistesfrische] and the acuity of his grasp [Verstandesschärfe], the evident breadth of his reading and the unusual fund of his linguistic and literary knowledge, it would most likely be too much of a good thing, [that is] an oppressive excess of interspersed asides, notes and quotations. Regarding his essay on Jewish literature in Ersch and Gruber, I am convinced that among

publication Society of America, 1947), 112–184 and my essay “Moritz Steinschneider: The Vision Beyond the Man”, in this volume. 54 Verhandlungen der ersten Versammlung, 78; Moritz Steinschneider, Die fremdsprachlichen Elemente im Neuhebräiischen und ihre Benutzung für die Linguistik, (Prag: W. Pascheles, 1845). 55 RLC, Fleischer papers, Steinschneider file, letter dated 7 March 1851; JTSL, ARC, Fleischer file, letter dated 11 March 1851; Moritz Steinschneider, ‘Jüdische Literatur’, in Allgemeine Enycklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, zweite Section, 27 (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1850), 357–471.

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the living Jewish scholars only Zunz and Rapoport, maybe also Geiger and Fürst, could have single handedly written such a survey.56

With his focus on Jews in the Islamic world, Steinschneider pursued a dual career as Arabist and Hebraist. His perch at the Bodleian afforded him the chance to also scour its rich collection of Hebrew manuscripts. In truth, his 1860 encyclopaedic Latin catalogue of its printed Hebrew books, with its 9559 entries, not only set the gold standard for Hebrew bibliography, but wherever possible referenced related unpublished Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts in the Bodleiana and elsewhere awaiting their redeemer. By mining these deposits in the decades to come, Steinschneider vastly increased what was known about the literary output of Jews under Islam. In the process, he demonstrated beyond dispute their cultural at-homeness in the era of Islam’s ascendancy.57 In conjunction with this, Steinschneider became a frequent contributor to the ZDMG. Of the 43 volumes which came out between 1849–92, products of his research appeared in 25 of them, on occasion more than one in the same year. In 1877 the society also published his pioneering bibliography of Arabic texts and treatises engendered by religious controversy among Muslims, Christians and Jews. Indeed, no Jewish scholar of the Wissenschaft coterie channelled as much of his work into non-Jewish journals as did Steinschneider.58 And yet his status was nowhere commensurate with his stature. A heartrending letter by Steinschneider to Fleischer dated 7 July 1863 reveals the wide gap between the fields of Jewish and Islamic studies in their paths toward institutionalization. Despite his efforts to enter the prevailing academic discourse, Steinschneider felt utterly estranged from its university venue. He was surviving precariously on a pittance from the Veitel Heine Ephraimsche Lehranstalt, a free-standing, non-degree granting Jewish academy, where he lectured to Jewish and non-Jewish students registered elsewhere, and from administering the offensive more judaico to Jewish witnesses about to testify in court, which repulsed him but paid him much more money. That he could humble himself before Fleischer reflected both his dire straits and the nature of their relationship:

56

Universitätsarchiv Leipzig, philosophische Facultät Promovieren, 251 (hereafter UAL, phil. Fac. Prom.). 57 Moritz Steinschneider, Catalogus librorum hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana, 4 vols.( Berlin: Friedlaender,, 1852–60). 58 Wagner (ed.), Generalindex zur ZDMG, 101–102; also George Alexander Kohut,‘Bibliography of the Writings of Prof. Dr. M. Steinschneider,’ in Festschrift zum achtzigsten Geburtstage Moritz Steinschneider, (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1896), v–xxxix.

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I am without vacation [from my judicial post] for I am “irreplaceable,” my offical surrogate being busier than I am. I can’t leave for two days without being summoned. As a result, my family is quite restricted, because I don’t want to leave them alone. Besides, I am not in a position to forgo even 20 talers of income. Should my job end – and that is something I half wish and advocate for the sake of progress – then I would be reduced with my five children to a yearly income of 300 talers, which I get for my lectures at the Veitel Institute. Yet my 50th year is bearing down on me – I have passed 47 – and then it will be hard to start something new, even harder to get a job. I admit to you honestly that I had thought for a moment to apply for Gosche’s job at the library (he had left recently for Halle), which brought him at the time 800 talers and then to give up the court [job]. But because I am a Jew, I had neither much prospect nor courage.59

It took Fleischer eight months to respond to Steinschneider’s cri de coeur, and when he did, on 24 March 1864, he seemed more concerned about the half-printed catalogue of Arabic manuscripts at the Royal Library that Gosche left behind, and Emil Rödiger’s snail’s pace cataloguing of Persian manuscripts in Halle. “It is truly a miserable situation: accumulating hordes of Oriental manuscripts and not a single librarian with the indispensable knowledge of the languages and subject matter to deal with them.” Admittedly, the first name to cross Fleischer’s mind was that of the young Theodor Nöldeke, who sorely needed a Brotwissenschaft (a paying job) till he received the professorship in Oriental languages at Kiel. Only then did Fleischer come around to Steinschneider. Were he ready to apply and were there even a remote chance for success, Fleischer would weigh in, although he acknowledged that his influence was minimal.60 What Fleischer omitted to say was that his rejection of the professorship in Berlin in 1860 had probably burned his bridges. Leipzig had immediately matched Berlin’s offer of a salary of 2000 talers, along with a larger apartment at a reduced rent, a level of prestige, remuneration and security far beyond Steinschneider’s reach as a “gentleman scholar”.61 Still, Fleischer’s offer of assistance is noteworthy, for it clearly implied that he considered Steinschneider to be a first-rate Arabist and qualified successor to Gosche in charge of the Oriental manuscripts at the Royal Library. While Fleischer surely facilitated Steinschneider’s advance in the field and the Gesellschaft and on a larger scale (as we shall see) modified the practice of scholarship in Oriental studies, he did not tilt at windmills. His

59 RLC, Fleischer papers, Steinschneider file, letter dated 7 July 1863. The more judaico (“according to Jewish custom”) was a lengthy, humiliating oath, of medieval origin, imposed on Jews testifying in non-Jewish courts because their testimony was otherwise deemed untrustworthy. In Prussia, the state ended the degradation with the completion of legal emancipation in 1869 (for a sample from 1392, see Jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World [New York: Atheneum, 1978], 50). 60 JTSL, ARC 108, Fleischer file, letter dated 24 March 1864. 61 UBL, FN, 267.6.5.

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ultimate advice to Steinschneider in 1875 was to find his place in a Jewish institution of higher learning. On principle, Steinschneider had adamantly refused any involvement with the recently opened Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, which was not intended to be a Reform rabbinical school. “It is high time”, he wrote to Fleischer, “that true scholarship rise above theological divisions […]. The so-called Hochschule] will again be a Jewish theological seminary”.62 Fleischer, who wished the school well, chided him gently for his inflexibility: “I respect the grounds you have to reject any connection with it, but tell me please: If men like you avoid any involvement, do you then still have the right to complain should it fail? Why not seize the moment in the belief that in this way the better will prevail?”63 Like Steinschneider, Daniel Chwolson was not a native German. Born in Vilna in 1819, he came to Breslau in the 1840s sorely lacking in money, secular education and knowledge of German. In the foreword to his foundational two-volume work on the Sabians, which was published by the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg in 1856, he touchingly recalled his indebtedness to Abraham Geiger: “I might have rotted intellectually [geistig] and physically, if that noble man had not adopted, sheltered and nurtured me. […]. It is to him primarily that I owe the scholarly rank that I have attained and exercise.”64 But not entirely. Fleischer too had a generous hand in his dramatic rise to associate professor of Hebrew in the newly organized Oriental Faculty at the University of St. Petersburg, even though he never studied in Leipzig.65 Perhaps at the urging of Geiger and having finished his work at the University of Breslau, he approached Fleischer on 8 February 1850 to ask if his research on the identity of the non-Muslim Sabians, often discussed by Muslim authors as well as Maimonides, would not merit a doctorate in absentia. With evident excitement, Chwolson referred to the large array of primary sources, many from unpublished manuscripts, dealing with the Sabians, which he had assembled and analyzed, drawing a plethora of startling conclusions. At this stage, Chwolson dared to burden Fleischer only with the introductory section of his study, withholding the documentary evidence till later. But it succeeded to persuade the faculty committee of its originality, and by 20 February Chwolson, to his amazement, had his doctorate. Fleischer had seen

62 RLC, Fleischer papers, Steinschneider file, letter dated 23 Feb. 1875; see also Alexander Marx, ‘Steinschneideriana II’, in S.W. Baron and Alexander Marx (eds.), Jewish Studies in Memory of George A. Kohut (New York: The Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation, 1935) 518–520. 63 JTSL, ARC 108, Fleischer file, letter dated 1 July 1875. 64 Daniel Chwolson, Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus, 1 (St. Petersburg: Buchdruckerei der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1856), xxi. 65 ZDMG, 10 (1856), 520.

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enough to tell his colleagues, regarding the erudite author of this solid and multifaceted manuscript, that “if God gives him health and he continues to work [he] […] will soon rank among the top scholars of his nation (by which I (I.S.) understand Russians and not Jews)”.66 Beyond that, Fleischer helped Chwolson make a book of his manuscript. He came to Leipzig at the end of March with the entire manuscript and for the first time showed Fleischer the full extent of his research. Fleischer must have been utterly taken by its import, because unbeknownst to Chwolson he proceeded to edit it, largely correcting his German and reining in his proclivity to long-windedness. The absence of corrections to his Arabic transcriptions and translations suggests the high level of his work and the basic reason for Fleischer’s investment. In addition, he offered to write a forward for the book and wrote to the influential German Orientalist in St. Petersburg, Bernard Dorn, who had also studied with de Sacy, recommending that it be published by the academy.67 While Chwolson certainly gave Fleischer his due in the book’s forward, his outpouring of emotion upon receiving the edited manuscript more fully depicts the largesse of the man: I want to assure you that the manner in which you have treated me, which exceeded all my expectations, has instilled in me the firm resolve to relate to others exactly like you and to dispense as much blessing and joy as you do to those whom I will come in contact with. No one could be more solicitous and giving than you. I could never have imagined that you would revise my work with such care. You cannot possibly be more scrupulous with your own. The revision must have robbed you of so very, very much time.68

Fleischer thus taught his students to emulate him in more than mastering the languages of Islam and the philological method. A gifted student or original piece of research always triggered his nobler instincts. Chwolson’s success in disentangling the different uses of the term Sabians was such a breakthrough and would serve as a point of departure for all future research. Nevertheless, Chwolson’s prospects for teaching in Czarist Russia were even slimmer than Steinschneider’s in Germany. He had asked of Fleischer forthrightly that when he wrote to Dorn, he should tell him that Chwolson was a Jew: “It is not a disgrace, says Heine, to be a Jew, just a misfortune, at least in Russia.”69 Several years later, Chwolson, in desperate straits, decided to rectify his misfortune, as he related to Fleischer:

66

Preissler, 25; RLC, Fleischer papers, Chwolson file. Ibid., letters dated 9 May 1850, 8 June 1850 and 20 June 1850. On Dorn, see Preissler, “Die Anfänge der DMG”, in ZDMG, 145, no. 2 (1995), 285. 68 RLC, Fleischer papers, Chwolson file, letter dated 8 June 1850. 69 Ibid., letter dated 19 April 1850. 67

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A few days after receiving your precious letter of 5 November 1854, I began collating [the pages of my book], which took me until New Year’s eve to finish. But what a chasm in between! I began the work as a Jew and finished as a Christian […]! As my first child lay dying from his circumcision, I made the initial decision to convert to Christianity, and after two years of vacillating, the decision had ripened sufficiently to carry out. The pale face of my poor, wretched and sickly child admonished me constantly and thus fourteen days ago, I, my wife and my two small children (the second is only ten weeks old and not circumcised) converted to Christianity. We would have preferred to become Protestants but a variety of circumstances, which I cannot spell out here, prompted me to convert to the Greek [Orthodox] Church. This step is judged differently by different people, though God alone knows what was in my heart.

By October 1855, Chwolson had his wish, an academic appointment from the Czar as an associate professor of Hebrew language and literature in St. Petersburg’s newly founded Oriental faculty, where he would educate the next generation of Russian Orientalists, as Fleischer had more or less predicted.70 Fleischer’s knowledge of Hebrew was extensive. By the time he had graduated from the Gymnasium, he had worked his way through the Hebrew Bible in the original. At Leipzig he belonged to its Hebrew society for three years and passed his Magister exam in Hebrew in 1833 with noteworthy ease.71 Among the biblical books that he taught in his first years back were the Pentateuch, Joshua through Kings, the Minor Prophets, Proverbs, and selected passages of biblical Aramaic.72 In 1842 he cancelled his classes to attend the funeral of Wilhelm Gesenius of nearby Halle, paying his respects to the scholar who had laid the foundation for the grammatical and lexicographical study of biblical Hebrew.73 To the ninth edition of Gesenius’s classical Handwörterbuch über das alte Testament, Fleischer had supplied invaluable notes on Arabic cognates and derivations and corrected the many errors that had crept into the material adduced from Arabic in the course of constant reediting.74 His impressive command of Hebrew, in short, made Fleischer one of the few Arabists who could read Judeo-Arabic, that is Arabic in Hebrew characters with an admixture of Hebrew words thrown in, which was the language of the vast

70 Ibid., letter dated 29 Jan. 1855. As for the creation of the Oriental faculty at the University of St. Petersburg, see ZDMG, vol. 10 (1856), 518–520. Chwolson’s initial appointment was as an ausserordentlicher Professor der hebräiische Sprache ( 520). In 1851 Fleischer had the Zeitschrift announce that the Academy of Science in St. Petersburg was going to publish Chwolson’s work. The occasion gave Fleischer the chance to draw the public’s attention to the importance of his research (ZDMG, vol. 5 [1851], 392). 71 UBL, FN, 267.6.11, letter dated Easter 1833. 72 Veranstaltungen, https://histvv.uni-leipzig.de/dozenten/fleischer hl.html. 73 UBL, FN, 267.6.1. 74 Wilhelm Gesenius’ hebräisches und chaldäisches Handwörterbuch, eds. F. Mühlau and W. Volck, (Leipzig: F.C.W. Vogel, 1883), v.

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Undated photograph of Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig (Fleischer Nachlass Signatur NL 267, 1.5).

majority of texts written by Jews under Islam.75 Without that knowledge, the traffic between the fields of Jewish and Islamic studies went only one way. Over the last twenty-five years of his life, Fleischer was involved in a collaborative project with Jacob Levy in Breslau that was surely the capstone of his ethos and vision. Like Chwolson, Levy was a rich blend of the old and the new. Born in 1819 in the still intact traditional world of Posen, he received his rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Akiva Eiger, the pre-eminent traditional Talmudist of his time in Germany. After finishing his studies at the Univer-

75 H.L. Fleischer, Kleinere Schriften, 3, reprint (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1968), 167–186, 425–439.

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sity of Breslau, he acquired his doctorate from Halle in 1845. In 1850 he returned to Breslau essentially as a Privatgelehrter to pursue his scholarship, settling for a modest salary from its Jewish community for fulfilling certain judicial functions and later from the city for administering its more judaico.76 The trade-off yielded two monumental dictionaries of rabbinic (i.e. postbiblical) Hebrew, with careful attention to the grammatical and etymological derivation of each word, along with sample passages quoted in the original and translated into German to illustrate usage. To each Fleischer added philological addenda bringing to bear his incomparable knowledge of Arabic and Persian. The sum total bespoke the depth of his commitment to the project. He contributed twenty-eight pages to the two-volume Chaldäisches Wörterbuch über die Targumim (the ancient Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible), which came out in 1867–68, and 127 pages to the four-volume Neuhebräisches und chaldäisches Wörterbuch über Talmudim und Midraschim, published from 1876 to 1889; the latter contribution covered every letter of the Hebrew alphabet except the last, which death kept him from completing.77 The surviving correspondence shows poignantly how Levy and Fleischer bonded through their shared linguistic passion. In 1869 and again in 1873 Fleischer wrote letters to the board of the Jewish community on Levy’s behalf seeking to raise his salary. In 1872 he served as intermediary in getting the prestigious Leipzig firm of F.A. Brockhaus to publish Levy’s second dictionary. In 1875 he sought and secured for Levy an honorary title of professor from the German Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Education. A year later he was approached by the renowned Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz to lend his name to a fundraising letter seeking some 6000 marks so that Levy could give his daughter a dowry, without which she would not be able to marry. And in 1887 Fleischer again granted Graetz permission to use his name on a letter raising funds to celebrate Levy’s seventieth birthday, a cause to which he gave a personal gift of 150 marks.78 Rarely has philology come wrapped in such humanity. Nor should it be overlooked that Fleischer calmly and courageously dedicated his expertise to

76

Encyclopaedia Judaica, 10 (Berlin: Verlag Eschkol, 1934), cols. 904–905. Jacob Levy, Chaldäisches Wörterbuch über die Targumim und einen grossen Teil des rabbinischen Schriftums, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Baumgärtner, 1867–68); idem, Neuhebräisches und chaldäisches Wörterbuch über die Talmudim und Midraschim, 4 vols. (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1876–89). 78 RLC, Fleischer papers, Levy file and Graetz file. In a letter dated 31 Dec. 1869, Levy belatedly introduced Ignaz Goldziher to Fleischer. Goldziher had been in correspondence with Levy and the previous summer had come to Breslau to study with Levy. By the time Levy got around to writing, Goldziher was already studying with Fleischer (RLC, Fleischer papers, Levy file). 77

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the study of rabbinic Hebrew at the very time that German Protestant scholarship on the intertestamental period was reasserting, ever more bluntly and crudely, its negative critique of rabbinic Judaism with its unsubtle supersessionist thrust.79

III The DMG was Fleischer’s offspring and the institutional embodiment of his ethos. The idea to create it was born in conversation with a few colleagues in his home in September 1843, and without his tireless efforts it would never have come to fruition in Darmstadt in October 1845.80 He may well have harboured the idea since his days in Paris. Upon his arrival in 1824, he attended a meeting of the Socie´te´ Asiatique where he first heard de Sacy and his arch rival Abel Remusat speak (he was impressed by neither), and published his first two essays as a fledgling Orientalist in its Journal Asiatique in 1827 and 1829.81 In 1831, still without an academic appointment but having resumed his editing of Baydawi, Fleischer wrote his friend Hassler of the need to found a German equivalent of the Socie´te´ Asiatique. With the Dresden conference fast approaching in 1844, Fleischer spelled out more fully for Hassler the ethical impulse that drove him: “What we still lack is a common spirit that places a supreme value on the participation of every individual in the development of our discipline, shrinks the needs of our ego [Persönlichkeit] to insignificance and bans from criticism all cheap self-aggrandizement. It is precisely this [kind of spirit] that we hope to awaken and nurture through our gathering.”82 An early indicator of that spirit was the first nation-wide gathering of German Orientalists in Dresden in 1844, at which the decision was taken to proceed to Darmstadt. The prominence of Jews was conspicuous. They represented some twenty percent of the forty-nine scholars who attended, and they delivered three of the fifteen learned papers. Indeed, with Geiger and Zacharias Frankel, Dresden’s scholarly rabbi, opening the first session and Steinschneider closing the last, they served as the program’s bookends. All these talks were heavily philological and together encompassed the full range

79

Wiese, passim. Preissler, “Die Anfänge der DMG,” 245–53; UBL, FN, 267.6.11, a Fleischer letter to his father dated 29 Oct. 1845. 81 Seybold, 11; Wolfgang Reuschel, “Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (1801–1888). Der Begründer der Leipziger Schule der Arabistik,” Ernst Engelberg (ed.), Karl-Marx Universität Leipzig 1409–1959, 1 (Leipzig: Enzyklopädie Leipzig, 1959), 423. 82 Seybold, 60, 68 (the quotation). 80

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of layers of the Hebrew language.83 The stress on philology accentuated the desire to emancipate Oriental studies from theology, as did the society’s formal affiliation with the German society of philologists and educators founded in 1837 in Gottingen.84 Nevertheless, the generation of founders was still largely trained in Protestant theological faculties and not all were pleased with the disproportionate presence of Jews.85 At Darmstadt the conference acknowledged the leadership of Leipzig and Halle in the creation of the DMG by placing the running of the organization in the hands of a small executive committee of four, consisting of two faculty members from each university, one being Fleischer. As president, however, the conference elected Andreas August Ernst Schleiermacher, an Orientalist and museum director who had likewise studied in Paris but was currently serving as the secretary of the Grand Duchy of Hesse’s privy council.86 With humanity and humility, he set forth in his inaugural address the spirit that would animate and set apart Germany’s Oriental Society. The focus was to be solely on the past. Contemporary issues of a divisive nature such as politics, religion and theology would be rigorously excluded. Nor would the Society harbour any intent to affect public policy or popular behaviour: Our studies have taught us not to look down arrogantly on the adherents of other religions or the members of other political systems. We gladly acknowledge all that is good that we espy in the religions and constitutions of the Muslims, Parsees, Hindus, Buddhists and ancient Chinese. With joy would we admit them into our ranks, if the opportunity presented itself. […]. We, whose ancestors in matters of faith caused rivers of blood to flow, cannot condemn the peoples of Asia for their [bloodletting]. They have had their religious fights, bloody religious wars and court intrigues over religion. The Occident can boast of having retained its purity of faith through inquisitions and witch trials; the Orient, the purity of its blood through its eunuchs. We find delusions and superstitions the world over, the same virtues, irrespective of external circumstances. In the parameters of our research we will take up the religions, languages, customs, laws and forms of government from the perspective of a world citizen, one who does not hold the opinion that his homeland should be the standard for all that is foreign or that the institutions of his fatherland could benefit distant realms, which just might be entirely comfortable with what they have.87

Schleiermacher’s lofty sentiments amounted to a ringing affirmation of independence. A universal perspective would guard the Society from parochial interests, ulterior motives and an unwarranted sense of superiority. The objective was to understand the cultures of the Orient solely on their own terms,

83

Verhandlungen der ersten Versammlung, 76 (list of attendees) and 78 (list of papers). Mangold, 85; Preissler, “Die Anfänge der DMG,” 266. According to Paula Sutter Fichtner, when Hammer-Purgstall in Vienna in the 1850s tried to create an Oriental society, he too advocated reaching out to Jews [139]. 85 Preissler, “Die Anfänge der DMG,” 276 n. 112 and 285. 86 Ibid., 277. 87 Jahresbericht der DMG für das Jahr 1845 (Leipzig, 1846), 12–13. 84

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while the exclusion of domestic rifts would enable the widely dispersed Orientalists of Germany to generate a common discourse. Not only did Fleischer wholly identify with this ethos, he would soon be called upon to uphold it.88 Between Dresden and Darmstadt, Fleischer had carried the workload almost alone.89 Now with a semblance of order in place, it was nominally shared. Still by 1847, as he reported to the third annual gathering of the DMG in Basel, he had to forgo editing the journal that had made its debut the year before. His multiple duties, which also included handling much of the correspondence and administration of the Society plus preparing the annual review of new literature in a field that stretched from Portugal to Japan and Africa to Russia, were simply too onerous.90 By 1852 the DMG had grown to well over 300 members, Hermann Brockhaus, who in 1841 had become Leipzig’s Sanskritist, had brought stability to the editorship of the journal, and Heinrich Ewald of Göttingen had been elected president at the annual meeting that fall in Göttingen. Perhaps because of that election or again from overwork, Fleischer resigned from the executive committee at the same gathering.91 It took but a moment for Ewald to provoke discord. In many ways his prodigious scholarly range personified the scope of the sub-fields of the DMG. However, brilliance had its price: a volatile and dogmatic personality of unbounded contentiousness.92 The Leipzig-Halle cabal that had created the DMG allotted him but a minor role. The presidency accorded him a belated tribute and a much desired platform. His first presidential address in Göttingen induced him to stray advertently into the present. True, he contended, the public respected the canons of authentic scholarship, but it also wanted clarity and guidance on the nature of Islam in an age when Christians in its domain, with the connivance of the Christian powers in Europe, were still being forced to convert. Moreover, Ewald evinced no patience for those members who might dispute this responsibility:

88

Mangold, 108–115. UBL, FN, 267.6.11, Fleischer’s letter to his father was dated 29 Oct. 1845. 90 Bibliothek der DMG, Halle, DMG Acten 1847. 91 On membership size, see DMG, 1845–1895. Ein Ueberblick, 57. On Fleischer’s resignation, see UBL, FN, 267.6.1, a letter by Fleischer to his father from 8 Oct. 1852; on his state of mind, see JTSL, ARC 108, Fleischer file, letters to Steinschneider dated 2 March 1852 and 29 Oct. 1852. In the second letter, Fleischer reported to Steinschneider on the bad blood between Göttingen and Leipzig, Ewald and himself. The two men were polar opposites. 92 For an introduction to Ewald, see Perlitt, ‘Heinrich Ewald: Der Gelehrte in der Politik,’ 156–212. 89

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To be ever more certain in such general questions [Ewald had also posed others] and bodies of knowledge and to bring the public to ever more correct opinions that is what in the final analysis people can rightly and minimally expect of us, though to do it productively is actually not so easy. Or should we instead advance Islam by our efforts and exertions? Or spur on still further the repeated and harmful conceits of the new Jews? Or should we silence or conceal the truth and avoid the knowledge of what is correct, so that we will not give offense and risk harming the sale of our books or ambition or timidity or material comfort?93

The reason for this gratuitous and unguarded slur of Jewish scholars may well have lain elsewhere. Ewald probably came to the conference seething from a vituperative exchange with Frankel. Frankel had been working for more than a decade on a careful study of the Septuagint meant to prove that the Jews of Palestine and Alexandria in the Hellenistic period shared a common exegetical tradition regarding the Hebrew Bible. When Frankel’s second book on the subject appeared in 1851, Ewald pounced on it with a hasty, imperious and scurrilous review in the journal he edited. Without deigning to even look at the earlier study of 1841, he scornfully rejected Frankel’s argument, vilifying him as nothing more than a talmudic Jew who wrote on the Septuagint, the Samaritan Bible and every other related non-rabbinic topic solely from the perspective of the masoretic tradition.94 Frankel fired back a forthright rejoinder in his own journal, accusing Ewald of being abysmally ignorant of both the text of the Septuagint and the scholarship on it. Nor was Frankel the first Jew to fall victim to Ewald’s wrath. A year before, he reminded his readers, Ewald had crudely lashed out at Munk for what he deemed to be a piece of specious scholarship.95 In short, Ewald came to the podium in Gottingen vexed by Frankel’s defiance. By choosing the occasion to slap down the purported uppityness of all Jewish scholars, he violated the commitment of the DMG to skirt the contaminating issues of the day. Had Zunz not intervened, the offence might have gone unnoticed or unchallenged. But when he saw the address in the next issue of the journal a few months later, he exploded in fury. His anger forged an eloquent letter to Fleischer on 25 February 1853 bearing testimony to their close ties and Zunz’s fearlessness:

93

Heinrich Ewald, “Eröffnungsrede der Göttinger Generalversammlung,” in ZDMG, 7(1853), 6–7. 94 Jahrbücher der Biblischen Wissenschaft, ed. Heinrich Ewald, 4 (1851–52), 16–17. The book in question was Frankel’s Ueber den Einfluss der Palästinischen Exegese auf die Alexandrinische Hermeneutik (Leipzig: J.A. Barth, 1851). 95 Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (hereafter MGWJ), 1 (1851–52), 597–598.

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When nine years ago you and Rödiger urged me to join the Oriental society, I did not suspect that the arrogant, exclusionary spirit of times long buried and hours long wasted away would ever take over the seat of the presidency, and raise a hue and cry over Jews in an outburst of barely disguised phrases bereft of any content. So that is the science of sciences, the lofty goal of uniting scholars, the recommended ideal for university studies!96

And, Zunz continued, how were people to understand what Ewald meant by “the new Jews” and their “conceits?” Surely, the ZDMG did not support them. It barely reported on developments in the field of Jewish studies. The names of Krochmal and Rapaport, Munk and Zunz, Geiger and Sachs did not grace its pages. Or perhaps Ewald had been offended elsewhere by an insolent Jew and summoned the entire DMG to his defence. But did Goliath really need to fear David? Having vented his hurt, Zunz closed by asking Fleischer for a public rebuke:97 Hence I await a word in the next issue [of the Zeitschrift], indeed a word that is public. As the founder of the society, you are called upon to keep such vulgarities from its midst. Should nothing happen then I have all too long been a member of a society in which barrack’s arrogance and Jew-hatred instead of science and Germanness [Deutschtum] threaten to imbed themselves. I do not know of a more noble voice of true humanity and free scholarship than yours, and thus I am so bold as to turn directly to you.

Fleischer responded almost immediately with a four-page epistle, whose very length bespoke his respect for Zunz and the gravity of his concern. The executive committee itself, he related, was very apprehensive about Ewald’s address. Every Orientalist knew that he was slightly unhinged, the tragicomic figure of the field. And yet a presidential speech was a matter of record that had to be printed as delivered. The executive decided in advance to edit only misinformation that might embarrass the Society or hinder its operations. All else would be Ewald’s responsibility. Fleischer went on to say that if anyone had the right to be offended by Ewald’s performance, it should have been he, for what Ewald and his minions had to say about him was reprehensible. But he was unfazed, brushed off the mud and moved on. Notwithstanding his equanimity, Fleischer remonstrated that Zunz had put a pistol to his head; though he did not appreciate being threatened, he would honour his request. And then as if to show that their relationship had not been frayed, he reiterated an earlier request that Zunz send him an essay for the journal.98 To comply, Fleischer had to negotiate delicately between Ewald’s ego and Zunz’s ultimatum. An adroit political sensibility helped him wield a strategy that satisfied the latter without humiliating the former. Later that same year 96

RLC, Fleischer papers, Zunz file. Ibid. 98 Jewish National and University Library (hereafter JNUL), Jerusalem, ARC, 4° 792, G 12. 97

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in the journal, he published the French statutes of an Oriental society in formation in Constantinople, celebrating the opening of a venue for European scholarship on the doorstep of the Porte. The second paragraph affirmed the exclusion from its deliberations of any reference to the religious and political issues of the day. To this paragraph, Fleischer saw fit to append a pregnant footnote again avowing unequivocally that this had been and would continue to be the DMG’s stance: Even without a specific statute of this sort, the DMG has until recently kept its halls free of any unfriendly mention of religious differences. Let us elevate what has until now been simply good practice to the level of principle. Let us not forgo the beautiful privilege, at least not here in the open lodge of cosmopolitan scholarship [in der offenen Loge weltbürgerlicher Wissenschaft], to have all kinds of religious controversy, as no more than a subject of dispassionate historical consideration before us, in every other regard though behind and beneath us. When in 1844 German Orientalists of different persuasions laid the foundation for the [DMG], it was stated, not prompted by anything specific, yet apparently acknowledged by all, that the loftiest purpose and greatest blessing of our convening would be achieved and won when the hearts of those united “would open themselves to the social virtues, which alone render even the relationships of the scholarly world truly noble and beneficial”. One year later, [Schleiermacher’s] opening address at the start of our society put forth, in the same vein, still more lofty and general considerations. These demands should be valid for all and forever – and to recall them now is again timely.99

Fleischer’s file contains no further letters from Zunz that expressed his appreciation. What did come in, however, was the essay for which Fleischer had pleaded, an erudite and visionary call for the production of a comprehensive dictionary of the Hebrew language, the foundation of which Zunz had laid in the philological studies to his just completed Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters. The daunting scope of such a project, however, delayed its actualization until 1910, when Eliezer Ben Yehuda published the first volume of his monumental dictionary of the Hebrew language, destined only to be finished in 1959, and then by other hands. Fittingly, Ben Yehuda quoted from Zunz’s essay to vindicate his life’s work.100 Fleischer’s defence of value free scholarship, in retrospect, could not have been more richly rewarded. Fleischer’s note of 1853 thus reiterated what he had signalled through his line-up of presenters in 1844 in Dresden – Jewish studies constituted an integral sub-field of the work of the DMG. The pages of the journal implemented that policy in three distinct ways: by the attention paid to Jewish scholars and scholarship in its annual surveys of new books in Oriental studies; by the

99

ZDMG, 7 (1853), 275. Mangold took the title for her book from this footnote. Leopold Zunz, “Wünsche für ein Wörterbuch der hebräischen Sprache,” in ZDMG, 10 (1856), 501–12; Eliezer Ben Yehuda, A Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew (Hebrew), vol. 1 (Jerusalem/New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1959), 19. That the essay is the grand culmination of Zunz’s book (Berlin 1855) is suggested by its stunning philological supplements. 100

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number of Jewish works reviewed by the journal; and by the number of essays published on Jewish subjects. As more scholars entered the field and more Judeo-Arabic manuscripts of medieval Jewish classics preserved only in Hebrew translation were published, the cumulative effect of these three forms of coverage was to make Islamic studies in Germany truly interdisciplinary. Indeed, the ZDMG had cast its net so broadly that on the commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the DMG on 30 September 1921, Carl Brockelmann, the dean of Orientalists of his era, regretted that the journal had strayed from its original intent, which had been to include only philological studies pertaining to the Hebrew Bible and Jewish literature.101 The comment in his retrospective survey of the society’s history was an allusion to the annual survey Fleischer presented to the organization at its meeting in 1849. Mandated by its statutes, annual surveys of this sort, mainly bibliographical, were meant to lend a semblance of unity, coherence and hence legitimacy to a sprawling and unwieldy field. Precisely for this reason they were meant to be authored by a single scholar. But Fleischer, not a synthesizer or surveyor by nature, tended to restrict his purview to linguistic developments in each sub-field. In particular, he referenced only a few Jewish studies of a grammatical, philological and exegetical nature, though to his great credit, he anticipated Zunz in envisioning a comprehensive dictionary of Hebrew following the necessary spadework.102 He also felt obliged to reassure the Jewish literary press that the journal would not crowd it out by treading on the domain of rabbinics or medieval Jewish history and literature. Yet elsewhere in the context of his survey of Arabic studies, he hailed the evidence amassed by Jacob Goldenthal in Vienna regarding the influence of Islamic culture on medieval works in Jewish philosophy and Hebrew grammar and encouraged Jewish scholars to develop that line of research.103 Nevertheless, the overall amount of space devoted to Jewish studies was minimal. In the years that followed the restraint lessened, but only gradually. Emil Rödiger, Gesenius’s successor at Halle and one of the coterie in Fleischer’s home to launch the initiative for a German Oriental society, took responsibility for four of the next five surveys. The designated coverage remained modest, though by the last, which treated the new publications appearing in 1854–55, it had expanded to nearly eight pages. More indicative of things to 101

Carl Brockelmann, “Die morgenländischen Studien in Deutschland,” in ZDMG, 76 (1922), 13. 102 ZDMG, 4 (1850), 486. 103 Ibid., 74, 497. In regard to Goldenthal’s 1848 Vienna lecture on the influence of Arabic culture on Judaism, Fleischer opined: “Though this irrefutable truth will surely discomfort some, it should not intimidate the enterprising scholar from striving to gain due recognition for it.” (497).

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come, Rödiger moved beyond the original parameters to single out works by Rapaport, Frankel, Geiger, Jellinek, Graetz and Steinschneider that were either rabbinic or medieval in focus. Even the contents of Frankel’s new journal, the Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, destined to appear uninterruptedly from 1851 to 1939, merited individual mention.104 The scope of Jewish coverage peaked under Richard Gosche, who threw caution to the winds in authoring the next four surveys, which ended with the new publications of 1867. He was clearly more comfortable with the medium, and as custodian of Oriental manuscripts at the Royal Library in Berlin until he moved to Halle in 1862, he had access to books. His initial survey for 1856 set the tone by allotting some 20 pages to Jewish studies out of a total of 150.105 Nor were his references merely bibliographical. His discussion suggests actual perusal, even of works in Hebrew, while his praise of individual scholars is often effusive. Munk’s Arabic edition of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed finds him grasping for superlatives: “Munk’s contribution, including his translation and notes, is so far beyond praising that I would be guilty of immodesty if I tried to find the right words rather than just saying it is selfevident.”106 Despite Gosche’s unprecedented coverage, which even extended to new festival prayerbooks (mahzorim) by Michael Sachs and Meir Letteris,107 he lamented the lacunae that remained, which were not altogether his own fault: I regret that the majority of Hebrew publications eludes the attention of Christian scholars. Indeed, even those located in specifically Jewish circles obtain information about the literary activity of their people only with great difficulty. This literature is still hidden from us inside a ghetto. It is this exclusivity which caused the great gaps in my presentation and not any principled opposition, engendered by a misguided humanistic standpoint that has at last been fully overcome by the religious and literary ethos of our century.108

Reciprocity required accessibility. To do justice to the burgeoning field of critical Jewish scholarship called for new vehicles of communication. The ghetto had to be lifted from inside as well as from outside. Because Gosche’s stinging criticism erupted from frustrated sympathy, it did not fall on deaf ears. Exactly one year later, Steinschneider, whose Bodleian catalogue had come in for kudos in Gosche’s review,109 launched his invaluable bimonthly

104 ZDMG, 5 (1850), 417–466, “Judaica and Hebraica,” 433–435; 8 (1853), 637–719, “Judaica and Hebraica,” 706–711; 9 (1854), 321–356, “Judaica and Hebraica,” 348–349; 10 (1856), 691–799, “Judaica and Hebraica,” 771–779. 105 ZDMG, 11 (1857), 597–616 for “Judaica and Hebraica.” 106 Ibid., 614. 107 Ibid., 612. 108 Ibid., 613. 109 Ibid., 611.

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Hebräische Bibliographie, which he would single-handedly edit until 1881, with only one four-year hiatus. Working closely with the Berlin book-dealer and publisher Abraham Asher, who had recommended him for the Bodleian assignment, Steinschneider facilitated the dissemination of information about new texts and studies in all languages.110 He demanded only a single copy of works authors wished to have listed, described and possibly reviewed. Quickly and meticulously, then, he crafted the kind of exchange that Gosche may have had in mind and on which he would noticeably rely in preparing the surveys to come.111 Munk has already offered us an example of the second type of coverage the journal extended to Wissenschaft des Judentums, reviews of individual books by Jewish scholars. Just how pro-active the journal could sometimes be in soliciting reviews comes out in respect to two works on Cabbala by Adolph Jellinek, who like Steinschneider came from Moravia. In 1842 when Jellinek relocated to Leipzig to study with Fleischer, Steinschneider made the introduction, stressing Jellinek’s extensive knowledge of Hebrew and rabbinic literature (an expertise that Fleischer valued, as we shall see).112 Jellinek drew close to Fleischer, taking some twenty-four of his courses during his sixyear stay at the university. Years later after Fleischer’s death, Jellinek would write of the influence of his example on him: “If I may have advanced the study of Jewish literature a bit by stimulating others, then I owe that to the example of my departed teacher. […]. As a scholarly Croesus, he dispensed his literary estate with both hands.”113 From 1845 to 1856, Jellinek served as the rabbi of Leipzig’s nascent Jewish community and as an early and active member of the DMG. In 1852 when Rudolf Anger, a professor of theology at Leipzig, resigned as editor of the Zeitschrift, the executive committee, which wanted to retain the journal in Leipzig, briefly even considered Jellinek for the position before persuading Brockhaus, who had the triple advantage of being neither Jewish nor a theologian nor a non-academic.114 110

Shimeon Brisman, A History and Guide to Judaic Bibliography, 1 (Cincinnati/New York: Hebrew Union College and Ktav Publisching House, 1977), 39–43. On Asher, see Marx,”Moritz Steinschneider,” 133. 111 HB, 1 (1858), 1–3. For a sample of Gosche’s subsequent reliance on the HB, see the footnotes in ZDMG, Supplement zum 20. Bande, 208–213. 112 RLC, Fleischer papers, Steinschneider file, letter dated Oct. 9, 1842. 113 Moses Rosenmann, Dr. Adolf Jellinek. Sein Leben und Schaffen (Wien, Jos. Schlesinger, 1931), 33–36. 114 Bibliothek der DMG, Halle, DMG Acten 1852, letter from Brockhaus to Arnold dated Nov. 19, 1852: “Now since in Halle, as I was told, you decisively turned down taking over the editorship, and since Anger and Tuch because of illness and Fleischer because of excessive work are unable to, the choice came down to me or Jellinek. I thought it not quite appropriate that he should take it over, for reasons that do not have to be spelled out, and so I decided to do it.”

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During those years Jellinek did pioneering work in the study of Cabbala. In December 1851 Anger wrote hastily to Steinschneider asking if within the span of four days he might provide him with a short review of Jellinek’s most recent publications, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kabbala and Moses ben Schemtob und sein Verhältniss zum Zohar. If the notice was too short, Anger would be ready to accept it at a later date. To increase the pressure, Anger allowed Jellinek to append a postscript reiterating the request. Steinschneider complied, though his loathing of Cabbala prompted him to throw in a nasty swipe at Adolphe Franck.115 A few years earlier Jellinek had prepared and enhanced a German translation of his far-reaching history of La Kabbale, with its slightly presumptuous subtitle La philosophie religieuse des Hebreux.116 In his review Steinschneider chided his friend for having wasted his time. Unhappily, Anger was compelled to tell Steinschneider that journal policy prevented him from printing such an unsubstantiated slight. Anger also found the review too judgmental for the format of a notice of publication meant to inform the public of a book’s contents rather than criticize.117 Caught between friendship and integrity, Steinschneider accommodated Anger only partially. The denigration of Franck disappeared as did one of the volumes to be reviewed. Steinschneider ended up reviewing Moses ben Schemtob alone, and that work quite critically. He regarded the purported author of the Zohar as little more than a charlatan and counselled Jellinek to shift his focus from its provenance to a thorough study of its contents for “it seems to us that with a composite and reworked text as the Zohar manifestly is, it is better to start with the parts and thereby reach some solid conclusions regarding each one”.118 Granted the episode was minor, it was nonetheless not isolated; it vividly attests to the length to which the journal would go to incorporate reviews of Jewish scholarship into its Orient-centred discourse. The journal’s third and final mode of incorporation, the sharp increase in essays contributed by Jewish scholars, was initiated by Brockhaus after becoming editor in 1852, when he immediately reached out to Steinschneider with an invitation to submit the results of his research to the journal in any format he liked. Brockhaus knew the frontier nature of his work better than anyone except perhaps Fleischer, because he was the publisher of Ersch and Gruber, to which Steinschneider was a major contributor of synthetic and biographical entries (one of the former has been mentioned above). Aside from its expression of appreciation of Steinschneider’s stature, the letter of invitation marked the admission of students of Judaica to the German re115

JTSL, ARC 108, box 1, letter dated 17 Dec. 1851. Adolphe Frank, Die Kabbala oder die Religions-philosophie der Hebräer, übersetzt, verbessert und vermehrt von Adolph Jellinek (Leipzig: H. Hunger, 1844). 117 JTSL, ARC 108, box 1, letter dated 17 Dec. 1851. 118 ZDMG, 6 (1852), 298–99. 116

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public of Orientalists, by seeking Steinschneider’s help in effecting this policy: The undersigned has the honour to inform you that he has assumed the editorship of the Zeitschrift der DMG. Since I have the strong wish to from now on make this journal the true centre of German scholarship in the field of Orientalism, I turn to you, dear sir, with the urgent request to support me vigorously in the attainment of this goal. In whatever form and length you wish to give us your contributions, I leave to you. Be they large essays or small notes or pre´cis of new books, all will be welcome by me and find quick acceptance.119

In consequence, as already often noted, during the first quarter century of the Zeitschrift its pages were frequently punctuated by essays by Steinschneider, Geiger, Zunz, Fürst and Moritz Abraham Levy, who constituted the first cohort of Jewish practitioners of Jewish Wissenschaft. The essays by Steinschneider and Levy in fact often dealt with topics that touched Jews only tangentially. By the second quarter century, the journal hosted a still larger and equally talented cohort of scholars, many of whom had studied with Fleischer in his waning years. The likes of Ignaz Goldziher, Alexander Kohut, Wilhelm Bacher, David Kaufmann, Samuel Landauer, Jacob Barth, Eduard Baneth, Martin Schreiner and Immanuel Low, all first-rate Arabists, transformed the journal into a unique forum for exploring the multifaceted interaction between Islam and Judaism. The upsurge in contributions also mirrored the upsurge of new manuscripts and knowledge that came to light in the latter half of the nineteenth century in both Jewish and Islamic studies. Thus Goldziher reviewed, at length and appreciatively, the 1880 publication by Landauer of the Arabic original of Saadia Gaon’s Book of Beliefs and Opinions, and far more critically the 1887 publication by Hartwig Hirschfeld of the Arabic original of Yehuda Halevi’s Kusari.120 Similarly, the publication of the Arabic original of Jonah Ibn Janah’s biblical dictionary by Adolf Neubauer in 1875 and Ibn Janah’s grammatical introduction to his dictionary by Joseph Derenbourg in 1886 prompted Bacher a few years later to compose his elegant history of the early stages of Hebrew grammar, extending from the rabbinic period to Saadia, which ran to well over 100 pages in the Zeitschrift.121

119

JTSL, ARC 108, box 2, letter dated 23 Dec. 1852. On Landauer, see ZDMG, 35 (1880), 773–783; on Hirschfeld, see ZDMG, 41 (1887), 691–707. 121 Adolf Neubauer (ed.), The Book of Hebrew Roots by Abu al-Walid Marwan IbnJanah (Oxford Oxfordshire: Clarendon Press, 1875; Joseph Derenbourg (ed.), Le livre des parterres Fleuris grammaire he´braique en arabe d’Abou ‘l-Walid Merwan ibn Merwan ibn Djanah de Cordoue (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1886); Wilhem Bacher, ‘Die Anfänge der hebräischen Grammatik’, in ZDMG, 49 (1895), 1–62, 335–392. 120

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Overall, the essays were growing in number, length and scope. Most illuminating of the degree to which Jewish studies now belonged to a single universe of Orientalist discourse was an essay by Landauer that did not concern itself solely with Jews under Islam. A grateful student of Markus Muller in Munich and Theodor Nöldeke in Strasbourg, Landauer was struggling in 1880 as an instructor at the University of Strasbourg, where he would eventually become the librarian. In 1879 he had enriched the pages of the journal with the Arabic text and translation of a manuscript on psychology by the seminal tenth-century Islamic philosopher Ibn Sina. In his notes he related some of Ibn Sina’s ideas, images and terminology to Jewish parallels without positing borrowing, even as he underlined his influence on Halevi’s Kusari.122 That same year he published the journal’s first annual review of new Oriental scholarship devoted solely to the subject of “Rabbinics and Judaica”. The 24-page essay was by no means a history of Wissenschaft des Judentums, but merely a well-ordered catalogue raisonne´ of its expansion and diversification over the previous few decades. Jewish Studies was now generating sub-fields and taking root in other countries, with recent studies of talmudic and rabbinic literature coming in for extensive attention.123 Most likely initiated by the editorial staff, since the yearly reports were surely their domain, this remarkable review signalled unequivocally that the totality of Wissenschaft des Judentums, and not merely its Judeo-Arabic segment, was regarded as an integral component of Oriental studies. Not only had Jewish Studies come of age, but it had located an unofficial corner of the German academic establishment where it was welcome. In sum, the DMG was Fleischer’s enduring legacy, a monument to his humanity and vision of unadulterated scholarship. His openness was a direct function of his uncompromising devotion to advancing his field. The intrusion of extraneous sentiments would always come at the expense of progress. Fleischer did not encourage Jews per se to enter the field, but only those endowed with a knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic and their rich literary deposits. These students, and not their Hebraically illiterate co-religionists, had an advantage in the study of Arabic, a cognate language, over Protestant students, who admittedly often overshadowed them in their mastery of Latin and Greek. On occasion, Fleischer would even utter this sentiment publicly. In 1844 he reviewed an edition by Ernst Bertheau of Göttingen of a Syriac (i.e. eastern Aramaic) grammar by one Bar Hebraeus, a thirteenth-century monk, written in poetic form to facilitate learning. Fleischer bemoaned that 122

Samuel Landauer,”Die Psychologie des Ibn Sina,”in ZDMG, vol. 29 (1879), 335–418. See 373, n. 1, 377 n. 5 and 380 n. 8. On Halevi’s borrowing from Ibn Sina, see also 384 n. 12, 386 n. 6 and 387 n. 2. 123 S. Landauer,”Rabbinica und Judaica,” in Wissenschaftlicher Jahresbericht über die morgenländischen Studien, von Oct. 1876 bis Dec. 1877, Leipzig, 1879, 71–95.

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knowledge of Syriac was still rudimentary, restricted almost entirely to the Christian translation of the Bible into Syriac (known as the Peshitta) and bereft of all contact with the living language. Unfortunately, neither Bar Hebraeus’s grammar nor Bertheau’s flawed edition had done much to alter this deficit. But Fleischer, refusing to end on a negative note, solicited help from a disdained source: […] also Jewish scholars should apply their well-honed Semitic feel for languages more than they have until now to Syriac. I am prompted to say this by a related book that has lain on my desk too long, a manuscript of Etz Hayyim co-edited by Mr. Steinschneider, a candidate for the rabbinate, in Prague. It contains notes to the text and its translation which often elegantly correct both, as well as a collection of synonyms for logical and grammatical terms from Bar Hebraeus, the rabbis and Arab writers. I thank him for some welcome instruction and urge him to devote his diligence and acuity especially to this last subject.124

This conspicuous encomium, privileging a candidate for the rabbinate over a university professor, was surely intended to strengthen Steinschneider’s resolve at a particularly stressful moment in his arduous career path. But it also singled him out as representative of a type: Jews from traditional backgrounds with a well-stocked repertoire of sacred texts, fluency in their languages and a set of exegetical skills to read them, together with a hunger for enlightenment. Precisely that background equipped them with an affinity for the study of Islam and its languages, a body of knowledge for which Fleischer consistently showed respect and sympathy. Nor did Fleischer’s private comments deviate or detract from the largesse of his public remark. During the course of his long tenure at Leipzig, Fleischer was often called upon to render a written opinion on work submitted by Jewish doctoral candidates, both in residence and in absentia. His admiration for traditional Jewish learning was often evident. In the case of Immanuel Löw, who would follow his illustrious father Leopold in the rabbinate at Szeged and who had written a brilliant dissertation for Fleischer on the Aramaic names for the flora of the Middle East, Fleischer thus observed that “to do this task [requires] no less than a thorough knowledge of Aramaic, old and 124 Leipziger Repertorium der deutschen und ausländischen Literatur, 20 Dec. 1844, 500. In a letter to Bernhard Beer in Dresden from 27 Jan. 1845, Steinschneider reported Fleischer’s compliment: “In Gersd. Repertorium, Fleischer made mention of me and Jewish learning in a highly favourable way” (JNUL, ARC, Var 236 # 46). The work of Steinschneider to which Fleischer made reference was his collaboration with Franz Delitzsch in editing Aaron ben Elijah’s fourteenth-century Hebrew philosophic treatise Etz Hayyim, a Karaitic equivalent of Maimonides’ Moreh Nevukhim. Delitzsch had discovered the manuscript while cataloguing the Oriental manuscripts of the Leipzig city library with his teacher Fleischer. Steinschneider’s notes and addenda made the work accessible for comparative purposes (Franz Delitzsch, Etz Hayyim. Ahron ben Elias aus Nikomedien des Karäers System der Religionsphilosophie, (Leipzig: J.A. Barth, 1841).

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new Hebrew [i.e. biblical, rabbinic and medieval] and Arabic plus an intimate familiarity with both Talmuds and later works of new Hebrew literature, which today is only to be found among learned Jews”.125 To Fleischer’s joy, Bacher, who wrote his dissertation on the twelfth-century Persian poet Nizami, brought the same propaedeutic training to his task: “The present sample submitted for promotion [i.e. for a doctorate] is in its way a most delightful phenomenon, a young Israelite with a good head, spirit and taste and equipped with the usual linguistic knowledge of learned Israelites (Gelehrten seines Namens) [...].”126 No less revealing are those instances where Fleischer saw that advantage go to waste, as it often did with candidates from Hungary, Poland, Russia and Galicia. Here his criticism was suffused with regret and noticeably devoid of untoward cultural asides. In the case of Salom Schachna Simchowitz, born in Russia in 1851, but now (in 1880) in Vienna teaching at its Beit haMidrash, Fleischer served only as a second reader. Yet instead of merely concurring with the negative decision of the first reader, he took the trouble to read the submitted work in its entirety. While he too rejected Simchowitz’s candidacy for a doctorate in absentia, his opening gambit sounded a note of sadness: It is regrettable to see how extensive knowledge of the Jewish theologians and philosophers of the Middle Ages as well as of the Talmud and midrashim, though utterly bereft of any philosophical and critical sense, helps Mr. Simchowitz to transform the Moses of the Old Testament, whom when stripped of his mythic garb we know only as an energetic leader, lawgiver and religious founder, into an ingenious scientist and the founder of “Positivism” (a worldview based on empiricism).127

Without the leavening of university training, the autodidact was always at risk of running amok.Yet Fleischer’s ire was directed at Simchowitz and not Judaism. His interest in Judaism, if not downright sympathy with it, even occasionally sparked disagreement with his colleagues. One of these was Isaak Mises, who in 1870 requested a doctorate from the Leipzig Philosophy faculty for a small tract of eighty pages (Beitrag zur Würdigung der Wirren im Judentum) he had written back in 1845. Born in Lemberg in 1810 but since 1864 a Prussian citizen, Mises was a lifelong autodidact in pursuit of secular as well as religious studies. Fleischer’s other colleagues found his anti-Reform, eudaemonistic treatment of Judaism unworthy of promotion, largely on external grounds. Fleischer’s eye, however, penetrated beneath the surface:

125

Preissler, “Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer,” 263. UAL, phil. Fac. Prom. 1392. 127 Ibid., 9094. 126

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The further I read the more the content reconciled me to its defective form. Indisputably, there is in this small tract a thorough philosophic training in addition to a solid knowledge of the subject under discussion. The views of Mr. Mises on the distinctive essence of pure Mosaicism in contrast to paganism, Christianity and Islam are so unbiased and penetrating that I can hardly remember reading anything comparable by a Jewish author.

Fleischer was also impressed with the command and treatment of Cabbalistic literature that Mises displayed in two smaller pieces he had also submitted: Mr. Mises handles his subject with love and devotion, yet soberly and objectively without getting lost therein. I must admit that I learned much from his presentation and hope that he will continue his work as promised, which can’t fail to take an honourable place in the history of the theosophic systems of the Orient. Accordingly, I vote for promoting Rabbi Mises in absentia.128

Fleischer’s prescience in seeing the history of Judaism within the context of the Orient is what shaped his openness to its study. He sensed early on that behind the infinite diversity of the Orient lay a cultural continuum of great commonality. And it was that vision that gained institutional vitality in the discourse of the DMG. In celebration of the fiftieth year since the conferral of Fleischer’s own doctorate by Leipzig, in 1873 the DMG set out to establish an endowment of 3000 talers, the interest of which would fund annual stipends bearing Fleischer’s name for worthy advanced students in Arabic studies, irrespective of nationality or religion. The absence of barriers did justice to the unbounded horizon of the man. Steinschneider announced the fellowships in his Hebräische Bibliographie, highlighting the significance of Jewish eligibility: “We wish merely to remind our readers that to advance in any which way the promotion of Semitic studies and the possibility of an academic career for Jewish scholars is meritorious.”129 What Steinschneider may not have known two years later when he informed his readership that the sum had been raised was that Fleischer had arranged for the first grant to be awarded to Goldziher, whose failure to garner an academic appointment in Budapest had thrown him into despair and great need.130 At the same time, Steinschneider mounted his own initiative to advance Fleischer’s vision of interdisciplinary studies. At Geiger’s death in 1874, he persuaded the curatorium and academic council of the Zunz Foundation in Berlin to invite Fleischer to take Geiger’s seat on the five-man council. The foundation had been set up in 1864 when Zunz turned 70 to provide him and his beloved wife Adelheid with the security of a pension. After their death, the interest would be used for the support of critical scholarship. The creation of 128

Ibid., 9128. HB, 13 (1873), here viii; 15 (1875), 45. 130 RLC, Fleischer papers, Goldziher file, letters dated 8 February 1875 and 5 March 1875. 129

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the Lehranstalt für dieWissenschaft des Judentums in 1872 had provoked Steinschneider to register his protest against the retreat of Jewish scholarship into yet another ghetto. As he wrote to Fleischer, his invitation was meant to repudiate the surrender and bifurcation: “It was for that reason that I gave the impetus to elect a Christian to the Zunz Foundation and I am pleased that my suggestion had such a happy outcome.”131 Steinschneider knew that the Zunz Foundation could not have chosen better to affirm its allegiance to a scholarly ethos that transcended religious divisions, for as Fleischer avowed in his acceptance letter, that ethos had always been the lodestar of his own life: I accept with joy and gratitude my election to the seat on the council of the foundation formerly held by my departed friend Dr. Geiger, as stipulated in your letter to me of 18 May [1875]. For wherever names such as Zunz and Geiger come together, there hovers the spirit of authentic scholarship free of self-centeredness and prejudice. As you know, it is only here that I feel at home and therefore I am yours.132

Fleischer was to stay until his death in 1888.That he was the last Christian scholar to be accorded that degree of esteem and trust, however, sadly attests to the embattled state of his vision, despite the beachhead he had secured for it in the DMG.133

131

RLC, Fleischer papers, Steinschneider file, letter dated 23 May 1875. JNUL, ARC 4° 792, Z9b, letter dated 24 May 1875. 133 Replacing Fleischer in 1888 on the academic council was David Kaufmann, a former student of Fleischer’s and now a professor at the seminary in Budapest (ibid.). 132

13. Moritz Steinschneider: The Vision Beyond the Books On February 13, 1848, Moritz Steinschneider wrote his fiance´e, Auguste Auerbach, with a measure of relief that his pioneering essay Jüdische Literatur for the Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste (better known by the names of its editors as Ersch und Gruber) had been accepted uncut.1 He had not yet reached his thirty-second birthday. Since accepting the assignment, for which Leopold Zunz, his revered mentor, had recommended him, he had tried, as he wrote her earlier, not to waste “the opportunity to make clear for himself and others the totality of this grand phenomenon as an organic whole.”2 When published two years later, the book-length entry, far in excess of what had been expected, would earn him a doctorate in 1851 from the University of Leipzig with the aid of his former Leipzig professor of Arabic and now friend and supporter Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer.3 At the time, Steinschneider was thirty-five and a good dozen years behind the career trajectory of aspiring academics. This tight conceptualization and serried survey of a field both sprawling and inchoate bespoke the scholarly power and professional precariousness of its young author. The academic study of Jewish history and literature was to mature in Germany entirely outside its vaunted universities. Of all the polymaths who founded the Wissenschaft des Judentums in the nineteenth century, none mounted a more sustained personal campaign to end that unwarranted exclusion than Steinschneider.

1 Moritz Steinschneider, Briefwechsel mit seiner Verlobten Auguste Auerbach 1845–1849, eds. Renate Heuer and Marie Louise Steinschneider, (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1995), 263. [Unless indicated differently all translations from the German are by the author.] 2 Moritz Steinschneider, “An Introduction to the Arabic Literature of the Jews,” The Jewish Quarterly Review (hereafter JQR), 9–12 (1897–1901), 9, 224; Steinschneider, Briefwechsel, 114. 3 Letter from Steinschneider to Fleischer, March 7, 1851, in the Royal Library Copenhagen, Ny kgl. Sam. 4° 2969 (hereafter RLC, Fleischer papers); letter from Fleischer to Steinschneider, March 11, 1851, in The Jewish Theological Seminary Library (hereafter JTSL), ARC 108, Fleischer correspondence.

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The dominant figure of the second generation, he pursued a dual career as Hebraist and Arabist, studying the ramified nexus between medieval Jewish and Arabic literatures with a fervent sense of mission. In the process, he identified a corpus of secular Jewish writings, created a conception of Jewish culture free of the trope of persecution and discovered the vital role played by Jewish translators of the thirteenth century in transferring Greek knowledge from east to west. Consistently, over the span of sixty-seven years, he published his research outside the parochial organs of Jewish scholarship, gaining thereby eventually universal acclaim. Nor did he ever betray his conviction that the only fit institutional venue for doing Jewish scholarship was in that faculty of the German university that cultivated the humanities and not theology.4 While only a book can do justice to such singular accomplishments, it is possible to catch a glimpse of the coherence of the animating vision and the scope of the landscape by focusing on Steinschneider’s 1850 essay on Jewish literature, which in fact would serve as the fulcrum of his career.5 In the decades that followed, the conceptual grid remained firm even as the sum total of his knowledge grew almost exponentially.

I Aside from Steinschneider’s own prodigious talents, his precocious essay can hardly be understood apart from the relationships he formed and the research he produced prior to authoring it. Though a stunning feat, it sprang from a fertile matrix. Steinschneider spent most of the first three decades of his life in the Habsburg Empire, where the onset of emancipation for its Jewish subjects had barely moved beyond the educational reforms of the various edicts of tolerance issued by Joseph II in the 1780s. The Jews of Prossnitz, his place of birth and Moravia’s second largest Jewish community, were still restricted residentially, economically and demographically. In 1829, thirteen years after his birth, the Moravian government still enforced regulations dating from a century earlier, confining the 328 Jewish families of Prossnitz to a ghetto of 48 houses consisting of 120 apartments. It also burdened them with exceptional imposts and, worst of all, limited the right to marry to the first-born 4 Alexander Marx, “Moritz Steinschneider,” Essays in Jewish Biography (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947), 112–84; Salo W. Baron, “Moritz Steinschneider’s Contribution to Jewish Historiography,” Alexander Marx Jubilee Volume, English section (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1950), 83–148. 5 “Jüdische Literatur,” in J.S. Ersch and J.G. Gruber, Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, section ii, part 27, 357–471 (hereafter JL/G).

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son of each family.6 In other words, Steinschneider came of age in an authoritarian regime with a medieval Jewish policy of separate and unequal. These early experiences of discrimination would freight for him the revolutions of 1848 with existential meaning and decisively color his mature views on politics and religion. The personality that influenced Steinschneider the most in Prossnitz was Gideon Brecher, who had married his mother’s sister in 1827. He always addressed him as uncle.7 Brecher had earned a master’s degree in surgery and midwifery from Pester University (Hungary) in 1824 and was Prossnitz’s first Jewish physician, where he practiced till his death in 1873. He was also a learned Hebraist with a solid command of Bible and Talmud. Like many a maskil who had grown up strictly traditional, he began reading German books only as an adolescent. In Prossnitz he helped to engineer the election of Hirsch Fassel in 1836 as its mildly liberal rabbi over the bitter opposition of Nehemias Trebitsch, Moravia’s staunchly Orthodox chief rabbi in Nikolsburg with whom Steinschneider had unhappily studied in 1832–33.8 More generally, Brecher advocated far-reaching institutional reform: namely graded and enlightened religious education for the young, university education for rabbis in training and rabbinic synods empowered by the government and guided by philosophic reasoning.9 The bonds that bound uncle and nephew are evident in a poignant letter dated June 25, 1833, from a distraught Steinschneider to Brecher in Carlsbad where he was enjoying a respite. Steinschneider, brainy (the letter was punctuated with Italian words) but callow, had come to Prague to start his university studies in October and found that he had blundered badly in his housing arrangements. His bed was too hard for sleeping, his roommates (six children and three adults) distracted him day and night with their incessant recitation of passages they had to memorize for school and the ubiquitous filth of the room quashed his appetite. In this setting he could not study and his health had taken a turn for the worse. He yearned to seek refuge in the country and sought Brecher’s urgent advice on the proposition to serve as a companion to a gentleman headed for the country whom they both knew. Steinschneider was embarrassed to be so self-revealing, but his uncle had helped him often in the past. He pleaded with Brecher not to mention his plight to his parents.10

6

Michael Laurence Miller, Rabbis and Revolution: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Moravian Jewry (New York, Columbia University dissertation, 2004), 25–32, 51–7. 7 Marx, “Steinschneider,” 113. 8 Moritz Duschak, “Gideon Brecher,” Die Jubiläums-Feier des Dr. Gideon Brecher in Prossnitz am 14. Jänner 1865 (Prossnitz: Ignaz Rottberger, 1865); Miller, 74–8, 106–7. 9 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (hereafter AZJ) 1838, 183–4. 10 JTSL, ARC 108, box 13.

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A number of the essays that Steinschneider wrote in the 1840s owe their patrimony to this relationship. In 1841, he reviewed at length a new edition of Judah Halevi’s famous Kuzari by Heimann Jolowicz and David Cassel, who were the first to translate the treatise into German. Steinschneider praised the editors for contextualizing Halevi within the Sephardi orbit and acknowledging that without the Judeo-Arabic original (which would be published only in 1887 and then faultily) many an idiomatic and linguistic conundrum of the Hebrew rendition by Judah Ibn Tibbon would elude its translators. Steinschneider was surely conversant with Halevi because his uncle had just finished publishing his own Hebrew edition with an extensive Hebrew commentary, though without a German translation. To his credit, Steinschneider did not try to compare these very different endeavors.11 An 1845 essay by Steinschneider on the need for reference books to find one’s way in the Talmud was directly indebted to a manuscript acquired not long before by his uncle. Brecher had in fact had a copy of several sections made for him. Steinschneider conjectured that its as yet unknown author had completed the work in the second half of the eighteenth century. It bore the odd title of Siah ’Avdei Avot (The Discourse of the Disciples of our Ancestors) ˙ an invaluable talmudic encyclopedia covering four types of and constituted data arranged alphabetically. Published in Serapeum, the journal for library science and archival studies, the essay gave Steinschneider a chance to introduce a non-Jewish readership to the complexity of talmudic literature and its inaccessibility to historical research due to the absence of scholarly aids. Both uncle and nephew bristled at the disordered state of the Talmud. After Brecher’s death, Steinschneider arranged to have the Royal Library in Berlin, for which he had recently begun to work on a regular basis, acquire the manuscript for its own collection.12 Finally in 1845, Gideon Brecher authored a tract on circumcision to which he had asked his nephew to add an appendix on the rite in Islam. Brecher’s intent was to persuade the Habsburg authorities to forbid the practice of 11

Moritz Steinschneider, “Die neueste Ausgabe des Cusari,” Literaturblatt des Orients (hereafter LBO), 2 (1841), cols. 289–95, 331–3, 345–9, 537–45; 3 (1842), cols. 177–82, 193–7, 209–14, 225–35, 673–81, 707–10, 811–16, 822–27; Gedaliah Brecher, Sefer haKuzari (Hebrew), 4 vols. (Prague: M.J. Landau, 1838–40); Hartwig Hirschfeld, Das Buch al-Chazari (Leipzig: O. Schulze, 1887) (See Ignac Goldziher’s highly critical review in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft [hereafter ZDMG], 41 [1887], 691–707). 12 Serapeum, 6(1845), 289–301; ZDMG, 57(1903), 475. By 1849, Steinschneider had identified its author as a certain R. Eliezer of Kunitz, Moravia who composed his work sometime after 1770 (ZDMG, 4 [1849], 146). In his catalogue of the Hebrew manuscripts of the Royal Library, he listed the author as Elieser b. David Fried, but without further annotation (Moritz Steinschneider, Verzeichniss der hebräischen Handschriften, 2 vols. in one, reprint [Hildesheim/New York: Georg Olms 1980], 2, 17, 169).

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cleansing the wound by oral suction. Writing both as a student of Jewish law and a physician who had performed nearly 300 circumcisions, he contended that metzitzah was ancillary to the ritual itself and incontrovertibly a source of infection. The invitation to his nephew reflected Brecher’s longstanding interest in comparative religion. Steinschneider obliged him with a highly informative essay that didn’t quite make the deadline and had to be published separately.13 The Brecher initiative was clearly part of the raging controversy of the 1840s in the German states over the retention of an ancient rite of passage deemed by many to be primitive and barbaric.14 He, however, did not want to discard but rather enhance its observance by demystifying it, and therefore treated the subject historically, halakhically and medically. A final section even provided the Hebrew liturgy with instructions for the proper performance of the ritual. To be sure, Brecher was a rationalist like Steinschneider yet a far more harmonious personality with a genuine interest in religion, and not beyond studying its irrational expressions unapologetically. His lifelong study of medical data in the Talmud also induced him to explore with empathy related texts dealing with magic, dreams, the nature of the soul, life after death and gehinom.15 Brecher personified for Steinschneider a proximate and elegant role model of a Jew immersed in sacred texts who brought to bear the questions, tools and perspectives of a new age in a radical departure that seemed sanctioned by the expansive culture of Sephardi Jewry. To help him on the topic of circumcision in Islam, Steinschneider turned to Fleischer, his former teacher of Arabic in Leipzig. In a long letter from Prague dated June 23, 1844 and composed in a near state of exhaustion from overwork (he was learning to swim to relax), Steinschneider told him of his uncle’s request and the inadequacy of the sources at his disposal in Prague. Hence four questions: “Is there a specific sunna which calls for circumcision and how? Is circumcision already a religious injunction soon after Mohammad? Is there any sect which rejects it? And is age thirteen based on a text or custom as in places where it is done at age seven or eight?” Steinschneider added that he would make every effort to find relevant information in the

13

Gideon Brecher, Die Beschneidung der Israeliten, von der historischen, praktischoperativen und ritualen Seite, zunächst für den Selbstunterricht, dargestellt (Vienna: Selbstverlag, 1845); Moritz Steinschneider, Die Beschneidung der Araber und Muhammedaner (Vienna: Selbstverlag, 1845). 14 Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context (Hanover N.H./London: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 104–5, 276, 336. 15 Duschak, 14; Gideon Brecher, Das Transcendentale, Magie, und magische Heilarten (Wien: 1850); idem, Die Unsterblichkeitslehre des israelitischen Volkes (Leipzig: Leiner, 1857).

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Jewish sources available to him.16 Before reporting in his essay Fleischer’s conclusions – that circumcision is unmentioned in the Quran and seems to rest on a sunna rarely commented on, which may reflect the practice of Arabic tribes prior to Mohammad – Steinschneider thanked him for his “customary friendliness and generosity.” His own research, he added, led him to conclude that Mohammad may himself have been circumcised by virtue of the true religion of Abraham “that he espoused.” According to the sources, Muslims circumcise at various ages and not uniformly at thirteen, while at the rite the boy is bestowed with a name other than the one given at birth. Lastly, converts to Islam are required to undergo circumcision.17 The collaboration betokened a relationship that would endure until Fleischer’s death in 1888. Remarkably, Steinschneider had studied with him for just a few months, having arrived in Leipzig in May 1839 only to leave the following October.18 In Vienna, where he had attended the university for three years, the government had denied him admission to its Oriental Institute as an auditor on the grounds that it was restricted to those young men preparing for a career in Austria’s diplomatic service. In Leipzig Steinschneider would finally decide, after some five years of philosophical and philological studies at the universities of Prague and Vienna and uninterrupted efforts to advance his rabbinic education, to embark officially on a dual career.19 Besides studying the Quran with Fleischer, Steinschneider undertook to write a series of eleven short entries for Pierer’s Universallexicon ranging over the field of Arabic language, literature and history and to produce a Hebrew translation of the Quran intended as an appendix to an Arabic primer in Hebrew.20 A year after he had left Leipzig, Steinschneider admitted ruefully to Fleischer in a letter introducing his friend Adolph Jellinek, who also wanted to study with him, that he had erred in departing so abruptly, “depriving himself of the benefit and value which flow so freely from your lectures.” Nevertheless, I constantly console myself with the lovely thought of yet another longer stay in Leipzig, and would deem my self fortunate, if you, your honor, would retain your affection for me, which I flatter myself as being the best memento (vademecum) I could have taken with me from Leipzig.21 16

RLC, Fleischer papers. Steinschneider, Die Beschneidung, 18, 20–1, 23, 28. 18 JTSL, ARC 108, box 15, “Kassa 1832–70.” 19 Ibid., “Über meine Vorbereitung für das Schulfach.” 20 Ibid., George Alexander Kohut, “Bibliography of the Writings of Professor Dr. Moritz Steinschneider,” Festschrift zum achzigsten Geburtstage Moritz Steinschneider’s (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1896), xxxiii; Jewish Literature from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century (trans.), William Spottiswoode (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1857), 320, n. 48 (hereafter JL/E). 21 RLC, Fleischer papers. 17

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A short stay in Leipzig, then, was all Steinschneider needed to impress Fleischer with his exceptional talent. In December 1845, Fleischer would voice his high regard for his former student directly to the Prussian Ministry of Interior. Following a second sojourn to Prague (this time for three years), Steinschneider had settled in Berlin and required naturalization in order to earn a living as a teacher. Fleischer obliged him with a strong letter of recommendation that attested his scholarship and character. The latter in particular, he averred, on the basis of the time spent together, was marked by a harmonious blend of integrity, spirit, industriousness and erudition. In the heady atmosphere of Berlin, he would continue to grow morally and academically to the benefit of scholarship.22 Steinschneider wrote to his fiance´e, working in Prague as a governess and to whom he had just gotten engaged, that the letter exceeded his expectations. Leopold Zunz could not have written a better one! He also told her that Fleischer was delighted with their engagement and instructed him to keep it brief.23 Fleischer had become the Professor of Oriental Languages at Leipzig in 1836. By then the university had slipped badly from the pinnacle it once held in the field during the brief tenure a century before of Johann Jakob Reiske, who resided in Leipzig but taught elsewhere than at the university.24 Fleischer would restore its luster and, indeed, set the standards for the field throughout Germany. At Leipzig as a student, Fleischer studied theology. By the time he had finished the gymnasium, he had already worked his way through all of the Hebrew Bible in the original, and his parents urged him to enter the ministry. But in 1824, with doctorate in hand, he went to Paris to study with Sylvestre de Sacy, then Europe’s premier Arabist, from whom he learned to put the literary language on a sound grammatical footing. He also deepened his knowledge of Persian and Turkish, gained command of spoken Arabic from Egyptian savants then in Paris and pored over the manuscripts in the rich collection of the Biblothe`que nationale. He returned to Saxony in 1828 with an incipient national agenda.25 22 Alexander Marx, “Steinschneideriana II,” Salo W. Baron and Alexander Marx (eds.), Jewish Studies in Memory of George Alexander Kohut (New York: The Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation, 1935), 511–512. 23 Steinschneider, Briefwechsel, 66–7. 24 Holger Preissler, “Der Koran in Leipzig,” Vorträge aus dem Studium universale 2003–4 (Leipzig: Universität Leipzig, 2005), 14–6. My thanks to Dr. Arndt Engelhardt of the Simon-Dubnow-Institut of Universität Leipzig for sending me a copy of this essay. 25 Idem, “Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer. Ein Leipziger Orientalist, seine jüdischen Studenten, Promovenden und Kollegen,” Bausteine einer jüdischen Geschichte der Universität Leipzig, ed. Stephan Wendehorst (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006), 247–8; Ignaz Goldziher, “Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer,” Gesammelte Schriften, 6 vols., reprint (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967–73), 6, 193–5 (reprint from Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 48, Leipzig: 1904, 584–94).

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By the early 1840s, he began to take the lead in replicating in Germany two of France’s prestigious vehicles for promoting Oriental scholarship, the Socie´te´ asiatique, of which he was a member, and its Journal asiatique, in which he had already published.26 The founding conference of Die Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft took place in Dresden from September 30 to October 4, 1844. The forty-nine Orientalists attending elected Fleischer as their first president by acclamation.27 And during its first decade Fleischer worked tirelessly to increase its membership and sustain its Zeitschrift, which began in 1846. As he was nearing the end of his embattled tenure on the executive committee, Fleischer shared in a letter to Steinschneider from March 2, 1852, the ethos that impelled him: You have no idea how stressed out I am. My motto to serve scholarship by furthering the work of others, I dare say, has estranged me from myself. If there were some other likeminded and respected souls, then it might work. But alone, I am overwhelmed by the demands made on me. I don’t want to bother you by enumerating the papers before me. It suffices to assure you that since the Berlin conference, I have not been able to add a single line to my Badawi index.28

Not only were Jews some twenty percent of the participants at the first conference of the German oriental society, but they delivered three of the fifteen papers given. Indeed, with Abraham Geiger and Zacharias Frankel opening the first session and Steinschneider closing the third, they served as its bookends.29 Steinschneider spoke last because Fleischer had turned to him only when he realized that the conference suffered from a shortage of papers. Nor did Steinschneider, the only speaker without a doctorate (he was listed as a candidate for the rabbinate), betray the confidence of his teacher. His lecture and greatly expanded printed version sparkled with brilliance, obviously a work long in gestation. When it appeared a year later, he fittingly dedicated it to Zunz and Fleischer, “my highly respected teachers and friends, a small token of my deeply felt reverence and gratitude.”30 His lecture could not have been more suited to the occasion. It was both universal in spirit and philological in method. Steinschneider dismissed as

26 Johann Fück, Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1955), 150. 27 Verhandlungen der ersten Versammlung deutscher und ausländischer Orientalisten in Dresden 1844 (Leipzig: 1845), 3, 76. More generally, Holger Preissler, “Die Anfänge der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft,” ZDMG, 145 (1995), 241–327. 28 JTSL, ARC 108, Fleischer letters. See also his letter to Steinschneider of October 29, 1852. As for his work on Badawi’s commentary on the Quran, see Preissler, “Der Koran,” 21. 29 Verhandlungen der ersten Versammlung, 76, 78. 30 Moritz Steinschneider, Die fremdsprachlichen Elemente im Neuhebräischen (Prag: W. Pascheles, 1845).

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purely ideological the question whether Hebrew had ever disappeared as a living language after the completion of the Canon or the demise of the Jewish state. The body of literature produced in Hebrew thereafter and throughout the Middle Ages deserved to be studied irrespective of ideology, and not only by Jews. It actually constituted a vast linguistic mine of the verbal remains of the languages to which Jews had been exposed in their wanderings. The deposits of Aramaic, Persian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, Turkish and Hungarian words preserved in Hebrew embodied fossils vital to the students of these cultures. And to prove his point, he studded his text with many a fascinating example. The young Steinschneider then set forth a bracing vision of philology as a mirror of cultural reciprocity. With e´lan and erudition, he demonstrated that the seemingly parochial history of the Hebrew language was saturated with universal significance.31 Fleischer’s exceptional magnanimity toward Steinschneider extended as well to other Jewish students of Arabic and Islam, who either came to Leipzig to study with him or approached him with questions from afar.32 In 1841, he paid Geiger the honor of a lengthy review of his prize-winning 1833 book on what Mohammad owed to Judaism in the leading Jewish scholarly journal of the day. Fleischer was dubious that any single scholar could ever acquire a sufficient mastery of both Hebrew and Arabic and their respective literatures to do justice to such a complex subject, and his numerous corrections of Geiger’s faulty translations and etymologies highlighted the latter’s limited knowledge of Arabic, not to mention the faulty supervision of his Bonn professor of Arabic, Gustav Wilhelm Freytag, who had also studied with de Sacy. But the tone was respectful and constructive throughout, designed to advance and not quash the cause of interdisciplinary research rather than to embarrass the author.33 The next generation of Jewish students would serve to allay some of Fleischer’s doubts about the possibility of combining the fields. Besides interceding in Steinschneider’s behalf to secure his doctorate from Leipzig in 1851, he provided the administration with glowing written opinions of the dissertations of Daniel Chwolsohn in 1850, Ignaz Goldziher in 1870 and Immanuel Loew in 1878. Throughout his career the prominence of Jewish students was noteworthy. Of the 131 doctoral promotions in which he was involved between 1866 and 1886, fifty-two of the dissertations had been written by Jews, lending credence to Steinschneider’s stinging comment in 1869 that without their Jewish students, university classes in “Semitic literature would be prac-

31

Ibid. On the contemporaneous debate over Hebrew in the Second Temple period, see Schorsch, From Text to Context, 281. 32 Preissler, “[…] Fleischer […], seine jüdischen Studenten […],” passim. 33 LBO II (1841), nos. 5, 6, 8, 10, 12.

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tically empty.”34 His commitment to the field most assuredly transcended the residual insularity and bigotry of the German university in its era of ascendancy. Without doubt, his most enduring act of selflessness was his more than twenty-year collaboration with Rabbi Jakob Levy of Breslau on his two monumental Aramaic dictionaries which Fleischer enriched with countless pages of philological addenda, a tribute to both men.35 In gratitude for Fleischer’s courageous independence, Steinschneider persuaded the board and academic council of the Zunz Foundation to invite him in May 1875 to join the latter to fill the seat left vacant by Geiger’s death the previous October. The foundation had been created in 1864 to honor Zunz on his seventieth birthday by providing him and his wife with a pension for life. Thereafter, the income of the fund would be used to promote the cause of critical Jewish scholarship to which Zunz had devoted his life.36 Fleischer would have been the first Christian to sit on the five-man academic council. As Steinschneider related to Fleischer a few days after the official invitation was sent: It is time that authentic scholarship rise above theological divisions. This was my reason for rejecting any involvement here in the so-called Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. It will be just another Jewish theological seminary. That is why I pushed to have a Christian elected to the Zunz Foundation and am pleased that my suggestion took such a favorable turn.37

Fleischer responded to Steinschneider quickly, graciously and affirmatively, fully cognizant of the invitation’s import. He thanked him in particular for “having seized the initiative and carried it to fruition in a matter that constitutes the victory of academic universalism over religious particularism. It is also part and parcel of the Kulturkampf and belongs to signatora temporis.” As late as 1886, Fleischer still enjoyed a seat on the unenlarged council.38 34 Preissler, “[…] Fleischer […], seine jüdischen Studenten […],” 254–5, 262–4, 266; Hebräische Bibliographie hereafter HB, ed. Moritz Steinschneider, 9 (1869), 77. 35 To the second, Levy’s Wörterbuch über die Talmudim und Midraschim, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Berlin/Wien: B. Harz, 1924), Fleischer added some 127 pages of Nachträge. His death in 1888 prevented him from reviewing Levy’s entries under the last letter (tav) of the Hebrew alphabet. In the posthumous tribute to Fleischer, Levy praised him for his rare combination of deep learning, noble character and genuine love of humanity (IV, “Nachwort,” 681). For a more expansive treatment of Fleischer’s seminal role in opening up the study of Arabic and Islam to Jews, see my recent essay “Converging Cognates. The Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in this volume. 36 HB, 7 (1864), 73–4; Statut der Zunz-Stiftung (Berlin: G. Bernstein, 1886). Steinschneider was the chair of the Beirat. 37 RLC, Fleischer papers, May 23, 1875. The official invitation to Fleischer was dated May 18 and was signed by S. Neumann, the chair of the curatorium, and M. Steinschneider, the chair of the academic council (Fleischer papers). 38 JTSL, ARC 108, Fleischer letters, May 24, 1875. The Statut der Zunz-Stiftung of 1886

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The final tribute to the man from the Jewish side came posthumously in 1904, when Goldziher, his former student and by then Europe’s leading scholar of Islam, authored the official biographical entry on him in the prestigious national encyclopedia of famous Germans, a ten-page treasure of information and paean of praise. Only a Jew could bear witness that Fleischer’s noble character matched his sterling scholarship.39 While in Leipzig, Steinschneider also befriended Franz Julius Delitzsch, destined to become the finest Christian Hebraist and exegete of the Hebrew Bible in nineteenth-century Germany. Some of his commentaries are still in print in either German or English. At the time Delitzsch, only three years older than Steinschneider, was an impoverished free-lance scholar who had earned his doctorate in 1835 at age twenty-two.40 A year later he astonished the world of scholarship with a sweeping, exuberant and competent history of post-biblical Hebrew poetry up to his own day, the first of its kind. In 1838, he returned to the subject more broadly in a second volume with undiminished exuberance.41 In between he had been invited to catalogue the Hebrew manuscripts in the city and university library and discovered one entitled ’Etz Hayyim by Aaron ben Elijah of Nicomedia (Greece), a fourteenth-century ˙ Karaite polymath.42 Delitzsch solicited Steinschneider’s help in the daunting task of editing this unpublished manuscript (partially written in Rashi script) in which its author had tried, on the model of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, to lay out the full expanse of Karaite theology. The two may have first met while studying the Quran with Fleischer, who subsequently enriched their edition with Arabic excerpts pertaining to Islamic philosophy. When it finally appeared in 1841, Delitzsch gave ample recognition to the inestimable contribution of both men, a rare testament to a singular collaboration across religious lines in the exhuming of a medieval Jewish text.43 But the relationship was not to last. The personalities and beliefs of Delitzsch and Steinschneider were too disparate to allow for bonding. Delitzsch, who had gone through a religious experience in 1832, emerged as a staunch

still shows Fleischer to be a member of the Beirath, as do two letters to him from S. Neumann, who still presided as the chair (RLC, Fleischer papers). 39 Goldziher, “Fleischer: Heinrich Leberecht.” On the relationship between Fleischer and Goldziher, see Robert Simon, Ignac Goldziher. His Life and Scholarship as Reflected in His Works and Correspondence (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1986), 37–9. 40 Karl Heinrich Rengstorf, Die DelitzschÆsche Sache (Berlin/Hamburg: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 1967). 41 Franz Delitzsch, Zur Geschichte der jüdischen Poesie (Leipzig: K. Tauchnitz, 1836); idem, Wissenschaft, Kunst, Judenthum (Grimma: J.M. Gebhardt, 1838). 42 Idem, ’Etz Hayyim (Hebrew in original) (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1841), 7. 43 Ibid., 13–4.

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romantic, devout Lutheran separatist and eventual missionary to the Jews.44 He closed his foreword to ’Etz Hayyim on an overtly religious and subtly ˙ whose word is the only touchstone of all Christian note, by asking “that God human creations and whose honor is the final goal of all endeavors might grant that my work glorify his threefold holy name.”45 Perhaps for that reason Steinschneider distanced himself publicly from Delitzsch the very year Etz Hayyim came out. In a review of recent scholar˙ ship on medieval Hebrew poetry, he criticized his two earlier works with their aesthetic and religious perspectives as being quite Christian in character, a subtext, he felt, as yet undetected by his fawning Jewish admirers.46 Regardless, Delitzsch cherished the memory of their brief collaboration. When Steinschneider turned seventy, Delitzsch surprised him with a charming greeting full of tenderness: A fortunate glance at Ad. Brüll’s Monatsblätter brought me the knowledge that tomorrow you enter the ayin (the Hebrew letter for 70) of life’s alphabet. Since 1849 our ways have parted and seldom crossed, but the years we sat together with the ‘Etz Hayyim of Ahron b. Elia, especially in that fierce winter in your modest bakhur-room on the far side of the ? bridge, are for me unforgettable! In the meantime you have become a great literary historian and (as I have diligently gathered) a fortunate family man. May God of the World yet bestow on you a long and serene twilight whose end shall be a hearty and sunny beginning. This is the wish of your old friend who finds himself already on the road between shivim (Hebrew for 70) and shemonim (Hebrew for 80) awaiting the summons of the world (des Rufes Welt)!47

What bears stressing is that the collaboration did not divert Steinschneider to focusing on the fate of the Karaites. The subject was to intrigue his contemporaries because it mirrored the intramural religious polemics of their own age. The influence of Islam on the Karaites surely interested him. In his essay on circumcision he ventured to opine that it was extensive.48 Though still very much in formation, his larger canvas would eventually encompass the panoply of Arabic–Jewish interaction with special attention to its expressions of a nascent secular temperament. Steinschneider arrived in Berlin in November 1839, only to depart again in October 1841 for a three-year stay in Prague. He returned to settle permanently in June 1845, provided the Prussian government deigned to grant him citizenship. Without it he could hold no communal educational post.49 In March 1847, after passing a strenuous set of state exams with distinction, he

44

Rengstorf, 17–24. Delitzsch, ’Etz Hayyim, 15. 46 LBO, 2 (1841), cols. 241–2. 47 JTSL, ARC 108, Delitzsch letters. 48 Steinschneider, Beschneidung, 26–7. 49 JTSL, ARC 108, box 15, “Kassa 1832–70.” 45

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received a teacher’s license and a year later his decree of naturalization signed by King Frederick William IV on March 18, 1848, as the streets of Berlin erupted in violence.50 Finally in July 1849, Steinschneider felt secure enough financially to marry his fiance´e after a seven-year courtship. As he had often insisted to her in his somewhat autocratic letters during their separation, he would not consider the step until he had secured an annual income of at least 200 talers from his tutoring and writing.51 A few months later he wrote to Fleischer that he was serving as a reporter for the Nationalzeitung covering Prussia’s upper house: “The work is time-consuming, but respectably paid and will serve to send me to Oxford.”52 This tortuous path to stability reveals graphically the painful absence of academic opportunities for the devotees of Jewish scholarship. Even Delitzsch, whose rejection of Prussia’s unification of its Lutheran and Reform Churches in 1817–21 cost him academic appointments to Breslau and Koenigsberg, did receive an invitation in 1846 from Mecklenburg-Schwerin to join its university in Rostock as a full professor.53 Advancement was also easier for Steinschneider’s friend Friedrich Heinrich Dieterici, five years younger and likewise a student of Fleischer’s, with whom he met weekly to pursue their Arabic interests; he was by 1846 a Privatdozent (lecturer) at the University of Berlin and the recipient of a 500-taler government research grant to travel to Cairo. By 1850 he had reached the rank of associate professor of Oriental languages in Berlin.54 It was this systemic inequity which had convinced Salomon Munk, thirteen years older than Steinschneider, to forsake Germany for France in 1827 without a doctorate, though not without a pilgrimage to Weimar to see Goethe. Until 1833, when he died suddenly, Michael Beer (b. 1800), the brother of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, eased Munk’s transition as patron.

50 Steinschneider, Briefwechsel, 181; Marx, “Steinschneider,”129–30; JTSL, ARC 108, box 18. 51 Steinschneider, Briefwechsel, 40, 72, 189; from Steinschneider’s letter of July 11, 1849, to Fleischer, it is clear that he and Auguste were planning to get married on the 28th of the month (RLC, Fleischer papers). However, in a letter to George Alexander Kohut after Auguste’s death, Steinschneider related that they were married on July 1, 1849. After the transfer of his far-flung correspondence to the Seminary Library in 1933, Alexander Marx must have asked Adeline Goldberg, his devoted secretary, assistant and executrix, about the discrepancy, for in a letter to him dated November 21, 1934, she conjectured that the civil and religious marriage ceremonies must have occurred on different days (George Alexander Kohut, “Steinschneideriana,” Studies in Jewish Bibliography and Related Subjects in Memory of Abraham Solomon Freidus [New York: The Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation, 1929], 104; JTSL, ARC 80, box 25/39). 52 Letter dated December 25, 1849, RLC, Fleischer papers. 53 Rengstorf, 52–78. 54 Steinschneider, Briefwechsel, 185, 193; Neue Deutsche Biographie, 3, 672.

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Thereafter, his career as a student of Arabic and Jewish philosophy, despite setbacks, gained traction. As early as 1832, a good decade before Steinschneider, Munk detected, while perusing the Oriental manuscripts in the Bibliothe`que nationale, the critical role played by Jewish translators in mediating Greek and Arabic science and philosophy to the West. In 1838 the Bibliothe`que invited him to join its staff and almost immediately he began publishing Judeo-Arabic samples of medieval Hebrew translations. In 1844 the Consistoire central des Israelites hired him as its secretary for 1500 francs (400 taler) per annum and four years later the Minister of Public Instruction added an annual research stipend of 1200 francs. The culmination of his illustrious dual career came in 1864 when the government appointed him to fill the chair in Hebrew and Syriac at its renowned Colle`ge de France replacing Ernst Renan, who had lost it in the furor over his Life of Jesus.55 By way of contrast, Steinschneider’s tombstone in Berlin etched his career acidly. “Here rests the teacher and writer Moritz Steinschneider […],” that is how he wished to be remembered, a member of two professions bereft of status!56 While Steinschneider chose not to seek a haven in the rabbinate, his scholarship surely would have brought renown to any university faculty.57 To have inscribed his tombstone with the title “honorary professor,” which the Prussian government awarded him belatedly in 1894, would have merely concealed the stark truth that throughout his life he and his field were deemed unworthy of admission to the German academic guild.58 Nor did he hide that he owed his survival to teaching. On the reverse side of his tombstone, it was not his vaunted scholarship that he touted but rather, in a rhyming Hebrew couplet, a lifetime of uninterrupted teaching that spanned 75 years.59 Had he been a full time scholar, his awesome output might even have been greater! 55

Moise Schwab, Salomon Munk. Sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Ernest Leroux, Libraire, 1900), 31–5, 50–1, 74, 126–7, 133–4, 165–6. 56 Steinschneider and his wife are buried in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee. A common tombstone marks their graves. 57 In a letter dated February 22, 1846, Steinschneider wrote Auguste of his decision not to become a rabbi: “I am enjoying my studies again and am far more relaxed. Surely a contributing factor is that I have shaken off that massive, burdensome and tormenting literature of the practical or ceremonial law, in German Schulhan Arukh and Poskim. I have come to realize that a conscientious, religious rabbi can never be well educated. He needs to immerse himself in a literature that dissipates his life-force. Still, I do not regret enduring the chains for so long. True wisdom must be grounded in life. I am entitled to speak because I tried so hard” (Steinschneider, Briefwechsel, 85). 58 Marx, “Steinschneider,” 180. 59 From 1869 to 1890, Steinschneider served as director of the Berlin Jewish community’s school for girls on Heidereutergasse. It consisted of six grades with some 400 students. Adeline Goldberg, his faithful amenuensis, described him as a serious, hardworking and independent educator well ahead of his time (“Steinschneider als Schulmann,” AZJ, 80 [1916], 151–3).

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When Steinschneider informed Fleischer of his decision to return to Berlin from Prague, the latter felt strongly that it was the right move: Your future appears to me in a friendly light now that I know you are with Zunz. There are people in whom I have an instinctive and unshakable confidence without having been able to take their measure. Zunz is one of them and the two of you belong together.60

The two men were truly kindred spirits who had drawn close during Steinschneider’s first sojourn in Berlin. Zunz, whom he revered as a paragon of scholarship and a fatherly friend, epitomized what Steinschneider aspired to become. In Prague its esteemed scholarly rabbi, Salomon Judah Rapoport, never engendered the same degree of reverence in him, as he wrote to Auguste after she had spent a Purim evening with him: That Rapoport sometimes yearns for me, I take to heart only because there is scarcely anyone in Prague who can appreciate his knowledge. Rapoport is a lovable man, a sharp and witty mind but with the character, forgive me, of a Pole, who for me can never become one that will prove appealing.61

Yet when Rapoport died in 1867, Steinschneider closed his sympathetic obituary with the searing comment that “the Prague rabbinate needed twentyseven years to destroy a rare genius.”62 Zunz yearned for Steinschneider no less than Rapoport. During their separation, he often expressed his great need for his assistance. “If only I had Steinschneider here and he could work with me, then my books would be edited,” Adelheid wrote to him on June 19, 1843 quoting her husband. She added forlornly: You know that they are all idiots here who have neither an ear for let alone any interest in selihot [penitential prayers, Hebrew in the original; I.S.]. Where are the young to be found who have the understanding, knowledge and affection to love and support path breaking scholarship and my Zunz?63

In the same combination of candor and despair, Zunz depicted darkly for Steinschneider the plight of his life’s work: Except for a pair of poor souls, who perhaps could do something if they had food to eat, everything here in the domain of Jewish scholarship is dead. [dots in the original; I.S.] Lebrecht and I, we will take care of the hespedim [eulogies, Hebrew in the original; I.S.].64

60

JTSL, ARC 108, letter dated March 10, 1845. Steinschneider, Briefwechsel, 174, 258–9. 62 Gessammelte Schriften von Moritz Steinschneider, eds, Henry Malter and Alexander Marx, 1 (Berlin: Poppelauer, 1925), 628. 63 Alexander Marx, “Zunz’s Letters to Steinschneider,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 5 (1933–4), 119. 64 Ibid., 118. 61

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Internal apathy and external animus, then, according to Zunz, threatened Wissenschaft des Judentums with an early burial, not the intent of its beleaguered and deprived practitioners. Undeterred, Steinschneider returned to cement a friendship unlike that of any two other Wissenschaft scholars. He at once assisted Zunz in finishing the editing of Nahman Krochmal’s dense and disordered torso of a manuscript, for which Zunz refused payment from the family while insisting on remuneration for Steinschneider. When Moreh Nevukhe ha-Zeman finally came out in 1851, Zunz’s pristine Foreword ended by thanking Steinschneider and linking his name forever with that of the author of this classic and its selfless editor.65 A year before, Steinschneider had informed Fleischer with grave concern of Zunz’s ever precarious financial situation: The local Jewish [teacher’s] seminary [which Zunz had headed since 1840; I.S.] will close by Easter, because the community [Gemeinde; I.S.] has no money and the old Zunz is left without a pension or employment. I feel for him much more than for Archduke John and his imperial ministers [whose Habsburg regency would fall with the failure of the Frankfurt National Assembly; I.S.].66

On his five summer visits to the Bodleian Library at Oxford to catalogue its collection of Hebrew books printed before 1732, Steinschneider was ever mindful that he was fulfilling Zunz’s long cherished dream. “You are sitting at the fountainhead for which I thrilled in days long gone.”67 Steinschneider scoured its incomparable Hebrew manuscript collection, which he wanted to catalogue above all else, in part for unknown liturgical materials for Zunz. On October 13, 1851, Zunz wrote him excitedly from Berlin: “Don’t fail to have copies made for me; I will cover your expenses for the selihot … The 613 mitzvot (azharot for Shavuot) I prefer to delay for the time being. However, Saadia’s entire siddur [just discovered by Steinschneider; I.S.] must be printed.”68 At Zunz’s request, Steinschneider refrained from publishing on his own anything that he had turned over to him until Zunz had a chance to take up the items in his forthcoming Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters. At the

65

Ismar Schorsch, “The Production of a Classic: Zunz as Krochmal’s Editor,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 31 (1986), 289; Shimon Rawidowicz (ed.), The Writings of Nachman Krochmal (Hebrew), 2nd enlarged ed. (Waltham, MA: Ararat Publishing Society, 1961), haqdamat ha-motzi la-or. 66 RLC, Fleischer papers, December 25, 1849. 67 Marx, “Steinschneider,” 134; idem, “Zunz’s Letters to Steinschneider,” 133. 68 Moritz Steinschneider, Der Siddur des Saadia Gaon entdeckt von M. Steinschneider, als Manuscript gedruckt, 1856 (?), 1 (copy in JTSL, Steinschneider Pamphlets, Vol. 4). See also Moritz Steinschneider, Die arabische Literatur der Juden (Frankfurt a.M.: Kauffmann, 1902), 62–3.

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Bodleian Zunz was Steinschneider’s silent partner, whereas in the synagogale Poesie the invisible hand was Steinschneider’s. When Zunz finally made it back to England in 1855 after its publication, Adelheid, his wife, who accompanied him, met the Queen at the home of Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, English Jewry’s first baron (1778–1859). On her own, the Queen came on a surprise visit to admire the prize-winning flowers of his greenhouse, and in an intimate setting Adelheid impressed the company with her charm and intelligence. Zunz missed the occasion because he was at the British Museum. In a total of 35 days at the Museum, the Bodleian and the Bibliothe`que nationale in Paris, he pored over some 180 manuscripts and 100 printed books. The intensity of his effort suggests that even had he known of the Queen’s visit in advance, he would not have allowed her luster to distract him from the lure of his work. The priority epitomized the ethos of both mentor and disciple.69 Organized alphabetically by author, the second half of Steinschneider’s massive Latin catalogue of the Bodleiana with its more than 9500 packed entries closed with an entry on Zunz, and he seized the opportunity to annotate and publish it separately in German as a bibliographical tribute honoring his 63rd birthday in 1857. Steinschneider suggested that as the revered founder and leading practitioner of a new field of study, Zunz did not need acclaim by learned societies or awards for his books or even a university appointment. It was the field itself, bereft of all institutionalization, that pleaded for external recognition. Steinschneider’s unprecedented nine-year effort under the auspices of a world-class library would hopefully begin to rectify this grievous drawback. Guiding him throughout, he gratefully acknowledged, was Zunz’s scholarship and sage advice.70 One can only imagine the animated conversation between them each time Steinschneider returned from an expedition to “the fountainhead.” There is surely warrant for surmising that Steinschneider, now at the peak of his career, was not only instrumental in creating the Zunz Foundation in 1864, but also in directing those funds not needed for the pension to ensuring the luster of his name and the perpetuation of his writings.71 Thus in the 1870s

69 Steinschneider, Der Siddur, 1; Immanuel Bernfeld, “Zum Andenken an Leopold Zunz,” Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur, 31 (1938), 233–34; Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), Leopold Zunz. Jude –Deutscher – Europäer (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1964), 372. In 1846 Zunz had devoted a short visit to England (from August 1 to September 12) largely to sightseeing, managing to work in the British Museum only two consecutive days (Jewish National Library, Jerusalem, ARC 4° 792, C 13; Das Buch Zunz, 97, 97a). 70 Catalogus Librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana (Berlin: Friedlaender, 1852–60) cols. 2774–80; Moritz Steinschneider, Die Schriften des Dr. L. Zunz (Berlin: Friedländer‘sche Buchdruckerei, 1857), 2–4. 71 Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), Leopold and Adelheid Zunz. An Account in Letters 1815–1885 (New York: East and West Library for the Leo Baeck Institute, 1958), 307.

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the foundation initiated and funded a three-volume edition of his collected writings, a jubilee volume in 1884 when Zunz turned 90, with Steinschneider’s essay on Aristotle’s Metaphysics in Jewish garb in pride of place as the book’s first essay, and finally in 1892, six years after Zunz’s death, a modestly revised second edition of his grand maiden book on the history of midrash.72 Appropriately, it was Steinschneider who adorned the volume with a brief Foreword in which he recounted that Zunz had often told him that he had actually planned to write a history of the Jews when his friend Isaak Markus Jost upstaged him. In reaction Zunz decided to focus on the sermons and prayers of the synagogue, thereby mapping the cultural terrain of medieval Jewry.73 In sum, the collaboration of these two titans of critical scholarship could not have been more intimate nor its continuity more congruent. As Zunz had dominated the generation of the founders, Steinschneider would reign supreme among their immediate heirs. Between them they covered the expanding parameters of the field, with Zunz working mainly on the religious legacy of Ashkenazi Jewry and Steinschneider on the secular literature of Sephardi Jewry. By the century’s end, a coterie of scholars inspired by Steinschneider and Munk had anchored the appeal of the Sephardi mystique in a trove of Judeo-Arabic texts unearthed in the Oriental manuscript collections of libraries across Europe.

II A breakthrough can never be fully accounted for but neither is it wholly a mystery. There is a dialectic to the writing of history as there is to other disciplines. Steinschneider’s Jüdische Literatur of 1850 did not come out of the blue. It was rather the comprehensive map of a tireless explorer on the frontiers of Jewish knowledge. Expanded and reconceptualized, the bracing diversity of essays which he had authored at a feverish pace in the 1840s converged and evolved into a grand synthesis. The essay came to a total of 114 double-columned quarto pages, covered an expanse of 2500 years of Jewish literature and brought to the fore the names of some 1600 authors. It appeared twice, first in Germany’s august scholarly encyclopedia of the arts and sciences (the above-mentioned Ersch 72 Leopold Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, 3 vols, ed. Curatorium der Zunz-Stiftung (Berlin: Louis Gerschel, 1875–6); Jubelschrift zum neunzigsten Geburtstag des Dr. L. Zunz, ed. Curatorium der Zunz-Stiftung (Berlin: Louis Gerschel, 1884); Leopold Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kauffmann, 1892), Foreword by M. Steinschneider, xiv–xvi. 73 Ibid., xiv.

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und Gruber) founded in 1818 to compete with its older French and English counterparts, and then again in 1857 in a revised cumbersome English translation, less polemical in tone and greatly enriched by Steinschneider’s intervening visits to the Bodleiana.74 The prestigious setting of the German edition not only added to the resonance of his scholarship, but also heralded his lifelong preference to publish in places frequented by non-Jewish scholars. Steinschneider’s tour de force gave Wissenschaft des Judentums a calling card. The key to the expansion in scope was a redefinition of what constituted Jewish literature. Steinschneider went beyond Zunz’s initial enlargement in 1818 of the term rabbinische Literatur to include all that which had been written in Hebrew. Henceforth, the field was to encompass anything written by Jews in any language.75 The objective of both men was the same: to alter radically the image of the literature as wholly religious in nature and written solely by rabbis. In the libraries of Europe, Jewish books and manuscripts were catalogued under the rubric of theology.76 As for the universities, the field in the truncated form of the Old Testament was confined to the faculty of theology. To be sure, the provenance of Arabic language and literature in the German university was also the faculty of theology, though by the second half of the nineteenth century it gained entry into the faculty of philosophy where the humanities were taught.77 In the German version of his essay, Steinschneider lamented the ghetto within general scholarship in which Jewish literature still found itself and speculated that freeing it would be even more difficult than emancipating the Jews.78

74

An Index of Authors to JL/G appeared in 1893 (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kauffmann). JL/G, 357. Inexplicably, this critical passage was omitted in Jewish Literature. It was restored by Henry Malter in his superb Hebrew translation of the English text (Moshe Steinschneider, Sifrut Yisrael (trans.), Zvi Malter [Warsaw: Ahi’asaf, 1897]. 13). 76 Steinschneider, Serapeum no. 1, January 15, 1847, 7. Also idem, Serapeum no. 3, February 15, 1846, 39. 77 In 1840 Fleischer moved from the theological faculty at Leipzig to its philosophical faculty (Fueck, 170). In a letter to Steinschneider dated June 23, 1862, Fleischer expressed his approval of the decision by the Prussian Minister of Education to separate Oriental studies from the exegesis of the Old Testament at Halle (JTSL, ARC 108, Fleischer letters). To keep the fields tethered, he felt, would yield only superficial scholarship. Not surprisingly, the preponderance of the membership of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft in its early years consisted of graduates of theological faculties, gymnasium teachers and Protestant clergy (Preissler, “Die Anfänge der DMG,” 285. More generally, 260–65). 78 “Jüdische Literatur,” 451. 75

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The sweep of the essay from Ezra to the end of the eighteenth century was predicated on a periodization scheme first propounded by Zunz. In 1841, toward the end of an exhaustive survey of Jewish geographical literature, Zunz had boldly asserted that the legacy of Greece fructified Jewish culture three times, first under the Ptolemaic and Seleucid hegemonies in the third and second centuries before the Common Era, then again beginning in the eighth century in the guise of Islam and finally through the medium of the German Enlightenment in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Steinschneider adopted this scheme of demarcation according to external rather than internal factors and devoted the bulk of his essay to the centuries when the Arabic renaissance profoundly transformed the contours of Jewish culture.79 In reference to the first millennium, which spanned from the early centuries of the Second Temple to the rise of Islam, Steinschneider tended to minimize the Greek influence. Although the centrality of Scripture cast all of rabbinic literature into an unreflective and amorphous exegetical mode, he was able with insight and intuition to identify and assemble vestiges of different literary genres that under the Arabs would morph into a life of their own. In so doing, he drew on earlier work.80 Prior to writing his essay for the Allgemeine Encyklopädie, Steinschneider had been absorbed by the application of the categories of folklore, legend and saga to the corpus of midrashic literature. Because the exegetical dynamic of aggadah was far freer than that of halakhah, midrash became the fluid medium for confronting the outside world. In one essay he argued that rabbinic tales and topics turn up in early Islamic literature about Mohammad, even the Quran, then take on an Islamic coloration and eventually return to the midrashic fold to give the Hebrew prophets a distinct resemblance to the founder of Islam.81 In contrast, the genre of saga always bears a nugget of historical veracity, situating it somewhere between history and myth. When Steinschneider went beyond looking at samples of midrash through the lens of saga to examining biblical stories, including some of those in Genesis, Zacharias Frankel, the heavy-handed editor of the journal in which Stein-

79

Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, I, 205–6. See also Schorsch, From Text to Context, 86–8. Steinschneider had already adumbrated a version of this periodization in his Kuzari essay (LBO, 2 [1841], cols 293–4, 345–8). At the time, he posited that the third instance of fructification by Greece came with the Renaissance and Reformation. But since the “dark ages” in Jewish cultural history lingered for him as well as for Zunz until Mendelssohn, he preferred later to identify the third infusion with the Enlightenment. 80 Jewish Literature, 35–45. 81 Moritz Steinschneider, “Zur Legendenkunde: Etwas über das Verhältniss der muhammedanischen Legende zur rabbinischen,” Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes 72, June 17, 1845, 286–8.

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schneider published this particular analysis, vented his spleen on grounds of faith in a footnote. The third and final installment of Steinschneider’s essay failed to appear, however, not because Frankel exercised any censorship but because his short-lived journal simply expired after a run of three years.82 The extended section, then, on midrash in Ersch und Gruber should not be seen as a mere prolegomenon to the Islamic period, where Steinschneider’s affinity and expertise actually lay, but as an independent contribution. Not only had he caught the unity and dynamic of the literature, he also proposed a new angle for studying it. The ascendancy of Ashkenazi supremacy after the Spanish expulsion at the other end of the spectrum failed to resonate with Steinschneider. Christianity, unlike Islam, had always impeded the building of cultural bridges. He characterized the centuries before Mendelssohn as a period of shrinking horizons, far fewer literary genres and endless repetition, unrelieved by the rapid introduction of printed Hebrew books. The price of turning inward was unoriginality.83 Having ordered and analyzed the literary creativity of three separate periods, Steinschneider brought his survey to a close with the end of the eighteenth century, on the brink of a renewed exposure to the legacy of Greece which promised a reprise of the ferment witnessed under Islam. What had readied Steinschneider to master this vast terrain was the feverish effort he and his close friend David Cassel had mounted in 1843 and 1844 to produce an encyclopedia on Judaism informed by a quarter-century of critical Jewish scholarship. Steinschneider was to be the editor for the domain of post-biblical literature, one of its five large divisions.84 By spring 1844, his spirits were rapidly sinking. So many good collaborators had pulled out. A letter by Cassel from May 10, 1844, tried to firm up his resolve and gives some idea of just how hard Steinschneider was working to plot out his area:

82 Moritz Steinschneider, “Zur Sagen-und Legendekunde,” Zeitschrift für die religiösen Interessen des Judenthums (hereafter ZRIJ), 2 (1845), 380–93; 3 (1846), 281–90. Steinschneider, Briefwechsel, 150. In his note Frankel inveighed against Steinschneider’s treatment of Genesis as undercutting the belief in the divine origin of Scripture (III, 286). In consequence, Jewish Literature bristled with animus toward Frankel ( 279n. 58; 287n. 19; 288n. 38; 315n. 10; p. 318n. 30). When a few years later (1854) Frankel declined to grant Brecher a prize in a contest for which he had submitted a piece of original scholarship, Steinschneider consoled him by calling Frankel a coward as well as a tyrant (Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums [hereafter MGWJ], 3 [1854], 168; undated letter by Steinschneider to Brecher sometime in 1854, JTSL, ARC 108, box 12). See also Schorsch, From Text to Context, 196–7. 83 Jewish Literature, 214, 218, 220–1. 84 Schorsch, From Text to Context, 194–5.

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I grant you that the withdrawal of the best workers is discouraging. But I believe that it is only till we get started; later they will be reenergized. You must, however, permit me the remark that you make things too difficult for yourself because you are trying to do what Bibliotheca Hebraea (i.e. Wolf) did. I see no tragedy if a name is omitted. We ourselves said in the Plan [der Real-Encyclopädie des Judenthums – Krotoschin, 1844; I.S.] that given our present resources, gaps will remain. Please don’t regard me as beings superficial or cavalier […].85

Thus the still invaluable four-volume catalogue of Hebrew books published 1715–1733 by Johann Christoph Wolf enabled Steinschneider to work at an advanced level. Tools were available. By nature an encyclopedist, he reached for comprehensiveness. In the end, he covered the subject of post-biblical Jewish literature in a single essay by himself for another publication of much great impact. But genius never expresses itself in terms of quantity alone. Steinschneider implanted his noteworthy scope in a captivating conceptual grid, the coordinates of which were the fertile influence of Islam and the emergence of secular interests. The deep exploration of both foci would constitute the heart of his scholarly agenda. For Steinschneider the rise of Islam was the decisive turning point in Jewish history. With its cultivation of philosophy, science and literature, Islam engendered a measure of Jewish self-consciousness, individuality, systematization and rationalism. A plethora of new Jewish literary genres attested the end of a mentality of unreflectiveness and anonymity in which the supremacy of the Bible had allowed for only midrashic forms of self-expression. A common language, Arabic, maximized the cultural interchange.86 In an essay from 1843 on Immanuel of Rome, Steinschneider voiced his externally weighted view in a striking metaphor: A tiny bubble floats on the ripples and waves of a mighty river. Colors and pictures pass over its clear surface, while inside figures of all sorts, phenomena great and small, bright light and deep darkness come and go. In that tiny bubble are mirrored the river that engulfs it and everything in it.87

Again, earlier spade work had sharpened his outlook. In 1845, for example, Steinschneider had written at some length about several medical writings of Maimonides authored in Arabic but preserved as yet only in Latin or Hebrew translations.88 A year later he put out the Hebrew rendition of an Arabic

85

JTSL, ARC 108, David Cassel correspondence. Jewish Literature, 60–4, 80–4. 87 Gessammelte Schriften, 271. 88 Görge K. Hasselhoff, “The Rediscovery of the Maimonidean Influence on Christianity in the Works of Moritz Steinschneider, Manuel Joel, Joseph Perles and Jacob Guttmann,” in Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), eds. Görge K. Hasselhoff and Otfried Fraisse (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2004), 451–3. 86

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theological tract which both he and Rapoport erroneously attributed to Maimonides.89 The following year he republished it along with a Hebrew text by Abraham Ibn Ezra on the calendar and a tender dedication to his beloved and learned maternal grandfather.90 Though Maimonides did not receive undue attention in Ersch und Gruber, his was by far the largest entry in the Catalogue of the Bodleiana, spanning 81 columns with Saadia Gaon a distant second with 58.91 Steinschneider’s affinity for Maimonides ran deep. In 1843 he refused to countenance the unanticipated evidence marshaled by the usually cautious Munk, who claimed in a thunderclap that the sage of Fustat had no choice but to convert outwardly to Islam in his early years in the face of the religious fanaticism of the Almohades in Spain and North Africa.92 In Ersch und Gruber he made no mention either of the Almohades or Munk’s thesis, while in the Bodleian catalogue he reiterated his rejection outright.93 In a letter to Auguste from March 24, 1847, Steinschneider proudly declaimed that he had been born on March 31, 1816, one day after the birth date of Maimonides, which he would note in the CB as being March 30, 1135.94 But surprisingly that is not the date recorded on the German side of his tombstone. Rather the inscription reads March 30, 1816. Could it be that Steinschneider, a stickler for accuracy, gave in to the temptation to align his date of birth forever with that of Maimonides? After all, they already shared the same Hebrew name. Maimonides, however, was only the epitome of the Jewish-Islamic symbiosis. The pervasive orientation of Ersch und Gruber flowed from extensive bibliographic work, done prior to its composition. In 1897 Steinschneider reported: In the year 1845, I thought to have already compiled the most important materials for an essay entitled Bibliotheca judaeo-arabica, containing short biographical notes on Jewish authors (their lives are, with but few exceptions, exhausted in a few lines), and a full account of their works, the manuscripts (of which at that time scarcely one had appeared in print), the translations into Hebrew and other languages. I also prepared an alphabetical list of titles, partly extracted from Arabic sources, at that time not yet printed. I hoped to compose a small book which might be useful to those who had access to the treasures in

89 Moritz Steinschneider, Ma’amar ha-Yihud (Berlin: H.M. Lewy, 1846); Herbert A. Davidson, Moses Maimonides. The Man and his Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 310–11. 90 Moritz Steinschneider, Shene ha-Me’orot (Berlin: L. Zarenzanski, 1847). 91 Steinschneider, Catalogus Bodleiana, Moses Maimonides, cols. 1861–1942, Saadia Gaon, cols. 2155–2224. 92 Salomon Munk, “Notice sur Joseph ben Jehouda,” Journal asiatique, 2nd series, 14 (1841), 5–77; Moritz Steinschneider, ZRIJ, 2 (1845), 76–80, 108–20. 93 Catalogus Bodleiana, col. 1866. 94 Steinschneider, Briefwechsel, 178; Catalogus Bodleiana, col. 1861.

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Oxford and Paris; to visit Oxford myself I could not even dream of, and a journey to Paris was likewise out of the question.95

At least two biases were operative in promoting the preference for Islam. The first was a pronounced antipathy for Christianity expressed most openly by David Cassel. In an essay that appeared in 1846, he asserted unequivocally that in the Middle Ages Jews fared better under Islam than Christianity, enduring fewer and smaller persecutions. The reasons were, he conjectured, that Christianity by deriving directly from Judaism came to hate it congenitally, that Islam was less missionary and that Christianity was in the clutches of a priestly caste. Toward the end of the essay, Cassel dared to challenge the world significance of Christianity itself as an unwarranted reading concocted by Christian historians.96 Given the intimate relationship between Cassel and Steinschneider at the time, it is not unlikely that Steinschneider shared his views. What is incontrovertible is that he was repelled by the culture of Ashkenaz. Christianity had construed for the Jews in its domain a far more confining and insecure habitat. “For only in the house of God was the Jew of those countries at home.”97 Halakhah and aggadah constituted the primary content of its few literary genres to be replaced in time by Kabbalah, which he disdained “as metaphysics in the garb of midrash and aggada.”98 Language and literature deteriorated in quality, especially after 1492, for want of external stimuli. His contempt for late medieval rabbinics was unmitigated: Study indeed increased (in eastern Europe) to a gigantic extent; but being left to itself, and guided by no general scientific knowledge, it unavoidably degenerated into a method repulsive to the few who were really profound scholars, or whose minds were less distorted.99

The second operative bias was the prevailing Sephardi mystique which had captured the imagination of German-speaking Jews in the first half of the nineteenth century. Changing sensibilities and the vitriol of opponents to emancipation had estranged them from their own Ashkenazi heritage. Among the medieval Sephardim they found a model of a Jewish community that had flourished precisely because it lived in two worlds.100 Steinschneider’s contribution was to invigorate this construct by grounding it deeply in the fertile soil of the Islamic world. When in 1843, Munk published the

95

Steinschneider, “Introduction to the Arabic Literature of the Jews,” 9, p. 224. David Cassel, “Zur Geschichte jüdischer Zustände in der pyrenäischen Halbinsel,” ZRIJ, 3 (1846), 22–3, 41–3. 97 Jewish Literature, 162. 98 Ibid, 106. 99 Ibid, 106. 100 Ibid, 106. 96

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Arabic original of a commentary on the prophet Habakkuk by the thirteenth-century Jerusalemite R. Tanhum, it represented one of the first under˙ lying Arabic texts of a medieval Jewish author ever published.101 Prior to that date rabbis and maskilim enmeshed in the Sephardi mystique had hurried to reissue Sephardi classics, ignoring the critical need to unearth the underlying Arabic texts in order to better understand and even correct the Hebrew derivative. One such case was the edition of the Kuzari put out by Brecher between 1838 and 1840 with an extensive Hebrew commentary but no German translation. Munk had spent one month at the Bodleian in the summer of 1835 and uncovered a single, error-filled Arabic manuscript of the Kuzari. Five years later he reported his find but cautioned that without a few other Arabic manuscripts of Halevi’s classic, the Bodleian text was unpublishable.102 Another of these transitional figures between Haskalah and Wissenschaft was Raphael J. Fürstenthal from Glogau. In 1836 he published two editions of Bahya Ibn Pakuda’s pietistic masterpiece Hovot ha-Levavot with his Ger˙ in one and in German in the man translation printed in Hebrew characters other, obviously aimed at two different markets.103 The indispensable Arabic original in fact would not be published till 1912.104 In 1839 Fürstenthal struck again, this time with a German translation in Hebrew letters of Maimoni-

101 Salomon Munk, “Commentaire de rabbi Tan’houn de Je´rusalem sur le livre de Habakkouk,” in S. Cahen, La Bible, traduction nouvelle avec l’He´breu, 12 (1843), 1–103. On the significance of Munk’s contribution, see Steinschneider, Die arabische Literatur der Juden, xlvi. In 1833 Munk had already announced in Vol. IV of Cahen’s Bible his intention to publish a critical edition of the Arabic original of the Moreh Nevukhim along with a French translation and notes. At the time he provided a sample of two chapters from book three with a translation. In 1838 he reappeared in vol. 9 of Cahen’s Bible with excerpts of two commentaries to Isaiah, one in Arabic by Saadiah and another in Persian by an unknown author. He added a French translation for both as well as a related chapter from Maimonides’s Moreh (Ch. 29, Bk 2). He hoped that his scholarly efforts would “attract the attention of our young rabbis to the works of our sages (docteurs) written in Arabic, which constitute the most brilliant part of rabbinic literature. The literary monuments of these Arabic rabbis are in great part unfortunately lost, though one still finds a good number in several libraries. The collection in Oxford is the most important” (Cahen, 9, 74). 102 For Brecher, see note 11. On the trip to Oxford, see Munk’s letter to “Monsieur Humbert,” a professor of Arabic in Geneva, dated July 17, 1835, who was prepared to provide him with some financial backing (Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, Archives, Schwadron Collection Autographie). As for the Arabic original of the Kuzari, see Munk, LBO, 1 (1840), col. 136. 103 Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda, Hovot ha-Levavot, ed. and trans. R. Fürstenthal (Breslau: Zultsbach u-veno, 1835); idem, Hovot ha-Levavot. Über die Herzenspflichten, ed. and trans. R. Fürstenthal (Breslau: H. Sulzbach, 1836). 104 A.S. Yahuda (ed.), Al-hida¯ja ’ila¯ fara¯’id al-qulu¯b des Bachja Ibn Jo¯se¯f Ibn Paqu¯da aus Andalusien (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1912).

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des’s Moreh Nevukhim accompanied with an extensive Hebrew commentary, whereas a year earlier Simon Scheyer had issued a German translation of Book Three.105 All these uncritical endeavors were inspired by an apologetic rather than a philological impulse. Munk’s unsurpassed edition of the Arabic original of the Moreh along with a meticulous French translation did not begin to appear till 1856 and by the time he finished a decade later he had tragically gone blind.106 Though Steinschneider minimized some of Munk’s research in Ersch und Gruber, there was no gainsaying its overall impact.107 In 1897 he would begrudgingly acknowledge that in 1850 “Munk began his valuable accounts of Arabic manuscripts in Paris and Oxford.”108 Historically, the combined research of both men embedded the study of Jewish culture under Islam deep within the context of the Arab renaissance. The magnificent opportunity afforded Steinschneider to scrutinize the Judaica collection of the Bodleian, the largest in the world, enriched his English edition of Jewish Literature with countless references to Arabic manuscripts of texts both known and unknown. The next fifty years would see ever more Arabic originals edited and published for the first time. Not given to exaggeration, Steinschneider concurred in a laudatory review of a book by Wilhelm Bacher on the grammarian Jonah Ibn Janah in 1885: This work, along with several others, compels us to acknowledge that in the history of Jewish literature what has been accomplished in the last fifty years took hundreds of years in other fields, and in our case without benefit of an academic setting or financial support, but solely through the devotion of a few scholars.109

Moreover, the center of gravity of Jewish scholarship by then had definitely shifted into the alluring orbit of Islamic Jewry. Within the millennium of medieval Jewish literature, Steinschneider classified and surveyed fourteen different categories. The last three, comprising non-liturgical poetry, mathematical sciences and natural history (including medicine), were to be found only in the Islamic world and constituted his major find.110 Steinschneider gravitated to them because in sentiment and substance they were largely non-religious and universal, or, anachronistically, secular. And even when triggered by a religious problem such as 105 Moreh li-tzdaqah hu sefer Moreh Nevukhim, ed., trans. and annot. R. Fürstenthal (Krotoschin: B.L. Monasch, 1839); Simon Scheyer, Dalalat al Haiirin. Zurechtweisung der Verirrten, dritter Theil (Frankfurt a.M.: Ferdinand Hauch, 1838). 106 Moses Maimonides, Le guide des e´gare´s, 3 vols., ed., trans. and annot. Salomon Munk (Paris: A. Franck, 1856–66); MGWJ, 5 (1856), 423. 107 Jewish Literature, 99, 120, 295, 310. 108 Steinschneider, “Introduction to the Arabic Literature of the Jews,” 9, 224. 109 Deutsche Litteraturzeitung, 1885, no. 45, 1582–83. 110 Jewish Literature, 168–203.

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Saadia’s Arabic treatise on inheritance law, which Steinschneider discovered in the Bodleian, the mathematical principles and calculations were identical with those operative in Islamic jurisprudence.111 By the time he summed up his years-long research on Jews in mathematics in the 1890s, he had mined the manuscripts at his disposal to compile a list of 240 Jewish mathematicians, almost wholly unknown, throughout the ages with nuggets of historical and bibliographical information about each. Nor was he adverse to including those who had chosen to convert out of Judaism.112 These profane fields refracted a cultural landscape far less compartmentalized than once thought. By way of demonstration, the young Steinschneider took recourse to poetry rather than science. In 1843 he published a masterful portrait of Immanuel of Rome, born the same year as Dante and often compared to him. The poet epitomized a Renaissance figure at the nexus of Sephardi and Italian culture, yet unappealing to Steinschneider because bereft of Jewish consciousness. He compared his worldly collection of poetic novelle (mahbarot) to Boccaccio, but found them utterly wanting in gravitas and inferior˙ to the Hebrew maqamat of Judah Al-Harizi. Paradoxically, Steinschneider ended up siding with the doyen of Sephardi halakhists, Joseph Karo, who had declared the reading of his mahbarot as unsuited for Shabbat.113 Three years later in an unambiguous celebration of the blessings of acculturation, Steinschneider announced one of his most intriguing speculations, that the popular Hebrew poetic novella The Prince and the Dervish (ben ha-melekh we-ha-nazir) by the thirteenth-century Sephardi poet Abraham Ben Hisdai was actually based on a Greek source most likely translated into Arabic.114 By 1850 Steinschneider had identified the Greek original as Barlaam and Josaphat while others thought that it was the biography of Buddha that had actually inspired the Greek version.115 Though neither the discovery of the Arabic intermediate text from which Hisdai had translated nor the ultimate Sanskrit original would come to light in Steinschneider’s

111 Moritz Steinschneider, “Arabische Mathematiker u.s.w.,” Orientalische LiteraturZeitung, June 15, 1904, 7, no. 6, cols. 205–7. 112 Moritz Steinschneider, “Die Mathematik bei den Juden,” Bibliotheca Mathematica, 1893–8. On the issue of converts to Islam, see Bibliotheca Mathematica, 1894, p. 99; also idem, “Allgemeine Einleitung in die jüdische Literatur des Mittelalters,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 17 (1905), 148–9. 113 Gessammelte Schriften., 271–308. 114 Moritz Steinschneider, “Das Buch Ben Hamelech Wehannasir,” Jahrbuch für Israeliten, eds. I. Busch and J. Wertheimer, 4 (1845), 221–33, 5 (1846), 335–40. 115 Moritz Steinschneider, “Über eine arabische Bearbeitung des Barlaam und Josephat,” ZDMG, 4 (1850), 89–93; Jewish Literature, 174; Hayyim Schirmann, Ha-Shirah ha’Ivrit bi-Sefarad u-we-Provence, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Jerusalem/Tel Aviv: Mosad Bialik and Devir, 1954–1959), 2, 238–41.

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lifetime, he took great pleasure in the ecumenical fact that the life of the founder of Buddhism became an edifying tale for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike.116 Still another charming specimen of non-liturgical Hebrew poetry was borne aloft by deeply felt emotion. In 1847 Steinschneider published a choice selection of medieval Hebrew gnomes, parables and lyric poems in German translation. He titled the modest volume of 114 pages Manna and dedicated it to his beloved Auguste. The odd title recalled the food that had sustained the Israelites in the wilderness and was meant to signify the shared love of poetry that once nourished the young couple through their own experience of deprivation in an engagement spent apart that would eventually last four full years.117 What made the volume sparkle was Steinschneider’s genuine talent for translation, which dexterously preserved in German the meter and rhyme of the original poem. A labor of love, but much more! Steinschneider drew his samples from a galaxy of Sephardi luminaries and used his dense endnotes to show their dependence on Arabic tales, themes and literary models. The originality of his contribution stands out only when contrasted with the work of his predecessors. From 1836 to 1845, Franz Delitzsch, Leopold Dukes and Michael Sachs had produced a succession of studies that highlighted almost exclusively the religious legacy of Sephardic poets.118 To his credit, Dukes had briefly taken up their more worldly oeuvre but just as quickly dropped the subject.119 In 1845, Sachs, by now rabbi in Berlin, capped the depiction with a passionate brief on the depth and beauty of Sephardi religious poetry backed by a rich sample of his own exquisite translations. Once close to Sachs in Prague, Steinschneider had grown disenchanted and his Manna bears all the earmarks of a subtle rebuttal.120 By then too he had decided irrevocably that he would not seek refuge in the rabbinate. Manna thus evinced both biography and history, a personal disposition increasingly secular and a less one-sided paradigm to encompass Jewish creativity.

116

Moritz Steinschneider, Die Hebraeischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (Berlin: Kommisionsverlag des Bibliographischen Bureaus, 1893), 864–65. 117 Moritz Steinschneider, Manna (Berlin: J. Rosenberg, 1847). 118 On Delitzsch, see note 41. Leopold Dukes, Ehrensäulen und Denksteine (Wien: A. Strauss’s sel. Witwe, 1837); idem, Moses ben Esra aus Granada (Altona: Gebrüder Bonn, 1839); idem, Zur Kenntniss der neuhebräischen religiösen Poesie (Frankfurt a.M.: Bach’sche Buch- und Steindruckerei, 1842); Michael Sachs, Die religiöse Poesie der Juden in Spanien (Berlin: Veit und Comp., 1845). 119 Leopold Dukes, “Übersicht der Neu-Hebräischen Literatur weltlichen Inhalts in Prosa und Versen,” Israelitische Annalen I (1839), nos. 9, 11, 13, 17, 25, 31, 44, 52. 120 Steinschneider, Briefwechsel, 25, 30, 58–60, 172, 255.

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In the end, Steinschneider’s vision of Judaism as a multifaceted religious civilization was heavily indebted to Zunz. His mentor’s highly compressed and charged bibliographic essay of 1818 had tried to order the bounty of Hebrew literature under the rubrics of religion, politics, science and national history. It was in the third category that the profane came to the fore as Zunz unfolded a broad spectrum of disciplines, both theoretical and practical, from astronomy to music on which Jews had left a footprint. But the insight lay fallow till revived and vastly expanded by Steinschneider.121 In the Islamic orbit, Steinschneider was also able to limn a Jewish culture defined by cross-cultural fertilization rather than persecution. Zunz had largely restricted himself to the voluminous poetic liturgy of the synagogue, which often gave pained expression to the political instability of Jewish life in Christendom, and hence was unable to sever the link between culture and persecution. For Steinschneider it was not a matter of which society fomented more or less hostility toward its Jews, but the degree to which its language and intellectual life allowed for Jewish participation. The cultural accessibility of Islamic society, especially in its vibrant early centuries, was unmatched in the Christian world. Steinschneider’s sweeping survey of 1850 revealed not only its manifold influences on Jewish thought and expression but also the role played by Jews as cultural agents in the transmission of Greek learning to the Christian West. That seminal interchange would remain his focus for the rest of his life. As a strand in the tapestry of medieval culture, Jewish literature and history deserved to be taught in the university’s philosophy faculty, the domain of the humanities. The nature of the field dictated the venue. Conversely, Steinschneider inveighed against the double isolation in which Jewish scholarship languished. Since his collaboration with Delitzsch back in 1840, he wrote in 1865, no Christian scholar in Germany had evinced the slightest interest in putting out a post-biblical Jewish book. Similarly, Jewish scholars institutionally adrift repeatedly failed to study their subject contextually.122 Nor did he view with favor the theoretical option of a Jewish theological faculty at a German university or the practical option of a rabbinical seminary a` la Breslau. Both settings perpetuated the damaging apartness of Wissenschaft des Judentums and worse still threatened to garb it again in the straightjacket of theology.123 In his own forceful way, Steinschneider intoned afresh the relevance of the Sephardi mystique: 121

Leopold Zunz, “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur,” Gesammelte Schriften, 1, 11–15. 122 Moritz Steinschneider, “Aus der Literatur,” Jahrbuch für Israeliten, 12(1865), 4, 8. 123 Marx, “Steinschneideriana II,” 520–21; Hebräische Bibliographie, 8(1865), 137. See also my essay on Steinschneider’s view of Judaism after emancipation in this volume, where I discuss his unpublished letter to Brecher dated January 27, 1868, on the proper training of rabbis ( JTSL, ARC 108, box 12).

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Literature is the pinnacle of culture (Bildung) and there are only two great world literatures in which Jews have played a prominent role: that of the Arabs and Germans. Under their aegis Judaism was elevated rather than destroyed as it came to know the unity of the great and universal ideas of humanity through its own particular views and thereby breaking the chains of its isolation.124

III Steinschneider died as he had lived, fiercely independent. According to the official burial notification, death came in the wee hours of the morning of January 24, 1907, from a heart attack brought on by the flu. He missed his ninety-second birthday by little more than two months. That evening the burial society washed his body ritually to send it the next day by train to Hamburg for cremation. Berlin apparently did not yet have a crematorium. When the ashes returned, the Society for Cremation (Verein für Feuerbestattung), to which he may have belonged, provided a zinc casket (Zinksarg).125 The funeral took place on January 31 in the sanctuary of the new Weissensee cemetery packed with the lay, rabbinic and academic elite of the Berlin Jewish community, after which the ashes were interred in the cemetery’s row of honor.126 Inexplicably, the Hebrew dates on the Hebrew side of his tombstone are both in error. In the letter to Auguste in which Steinschneider told her of the proximity of his birthday to that of Maimonides, he added that he was born on the first of Nisan, yet the inscription on his tombstone denotes the 28th of Nisan.127 As for the date of his death, the inscription reads the year 5662 of the Jewish calendar corresponding to the year 1902, which is even wider off the mark. History entertains us with its ironies. One mistake on a tombstone is plausibly an act of ignorance. Two, one of which is egregious, are more mysterious, perhaps a silent and concealed act of reproof for flouting publicly the sacred norms of a venerable tradition. In truth, though, Steinschneider needed no tombstone. His prodigious scholarly legacy left its own indelible epitaph.

124

Hebräische Bibliographie, 2 (1859), 83. Beerdigungs-Anmeldung, Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin – Centrum Judaicum. 126 AZJ, February 7, 1907, Der Gemeindebote. 127 Steinschneider, Briefwechsel, 178.

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14. Beyond the Classroom: The Enduring Relationship between Heinrich L. Fleischer and Ignaz Goldziher In his memoir, Ignaz Goldziher lamented the fact that the death of his beloved teacher Heinrich Fleischer on February 10, 1888 deprived the latter of the chance to witness the triumphant publication in November 1887 of the first volume of his student’s heralded Muhammedanische Studien. The unexpected convergence of the two events signaled to Goldziher the end of his student days and the onset of his mature years in which his scholarship would finally garner the admiration of his academic peers. Goldziher hinted that Fleischer had played a crucial role in bringing him to this threshold: The most precious memories connect my unforgettable teacher with the most precarious moments of my life, and his unbroken correspondence with me from 1870 to 1888 (from which I have mislaid but one letter) will show my children with what love and engagement he accompanied the fate of their father.1

To be sure, Goldziher did give ample public expression to his lifelong devotion to Fleischer’s memory. A year after his death, Goldziher obliged the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, of which he was only a corresponding member, with a memorial lecture that contextualized majestically Fleischer’s specific contributions within the long history of Europe’s interest in the study of Islam. Though Fleischer had swiftly and singlehandedly made Leipzig “the seat and center of Oriental Studies in all of Europe,” he never shortchanged his students, who benefited as much from his humanity as from his expertise. In 1904, Goldziher was likewise to author – in a more measured tone and with greater focus – the details of his biography in the long entry on

1

Ignaz Goldziher, Tagebuch, ed. Alexander Scheiber (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 116. –. Words cannot express my indebtedness to Professor Raymond Scheindlin for his unstinting help with names, titles, and phrases in Arabic, as well as with transliteration. My thanks also go to Professor Menahem Schmelzer and Professor Istva´n Ormos for their invaluable corrections and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Dr. Ottfried Fraisse for allowing me to read his forthcoming German translation of Goldziher’s Emle´kbesze´d (Ignaz, Goldziher, Emle´kbesze´d Fleischer Leberecht Henrik a. M. Tud. Akad. kültagja felett [Memorial Speech on Henrik Leberecht Fleischer, external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences] (Budapest: n. p., 1889).

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Fleischer in the prestigious Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie.2 Yet, the texture of this exceptional relationship that bound mentor and student, each embodying a distinct era in the emerging discipline of Islamic Studies, can only be appreciated by reading that extensive correspondence. The cache consists of some 210 letters, ninety by Fleischer and 120 by Goldziher, plus one of Fleischer’s postcards and a charming letter along with a photograph by Laura Mittler, Goldziher’s fiance´e, introducing herself to Goldziher’s beloved mentor.3 From Fleischer’s note at the top of her letter, we know that he responded five days after it arrived, enclosing a picture of himself as well.4 A few days before their engagement, Goldziher had described Laura, who hailed from the village of Szentma´rton [Saˆnmartin] in the district of Arad some seven hours southeast of Budapest, to Fleischer in the following words: My bride to be is a well-bred, highly educated, modest, and gentle young woman who, I hope, will be able to handle my weaknesses and shortcomings with care, while appreciating the few virtues that I have. She received her education in Germany and has a good sense for the scholarly enterprise without herself being a bluestocking [Blaustrumpf].5

Immediately after the engagement, Goldziher reported to Fleischer with a mixture of pride and relief that Laura had stipulated only one condition prior to their betrothal: that Goldziher’s widowed mother should live with them, a request that he had intended to make of her only later.6 The wedding took place on May 21, 1878 in the synagogue in Arad, and that summer the newlyweds visited Fleischer in his summer pension in Tirol, where he was eager to interrogate Laura as to whether Goldziher had remained a gentleman after the honeymoon as well as a scholar.7 In short, the correspondence bespeaks a relationship full of intimacy without ever switching into the familiar form of address. 2 Ignaz Goldziher, “Fleischer: Heinrich Leberecht,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 48 (Leipzig: Duncker/Humblot, 1904), 584–594. 3 The Fleischer letters to Goldziher are in the Magyar Tudoma´nyos Akade´mia Könyvta´r e´s Informa´cio´s Központ (Budapest), Keleti Gyüjteme´ny, Goldziher leveleze´s, Tok 10 [Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest), Oriental Collection, Goldziher Letters, Box 10 – hereafter HASL, Oriental Collection, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File]; the Goldziher Letters are in the Royal Library Copenhagen, Ny kgl. Sam. 4° 2969 (hereafter RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File). 4 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Mittler to Fleischer, April 30, 1878. Fleischer always noted at the top of his incoming mail the dates received and answered, and occasionally whatever action was taken. Goldziher, however, did not record such information. 5 Ibid., Goldziher to Fleischer, February 6, 1878; Peter Haber, Zwischen jüdischer Tradition und Wissenschaft (Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2006), 165–166. 6 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, February 18, 1878. 7 Ibid., copy of the wedding invitation sent by Goldziher to Fleischer; HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, July 28, 1878.

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Written entirely in German (Fleischer always grieved when Goldziher sent him works he had written in Hungarian, which Fleischer could not access), the letters are long, substantive, and personal, and always promptly answered. When Fleischer fell ill after the festive celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of his doctorate from Leipzig, he instructed his son Georg, who had momentarily taken over his epistolary chores, to answer Goldziher’s letters before responding to other well-wishers, as a token of what it meant to his father.8 On occasion, when Goldziher was especially hurting, Fleischer’s complimentary closing could be effusive, as in his six-page letter from August 12, 1872, which reads: “Your truly loving and cherishing Fleischer [Ihr Sie wahrhaft liebender und schätzender Fleischer].”9 In contrast to Fleischer’s polished prose, measured tone, and unerringly legible penmanship, Goldziher’s emotionally-charged letters often wreaked havoc on his handwriting. When he was agitated, it made little difference whether Goldziher wrote in Gothic or Latin characters, the script suffered equally. The two personalities, then, of mentor and disciple, are a study in polarities. When Goldziher inaugurated the correspondence with his “much beloved Herr Professor,” after a thirty-six-hour trip back to Budapest on August 15, 1870, he was barely twenty with a published doctoral dissertation, largely written in Berlin under the aegis of Moritz Steinschneider, though finished under Fleischer, on the Middle Eastern Jewish Bible commentator and grammarian known as Tanhum Yerushalmi. The work fully vindicated the funding of Goldziher’s studies abroad by Hungary’s enlightened minister of religion and education, Ba´ro´ Eötvös Jo´zsef, to whom the tract was dedicated. It epitomized the use of philological and comparative tools to date the fragments of a little-known author by analyzing his purpose, language, and sources and detecting the external influences embedded in them. The wellrounded final product also exhibited in spades the extent to which Goldziher was equally grounded in the cognate fields of Jewish and Islamic Studies.10 Fleischer responded to that first letter on August 17, the day it arrived, thanking Goldziher for enclosing a copy of his photograph. Fleischer was no less pleased with Goldziher’s next letter happily informing him that he would return to study with him for one more semester and asking him to consider giving a class on the text of One Thousand and One Nights, which Fleischer subsequently did. Since Goldziher’s parents did not want him to leave Budapest sooner than necessary, he needed to know exactly when classes would begin. Finally, Goldziher urged Fleischer to press Ludolf Krehl, his Leipzig colleague, former student, and then editor of the Zeitschrift der Deutschen 8

Ibid., Georg Fleischer to Goldziher, March 20, 1874. Ibid. 10 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, August 15, 1870; Ignaz Goldziher, Studien über Tanchum Jeruschalmi (Leipzig: List & Franke, 1870). 9

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Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (hereafter ZDMG), to expedite the publication of Goldziher’s recently submitted essay on the linguistic knowledge of medieval Arabic savants because Goldziher needed publications to retain the grant that enabled him to study abroad.11 At the time, Fleischer was sixty-nine and still at the height of his powers and the peak of his reputation. As the acknowledged master of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, the three languages regarded then as indispensable for the study of Islam, he had trained a flock of important Orientalists who affectionately dubbed him “the great sheikh.”12 The Franco-Prussian War had reduced the number of students in his Arabic colloquium to three, though by March 1873 some eighteen students overran his home to attend the first session of his 7 a.m. Beidawi colloquium. As late as the winter semester of 1882, he was still attracting foreign students to Leipzig.13 In the mid-1840s, Fleischer had been the moving spirit behind the creation of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (hereafter DMG), and even without the benefit of holding elected office, he remained its driving force.14 In the apt words of the Dutch Orientalist and colonial administrator, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, to Goldziher in 1915, “The ego [Ichheit] did not play the same important role for Fleischer as it did for his epigones.”15 An offer from Berlin in 1860, which Fleischer refused, attested to his national stature and independent mind.16 Fleischer employed his exceptional humanity and enlightenment to advance his single-minded devotion to the cause of Oriental Studies. To meet his scholarly expectations was to acquire a lifelong insurance policy. More note11

RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, September 28, 1870. As for the course offering, see Jewish Theological Seminary, Library Archives, MS, NH 68. 12 On Fleischer, see Holger Preissler, “Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer. Ein Leipziger Orientalist, seine jüdischen Studenten, Promovenden und Kollegen,” in Bausteine einer jüdischen Geschichte der Universität Leipzig, ed. Stephan Wendehorst (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006), 245–268; idem, “Ignaz Goldziher in Leipzig – Ein ungarischer Jude studiert Orientalistik,” in Leipziger Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur, 3, ed. Dan Diner (München: K. G. Saur Verlag, 2005): 293–315; Ismar Schorsch, “Converging Cognates: The Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in Nineteenth Century Germany,” in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 55 (2010), 3–36. 13 HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, August 17, 1870; April 25, 1873; November 30, 1882. 14 Holger Preissler, “Die Anfänge der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (hereafter ZDMG), 145, 2 (1995), 241–327; Schorsch, “Converging Cognates,” 22–36. 15 P. Sj. van Koningsveld (ed.), Scholarship and Friendship in Early Islamwissenschaft. The Letters of C. Snouck Hurgronje to I. Goldziher (Leiden: Rijksuniversiteit, 1985), 442–443. 16 Schorsch, “Converging Cognates,” 17.

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worthy was his unadorned practice of value-free scholarship in an age saturated with religious prejudice. By infusing and defending that ethos in the DMG, he forged a rare venue that granted Jewish Orientalists and Jewish subjects ever more prominent billing in contrast to their continued exclusion from the lecture halls of German universities.17 Not only did Fleischer’s largess throw Goldziher a lifeline during his most vulnerable years, but it also kept his career from being derailed. Fleischer’s appreciation of what aspiring Jewish Orientalists could bring to the table, however, did not mute his voice when shortcomings called for reproof. In 1872 in Geiger’s Jüdische Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Leben, he gave vent to an uncharacteristic, exasperated outburst. What triggered his reaction was a fifty-eight-page tract that tried to revive the long discredited grammatical theory that the basic root of the Hebrew verb consisted of two radicals rather than three. Its author, Moses J. Cohn, who held a minor rabbinic post in Frankfurt am Main, had sent it to Fleischer for approval. Unexpectedly, Fleischer issued a public rebuke. Writing to Geiger, whom he knew personally from his many submissions to the ZDMG, Fleischer exclaimed: Is it possible that in our day alongside you […] [omission in the original] there are still among Jewish scholars in Germany, such muddled heads as Herr M. J. Cohn […]? I am downright enraged over the abyss of wrongheadedness and nonsense which opened before my eyes with one glance at the work I received yesterday from the author.18

Geiger acknowledged that he had not seen the tract yet, but surmised that Cohn must have come under the influence of the utterly speculative etymological system of Samson Raphael Hirsch in his biblical commentary.19 In a postscript to Goldziher from October 4, 1872, Fleischer revealed some typical remorse over his harsh treatment of Cohn: That I totally betrayed my innate good-naturedness in regard to poor Stiftsrabbiner Cohn really pained me afterward, when Geiger sent me a printed copy of my fillip. All the more so, because the good man probably sent me his abortive piece fully relying on that good-

17

Ibid., 22–28. “Von Hrn. Prof. Fleischer, Leipzig d. 7. April 1872,” Jüdische Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Leben 10 (1872), 157–158; M. J. Cohn, Gilui A’ yin. Zur Analyse der hebräischen Wörter (Frankfurt a.M.: Selbstverlag, 1871) 19 “Aus der Antwort, Berlin 9. April.” Ibid., 158–160. Though referencing Hirsch (8), Cohn also cited the recently published dictionary by Julius Fürst (1, 8), which defended vigorously the theory that the “organic” root of Hebrew verbs always consisted of two radicals; see Julius Fürst, A Hebrew & Chaldee Lexicon of the Old Testament, 4th ed., trans. Samuel Davidson (London: Williams/Norgate, 1871), viii, 6, 897. The first edition was published in 1857. 18

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naturedness. But how can one remain silent in the face of such nonsense? It was enough to make one’s blood boil.20

Strikingly, though, Fleischer kept his criticism in house. He did not publish it in the pages of the ZDMG. His intent was not to embarrass but to be constructive. However, Fleischer was not beyond admonishing Goldziher on occasion. For example, Goldziher’s second installment of his linguistic studies of Arab grammarians rattled Fleisher because it swarmed with misprints and errors in Arabic. Fleischer was ready to attribute its deplorable state to the fact that it had been printed in Vienna, for Fleischer was contemptuous of the careless manner in which Arabic texts had long been treated there. Did the printer not send Goldziher proofs to correct? The proofreaders in Vienna were unreliable. But then Fleischer moved on to what truly troubled him: Dear Doctor, I am still not finished with my grumbling, which you can’t begrudge your old school master. What you dispense from the treasure of your wide reading is once again invaluable, and the entire mode and method of your presentation shows a scholar who works with joy and love in this field and then offers his colleagues what has been recovered with fresh delight. Only one thing does not please me: in Arabic you tend to neglect the form in favor of the content and – to be perfectly candid with you – in the face of so many blunders in language, I am fearful regarding your edition of Fiqh al-lugha [The Science of Language – to which we will return]. To see this work come out in the same manner is certainly not my wish. Yet to harbor that worry would mean that I really don’t know you. May this admonition suffice to encourage you henceforth to pay greater attention to all technical matters to show that you are absolutely not inclined to revert back to procedures associated with Vienna.21

Goldziher did not need the three pages of Arabic corrections that Fleischer appended to grasp the point of this hurtful letter. Embarrassed beyond words, it took him more than three weeks to answer: I can’t find enough words to thank you for the proof of your fatherly disposition, which manifests itself in the manner of your censure. You assume that I do not bear the entire guilt for the mistakes. But I cannot avoid admitting on my side that many are my fault, or better the fault of the shaytan [demon, in Arabic] of a bad temperament, which makes me ˙ stumble over the simplest things when I get agitated. I have often resolved to put something on paper only when I am completely settled. But my nervous temperament does not tolerate such self-restraint. I need not assure you that these kinds of mistakes do not lie in my fitra [natural disposition, in Arabic] (I mean in my command of Arabic grammar). And ˙ in myself no desire to jump back from Leipzig to Hammeristan [i.e. Vienna where I detect Hammer-Purgstall once reigned].22

20

HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, October 4, 1872. 21 Ibid., Fleischer to Goldziher, May 3, 1873. 22 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, May 28, 1873.

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The display of candor on both sides left the relationship intact. In fact, Fleischer saw fit to select some of the Arabic passages regarding Ibn al-Sikkı¯t (on whom more anon) that Goldziher had included for publication under Goldziher’s name in the ZDMG, an elegant gesture of undiminished esteem.23 Fleischer’s impressive command of Hebrew made him acutely aware of what knowledge that Semitic language could contribute to the understanding of Arabic. The interest inversed the relationship between the two languages, which had prevailed for centuries when the study of Arabic was incubated in university theological faculties merely to shed light on the language of Scripture. To his chagrin, Fleischer spent his first decade at Leipzig largely teaching a range of biblical books to uninspiring theology students. But once freed from that drudgery and firmly ensconced in the philosophy faculty, Fleischer could exercise his linguistic breadth to encourage Jewish students to explore the nexus between the cultural orbits of Arabic and Hebrew.24 Thus, in a letter dated May 10, 1871 from Leiden, where Goldziher had moved after Leipzig for research, he excitedly shared with Fleischer an Arabic passage from a polemical manuscript by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzı¯ya, entitled Guidance for Those in Doubt about Answering the Jews and Christians (in Arabic), in which the author recognized the cognate nature of Arabic and Hebrew. What is especially noteworthy is Fleischer’s response to that discovery: I also found extremely interesting what you reported to me from Ibn Jawzı¯ya’s proofs regarding the kinship of Hebrew and Arabic. Finally, at least one Arab had eyes and ears for a fact that one should have believed to be known by the whole world. That no Semitic people could rise to a correct view and estimate of the relationship of its language to that of their tribal ancestors and vice versa is surely a direct consequence of Oriental national and religious prejudice. To be sure, there were a few initiatives and attempts by some exceptional individuals to disperse these clouds, but they led nowhere. This, like so much else, remained waiting for us northwestern barbarians.25

Fleischer’s appreciation of comparative philology later led to a unique collaboration with Jacob Levy of Breslau in the production of two substantial sets of dictionaries, first for the Aramaic of the Targumim (the ancient Aramaic translations of books from the Hebrew Bible) and then for the Hebrew and Aramaic of the Talmud and Midrash. For many years, Fleischer added pages of addenda to every letter of the Hebrew alphabet with alternate derivations for countless words, especially from Arabic cognates. As Fleischer wrote to Goldziher on March 14, 1877, he often lost patience with Levy’s farfetched etymologies: 23

Ibid.; Ignaz Goldziher, Gesammelte Schriften (hereafter G.S.), ed. Joseph DeSomogyi, 6 vols., reprint (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1967–1973), 1, 200. The three-day gap in dates is due to Fleischer’s practice of recording the incoming date at the top of each letter. 24 Schorsch, “Converging Cognates,” 20–21. 25 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, May 10, 1871; HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, May 21, 1871.

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I am hard at work now on my additions to the letters Het and Tet of Levy’s Hebrew ˙ ˙ love to know how dictionary. Curiosities of a piquant sort jump out at me again. I would one can bring this good man to understand how not to mar his book time and again by burning his fingers on crazy etymologies from Greek and Arabic, which resemble the fantasies of [Julius] Fürst like one egg to the other. I often succumb in the galleys to express my additions coarsely and to call nonsense, nonsense. But then when I get the proofs back with samples of my inconsiderateness in black and white, my Saxon courtliness erupts again to kill the redneck [Grobian].26

Whether Fleischer always sent his additions on each letter of the alphabet to Goldziher is not clear from the correspondence, though in this instance he did, and Goldziher fully concurred with Fleischer’s opinion.27 At an earlier age, scholarly questions had drawn Goldziher into correspondence with Levy while he was a gymnasium student in Budapest. On his way to Leipzig, he even visited him personally, securing a letter of recommendation from him to Fleischer that was sent apologetically months after Goldziher had arrived. Levy’s high regard for the young Hungarian later prompted him to send Goldziher some samples of entries for the letter aleph to his talmudic dictionary. But Goldziher lacked the finesse of Fleischer. His impatient corrections may have been a tad too blunt and assertive to induce Levy to continue relying on him.28 The Fleischer-Goldziher correspondence narrates in exquisite detail the salient fact that Fleischer never abandoned Goldziher to his arduous fate. The death in February 1871 of Eötvös, “an oasis in the midst of a wasteland 26 Ibid., Fleischer to Goldziher, March 14, 1877; Schorsch, “Converging Cognates,” 21. Fleischer’s mastery of Hebrew enabled him to work with texts written in Judeo-Arabic – that is, Arabic in Hebrew characters. For a splendid example of his expertise in action, see his devastating critique of Leon Schlossberg’s publication of a manuscript in Judeo-Arabic allegedly authored in the early sixth century by a bishop after his conversion to Judaism. The intent of the polemic against Christianity was to vindicate his conversion to his former clerical colleagues. Aside from condemning Schlossberg’s error-ridden transcription, Fleischer contended that the author’s pose was a mask adopted by a ninth- or tenth-century Jew who knew the Quran better than the New Testament and wrote in Arabic and not Greek or Syriac. Fleischer added that he was especially disturbed by Schlossberg’s design to have this triumphalist text translated into French, English, and German: “You know, dear friend, how ill-disposed I am toward all these religious clashes (mise`ren). But particularly now, at this time, for the lofty sake of humanity, I would not want to see these medieval crudities circulated in public in translation. They may be items of historical and scholarly curiosity for academic circles, but certainly not beyond.” (HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, December 29, 1881. For a thorough examination of this text by Fleischer, see Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, Kleinere Schriften, 3 vols., reprint (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1968), 3, 167–186. On Fürst, see note 20. 27 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, August 28, 1877. 28 Schorsch, “Converging Cognates,” 22, n. 78; Ismar Elbogen, “Bemerkungen Ignaz Goldziher zu Levys Neuhebräischen Wörterbuch,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (hereafter MGWJ), 78 (1934): 34–41.

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of medieval barbarism and garnished coarseness,” who desperately wanted to bring Oriental Studies to Budapest, put Goldziher’s career trajectory in jeopardy.29 He still managed to finish his funded research trips to Leiden and Vienna, secure a foothold in 1871 at Budapest University [today Eötvös Lora´nd University] as a paid docent, and travel to the Middle East from September 1873 to February 1874 on a government stipend to master spoken ´ goston Trefort, Eötvös’s brother-in-law Arabic.30 While abroad, however, A and successor, conspired with the university faculty to fill the chair in Oriental Studies designated for Goldziher with a completely unqualified individual. Pe´ter Hatala, an ordained priest and prominent member of the theology faculty, had infuriated the Catholic Church by rejecting its recent papal claim of infallibility. To mollify it, Hatala was reassigned to the philosophy faculty, where his presence would block Goldziher’s promotion until his retirement in 1905.31 Instead, from January 1876 to January 1905, Goldziher served as the secretary of the growing Neolog Jewish community of Budapest, a post that gave him financial security but unending emotional torment. In the bitter words inscribed in his memoir-diary, he writes: “The Jews took pity on me. That is the misfortune of my life.”32 What Fleischer’s steadfast support gave Goldziher during the first eighteen years of his ordeal was a crucial source of self-esteem and encouragement not to lose faith in himself. Goldziher poignantly expressed that intangible asset in a letter from October 7, 1876, in which he had to deflect another gentle scolding from Fleischer. Again, he was too distraught to answer immediately: My only consolation in all my turmoil has been that those who stand by me in my scholarly endeavors like a godfather, if I maybe so bold, are satisfied with me. And now I am confronted with the wrath of that person to whom I owe the best that I have, not only the best of my knowledge but the best of my spirit, the stubborn adherence to the intentions of my youth, which I would long ago have slackened without his encouragement and stimulation.33

The identifiable instances of Fleischer’s assistance to Goldziher are legion and will constitute much of the storyline for the remainder of this essay. By way of example, when Goldziher left Leipzig for Leiden in April 1871 to pore over its treasure of Arabic manuscripts, Fleischer did not allow him to leave empty-handed. In addition to letters of introduction to Reinhart Dozy and 29

Goldziher, Tagebuch, 48, 46 (the quotation). Ibid.; RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, October 25, 1871. 31 Haber, Zwischen jüdischen Tradition und Wissenschaft, 154–155; Goldziher, Tagebuch, 241. 32 Ibid., 81. 33 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, October 7, 1876. 30

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Michael Jan de Goeje, Leiden’s reigning Orientalists, which would ensure him of the right reception, Fleischer armed him with a testimony designed to protect him back home after Eötvös’s death: On the basis of intimate knowledge and in good conscience, I can now attest generally at the end of his studies in Leipzig that not only is he the most talented, knowledgeable, and determined of the young Orientalists who studied with me at his time, but in fact among all the students that I have ever had, he is one of the hardest working and promising. The more I expect of him and the more I look forward to his edition of Tha’a¯libı¯’s Arabic thesaurus of synonyms, which I have entrusted to him, the more I feel compelled to recommend urgently to all friends and benefactors of Oriental Studies, in particular the enlightened government of his homeland, which to date has already amply demonstrated its good will, to continue their strong support and promotion.34

Goldziher wasted no time in visiting both men. Two days after his arrival, he could already report to Fleischer in a letter dated April 17, 1871 that they had greeted him warmly. Shortly thereafter, De Goeje showed him the library’s collection of Oriental manuscripts of which he was in charge and permitted Goldziher to borrow freely. When Goldziher selected only a single codex with which to start, De Goeje urged him to take more. Since Goldziher regularly worked into the wee hours of the morning, the liberal borrowing privileges enabled him to lay the foundation for his unparalleled command of Islamic primary sources during his half-year in Leiden.35 By May, however, a scurrilous attack against Goldziher in a Budapest paper had driven him in consternation back to Fleischer for help. Goldziher had published a piece in Hungarian, still solicited by Eötvös, on canonical numbers among the Arabs. Since it consisted largely of excerpts from two or three literary sources, it was scorned by an anonymous critic who contended that the government was wasting its money. Clearly, Goldziher was no more than a collector of information with minimal knowledge of Arabic. Goldziher beseeched Fleischer to write to Ferenc Pulszky, Director of the Nemzeti Mu´zeum [Hungarian National Museum] and a former friend and colleague of Eötvös, to minimize the damage.36 Fleischer and his colleague Georg Moritz Ebers, with whom Goldziher had studied Egyptology, quickly came to the aid of their prote´ge´. They began their brief wryly with the observation that “it is most likely the first time that two German professors seek your ear to defend rather than recommend a young Hungarian scholar.” After summarizing the critique, they closed by asking to have their public and private testimony placed on the scale: “So that such a proven and immensely pro-

34

Preissler, “Goldziher in Leipzig,” 313. RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, April 17, 1871; Goldziher, Tagebuch, 50. 36 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, May 10, 1871. 35

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mising stalwart [Kraft] not be forced at length off the path to completing his development and reaching a goal in the public realm worthy of him.”37 Their joint letter was not without effect. By June 10, 1871, Goldziher gratefully reported in the name of his father that his nemesis had been dismissed from the paper for which he wrote.38 The incident took its toll on Goldziher’s fragile health. In the same letter in which Fleischer had assured him of his immediate attention to the besmirching of his reputation, he tenderly cautioned Goldziher to take care of himself: My dear young friend, I implore you in the name of science for which you are summoned yet to do great things: Above all, take every precaution to hinder the progression of your nervous excitability, your sleeplessness, etc. Toward this end, you must work gradually to repair again what is lacking in order to avoid that one day it might be too late.39

There is also no doubt that Fleischer assisted Goldziher in his research and publication efforts. Fleischer was always ready to unravel linguistic conundrums for Goldziher, to read and correct his essays prior to submission, and to serve as a friend in court of the editorial office of the ZDMG. Moreover, on at least six occasions during the span of their correspondence, Fleischer saw fit to select insights and findings from Goldziher’s letters for publication in the ZDMG as excursuses bearing Fleischer’s seal of approval.40 Yet the first fellowship bearing Fleischer’s name, awarded to Goldziher in the winter of 1875, did meet resistance from the intended recipient. Two years earlier at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Fleischer’s doctorate from Leipzig, the DMG announced the creation of an endowment fund of 3000 Taler, whose interest would annually generate a Fleischer stipend to an advanced student in Arabic, regardless of nationality or religion.41 When Fleischer informed Goldziher of his decision to inaugurate the fund with a fellowship to him, Goldziher urged him gratefully but unequivocally to give it to another student or scholar in greater financial need. Goldziher had just learned about the renewal of his docentship for one more year and was hopeful about its continued renewal.42 But Fleischer was not to be deterred.

37

Draft dated May 25, 1871 in HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File. In his memoir-diary, Goldziher recalled Ebers fondly. Fleischer was not at all pleased about the time Goldziher invested in mastering Hieroglyphics: “The old man (der Alte) had no stomach for trivialities. One had to give oneself over completely and totally to the key languages of Islam, as he called them” [Goldziher, Tagebuch,47–48]. 38 RLC, Fleischer Letters Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, June 10, 1871. 39 HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, May 21, 1871. 40 ZDMG, 24 (1870): 710–711; 27 (1873): 155–156; 28 (1874): 161–168, 493; 31 (1877): 545–549; 36 (1882): 647–648. 41 Schorsch, “Converging Cognates,” 35. 42 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, February 8, 1875.

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Opening with the laudatory salutation “Dear Herr Doctor and surely to be in due time Professor,” Fleischer’s next letter insisted on Goldziher’s acceptance: I can’t help you. You must, as far as I can remember, for the first time submit to my authority and take the first year’s interest of the Fleischer endowment. You are among my more recent students indisputably the most worthy, and I would do violence to my innermost conviction if I would heed your request in your letter of February 8 to direct the stipend to a more worthy student. You can’t be serious about expecting me to deny the dictates of my conscience. If you don’t need the 147 Reichstaler for yourself then donate them to the welfare of your mother in gratitude for the outstanding worker for science whom she has brought forth and raised. In sum, then, ready yourself for the inevitable. I have already informed the three other members of the [DMG’s] executive committee of my decision.43

Three days later on March 5, 1875, Goldziher announced his capitulation. Fleischer’s resolve and gracious letter, which he had shown to his mother, had brought her to tears. Reconciled, Goldziher conveyed her deep appreciation for the solace.44 Neither the stipend nor Goldziher’s subsequent election to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as a corresponding member in June 1876 could alleviate his grim joblessness. Two devastating blows struck him upon his return in April 1874 – the death of his father on May 4 and the loss of a chair at the university. In retrospect, he came to believe that he had been sent abroad to facilitate Hatala’s transfer. While Trefort comforted him with illusions of a quick government appointment as an associate professor, Fleischer and Ebers joined forces once again to lobby on his behalf in Vienna.45 A post as a librarian in Cairo excited him, but he feared it had been filled already. As he confessed to Fleischer on January 7, 1875, he was torn by the prospect of leaving Budapest. He acknowledged the moral obligation he owed to the Hungarian government for its years of support:

43

HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, March 2, 1875. 44 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, March 5, 1875; Goldziher, Tagebuch, 76. The official notification of the award was conveyed to Goldziher by Professor Konstantin Schlottmann of Halle and a member of the DMG’s executive committee in a letter dated March 24, 1875 (HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File). 45 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 73–79. To Ebers’ richly illustrated, two-volume extravaganza on the history and culture of Egypt through the ages, Goldziher contributed both substance and tone to the chapter dealing with Al-Azhar, where he had studied in January 1874. Though written by Ebers, the valorization of Islam’s attachment to science and the Sunni respect for legal diversity surely derived from Goldziher [Georg Ebers, Aegypten in Bild und Wort, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Stuttgart/Leipzig: E. Hallberger, 1879), viii, 1, 2, 71–88; Goldziher, Tagebuch, 65–74].

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But how can I bear that a professorship, which was expressly designated for me, during my absence in the Orient was filled by a Catholic priest, who can show no other qualification than the fact that he made himself unacceptable to the theological faculty by virtue of being an Old Catholic […] and who himself admitted that he understands nothing of the subject matter of which he is a full professor? If I were to leave here, I would leave in sadness. I love this country and would happily have worked and labored here. I am tied with devotion to the soil that protects the remains of my unforgettable father. But if something acceptable were to present itself, I would have to secure my future abroad and with my mother take our leave.46

What Goldziher was alluding to in his closing words was the prospect of a faculty position in Berlin at its recently founded Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (informally referred to as die Hochschule). Abraham Geiger, its dominant figure, had died suddenly on October 23, 1874, and the chair of its board, Moritz Lazarus, perhaps as a consequence, was excited about Goldziher’s interest.47 Far more substantive and promising, though, was an offer extended to Goldziher by the large, liberal Jewish community of Budapest with some 40,000 members through his friend and later chief rabbi, Sa´muel Kohn. The offer entailed becoming bureau chief of its administrative office for a salary of 2,500 Gulden with the likelihood of an additional 1,000 Gulden on the side, a comfortable level of compensation, especially when combined with the 1,200 Gulden Goldziher received for teaching as a lecturer [Dozent] at the university.48 Moreover, neither his letters nor his diary gives any evidence of economic distress thereafter. In sum, the post had prestige, paid well, and required him to be in the office only four hours per day. Despite the offer’s appeal, Goldziher would not make a move without consulting Fleischer. He feared jeopardizing his academic prospects by being ensconced in a line of work to which his scholarship was entirely extraneous. Yet his present circumstances were insufferable: I fervently hope that the offer goes through. Any post that would free me from my current sorrowful condition, giving me the chance to devote myself to my dear mother and my scholarship, would be great regardless of the amount of work. It is not clear what will happen to me, if things don’t change. The longer I remain in my present contemptible state, into which I fell by pure “luck” [aus purer “Gnade”], the more my self-respect suffers […]. I urgently seek your advice; I am no longer able to advise myself. Here I cannot think of a soul who has the capacity to weigh the pros and cons.49

Fleischer responded within a few days, despite being on vacation in Riga with his daughter and son-in-law. “With a full heart and without any mental reservation,” he urged Goldziher to take the job. Though it would formally demote his research to an avocation, Fleischer was convinced it provided 46

RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, January 7, 1875. Ibid., Goldziher to Fleischer, August 29, 1875. 48 Ibid., Goldziher to Fleischer, August 17, 1875; Goldziher, Tagebuch, 56. 49 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, August 29, 1875. 47

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ample time for him to pursue it as a vocation. The job was surely far better than squandering his energy in journalism as he had been doing.50 Reassured, Goldziher accepted the offer and kept Fleischer apprised of the labyrinthine approval process. At each stage, a determined minority objected, some with ad hominem aspersions, others on the more objective grounds that the position called for a lawyer with practical experience and not a scholar brimming with bookish knowledge. On November 5, 1875, with the outcome not in doubt, Fleischer sent a nervous Goldziher an official congratulation letter on DMG stationery: Why am I using official stationery for this letter? Because I have given myself the task to wish you good luck in the name of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft at your redemption from worry and aggravation and for the just reward of your work for scholarship by securing worthy employment to meet your external needs. Now this may sound a bit arbitrary and that’s my fault. But I am morally convinced that every sincere, worthy member of our organization, were I to notify them of what I am doing at this moment, would shake my hand in gratitude. I reserve for myself in this collective act only one small prerogative; namely, that you regard me as the most enthusiastic leader at the head of this long line of well-wishers.51

Fleischer’s sensitive and astute gesture could not have been more timely. Goldziher was in desperate need of recognition from the international guild whose local franchise in Budapest continued to deny him admission. Goldziher appreciated beyond words this touch of compensatory justice: My mother and I cannot thank you enough for your heartfelt letter. My mother continues to read it time and again. It came for me at the right time. A throng of envious rabble had begun to work me over [an meiner Harfe gesetzt] in order to rouse public opinion against me in the strange way in which wickedness always manages to find expression. I am portrayed in the image of a fallen giant, who has plummeted from the lofty throne of scholarship into the mud hole of a communal office. These folks are so rough and uneducated that they don’t even realize that it brings honor to a scholarly person to involve himself in the welfare of a large community. Your letter of good wishes and the affectionate turn you gave it serve to assure me that it is entirely up to me to be of value or not to the future of scholarship.52

On November 21, 1875, a meeting of the community’s General Assembly gave its final, resounding approval to appoint Goldziher. He could not inform Fleischer until late that evening because he was visited by well-wishers for the rest of the day.53 He would take over the reins at the beginning of January, and a few days later Fleischer sent his customary New Year’s greetings with yet another word of encouragement: 50

HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, August 24, 1875. 51 Ibid., Fleischer to Goldziher, November 5, 1875. 52 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, November 11, 1875. 53 Ibid., Goldziher to Fleischer, November 21, 1875.

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In addition, an equally hearty good luck on the start of your communal secretariat. You will surely have a lot to do at the outset in order to get oriented in the job and to gain the necessary skills to supervise. But given your head, this should not cost you dearly; experience and habituation should do the rest.54

But Goldziher got off to a rocky start and his mood quickly soured. By February 20, 1876, he unburdened himself to Fleischer: “You surely are curious to know how my work is going. Well, my office devours humans. The amount of time and energy it demands of me was never spelled out beforehand, nor could I have foreseen it. The hours in the office never end.”55 Goldziher spelled out what he faced. The work was strenuous and not without friction, and the staff was mediocre at best, which meant that much of the workload fell on his shoulders. It had also taken him many long hours to clean up the mess left by the previous administration. Goldziher’s own tireless work ethic exacerbated the situation, for he was unable to leave the office with tasks half-finished. He also found absolutely no pleasure in completing paperwork, in arranging religious activities, or in arguing over things that did not interest him. Above all, he loathed the people with whom he had to interact. The single oasis in this wilderness was his oversight of matters pertaining to education and welfare.56 As is well known from Goldziher’s memoir and diary, this level of discontent would only intensify. The eleven-year presidency from 1883–1894 of Mo´r Wahrmann, a prominent banker who became the first Jew to join the Hungarian parliament, made matters even worse. His autocratic conduct humiliated Goldziher, even as his wealth infuriated him.57 The letters offer no reprieve; on the contrary, they are repeatedly punctuated with outbursts of pitiful suffering. Aside from his unfailing empathy, Fleischer occasionally felt compelled to protest that Goldziher’s melancholy was unwarranted and his whining inappropriate: Your job, like all others, surely consists of an onus along with its honos. But dear Doctor, it is not so bad. The four or five hours that, according to Jahn’s report, you have to put in daily would seem preferable to many an overburdened and poorly paid official in some nuqta mawhu¯ma [imaginary spot, in Arabic]. Thank God that for the time being, until you find a suitable position, you have at your disposal so much free time for your learned works. I can’t spare you this slight scolding, for in truth your moaning and groaning by this time is too much. You complain that in three years you will enter your thirties [das dritte

54 HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, January 7, 1876. 55 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, February 20, 1876. 56 Ibid. 57 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 96. For a profile without vitriol, see Ka´roly Vörös, “Mo´r Wahrmann: A Jewish Banker in Hungarian Politics in the Era of the Dual Monarchy,” in Jews in the Hungarian Economy 1760–1945, ed. Michael K. Silber (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992), 187–195.

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Decennium Ihres Lebens] without having completed half of what you would have liked to do by then. Yes, that is truly awful! You poor old fellow! Already twenty-seven years old with only one famous book to your name, not to speak of a swarm of solid scholarly essays and journal articles! Forgive me this flight of sarcasm, but I can’t help myself, c’est plus fort que moi. I was twenty-seven years old, living in Paris from tutoring and going to Sacy’s seminar with books under my arm. I had no thought of writing a book because I regarded myself as too young. I was happy dividing my time equally between earning a living and pursuing my studies [Brot- und Geistesarbeit] and collecting materials for later works. Wouldn’t it be good for you sometimes, when you are overcome by the demon of impatience, to remember that twenty-seven-year-old Parisian student?58

Under the best of circumstances, the pace of Goldziher’s published work would be considered phenomenal. From 1870, when his doctoral dissertation appeared, until he died in 1921, not a year passed without the publication of a cluster of longer and shorter scholarly works. The quality of Goldziher’s scholarship never suffered in exchange for quantity.59 What is even more astonishing is that during the twenty-nine years that Goldziher served as secretary of the community, he maintained that he could write uninterruptedly only during his five-week summer vacations and Jewish holidays – a total of some forty to forty-two days per year.60 Goldziher often returned home from the office too exhausted or agitated to delve into his books.61 Each year, the preparation of the communal budget absorbed him fully from December through March with endless meetings and negotiations.62 Moreover, Goldziher held on to his tenuous lectureship at Budapest University, despite the grievous embarrassment it caused him to be on that low rung of the

58

HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, October 15, 1877. Professor Robert Morrison of Bowdoin College, a specialist in medieval Islamic science, was kind enough to inform my colleague, Professor Scheindlin, that the Arabic phrase nuqta mawhu¯ma is a fixed expression that comes from debates beginning in the thirteenth century in which critics of geometric entities contended that they were merely imaginary constructs with no basis in reality and hence not really true. 59 See the invaluable bibliography compiled by Bernard Heller, Bibliographie des oeuvres de Ignace Goldziher (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1927), and the supplement by Alexander Scheiber, “A Supplementary Bibliography of the Literary Work of Ignaz Goldziher,” in Ignaz Goldziher Memorial Volume, part I, eds. Sa´muel Lo˝winger and Joseph de Somogyi (Budapest: Globus nyomdai müinte´zet, 1948), 419–429, along with additions and corrections to Heller by I. Kratschkovsky, 430–431. One final supplement to Goldziher’s oeuvre appeared subsequently in Ignace Goldziher Memorial Volume, part II (Jerusalem 1958), 209–214. 60 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 93. 61 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer October 23, 1878; December 23, 1878 (printed in Moritz Lazarus und Heymann Steinthal: Die Begründer der Völkerpsychologie in ihren Briefen, ed. Ingrid Belke, 3 vols. [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1971–1986], 2/2, 488–490.) 62 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, December 26, 1882.

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academic ladder far longer than any of his peers.63 Thus, during the winter semester of 1872–1873, Goldziher had some twenty-one students in his Hebrew class who came primarily from the local seminary of the Reformed Church, where he had been invited to teach its first courses in the Hebrew language and the Hebrew Bible. That unprecedented number prompted Goldziher to speculate that Oriental Studies in Hungary might one day emerge out of Hebrew Studies as it had elsewhere in Europe a century earlier.64 In the winter semester of 1875–1876, he attracted some twenty students to a lecture course on Arabic culture in Spain, which surely informed, if not inspired, his sweeping comparative treatment of the subject before the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.65 Two years later, Goldziher taught a total of five hours: the Quran for two (the Sura dealing with Maryam); Syriac for one; and his lectures on the institutions of Islam for two additional hours.66 To further complicate Goldziher’s life, death was not an infrequent visitor to his household. In the fall of 1879, Goldziher lost his father-in-law, a country doctor, whom he treasured as a surrogate father and wise counselor. Upon returning from the funeral in Arad, he found his twenty-seven-year-old sister, a mother of four children, ravaged by fever. Two years younger, she had long been his friend, confidant, and supporter. The double tragedy left Goldziher distraught and disabled. The length of his letter to Fleischer on October 6, 1879 bespoke the depth of his anguish: That I cannot exert myself or read a lot is understandable. Often I would like to bury the bitterness that overcomes me in the folios of the Muslim fiqh [law, in Arabic] – but in vain! Time and again forms hover before me that prevent me from concentrating on the letters of my book or manuscript. I needed to write this letter because the pain that pulverizes me cries out to be shared.67

Goldziher’s sister finally died in January 1884 after an excruciating illness, followed five months later by the death of his mother, who lived solely for her children. His brother-in-law did remarry, but his second wife and devoted mother to his children died from a kidney operation two years later. And

63

Ibid., Goldziher to Fleischer, October 6, 1879. Ibid., Goldziher to Fleischer, November 1, 1872; Goldziher, Tagebuch, 53. This was most likely a combined class of identical courses which Goldziher taught at both the seminary and university. 65 Ibid., Goldziher to Fleischer, October 23, 1875; see also Ignaz Goldziher, “The Spanish Arabs and Islam,” G. S., 1, 230–423. Given on November 13, 1876, this was Goldziher’s inaugural lecture as a corresponding member. The Academy published it a year later. At the university, his lectures on the culture of Islam in Spain attracted many students from history (RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, November 21, 1875). 66 Ibid., Goldziher to Fleischer, January 23, 1878. 67 Ibid., Goldziher to Fleischer, October 6, 1879. 64

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when death took Goldziher’s brother-in-law in 1889, he became the guardian of his four children. In resignation, he confessed in his memoir “that the uplifting moments in my life are but the passing glance of grace from the One who guides my life, while everything distressing is destined to unfold in unmitigated horror.”68 That Goldziher was miscast and that family tragedies punctuated his first fifteen years on the job are beyond doubt. But ultimately, it was his own unmanageable frustration at being distanced from his scholarship and denied admission to the university that fueled his unending litany of laments. When Goldziher could write, the paucity of Oriental manuscripts and secondary literature in Budapest constantly bedeviled his work. Goldziher published in Hungarian as well as German to improve his chances of promotion in Budapest, though he always feared negative reviews capitalizing on inadvertent errors due to a lack of resources. To complete his research for his pioneering reconstruction of the legal theory and history of the Za¯hirı¯s, the most inflexible school of Muslim jurisprudence, Goldziher had to travel to Vienna. Fleischer helped him secure a publisher in Leipzig, but when it appeared in early 1884 with a bumper crop of typos and errors, Goldziher asked him limply to remember the difficult circumstances under which he worked.69 Two years earlier, Goldziher reluctantly admitted to Fleischer that it was antisemitism in the upper echelons of the government bureaucracy that blocked his promotion to professor extraordinarius, and not the faculty, which in 1878 had endorsed him by a large majority, as did the university senate. Goldziher was no longer under any illusion that his just-published, 400-page Hungarian study of Islam qua religion could make a difference. Goldziher went on to vent his dismay in the following words: You can scarcely appreciate, my honored Professor, how disheartening it is for me to know that I am considered to be a Semite. I have indeed experienced that my blood has the same color as that of every good Aryan and Ugro-turanian. My mother tongue is Turanian, and my education rests on an Indo-Germanic foundation, and you know that Kant and Goethe are more influential therein than my otherwise revered Sa¯m ibn Nu¯h [Shem, the son of Noah, in Arabic], peace be upon him. I share with all the Christians ˙and Muslims of the Austro-Hungarian state the Semitic origins of my faith. And yet the foetor semiticus [the fetid smell of a Jew] should still cling to me, rendering me different from all other citizens of Hungary and Europe! The oppressive feeling that such a feeling brings with it can only be sensed by those who [suffer] the social consequences of this Renan classification (for he is the inventor of the “modern” concept of Semites), which draws a black mark across the path of one’s life. One cannot fight against this horror. To endure with no visible end in sight, that is martyrdom and one must bear it. Now you see why from this perspective my book on Islam can bring me no success.”70 68

Goldziher, Tagebuch, 101–103. The quotation is on 101. RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, June 20, 1882; October 3, 1883; February 18, 1884. 70 Ibid., Goldziher to Fleischer, January 25, 1882; Ignaz Goldziher, Az iszla´m (Buda69

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There is no direct response from Fleischer to this cri de cœur. He happily received Goldziher’s Hungarian study of Islam in November 1881, though its treasures were sealed to him. He looked forward to a quick German edition and hoped that Goldziher would attain what he yearned for and deserved.71 When Goldziher disabused him of that prospect, he knew full well Fleischer’s sentiment. A few years earlier, an English colonial official had approached Goldziher, inquiring whether he would come to Lahore, India to teach Arabic and Islam at its university. The official (a certain Dr. Leitner) wanted to know if Goldziher was fluent in English. Goldziher informed him that he had long been a student of English literature and assured him that within three months of his appointment he would be able to speak and write in English. The other impediment that Leitner raised was more sensitive. Goldziher’s religion caused discomfort both for the English and the natives in Lahore, which prompted Goldziher to end his account with a flurry of sarcasm: “I am thus a true martyr of Yahweh. At every stage my ethnicity [Abstammung] turns out [erweist sich] to be a drag on my advancement. First, for a Hungarian minister it is too plebeian, then for a Muslim on the Nile or a Brahman on the Ganges it is unworthy. And all do it in the name of God.”72 For Goldziher, conversion, of course, was an act of betrayal. The night before he died, Goldziher’s father had admonished him never to abandon the faith of his ancestors.73 Fleischer was as chagrined by the religious prerequisite as he was excited by the offer itself, and he urged Goldziher to take it, provided the English came to their senses: It would be truly deplorable that – or let me rather say – if Leitner with his concern about your ethnicity and religion were not wrong. [But] among educated individuals in the last quarter of the nineteenth century – in a purely scientific matter – can worries [mise`ren] of

pest: Akade´miai Könyvkiado´, 1881). Heller’s Bibliographie, 30–35, as well as Wilhelm Bacher, ZDMG, 36 (1882): 720–724 provide a good overview of Goldziher’s revisionist work. The existential swipe at Renan comports with Goldziher’s disgusted rejection of philology’s turn to racism (See Ignaz Goldziher, Renan als Orientalist (trans.), Peter Zala´n (Zürich: Spur-Verl., 2000), 32–42 and Lawrence I. Conrad, “Ignaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan: From Orientalist Philology to the Study of Islam,” The Discovery of Islam: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lewis, ed. Martin Kramer (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, 1999), 137–180. On the conundrum of Goldziher’s mother tongue, see Istva´n Ormos, “Goldziher’s Mother Tongue: A Contribution to the Study of the Language Situation in Hungary in the Nineteenth Century,” ´ va Apor and Istva´n Ormos (Budapest: Library of Goldziher Memorial Conference, eds. E the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2005), 203–243. 71 HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, December 29, 1881. 72 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, June 1, 1876. 73 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 73.

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this sort still be taken seriously? Just send your book (Mythos) to India. It will be the best medicine to dispel the religious vagaries of the reverends, imams, […] and other hierophants there. And do not forget to include your photographs; a forehead like yours that nature has so clearly stamped with a seal of power, that is, spirit, can belong only to a person [touched] by God’s grace, who has the right to be himself and nobody else.74

The internal antagonism toward Goldziher’s radical religious views by his coreligionists meant, in fact, that Goldziher was ostracized twice. His entrance into the Gemeinde post coincided with the publication of the German edition of his Der Mythos bei den Hebräern und seine geschichtliche Entwickelung, followed a year later by an English translation that included as a validating addendum two essays by Heymann Steinthal, the founder of the study of the mythology of early ethnic groups (Völkerpsychologie). Goldziher had written a good chunk of it on his five-month trip to the Middle East, and the comments recorded at the time in his Oriental Diary strongly suggest that the work precipitated a classic example of a crisis of faith brought about by critical scholarship.75 Tradition crumbled in the face of new tools and perspectives freely exercised, and the anger and disgust aroused in him by the expressions of Jewish ritual, piety, and history that he witnessed in Constantinople must be seen through the distorting lens of that unresolved conflict. Thus, at the end of a wrenching Yom Kippur in Constantinople, Goldziher confided in his diary: Ever since scholarship disenchanted me with the intoxicating ideals which I had attached to the synagogue; ever since it became impossible for me to think of rabbinism without adding an e´crasez l’infaˆme [crush the vile system]; ever since the history of religion and exegesis brought me to cherish a religious ideal, which lacks the brute, crude stuff that one calls a synagogue or church serving in the background, though not identical with the indistinct “cult of genius;” ever since then, the Jewish house of prayer has increasingly disgusted rather than edified me because I abhor the refined power of idolatry therein.76

74

HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, June 13,

1876 75 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, February 8, 1875; Goldziher, Tagebuch, 74; Ignaz Goldziher, Der Mythos bei den Hebräern und seine geschichtliche Entwickelung (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1876); idem, Mythology among the Hebrews and its Historical Development, trans. Russell Martineau (London: Longmans, 1877). On Völkerpsychologie, see Belke (ed.), Lazarus und Steinthal, 1, xlii–lx; also M. Lazarus and H. Steinthal, “Einleitende Gedanken über Völkerpsychologie,” Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (hereafter, ZVS), 1 (1860): 1–73. 76 The translation of this passage, crucial to my argument, is my own. A comparison of the translation by Raphael Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 99, with the German original in The Jewish Theological Seminary Library, Archives, ARC 105, “Ignaz Goldziher Oriental Diary,” 20, showed it to be imprecise and more convoluted than necessary. On the reliability of Patai’s edition, see Lawrence I. Conrad, “The Near East Study Tour Diary of Ignaz Goldziher,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1 (1990): 105–121.

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Whereas Franz Rosenzweig’s Yom Kippur experience in Berlin in 1913 would bring him back into the fold of traditional Judaism, Ignaz Goldziher’s experience in Istanbul in 1873 exacerbated his estrangement. The irony of Goldziher’s turmoil lay in the fact that the book he bore in mind was intended to defend the faith against Ernst Renan’s characterization that it was bereft of all mythology. The barren desert in which Judaism originated, according to Renan, could give birth to no other worldview than an abstract and non-visual monotheism. On the other hand, the Aryans’ polytheism embedded in the multiple forces of nature led to a disposition that carefully observed those forces, eventually culminating in a scientific worldview.77 But in order to access that buried mythological stratum of Semitic thought, Goldziher had to deconstruct the narrative texts of the Hebrew Bible to accord with the rigid developmental grid of Friedrich Max Müller’s solar mythology. Rich in philological arguments, comparative evidence, and difficult speculation, the book was by far the most extreme deployment of biblical criticism authored by a Jew since Spinoza. Just a few years before, Leopold Zunz had endorsed the documentary composition of the Pentateuch with a panoply of different dates, but he did not transform the text into a palimpsest.78 At the beginning of 1875, as Goldziher neared the end of his manuscript on myth, he introduced his work to Fleischer in a state of satisfaction: It is my veritable child of sorrow. The opening chapters I wrote in Syria, the middle ones in Egypt, and the final ones in Pest, where I revised the whole thing, reworking from a rigorously philological perspective what I had hastily conceptualized and sketched in the Orient. I believe to be the first to have tried to demonstrate that the results obtained by Müller in regard to the stages of Indo-Germanic myths [apply as well] to one sector of the Semitic world. I flatter myself that I am not guilty of any etymological leaps or acts of violence.79

Goldziher had written his book in a somewhat popular vein, a` la Müller, to reach a larger audience. Still, he anxiously awaited the approval of orientalists and historians. But Goldziher’s satisfaction soon gave way to apprehension. With the imminent appearance of his book, it began to dawn on him that its radicalness could damage his prospects for employment in the Gemeinde in Budapest or the Hochschule in Berlin. If that were to happen, there

77 On Rosenzweig, see Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1953), 23–31; Goldziher, Renan als Orientalist, 37–40. On Der Mythos as a direct response to Renan, see Sabine Mangold, “Igna´c Goldziher et Ernest Renan – Vision du monde et innovation scientifique,” in Igna´c Goldziher: Un autre orientalisme?, ed. Ce´line Trautmann-Waller (Paris: Geuthner, 2011), 73–88. 78 Ismar Schorsch, “Leopold Zunz on the Hebrew Bible,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, 102 (Summer 2012): 431–454. 79 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, February 8, 1875.

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were no other options available. Duplicity had barred him from obtaining a university professorship, and prejudices blocked him from even being considered for one of the numerous jobs available in the city’s libraries or high schools. The protracted approval process of Goldziher’s appointment only added to his disquiet.80 His angst abated momentarily with the final approval of his appointment and a contract for an English translation of his study of Israelite myth. In his aforementioned late-night letter from November 21, 1875 to Fleischer, Goldziher triumphantly reported both successes, adding that his English publisher was also the publisher of Müller’s works. Fleischer answered immediately and shrewdly. Goldziher still had reason to worry: So an English translation of your heretical views is also on the horizon? I confess to you, my dear friend, that I am pleased that you have found firm ground beneath your feet before your bilingual book will trigger a spectacle in both the synagogue and church. The intelligentsia who engineered your appointment has my respect. But notwithstanding, there are conservatives among the Jewish and Christian intelligentsia who at the end of the day will rise to oppose you, and indeed already would have done so if your book had come out before your appointment. In any case, the way it happened is better.81

As the date of publication approached, Goldziher’s angst returned. He had sought only to serve the cause of truth and believed that God would protect him from a witch hunt. Yet, he began to fear the impact of negative reviews by skeptical scholars on his coreligionists and beseeched Fleischer to favor him with a quick, short, positive review to stem the expected tide.82 To buttress this rather blunt request, Goldziher added later that it was Müller himself who secured both the translator and publisher for Goldziher’s work, a fact which might persuade Fleischer to allow Goldziher to dedicate the volume to ´ rmin Va´mhim.83 In the end, Fleischer shared the honor with Müller and A be´ry, “the pioneers of Semitic, Aryan and Turco-Tataric philology.”84 There is no evidence that Fleischer ever complied with Goldziher’s wishes, though when he finally received a copy of the German edition of the book from the 80

Ibid., Goldziher to Fleischer, August 29, 1875; October 23, 1875; November 1, 1875; November 11, 1875. 81 HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, November 24, 1875. 82 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, December 28, 1875; February 20, 1876. In the latter letter, Goldziher stressed that Fleischer’s review should not appear in the section reserved for theology, where any review dealing with a Jewish book was always placed, but rather under the rubric mythology. The classification bespoke a still dominant Christian perception, which Goldziher struggled to avoid. See Ismar Schorsch, “Moritz Steinschneider: The Vision Beyond the Books,” in Studies on Steinschneider, eds. Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2012), 23–24. 83 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, May 12, 1876. 84 Goldziher, Mythology, dedication page.

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Leipzig publishing firm Brockhaus, which he had probably approached about publishing the work in the first place, Fleischer playfully compared Goldziher to Alexander the Great: That you command an army of wide reading and great learning I knew. But what I did not know and indeed had no inkling of is that this army makes frightful conquests in all directions, bringing home booty from all sides. Hence on your return from your worldwide conquests, Alexander of awesome knowledge, kindly accept this sincere expression of awe as a token of my homage.

Fleischer then asked Goldziher to bear with him as he broadened his own horizon to venture into this confusing terrain.85 Despite the morale boost that Fleischer’s compliment gave him, Goldziher was growing ever more insecure. Would the book compromise his ability to publicly represent a religious institution whose tenets he disdained? Even his beloved former teacher of Talmud, Moses Wolf Freudenberg, had already preached against it, though without repercussions.86 Above all, Goldziher continued to brood over the verdict of the scholarly world, which came in the form of critiques by Friedrich Delitzsch, Bernhard Stade, and Wolf Baudissin, all recent Leipzig doctorates who had been Goldziher’s fellow classmates.87 While Stade berated Goldziher for not being a biblical scholar, Baudissin completely rejected his misguided treatment of mythology.88 On occasion, Fleischer would alleviate the tension with good humor; for example, when he thanked Goldziher for his copy of the English translation with “its mythological heresies, for which some 200 years ago you would have been utterly banned, just like Spinoza. Thank God that he has spared you from this dangerous honor of being ejected from the synagogue, exactly like the greatest Jewish philosopher once was by his contemporaries.”89 To no avail. By the latter half of 1878, a disconsolate Goldziher, stonewalled again by the university, was ready to resign. He could no longer tolerate the derision with which members of the Gemeinde greeted his book nor the company he kept in the office. Their jargon, he told Fleischer, made him forget that he was a European, and their lack of respect pained him grievously. Only the common sense of his wife kept him from leaving his post

85 HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, May 18, 1876. 86 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, June 1, 1876; Goldziher, Tagebuch, 19. 87 Ibid., 44. 88 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, July 15, 1876; Baudissin’s dismissive review appeared in the Theologische Literaturzeitung 1, no. 18 (1876): 461–464. 89 HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, March 14, 1877.

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without a viable alternative. Goldziher recalled an Arabic proverb he had learned in Cairo that “a donkey at hand is preferable to a horse that isn’t.”90 Fleischer intervened again to look for that horse. With a professorship thwarted in Budapest, Fleischer wrote to the Austrian Minister of Culture and Education in Vienna on December 22, 1878, kindly suggesting to invite Goldziher, who was about to be dismissed from his Gemeinde post in Budapest, for a meeting.91 Implicit in Fleischer’s explicit depiction of Goldziher’s impressive curriculum vitae was the hope that an academic position might be found for him elsewhere in the Dual Monarchy. That same month, Fleischer also resumed his efforts in the direction of Berlin. Several years before in a face-to-face conversation, he had piqued Lazarus’s interest in Goldziher. At the latter’s request, he followed up with a written recommendation.92 To help Goldziher make an informed decision should an invitation be forthcoming, Fleischer shared with him a letter from Steinschneider dated June 12, 1875, explaining why he himself would have nothing to do with the Hochschule. Regardless, given Goldziher’s state of mind, Fleischer sent an urgent appeal to Steinthal, Lazarus’s colleague at the Hochschule, on December 17, 1878: Please help if you can! I plead for our brilliant and profoundly learned, dither-headed [Wirbelkopf] Goldziher, who is about to become the martyr of his Mythos. That it would, one way or the other, come to this should he wish to remain an official of the Jewish community was self-evident from the outset and I told him so. But acting with savvy was never his thing. He now faces the dilemma of being dismissed this coming February, and even like Spinoza excommunicated, or resigning his post voluntarily and living with his family in extreme poverty. He, of course, has chosen to do the latter. But can we, his friends, who know of his despair allow such a move to run its course? […] I am ready to do everything in my power to sustain the most ingenious and knowledgeable of all my students to date in his natural calling and to protect him from outer and eventually inner atrophy.93

This disarmingly insightful letter was not only a sterling token of Fleischer’s devotion, but also a plausible initiative because the year before Steinthal had hailed Goldziher’s Mythos in a thirty-page review as a milestone in the recovery of the mythology of the ancient Israelites. The dire financial straits of the Hochschule, however, proved prohibitive.94 Moreover, Goldziher, as he in-

90

Belke (ed.), Lazarus und Steinthal, 2/2, 490 (Goldziher to Fleischer, January 5, 1879). A copy in HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File. 92 Ibid., Fleischer to Goldziher, July 20, 1875. 93 Heinrich Loewe, Ignaz Goldziher: Ein Wort des Gedenkens (Berlin: Soncino Gesellschaft, 1929), no page no. 94 H. Steinthal, “Über Mythen-Schichtung,” ZVS, 9 (1877), 272–303; Belke (ed.), Lazarus und Steinthal, 2/2, 486–488. 91

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formed Fleischer a few days later on December 23, 1878, had been cured (by then) of any desire to continue his scholarship in a Jewish setting: The Hochschule is not the object of my desires. I have had my fill of religious employment. My coreligionists are not advanced enough to digest me. Perhaps Steinthal and Lazarus, that I would like to believe. But not the people who give the money for a school to educate rabbis, who vacillate between the middle ages and modernity, lacking any firm ground in the realms of conviction and practical life. Furthermore, this institution is, as far as I know, a private school without any legal standing. And were it not for Geiger’s name in its first catalogue, it would not be worth much. Years ago, Steinschneider had refused categorically to accept a position there.95

Goldziher, though, was not in danger of losing his job. Fleischer had erred (or exaggerated) in his letter to Staatsminister Karl Streymayr.96 Goldziher emphasized to Fleischer that a binding protocol with the General Assembly of the Gemeinde protected him legally. What had been lost were the last three years, the best of his life, in which he had been prevented from doing any serious scholarship.97 Another long-term consequence was his twenty-twoyear estrangement from the Breslau-type rabbinical school, which had opened in Budapest in 1877 and whose faculty suspected him of being an atheist and a heretic.98 Neither epithet does justice to Goldziher’s entangled attitude toward Judaism or religion. In his letter to Fleischer, Steinschneider recalled Goldziher as being quite Orthodox (streng orthodox) when he had studied with him during the winter semester of 1868–1869.99 And indeed he was Orthodox then. During his sojourn in Berlin, he continued to study Talmud daily, lived in the home of Adolf Berliner, and was close to Fürchtegott Lebrecht – both Orthodox practitioners of Wissenschaft.100 In Leiden, he offended Dozy by declining his dinner invitation, though he could not reconcile doing biblical criticism while observing Judaism’s dietary laws.101 Steinschneider’s throwback to recollections of those callow days obliged Goldziher to explain his trajectory to Fleischer:

95

Ibid., 488–490. Ibid., 490. 97 Ibid., 488–490. 98 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 87–88, 220–221, 267. 99 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Steinschneider File, Steinschneider to Fleischer, June 12, 1875. 100 Goldziher Tagebuch, 38. In his Hebrew essay dealing with the correspondence between Goldziher and Shmuel Avraham Poznanski, Shlomo Dov Goitein cited the testimony of both Poznanski and Aron Freimann that Goldziher studied a page of Talmud every day of his life (“Goldziher lfi Michtavav,” Ignace Goldziher Memorial Volume, I, Hebrew part, 6–7, n. 9). I have found nothing in the Fleischer-Goldziher correspondence to confirm that claim. 101 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 48. 96

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It appears that what Steinschneider says about my previous Orthodoxy was not really thought through. In my youth, I had to observe many a medieval custom out of consideration for my blessed father. But when I mentioned to him that these customs were becoming untenable for me in social settings, he absolved me from their fervent observance [pietätvollen Rücksicht]. I have never made my biblical and critical scholarship contingent on human dogma, and in matters of free thought I have, like others, consistently advanced according to the standards of broader intellectual perspectives.102

But social discomfort was surely only one source of Goldziher’s emancipation. His memoir-diary abounds with evidence of intellectual ferment. As an adolescent in Budapest, he began to complement his intensive study of Talmud with forays into the literature of critical scholarship on Judaism authored by Jews and Christians during the last half-century. He never forgot the shock of the day when he learned that the Pentateuch might be a composite rather than a unitary text.103 In Wilhelm Bacher, who would also study with Fleischer, he found another intellectually voracious adolescent with whom he read the works of Saadia Gaon and to whom he taught Persian. What separated them, Goldziher later opined, was existential angst. For Bacher, “Judaism was a literary fact; for me already in 1867 it was the heartbeat of my life.”104 Without a doubt, though, the two most influential personalities for Goldziher’s intellectual maturation were his Hungarian mentor and friend, Mo´ric Ka´rma´n, and the seminal Wissenschaft scholar and leader of the German Reform movement, Abraham Geiger. Ka´rma´n, who was a prote´ge´ of Leopold Löw, Hungary’s counterpart to Geiger, deepened Goldziher’s knowledge of biblical criticism, introduced him to the burgeoning field of mythology, and strengthened his conceptual thinking.105 From Geiger’s pathbreaking studies on the genesis of rabbinic law, in conjunction with the New Testament criticism of the Tübingen School, Goldziher came to appreciate the developmental nature of religious phenomena and to master the application of tendency criticism.106 The paradoxical outcome of this journey is that while Goldziher lost all tolerance for the legal character of the Judaism of his day, he became the first great expositor of Islam’s legal character to Europe. In youthful ardour during his stay in Cairo, he concluded that normative Islam was the only religion amenable to philosophical minds, for it was orthodoxy and not a rational 102

RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, August 9, 1875. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 27–29. 104 Ibid., 32–33. 105 Ibid., 42–44, 158–162; see also Ce´line Trautmann-Waller, “Histoire culturelle, religions et modernite´, ou: y a-t-il une ‘me´thode’ Goldziher?,” in Igna´c Goldziher: Un autre orientalisme? (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 2011), 120–121. 106 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 39, 42–44, 123. On the Tübingen School, see Horton Harris, The Tübingen School (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). 103

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critique external to the system that expunged superstition and pagan vestiges from its midst. The insight inspired him to think of reforming the encrusted character of emancipated Judaism on a similar rational basis.107 To be sure, when he went public in the winter of 1887–1888 in a lecture series with his pervasively developmental construction of Judaism, his scheme did not resonate.108 Yet his home embodied a form of messianic Judaism saturated with the words of psalmists and prophets and cleansed of all irrational impurities, if not ritual observance.109 Similarly, his memoir-diary reverberates with a reverential, intimate relationship with God that often turns conversational. In short, for all his sophistication, erudition, and uncompromising scholarly ethos, Goldziher remained a homo religiosus. His desk was tellingly bedecked with a small plaque that bore the inscription of a verse from Psalms often inscribed on the eastern wall of a synagogue sanctuary: “I am ever mindful of the Lord’s presence (16:8).”110 And like no other scholar of his age, Goldziher was interested in Islam as a religious culture. As he wrote to Fleischer when his study of the Zahiris was coming off the press: My Za¯hirı¯s is up to the tenth quire. I believe that there will be about six more. I truly regret that I read proofs while traveling, as a consequence of which, many misprints remain that distress me. I fear more than anyone the judgment of discomfiting reviews, especially because the subject and spirit of my work are alien to that group which dominates the field of Oriental literature in our decade. I have noticed that many a pacesetter recoils with genuine horror at the sight of a work dealing with the Muslim religion or theology. I suspect that you will agree that this animus is unwarranted and derives from a one-sided view of the goal of our field.111

As an academic freelancer absorbed by the study of religion, Goldziher had to be doubly cautious. Goldziher continued to rely on Fleischer to help correct his proofs. The extreme legal conservatism of the Za¯hirı¯s did not seem to faze him, as he implied in his letter to Goldziher from July 29, 1883: “I have just gotten pages 73 to 81 of your Zahiris. Once again you have produced a splendid work,

107 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 59; on the nature and importance of Goldziher’s Oriental study tour, see Lawrence I. Conrad, “The Pilgrim from Pest: Goldziher’s Study Tour to the Near East (1873– 1874),” Golden Roads: Migration, Pilgrimage and Travel in Medieval and Modern Islam, ed. Ian Richard Netton (Richmond, England: Curzon Press, 1993), 110–159. Conrad tends to overestimate the importance of Geiger’s influence on Goldziher’s approach to Islam. His description of Geiger’s Urschrift und Übersetzungen der Bibel (Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag Madda, 1928) as the work “in which he argued for the mythic character of Old Testament texts” is blatantly wrong (124, more generally 123–25, 139–459). 108 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 111; Heller, 41, no. 125. 109 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 111. 110 Ibid., 91. 111 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, October, 3, 1883.

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whose printing I would gladly oversee to the last letter, if it were only possible (Fleischer was about to depart on vacation).”112 What did, however, incur Fleischer’s wrath were the irrational excesses of Islamic belief. In a letter dated October 15, 1877, Fleischer could not repress his displeasure at the appearance of a French edition of an edifying tract on the afterlife by the renowned eleventh-century thinker al-Ghaza¯lı¯, which he denounced as: A hodge-podge of the most absurd offspring of Muslim fantasy on death, resurrection, etc. by the firm of Muhammed and Company, to be sure, understood, according to al-Ghaza¯lı¯, only allegorically. I would have rather preferred for his honor’s sake if he had left the matter where it belongs […] The good Lord comes across throughout as truly Oriental in the role of a despotic caricature [Schlafrocksdespoten], thoroughly taken by his power, yet from time to time seized by fits of kindliness that are completely arbitrary. In particular, he is not unamenable to a good or bad joke, with which a poor sinner, who already has his ticket to hell in hand, regales him. As narrated, the good Lord then lets mercy trump justice, laughs (truly laughs – in Arabic) and sends him off to paradise. One must indeed have a rock solid faith in the uniquely saving grace of allegory not to laugh at this stupid thing, all the more at the stupidity of people who are taken in by it.113

In his response, Goldziher did not contest Fleischer’s harsh judgment. He acknowledged and lamented the fine line between faith and superstition to be found in the works of many Muslim theologians: I avidly long to get to know al-Durra al-fa¯khira [in Arabic – The Precious Pearl]. It is noteworthy that the best of thinkers of Islam are full of superstition. One is not startled at Ibn Khaldun’s exposition of magic [in Arabic]. And he was an enlightened fellow! It is in fact [the result] of the fetters of the Hadı¯th, whose welts are visible on their spirit. Just now I read the trial that the poor Ibn Taymı¯ya [in Arabic] was subjected to because he came into conflict with the Hadı¯th [in Arabic], and in the same book there is a description of the execution of a man about whom the Qa¯dı¯ of the Malikites in Damascus dreamed that he had blasphemed the prophet Lut¸, which the poor devil denied strenuously […]. Moreover, a god who writes and reviews books may indeed have muscles for laughing. It is the concretizing (Vermaterialisirung) of lofty, monotheistic ideas which orthodox sages of monotheistic faiths (Formeln) then demand of the faithful, whether Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, that is for sure the source of all the brutality which they attribute to their Elohim and Allah and render into a system for which governments are glad to pay.114

112

HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, July 29,

1883. 113 Ibid., Fleischer to Goldziher, October 15, 1877; L[ucien] Gautier, ad-dourra al-faˆkhira, la perle pre´cieuse de Ghazaˆlıˆ (Gene`ve-Baˆle-Lyon: H. Georg, 1878). The author had been in contact with Fleischer during his research because in his introduction he thanked him for his steadfast interest and assistance [xvi]. 114 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, November 17, 1877. Notwithstanding, Goldziher identified with al-Ghazaˆlıˆ’s assault on the intolerance of Islamic legalism toward doubt and inquiry and his embrace of Sufism to reassert the centrality of the divine-human relationship. See Conrad, “The Pilgrim from Pest,” 142.

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To Goldziher’s credit, the excesses did not deter him from the study of Islam qua religion. He could not wait to lay his hand on a new work by al-Ghaza¯lı¯, much of whose vast oeuvre still lay unredeemed in public archives and private libraries. Aside from his own abiding interest and manifold contributions, Goldziher encouraged others similarly inclined to ignore the disdain of a secular age. In his tribute to Goldziher after his death, Snouck Hurgronje, whom Goldziher befriended in 1883, affirmed that without Goldziher’s vigorous support he would never have mustered the courage to pursue his study of Islamic law, from which many had tried to dissuade him.115 Similarly, Goldziher played a vital role in the early career of Louis Massignon. As a recent scholar of their correspondence has shown, Goldziher was not only enthralled by the young Massignon’s massive project on al-Halla¯j, the Sufi “master of mystical love,” which he often prodded him to finish, but also served as his adviser and proof reader, as Fleischer had once done for him.116 Likewise, it was due to Goldziher that Abraham Shalom Yahuda published for the first time in 1912 the Judeo-Arabic original of the eleventh-century pietistic classic (on the basis of two manuscripts and a few fragments) Hovot ha-levavot (Duties of the Heart) by Bahya Ibn Paquda, preserved until ˙ then only in the medieval Hebrew translation by Judah Ibn Tibbon. Tellingly, Yahuda dedicated the volume to his mentor. His accompanying tribute deftly linked Goldziher’s lifelong agenda to his youthful passion: He was indeed the one who first prompted me to do this edition of the book that he had loved in his youth. It was his fondest wish that he be able one day to read this beautiful text, which he had read so often in Hebrew translation, in its original language. He considered it a noble duty to support me in every way and advise me with his wise counsel till the end. [In short], he was ever ready to devote time to this project.117

From afar, Goldziher’s peers admired the audacity, perseverance, and empathy, not to mention the conclusions, which he consistently manifested in his religious studies. On September 2, 1889 in Stockholm, the International Congress of Orientalists had the King of Sweden bestow its coveted gold medal on Goldziher. His fellow recipient was none other than Theodor Nöl-

115

Koningsveld, Scholarship and Friendship, xiii–xiv. Francois Angelier, “Louis Massignon-Igna´c Goldziher: Influence intellectuelle et legs spirituel: Correspondance ine´dite (1909–1921),” in Igna´c Goldziher: Un autre orientalisme?, 195–212. The sobriquet comes from The Encyclopedia of Religion, 16 vols. (New York – London: Macmillan, 1987), 6, 173. 117 A. S. Yahuda, Al-hida¯ja ‘ila¯ fara¯‘id al-qulu¯b des Bachja Ibn Josef Ibn Paqu¯da aus Andalusien (Leiden: Brill, 1912), xvii. See also Yahuda’s glowing tribute to Goldziher after his death: Yahuda, “Die Bedeutung der Goldziherschen Bibliothek für die zukünftige hebräische Universität,” Der Jude, 8 (1924), 575–592. 116

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deke, the dean of German Arabists in the generation after Fleischer.118 In their precious personal correspondence, Nöldeke, who like Fleischer had an affinity for Jewish students, railed against the unforgivable exclusion of scholars like Goldziher and Immanuel Löw from institutions of higher education in Hungary.119 But Nöldeke, as he admitted to Goldziher, was a diedin-the-wool rationalist who had little stomach for ritual and believed that religion had done more harm to humanity than good.120 He never felt at ease studying the Quran, preferring instead the poetry of the Bedouins, and he readily admitted that his pioneering work on the Quran had little to do with religion.121 He marveled at but did not envy Goldziher’s capacity to plow through the literature being published in the Orient: Indeed, you, like no one else, know how to extract from the boring theological and canonical arguments what is essential, important, and interesting and present it in an interesting fashion. But even for you the reading of this literature must be boring.122

At the age of seventy-eight, having returned to reading the Greek classics, Nöldeke confessed poignantly that he was unsuited to appreciate Islam as a religious phenomenon. What is more, he said: “I would have had much more inner satisfaction if I had become a classical philologist and occupied myself as a scholar solely with the Greeks. At least now for my edification I am again reading a lot of Greek.”123 When Goldziher departed from Leipzig for Leiden, he was still entranced by the philological agenda of his mentor. But as his interest in religion and culture ripened, their paths diverged, and in that divergence there is a saga that spans their correspondence. It is well known that Goldziher left with a manuscript of Tha’a¯libı¯’s (d. 1038) Fiqh al-lugha (The Science of Language), a work of some thirty chapters on Arabic synonyms, which at Fleischer’s request he had committed himself to publishing. Years before, Fleischer had received a copy of this manuscript from Johann Gottfried Wetzstein, one of his early students and since 1848 the first Prussian consul in Damascus. In gratitude, Fleischer treasured the gift and assured Wetzstein of his intention to publish it. The Leipzig sheikh was wont to speak of the richness of the Old Arabic of the pre-Islamic Bedouins as a tropical forest in which nothing went 118

Goldziher, Tagebuch, 117–120. Ro´bert Simon, Igna´c Goldziher: His Life and Scholarship as Reflected in His Works and Correspondence (Budapest: Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1986), 168–169. Löw had also studied with Fleischer and dedicated his Aramäische Pflanzennamen (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1881) to him. On Fleischer’s esteem for Löw’s dissertation, see Preissler, “Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer: Ein Leipziger Orientalist,” 260. 120 Simon, Igna´c Goldziher, 253, 291–292. 121 Ibid., 368. 122 Ibid., 292. 123 Ibid., 368. 119

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297

unnamed. The language was marked by a robust concreteness and freedom of form that required a thesaurus to recover the specific meaning of the profusion of its terms. It is also well known that Goldziher failed to publish the Tha’a¯libı¯ manuscript and also Ibn al-Sikkı¯t’s (d. 858) Kita¯b al-alfa¯z (Book of Words), which he had discovered was the older, more original work that Tha’a¯libı¯ had plundered and plagiarized. What remains unknown is why Goldziher, a prodigious scholar, abandoned the project. The correspondence reveals the answer and the psychological cost.124 In Leiden, Goldziher was absorbed with preparatory work, perusing and copying everything pertaining to the subject of Arabic synonyms including the entire book by Ibn al-Sikkı¯t.125 By August 15, 1871, Fleischer expressed his pleasure at the thoroughness of Goldziher’s work and informed him of the generous offer of Professor William Wright of Cambridge University to collate their underlying text (a Parisian printed edition of Fiqh al-lugha, which had not obviated the need to publish the Wetzstein manuscript) with a splendid, earlier Tha’a¯libı¯ manuscript in Cambridge.126 The following year, Goldziher secured the Leiden firm Brill as his publisher, integrated what was relevant from the selflessly exemplary collation provided by Wright, and convinced Fleischer to allow the edition to be dedicated to him. Goldziher had even persuaded his rector at the university to secure the Leiden manuscript of Ibn al-Sikkı¯t for him.127 But Goldziher’s conviction regarding the importance of the project was waning as he realized the extent to which Tha’a¯libı¯ had borrowed from lexicographers like Ibn al-Sikkı¯t and Ibn Fa¯ris without acknowledgment.128

124 Fleischer, Kleinere Schriften, 3, 161–166. On Goldziher’s command of and contribution to Arabic philology, see Ignaz Goldziher, On the History of Grammar among the Arabs, trans. Kinga De´ve´nyi and Tama´s Iva´nyi (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 1994), and especially Simon Hopkins, “The Language Studies of Ignaz Goldziher” Goldziher Memorial Conference, 81–157. On Wetzstein, see Ingeborg Huhn, Der Nachlass des Orientalisten Johann Gottfried Wetzstein in der Handschriftenabteilung der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), xi–xii. In an informative note, De´ve´nyi and Iva´nyi summarized what had been known to date about this failed project [63–64, n. 4]. 125 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 49. 126 HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, August 15, 1871; January 9, 1872. 127 Ibid., Fleischer to Goldziher, March 20, 1872; August 12, 1872; RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, May 26, 1872. 128 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, July 31, 1872; Ignaz Goldziher, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachgelehrsamkeit bei den Arabern: Abu l’Husein ibn Faˆris,” in G.S. I, 186–228; idem, “Aus einem Briefe Dr. Goldziher’s an Prof. Fleischer” ZDMG, 28 (1874), 161–168.

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By the fall of 1876, there was still no evidence of any progress, except that Goldziher had decided to follow up his Tha’a¯libı¯ edition with an edition of Ibn al-Sikkı¯t, which Fleischer had convinced the DMG to publish.129 But Goldziher’s silent partners were growing restless. On the train from the International Congress of Orientalists in St. Petersburg to the conference of German Orientalists in Tübingen in September 1876, Wright conveyed to Fleischer De Goeje’s frustration with Goldziher for the endless delays in the appearance of the Tha’a¯libı¯ edition. Stung by the charge, Fleischer confronted Goldziher upon his return home in a letter dated October 1, 1876: This was for me entirely new and contradicted your earlier answers to me in response to my inquiries, as well as your commitment to me when you took over this project. Though it pains me, I must give you the option either to honor your commitment or by the end of the year to return to me the material that I provided you with for the editing of the book. It is my intention to fulfill finally, perhaps belatedly, the promise I made to Consul Wetzstein, upon his request, when he gifted me that manuscript.130

The letter was doubly distressing for Goldziher because it also impugned his integrity. He had never lied to Fleischer: My manuscript for publication along with an introduction of several quires has been in Leiden since the fall of 1872. I am not guilty for the delay in printing, nor is it my fault that a few pages would come to me from Leiden to Budapest every three or four months, then ever more sparingly till they finally stopped. In this regard, I expressed my displeasure often to Mr. Rittershausen, who mediated between me and the publisher. A few months ago, in fact, I informed Mr. Rittershausen that the whole thing had become a burden to me because I am no friend of sea serpents (Seeschlangen). If you are prepared to buy this explanation, then you will see that it is not correct to blame me for not having delivered a print-ready manuscript for years. This is the objective side of the matter. But since the matter is getting a full airing, I wish to add a subjective consideration. I cannot deny that I have long lost any pleasure in working on the book. I have decided instead to put out soon the Kita¯b al-alfa¯z of Ibn al-Sikkı¯t, the very book which Tha’a¯libı¯ plundered in such a crude manner. Once Ibn al-Sikkı¯t is in the hands of Arabists, Tha’a¯libı¯ will be of no value because I intend to give in the beginning of the relevant chapters [in Arabic] the synonyms which are in Fiqh al-lugha but not in Ibn al-Sikkı¯t. Since this will require but a very small space, it will be possible to bring in the materials Wright provided. Why publish an arid work of a plagiarist if the whole tasteful original is available? This is my scholarly opinion. To be considered, in addition, is the fact that Fiqh al-lugha along with The Mysteries of the Arabic Language [in Arabic, the second part of Tha’a¯libı¯’s work, which Goldziher had uncovered only while in Leiden] have already appeared in Cairo in a good and correct edition (though without an index), and which is available for a song. I have lost all my respect for Tha’a¯libı¯. Moreover, his character as a plagiarist I stressed and proved in my essay on Ibn Fa¯ris [in Arabic], even that he took for his own title the title of Ibn Fa¯ris’s Fiqh al-lugha [in Arabic]. Ibn al-Sikkı¯t is a primary source for Arabic synonyms, the only valuable one we have and you, honorable Professor, convinced yourself from a sample that I gave you just

129

HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, October 24,

1875. 130

Ibid., Fleischer to Goldziher, October 1, 1876.

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299

how valuable this work is and how superfluous it makes Tha’a¯libı¯ and how I have striven to be worthy of editing this edition. Since then I have again put in a great deal of work and can assure you that Kita¯b al-alfa¯z [in Arabic] will offer Arabic lexicography in Europe a significant advantage. By making use of Wright’s material and of material from six other manuscripts brought to the fore by Wetzstein’s manuscript, whose results will be incorporated, your promise to Wetzstein will have been fulfilled […]. If we lay this out clearly to Consul Wetzstein (and I would gladly take the trouble […] to write him a detailed letter), I have no doubt that he would regard it as fulfilling your promise […]. Laziness, shirking my responsibility, and lame excuses have never been my style and I am deeply, very deeply hurt that I could be suspected of this, my cherished Professor.131

Moved by Goldziher’s anguish, Fleischer answered the day he received the letter to reassure him of his confidence. He deeply regretted having given too much credence to the criticism of Wright and De Goeje and asked Goldziher to write to Wetzstein, seeking his approval for the mid-course correction, which Goldziher promptly did.132 Goldziher had taken several courses with Wetzstein in the language, life, and customs of the Bedouins while studying in Berlin in 1868–1869. On the basis of that contact, Goldziher asked him in a letter dated August 15, 1873 for a recommendation for his forthcoming trip to Damascus and for help in gaining access to the private library of a certain Ibn Farchi, who “if I err not is a respected Jew.”133 On October 15, 1876, Goldziher approached Wetzstein again, this time regarding his Tha’a¯libı¯ manuscript. He indicated at the outset that prior to preparing it for publication, Fleischer had persuaded another one of his students, Dr. Steiner, who was now a professor of theology in Zurich, to undertake the task. His post, however, deprived him of time and Steiner returned the manuscript. Goldziher then proceeded to lay out for Wetzstein the mileposts of his saga. Years of delay caused by internal problems at Brill proved to be the major impediment. In the interim, Goldziher became utterly disillusioned with Tha’a¯libı¯’s plagiarism and convinced of the greater value of Ibn al-Sikkı¯t’s work: Kita¯b al-alfa¯z is a wide-ranging, complete Arabic synonymy in which nearly every word is illustrated by one or more – in part otherwise unknown – shawa¯hid [in Arabic – prooftexts], which in turn are interpreted either by the learned commentary of Tibrı¯zı¯ [a famous medieval philologist and commentator on early Arabic poetry] or the published hama¯sa [a collection of ancient Arabic poetry, mostly on themes of war]. All in all, the work is a treasure of learning in the field of lugha, and the DMG has shown its appreciation of my minor service to Arabic studies by agreeing to cover the cost of the edition.

131 132

RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, October 7, 1876. HASL, Goldziher Letters, Box 10, Fleischer File, Fleischer to Goldziher, October 9,

1876. 133

Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nachlass Johann Gottfried Wetzstein, I, Kasten 5, Mappe G. Upon his return, Goldziher wrote that he had found Ibn Farchi’s library less significant than Wetzstein had led him to believe (Goldziher, G.S. I, 347).

300

14. Beyond the Classroom

Goldziher specifically asked Wetzstein whether he would accept his inclusion of Tha’a¯libı¯ entries not found in Ibn al-Sikkı¯t as fulfilling Fleischer’s pledge. At the end of this long epistle, Goldziher added a pitiful postscript apologizing for its messy state: After finishing this letter, I noticed its disorderliness and crude handwriting. Honored Consul, I beg of you a thousand times to forgive me. I wrote under the press of an overwhelming job-related workload, yet was in a great rush not to delay this letter any longer, in order to learn whether this matter that weighs so heavily on me was resolvable.134

Mercifully, Wetzstein’s approval came promptly, though the surfacing of a second manuscript of Ibn al-Sikkı¯t in Paris brought yet another three-year delay. Goldziher lacked the money to afford a visit to the Bibliothe`que Nationale and did not acquire the manuscript on loan until September 1882. The wait had not been in vain, however, because the Paris manuscript represented a different line of transmission from that of the Leiden manuscript on which he had been working, thus giving him a final text more approximate to the original. Reenergized, Goldziher wrote three days after its arrival that he now hoped to publish by the beginning of 1884, if not sooner.135 But by early 1886, Goldziher was forced to admit to Fleischer that he could not complete the edition. He was absorbed with other projects, including: a critical review of Hartwig Derenbourg’s Judeo-Arabic edition of Judah Halevi’s famous Kuzari; a textually based essay on the Almohades in North Africa; and the first volume of his Muhammedanische Studien. Regarding Halevi’s Arabic style, Goldziher observed that “it was often downright horrible, a fact always to be borne in mind when correcting the original.” To prove his point, Goldziher asked Fleischer for help on a four-line passage that he found impenetrable in which Halevi averred the superiority of the biblical cantillation system over the system of Arabic metrics. And then to the crux: When will my circumstances allow me to go to press with my Kita¯b al-alfa¯z? Whenever I put that question to myself, I am driven to the conclusion that the unsettled life I lead is unsuited for me to take on the correcting of [passages] from lexicographers, ancient poets – which abound in the text – and their likes. Since I had the honor of sharing this opinion with you in person in [Alt] Schönefeld [in August 1885], I have become more convinced of it than ever. Should the Kita¯b al-alfa¯z be made available to Arabists in my name, then I want it to be an exemplary edition, which requires above all that a calm and composed individual do the corrections. I could have provided the publisher long ago with a print-ready manuscript. But a clean manuscript is not enough to produce a clean edition. At the moment, I am obliged to let corrections lie for weeks.136 134

I. Wetzstein, Kasten 5, Mappe G. Heinrich Steiner had joined the DMG in 1865. Die Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft 1845–1895: Ein Ueberblick (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1895), 71. 135 RLC, Fleischer Letters, Goldziher File, Goldziher to Fleischer, September 17, 1882. 136 Ibid., Goldziher to Fleischer, April 18, 1886.

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301

Some sixteen months later, with no progress to report, Goldziher unburdened himself to Fleischer in a seven-page epistle filled with pathos. The problem was not providing the publisher with a collated and annotated text, but with faultless proofreading and the investigation of endless unforeseen questions that crop up in the process. Goldziher’s high standards, enervating job, fragile health, and other research interests kept him from producing a final, definitive edition. He pleaded with Fleischer to understand his precarious state: I am constantly warned by my doctor and closest friends to give up every intellectual and scholarly activity outside my job. They posit the impossibility of this going on much longer. My office responsibilities demand all of me and my time. Yet since 1876, I have been unable to bring myself to heed their ever more insistent warning to declare myself finished as a scholar. If God helps but a little longer, a volume of Islamic studies of some thirty quires, wrested from my nights and vacations, will go to press. Can I really undertake yet another task, whose execution would demand of me the utmost concentration on important and unavoidable details? I do not know where I should find the time, even if I could muster the intellectual energy[…]. I have just finished my six-week vacation and will soon be attending meetings as secretary till late at night and recording everything confidential in the minutes, [all this] after having spent a full day in deadening interaction with many dozens of people, in checking marriage documents, in handling the declarations and requests directed my way in these and other matters, in guiding the complicated administration of our well-run religious school system, in conducting the manifold correspondence of our community and finally in [enduring] the flow of criticism and remarks of my superiors […]. Despite all this, I cling tenaciously to my scholarship for which I feel a calling, and people close to me cannot figure out where I find the time to continue to pursue my academic, literary, and research work.137

Prior to receiving Goldziher’s letter on September 3, Fleischer had decided to append to his essay (1854) on Tha’a¯libı¯, about to reappear in the third volume of his collected writings, a long note recounting the fate of Wetzstein’s Tha’a¯libı¯ manuscript and announcing that Goldziher’s forthcoming edition of Ibn al-Sikkı¯t, which was to be published by the DMG, would serve to redeem his pledge to Wetzstein. In a considerate gesture, Fleischer had sent a copy of that note in advance to Goldziher, which gave him the chance to soften the finality of his previous negative stance to a simple “not yet.” At the same time, Goldziher returned to Fleischer his cherished Wetzstein manuscript of Tha’a¯libı¯.138 There was only one other brief letter from Goldziher to Fleischer before the latter’s death. The correspondence thus drew to a close with a mutual 137

Ibid., Goldziher to Fleischer, August 30, 1887. Ibid., Goldziher to Fleischer, September, 4, 1877; Fleischer, Kleinere Schriften, 3, 162. In their aforementioned note [63–64], De´ve´nyi and Iva´nyi reported that in Goldziher’s papers they found “two large folders from the early 1870s containing indices and notes on poets occurring in the text [of Ibn al-Sikkı¯t],” as well as “a large file containing the whole work completely edited and ready to be published.” 138

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feeling of disappointment at the failure of a resolution that would have relieved Fleischer of the burden of an unfulfilled promise, while sparing Goldziher the unease of having to edit the work of a plagiarist. Both men lived by a rigorous ethical code. Knowledge of what the project had meant to Fleischer must have compounded Goldziher’s lingering sense of remorse. But his scholarly agenda had moved well beyond the confined horizon of philology. In marveling at the frontiers Goldziher conquered while entrapped in adversity, we are usually unmindful of the projects never brought to fruition. Most importantly, Fleischer’s unwavering support during those first two decades of his torment, when Goldziher was most vulnerable, kept him from plunging into the abyss between his needs and his aspirations.

List of First Publications 1) “Catalogues and Critical Scholarship: The Fate of Jewish Collections in NineteenthCentury Germany,” Tablet, December 28, 2015, 1–8. 2) “Wives and Wissenschaft: The Domestic Seedbed of Critical Scholarship,” Gender and Jewish History, eds. Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 27-43. 3) “Moritz Steinschneider on the Future of Judaism after Emancipation,” my translation of “Dato shel Steinschneider al Atid ha-Yahadut le-ahar ha-Emanzipatzion,” Peamim, 129 (Fall 2002), Makhon ben Zvi le-Heker Kehillot Yisrael ba-Mizrah, 61–71. 4) “Schechter’s Indebtedness to Zunz,” Jewish Historical Studies, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 48 (2016), 9–16. 5) “Schechter’s Seminary: Polarities in Balance,” Conservative Judaism, 55, no. 2, (Winter 2003), 3–23. 6) “Scholem on Zunz: An Egregious Misreading,” Prooftexts, 38:2 (Fall 2020). 7) “Missing in Translation: The Fate of the Talmud in the Struggle for Equality and Integration in Germany,” Wissenschaft des Judentums Beyond Tradition, eds. Dorothea M. Salzer, Chanan Gafni, Hanan Harif (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 167-84. 8) “Unity amid Disunity: The Emergence of the German-Jewish Einheitsgemeinde,” delivered at the conference “Jews and Citizens – Juden und Bürger,” Technische Universität Braunschweig, Oct. 11, 2018 (unpublished). 9) “Leopold Zunz on the Hebrew Bible,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, 102, no. 3 (Summer 2012), 431–54. 10) “In the Shadow of Wellhausen: Heinrich Graetz as a Biblical Critic,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, 109, no. 3 (Summer 2019), 384–405. 11) “Coming to Terms with Biblical Criticism,” Conservative Judaism, 57:3 (Spring 2005), 3–22. 12) “Converging Cognates: The Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in NineteenthCentury Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 55 (2010), 3–36. 13) “Moritz Steinschneider: The Vision Beyond the Books,” Studies on Steinschneider, eds. Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2012), 3–36. 14) “Beyond the Classroom: The Enduring Relationship between Heinrich L. Fleischer and Ignaz Goldziher,” Leipziger Beiträge zur Orientforschung, 30, eds. Hans-Georg Ebert und Thora Hanstein (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2013), 75–114.

Index of Modern Authors Albeck, C. 108 Albright, W.F. 184 Alexander, G.E. 129, 132, 134 Angelier, F. 295 Aschheim, S.E. 110 Bacher, W. 106, 118, 231, 285 Baer, S. 103 Bamberger, F. 123, 144 Baron, S.W. 133, 238 Baudissin, W. 289 Bechtoldt, H.-J. 112, 126, 138, 142, 144 Beer, B. 102 Belke, I. 286, 290 Ben Yehuda, E. 148, 226 Ben-Chorin, S. 112 Ben-Horin, M. 76, 80, 82, 85, 89 Bentwich, N. 66, 69, 72, 78–82, 84–85, 87 Berdichevsky, M.J. 107 Berliner, A. 32, 142 Bernfeld, I. 50, 253 Bernfeld, S. 123, 125, 177 Biale, D. 96–97 Bialik, H.N. 107 Bilski, E.D. 45 Bischoff, E. 113 Blau, B. 134 Bloch, J.S. 117 Bobzin, M. 200 Brämer, A. 131 Brann, M. 17, 40, 46, 124, 151–152, 157–159, 182 Braun, E. 45 Brecher, G. 240–241 Brenner, M. 128, 131, 163 Brettler, M.Z. 147, 164

Breuer, E. 143, 158, 161 Breuer, M. 131, 133 Brisman, S. 32, 229 Brockelmann, C. 227 Brody, R. 113 Brüll, N. 120–121 Brumlik, M. 26 Buber, S. 103 Burstein, M. 132 Carlebach, E. 122 Cassel, D. 122–123, 260 Cohen, H. 173 Cohen, J. 114–115 Cohen, R.I. 82 Cohn, M.J. 271 Conrad, L.I. 285–286, 293–294 Cowen, P. 73–74 Craig, G.A. 203 Craster, E. 34 Davidson, H.A. 259 Davidson, C. 86 Davidson, I. 72, 80, 106 De Wette, W.M.L. 145–147 Delitzsch, F. 117, 233, 247–248 Derenbourg, J. 231 Dubnow, S. 129 Dukes, L. 264 Duschak, M. 239, 241 Eisenmenger, J.A. 201 Elbogen, I. 142, 146, 274 Ellenson, D. 132 Epstein, I. 114 Eron, M. 138–139, 153 Ewald, H. 138, 277, 224

306

Index of Modern Authors

Fackenheim, E.L. 173 Fierstein, R.E. 182 Fine, D.J. 92 Finkelstein, L. 75, 93, 184 Fishbane, M. 140 Fishman, T. 113 Fleischer, H.L. 202–203, 219, 274 Fraisse, O. 267 Frank, A. 230 Frankel, Z. 101, 123 Freidenreich, H. 133 Freund, I. 129–130, 133 Friedman, S. 19 Friedmann, M. 105 Fries, J.F. 116 Fück, J. 202, 244 Fürst, J. 32–33, 35, 122, 271, 274 Gafni, C. 158 Geiger, A. 11, 13–15, 138, 154–155, 175, 210–212, 293 Geiger, L. 11–12, 32, 130–131, 138, 144 Geller, S.A. 181 Gerber, N. 199 Ginsberg, H.L. 180, 184, 186–187, 194 Ginzberg, E. 81 Ginzberg, L. 106–107 Glatzer, N.N. 25, 41–56, 144, 253, 287 Goldberg, A. 250 Goldberg, H.E. 85 Goldin, J. 75 Goldschmidt, E. 112 Goldschmidt, L. 124–127 Goldziher, I. 156, 205–206, 243, 247, 267–268, 273, 275–279, 281–289, 291–293, 296–297, 299 Gosche, R. 210–211, 216–218, 226–228, 230–231, 240, 297 Grab, W. 26 Gräber, E. 153 Graetz, H. 19, 79–80, 107, 115, 123, 154, 157–158, 160–174, 176, 182, 201 Grafton, A.T. 29 Greenberg, M. 157, 187–189, 191, 193 Greive, W. 26

Gruenewald, M. 132 Grünbaum, M. 107 Ha’am, A. 139, 177 Haber, P. 268, 275 HaCohen, R. 138–139, 141, 151, 153 Halkin, A.S. 193 Haran, M. 140 Harris, H. 292 Hasselhoff, G.K. 258 Heine, H. 112 Heinemann, Y. 108 Heller, B. 282, 285, 293 Heller, M.J. 113 Hellwing, I.A. 117 Henne, T. 26 Herlitz, G. 120 Hertz, D. 42, 45 Herxheimer, S. 166 Heschel, A.J. 94 Heschel, S. 211 Hirschfeld, H. 122, 241 Hiscott, W. 26 Hoffmann, D. 119, 124–125, 155 Holborn, H. 201 Honigmann, P. 134 Hopkins, S. 297 Howard, T.A. 3 Huhn, I. 297 Hyman, P.E. 54 Idel, M. 111 Isler, M. 32–33 Italiener, B. 52 Ivry, A.L. 210 Jahuda Ibn Pakuda, B. ben 261 Japhet, S. 140 Jellinek, A. 100–101 John, U. 203 Jones, E. 127 Jost, I.M. 31, 43, 121, 141, 154, 202 Kadari, T. 106–107 Kalmar, I.D. 199 Kaplan, L. 138

Index of Modern Authors Kaplan, M.A. 42 Karpp, G. 174 Katz, J. 5, 115–116, 131, 201 Kaufmann, D. 144 Kaufmann, Y. 157, 173, 179–181, 187, 192–193 Keller, V. 132 Kirschner, B. 120 Kister, M. 67, 75 Kohut, G.A. 214, 242, 249 Koningsveld, P.Sj. 206, 270, 295 Kramer, M. 200 Krapf, T. 157, 188–189, 192–193 Kraus, H.-J. 144, 154, 174 Kretschmann, C. 26 Krochmal, N. 7

Meirovich, H.W. 67, 183 Meisel, J. 169, 173 Meyer, M.A. 131 Michael, R. 154, 158–160, 169 Miller, J. 82 Miller, M.L. 239 Mintz, A. 112, 122 Mintz, S.L. 76 Morais, S. 182 Morgenstern, M. 128, 133 Munk, S. 259, 261

Landauer, S. 232 Langton, D.R. 88 Lazarus, M. 286 Lebrecht, F. 36 Leiman, S. 122 Levine, B.A. 194 Levy, J. 120, 220, 246 Lewis, B. 200–201 Liberles, R. 131, 133 Liska, V. 110 Loewe, H. 290 Loewe, R. 66 Long, B.O. 184–185 Löw, I. 296 Lowenstein, S.M. 44, 143

Ormos, I. 285

Malter, H. 255 Maimonides, M. 262 Mangold, S. 200, 202–204, 206, 222– 223, 287 Manuel, F.E. 116 Marchand, S.L. 200, 202 Marcus, J.R. 215 Margolis, M.A. 182 Marx, A. 34, 46–48, 64–65, 212–213, 216, 229, 238–239, 243, 249–252, 265 Massmann, S. 26 Maybaum, S. 42, 46, 155

307

Neubauer, A. 231 Neusner, J. 114 Nicholson, E. 194 Niehoff, M.R. 11, 101, 141, 146

Pasto, J. 147 Patai, R. 286 Paul, S. 185 Penslar, D.J. 128, 199 Perlitt, L. 138, 160–161, 223 Pinner, M. 122 Plaut, G.W. 112 Polansky, A. 129 Popper, J. 154 Porges, M.B. 158, 162 Preissler, H. 207, 217, 221–222, 234, 243–246, 255, 270, 276, 296 Puschner, M. 26 Pyka, M. 157, 173 Rabinowicz, R.N. 37 Rabinowitch, S.P. 109 Rabinowitz, D. 179 Rahmer, M. 107 Rawics, M. 120 Rawidowicz, S. 7, 252 Rawnitzki, Y.H. 107 Rees, D.A. 35 Reif, S.C. 67–68, 77 Reissner, H.G. 46 Rengstorf, K.H. 247–249 Reuschel, W. 222

308

Index of Modern Authors

Rice, E. 127 Rofé, A. 145 Rogerson, J.W. 144–145, 146 Rohling, A. 117 Rohrbacher, S. 115 Römer, T. 161, 170, 177 Rosen, D. 144 Rosenmann, M. 46, 104, 229 Rubashaw, Z. 139 Rudersdorf, M. 203 Sachs, M. 8, 100, 143, 264 Salsberger, G. 112 Sammter, A. 120 Sandler, A. 132 Sarna, N. 154, 157, 175, 185, 189–190 Schad, M. 144 Schäfer, P. 95, 203 Schechter, S. 61, 66–71, 73, 75, 77–78, 82–86, 89–93, 98, 105, 108, 110, 183 Scheiber, A. 156, 282 Scheyer, S. 262 Schieferl, F.X. 116 Schiller-Szinessy, S.M. 66 Schine, R.S. 110 Schirmann, H. 263 Scholem, G. 35–37, 58, 61, 95–97, 109– 111, 124 Schorsch, I. 5–10, 14, 17–19, 21–23, 25, 29, 57–58, 60, 64, 68, 70–72, 95, 102, 105, 110, 117, 130–131, 141, 147, 167, 173, 199, 213, 241, 245– 246, 252, 256–257, 265, 270, 273– 274, 277, 287–288 Schwab, M. 209, 250 Schwarz, L.W. 187 Schwartz, S. 98 Scult, M. 74, 77, 80, 82, 93, 181 Seeman, D. 179 Seybold, C.F. 202, 204, 221 Shalom, M.I. 123 Shargel, B.R. 85, 181 Shavit, Y. 138–139, 153 Silberstein, J. 133 Simon, R. 206, 247, 296 Simon, U. 189

Ska, J.L. 158–159 Slyomovics, P. 193 Speiser, E.A. 190 Soloweitshik, M. 139 Sommer, B.D, 173, 176 Sperling, S.D. 189, 191 Spottiswoode, W. 242 Stein, J.B. 76, 79 Steinschneider, M. 22, 34–38, 59–64, 68, 132, 142, 207, 213–215, 229, 231, 235, 237, 240–246, 248–253, 255–266, 291–292 Steinthal, H. 286, 290 Stemberger, G. 104–105 Sterling, E. 3, 5, 25–26 Stern, E. 112 Stockhorst, S. 66 Strack, H.L. 118 Tal, U. 5, 183 Theodor, J. 107 Thorbecke, H. 207 Thulin, M. 151 Tov, E. 162 Trautmann-Waller, C. 292 Türk, M. 134 Ullmann, L. 211 Vargon, S. 138, 153, 169 Vatke, W. 145, 177 Viezel, E. 161 Vogel, K. 203 Volkov, S. 3, 134 Von Hammer, J. 202 Von Hehl, U. 203 Vörös, K. 281 Wagner, E. 212, 214 Wagner, S. 205 Weber, F. 79, 116 Weil, Go. 57 Weil, Gu. 211 Weinfeld, M. 169–170 Weitzman, S. 170 Wellhausen, J. 169, 178

Index of Modern Authors Wertheimer, J. 183, 187–188 Wiener, Ad. 62 Wiener, Al. 132 Weis, R.D. 175 Weiss, I.H. 104 Wiese, C. 178, 204, 221 Wilke, C. 210 Winter, J. 99, 120 Wolf, G. 55 Wolin, R. 110

309

Wünsche, A. 99, 107, 118, 120 Ya’ari, A. 74, 77 Yahuda, A.S. 261, 265 Zadoff, N. 110 Zunz, L. 12, 29, 31–32, 43, 49, 95, 97– 98, 103, 105, 121, 137, 139–151, 202, 226, 253–254, 256, 265 Zussman, Y. 75

Index of Subjects Abulafia, Abraham 100 Adler, Cyrus 93 Aggada 99, 106, 118, 119, 141, 256, 260 Albeck, Chanoch 10, 107, 108 Albright, William Foxwell 183–185 Alt, Albrecht 186 Anger, Rudolf 229, 230 Anti-Semitism 20, 23, 25, 99, 116, 117, 119, 124, 183, 284 Apocrypha 91, 102, 119 Asher, Abraham 229 Ashkenazi see Jewry, Ashkenazi Avoth de-Rabbi Nathan 9, 67–69, 105 Bacher, Wilhelm 106, 118n, 160, 231, 234, 262, 292 Bahir 35 Bandinel, Bulkeley 33 Baneth, Eduard 231 Barth, Jacob 231 Baudissin, Wolf 289 Beer, Bernhard 101–102 Beer, Michael 249 Beerman, Levy Moses 42 Bellermann, Johann Joachim 121 Ben Sira 68, 76, 88, 91 Benjamin, Walter 109, 110 Berdyczewski, Micha 107–108 Bereshit Rabbah 10, 98, 107 Berliner, Adolf 291 Bernfeld, Simon 125 Bernstein, Aron David 150–151 Bertheau, Ernst 232–233 Bialik, Hayim Nahman 107–108, 109, 193 Biblical criticism 91–92, 179–195, 287, 291–292

– and Graetz 158–178 – and Zunz 137–157, 167–168 Bibliothèque nationale 204, 250, 253, 300 Bischoff, Erich 113, 120, 124 Bleichrode, Isaak 124 Blickerman, Elias 185 Blood libel 122 Bodleian Library 22, 32, 33, 50, 76, 146, 213–214, 228, 229, 252–253, 254, 259, 261, 262, 263 Bomberg, Daniel 113, 124 Börne, Karl Ludwig 50 Brann, Markus 124, 156–157 Brecher, Gideon 62–63, 239–241, 261 British Museum 32, 50, 76, 253 Brockelmann, Carl 227 Brockhaus, Hermann 223, 229, 230 Buber, Martin 191 Buber, Salomon 9–10, 102–103 Buddha 263–264 Buxtorf lexica 148 Byron 49 Cairo Geniza 23, 38, 67, 68, 76–77, 83, 90, 92, 105–106, 199 Canning, George 50 Caspari, Carl 207–208 Cassel, David 123, 240, 257–258, 260 Cassel, Selig 64–65 Chasidism see Ḥasidism Chiarini, Luigi 121–122 Christianity 20, 22, 25, 26, 72, 80, 99, 102, 114–116, 118, 121, 168, 192, 200–201, 214, 223, 235, 257, 260, 265

312

Index of Subjects

–

and scholarship 29, 72, 78, 79, 80, 91, 138, 160, 161, 164, 170, 176– 177, 178, 183, 186, 187, 248, 265 – and the Zunzes 44–46, 51, 54 Chronicles 139, 140, 142, 144, 145, 150, 171 Church Fathers 11, 102, 107, 160 Chwolson, Daniel 216–218, 219, 245 Cohen, Gerson D. 179, 180 Cohn, Moses J. 271 Columbia University 4, 185 4 Communal secession 128, 130–134 Communal unity see Einheitsgemeinde Conservative Judaism 74, 85, 87, 93, 179, 188 Cowen, Philip 73, 74 Daniel 140, 144, 163, 165 de Goeje, Michael Jan 206, 276, 298– 299 de Lamartine, Alphonse 49 de Leon, Moses 8, 100 de Perceval, Caussin 202 de Sacy, Sylvestre 202, 204–205, 208, 209, 217, 221, 243, 245, 282 de Wette, Wilhelm Martin Lebrecht 144–146, 166 Delitzsch, Franz 118, 174, 206, 207, 247–248, 249, 264, 265, 289 Derenbourg, Hartwig 23, 300 Derenbourg, Joseph 23, 38, 231 Deuteronomy 137, 144–145, 149–150, 155, 171, 184, 194 Deutsche-Morgenländische Gesellschaft, die (DMG) see German Oriental Society Dieterici, Friedrich Heinrich 249 Documentary hypothesis 149, 154, 157, 170, 180, 184, 190, 287 Dorn, Bernard 217 Dozy, Reinhart 275, 291 Dubnow, Simon 181 Dukes, Leopold 264 Ebers, Georg Moritz 276, 277n, 278 Ecclesiastes 158, 163–164, 176

Ehrenberg, Julie 41, 42, 43–44, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54 Ehrenberg, Philipp 40, 41, 42, 43–44, 45, 46, 49, 52, 55 Ehrenberg, Samuel Meyer 40, 42–43, 44, 47 Ehrentreu, Heinrich 37 Eichhorn, J.A.F. 32 Eiger, Akiva 219 Einheitsgemeinde 129–134 Eisenmenger, Johann Andreas 115–116, 117, 121, 201 Ettenberg, Sylvia 86 Emancipation 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 25–26, 30, 55, 58–59, 61–62, 70, 72, 87, 96, 116, 128–129, 134, 178, 238, 255 – Catholic 50 Enlightenment 96 – German 6, 256 – Hebrew see Haskalah Entdecktes Judenthum 115–116, 121, 201 Eötvös, József 269, 274–275, 276 Esther 20, 137, 163, 165, 176 Ewald, Heinrich 52, 137n, 138, 160, 164, 166, 177, 223–225 Exodus 137, 155, 156, 170, 172, 190, 191 Ezekiel 137, 140, 150, 154, 167–168 Ezra-Nehemiah 140, 145n Finkelstein, Louis 93, 183–185 Fiqh al-lugha 272, 276, 296–298 Fischel, David Gabriel 43 Fleischer, Georg 269 Fleischer, Heinrich Leberecht 8, 23, 120, 174, 199, 202–203, 204–205, 206– 221, 222, 223, 224–226, 227, 229, 230, 231, 232–236, 237, 241–247, 249, 250, 252, 267–302 Fox, Seymour 188 France 5, 13, 14 Franck, Adolphe, 8, 230

Index of Subjects Frankel, Zacharias 16–19, 23, 47–48, 66, 67, 105, 106, 123, 162, 173, 182, 221, 224, 228, 244, 256–257 Frazer, James 80–81 Freud, Sigmund 127 Freudenberg, Moses Wolf 289 Freund, Ismar 133 Freytag, Georg Wilhelm 209, 211, 245 Friedlander, David 121 Friedlander, Israel 84, 183 Friedmann, Meir (Ish Shalom) 9, 104– 105, 123 Fries, Jakob Friedrich 116 Fürst, Julius 35, 118, 143, 211, 214, 231, 274 Fürstenthal, Raphael J. 261–262 Gabirol, Solomon (Shlomo) ibn 14, 60, 210 Gans, Eduard 45, 46n, 50, 153n Geiger, Abraham 11–15, 16, 21, 23, 40, 54, 58, 69, 83, 90, 138n, 154–155, 174–175, 210–212, 214, 216, 221, 225, 228, 231, 235, 236, 244, 245, 246, 271, 279, 291, 292 Geiger, Ludwig 40, 212 Genesis 124, 137, 150–151, 154, 155, 156, 170, 172, 189, 190, 256, 257n German Oriental Society 103, 137, 199, 210, 212, 213, 215, 221–236, 244, 270, 271, 277, 280, 298, 299 Gesenius, Wilhelm 36, 120, 218 Gillman, Neil 193 Ginsberg, H.L. 179–180, 183, 184, 185, 186–187, 194 Ginzberg, Louis 81, 84, 105, 107–108 Glatzer, Nahum N. 41 Glaubenswissenschaft 18 Goethe 44, 249, 284 Goldenthal, Jacob 227 Goldschmidt, Lazarus 112, 124–127 Goldsmid, Sir Isaac Lyon 50, 253 Goldziher, Ignaz 156, 205–206, 231, 235, 245, 247, 267–302 – and discrimination 284–286

313

–

Gemeinde post in Budapest 279– 282, 287, 289–290 – and Islam 292–295 – and Judaism 286–287, 291–292 – on myth 286–289, 290 Goldziher, Laura 268 Gordis, Robert 183 Gosche, Richard 208, 210, 215, 228–229 Gottheil, Richard 78 Graetz, Heinrich 19–21, 25, 77, 79, 83, 107, 123, 124, 154, 156, 158–178, 182, 220, 228 – on monotheism 172–174 Graf, Karl Heinrich 156, see also GrafWellhausen hypothesis Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis 155, 156, 157 Greenberg, Moshe 180, 187–188, 189, 190–191 Greenberg, Simon 187 Gruenewald, Max 57, 132 Grünbaum, Max 107 Gutzkow, Karl 45 Ha’am, Aḥad 84, 109, 110, 138–139, 181, 192, 193 Halakhah 10, 11, 13, 15, 37, 71, 82, 119, 201, 256, 260 Halberstam, Solomon Hayyim 69, 80 Halevi, Judah (Yehudah) 14, 231, 232, 240, 261, 300 Hamburg 31–32, 34, 40, 45, 47, 50–51, 53, 64, 128, 131, 132–133, 142, 173, 266 von Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph 201–202, 272 Harden, Maximilian 125 Harnack, Adolf 174 Hartmann, Anton Theodor 164 Harvard University 4, 72, 81 Ḥasidism 7, 78, 88, 89, 129 Haskalah 7, 261 Hassler, Konrad Dietrich 209, 221 Hatala, Péter 275, 278 Hatam Sofer see Schreiber, Moses

314

Index of Subjects

Hebrew Bible 3, 7, 8, 11, 15, 20–21, 25, 63, 71, 72, 91, 97, 99, 112, 202, 207, 218, 224, 239, 243, 247, 283 – and Graetz 158–178 – at JTS 179–195 – and Zunz 137–157, 167–168 Hebrew poetry 14, 99 Hebrew Union College 93 Hebrew University 36, 57, 95, 187 Hegel 19, 45, 173n, 183 Heine, Heinrich 8, 50, 112n, 153n Heinemann, Yitzhak 108 Hengstenberg, Ernest Wilhelm 170 Herder, Johann Gottfried 45, 166 Hertz, Joseph H. 67, 183 Herxheimer, Salomon 166n Heschel, Abraham Joshua 93–94 Hildesheimer, Esriel 133 Hirsch, Samson Raphael 12–13, 58, 104, 105, 131, 271 Hirschfeld, Hartwig 231 Hochschule 63, 216, 246, 287, 290–291 Hoffman, David 118–119, 124–125, 155 Holdheim, Samuel 54 von Humboldt, Alexander 49 Hosea 168, 170, 194 Hurgronje, Christian Snouck 206, 270, 295 Hyman, Paula 41, 54 Ibn al-Sikkīt 273, 297–301 Ibn Ezra, Abraham 148, 259 Isaiah 168–169, 170, 179 Islam 7, 8, 21, 22, 23, 38, 77, 100, 199, 211, 214, 216, 217, 219, 223–224, 227, 231, 232, 235, 247, 248, 256– 260, 262, 263, 265, 283, 284, 285, 292–295, 296 – and circumcision 240–242, 248 Islamic studies 199–206, 214, 227, 233, 267–268, 269, 270 Isler, Meier 32, 40, 47 Jellinek, Adolph 8–9, 100–101, 104, 111, 228, 229–230, 242 Jeremiah 140, 167, 169, 179

Jerome 102 Jesus 88 Jewish law see Halakhah Jewish mysticism 35, 36, 78, 87–89, 140, see also Kabbalah Jewish Studies 3, 17, 63–64, 72, 80, 114, 269, see also Wissenschaft des Judentums Jewish Theological Seminary of America 73–75, 79, 81–86, 92, 94, 105 – admission of women 85–86 – and biblical criticism 179–195 Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau 17–19, 21, 54, 62, 64, 71, 92, 98, 105, 106, 118, 120, 124, 151, 159, 170, 181–183, 204, 265 Jewry – Alexandrian 16 – Ashkenazi 6, 13, 14, 23, 112, 117, 175, 199, 254, 257, 260 – English 66, 105 – German 4, 5, 13, 17, 23, 30, 46, 60, 62, 129–134 – Hungarian 131 – Islamic 22, 23, 77, 199, 211, 214, 219, 232, 258–260, 262, 265 – Russian 129 – Sephardi 8, 13, 14, 148, 182, 199, 240, 241, 254, 260–261, 263, 264, 265 – Spanish 14, 23, 148 Job 141, 159, 162, 167 Jolowicz, Heimann 240 Jost, Isaac Marcus 5, 21, 30–31, 57, 117, 121, 141, 147, 154, 201, 254 Judaism, post-Biblical 3, 4 Judeo-Arabic 22, 38, 218–219, 227, 232, 240, 254, 274n, 295 Kabbalah 8, 9, 35, 36, 58, 60, 97, 100– 101, 111, 139, 160, 229–230, 235, 260 Kallir, Elasar ben 148 Kaplan, Mordecai 74, 84, 185, 194 Karaites 7, 148, 161–162, 247, 248 Kármán, Móric 292

Index of Subjects Karo, Joseph 263 Kaufmann, David 40, 71, 144n, 151– 152, 231 Kaufmann, Yehezkel 157, 173, 179–182, 185, 186–191, 192–195 Kautsch, Emil 174, 175 Kitāb al-alfāz 297–301 Klausner, Yosef 193 Kohn, Sámuel 279 Kohut, Alexander 231 Koran see Quran Krehl, Ludolf 269 Krochmal, Nahman 7–8, 21, 66, 67, 90, 168, 225, 252 Kuzari 231, 232, 240, 256n, 261, 300 Landauer, M.H. 35 Landauer, Samuel 231, 232 Lazarus, Moritz 279, 290, 291 Lebrecht, Fürchtegott 36, 291 Leiden 22, 33 Lepsius, Karl Richard 50 Letteris, Meir 228 Leviticus 137, 150, 155, 156, 170–171 Levy, Jacob 120, 219–220, 246, 273– 274 Levy, Moritz Abraham 231 Lewandowski, Louis 49 Lewes, George Henry 49 Lewy, Israel 67, 105 Lilienthal, Max 34–35 Löw, Immanuel 231, 233, 245, 296 Löw, Leopold 292 Luther, Martin 20, 112n Luzzato, Samuel David 21, 101, 122, 138, 152–153, 168, 182 Maimonides 9, 14, 23, 67, 88–89, 101, 209, 210, 216, 228, 247, 258–259, 261–262, 266 Martini, Raymond 115 Marx, Alexander 58, 84 Masoretic text 143, 159, 161–162, 174 Massignon, Louis 295 Maybaum, Sigmund 155 Melton Research Center 188

315

Melton, Samuel 188, 190 Mendelssohn, Moses 3, 89, 114, 256n, 257 – Bible Translation 112, 143, 161, 166n Merzbacher, Abraham 36 Meyerbeer, Giacomo 249 Micah 170 Michael, Heimann Joseph 32, 142 Midrash 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 24, 25, 31, 66, 70, 71, 72, 92, 97–101, 102, 104, 105–108, 109, 111, 118, 119, 139– 141, 145, 147, 160, 161, 202, 234, 254, 256, 257, 273 Mises, Isaak 234–235 Mishnah 11, 13, 18, 66, 119, 212 Muhammed 11, 241–242, 245, 256, 294 Montefiore, Claude G. 66, 75, 78–79 Morais, Sabato 182 Müller, Friedrich Max 287, 288 Muller, Markus 232 Munich 22, 34–38, 124, 232 Munk, Salomon 23, 38, 209–210, 212, 224, 225, 228, 229, 249–250, 254, 259, 260–262 Naḥmanides 88–89, 100 Nationalism 84, 93 – German 4, 5, 6, 20, 25 Neubauer, Adolf 231 Neumann, Salomon 69–70 New Testament 49, 117, 160, 274n, 292 Nicholas I, Tzar 122 Nöldeke, Theodor 118n, 138n, 175, 206, 215, 232, 295–296 Numbers 137, 150, 156, 170 Olshausen, Justus 166 Oppenheimer, David 31, 32 Orientalism 23 Orthodox Judaism 58, 62, 87, 91, 92, 128, 132, 155, 168n, 179, 291 Paul, Shalom 185 Pentateuch see Torah Peshat 13, 176, 181, 189, 195

316

Index of Subjects

Pesiqta de Rav Kahana 9–10, 102–103 Pharisees 15 Pinner, Ephraim Moses 120, 121–123 Piyut 10, 24, 25, 60, 68, 70, 72, 102, 147–148 Popper, Julius 154 Poznanski, Samuel Abraham 73–74, 77 Prayerbook 24, 59–62, 228 Prophets 140, 156, 161, 164, 167–169, 182, 186, 218 – Early 180, 194 Protestantism 3, 20, 21, 115–116, 128, 158, 178, 183, 202, 218, 221, 222, 232 Prussia 5–6, 12, 13, 25, 30, 32, 41, 58, 102, 129–130, 131–132, 133, 170, 176, 234, 248–249, 250 Psalms 20, 24, 25, 60, 70, 91, 140, 142, 144, 145–146, 159, 162, 166–167, 169, 176 P’shat see Peshat Pugio fidei 115 Pulszky, Ferenc 276 Qumran 67, 77 Quran 11, 203, 204, 207, 211, 242, 247, 256, 274n, 283, 296 Rabbinic Judaism see Judaism, postBiblical Rabbinic literature 7, 9, 19, 30, 104, 114 Rabbinowicz, Raphael Nathan 36–37 Rahmer, Moritz 107 Ramah Camps 85 von Ranke, Leopold 4, 29 Rapoport, Shlomo Yehudah 7, 43, 59, 66, 208–209, 210, 212, 214, 225, 228, 251 Rashi 6, 7, 124 Rathenau, Walter 134 Rawicz, Victor Meyer 120–121 Rawnitsky, Jehoshua Hana 107–108 Reform Judaism 15, 54, 58, 83, 87, 90, 92, 128, 134, 154–155, 210, 216 Reiske, Johann Jakob 243 Remusat, Abel 221

Renan, Ernst 164, 209, 250, 284, 287 Riesser, Gabriel 50, 58 Ritschl, Albrecht 174 Rödiger, Emil 215, 225, 227–228 Rohling, August 117–118, 120 Rosenzweig, Franz 287 Rubo, Julius 42 Rühs, Friederich 5, 30 Saadia Gaon 23, 231, 252, 259, 263, 292 Sabians 216–217 Sachs, Michael 8, 22, 54, 99–100, 143, 225, 228, 264 Sammter, Ascher 120 Sarna, Nahum M. 188–191 von Schabelski, Elsa 125 Schecter, Mathilde 75, 77, 80, 85 Schechter, Solomon 9, 66–72, 73–94, 98, 105–106, 108, 111, 183, 185, 191 – and Conservative Judaism 87–94 – public persona 77–81 Scheyer, Simon 262 Schiller-Szinessy, Solomon Marcus 66, 72 Schleiermacher, Andreas August Ernst 222, 226 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 49 Scholem, Gershom 35–36, 37, 57–58, 61, 95–97, 108–111, 124 Schreiber, Moses 128, 131 Schreiner, Martin 231 Schürer, Emil 174 Sephardi see Jewry, Sephardi Simchowitz, Salom Schachna 234 Simon, Uriel 189 Smith, Robertson 205–206 Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews 6, 153n Soncino, Joshua Solomon 113 Song of Songs 20, 158, 163, 164, 176 Speiser, E.A. 187 Spiegel, Shalom 179 Spinoza 287, 289, 290 Stade, Bernhard 289 Stamm, Theodor 49 Steinheim, Salomon Ludwig 47

Index of Subjects Steinschneider, Auguste 237, 243, 249, 250n, 251, 259, 264, 266 Steinschneider, Moritz 21–23, 24, 33– 35, 37–38, 46–47, 48, 57–65, 68, 69– 70, 96, 98, 123, 146, 207, 208, 212– 216, 217, 221, 228–229, 230, 231, 233, 235–236, 237–266, 269, 290, 291–292 – on education 62–64 – and faith 61–62, 64 – on Hebrew 244–245 Steinthal, Heymann 286, 290, 291 Strack, Hermann 118 Strauss, David Friedrich 49, 52 Sulzberger, Mayer 76, 80, 82, 89 Supersessionism 15, 21, 91, 156, 177, 221 Synagogue 24–26, 31, 70, 71, 86, 88, 92, 100, 102, 105, 109, 141, 142, 146– 147, 149, 265, 286 Synagogue sermon 7, 8, 31, 97, 254 Szold, Benjamin 159 Szold, Henrietta 85–86 Talmud 5, 9, 11, 13, 16, 18, 19 63, 66, 67, 78, 99, 102, 112–127, 139, 159, 179, 181, 234, 239, 240, 241, 273, 289, 291, 292 – Christian attacks on 114–118, 123 – European printing history 113 – Goldschmidt’s translation 124–127 – Munich manuscript 36–37, 124 – Yerushalmi 18, 76, 82, 119 Taylor, Charles 80 Tchernowitz, Chaim 193 Teachers Institute 74, 84–86 Tha’ālibī 276, 296–299, 301 Theodor, Julius 10, 97–98, 106–107 Tiktin, Solomon 90 von Treitschke, Heinrich 20, 25 Trefort, Ágoston 275, 278 Torah 21, 25, 60, 61–62, 70, 92, 102, 104, 114, 138, 139, 142, 145, 149, 150, 152–153, 154–155, 156, 161, 169–172, 179, 180, 182, 184, 186, 194, 218, 287, 292

317

Ullman, Lion 211 University of Berlin 4, 5, 20, 25, 30, 43, 46n, 122, 249 University of Cambridge 4, 66, 68, 72, 76, 79–81, 90 Vámbéry, Ármin 288 Varnhagen, Rahel 49, 52 Veit, Moritz 143 Victoria, Queen 50, 127, 253 Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden see Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews Wahrmann, Mór 281 Weber, Ferdinand 79, 116 Weil, Gotthold 57, 58 Weil, Gustav 211 Weimar 23, 129, 133, 134, 249 Weiss, Isaac Hirsch 9, 104 Wellhausen, Julius 21, 154, 157, 160, 167, 169–171, 175, 177, 178, 181, 183, 185, 186, 194, see also GrafWellhausen hypothesis Wetzstein, Johann Gottfried 296–301 Winter, Jakob 98–99, 118, 119–120 Wissenschaft des Judentums 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 17–18, 21, 24, 26, 29, 31, 35, 58, 66, 68–69, 71, 74, 79–80, 88, 95–96, 109–111, 121, 138–139, 150, 153, 157, 160, 176, 203–204, 214, 229, 232, 237, 252, 254, 261, 265, 291 – and Islamic studies 199–206, 211, 232 Wohlhill, Friederike Reichel 52 Wolf, Friedrich August 144 Wolf, Gerson 55 Wolf, Johann Christian 31, 258 Wright, William 297–299 Writings 139–140, 161, 163–167 Wünsche, August 98–99, 107, 118, 119 Yahuda, Abraham Shalom 295 Yavneh 73, 74, 127 Yehuda, Eliezer ben 148, 226

318

Index of Subjects

Yiddish 3 Zakkai, Yoḥanan ben 73, 74, 127 Zechariah 141, 168 Zeitschrift der Deutschen-Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (ZDMG) 137– 138, 151, 199, 208, 210, 212, 214, 223, 225, 226–232, 244, 269–270, 271, 272, 273, 277 Zephaniah 169 Zionism 35, 57, 84, 85, 93, 96, 109, 132, 189, 193 Zohar 8, 100, 230 Zunz, Adelheid 40–56, 235, 251, 253 Zunz, Leopold 4–5, 6–8, 9, 10–11, 12, 13–14, 16, 17–18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24–

26, 30, 31–32, 36, 40–56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 65,66, 68, 69–72, 80, 83, 90, 92, 95–111, 121,130, 137–157, 167– 168, 176, 202, 212–213, 214, 224– 226, 227, 231, 235, 236, 237, 243, 244, 246, 250, 255–256, 265, 287, see also Hebrew Bible and Zunz – religious observance 52–54, 151– 152 – and Steinschneider 251–254 Zunz Bible 142–144 Zunz Foundation 23, 235–236, 246, 253–254 Zvi, Shabbetai 128–129