Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity (Jewish Culture and Contexts) 9780812248531, 0812248538

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Leopold Zunz

LEOPOLD ZUNZ CREATIVITY IN ADVERSITY

ISMAR SCHORSCH

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania Series Editor: Steven Weitzman A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu /pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8122-4853-1

Frontispiece. Portrait of Leopold Zunz at age forty-nine from 1843 by Gustav Heidenreich. Courtesy of the National Library of Israel and Professor Haggai Ben Shammai, the Academic Director of the National Library of Israel.

For Gershon Kekst With esteem and affection

Was Du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es um es zu besitzen. What has come to you from your elders by way of inheritance, take hold of it to make your own. — Johann Wolfgang Goethe

The dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by the living. —Joseph Conrad

Echte Wissenschaft ist taterzeugend. Genuine scholarship is generative. —Leopold Zunz

contents

Preface

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. Born in Battle

7

Chapter 2. A Messianic Moment

24

Chapter 3. Into the Wilderness

55

Chapter 4. The Break with Reform

92

Chapter 5. A Clash of Scholarly Agendas

131

Chapter 6. A Time of Upheaval

156

Chapter 7. Poetry and Persecution

182

Chapter 8. Days of Twilight

215

Epilogue

240

List of Abbreviations

247

Notes

251

Bibliography

307

Index

323

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preface

In 1818 in a booklet of some fifty pages, Leopold Zunz announced his discovery of an unknown and uninhabited continent which modern Jews were soon destined to apprehend.1 A few hardy contemporaries in other sectors of Europe had already caught sight of a crag or shoreline of that continent, but Zunz was surely the first to see and sense the full expanse of its vast and variegated contours. And like other great explorers, Zunz would return time and again to map its terrain and unearth its treasures. No less astonishing, Zunz sailed without benefit of a fleet or a well-funded expedition. His single-handed effort and radical achievement, which would henceforth make history the homeland of Jewish self-perception and public discourse, welled up from an acute sense of historical consciousness, an almost fanatical commitment to get the facts straight, and an extraordinary medley of talents and tools. Spanning nearly a century of bitter turmoil, Zunz’s life of triumph and suffering, passion and pathos, scholarly seclusion and political activism has long deserved a biography in the round. Without the remarkable survival of Zunz’s papers, however, that desideratum would be beyond our reach. Zunz threw out practically nothing that bore his name or handwriting or in which he may have been involved. Though often brief and intermittent, his diary is extensive for some of his seminal decades, and his continental network of correspondents yields a trove of letters and often a précis of Zunz’s response that constitutes, as Zunz well knew, a skeleton history of the movement he inspired. At his death in 1886, his papers were transferred to the Zunz Foundation (Stiftung) in Berlin, which had been created in 1864 on the occasion of Zunz’s seventieth birthday to provide him and his soul mate, Adelheid, with a modest pension for their twilight years.2 One of the earliest scholars to avail himself of that precious repository was Solomon Schechter, who at the invitation of Claude G. Montefiore had left Germany for England in 1882 and five years later published the first

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critical edition of a rabbinic work, Aboth d’Rabbi Nathan (The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan).3 Perhaps it was Schechter’s own interest in midrash that induced him in 1889 to write an essay on Zunz, the master of midrash, for a prize awarded him the following year. The empathy with which he recounted Zunz’s life and surveyed his study of midrash clearly reflected a kindred spirit. But Schechter had relied entirely on personal copies of Zunz’s works lent him by the foundation, without benefit of his unpublished papers, and thus held off publication. Inexplicably, Schechter, who had more than a passing interest in the history of Jewish scholarship and an affinity for Zunz, never returned to peruse those papers, and the essay languished until it was published posthumously by his son Frank and Alexander Marx, the librarian of the Jewish Theological Seminary.4 Invaluable though unfinished, the essay brought to light two guideposts for any future biographer of Zunz: his cautionary note to David Kaufmann, his gifted young admirer, that “those who have read my books are far from knowing me,” and his motto “genuine scholarship is generative” (echte Wissenschaft ist taterzeugend). In a nutshell, Zunz’s biography must be more than the sum of his books.5 The true excavator of Zunz’s nonacademic legacy was Ludwig Geiger. The son of Abraham Geiger, who had elegantly and effortlessly straddled the fields of religious reform and critical scholarship, Ludwig was no less a prolific scholar in the history and literature of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and nineteenth-century Germany. But given his paternity, he also devotedly edited a five-volume edition of his father’s correspondence and scholarly works, followed in 1910 by a richly probing portrait composed by a cluster of eight experts, for which he served as editor and to which he contributed a masterful biographical essay of book-length proportions.6 From the large number of choice primary documents in the Zunz archive that Geiger published from 1892 on and the teeming volume of Zunz correspondence in preparation when he died in 1919, one has the distinct impression that Geiger, had he lived, would have tried his hand at a full-scale biography of Zunz.7 Not only did he appreciate the importance and power of Zunz’s letters, he also demonstrated beyond dispute that no biographer worth his salt could ignore the drudgery of deciphering their minuscule handwriting. In the final generation before the fall of Weimar, a number of younger scholars treated aspects of Zunz’s career on the basis of his papers, among them Ismar Elbogen, the reigning dean of German Jewish historians and, like Zunz, an authority on the history of the synagogue and its liturgy.8 His sensitive 1936

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essay on Zunz came closer to encompassing the whole man than any previous portrait.9 And it was Elbogen, defying the Nazis, who arranged in 1938, before his own departure for New York in October, to have a large portion of the Zunz archive smuggled out of Germany and taken to the still embryonic and vulnerable Hebrew National and University Library in Jerusalem.10 Had Elbogen accepted the invitation of Columbia University in 1929 to fill the first chair in Jewish history at an American university, Zunz’s papers might well have been ravaged by Nazi nihilists.11 Archives are the aquifers of Jewish scholarship, and the final link in this vital chain of guardians belongs to Nahum N. Glatzer, the longtime professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University. As a disciple and disseminator of Franz Rosenzweig, Glatzer contributed to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York a cache of 1,309 letters that were in the possession of the family. What linked them to Zunz was the fact that Rosenzweig was the great-grandson of Samuel Meyer Ehrenberg, the beloved surrogate father figure to Zunz and Isaak Markus Jost, both of whom he saved and nurtured when he assumed the directorship in 1807 of their Jewish school in Wolfenbüttel, still untouched by modernity. The 727 letters in the collection to Zunz and Jost by Ehrenberg and family over three generations attest the deep emotional bonds forged by fate.12 They add to the correspondence preserved in Jerusalem a rare personal and intimate tone. By subsequently editing two magnificent volumes of Zunz letters, the first in 1958 from the Rosenzweig collection and the second in 1964 from the Zunz archive, Glatzer placed all future students of Zunz and the Wissenschaft movement in his debt.13 I first entered the hallowed but intimidating domain of these unpublished collections during a sabbatical year in Israel in 1974–75 and have since returned often to spend countless hours with Zunz and his compatriots. It is a demanding cohort that does not readily share its revealing contents with unappreciative outsiders. Over the ensuing years with their many detours, a spate of discrete essays based on my research clarified for me the landscape, deepened my vision, and emboldened me not to give up on a biography that would capture the scope, complexity, and coherence of the life’s work of a singular modern Jew. As my skill improved and my thinking ripened, so did the technology at my disposal. At the University of Halle, where in 1821 Zunz got his doctorate, Professor Giuseppe Veltri, then the director of the Leopold Zunz Center for the Study of European Judaism, and his team digitized a large portion (though far from all) of the Zunz Archive, while in New York the

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Leo Baeck Institute digitized its sprawling archival collection, including the Ehrenberg correspondence. It beggars the imagination to think what would have been the scale of Zunz’s achievement if the rare book and manuscript repositories that lay so painfully beyond his impecunious reach had been accessible with the tap of a finger.14

Introduction

From the outset of his career, Leopold Zunz had been committed to disseminating the breakthrough of Wissenschaft des Judentums—its methodology, perspectives, tools, and early results—to fellow Jews in eastern Europe. For that purpose, the medium had to be Hebrew. Thus on the basis of strategy and esteem, Zunz readily accepted the deathbed wish of Nachman Krochmal in 1840 to edit his unfinished and disordered Hebrew manuscript, eventually to bear the title Moreh Nevukhei ha-Zeman (The Guide for the Perplexed of Our Time or equally correct The Guide for Those Perplexed by the Notion of Time). Though the two had never met, the Galician autodidact and the German gymnasium and university graduate both embodied in their respective domains the turn to history in the study of Judaism. The state of Krochmal’s manuscript reflected the adversity in which he persevered as a resident of a Jewish world that bitterly denied and thwarted the right of free inquiry. Had Zunz not assumed the burden of editing it, the fruit of Krochmal’s lifelong research and fortitude would have sunk into oblivion for decades, if not forever.1 In his own introduction to the book, which appeared in 1851 in an edition rife with errors not his fault, Zunz chose to articulate for his eastern European audience the ethos that informed his scholarship, and probably that of Krochmal as well. First, the critical study of Judaism requires a command of its entire literary heritage: “The Oral and Written Torah are inextricably linked. No prophet or sage stands alone; no rabbinic statement or homily (midrash) exists in isolation. Particulars can be grasped only in light of the whole, and the whole only via understanding the particulars. If access to the early books is closed to us, we will be confounded by the later ones.” Second, the practitioners of critical scholarship must acquire an equally comprehensive mastery of disciplines and bodies of knowledge outside their own field: “Indeed, it is our obligation to study and teach every science and intellectual tradition just like the great minds of Israel proclaimed and practiced. Ancient books are for us the mirror in which we can observe the daily

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life of all peoples, even if they are but the appearance of the deeds and not the deeds themselves. . . . Only by combining the particulars of events into a plausible construct will they become fathomable. Without an acute sense of time in general, the events, customs and decrees identified with our ancestors that rested on some foundation, as well as their polemics and homilies, will be sealed to us.” Finally, and unexpectedly, Zunz asserts that the new learning is not an end in itself, but an instrument by which to improve the human condition. The quest for truth serves to make us advocates for justice. Social activism and the life of the mind are not mutually exclusive. Or in the forceful words of Zunz: “The goal of Torah and science, the goal of opening our hearts to the spiritual is to do what is good and right. Those who have studied books and not learned to be of help to humanity, who love knowledge but not the supreme source of spirituality, their actions will attest that they have not reached the rank of a true sage. For the spiritual realm is not grasped except by a combination of clarity of mind and purity of heart. And as that realm engulfs us, it will inspire us to seek the good of all. Then shall we learn not to strive for wealth or glory, nor do scholarship out of envy or spite, nor expect recompense in this world or the next, but rather out of love for the truth, the good and the eternal.”2 This unambiguous explication of Zunz’s ethos unpacks for us the meaning of his cryptic motto that true scholarship is generative. The reliability, coherence, and cogency of dispassionate scholarship are implicitly and overtly aimed at effecting change in a world still darkened by myth and prejudice. For Zunz, scholarship is ultimately an ethical enterprise.3 The interconnectedness of its disparate realms is strikingly evident in the organization of his Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings). Initiated and funded by the Zunz Foundation to honor his eightieth birthday in 1874, the three volumes came out quickly over the following two years.4 The driving force behind the project, however, was Moritz Steinschneider, a key member of its academic advisory board and Zunz’s disciple, friend, and kindred spirit. The death of Adelheid Zunz, Leopold’s soul mate of fi fty-two years, just eight days after his birthday, had thrown Zunz into a state of inconsolable grief, from which he would be released only by death twelve years later. Thus the structure and contents of the three volumes were largely Steinschneider’s conception with Zunz’s passive approval.5 The conception did elegant justice to the three distinct strands of Zunz’s career and their linkage. Volume 1 assembled essays and chapters from his

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3

books (which were not reissued) intended for the German public, which is  the reason for the inclusion of Zunz’s bracing political speeches from 1848 through 1865, delivered to appreciative German audiences. The overriding theme of both the scholarly and political material was emancipation, for Jews in par ticu lar from a painfully incomplete acceptance by the body politic and for Germans generally from the suffocating strictures of an authoritarian regime. The second volume contained a medley of speeches, sermons, and occasional essays generated for a Jewish audience. Some, in fact, like Zunz’s address on October  18, 1840, in Berlin’s official synagogue celebrating the ascension of Frederick William IV to the Prussian throne, were solicited by communal leaders for purposes of representation, defense, or urgent enlightenment. When three prominent elders of the Berlin community board belatedly wrote Zunz on October 1 asking him in the absence of a suitable rabbinic incumbent to do the honor, Zunz responded swiftly and graciously without even checking his calendar:“For whenever matters pertaining to progress and the general welfare are at stake, the honorable Jewish community of Berlin will always find my ser vices at its disposal.”6 Similarly, in an autobiographical sketch, when Zunz came to describe his intense political participation in the revolution of 1848, he did not fail to note that “despite his interest in the body politic [ für das Allgemeine], he did not forget the religious community to which he belonged.”7 The third volume with its twelve sections of austere, hard-core scholarship is of course the trademark by which he is best known. But what deserves to be stressed is that it alone does not exhaust his multifaceted career. He devoted his ample gifts with no less zeal to his political and communal commitments, and Steinschneider correctly gave them equal billing in Zunz’s collected works. In short, Zunz was a political animal and a religious personality as well as a scholar of rare stature. The interrelatedness of these three dimensions was part of his self-understanding, as he declared in yet another autobiographical sketch in 1856:“Zunz may be seen as the founder of the academic study of Judaism [Wissenschaft des Judentums], that is the scholarly treatment of Jewish— till now rabbinic—literature, and his total literary activity constitutes a series of works for freedom and progress.”8 His biography, accordingly, must aspire to an integrated effort to capture a sense of the whole man. To compartmentalize him is to diminish his power and achievement. There can be no doubt that for Zunz the life of the mind and his frequent forays into the public arena were inseparable.

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Most assuredly then Zunz was not an antiquarian. The fi rst to offer that opinion was none other than Isaak Markus Jost, his once intimate adolescent but later estranged lifelong friend. In writing of his own century in 1846, Jost damned Zunz with faint praise: “In antiquarian research, especially in biblical criticism and the field of Jewish literature, Dr. Zunz stands nearly alone.”9 By implication, Jost was the historian, but Zunz only an antiquarian. More than a half century later, Hermann Cohen, one of the few Jews to gain a German professorship unconverted, accentuated what Jost left implicit. In response to a question from Franz Rosenzweig, who had his own doubts about Zunz, Cohen lamented: “He could have been a great historian, but was alas only an antiquarian.”10 And decades later in his full-throated assault on the founding cohort of German Wissenschaft scholars, Gershom Scholem still echoed that sentiment when he depicted their scholarly legacy as funereal.11 In regard to Zunz, that sustained critical stance is warranted only when his scholarship is torn out of its ethical matrix. To fully appreciate the enormity of his achievement, it must be firmly set within the framework of the fierce integrity of his personality and the raging battlefield in whose midst he worked. That the austerity of his scholarship could be misread as funereal is its greatest achievement. His rigorous self-discipline concealed what provoked him to write. The intensity of engagement behind his turn to history yielded an unadulterated model of critical research and not a stream of polemics or apologetics. The writing of Jewish history by an insider required no special pleading. The evidentiary truth would eventually prevail despite repeated and contentious rebuffs, a belief that made Zunz a bona fide heir of the Enlightenment.12 Toward that end, he was determined to launch his revolution according to the highest academic standards of his day. Four new values converged to forge that revolution: the human as the agent of history, chronology as its crux, the validity of non-Jewish sources, and new Jewish documentary evidence. Jewish knowledge of the past until then had been woefully deficient in all four. The will of the Almighty was still believed to determine the course of human events with revelation as the primary medium of an unfolding tradition grounded in a sacred canon. To do history from a human perspective, God had to be confined by a process of secularization inaugurated for Christian Europe by the Renaissance. For Judaism it began only in the nineteenth century and eventually culminated in an intellectual emancipation as far reaching as its political emancipation. Along the way, both encountered stiff resistance and frequent setbacks.

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5

But Zunz’s revolution was also about replacing myth with history, that is Wissen with Wissenschaft, unexamined knowledge with critically attained knowledge. Although medieval Jews, especially those living in the orbit of emergent Islam, had more than an inchoate command of Hebrew grammar and comparative philology, they lacked an acute sense of time. The preference of traditional Judaism was to minimize chronological distinctions in order to bring sundry texts and multiple generations into a single discourse animated by a dialectic of debate. Yet the careful dating of historical figures, events, and texts is the key to contextualizing them with a degree of accuracy and thereby approximating their meaning. Free-floating texts are susceptible to creative imagination and mischievous manipulation. It is for this reason that so much of Zunz’s labor was directed toward dating. Indispensable in this endeavor is the utilization of non-Jewish sources. The remarkable recovery of the ancient Near East by modern scholarship has profoundly deepened our understanding of the language, legal terms, rituals, stories, ideas, and institutions of the Hebrew Bible. By way of contrast, David Gans in his 1592 Hebrew chronicle Zemah David (The Sprout of David), which had introduced Zunz to history while he was still trapped in the Samson Free School, recounted the chronologically ordered details of Jewish and world history in two hermetically sealed sections. Each narrative rested on sources essentially different and unequal in value. Jewish history was inerrant because it derived from sources engendered by revelation, while world history in general and the history of Bohemia in particular were fashioned from fallible sources produced by human hands. Such a dogmatic defensive strategy which privileged revelation simply blocked the path to critical history.13 And finally in the vivid metaphor of Francis Bacon that the past was but “a plank from a shipwreck,” it was vitally necessary to increase the number of planks available.14 The deposits of Jewish creativity buried in public libraries and private collections had to be excavated. The number of sources beyond Zunz’s ken far exceeded what lay at hand, and a plea for manuscripts and their contents is a constant refrain in Zunz’s letters to his learned friends. Lacking the funds to travel, he was forced to rely on often archaic bibliographies riddled with error. The first and never finished task of critical history has always been bibliographical in nature, and that is why Steinschneider, Zunz’s protégé and comrade in arms, invested so much of his formidable talent in doing reliable and instructive cata logues of Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic manuscripts. By the end of the nineteenth century the two of them had turned an arid landscape into a fertile vista teeming with inviting possibilities.

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chapter 1

Born in Battle

It is well known that Leopold Zunz’s 1818 booklet Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur (On Rabbinic Literature) articulated the scope, methodology, and ethos of critical scholarship on postbiblical Jews and Judaism in a single stunning essay. Less appreciated is the combustible atmosphere in which it was set forth. The turn to history was an integral part of German Jewry’s campaign for admission into the German body politic, a campaign that tragically would never end because of Germany’s recurring unresolved ambivalence. In 1809 as Prussian efforts at reform took up the anomalous status of its 124,000 Jews in the wake of its humiliation by Napoleon, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Prussia’s brilliant young bureaucrat newly appointed as head of the reorganized Department of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Education, from which he would create the University of Berlin in 1810 and reform secondary education throughout Prussia, authored an internal memorandum advocating unequivocally full emancipation in a single ordinance. He closed on a cautionary note that would prove to be prescient: “In a new law, the government expresses the opinion, which it currently holds about the Jews and the possibility of their civil improvement, and this opinion is of supreme importance in determining the general attitude of the country. Thus a new piece of legislation regarding the Jews that is not wise may perhaps terminate many physical faults, but runs the risk of possibly promoting even greater moral ones than those that marked its present circumstances, by misleading public opinion and reinforcing old prejudices.”1 Zunz had arrived at the University of Berlin in 1815, but five years after its auspicious founding and just three years after the incomplete emancipation of Prussian Jewry, spearheaded by its liberal prime minister, Karl August von Hardenberg. Since his own emancipation from the antiquated curriculum of the Samson Free School in Wolfenbüttel (a city rendered famous by

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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who had served for a decade as the head of its important ducal library) by Samuel Meyer Ehrenberg in 1807, Zunz had speedily consumed a vast body of secular knowledge. By April 1809, he was the first Jewish student admitted to the gymnasium in Wolfenbüttel and two and a half years later awarded his Abitur (diploma). From 1813 to 1815, he taught in the now fully revamped Samson School a range of subjects that displayed the reach of his intellectual competence: German, Latin, Greek, French, Hebrew, arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, and Hebrew cursive script.2 In a report on the school’s graduates from July 1817, Ehrenberg traced the enormity of Zunz’s psychological as well as intellectual transformation: “Leopold Zunz—an outstanding mind in all fields of knowledge, or what is more, a genius. Above all, he excels in Hebrew and mathematics. Until 1807, he was unruly, wild and disorderly; in temperament, largely a mix of cheerfulness and peevishness. But through self-control, he grew since then to become respectable in appearance and well mannered. Somewhat later, some even came to regard him as quite phlegmatic.”3 Zunz had come into the world on August 10, 1794, in Detmold, in the tiny earldom of Lippe, “lifeless and in the company of a twin sister,” who died the same day.4 Because of his father’s ill health, the family soon moved to Hamburg, where the father died in 1802, at which point Leopold was sent to vegetate in the Samson Free School. His mother, who died at age thirty-six in 1809, never saw her son again.5 Years later Zunz recalled his forlorn state until redemption appeared in April 1807 in the person of Ehrenberg, who became his surrogate father: “We literally went in a single day from the Middle Ages to a new day, and likewise from a state of Jewish slavery to civil freedom. Just consider every thing that I lacked at that time: parents, love, instruction and the implements of learning. Only in math and Hebrew grammar was I ahead of the rest. The latter I had already studied as a child with my blessed father. But of the world and what fills it, of the subjects that thirteen-year-old boys today go through in three or four classes, of people and a social life, I knew nothing.”6 It would be Ehrenberg who would provide the guidance, stability, and affection the abandoned adolescent desperately needed. When Zunz left Woffenbüttel for Berlin on September 26, 1815, Ehrenberg accompanied him as far as Braunschweig. Two days earlier in a letter to Isaak Markus Jost, his other cherished student, who was already in Berlin, Ehrenberg had given voice to his melancholy: “Just two more days and our Zunz will be leaving Wolfenbüttel behind. You know that I won’t be the worse off. Not only will he be

Figure 1. Portrait of Samuel Mayer Ehrenberg from 1820, some thirteen years after he became Inspektor of the Samson Schule, by Johann W. Schroeder. Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York.

Figure 2. Undated and unattributed portrait of Isaak Markus Jost at age fiftythree. The inscription reads: “Our grandchildren will learn much that our time labored to produce and take it for granted.” Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York.

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replaced [i.e., as a teacher], but I will actually gain by the trade. Nevertheless, his departure touches me deeply. You know what he was when I came here. He was not yet thirteen. I confirmed him and he grew up under my care. And if I can’t claim any further ser vice to him other than having loved him like a child, that is reason enough why I follow him with tears in my eyes.”7 When Jost showed that passage to Zunz, he copied Ehrenberg’s avowal of parental love into his diary, and years later after Ehrenberg’s death in 1853, added to the entry: “I too see him 40 years later with tears in my eyes. To part is our fate [Geschäft] on earth.”8 But Ehrenberg’s sadness was aggravated by worry. He confided in Jost, with whom Zunz would be rooming at the outset, that he would be coming to Berlin inexperienced, naïve, indisposed to accept advice, and unfazed by his pending departure. In fact, he would have preferred slipping out in the middle of the night to avoid the discomfort of saying good-bye. Those who loved him found his stolid and laconic exterior painful. When Ehrenberg’s wife outfitted him with some clothes for his sojourn, he showed no trace of gratitude. Yet Ehrenberg knew that beneath the surface silence roiled a wellspring of strong emotions prone to sudden eruptions. Jost would have his hands full in keeping Zunz’s fragile temperament from harming him.9 By midNovember Zunz had found employment as a tutor in the home of Saisette Herz, where he would stay until March 1818.10 What confronted Zunz at the University of Berlin with its unprecedented combination of teaching and research, however, was a cauldron of German nationalism triggered by Napoleon’s final ignominious defeat and fueled by a virulent repudiation of French culture and institutions. The rational, universal, and secular discourse of the French Enlightenment quickly gave way to a resurgent embrace of Christianity, the Middle Ages, and the individuality of German law and literature. Among the casualties of this reactionary onslaught, because seen as a French import, was the emancipation of the Jews. The failure of the Congress of Vienna, convened among other reasons to unequivocally protect the equality of Jews extended by Napoleon in those German states under his dominion, further exacerbated the debate over terminating Jewish disabilities. Even in Prussia, where the emancipation edict of 1812 had been issued by the Prussian government itself, the debate raged on and would soon culminate in curbing the government’s liberal thrust.11 Thus Zunz arrived in Berlin at the onset of yet another bruising round of the Jewish question, the third since Christian Wilhelm von Dohm’s influential book of 1781, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the Civil Improvement of the

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Jews), though this time the field of battle would be the university itself.12 In the spring of his second year at the university, Zunz could report with certitude that the place was awash with animus toward Jews: “What Jews call Risches [the Judeo-German term for Jew-hatred] is here in many forms. De Wette is a Rosche [a Jew-hater] for philosophical reasons, Savigny for reasons of state, Buttmann out of erudition, Jahn out of Germanomania, Rühs out of Christian piety [Orthodoxie], Rudolphi out of Risches, etc.”13 Among the courses that Zunz took during the winter semester of 1815–16 was one by Friedrich Rühs in ancient history. A medievalist and student of Nordic myths, Rühs had taught at Greifswald and Göttingen before coming to Berlin in 1810. In his diary, Zunz confided that he would not continue to study with Rühs “ because he writes against the Jews.” Zunz is clearly referencing here Rühs’s polemical tract Über die Ansprüche der Juden an das deutsche Bürgerrecht (On the Demands by Jews for German Citizenship), which came out in 1815 as a journal essay and in 1816 in an expanded form as a separate sixty-two-page booklet for greater dissemination.14 From the start Rühs insisted “that only a very careful study of Jewish history, prompted by my work as a medievalist, has uncovered just how groundless and perverted is the prevailing view.”15 The brunt of the evidence marshaled by him was intended to show that the objectionable character traits of the Jews were not the result of external factors such as hostility or oppression, but ones internal to the nature of their religion. Their exploitative commercial profile remained unchanged no matter where they live, be it in the Greco-Roman world, medieval Spain, or early modern Poland. It is on religious grounds that they regard work as a divine punishment, find farming contemptible, and gravitate to pursuits in which they can accumulate wealth quickly. A survey of the codes of medieval German law, in fact, shows Jews to have been generally treated equally and humanely. They enjoyed the protection of the emperor and pogroms definitely contravened the law. In sum, the Jews are a distinct nationality with the rabbis as their despotic political leaders, Jewish law as their constitution, and an insufferable sense of chosenness.16 Since for Rühs nationhood was not a mechanical construct but rather an organic and homogeneous entity and since Christianity was an inseparable component of German identity, he was willing to grant Jews no more than the status of tolerated subjects, for which they would have to pay a special tax and wear clothing marked with a visible Jewish insignia. Moreover, the state should not tolerate any increase in their number through immigration and do all in its power to facilitate their conversion to Christianity. Assimilated

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Jews were equally unacceptable because they “constitute an in-between thing [Mittelding] between Jews and Christians,” and flaunt a kind of natural religion that is completely untenable. No state would recognize it nor grant it more than a wholly unobtrusive toleration.17 With this fusillade, Rühs aimed to undermine the basic premise of Dohm’s liberal tract: that history accounts for the character deformation of contemporary Jews and not any innate depravity: “History everywhere proves that political or religious devotion and fanaticism are only sustained by persecution and that indifference, toleration and inattentiveness are the surest means for their demise.”18 Dohm’s Enlightenment message then was that environment forged ethos. As long as Jews were shackled by Christian contempt, they would remain repulsive. Assimilation can only follow emancipation. In his more liberal days, even Rühs believed in that argument, but a deeper study of Jewish history, he claimed, brought him now to viscerally dispute its validity.19 Like Rühs’s booklet, its unabashed endorsement by Jakob Friedrich Fries in a journal review was quickly published as a separate pamphlet. At the time, he was a professor of philosophy, an authority on contemporary German thought, a mathematician, and a political liberal. Yet in vitriol, he outdid Rühs. He denounced Judaism (what he called Judenschaft to emphasize its political character) as a plague left over from an earlier primitive age. To ameliorate the legal status of the Jews requires the extermination (ausrotten) of Judaism. It alone accounts for their social insularity, economic harm, and moral degeneracy, and they must be expelled as they once were from Spain. Though Fries rejected the idea that Germany was a Christian state (a vestige of his erstwhile liberalism), Jews qua Jews were still unsuited and disqualified from gaining citizenship, for they constituted a state within a state.20 Back in Berlin, Zunz did more than drop the course taught by Rühs. Bestirred by anger, he took up his quill to do battle. Others did as well. The dismay and fear voiced in the opening lines of a rebuttal of Rühs by a Jewish law student at Heidelberg named Sigmund Wilhelm Zimmern surely expressed a collective angst that vitriol could easily give rise to violence: “Our time is alive with a general ferment that roils the masses. One anxiously waits to see how it will play out. And the Jews are hardly overlooked. Espousing the interests of humanity on their lips and the individual in their hearts, people, misguided by their baser instincts, attack a poor and defenseless confession in order to bury its future. Important men and public teachers lend their names to publications that throw burning, inflammable material into the midst of the

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masses. And though they are without effect on calm thinkers, they do agitate the mob.”21 Zunz, for his part, needed two distinct drafts to harness his ire. Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur was his second attempt. By March 1816, as recorded in his diary, he had finished his first, but unsatisfied, returned to the drawing board. However, he never tore up that draft, and its survival among his papers enables us to grasp his state of mind and the radical nature of his subsequent shift.22 Clearly daunted by the prospect of taking on his professor in public, Zunz adopted the ironic pose of a fawning acolyte, addressing himself “to the wise counselor of the wise ruler of Germany”: “Where shall I find the words to properly describe my enchantment with your refutation of Jewish demands? Only future generations more enlightened than we dull-witted contemporaries will give you due credit by immortalizing you in their chronicles. How sad that Lessing and Mendelsohn [sic] did not live to experience their defeat!”23 Zunz’s surface intent was merely to explicate and amplify Rühs’s evidence and arguments. To underscore his dependence, he deftly wove words and phrases from Rühs’s text into his own and flagged them for the reader by underlining and page citation. But in that sheath, Zunz tucked his rapier wit. In a blend of overheated praise and understated sarcasm, he sought to disarm Rühs through ridicule. A good sample conveys the tone and tactic: I [i.e., Zunz] have long been among the patriots who admire the Middle Ages. But therein you have outdone whatever I dared to put forth and I thank you publicly. It’s bad enough that people have decried this millennium as a time of barbarity and darkness, and imputed to the Christian religion and its servants acts of unspeakable cruelty. And, unfortunately, such superficial views are unavoidable as long as people have not studied Eisenmenger, Selig’s Juden, Rohrer’s Reisebeschreibung [Travels] and above all your godly documents. Where may one find more splendid laws than in Würzburg which in the fifteenth century allowed Jews to take with them 50 per cent [of their money]? Or in Switzerland where they could lend on stolen goods? Where more fairness than in Augsburg in 1440 where the expelled Jews could take along their belongings and sell their houses within two years? Where greater justice than in Spain, whose rulers permitted Jewish financiers all manner of extortion, and then stole their treasures wholesale? Where can one find less resolute tolerance and more laudatory zeal for the sacred

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and divine than in this land? Whenever did more Jewish blood flow, whenever did this beleaguered people wander about as much, and the forcefully articulated difference between them and Christians—when was it ever more vigorously declaimed than in the Middle Ages?24 By the end of this passage, Zunz had lost control of his artifice. The sudden gravity of his voice was nothing if not a direct challenge to Rühs’s sunny view of the Middle Ages. The gruesome fate of Jews in Spain and, for that matter, throughout much of the Middle Ages defied ironic description. Zunz’s instrument was too crude, shallow, and misleading. Moreover, when he came to the litany of alleged Jewish religious and character failings, it was nearly impossible to distinguish his voice from that of Rühs. The distance between them had vanished because Zunz actually agreed with much of Rühs’s critique.25 It would not be the last time in the modern period that the internal and external critics of Jews and Judaism would converge on the same shortcomings. Nearly three years later, Zunz presented to the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (on which more in the next chapter) “A Draft on Jewish Matters in Need of Improvement.” Basically an outline in his handwriting, on which he probably elaborated orally, the list carefully categorized and delineated its particulars. Previously, the association had decided to demarcate Jewish failings in terms of their cause, be it in the religious or social realm. The resulting distillation was extensive and unmitigated. The religious realm predominated with four subdivisions totaling some twenty-eight reprehensible faults, whereas the social realm listed but twelve without further differentiation. Among offensive religious “ideas,” Zunz clustered “God’s partisan love for Israel, self-conceit, superstition, the attitude of Jews toward other nations, the subordination of a life of good works to an idle asceticism or picayune observance of ritual, the calculation of all value in terms of money and a disdain for all critical scholarship.” In reference to the subdivision of religious practice, Zunz cited the synagogue ser vice and its liturgy, customs that have become either “antiquated, harmful or senseless,” and generally “the surfeit of ritual law.” As for the third subdivision of communal organization, Zunz singled out the rabbis for special censure—“their power, fanaticism and uselessness, etc.” and the decrepit condition, if not total absence, of communal schools. Finally, on the subdivision of education, Zunz became apoplectic “rendering children effeminate, cowardliness, the ignorance, immorality and gruff ness of yeshiva

Figure 3. The sample of Zunz’s clear but minuscule handwriting is the first page of his discarded satirical response to Friedrich Rühs dated March 31, 1816. Courtesy of the National Library of Israel.

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bahurim, deficient and useless learning in school, Talmud, the absence of any language or practical instruction, poorly paid teachers and inattention to German.” Though briefer, the second major category of deficiencies due to external circumstances was no less harsh in its sweeping condemnation. Among Jews there was a lamentable absence of craftsmen or farmers and an exclusive concentration in petty trade. They tended to be work-shy, physically inactive, and indifferent to self-improvement. Their economic profile lacked class structure and their “indiscriminate grasping for bits of humor and information amounted to miseducation.” They evince “neither thorough nor concentrated study, are either retiring or fawning in their relationship to Christians and crude in their speech, demeanor, interaction and morality.”26 In short, Zunz’s strategy to expose Rühs obliquely through ridicule was inadequate to the task. While it proved itself of nominal value in casting some doubt on his reading of the past, when it came to the present, Zunz’s agreement with Rühs quashed his ironic pose. Stripped of sarcasm, his language became straightforward and blurred the distinction between the personae. More basic still, Zunz’s cleverness did little to undermine Rühs’s deeply flawed methodology. Yet the real question is not what prompted Zunz to withhold his fire, but why he saw fit to try again. The year 1816 was a productive one for Rühs. He soon came out with a second coarse pamphlet which staunchly defended his conservative views against the condemnation of Johann Ludwig Ewald, a politically and theologically liberal pastor and professor of theology in Heidelberg. Rühs declaimed therein that Christianity was an inseparable component of the Prussian state, that human rights were not universal but derived from the nation rather than the state, and that Christians shared no blame for Jewish faults. Above all, for him the French emancipation of its Jews was an anathema.27 It was Rühs’s third publication of the year, however, that induced Zunz to make his momentous shift from ridicule to research. Rühs’s Handbuch der Geschichte des Mittelalters (A Handbook on the History of the Middle Ages) was a gargantuan work of some nine hundred pages, the culmination of years of labor, that for the first time systematically ordered the sources, salient facts, and broad outlines of medieval history in terms of chronology, political bodies, ethnic groups, and religions. Within that tome, Rühs devoted ten pages to the Jews in which he singled out Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s malevolent source book Entdecktes Judentum (Judaism Disclosed) as “a rich and unjustly

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decried collection” regarding “the teachings and opinions of the Jews.” No other entry in Rühs’s book was marked by the same degree of spite and condescension as his brief treatment of the Jews. The bigotry of his previous two tracts was succinctly recycled with tiresome disdain. But by embedding his bill of particulars this time in the context of what Rühs surely hoped would become a landmark of serious history, he had forced Zunz to spell out what actually constituted a critical approach to the study of Jewish history.28 By 1818, when Zunz published Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur, the anti-French reaction throughout central Europe was in full swing. It had already prevented the Congress of Vienna from protecting within the states of the German Confederation any act of emancipation enacted under the French occupation. In the free cities of Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, the authorities quickly set out to reverse the favorable status of their Jewish subjects, and in Prussia the government refused to extend its celebrated emancipation edict of 1812 to newly acquired provinces such as Posen. Amid this miasma, Zunz dared to challenge the guardians of the academic establishment to undertake a proper study of Jewish history. Taking the long view, he invoked the canons of critical scholarship over the blood-letting virulence of polemics. The perversion of public policy emanating from the professoriate might thereby be unmasked as an egregiously flawed employment of their respected expertise.29 A single reference to the Handbuch of Rühs in the final footnote of Etwas, in which Zunz gently chided him for his excessive generalizing and undue harshness, alludes to the role the volume played in getting Zunz to shift gears.30 The change in genre also prompted Zunz to switch pronouns from first-person singular to plural. The language of science is universal and therefore must be inclusive.31 Zunz contended that the exclusion of the study of rabbinic literature from the curriculum of the university contradicted the animating ethos of the institution itself: “How is it possible, one may ask, that at a time when a grand, encompassing glance spreads its bright rays over all the fields [Wissenschaften] and activities of humanity, in which the most remote corner of the earth is visited, the least known language studied and no body of material disdained in order to serve the amassing of wisdom—how is it possible that our field lies fallow? What prevents us from studying the totality of rabbinic literature, understanding it properly, explaining it felicitously, judging it correctly and perusing it at our leisure?”32 What is more, such an academic initiative would yield political benefits. One cannot legislate intelligently out of ignorance. Misguided steps by the government only end up lending

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further credence to archaic and outmoded customs and rituals that should be discarded: “Thus to decide on the basis of knowledge what is ancient yet useful, archaic and injurious or new and desirable, we must prudently take up the study of the Jews [des Volkes] and their history, both its political and moral aspects.”33 Aside from its political urgency, the moment was propitious because Hebrew as the language of Jewish literature was slipping into oblivion. Zunz, a master of Hebrew in all its layers, sensed that the Haskalah, the rearguard effort to enlighten Jews in Hebrew, was rapidly giving way to German: “Precisely because we see in our day that Jews—to speak only of German Jews— are earnestly embracing the German language and German education and thus— often even without wishing to or realizing it—bearing their new Hebrew literature to the grave, does scholarship arise to demand an accounting of what has been ended.”34 The transition, indeed, would close an era of more than a millennium and a half in which the language of literary discourse among Jews was predominantly Hebrew, and it is the vast and variegated nature of this religious-cultural legacy that Zunz set out to sketch. The key to understanding a people was its literature.35 Minimally, then, Etwas is a bibliography of a bracingly new conception of Jewish literary creativity. The conception did not include the Hebrew Bible, the fountainhead of the language, because it was already long ensconced in the university’s theological faculty.36 Postbiblical Hebrew literature, beginning with the Mishnah, however, had not made the grade, for Protestant interest in Judaism ended once superseded by Christianity. By averting a head-on collision over the Bible, Zunz could stress the unappreciated secular nature of much of rabbinic literature, while implying that its study ought to be located in the now ascendant faculty of philosophy. Reluctantly, though, he retained the prevailing nomenclature for his subject (he would have preferred to call it new Hebrew or just Hebrew literature), but insisted that a multitude of its authors were not rabbis nor their works religious.37 The astonishing comprehensiveness of Zunz’s bibliography incontrovertibly reinforced his argument. From his threefold division into works of religion, language, and history, with their numerous subdivisions, emerged a religious civilization that was highly distinctive yet at home in the world.38 Like his mentors at the university in Altertumswissenschaft (the study of the Greco-Roman world), Zunz did not shortchange the primacy of original sources in reaching for encyclopedic coverage. He uncovered a bevy of Hebrew (and some Arabic) manuscripts and rare books for many of his disciplinary

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categories simply by scrutinizing the dated, incomplete and faulty cata logues of extant collections. In truth, the specificity of his bibliography went far beyond reshuffling familiar sources. In the process, Zunz acutely and presciently anticipated topics for future research: a history of the synagogue grounded in the sources;39 a comparison of talmudic law on culpability with its Roman counterpart;40 a systematic study of the disputes between the schools of Hillel and Shammai;41 a study of the numerous sources of the Zohar (many of which he identified with precision) that give it the appearance of a medieval composite work;42 a compilation of Jewish ethics (including “many of the gold nuggets in the little read book of the Zohar”) to counter the one-sidedness of Eisenmenger;43 a review of the abundant material scattered throughout the Talmud dealing with the disparate fields of natural science; and a history of the Hebrew language.44 In reference to the last topic, Zunz called for preparatory work in the fields of grammar, lexicography, and etymology. Acidly, he opined that most rabbinists were not Orientalists and the latter know no Hebrew.45 Zunz, like his mentors, extolled the predominance of philology: “For language is the first friend, who willingly leads us along the footpaths to scholarship and the last to whom we return longingly. She alone can tear away the past’s veil. She alone can prepare kindred spirits for the future. And that is why the scholar must endure her caprice. What centuries have created can only be enhanced by centuries.” 46 Rarely has so much novelty been packed into so little space. Yet Zunz never lost sight of the whole. Above the multiplicity of fields and myriad of details hovered the canopy of philosophy, which imbued the dissonance below with order, coherence, and meaning. The particularity of Jewish philosophy was in turn not only the quintessence of Jewish wisdom through the ages, but also an integral component of the collective wisdom of humanity: “And as such, every historical datum, diligently uncovered, incisively deciphered, philosophically utilized and tastefully and appropriately positioned, is a contribution to the knowledge of humanity, which alone is the most worthy final goal of all research.” 47 By withholding his initial impulsive retort to Rühs’s diatribe, Zunz set the stage for one of lasting consequence. An authentic study of the totality of the Jewish experience promised to indict Rühs as the deluded spinner of a dangerous phantasmagoria. By soaring above the battlefield, Zunz made his case without compromising the integrity of his enterprise. He neither rushed to premature conclusions nor indulged in direct refutation of instances of wild defamation. Rather, he had come in the spirit of Cicero, whom he quoted in

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signing off on his forward: “I believe the highest virtue to be the reconciliation of the minds of men.” 48 Though the turn to history would eventually advance an incomplete form of equality for Jews and attain a conflicted acceptance by Germans, the failure of the field of Jewish studies to gain as much as a toehold in German universities prior to 1933 signified just how fragile was the state of emancipation as late as the Weimar Republic.49 In addition to Rühs, whose course he failed to complete, Zunz studied in his first semester with Friedrich August Wolf, the preeminent Greco-Roman scholar of his day in Germany, and his protégé, August Boeckh.50 Both men were instrumental in educating the teachers who were to embed the intensive study of Greek and Latin into the core of Prussia’s reformed gymnasium curriculum. From 1809 to 1865, Boeckh gave his renowned lecture course on his encyclopedic conception of philology some twenty-six times to a total of 1,696 students, one of whom was Leopold Zunz.51 As noted in his diary, Zunz reacted favorably to their instruction: “Boeckh instructs me, but Wolf attracts me,” and he would go on to take at least three more courses with each.52 In other words, while Zunz composed his second rejoinder to Rühs, he was immersed in the language, history, and culture of the two nations that contemporary intellectuals idealized as the epitome of civilization and the building blocks of German character. The lure of this cult of neohumanism both influenced and confounded Zunz. Despite the absence of the word “encyclopedia” with its systematizing thrust from the title of his booklet, there can be no doubt that he borrowed the format and intent of the genre from his professors.53 The centrality of philology and primacy of literature in the discourse, along with its secular tone, came from them as well. Boeckh may also have been the source for the lofty synthetic role of integrating the findings of the disparate subfields that Zunz assigned to philosophy.54 Still, it is a tribute to his scholarly maturity and independence of mind that on the micro-level of language, terminology, and ordering of material Zunz was far less beholden to his mentors. In reworking their model, Zunz’s originality shines through.55 Overall, however, there was no room for the study of the Jews of antiquity in the vaunted field of Altertumswissenschaft propagated by Wolf and Boeckh.56 Greeks and Romans alone constituted the nations of antiquity worthy of the designation “cultured.” They alone rose above the constraints of nature to a level of freedom, intellect, and cultural life that became the seedbed for the ideas, practices, and institutions that germinated into Christianity and the modern world. In comparison, the other nations of antiquity deserved

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still to be regarded as barbarians.57 Only in the study of the earliest stages of Greek my thology did it seem warranted to cast a fleeting glance at the primitive my thology of the ancient Hebrews.58 The constricted and crowded horizon forced Zunz to ignore one of Rühs’s most telling pieces of evidence for the immutable character of the Jews, unaffected by external circumstances: “Long before Christianity and their dispersion, they manifest a speculative spirit, which seeks the greatest possible gain with the least exertion. They have been storekeepers and middlemen since the founding of Alexandria, where they already had their own streets.”59 Whereupon Rühs related at great length and with evident relish the escapades of one Joseph, the nephew of Onias the high priest in Jerusalem, and thereafter Joseph’s son Hyrcanus during the century of Ptolemaic rule over Palestine following the conquests of Alexander the Great. Taken from Josephus, the narrative recounted the daring and cunning by which Joseph secured and retained the right to collect the king’s taxes in all of Coele-Syria for twenty-two years, during which time he amassed a fortune and lifted his coreligionists out of poverty.60 Rühs exulted in conclusion: “This story reads as if fabricated by the enemies of the Jews. It matches to a tee the events of several wealthy families in our day, and yet it is ancient. The Jewish historian Josephus tells it to the world as proof of the endowment, skill and wit of his people, happily placing a few Jews like Joseph and Hyrcanus next to the heroes of Greece and Rome.”61 The provocation, though, did not induce Zunz to extend his encyclopedic survey into the Greco-Roman period. The terrain of the medieval Jewish world was less well known, more fluid, and perhaps even more relevant for his day. Moreover, many of the Jewish sources of the earlier period were in Greek and would have jeopardized the compact Hebrew framework that defined his periodization. It is also not improbable that he regarded a field monopolized by the Greeks and Romans as more hermetically sealed than one dominated by Christianity and Islam. Yet the exclusion from the neohumanistic conception of antiquity did not dampen Zunz’s admiration of Greek culture. Under the aegis of Wolf and Boeckh, he too came to venerate it as the summit of human achievement. In 1841 toward the end of a massive pioneering survey of Jewish contributions to the general field of geographic literature from the Hebrew Bible to his own century, he suddenly waxed eloquent on the impact of the Greek legacy on Jewish history: “By virtue of this journey through the ages [i.e., his survey], we have seen science arise among Jews, when freedom and culture infuse their

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settlements[,] and sink once again, when they are gone. Three times did the Hellenic spirit, which brings nations to maturity, intersect with the Jews.”62 And each time—first unmediated in the Greco-Roman world, then mediated through Islam, and finally directly again in the Renaissance—the critical thought of that ancient civilization revitalized the forces of Jewish creativity.63 Zunz, indeed, made the confrontation with classical learning the benchmark of his periodization of Jewish history, and from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, according to him, a critical mind-set had again begun to fructify Jewish thought. Thus Zunz as an independent scholar managed to smuggle in through the back door what he had not dared to venture as a student through the front door. What he omitted from his 1818 manifesto he embedded in his later trajectory of Jewish history, making the study of the Jews in antiquity eventually an indispensable part of the emerging and expanding field of Judaica.

chapter 2

A Messianic Moment

As an intellectually gifted young Jew caught in the cross-currents of a conflicted Prussian state and society, Leopold Zunz faced a future of uncertainties. If Samuel Ehrenberg had salvaged his youth, Adelheid Bermann, his wife to be, would soon become the critical enabler during his storm-tossed career. As he playfully reported to Ehrenberg in January 1822, “I have known my bride since May 1819; her consent [to be engaged] I got in May 1821 and the wedding will probably be in May 1822. Aren’t you impressed with my love of chronological order?”1 The courtship suggests a romantic relationship unencumbered by outside interference, that would culminate in a fifty-two-year childless marriage embedded in deep love and mutual respect. Though Zunz’s scholarship was beyond her, Adelheid appreciated its significance and supported it wholeheartedly. For years she hosted a Saturday evening salon in their modest apartment that gave Leopold a setting in which to fascinate friends and newcomers, scholars and literary figures, Jews and Christians.2 During the week, after a long day apart (for Zunz often from 5 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.), they would spend the evening in intimate conversation, sharing their political, literary, and philosophical interests, often reading passages and whole books to each other, with Leopold usually in the role of instructor. As the years wore on, he taught her chess and even geometry. They were averse to taking solitary trips for any length of time and when they did, their long letters written at the end of a day or over several shared unflinchingly their experiences, thoughts, and yearnings. Adelheid was an eager, adept, and expressive correspondent, and her postscripts to many of Leopold’s letters to mutual friends served to broaden and deepen the relationship between the families. Above all, the correspondence that emanated from the Zunz household abounds in their affection and

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solicitousness for each other. And when Adelheid died an excruciatingly painful death in 1874, Zunz’s steely resolve in the face of adversity, which owed so much to her unbroken faith in him, gave way to bitter self-pity.3 By the time that Leopold met Adelheid, he was nearing the completion of his doctoral dissertation on Shem Tov Ibn Falaquera, a thirteenth-century Spanish Jewish philosopher. On December 21, 1820, he submitted his handwritten Latin copy to the philosophy faculty in Halle, which awarded him his doctorate on January 2, 1821, though surprisingly the signature of Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius, its rising authority on biblical grammar and lexicography, was not on it. It would be Gesenius, in a career at Halle that spanned thirty-two years, who would make the university the favorite destination of Jewish students in Oriental studies in the first half of the nineteenth century.4 In his forty-five-page work, Zunz methodically delineated Ibn Falaquera’s persona, ideas, and context. Earlier he had already announced at the end of his Etwas his intention to publish the Hebrew text along with a Latin translation of Ibn Falaquera’s Sefer Ha-Ma’alot (The Book of Degrees), a discourse on Jewish ethics grounded in theology. Zunz’s motive in this instance went beyond rescuing a valuable relic of Jewish thought from the dustbin of history: “Nicer hopes [than purely academic] have helped to sweeten our arduous labor: The hope to awaken a desire for thorough and fruitful research on the foremost works of the Jewish people, while always bearing in mind a sense of the whole, and the hope that bringing to light the best of rabbinic literature might banish the prejudice in which it is generally held.”5What is noteworthy in this apologetic gambit is that Zunz’s choice came to rest on a sample from the Sephardic orbit, which aligned him squarely with the increasingly pervasive preference of disgruntled Ashkenasic intellectuals for an authentic Jewish model of living in two worlds.6 To his credit, he would soon refocus his scholarship onto the legacy of Ashkenaz (Germany). His high scholarly standards, however, would deter him from ever publishing Ibn Falaquera on the basis of but a single faulty manuscript.7 The acquisition of a doctorate by a Jew in Restoration Prussia did not pave the way to employment and career advancement. By August 1822, King Frederick William III, citing popular unrest, reversed the article of the liberal 1812 emancipation edict that declared Jews eligible for academic appointments and communal offices. The decision effectively closed off Prussia’s extensive public sector to Jews.8 And it was precisely that barrier that prompted Ehrenberg to counsel Zunz already in his first semester to pursue a course of study that

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would lead to a job: “Though I am happy that you have a chance to immerse yourself in studies that you love, I am deeply concerned, given the present tenor of Jewish-Christian relations, that it will be of little benefit to you to spend your best years on them. I confess that I wish for your sake that you would take up a Brotwissenschaft [a course of study that would put some bread on your table].”9 Nearly two years later, Ehrenberg returned more insistently to what must have been a delicate subject: “You are not wrong to study what you love, but shouldn’t you give some thought to your future? You know on the basis of personal experience that a Jew must learn a Brotwissenschaft, because he can’t become a teacher at a university. I very much want to hear your opinion regarding this life (as opposed to the study of antiquity).”10 Zunz shot back in earnest jest: “For a Brotwissenschaft, a Jew can take up only medicine, and since I’m unwilling to do that, I must believe that young philologians will not be any worse off than young ravens.”11 The dilemma was not Zunz’s alone. Despite obstacles and the prevailing atmosphere, Jews gravitated quickly to Prussia’s universities in the age of their ascendancy. When Berlin opened in 1810, Jews quite possibly represented some 7 percent of its matriculated students, a number which by 1834 had probably risen to several hundred.12 The law faculty in Berlin did not even award doctorates to Jews because they could not exercise the authority invested in the degree, and though Eduard Gans, Zunz’s friend and compatriot, had started there, he secured his law degree from Heidelberg in 1819.13 The first Jew in Berlin to earn his doctorate from its philosophy faculty was Moritz Ludwig Frankenheim, also from Wolfenbüttel, though it was only after his conversion in 1827 that he was appointed as an associate professor of physics in Breslau and eventually in 1850 promoted to full professor.14 The constant frustration of rising expectations clearly contributed to the three waves of conversions that swept over Berlin from 1770 to 1830. Some sixteen hundred baptisms averaged about twenty-seven per year. During the first wave from 1770 to 1800, the total may have reached as high as 7  percent, of which two-thirds were children and 60  percent women. The flight affected especially family units among the upper echelon and the young. After 1810, with Jews heading for the universities, the number of male converts rose to 59 percent, while the number of women dropped to 41 percent.15 For all of Prussia, some twenty-two hundred Jews chose to opt out between 1820 and 1840,16 and among them were many university students painfully trapped in the gulf between expanding educational opportunities and a narrow band

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of occupational choices. From Berlin Jost reported to Ehrenberg on August 31, 1819, that “people here constantly ask, ‘Why would a Jew study [at the university], since without a livelihood there is no way he can make any use of it?’ ”17 Thus typically, when Sigmund Zimmern (see above), the son of a Heidelberg banker and close friend of Gans, sought an appointment as associate professor from the local juridical faculty, it concurred unanimously that Heidelberg should not be the first university to take such a problematic step, which would discomfit not only sister institutions but all of Germany. Zimmern obliged by converting and immediately garnered an appointment as a full professor.18 Gans held on a few years longer. On May 3, 1821, he submitted to Prussia’s Ministry of Education a tightly reasoned brief against the inconsistency and untenability of Prussia’s policy to withhold academic appointments from Jews, in consequence of which Berlin’s juridical faculty had stonewalled his efforts over the last two years. In his covering note, Gans claimed to be a victim of “persecution, torment and rejection”: “I belong to that unfortunate class of human beings that is hated because uneducated and persecuted because it educates itself.”19 No one was more afflicted by this tantalizing bridge to nowhere than Leopold Zunz, and it is not surprising to learn from Jost’s letters to Ehrenberg that he wrestled with the idea of converting. To be sure, their friendship forged in a shared youth of misery had quickly cooled once Zunz arrived in Berlin, but there is no reason to suspect that Jost would have misled his beloved mentor, to whom he eff usively dedicated the first volume of his Geschichte der Israeliten (A History of the Israelites) in 1820, on a matter of such existential import.20 Jost knew from Ehrenberg’s letter to him just prior to Zunz’s departure for Berlin that he was even displeased that Zunz had adopted the first name Leopold for Lippman, when he began to teach in Wolfenbüttel: “Now a word regarding the name Leopold: I find it intolerable when Jews change their forenames in order to erase any outer trace of their origin. For the ghetto Jew [dem Stockjuden] no amount of concealment will help and for the educated Jew it is a disgrace to deny his origin. Did Moses Mendelssohn call himself Moritz or was he less respected as Moses? Just stop thinking and acting Jewish! The name is wholly irrelevant.”21 Jost touched glancingly on Zunz’s state of mind first in a letter dated April 6, 1819: “Zunz visits me rarely. Baptism is very much on his mind, although he struggles mightily against the idea and doesn’t really want to have anything to do with it. He is too far ahead of his co-religionists to be appreciated, let alone nurtured by them.”22 The generosity and perspicacity of the compliment confi rm the truthfulness of

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the news. Zunz’s medley of extraordinary gifts would destine him to be an outlier. Three and a half years later, after much had transpired, including the termination of Zunz’s abbreviated tenure as preacher at the Beer Temple (on which more anon), Jost returned to the subject at greater length and in a tone far more critical. Though Zunz no longer appeared to be wavering, he had apparently earlier informed many, as had Jost, of his intention to convert: About other news from here, regarding the dismissal of Dr. Zunz, which in a crude circular included many reproaches of me for speaking out freely against the piety of a preacher once close to the baptismal font and whose story of his most recent widely criticized behavior will soon appear in print— all this you surely know full well. Those presumptuous plans only gingerly hinted at have now collapsed. . . . I have always admired Zunz’s talents, but held his use of them to be inappropriate. He really has the power to do much good here, but lacks the necessary sagacity. First, he took the whole world into his confidence about his plan to convert to Christianity. Then by taking the post as preacher, he wanted to quash the rumor. And finally, to gain control over the truth, he became zealous, imprudent and provocative. The public ignored him and I did not counter his slights, except to speak the truth, as I always do, and overlook the insults.23 Hence Zunz’s ruminations about converting were no secret and not out of line with the angst of his peers.24 The conversion of Jost’s younger brother Simon, a student of law, in 1820 certainly did not escape Zunz’s attention.25 Once over the decision, Zunz never reconsidered. Not only did he personify the virtue of fidelity in stormy weather, but he became the scathing critic of those who jumped ship. His diary abounds with sardonic comments about prominent converts,26 while few merit mention in his unique Yahrzeit calendar (Die Monatstage des Kalenderjahres) of 1872 with its 722 names of Jews and Christians, men and women, whose known day of death allowed for memorialization.27 For instance, Zunz conspicuously omitted the name of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, even as he made an exception of Eduard Gans, Hegel’s preeminent legal disciple, though only for his work for the Verein (the subject of this chapter). Noting his premature death on May 5, 1839, Zunz recalled: “Professor Gans . . . converted to Christianity on December 12,

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1825 in Paris, but [his] most admirable years of development fell between 1818 and 1823, a period which Laube in his biography skipped over entirely.”28

* * * The Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (the Society for the Culture and Critical Study of the Jews) was founded in Berlin on November 7, 1819, by seven men who, except for Gans, were not native to Berlin and five of whom were under thirty. Zunz described the initiative to Ehrenberg a few months later as an effort to unite the best minds of German Jewry to promote culture and critical scholarship among their compatriots. In consequence, its active membership to the bitter end remained fairly homogeneous, socially marginal, decidedly bookish, and disastrously small in number.29 Heinrich Heine joined for a short stint in August 1822 while in Berlin,30 and when his immensely diligent and utterly sympathetic first biographer, Adolf Strodtmann, began his undertaking, Zunz prevailed upon him not to omit the story of the Verein: “Nearly all the advances [made by] Jews in the academic, political and civil arenas, as well as their initiatives in the reforms of their schools and synagogues have their roots in the activities of that association and its handful of members.”31 Zunz never discarded the papers of the Verein and placed them at the disposal of Strodtmann, who wove them into a colorful tapestry he called “Das junge Palästina,” analogous to his later chapter on “Das junge Deutschland.” Both told the story of idealistic youth in rebellion against the hidebound conservatism of entrenched elders in the entangled fields of religion and politics. As communicators, though, the former never matched the latter: “The Young Palestine, as we would like to call these heralds, who [were] way ahead of their time in anticipating the era’s new ideas, had not yet learned to package their liberal wisdom in a popular idiom, as did The Young Germany so effectively a decade later.”32 Still, by evocatively corroborating Zunz’s judgment, Strodtmann put the Verein on the historiographical map. Nor would the memory of its messianic fervor ever dim for Zunz. In 1839, he wrote his friend the Berlin publisher and communal leader Moritz Veit that “the Verein survived 39 × 40 days [Zunz often expressed his feelings in arithmetic terms], and those days in which Gans, Moser, Heine, Zunz and Rubo, ignoring their own welfare, devoted themselves wholly to the interests of their people [nationalen Interessen]—were they not more comely than our own day with its heartless self-centeredness?”33

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By November 1819, the prospects for full emancipation in the states of the German Confederation were rapidly receding. Liberals and Conservatives had united in their suspicion of the Jews. The recently founded Burschenschaften, the organized expression of student agitation for national unification across Germany, did not accept Jews as members,34 and in its celebration at the Wartburg Castle in October 1817 of the tercentenary of Luther’s Reformation and the more recent battle of Leipzig, among the books its members burned was Saul Ascher’s 1815 denunciation of their chauvinism, Die Germanomanie.35 The murder of a reactionary playwright in Mannheim on March 23, 1819, by a radicalized university student gave Austria’s chancellor Metternich a chance to extract from the diet of the German Confederation in Frankfurt a web of repressive measures and principles.36 And in the late summer of 1819, rhetoric erupted into violence against Jews and their property as riots leapfrogged across towns in southern and western Germany, though not in Prussia, where the promise of 1812 was undercut administratively.37 Thus when the Prussian government ordered all Christian children attending Jewish private schools to leave by September 15, 1819, Jost, one of the founders of the Verein, was forced to close his school by the start of the new year. The loss of income suddenly made him dependent on the goodwill of friends, such as Israel Jacobson, his former benefactor, who had helped him financially to open the school and now gave him the tidy gift of 800 Reichstaler. Jost proudly told Ehrenberg that he accepted only what he actually needed.38 A second factor served to increase the urgency to find refuge among one’s own. Internally, the erosion of faith among many Jews was weakening their resolve to withstand the adversity from without. Jost’s own estrangement from traditional Judaism exemplified the state of mind. In a long epistle to Ehrenberg from July 1820, Jost described in detail the expensive effort of an English missionary society founded in 1810 and operating in Berlin to convert Jews through suasion. He lauded it but doubted its efficacy because the society was perversely focused on converting religious rather than irreligious Jews. Moreover, Jost abhorred a Christianity dominated by clergy no less than a Judaism subservient to rabbis: “I am far from admiring clerical Christianity [Pfaff enchristenthum], although I can’t deny approving of the Christianity of the New Testament because it is a pure and purged Judaism, and our Judaism only a debased Christianity. But these poor Englishmen are as impoverished in learning as loaded with money. They are theologically naïve enough to convince themselves that observant Jews are more likely to convert than free thinkers,

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and thus they take aim at bearded rabbis . . . , starting a religious fight that alienates free thinkers, who till then had admired Christianity.”39 The hostility toward rabbinic Judaism, with its elaborate legalistic superstructure, was indeed a staple of the Verein and though long gone from its ranks, Jost unfurled it in a highly personal diatribe in the third volume of his history in the context of rejecting the talmudic claim that the whole corpus of dietary laws requiring the separation of meat and milk derived from a single biblical verse: This misunderstanding is all the more noteworthy since Moses himself relates that Abraham set before the angels (who visited him after his circumcision) meat and cream, making it clear that in doing so Abraham gave no offense to God. Yet the rabbis assert that Abraham already observed the most minute of rabbinic injunctions. Indeed, the statement doesn’t even deserve to be rebutted. Yet one sees that not only have millions been blinded by such views and burdened with innumerable laws, but also rendered anxious by the myriad related details. How many noble works could have been produced in the time stolen by their study or the sacrifices made by their observance. To be sure, it is not advisable to lightheartedly sever the fetters of a religion once adopted, but the time has come that seminars be given on the basis of Scripture that erect an authentic building in which the Mosaist [Jost’s neologism] can abide by the principles of his synagogue with dignity. Whoever may be offended by this wish, should teach me something better, show me the infallibility of human statements and I will gladly retract it. But who after a deep examination of the spirit of Rabbinism can suppress the anguish that seizes the heart, when seeing the thousands and millions blinded by these terrible errors, confined in the pursuits and bedeviled by obsessive anxiety in the face of such phony piety on every side. One can read traces of spiritual bondage in their faces, which block the entrance of more salutary knowledge. Moses never intended this to be the outcome of God’s law!!40 The consternation of this outburst connotes the existential crisis that drove the founders of the society into their rescue operation. Besieged from without

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and bereft from within, they fought on two fronts with little more than their wits and their will. The inspiration and energy for the organization came from Gans and Zunz. Gans, who had two years earlier tangled with Rühs himself over the reputation of his father, a failed banker,41 became its president on March 11, 1821, and articulated its Hegelian ideology with eloquent power. Zunz provided the administrative heft. As he wrote to Ehrenberg on January 15, 1822, he was currently the Verein’s vice president, editor of its scholarly journal, about to appear, and chair of its network of correspondents as well as head of its scientific and educational institutes. He also sent him a copy of the Verein’s newly printed statutes, which after protracted consultations with the government and several revisions, the government said required no official approval.42 Since every one of its four lines of activities was also the object of a separate set of bylaws, it is readily apparent that while for the first two years of its existence the society was absorbed with organizing itself, the deliberations explored many a question essential to a minority in transit from the margins of a Christian body politic to its heartland.43 Napoleon had compelled French Jewry to resolve such questions in 1806 when he convened an Assembly of Notables in Paris followed by a Sanhedrin in 1807, whereas the refusal of the Prussian government either to finish emancipating its Jewry or reorganizing its communal structure sowed the seeds for decades of bitter internal strife. In an effort to persuade the government to extend its approbation to the work of the Verein, Gans embedded his plea of April 1820 in an elaborate historical argument. To prove that Judaism was no impediment to Jews adopting the language, livelihood, and culture of their host societies, Gans summoned the history of Sephardic Jewry, with special emphasis on the assimilated descendants in modern France, England, and Holland. In contrast, such opportunity was not afforded Ashkenazic Jewry in medieval Christian Europe. With the Renaissance the gulf between Jew and Christian deepened even further, in part because the study of the multivolume Talmud, now readily available in print, came to monopolize the intellectual life of Polish Jewry. And yet since Mendelssohn, German Jews had given ample evidence of their ability to remake themselves, only to face now mounting public impatience and government ambivalence, which threatened to upend the process. Gans presented the society as totally committed “to eradicating all articles of faith and morality, manner of living and thinking which set Jews apart in civil society by a broad and useful spiritual makeover.” 44 Gans offered to collaborate with the authorities toward an eventual fusion of

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Germans and Jews. While the government should lower the legal barriers, the society would work internally to counter Jewish resistance to assimilation.45 The Verein regarded itself as a vital force for regeneration. In an emancipation tract authored by Zunz in the fall of 1818 for Levi Lazarus Hellwitz, a Westphalian advocate of modernization whose name it bore, Zunz also argued historically that Jews deserve citizenship and can be rejuvenated. Christian contempt had led to their degradation in exile. The miserable fate of the Greeks under the Turks, the Moors under the Christians, and the Christians in Egypt proves indisputably that oppression always corrodes character. Conversely, freedom and education transformed the lowly settlers of North America into a blessed nation. German Jews are no longer a mirror image of their still benighted Polish brethren. Reflective of the distance traveled is the fact that there are (at the time) some forty important German writers who are Jewish.46 Along with full emancipation, Zunz called for a cleansing of the public discourse on Jews and state assistance in the reformation of an insular rabbinate and a dilapidated school system. Most unexpected was his invocation of a French-type Sanhedrin under government auspices that would restructure Jewish life at the local and national levels and issue a new code of Jewish law in which only the Bible would be sacrosanct.47 Overall, this sophisticated but unrealistic roadmap delineated what was to be expected of Jews, Christians, and the state in making space for Jews marked by political equality and social integration. As Zunz recounted to Ehrenberg in a letter, the initiative was not his. He had been commissioned to salvage the remnants of an earlier effort. After studying the material, he dictated the final coherent and cogent text in just two days, for which, he bitterly noted, he received neither acknowledgment nor compensation: “Büschenthal [Zunz’s friend and the original author, who had died] has the money, Hellwitz the fame, the workers their pay, the Jews a word in their behalf and I, the prime mover, need to go to the publisher and buy my own thoughts for six groschen.” 48 The Verein created four lines of activity to wage its two-front war, two on the external front and two on the internal. The educational arm and the correspondence archive were deployed to counter Christian disdain and government suspicion, while the scholarly institute and journal were mounted to earn re spect from Christian academics, engender pride among Jews, and identify what was eternal in Judaism. Put differently, the embrace of German culture would facilitate assimilation and the application of critical scholarship would cultivate a sense of continued apartness, if only inwardly. The cultural

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agenda would be hands on, the academic theoretical. The advocacy of religious reform, however, was not in the cards, because the government bristled when it misread Cultur as Cultus.49 In November 1821, Gans appointed Zunz to replace the disgruntled and ineffective Joel Abraham List, the society’s first president and one of its older members, as the head of the educational institute,50 and in one week’s time Zunz had drafted a statute of thirty-one planks. Its opening paragraph announced the society’s intent to establish “a free school for those coreligionists who are devoted to science and art, but unable to attend a school or gymnasium, with the hope to awaken an appreciation for the world of science among suitable coreligionists.” The instruction would be offered without tuition, but only to Jewish boys thirteen or older who had a clear interest in pursuing a career in scholarship, business, education, preaching or the rabbinate, music, painting, or architecture and construction. The faculty would consist of Verein members who were obligated to teach at least three hours a week without pay.51 The next month (December 1821), Gans reported to Zunz that during the past semester he had been teaching ancient history and Latin four hours a week. His most promising student in both was a young man recently arrived from Glogau on the Oder by the name of (Salomon) Munk, fairly fluent in reading Latin prose and poetry, though without any appreciation for the beauty of good poetry.52 Munk one day would be heralded as the discoverer and editor of the Arabic original of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed and as professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France. In his next report to Zunz in April 1822, Gans spoke of teaching Greek as well. Of his nine students, Munk still stood out: “Munk grasps quickly, though could be more productive. He is learning a lot and conducts himself well. To be noted, however, he is excessively attached to rabbinic Judaism [Rabbinismus] out of sheer perversity.”53 By the end of October 1822, Julius Rubo and Moses Moser replaced Zunz, probably at his request.54 Nevertheless, growth remained precariously slow. While in April 1822, Gans could report in his presidential address that a total of twelve students had been taught by nine instructors, in his next address a year later, he spoke of fourteen students and twelve teachers and hinted at a possible merger of the society’s program with that of the long-standing Free School in Berlin.55 Behind the comment was an impassioned plea by Zunz in the winter of 1823 to the elders of the Berlin Jewish community to promote such a merger by assuming financial responsibility for the far stronger school that would result. Led by Lazarus Bendavid (a member of the Verein) with-

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out remuneration, the forty-five-year-old Free School lived from hand to mouth. According to Zunz, of its fifty-six students, only six paid. As for the society’s school, it had instructed twenty-two students out of an applicant pool of forty. Were the community willing to fund the merger, Zunz went on, the members of the Verein would gladly commit to teaching without pay. The emergent Free School would be of such high quality that paying students would soon appear. Above all, it would bring credit to the Jewish community of Berlin and ensure its future, for “the prosperity or decline of schools and synagogues are decisive in determining our progress and sanctity or our retreat and ruin.”56 Not only was this appeal infused with common sense, but also filled with intense conviction, a foreshadowing of Zunz’s lifelong dedication to the priority of Jewish education. But a communal board, which in October 1821 had refused to allow the society’s course offerings even to be announced at its synagogue ser vices because the society’s existence had not yet been approved by the government, was unlikely to consider favorably a request fraught with expense.57 By the start of 1824, it no longer mattered; the Verein had gone out of business.58 The second arm of the Verein to focus on the world outside was its correspondence archive. According to Moser, who as its temporary head delivered a preliminary report to the membership on its mission in March 1822, it was the last of the Verein’s four arms to be launched.59 Moser had come to Berlin in 1814 and worked in the banking firm of David Friedländer’s son Moses.60 Heine later would laud his understated and compassionate dedication to laboring for the good incognito, and it was most likely Moser who drafted the twenty-four paragraphs of the archive’s statutes.61 While yet another instance of the society’s reach exceeding its grasp, the document underscored the importance of comprehensive information on the Jewish world in the fight for emancipation and against defamation.62 The objective of the archive was to create an ever-expanding network of correspondents inside and outside Germany to generate information that would eventually enrich the deliberations of the scholarly institute and the publications of the journal. The guidelines stipulated the scope of the information sought: on recent events regarding Judaism and the involvement of noteworthy individuals; on new writings related to Judaism and their authors; on little known or utterly lost works about Judaism, whether by Jews or non-Jews; on the past or present moral, religious, political, and economic condition of Jews at all social levels and in all regions of the body politic; on

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advances in culture and ethics registered by Jews collectively; and finally on contributions made individually by Jews in the arts and sciences or civic and national life. Verein members were obligated to participate actively by securing correspondents outside Berlin or by sending in reports themselves on anything newsworthy as quickly as possible.63 A few examples of the archive in action will readily suggest its ambitious expanse. The earliest submissions came from Hellwitz, a recent member of the Verein, in the form of copies of a complaint to the Prussian chancellor from the Jewish community (israelitische Corporation) in Westphalia dated May 1821 and his official response of December 9, 1821, and a subsequent report from February 26, 1822, on the state of Westphalian Jewry, probably written by Hellwitz himself.64 The inventory list also shows an excerpt from an unpublished chronicle on the history of the Jews in Teplitz and another from a newspaper in Warsaw dated February 18, 1822, that printed the edict of Czar Alexander I, ordering the immediate disbanding of the traditional local Jewish communal structure (the Kahal) throughout Poland.65 In charge of both the archive and journal, Zunz published the edict in the third and final number of his Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Journal for the Academic Study of Judaism) (ZWJ) along with Gans’s full-throated approval, given first in one of the many sessions of the scholarly institute (wissenschaftliches Institut).66 Gans took the occasion to reiterate the society’s rebellion against the rabbinic and moneyed leadership of the traditional Jewish community. Both were oppressive relics from its medieval past, no less than serfdom, the duel, and the fourfold faculty structure of the university. In Poland, Gans contended, the rabbinate had stagnated, turned inward, and sunk into scholasticism. It also forged a fateful alliance with the wealthy, which, akin to the medieval alliance of churchmen and nobles, dominated the governance of the Jewish community. Whereas the rabbinate had been under assault now for decades, Gans was especially stirred by the czar’s attack against the power of the wealthy: “Far more ruinous and enervating than the most stupid and crude rabbinism is the monopoly of money, because the former promotes ignorance while the latter decadence. One can only hope that the ingenuity with which a wise prince has stanched here a barely noticed source of cultural deprivation might prompt some imitation in our German Fatherland, namely a closer look at the governance of the Jewish community.”67 The confidence with which Gans had addressed his fellow rebels on the first anniversary of the founding of the Verein on November 21, 1820, was long gone by the end of 1823. Then, he had believed that a cluster of intellectuals

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driven by a sense of calling could pull off unaided the hardest revolution of all: “The overturning and remaking of consciousness. In this no power or intrusion from without is of value. A psychic evil needs a psychic healing. You will effect it.”68 By 1823 the Prussian government had not only quashed all refashioning of Jewish worship, but also reversed itself on appointing Jews to university faculties.69 The interconnectedness of the society’s activities is also manifested in its courtship of Mordecai Manuel Noah, the most prominent American Jew of his day. Word of his 1819 project to found a settlement on Grand Island near Buffalo, New York, for Jews persecuted in Europe stirred messianic embers, reinforced by news of a similar undertaking in the Upper Mississippi and Missouri Territory by William Davis Robinson, an enterprising Christian merchant.70 In two successive meetings on December 29, 1821, and January 5, the Verein heatedly discussed endorsing Noah’s project and encouraging Jews to emigrate. Immanuel Wolf (later Wohlwill) spoke for the majority when he declaimed: “Over there is a land of freedom and tolerance, where even Jews will not be treated as strangers. Over there one can begin a new, resourceful life which will serve to promote the rebirth of the Jews.”71 But Gans and Zunz, who had an uncle living in New York,72 prevailed in convincing those in attendance that advocating emigration exceeded the purview of the society’s statutes and might readily displease the government. They proposed no more than turning the matter over to the archive and inviting Noah to become an associate member and correspondent of the Verein. And on January 1, 1822, between the two meetings, a letter in stilted English signed by Gans, Zunz, Moser, and one Leo-Wolf, a physician and corresponding member from Hamburg, went out to Noah.73 The value of the letter lies in its hunger for information about Jews in America—“their progress in business and knowledge, and the rights allowed them in general, and by each state”—which when disseminated would dispose at least some “to leave a country where they have nothing to look for but endless slavery and oppression.”74 Heine, who had come to Berlin in the summer of 1821 and joined the society at Gans’s behest, defiantly counseled the students he taught in its educational program to leave Germany for England and America: “In those countries, it would not occur to anyone to ask, what do you believe or don’t believe? Everyone can seek bliss in his own fashion.”75 Finally, the reports and documents accumulating in the Verein’s archive would become the fragments for an eventual collage of Judaism and its innumerable components. Bearing the technical name Statistik, such a composite

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had nothing to do with numbers, but rather with a snapshot of a present moment sociologically viewed as comprehensively as possible. If history faced the past, Statistik focused on a slice of time in the present, with documentary evidence being the building blocks of both. In the last of his three essays published in the ZWJ, Zunz validated the long term mission of the archive by co-opting the eighteenth-century German concept of Statistik into the embryonic field of Jewish studies. Bereft of a galvanizing state, Judaism would serve as the fulcrum that gave coherence to the totality of the Jewish experience. Ultimately, Jewish history consisted of a myriad of “statistically” studied moments; it would take scholars some eighty years to approach the sweep of Zunz’s vision of historical sociology.76 Zunz had first lectured on the nature of a Jewish form of Statistik in the Verein’s scholarly seminar, as had Wolf on his conception of what constitutes the field of Jewish studies. Both lectures subsequently appeared in the society’s journal, ten of whose sixteen essays had first been rolled out in the seminar. The overlap was intended, for the seminar’s bylaws drafted by Zunz (with thirty-five separate articles) stressed that Judaism was to be subjected to critical scholarship in a free and objective spirit. The seminar was to meet frequently and each member was obliged to regularly share his research. Even associate members living outside Berlin were expected to submit at least one paper every six months. The gravitas of its agenda inevitably constricted its membership. Of the twenty-five papers given over the course of forty-five sessions during the lifetime of the Verein, sixteen came from the seminar’s three founders— Moser, Gans, and Zunz.77 Thus the seminar served as the laboratory for testing and collaborating on research, which would eventually be distilled for publication in the journal. The intimate connection requires that these two arms of the Verein’s activities be treated together, though each had its own elaborate set of statutes. If the school and archive were oriented toward the external state of the Jewish condition, the seminar and journal concentrated on its internal state. Not only did the high-minded rhetoric of the society concede at least partial Jewish responsibility for the deplorable condition of German Jewry, but it also granted the legitimacy of the government’s demand for the social homogeneity of all its citizens. Accordingly, the Verein espoused an agenda of total assimilation that would drastically shrink the scope of Judaism, eliminate all external differences, produce a radically altered rabbinic leadership, and return Judaism to its Mosaic foundation. In an age saturated with Hegelian idealism that believed ideas to be the engine of human events, the society

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invested in identifying and formulating the essential idea of Judaism as the centripetal force that would offset the centrifugal stress of total assimilation. Jewish singularity and influence historically were always to be found in the realm of ideas and values and not in the annals of statecraft or military prowess. Though Zalman Shazar (then Rubaschoff ) when he republished Gans’s three presidential addresses in 1918–19 called them “the first fruits of dejudaization,” he knew full well that neither Gans nor the Verein advocated religious conversion. Political accommodation yes, but not religious betrayal. The society was acutely aware of the differences between the demands of the state and those of the church. Nor was it oblivious to the suffering of Jews at the hand of the church in the Middle Ages. But the Verein was desperate for Jews to reenter history after nearly two millennia on the sidelines. The mantra of the age was reconciliation and toward that end the Verein demanded the completion of the emancipation process, which would bestow the freedom Jews needed to regenerate themselves.78 The Verein’s preferred weapon of combat was critical scholarship, an empirical and rational science of universal import. Research would muster the data to convince the authorities of the contributions of Judaism to humanity and the right of Jews to find their place in the present political configuration. Internally, it would craft a narrative over time that would steel the resolve of Jews to remain distinct, if not apart, or in Gans’s resonant metaphor “as a current . . . in the ocean.”79 Aimed at two audiences then, scholarship would simultaneously be a source of truth and pride. With the nomenclature Wissenschaft des Judenthums as opposed to Wissenschaft der Juden, Zunz avoided the atomization implicit in the use of the plural Juden. Jews were now defined as individuals who played out their lives on a chessboard called Judaism, even as the expansive scope of that board recast it as a cultural rather than a theological grid. Clearly echoing Zunz’s Etwas, Wolf declared in the opening essay of the journal: “If we are to talk of a science of Judaism, then it is self-evident that the word ‘Judaism’ is here being taken in its comprehensive sense—as the essence of all the circumstances, characteristics and achievements of the Jews in relation to religion, philosophy, law, literature in general, civil life and all the affairs of man— and not in that more limited sense in which it is only the religion of the Jews.”80 Yet, ironically, what kept those divergent strands together for Wolf was Judaism’s unique God idea, which fructified even its most secular extensions.81 The sense of urgency that drove Gans, Moser, and Zunz to bring the Verein’s journal to life quickly was not shared by Jost. By resolution the society

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had decided to elect two editors and give them full autonomy. It would retain only a right to be consulted. Its primary responsibility was to get members to contribute samples of their work. Jost was exceedingly displeased by the exclusion of the Verein from managerial authority and at a meeting on April 20, 1820, aired his views at length. The purpose of the journal was to be a mouthpiece of the society and therefore it was improper for the Verein to forgo all supervision of the editors. Instead of a loose relationship between the Verein and the journal, Jost demanded a detailed set of bylaws and even a written contract with the editors that would spell out how future conflicts would be resolved. By way of a peroration, Jost cautioned that “it would be far better to proceed slowly and deliberately than to harm the project with rash decisions.”82 With Gans in disagreement, Jost’s proposal failed to garner support. And by May 14, he had withdrawn from the Verein.83 Some two years later in a discursive letter to Ehrenberg, Jost depicted the gulf that estranged him from his peers and friends: [The Verein] is an outpouring of unabashed self-importance of the dumbest nonsense [Dünkels] of a few young people, who arrogantly imagine to be able to change a whole nation which they barely know. The results match the underlying premises, witness the boastful, laughable statutes, the childish criticism of every thing that exists and the unreadable journal. What comes along to do some good must proceed modestly and young men who share the same goal must pave for themselves a calm road. . . . Moreover, the Verein, as yet unapproved by the authorities, operates illegally. I have nothing against an association of Jewish intellectuals [committed] to educating their errant brothers, but they must first give evidence that they themselves are educated. . . . That is why I hold myself aloof from a cause which I helped initiate with great excitement.84 But this self-revelatory epistle from August 1822 illuminates a much larger landscape. The dark horizon facing Prussian Jewry filled Jost with foreboding and resignation. Jews who attended a university had no alternative but to convert. If we don’t push Jews, Jost declaimed, to learn to work with their hands, a whole generation will go over to Christianity. And rightly so, for what binds them to their religion but childhood memories? What is more, Jost continued, the state cannot extend equality to Jews as long as they refuse to

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marry Germans. A state consists of a single national entity that must be a unified whole. How can the state tolerate a minority that believes it possesses the truth and will not socialize? Can such a minority ever show true patriotism? We are worse off than our persecuted ancestors, he contended, because we no longer find consolation in our faith. What can possibly compensate young intellectuals who wander around unemployed and hungry in order to preserve the name Jew? Faith is a bugaboo that vanishes as soon as it is derided. Jost was quick to assure Ehrenberg that he was no friend of desertion, but who can swim against the rapids of our day? Each person lives but once.85 Despite Jost’s abrupt departure, the first issue of the Zeitschrift came out in March 1822, with two more numbers thereafter in 1823, in all a single quarto volume of 539 pages.86 At its meeting on August 11, 1822, the Verein decided to pay both Zunz, its editor, and contributing essayists for their ser vices.87 The field of Jewish studies in Germany would ever after bear the name of that beleaguered undertaking.88 Collectively, its authors, especially Gans and Zunz, who each wrote three of its pieces, respectively, showed with conceptual power and stunning detail the potential for critical scholarship to reshape the understanding of Judaism. Whether dealing with its external or internal history, their essays are secular in tone, inductive in method, and generally nonpartisan. Methodologically, they move in different directions. In his exploration of the earliest traces of Jews in northern Europe and Slavic lands joined by the German language, Gans illustrated the inescapable need to consult nonJewish sources to do Jewish history. The essay focuses in particular on Jews in England before 1066, for which Gans listed more than a dozen primary and secondary English sources indispensable for the subject.89 Nor can a reliable internal history of any Jewish settlement be done prior to knowing something of its external history.90 The same methodological message reverberated in Gans’s study of Jewish legal status in the Roman Empire and medieval Christian Europe, which Jost was quick to praise in his own history.91 The essay relied entirely on Greek and Roman sources. Laws, however, functioned differently in different periods. In pagan Rome, polytheism was tolerant and not obsessed with truth and hence the law protected Jews. Intergroup tensions erupted in the social arena from Jewish allegiance to Jerusalem and pagan ignorance of Judaism. With Christian ity in possession of the truth, deviation often ran afoul of public opinion. It was actually church theology that tempered Christian animus with its reverence for the Old Testament and its expectation of an eventual

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conversion at the end of days. The self-contradictory nature of Christian policy toward the Jews down to his own day triggered an outburst of presentmindedness that brought down the wrath of the censor on the passage: “How long will this destructive half-measure still last? Has history not amply taught that between two options, the only choice is either to embrace the principle of salvation through a single church, in consequence of which Jews should be banished from the earth and the resulting chasm filled with their lifeless bones, or to forget about the Jews in matters of law and then fill the chasm with their reborn spirits? Only that which lies in the middle is evil.”92 Beyond the utilization of non-Jewish sources, Gans argued tellingly for the employment of comparative research. The body of terms, institutions, ideas, ritual, and purportedly historical events found throughout rabbinic literature needed to be brought out of its isolation. Many of these items bore a resemblance to items in cultures with which Jews interfaced, and similarity implied the possibility of influence. Gans had already set out in this direction in his essay on Jewish legal status in the Roman Empire, when he tried to align the titles of Jewish officials mentioned in the Roman codes with the titles of Jewish officials in rabbinic literature. His majestic essay on the principles of inheritance law in the Bible and Talmud also firmly planted its terminology and practices within the Roman world. The comparative approach led to large conclusions. While Gans regarded the Hebrew Bible as the highest expression of the Oriental world, he contended that the Talmud was a product of the Westernization of Judaism. Continuity lay in the fact that the Talmud acted as the expositor of Mosaic law, but in so doing the Talmud was open to the influence of the societies through which it passed. And Gans offered a bevy of examples of rabbinic terms relating to marriage that resemble Roman practice and terminology. As for talmudic inheritance law, he credited it with taking the disparate fragments and allusions of biblical practice and forging them into a well-ordered, inflected legal system, indeed one that compared favorably with that of Roman law.93 If then a keen eye for relevant non-Jewish sources and plausible instances of comparative material greatly sharpened the perspective on the Jewish past, Zunz’s methodological breakthrough in the handling of conventional Jewish sources was no less critical in the contextualization of historical phenomena. Th is was the dramatic achievement of his biographical essay on Rashi, the swan song of the scholarly seminar and the Verein itself. Texts long sanctified by tradition could be induced to yield unimagined information when subjected

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to new questions. Zunz’s goal was to strip Rashi, the classic eleventh-century commentator on the Bible and Talmud, of the nimbus of saga and my thology. Veneration had buried the Rashi of history. There was only one way to do a critical biography, and that was to read the works of Rashi themselves. By an exhaustive reading of all he had written and a rigorous application of philological analysis, Zunz was able to assemble the profile of a man of his age (d. 1105), who did not know Arabic or Persian or Latin, who had never met Maimonides, and who in fact was unfamiliar with the exegetical creativity of Spanish Jewry. Moreover, his command of French was far greater than German. Zunz was also able to identify the works that Rashi actually wrote and the works of others that he knew and used. Some eighty such works made up his own library. Overall, Zunz’s biography was a remarkable display of erudition, acumen, and discipline. With new tools and perspectives, Zunz was destined to mine and extract from the classical corpus of Jewish literature untold new information and significance.94 The importance of the Rashi essay also derived from the challenge it threw up to the dominant preference for Sephardic Jewry, which Zunz had shared up to that point with the rest of the society. His doctoral dissertation had been on a thirteenth-century Spanish Jewish philosopher and an earlier essay of his in the journal had focused on the difficult task of identifying Spanish place names in the Hebrew literature of the Iberian Peninsula. The essay was a model of a methodology that could be used on any geographical area in which Jews once resided. Zunz felt obliged to vindicate his choice with another intrusion of present-mindedness: The study of Jewish literature draws us primarily there (to Spain) because a literature is actually to be found there. Among all the efforts of the Jewish people since their political decline, there are none comparable to those of the Spanish era, where Jews attained a level equal to that of Europe, if not higher. There men lived worthy of renown. There was not only a dead language as a cherished legacy from their forefathers, but also a living, comprehensible, cultural language. Devotees of poetry and science competed with the Moors. Even its external history was more important, vital and fascinating after the barbarism of the Gothic era than anywhere else. Indeed, ethics and education became so ingrained that even the most distant settlement of Jews fleeing Spain was distinctively marked by them.95

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But Zunz was on his way to overcoming the bias. The Rashi essay signaled a momentous step to correct the imbalance. The lasting value of the essay on Spanish place names, however, is that in its sweeping theoretical prelude, Zunz enunciated a fuller version of the methodology that undergirded the new science of Judaism. In spare language, he sketched the evolution of Jews out of Israelites in the Roman period, the decentralization of Jewish settlements, the cohesive role of Judaism as a religiouspolitical construct, and, fi nally, a delineation of eleven periods of Jewish history from the earliest time to his own day. To put this all together and to integrate the external and internal dimensions required a labor of intense specificity: where and when did a person live or was a book written and in what setting did an event take place? Each fact was a single but critical stone for a building under construction. In addition to the qualifications requisite of all modern historians, Jewish historians needed to have the well-rounded knowledge to detect internal developments in Judaism, an ability to see details against the backdrop of the whole, and a critical understanding of all of Jewish literature. As for the Hebrew sources in which place names appeared most often, Zunz listed four types: chronicles and travel books; halakhic responsa; inscriptions on coins, buildings, and tombstones; and communal record books. Zunz also drew attention to the reference works available for consultation.96 Taken together, the bold essays by Gans and Zunz laid out in both theory and practice the arduous spadework ahead. In retrospect, the journal’s modest reception made it a symbol rather than a success. After reading the third number, Heine wrote Zunz that he found the German of the journal abominable and impenetrable.97 Ehrenberg concurred. Only two copies sold in Braunschweig. Good Jews found its discourse far too learned.98 In a letter to Ehrenberg on April 18, 1823, Zunz wrote in defense by crisply restating the journal’s intent: “The journal is certainly not a Jewish paper and not designed to educate the Jews of Braunschweig. We have enough vehicles for education right now. But to create for Judaism some status and respect and gradually to arouse and unite the better minds in Israel, that can only be done through critical scholarship and it is our goal to keep the journal at that level.”99 Sylvester de Sacy in Paris, France’s renowned Orientalist and the mentor of Germany’s rising generation of Orientalists, courteously thanked Zunz on October 7, 1822, for his free copy. But he cautioned that given the paucity of Jewish and gentile sources for many periods of Jewish history, the term “Judaism” might often end up replacing facts with speculation. And he added prophetically “that Germany is hardly the place

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where anyone will appreciate the usefulness and difficulty of the work to which you are dedicating yourself.”100 Most lamentable, the journal reached few hands. The first number in the spring of 1822 had been printed in a run of five hundred copies at a total cost of 124 talers. As late as 1839, Zacharias Frankel admitted to Zunz that neither he nor his close friend Bernhard Beer, who had a fine personal library of Judaica, nor anyone else in Dresden had ever seen a copy of the journal.101 Two other projects that Zunz thought through for the Verein give still further evidence of its unrestrained élan, uncanny insight, and totally inadequate means. In January 1822, Gans had asked him to draft statutes for a Verein library. By November 3, he submitted to the plenum a document of twenty-nine articles that suggested the future collection be divided between original and auxiliary works. Original works were to be authored by Jews or deal with Jews and Judaism and fall in one of twelve discrete categories of literature. In contrast, auxiliary works had to be crafted by non-Jews or ex-Jews and likewise deal with Jews and Judaism. Some eight categories defined their substance and scope.102 At the conclusion of Zunz’s presentation, the assembled members adopted his proposal unanimously. Eleven months later on October 5, 1823, Zunz would make his final quarterly report on his creation.103 Though it was destined for the dustbin, the sweep and refinement of Zunz’s vision fully anticipated some of the modern conundrums in the collecting of Hebraica and Judaica. The society also entertained the grandiose idea of a new German translation of the Hebrew Bible. The initiative came from its affiliate in Hamburg headed by Gotthold Salomon, one of the two preachers in the employ of the city’s Temple Association, though it was left to Zunz to make the case for the project in Berlin at a plenary session on August 31, 1823.104 In his usual learned and methodical way, Zunz argued that historically, unlike the medieval church, Judaism never disparaged the translation of its Scripture. As examples, he cited the highly regarded Arabic translation of Saadia, the Spanish translation published in Ferrara in 1553, the two Judeo-German translations of Jekutiel Blitz and Josel Witzenhausen in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and of course that of Mendelssohn. But the need for a new translation was always commensurate with changes in language, taste, and opinion: “Thus what is lacking at this moment when German sermons and German religious education ought to be reintroduced into our synagogues is a completely new Bible translation, in accord with an agreed upon plan, that is inexpensive, compact and readily accessible.” According to the agreement

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between the two chapters, the translation would be carried out in Hamburg, but revised in Berlin, which would also raise the large sums needed to fund the project. Though the printing of the translation would be done in Hamburg, Berlin would be listed as the official publisher.105 Even the guidelines for the actual execution of the translation had been agreed upon.106 Despite some moments of contention, Berlin adopted the proposal.107 Unfortunately, the lifespan of the Verein was nearing its end and the fruition of the forethought would not become manifest until the late 1830s, when two independent translations of the Hebrew Bible, one done single-handedly by Salomon and the other merely edited by Zunz, came out within a year of each other.108 The final meeting of the Verein took place on February 1, 1824, with but five members in attendance. Gans reported that thus far the Berlin community leadership had shown no interest in the Verein’s offer to assist in the reform of its worship ser vice. Samuel Schönberg, born in Hungary in 1794 and a member since July 1821,109 lamented the declining interest of the entire membership in the work of the society. Gans promised to convene an extraordinary meeting to discuss the matter on the following Saturday, though there is no evidence that it ever took place.110 Before Gans left Berlin in April 1825 to convert in Paris in December, he turned over the papers of the Verein to Zunz as requested with a note: “As I regard the Society as de facto finished, so is my presidency. If you are of a different mind, you are free to assume the reins as acting president.”111 By March 1826, Gans had secured an appointment in Berlin as an associate professor.112 Not only did Zunz preserve the papers, but he vowed to soldier on alone. In the summer of 1824, he delivered a heartrending eulogy on the Verein in a letter to Wohlwill, who had changed his name from Wolf in 1822 and moved to Hamburg in 1823: I have come to the point of no longer believing in a Jewish Reformation. We must hurl a stone at this ghost in order to be rid of it. . . . The Jews and Judaism that we wanted to remake are wholly fragmented, the booty of barbarians, fools, money changers, idiots and communal leaders. Many solstices from now will find this lot still unchanged—fragmented, streaming into the Christian religion of necessity [Nothreligion], without backbone or principle, some still clad in old rags shoved aside by Europe, vegetating and with dry eyes looking for the donkey of the Messiah or some other long-eared animal, some thumbing through paper money, others through popular dictionaries, sometimes rich, sometimes bank-

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rupt, sometimes oppressed, sometimes tolerated. Among German Jews their own scholarship [i.e., traditional learning] has died out, and for European scholarship they have no appreciation because they are untrue to themselves, estranged from the very idea and slaves solely to that which is of benefit to them. . . . In truth the Verein never existed. Five to ten inspired men found each other and like Moses dared to hope in spreading their spirit. But that was a delusion. What alone survives this flood is the science of Judaism. It lives, even if for hundreds of years it lies fallow. I confess that next to my submission to God’s judgment, this science is my comfort and support. These storms and experiences will not bring me into conflict with myself. Because I realized that I was preaching in the wilderness, I stopped preaching so that I would not be disloyal to my own words. Sapiente sat [a word to the wise is sufficient].113

* * * The intensity of Zunz’s engagement with die deutsche Synagoge matched his devotion to the Verein. On May 20, 1820, he began to preach in the modernized worship ser vice in the spacious home of Jacob Herz Beer and continued thereafter every two weeks. Upon receipt of his Prussian citizenship in June 1821, Zunz succeeded two months later in gaining from the synagogue’s directors an official appointment as its Prediger (preacher). Thus in a letter dated August 31, 1821, from Altona, he could proudly inform Adelheid that after their marriage, she would be addressed as “Frau Predigerin” (madam preacher).114 The importance of that post was that it enjoyed official status. The Prussian government had long loathed private religious ser vices for fear of diminished control, and when the community’s existing Heidereutergasse building required renovation to accommodate a growing membership, the Beer Temple became one of three temporarily sanctioned sites for ser vices.115 The German nomenclature for the innovation expressed the underlying discontent with the incumbent traditional establishment. Indeed in terms of education, function, and authority, the Prediger posed a radical alternative to the religious leadership of the traditional yeshiva-trained rabbi. Until then the usual setting for such breakaway ser vices had been in schools founded by maskilim (enlightened Jews who wrote in Hebrew) since Mendelssohn, which often floundered

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on the periphery of the organized community.116 At the meeting of the society on July 7, 1822, Gans had proposed that it take the initiative to organize the proliferating preachers throughout Germany into an independent organization in which the Verein would have a nominal presence through two deputies. While Zunz supported the idea, Rubo argued against it on the grounds that the action would violate the warning of the government to stay out of matters religious (Cultus) and that the office of Prediger was still too unstable and ephemeral. An eight-to-three vote approved the proposal, but like many of the Verein’s bright ideas, it died aborning.117 At its next meeting, Gans, on a roll, proposed having Zunz’s scholarly institute vet the candidates applying to preach at the High Holy Day and Passover ser vices of the biannual Leipzig fairs with their aggregate of Jews from all over Europe. That proposal too was approved, along with the amendment that only preachers or men conversant with Hebrew literature be allowed to conduct the evaluations.118 There was good reason for the society to take up the cause, if ever so carefully, for die deutsche Synagoge; worship had much greater resonance than Wissenschaft. In 1820 Zunz had been invited to preach in Leipzig at the dedication of its German worship ser vice on Shmini Atseret. On October 3, at the end of the festival, an elated Zunz wrote Ehrenberg an upbeat report, whose rich details limn the scope and political import of liturgical reform as well as Zunz’s own religious posture. The nascent reform ser vices in Hamburg, where the Verein had its only official branch, inspired the initiative in Leipzig, and the participation of four children from Hamburg who had come specifically for the dedication, highlighted the patrimony. The University of Leipzig accommodated the group with space on its premises. On Simhat Torah Joseph Wolf delivered the sermon, while Zunz led the German parts of the ser vice, read the Torah, and accepted the honor of completing the annual public cycle of Torah reading with the final chapter of Deuteronomy (Hatan Torah). A Jew from Brody later expressed his delight with Zunz’s Torah reading, which Zunz told Ehrenberg he did with grammatical precision but no cantillation. Zunz also related that on Simhat Torah he observed the Hasidim from Shklov at their ser vices auctioning off the recitation of biblical verses while “smoking, yelling, eating and singing like the barbarians in New Zealand.” But Leipzig did more than nourish his contempt. The infectious promise of liturgical reform to advance the prospects of emancipation stirred his political imagination:

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The effect of this never-before-seen celebration is indescribable. You can compare it to a storm, whose whirlwind erupts in one spot and then moves on taking every thing with it. Polish Jews, [along with] others either pious, or enlightened, or from abroad, and even Christians, etc.—none were unsatisfied— and word thereof is going out to all parts of Germany with yesterday’s or today’s mail. Both dedicatory sermons will be printed. Thus far those who attended our ser vices came from 30 cities, including Lissa, Brody, Bucharest, Vienna, Munich, Dresden, Elberfeld, Cracow, Cassel, Florence, Amsterdam and Frankfurt on the Main. I hope the institution will last and exert no small influence on Breslau, where a synagogue is now being built. Indeed, a Jew from Fürth intends to gather signatures for a German synagogue. . . . Aren’t there men in Braunschweig who could advocate the creation of a reformed worship ser vice? Precisely at this moment, we should be collecting signatures in Seesen, Wolfenbüttel, Blankenburg and Gandersheim. In fact, I will argue that we do exactly that so that the German Bundestag might realize just who and how many favor a German synagogue. We should not be deterred by their small number, for I hope their stature will outweigh the number.119 In other words, it was vital that German officialdom be made aware of the religious transformation underway. The German synagogue proved not only that Judaism was rapidly adapting itself to German modes of belief and practice but also that Jews were amply ready to assume the responsibilities of citizenship. Zunz’s Leipzig sermon on “The Call to Proceed” propounded the need to shift away from rabbis to prophets, from law to morality, from external piety to inwardness, and from particularism to universalism. What God demands of us is deeds not words, dignity and decorum rather than wild outbursts, and love of God and our fellow human: “For whenever we have wrought something great or written something beautiful, it was neither passivity nor laziness, neither sensuousness nor selfishness that created it, but rather intellectual energy, rational thought and unlimited trust in God.”120 Zunz’s tight-knit sermon displayed that he was no stranger to the genre. His language was mea sured, his sentences cadenced, and his ideas sharply articulated. The palpable sincerity of his conviction, moreover, animated the whole.

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Toward the end of August 1821, Zunz, in need of a break, went with Gans and Rubo to Hamburg, ostensibly on Verein business. The composition of the group prompted Gans to entertain Moser later with the following sardonic quip: “Three Jewish doctors on a journey squeezed into a coach, each with four letters to his name, and not an M.D. among them!”121 Though Zunz was particularly glum and uncommunicative during the two-day journey, his invigorating month-long stay firmed up his resolve to work for the welfare of German Jewry. Shortly after his arrival and the warm reception accorded him, he shared with Adelheid, still only his fiancée, his excitement at being part of a movement that extended far beyond Berlin: I am pressed from all sides to preach here at least once. But I have not decided yet. . . . I am fascinated here by the convergence of the German worship ser vice with matters pertaining to the Jews. Berlin, Breslau, Vienna, Leipzig and southern Germany are all in constant contact with the business life here. And the activity ignited by the god Mercury serves the interests of Jehovah. But the greatest plus is that this place has a few proactive, eager, knowledgeable and determined men, who do not wait till they are pushed, but act on their own with energy. I am firmly convinced that until the present sclerotic and cowardly generation dies out and one born in freedom arises, which will fight for its own salvation, that is for human rights and knowledge, no good will emanate from the Jews themselves. I hope upon my return to Berlin to be active in behalf of the Jews. At this juncture in his letter, Zunz broke into a romantic mode. The presence of a soul mate imbued him with the confidence to endure the hardships attendant to his mission, even as it impelled him to be forthright: “Do not wonder, my devoted partner [Treueste], that in my letters I touch upon this topic so often. My whole life is a text to this unending subject, although the world has not always known or fathomed it. Here where I am both aroused to new action and feel a sense of satisfaction in conversing with you, I am touched with longing for you and the wish to be worthy of you, so that you might share in the earnestness of my views and strivings. It seems to me that the more fervently I work for the good of my brothers, the deeper I long for you. And even though I am inclined to laugh at this gush of emotion, I still feel that it did me some good.”122

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Unfortunately, Zunz’s tenure as one of the two official preachers of the Beer Temple lasted no longer than one year. By September 12, 1822, he had submitted his resignation. But a few months earlier, the temple had been the site of his marriage to Adelheid.123 As his relationship with the temple leadership deteriorated, charges and countercharges filled the air. A special committee of nine members to resolve the differences submitted its report on September 9. Of the four charges against Zunz, the committee found merit in only one, that Zunz had improperly departed from the synagogue at the moment services for Tisha be-Av were about to begin: “Granted that the divine [Gottesgelehrter] should heed his inner conviction, it is expected that he also take into account what the moment calls for.” Obviously at this point in his life, Zunz had discarded the observance of the twenty-five-hour summer fast commemorating the destruction of Jerusalem’s two temples.124 In contrast, the committee made short shrift of the charges brought by Zunz—that the leadership of the temple was responsible for its decline, that it had violated Zunz’s right as a preacher, and that after his jeremiad on the grave condition of the temple, the leadership encouraged its disaffected membership to call for his removal, without the courtesy of a hearing. The special committee, however, did not entirely exonerate the leadership. Much of the friction and misunderstanding so rife in this clash could have been avoided if the leadership had taken the time to draft a set of bylaws governing the operation of the temple, and its future welfare demanded that it do so immediately. As for Zunz, the committee instructed him henceforth to abide by the instruction of the temple’s official leadership.125 The outcome only exacerbated Zunz’s irascible disposition. After a letter of protest to the special committee on September 11, he submitted his resignation to the temple board the following day.126 A few weeks before, Zunz had summarized for his friend Isak Noa Mannheimer, destined to replace him briefly in Berlin and then go on to an illustrious career in Vienna, his own abbreviated misadventure in Berlin: Since September 1821, I have not given a sermon in which I have not intermingled clear and vague references to the improvement of the Temple. I also personally brought to people’s attention inappropriate practices and opposed their misconstrued and unauthorized liturgical regulations, etc. I drafted for them statutes, suggested [in conjunction with Isaac Levin Auerbach (the other preacher and a founding member of the Verein)] changes in the prayers. Nothing

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helped. Thus on August 17, I gave a sermon on the downfall of the Temple, which did not spare the board and set forth irreligion, vanity, arrogance and love of money as the reasons for the downfall. In consequence, the board that I had not spared fell into a frenzy. They incited people [who had not been in the Temple at the time], intimidated my friends, worked over the faint-hearted and finally on Tuesday August 20 notified Temple members of a meeting on Sunday August 25 to decide on Dr. Zunz’s attack against the community and the board. . . . Thus has this wretched Temple confirmed what I said, that it lies in ruins.127 By November 22, 1822, Zunz had a contract in hand to publish a selection of his sermons by the 1823 Easter fair in Leipzig. For each quire he was promised one louis-d’or (five talers in gold).128 The resulting volume of sixteen sermons gave Zunz the final word in his battle with the temple. More important, it modeled for a genre still in formation the highest religious and literary standards. The “new Jewish synagogue” embodied for Zunz the desperately needed synthesis of Eastern piety and Western culture, by bringing together salient ancient Hebrew prayers and ceremonies with choral singing and edifying German sermons. Nor were sermons in the vernacular anything new; they had already enriched the early synagogues in Italy, Spain, Germany, and Holland: “Only the organ, a few prayers, hymns and ritual modifications are new but also unessential.”129 And it was in such a synagogue “that I found a place to proclaim God’s word. My sermons spoke candidly and without one-sided partisan contamination about what Jews are now in need of, particularly here. For virtue and truth are more impor tant than fashion and glamour.”130 Zunz tried manfully to address both sides of the deep rift in Berlin Jewry. Only a fair and sensitive joining of the old and new synagogues could engender the harmony to overcome the ravages of the ages. So Zunz dedicated this volume not only to those who heard his sermons but also to a spectrum of those still attached to the old synagogue, to men and women hungry for God’s word, and to young people who had already abandoned God: “And above all I dedicate them to the attention of those few, who, after bringing about the downfall of this synagogue and disdaining the voice of truth and spurred on by evil intentions, brought me with their meanness and madness to the point of giving up my post as preacher, irrespective of income and vanity, so as not to violate my honor, my principles, my conscience and indeed the welfare of

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the whole. I shall seek other fields in which I will be able to employ my talents unhindered for the good of my coreligionists.”131 It is abundantly clear that Zunz’s resignation was meant to forestall his dismissal. The presence (and influence?) of Gans on the special committee was not enough to quell the uproar and save his appointment. The breakup surely did not endear the society to the Gemeinde (the official Berlin Jewish community, which sponsored the synagogue) and must have dimmed still further any prospect of an alliance. The episode also made crystal clear how unsuited Zunz was for the emerging post of preacher, one of the few career options available to him. Zunz failed because he was too religious for his congregants. His sermons display not a shred of duplicity. Deep faith and absolute conviction in the truth of his words, regardless of his selective observance of Jewish practice, were what generated the force of his eloquence and the fluency of his delivery. To be sure, Zunz could be impatient and uncompromising, but in the end his lofty religious expectations of an essentially wavering congregation and not any character faults did him in.132 In the absence of written rules of governance, Zunz’s zeal blurred the implicit distinction of roles. Yet the image of Judaism to emerge from his sermons was decidedly biblical rather than rabbinic. Though always tied to the Torah portion of the week or the festival of the moment, the sermon was animated by the spirit of the prophets.133 Its function now was no longer to instruct an observant congregation in the specifics of Jewish observance, but rather to convince one that consisted of many indifferent and estranged Jews that Judaism was a source of universal ethics and personal meaning. Its prophetic patrimony and apocalyptic tone, alas, often slipped into unrelenting rebuke. Still, on occasion, like the prophets of old, Zunz could light up a subject with a memorable simile. In a sermon on the beauty of harmony in the family, Zunz waxed poetic: “The love of family resembles the rays of the sun, which though they break down into seven colors, yet warm and light only when all seven are united as one. A house is bereft of true love if it is present in divided form, if there is love of parents but no love of children or either one goes unreciprocated.”134 In Zunz’s presentation and advocacy of Judaism, its essentially legal and exegetical nature is gone. Thus in his sermon commemorating Shavuot and the giving of the Ten Commandments, Zunz spoke only of the first, which serves as their theological preamble. Much of the sermon dwelt on the deleterious consequences of polytheism. Ultimately, our belief in a single, allencompassing God is not a function of revelation, but knowledge acquired and amassed through human effort. And this Kantian aversion to heteronomy

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was accentuated in a Passover sermon that expatiated on the nature of freedom. To shun license, freedom must be restricted by law, but only that law which we legislate for ourselves. Implicitly, a law imposed from without lacks moral worth: “The higher freedom, however, will not be conquered through a God-sent savior. It is not a consequence of the criminal court with which God threatens the unjust. . . . In yourselves, my friends, in yourselves do people become free! Free your will, your word and deed— and then you will be free, even in the clothing of a slave, and you will speak up to monarchs more sharply than monarchs will speak down to you.”135 In sum, Zunz was an early master of two new fields, homiletics and scholarship, the pulpit and the lectern, the only one of his generation equally at home in both, even as they rapidly evolved and diverged. With the closing down of the Beer Temple by the government in 1823, the expiration of the Verein in 1824 and the darkening employment horizon, Zunz’s enormous talent, unharnessed and unfocused, cast about for another haven.

chapter 3

Into the Wilderness

Among Zunz’s papers there is an intriguing list of nineteen pages of Hebrew works compiled by him in December 1823. On its title page he identified it as “a list of Hebrew works read and extensively excerpted by me, some of which I also used and cited in my published writings.” Page 2 consists of some 25 manuscript titles, while pages 3 through 19 list alphabetically another 465 titles of works in print, though often not readily accessible. If five years earlier in Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur Zunz had unveiled a stunning vision of the expanse of medieval Jewish literature for the German academic world, the list of what he had carefully studied by the end of 1823 gives resounding testimony to his resolve to immerse himself in as many of its particulars as possible. Zunz appears to have read whatever came to hand to gain command of the field’s contours, borders, and linguistic features. The dating of the list served notice that Zunz was determined to salvage the tool kit of critical scholarship from the wreckage of the Verein. Haunted by the ephemeral state of his primary sources, Zunz would tirelessly continue to buy manuscripts and rare Hebraica, despite his impecunious circumstances.1 From a financial standpoint, the next two decades would plague him with bouts of acute insecurity. As of January 1, 1824, Zunz worked at the Haudeund Spenersche Zeitung, the most prestigious of Berlin’s three daily papers, as its political editor.2 Given the government’s heavy-handed censorship in the wake of the Karlsbad Decrees of 1819, which advanced the restoration of absolutism throughout the Germanic Confederation after the defeat of Napoleon, the job amounted to little more than briefly chronicling political happenings abroad on the basis of anodyne passages selected and translated from the local press. Toward that end, Zunz would peruse daily two Italian, two English, three French, and eleven German newspapers, coming in at 7:30  in the

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morning and returning home often not earlier than 1:30 in the afternoon, or a total of thirty-seven to thirty-eight hours a week. By March 15, 1827, Zunz finally secured a written contract that fixed his salary at the annual rate of 900 Reichstaler, while obligating him to appear at work from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. each day the paper was published. Though its publishers, Johann Karl Spener until 1826 and Samuel Heinrich Spiker thereafter, were both favorably inclined to England and France, much to Zunz’s liking, when the paper turned against the Polish uprising in 1831, Zunz resigned at the end of the year, partly because Jews were in the ranks of the rebels against the harsh czarist regime.3 The tedium of the job may have been numbing, but it indisputably equipped Zunz with an exceptional fund of political knowledge and a keen understanding of the political arena. In the years to come he would repeatedly draw on that wellspring in his efforts on behalf of the emancipation of Prussian Jewry and his deep public involvement in the revolutions of 1848, an agenda fully shared with his wife. Thus when Adelheid wrote Leopold from Hamburg in 1827 about her dismay at the news of the sudden death of George Canning, England’s short-lived liberal Tory prime minister, he responded with a pained outburst: “On my way home I learned of Canning’s death, which utterly shattered me. Few of the people who sit on thrones or nearby 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.” 4 Zunz was destined to become not only the most politically engaged of all German Jewish Wissenschaft scholars but also the most radical in his political views.5 Beyond tedium, the job also sharply curtailed the amount of time and energy available to Zunz for scholarship. Years later he would estimate that over the eight years of his employment, he went through a total of sixty-six thousand individual papers.6 As a part-time scholar, Zunz’s focus wavered. In 1825 in the spirit of Wolf and Boeckh, he sketched the outline of an encyclopedic survey of the nascent field of Jewish critical scholarship, divided into four divisions encompassing eighty-six rubrics. Thirty years later he opined that twenty-one of them he actually researched and brought to print himself. Though the project came to naught, he entertained it as late as March 1829, when Heine took him to see a publisher. More lasting, the rubrics lent his research a roadmap that guided his omnivorous consumption of primary sources and provided files to order his findings. One of those rubrics was entitled “anything pertaining to religious ser vices” (zum Gottesdienst Gehöriges) and by August 1829 Zunz had finally decided to write a book on the sermon

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in the synagogue. Dismissively, he confided in his diary that “one doesn’t get very far with such decisions, though farther than the Bourbons with Polignac” (a sardonic reference to the abbreviated tenure of Jules de Polignac, the prime minister just prior to the July revolution of 1830 of Charles X, the last of the Bourbon house to rule in France).7 By September 1825 Zunz was also back in the employ of the board of the Berlin Jewish community, when he agreed to serve as the director of its newly founded, officially sanctioned Jewish communal public school for an annual salary of 360 talers. By November 1826 after ten months of operation, the school could show an enrollment of sixty-nine students in two upper classes and one preparatory class for children ages five to eight or nine. The curriculum for the upper classes included a total of thirty-four and thirty-two class hours per week with six and seven of them respectively devoted to the study of Judaism and Hebrew. The remaining hours were distributed over nine secular subjects designed to ready the youngsters for business, farming, the crafts, or advanced study. Zunz authored not only the curriculum but also a set of fourteen stern rules governing student behavior in class and toward each other.8 Thus by 1826 Zunz had secured the kind of community sponsorship for Jewish education that he had failed to achieve in the name of the Verein back in 1823. But parsimonious funding by the community frustrated Zunz’s short tenure. Despite the construction of a new facility for the boys’ school, the girls’ school never came to fruition. Moreover, the community continued to subvent the Talmud Torah of the Orthodox sector, thereby denying the new boys’ school a potential pool of sorely needed applicants. A severe shortage of staff also forced Zunz to spend his afternoons at the school teaching in the classroom rather than doing administration. When at last in 1829 a merger of the two schools seemed within reach, Orthodox pressure kept the directorship out of Zunz’s hands, whereupon he resigned in September.9 What had motivated Zunz to endure this exasperation was not only the need for additional income. A few years earlier when applying to be head of the community school in Königsberg, he had already enunciated forcefully a conception of Jewish education attuned to a radically new age in which the loyalty of the next generation would be an act of personal volition: Religion, as it ought to be taught, is the foundation of all education—of all ennobling thought and behavior—the mother of all magnanimity of spirit and the guide beyond the grave. Till

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now among Jews religion is mismanaged by two enemies: (a) by superstition that educates for us bigots, lazybones and ignoramuses and (b) by sophistry that saddles us with hypocrites, egotists, deviants and irreligious people. Unalloyed instruction in religion does not give children over to dry-as-dust history or incomprehensible miracles or antipathy toward Christianity—as the school teachers of that religion everywhere [currently] inoculate children with hatred for Jews with their mother’s milk. It [that unalloyed instruction] does not consist of terrible rote memorization of texts or in scientific proof of superstition. Rather it seeks to excite the spirit of the child for religion through affecting words and even more affecting example, to give them support for the storms of life, to implant the gentle virtue of love in their heart and to endow them with the good fortune which is the lot of anyone who believes in providence.10 In conjunction with that full-throated articulation, Zunz insisted on the importance of a supportive ambience. The instructor must be an educated, credentialed, and ethical man. The child’s home life must be in consonance with what he learns at school and the family must attend a German synagogue with a reformed Hebrew worship ser vice. While not all children should be expected to master Hebrew, all should at least learn to read it and be able to translate a few select passages. Finally, the ceremony of confirmation that culminates the child’s education must not entail an oath of allegiance. It should be no more than a show of his command of Judaism, a body of knowledge that cannot emanate from an inert catechism, but only from a teacher who embodies what he teaches. Though Orthodox intervention from Berlin torpedoed Zunz’s prospects for an invitation to come to Königsberg, his words again evinced the intensity of his religious commitment. Moreover, the maturity of his holistic view of Jewish education coupled with his three quick forays into the field during the 1820s (Königsberg, the Verein, and Berlin) strongly suggests that he held it to be a calling of a higher priority than the rabbinate.11 With the loss of his income from the Haude- und Spenersche Zeitung at the end of 1831, Zunz’s economic stability unraveled. In May 1832 he was offered the directorship of the Veitel Heine Ephraimsche Lehranstalt in Berlin, an institute set up and endowed in 1774 by Frederick the Great’s court Jew Veitel Heine Ephraim to teach Talmud as sanctioned by tradition. By mid-

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October the offer was withdrawn and Zunz was left with a meager teaching load of six hours a week of Bible, Hebrew, and German, which from February to May 1833 netted him no more than 50 talers for eighty hours of instruction. Among his students, as Zunz noted in his diary years later, was none other than nineteen-year-old Louis Lewandowski from Wreschen, Poland, who would in due time become Berlin’s renowned composer of synagogue music and choir director. Some forty-two years later, Zunz would be invited to grace the celebration of Lewandowski’s twenty-fifth anniversary in office with a stirring address on the role of music in religion and the synagogue.12 In mid-October, with the top job at the Lehranstalt going to someone else, Zunz decided to look for a job as a bookkeeper, and a month later he turned to his close friend in Hamburg, Meyer Isler, the nephew of his beloved mentor, Samuel Meyer Ehrenberg, who had himself a half-year before secured a job in the city’s public library.13 Forty years later in 1872 Isler would rise to the helm of the institution, an emblem of the city’s long-standing liberalism.14 In Berlin Zunz suffered from a twofold deprivation: no job and few friends. He asked Isler to look around for him in Hamburg. He would be ready to serve as someone’s personal secretary, provided the job did not rob him of all free time. He had also recruited his new friend Gabriel Riesser, who lived in Hamburg, to keep his eyes open: “Given the unlikelihood that anything is going to come my way here where I live, Berlin is becoming steadily more repugnant to me. . . . [And] indeed you are well aware of my preference for Hamburg.”15 Zunz reiterated his plea six months later more urgently to his good friend Solomon Ludwig Steinheim in Altona, a physician with a theological bent and poetic spark, in a letter dated July 21, 1833. Perhaps Steinheim could find or create something for him as a tutor or even a bookkeeper. As long as the job would pay him 1,500 marks (500 talers) and leave him time for research, he would grab it: “Here every thing leaves me cold and I cannot hold out much longer. My small sum of money is running out and no rich Jew gives a damn [unterstützt] about scholarship. I had never imagined that a man who had learned a bit would have such a hard time finding [next word illegible] respect. What’s more, I don’t need much. Please don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. Would my presence in Altona be advantageous to me?”16 Zunz’s dire straits compelled him to leave no stone unturned and in the fall of 1833 he allowed his name to be submitted for a rabbinic post in Darmstadt. Among the laudatory letters of recommendation was one by Gans, whose conversion had garnered him the academic trophy that eluded Zunz: “There

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is no one in Europe who with comparable knowledge has penetrated so deeply into [Jewish and rabbinic literature]. If the views regarding the appointment of Jews were not so superficial and mean-spirited, as they generally are, Dr. Zunz would long ago have found recompense for his selfless efforts in a university career. Alongside this scholarly equipment, Dr. Zunz commands a great gift for eloquence, which he amply displayed in his post as preacher here [in Berlin] and which is confirmed by his printed collection of sermons.”17 The tribute attests a friendship still intact as well as an act of courage to speak the unvarnished truth. To allay the traditionalists in Darmstadt, Zunz even secured a certificate of rabbinic ordination from the aged Aron Chorin in Arad, the inveterate Hungarian sage of the first generation of reformers in central Europe.18 But all to no avail. The growing resistance of the traditionalists in both Darmstadt and Berlin persuaded Zunz to quash his candidacy. On June 15, 1834, he wrote Joseph Johlson, the Frankfurt am Main educator, who had been the first to encourage him to apply: “I have withdrawn, lost all desire for Jewish employment. Hopefully here [in Berlin] I will find enough to live on (in Hebrew); whatever time is left over will be devoted to scholarship. I would love to take a research trip to Paris and Oxford, but what Jewish capitalist would give money for that! Were I a horse or a singer or an unscrupulous clown [Heuchler] . . .” (continuation omitted by Maybaum).19 Zunz’s timely withdrawal averted a painful mishap. That was not the case with the new Reform Association in Prague, which in January 1835 began courting him to become its first Prediger. Deteriorating conditions induced him to elicit a three-year offer following a successful site visit in May that met all his demands. The Zunzes left Berlin on September 10 bitter that no counter offer had been forthcoming from some local quarter, though gratified by the sixty-three people who had come to say good-by.20 In Prague Zunz was greeted by the heavy hand of the Hapsburg censor, whom he had to assure that the three cartons of books he was bringing were his property and to agree that the Hebrew works stipulated on a short list would never be sold, lent, or even leave his hands.21 Though still one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe with some ten thousand Jews,22 Prague quickly disaffected Zunz. By October 25 he wrote Steinheim that he was suffering from a want of science, people, books, newspapers, and freedom and sought to leave.23 And on November 6, he turned to a bureaucrat in Berlin whom he had befriended with a request to facilitate his return: “I have been here 50 days and it feels like

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50  years. Every thing seems to me old, decrepit and indifferent. Only my friends and relationships in Berlin, my lively independence, even though darkened at times by trouble . . . [what follows omitted by Maybaum]. Even when I preach, it is humanity that excites me, not Prague. Recalling your words to me when I left that if I ever needed help, I now come to you. For the moment, let’s keep it a secret. My intention is to return, for which I need permission (from the government) and sustenance. . . . I seek a post or provisional appointment of 4[00] to 600 taler, that would allow me some free time.”24 Ehrenberg did not take kindly to Zunz’s abrupt change of plans and on December 12, 1835, countered by letter with a dose of common sense. First impressions should not be given undue weight. Soon enough you will be in the parsonage promised with your own kitchen, making new friends. Time for research and the books needed to do it will also eventually materialize. Above all, Ehrenberg reminded Zunz that he had gained economic security and urged him to fulfi ll his three-year contract: “You must erase Berlin from your thoughts like a departed friend, other wise life will bring you no joy.” There is no work for you on the horizon in Berlin.25 Zunz did not rush to answer and by the time he did on May 1, 1836, his spirits had rebounded. Adelheid would be back in Berlin by June (where serendipitously the first to greet her would be Gans)26 with Leopold to follow in August. His successor, Zunz reported, would be Michael Sachs, who would occupy the post until 1844, before coming to Berlin as its associate rabbi and preacher. The heart of the letter, though, gave vent to his disenchantment with the caliber of Jewish lay leadership: “As for me, I am cured of all rabbinic work, etc. While I would be pleased to see men of noble disposition and solid education at the head of Jewish religious life, the [current] Jewish aristocracy [kezinim—the high and mighty] is a crude rabble bereft of ideas and power. Indeed, I have put these moneybags [Geldseelen] entirely out of mind, and recognize only those who combine scholarship and religion as the aristocracy from which holiness can emanate. Neither Maimonides nor Mendelssohn were kezinim.”27 Again Ehrenberg counseled moderation. In Zunz’s heated critique of the high and mighty, he sensed a disturbing undertone of misanthropy. They alone are not entirely to blame for the sorry state of affairs. The rabbis who need to work with them share some responsibility: “Just as I cannot tolerate rabbis who unduly curry favor with them [the kezinim] or bow and grovel before them, suffering gladly whatever they might do, I cannot tolerate rabbis who do not

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respect them and, so to speak, throw out the baby with the bath water. They [the kezinim] are a necessary evil on earth that we must suffer and endure, as God does. Only those who bear evil patiently can find therein a measure of comfort.”28 The Prague trauma reconciled Zunz to Berlin, where he would live ever after. Realizing his error, Zunz chose to return without a job in hand or the prospect of one, to the astonishment of his friends, but not before taking a cure at the spa in Franzenbad on the way back to calm his frayed nerves, a pleasant expense in which he other wise never indulged.29 This time, however, small assignments began to come his way from men of means who sensed the added value that Zunz brought to Berlin. Even before he arrived back, David Jacob Riess, a wealthy jewelry merchant, a former member of the short-lived Verein, and an elder of the Gemeinde board, contracted him in July 1836 to visit him weekly for 300 talers a year.30 The following month the board of the community commissioned Zunz to compose a brief rebutting the Prussian decree of 1828 forbidding Jews to take Christian forenames. In just over two months, Zunz submitted a masterpiece of erudition showing the historical travesty of the government’s action. Under the title Namen der Juden, it appeared in December 1836 and earned Zunz an honorarium of 100 talers. By March 1841 the government softened its original ordinance by restricting it to forenames intimately associated with the Christian faith (on the tract itself, more anon).31 Most auspicious for Zunz was the election of Moritz Veit in 1839 as head of the governing body of the organized Jewish community.32 A publisher by profession and admirer and close friend of Sachs, Veit understood and appreciated Zunz fully. While Zunz’s masterpiece on midrash (to which we shall return) had inspired him to undertake the study of the underlying rabbinic texts with a learned tutor, Veit had prevailed on Zunz and a cohort of three others in 1836 to do a new translation of the Hebrew Bible into German. With Zunz as editor, Sachs and Heymann Arnheim did the lion’s share of the translating. From the outset, Veit was fully engaged to ensure that the final product would be popular as well as critical. In 1838 his company published it in a single compact volume.33 Like Zunz, Veit was dismayed at the derelict condition of Jewish education in Berlin and quickly conceptualized a bold and comprehensive reorganization at the pinnacle of which would sit a modern teachers’ seminary with a national mission. Zunz’s name as director came to mind immediately with the subject being broached as early as July 1837.34 Nevertheless, several years elapsed before the city school board approved his appointment and permitted

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the dismantling of the outdated but long-standing yeshiva (jüdisches Seminar—Talmud Tora zu Berlin), which dispensed primarily instruction in Talmud to poor adolescents from Posen.35 During that interminable delay, Zunz had occasion to unburden himself to his former professor of Bible, Wilhelm de Wette. At the time Zunz made his preliminary excursion to Prague, de Wette had visited Berlin from Basel, where he had taken refuge in the university after being forced out of Berlin for his political and academic liberalism. Since de Wette’s departure in 1819 the two had had no contact, yet Zunz nurtured a sense of kinship with a fellow victim of Prussian autocracy to whom he was also intellectually indebted. The letter enabled Zunz to depict for de Wette his current predicament without asking of him anything more than a sympathetic ear: If I take the liberty of writing to you, my esteemed teacher, I do so on the presumption that my name will at least remind you of the young student who in 1816–19 had the good fortune to hear your lectures and benefit from conversation with you. I missed seeing you again during your trip in 1835 to north Germany, of which I heard while in Prague, and by my return at the end of May, you had left. Still I had the satisfaction of hearing from you through a few friends with whom you had spoken. Though our external relationship was ephemeral, the internal one was everlasting. For I thank you for the introduction [Einsicht] to biblical criticism and along with F. A. Wolf what I in fact possess of a critical perspective. If I have not fully perfected myself in Wissenschaft des Judentums, which is the content of my life, it is the adversities with which a Jewish scholar has to contend that are responsible. He needs to do so much just to survive, rarely has the funds to travel and lacks an audience to animate him. How great is the need to create a chair for Jewish literature at our universities. Ignorance, prejudice and injustice prevail in every thing that pertains to the social and historical factors regarding Jews. Neither scholarship nor the general welfare nor harmony nor morality benefit when Jewish students are taught with such disdain and condescension, devoid of all love. Thus were the Roman plebians, the first Christians, the oppressed Swiss and others abused, and yet they triumphed. Likewise the fate of the Jews moves along a steady ascent, even though I won’t live to see it here in Germany.36

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De Wette, who cited Zunz’s findings on the authorship and scope of the biblical books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles in his own work,37 must have answered this poignant sample of Zunz’s epistolary elegance and fearless candor, though the evidence is lacking. The letter also shows the comfort Zunz must have garnered in linking his own fate to a cause greater than his own. Some six months later in a brief drafted by Zunz and submitted to the city school board to accelerate its compliance, whose cogency and concision pleased Veit no end,38 he described the widespread erosion in the study of Talmud and made the case for professionalizing the training of Jewish educators: The study of Talmud has long ceased to be in Italy, France, England, Germany and to a great extent in Poland the staple of their schools, especially the public ones [des Volkes]. Only prospective rabbis and learned men and an occasional pietist immerse themselves in Talmud. For all the others it is remote. Even those who studied it as young boys abandon it. Talmudic texts have no market. Jewish educators in Germany find jobs not because of talmudic expertise but because of solid knowledge and appropriate education. The raw Talmudist goes hungry. In truth, it is these factors which have pushed Talmud Torahs onto the track of seminaries, and the one in Berlin suffers its deplorable existence because it is unaware of what is taking place.39 At last on January 4, 1840, the city school board approved Zunz’s curriculum for the seminary with instruction due to begin on April 27. Zunz’s annual salary was set at 500 talers plus another 120 for housing.40 At the celebratory opening on November 18, Zunz delivered the keynote address and as he so often did at these public events, he rose above the moment to limn the big picture in a few choice words. The essential purpose of a modern teachers’ seminary was to sustain Jewish unity and survival by strengthening an inchoate sense of belonging to an ancient dispersed people: “How can this sense acquire a language if it does not imbue our consciousness, our property [Besitz], our love. That we are an Israelite collective [Gesammtheit], wish to be and must be, that everyone of us grow up and mature in this awareness, for this we need bearers of this knowledge, institutions of the spirit to preserve the holy fire, which turn single embers of coal into a common glow and the hard metal of the heart into a flowing stream.” 41After an excruciating decade of

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insecurity and humiliation, Zunz had finally reached a safe haven that could nourish his soul as well as his body.

* * * Zunz’s vast store of knowledge, razor-sharp mind, and trenchant prose made him the spokesman of choice for Judaism in times of crisis and celebration. The role generated many a memorable occasional paper. An early instance was his address at the commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Moses Mendelssohn on September  10, 1829, at which  120 Berlin notables gathered at the Society of Friends, a religiously liberal fraternal organization founded in 1792, to be edified by the words of Jost, Moser, and Zunz. With a locus outside the synagogue on a day other than Mendelssohn’s Yahrzeit (the customary day of religious commemoration), the event bespoke a nascent rite of German Jewry’s emerging civil religion. Similar commemorations took place in five other cities across Germany, culminating in the formation in each one of them of a local Mendelssohn organization to advance the integration of its youth.42 For his part, Zunz accentuated the undiminished influence of Mendelssohn’s singular career. His character, indifference to fame, embrace of a simple life, calm in the face of adversity, loyalty to his people, and reconciliation of faith and reason were virtues that continue to elicit admiration. Abreast others, he stood at the dawn of German literature, extracting wisdom from heaven and implanting it in the hearts of many of his countrymen. As expected, Zunz celebrated Mendelssohn’s translation of the Torah with its run of 750 copies and subsequent reprints, which eventually effected “the banishment of eastern barbarism,” by which Zunz meant the eradication of Yiddish (Judendeutsch) and an end to the subordination of German synagogues and schools to the deficient and uncouth products of Polish yeshivot. It was German, Zunz proudly declared, that now reverberated in the public and private lives of German Jews. And yet in a semblance of noteworthy balance, Zunz also emphasized the literary quality of Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings, whose clarity of thought, deep knowledge, and uncluttered language matched his German, making him the most important Hebraist of his century. In both languages Mendelssohn taught without presumption and loved without wounding, and even when content became dated, the beauty of expression and nobility of thought remained. Though Mendelssohn was a man of his time, Zunz elevated him with his tribute to a cultural icon.43

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The gravity of an attack against Judaism a year later drew from Zunz a quick and forceful response. In 1830 Luigi Chiarini, an Italian-born and educated priest and professor of Oriental and Semitic languages at the University of Warsaw, published a two-volume diatribe against the Talmud in French called Théorie du Judaïsme. Chiarini was a key member of a Christian committee founded in Warsaw in 1825 to overcome Jewish resistance to assimilation, for which purpose it immediately set up a rabbinical school with a five-year program to train teachers and rabbis for the religious institutions of the Jewish community. According to Zunz, in 1828 Warsaw’s Jewish population of 30,446 supported 215 Talmud-Schulen (yeshivot) with an enrollment of 2,482 young men, four elementary schools with another 298 boys, and a single girls’ school of 60–80 pupils. The intent of this Old Testament Believers’ Committee was to wean the young from a Judaism defined by the Talmud, and toward that end it commissioned Chiarini to translate the Babylonian Talmud into French. In 1829 the Russian government endorsed the effort with a subvention of 1,200 talers.44 Chiarini’s nearly eight-hundred-page Théorie du Judaïsme was to serve as the translation’s introduction, though in fact by laying out the road map for reforming Judaism all over Europe, it rendered the translation redundant.45 Zunz recognized the work’s implicit threat to move the Talmud back again to center stage in the unending debate over emancipation. The want of acculturation among Jews politically, economically, and culturally derived solely from their religion, which rested squarely on the Talmud. The need for its translation, Chiarini argued, was that without it Christians would never fully grasp the warped and deformed nature of Judaism. Despite Eisenmenger’s achievement, it remained unrevealed.46 In brief, Chiarini contended in great detail that talmudic Judaism was a radical departure from the pristine religion of the ancient Israelites that could be reversed only by a relevant Mosaism. Yet for Zunz to take him on was a delicate matter, because, as we have seen, the Talmud discomforted him also, especially in its contemporary iteration. Rather than refute the plethora of Chiarini’s claims, Zunz zeroed in on the reliability of his underlying evidence. With cold precision, he uncovered that of the one hundred passages from the Talmud and rabbinic literature cited by Chiarini, some eighty of them were lifted directly from Eisenmenger with the rest taken from still other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century secondary sources. Hence, either the Talmud was already sufficiently revealed by the Christian humanists or Chiarini lacked the competence to do it.47

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But then Zunz felt compelled to declare what the Talmud actually was not dogmatically but historically: “The Talmud is not the source but only a monument of Judaism, which, to be sure, as the oldest is recognized and revered, though many components of Judaism (customs, institutions and ideas) were modified by the rabbis without detracting from its veneration. Thus in the Talmud—as in the Pentateuch and the Mishna—two contradictory things come together: authority and nonauthority. A further development and modification of Judaism is evident from Jewish sources since the 7th century, from Jewish praxis and from the nature of Jews in different countries.” 48 Zunz appended as well a list of six features of the talmudic dialectic that made it clear that not every thing to be found therein was meant to be binding.49 In short, a historical perspective effected a momentous shift away from a normative text to a testament teeming with remnants of Jewish life in antiquity. Monuments are not sources of authority, but generators of reverence rooted in memory. Without fanfare, Zunz had historicized the Talmud by transmuting it from a repository of eternal verities and injunctions into a legacy of human wisdom and experience. The later development of Judaism no less than the talmudic text itself contravened the imputed absolute authority of the Talmud.50 As for a translation of the Talmud, a question that would roil German Jewry for the rest of the century, Zunz was not averse to the idea.51 The enterprise had to be free of extraneous tendencies and produce a faithful and comprehensible rendition. Though attuned to possible misuse by Germans unfriendly to Jews, Zunz displayed as yet no anxiety about losing control of a literature utterly foreign to Western sensibilities.52 Zunz published his learned tract with the publishing house of the Berlin paper at which he worked, the reason most likely for its quick appearance. At the time, Jost’s response to Chiarini was still in press. The interval allowed him in the foreword to express his embarrassment. Neither had been aware of the other’s intention. Clearly, living in the same city was not enough to restore a friendship that had frayed (on which more anon). Jost praised Zunz’s effort guardedly as “very compressed but still rich in content.”53 To be sure, they covered much the same ground, though Jost may have wanted to distance himself from Chiarini because he overtly held the first six volumes of Jost’s Geschichte der Israeliten in high regard. In a cryptic comment in his own essay, Zunz highlighted the problematic nature of the linkage: “Indeed the author [Chiarini] seems to know of Judaism, whose theory he propounds, only from hostile [ fremden] reports, especially those by a nineteenth-century scholar full of unbelievable animosity toward all of rabbinic literature.”54

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The allusion certainly accords with the tenor and substance of Jost’s early volumes (see above) and delivers a harsh, if veiled rebuke. Without admitting guilt, Jost had to clear his name. Like Zunz, Jost harbored no reservations about a full translation of the Talmud. Provided it abided by scholarly standards, it could enrich the study of a broad swath of the ancient world by “yielding interesting disclosures about the intellectual character, the knowledge base and political and religious details of Jews as well as of the Persian empire in the early Christian centuries, strengthening our linguistic competence and finding as yet undetected historical connections.”55 For Jost the potential universal benefit offset what in the wrong hands might be turned into a Jewish liability. Irrespective of these early weighty endorsements, unremitting assaults on the Talmud to come would forge a consensus among German Jews not to provide still further grist for the toxic mill of anti-Semites by translating the Talmud in full.56 While other of Zunz’s occasional pieces were to be written at the behest of communal leadership, there is no evidence that his refutation of Chiarini was officially solicited. The duplicity, intent, and backers of the tract spurred Zunz to action. Gabriel Riesser, a young Hamburg lawyer, had just burst onto the German scene with a rousing plea for equal rights for Jews. Upon reading it, Zunz shared his appreciation with his Hamburg friend Isler: “I am pleased by Dr. Riesser’s book as I am with every new tract written with sincerity.” Zunz’s tract belonged to the same genre, though in his letter to Isler his mood quickly turned sour and acerbic: “It is a veritable misfortune to write for Jews. Rich Jews take no note of it. Learned [i.e., traditional] Jews can’t read it and Jewish idiots review it.”57 In Riesser Zunz found a fellow warrior, who like himself spurned the baptismal font to advance his career. In his opening salvo, Riesser indicted the tortuous system of disabilities by which German governments coerced young Jews to convert. Resorting to strength in numbers, Riesser called on Jews to form local clubs across Germany to lobby their governments and to avow personally not to baptize their children.58 In his next letter to Isler on April 28, 1831, Zunz applauded the strategy and sought more specific information on the club Riesser had formed in Hamburg. In a postscript, Adelheid chided Isler for taking her to be a dunce in that he had depicted Riesser so pedantically for her: “Yet it was all right and I thank you for it, since . . . 1000 voices have already sung his praises to me. Zunz and I read his book together and enjoyed greatly the incisiveness of his language and the truth it bore. I would like to get to know him better.”59

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By July Isler could report little progress. In Hamburg Riesser alone was engaged, but on too many fronts. His hasty diversion to battle with a liberal theologian from Heidelberg, who continued to declaim the non-German national character of the Jews, had delayed the club to move beyond talking, as did the appearance of Riesser’s announced paper Der Jude.60 In his animated response, Zunz condemned the medieval bigotry of Hanseatic cities like Hamburg. Their autonomy was the source of their illiberalism: “Only the large, uplifting life of a state can promote freedom.” Zunz did not make light of conversation. It would arouse others and eventually lead to action. However, Reisser should not squander his time by answering every “barking dog.” Above all, Zunz was excited by the prospect of Reisser’s paper and layed out at great length the steps it would take to succeed, obviously drawing on his own experience in journalism. Zunz even promised to write for Riesser as soon as he could make time: “Still I must caution that an enterprise like this demands patience, endurance, vision, help, money and luck.”61 When Riesser spent time in Berlin in 1832, he and Zunz drew closer. Riesser visited often and Zunz bemoaned his departure as he wrote Isler: “For Berlin, I was often together with Riesser, often in our home. Now that he is leaving, the old emptiness returns. Those here become ever more estranged from me. My friends from the days of the Verein, if still alive, have either left Berlin or Judaism. I have no one here to work with me on my agenda. I am eager to see how long this can go on.”62 Thus the two men had bonded politically, ethically, and strategically, despite deep religious differences.63 Isler’s quick and laudatory review of Zunz’s Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden just after it came out in Riesser’s paper exhibited for all to see the concord and collaboration among the three men. In light of the medieval creativity that Zunz had unfurled, Isler hoped that the fi xated focus on the Talmud by the opponents of equal rights for Jews would finally be dislodged.64 For Zunz a defense of Judaism was always an occasion to advance the frontiers of Jewish scholarship. His lofty sense of calling would not allow a momentary need to compromise his long-term objective. His aforementioned monograph on Jewish names attests his consistent quest for balance. As early as July 1834, his diary shows an entry that indicates that he was at work on the subject, as do his frequent requests for names of Jewish men and women in medieval France and Germany of Heimann Michael in Hamburg, who placed his friendship, private collection of Hebraica, and deep Jewish learning at Zunz’s disposal.65 When the elders of the community officially invited Zunz on August 5, 1836, to submit a brief contesting the constraints imposed

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on Jewish parents in naming their children, they relied on their knowledge of his prior interest. Zunz’s swift compliance would surely have been unlikely without his accumulated store of data.66 A keen eye for social history drives the sweep and specificity of Zunz’s tract. Names encoded the places in which Jews lived and the influence of their surroundings. Organized chronologically and geographically, the essay was the study of a barometer of assimilation over two millennia. In the welter of data, Zunz detected recurring patterns and relationships. Jews never restricted themselves to biblical names nor were their choices ever curbed by law. Wherever they lived, they availed themselves of names current in the local language, though often when in transition combining them with older biblical names. “For language, like sunlight,” he argued, “is a common good, unsuited for distinctions of castes and sects.”67 Zunz was no less attentive to the names of women in different periods. While they did not need liturgical names, it became the custom in the Middle Ages to give male children theirs at circumcision.68 For both, however, irrespective of time and place, he strove to understand the linguistic factors at play in name formation, at the end of which he unequivocally asserted that there is no Christian language nor, for that matter, a Muslim, monotheistic, or Lutheran one: “Names then belong always to a people and a language, never to a church or a dogma or to a political or religious point of view. In short, there are no Christian names.”69 It did not take long for a few men of discernment to recognize that Zunz had authored a work of lasting value. A few days after publication, Prussia’s renowned explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt complimented Zunz with an accolade drawn from his own endeavors: “Never has this subject, so intimately tied to the fate of this ancient tribe, been treated with such thoroughness and historical contextualization. In heaven’s vault the names of the stars teach us which nation in Spain pioneered the study of astronomy. The geographical names in North America attest the origins of the settlers. In the forenames of the Hebrews we can read the wanderings of this hounded people.”70 One week later Veit thanked Zunz less poetically, but with equal fervor: [Your book] refreshes like every ripe fruit of intellect and erudition. You have shown again that the most penetrating study of details does not suppress the unimpeded view of the whole, the warm feeling and historical sympathy for the circumstances and dispositions of the past and present, but rather grounds and strengthens

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them. In truth, it is high time that in this field of literature, those men come forward as leaders who in their intellectual training can actually be regarded as exemplary authorities. Neither shallow glibness nor gross pedantry can gain the kind of success for which you aimed and achieved. . . . The tone and temper in which you have written has given Jews an enormous amount of satisfaction. In the pamphlets of revenge [nekomoh-Büchelchen] of our nation your book must forever remain marked in red. Amen.71 These and other voices of appreciation must have momentarily assured Zunz that he had not labored in vain. What set Veit apart from his lay peers is that he was deeply engaged with Judaism and its sacred texts. He admired the ability of Sachs to mediate the wisdom, beauty, and power of midrash through the eloquence and conviction of his sermons. He scolded Sachs, who always spoke freely and often spontaneously, for not taking the trouble to write down the best of his often inspiring sermons on Saturday evening after the conclusion of the Sabbath.72 Veit was eager to publish such a collection to extend Sachs’s influence beyond Prague. In 1837 Veit committed himself to studying midrashic texts for four hours a week in the original with Salomon Plessner, a traditional scholar whose piety matched his learning. While Veit was thrilled with his progress at gaining an understanding of the creative nature and abundant meaning of midrash, he was increasingly captivated by the ascetic and mystical intensity of his teacher, who despised all outward show and material desire.73 During his tenure at the helm of the Berlin community, Veit quickly emerged as a compelling force for Jewish education, communal reorganization, Jewish scholarship, and a modern yet traditional rabbinate. Not only did Veit initiate the new Bible translation edited by Zunz, but his firm published three separate editions by 1855.74 To be sure, Zunz translated only the final two books of Chronicles, but his editorial work and reputation made the Zunz Bible, as it became known, the most often printed and widely appreciated of all the many German-Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible produced between 1783 and 1937. As late as 1934, Harry Torczyner, the editor of the last of these translations noteworthily sponsored by the Jewish community of Berlin and a distinguished scholar of Semitics, saw fit in his introduction to invoke the achievement of Zunz as still an inspiring milestone: “In our desire [to be as faithful to the Hebrew text as possible] we feel a special kinship to the Bible translation put out by Leopold Zunz a century

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ago. Despite what in content and form might be improved upon today, its unpretentious character still constitutes for our Bible an invaluable signpost.”75 As an added bonus, Zunz’s meticulously worked out chronological appendix imbued the lives and events recounted in Scripture with a semblance of historical veracity. Spread over fourteen pages, the table tabulated its data in two parallel columns according to the Jewish (anno mundi) and Christian (anno domini) calendars from creation to 330 bce, when Alexander of Macedonia humbled the Persian Empire. In a third parallel column, Zunz succinctly mentioned the significance of each date. For example, in the signage for the year 330 bce, Zunz enclosed in parentheses “duration 208 years,” signaling his rejection of the erroneous rabbinic calculation of only thirty-four years for the time in which Jews had allegedly lived under Persian rule.76 The discrepancy was at the heart of the Renaissance debate between Azariah de’ Rossi in Italy and David Gans in Prague at the short-lived dawn of critical scholarship in the Jewish world. In his pathbreaking effort to reconcile the indigenous sources of Jewish tradition with the avalanche of outside sources brought forth by the Renaissance, de’ Rossi in his Me’or Enayim (The Light of the Eyes) in 1573, among other things, vigorously disputed the validity of the Jewish creation calendar, with its most indefensible link being the reduction of Persian rule from Cyrus to Alexander to but thirty-four years.77 Notwithstanding, in 1592 David Gans, no less conversant with the legacy of the Renaissance, published his chronicle Zemah David (The Sprout of David) in which he reaffirmed the standing of dogmatic history and rejected any intermingling of Jewish and general history. Since the sources of Jewish history were revealed texts, they were far more reliable than the secular sources of general history.78 In consequence, Gans’s chronicle is binary, sacred and secular: in the first part on the basis of the creation calendar, he recounted year by year a truncated version of Jewish history, drawing only on Hebrew and Aramaic texts, while in the second he constructed an entertaining narrative of general history, culminating in the history of Bohemia. Often the availability of non-Hebraic sources permitted Gans to supplement his sparse account of Jewish turning points such as the Maccabean revolt, the translation of the Septuagint, and the uprisings against Rome in part 2. The strategy of separate and unequal allowed Gans to salvage the inviolability of the thirty-four-year calculation for the Persian period.79 On the other hand, it must be recognized that the ample attention paid to secular history potentially diminished the insularity of dogmatic history.

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It is not surprising that Zunz would side firmly with de’ Rossi on this issue and many others. Indeed, just three years after the publication of the Veit Bible, Zunz published an encyclopedic Hebrew essay in Kerem Chemed on de’ Rossi’s tome and times, though not a deep analysis of its contents. Zunz’s canvas teemed with details on the literary history of Italian Jewry, which he justified with his operative principle that the mastery of the microcosm should precede any pronouncements about the macrocosm. He hailed de’ Rossi as a modern who understood that scholarship alone could distinguish between what is true and false.80 And he disseminated his research in a Hebrew journal, which ironically came out in Prague where Gans had lived, in order to win a beachhead in eastern Europe for the cause of critical scholarship. Yet Zunz was not without a sentimental attachment to Gans. Zemah David had given Zunz his first taste of history, when he stumbled upon it in the Samson Free School in the forlorn days before the arrival of Ehrenberg.81 How are we to explain that Zunz began his biblical calendar with Adam and Eve and their sons Cain and Abel and that his first recorded date was the birth of their later son Seth in the year 130 after creation? Gans opened his chronicle with the identical date; in fact, Zunz followed his chronology without deviation down to the death of Joseph in 2309 bce, or more than two-thirds of the time span he would cover.82 That overlap is a significant nod to Gans. Not wishing to leave a chronological vacuum for the popular audience for which the Veit Bible was intended, Zunz set aside his critical stance and took refuge in the company of an old friend. He may also have learned from Gans the more vital lesson of context. If history is an endless game of chess, dates make up its chessboard. The beginning of historical knowledge is the accurate dating of its pieces. Among Zunz’s papers is an astonishing forty-page document consisting of a handwritten chronicle composed by him that enumerates in order the years from 529 to 1820 with the sporadic omission of some. Alongside each year, Zunz recorded a noteworthy historical datum or several, the overwhelming number of which came from general history. For example, for 1436 Zunz noted “first printing press,” for 1492 “the discovery of America” and “Jews expelled from Spain,” for 1517 “Luther’s Reformation,” for 1776 “abolition of torture in Austria,” and “Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith),” for 1806 “abolition of slavery in Great Britain,” for 1812 “the Jews of Prussia gain citizenship,” and for 1815 “a German worship ser vice for Jews in Berlin.” Toward the latter half of the eighteenth century, the data become more numerous. The clean state of the document (with an occasional insertion) suggests that it may point to a project

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Zunz undertook during his university years.83 The amount of information packed into the chronicle bespeaks a zeal to master the landscape of general history, while the chronological grid underlines the supreme importance of dating, two pursuits that would distinguish his future career as a Jewish historian. But they were also values that already found expression in the secular part of Gans’s 1592 chronicle and which might have left an indelible imprint on the fertile mind of a callow adolescent. Zunz’s deepening relationship with Veit prompted him to submit to Veit in the year the Bible translation came out a proposal to publish a chrestomathy of rabbinic passages to be selected, translated, and annotated by him. The idea may have recommended itself to Zunz as a plausible follow-up to his overview of midrashic literature of 1832 (Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, on which more anon), which related largely to the externals of the corpus, or perhaps as a correction of the one-sided treatment inflicted on rabbinic literature by Jost. The format of an anthology was a common vehicle of European scholarship to introduce ancient languages and literature to uninformed scholars and educated laity alike. After due consideration, however, Veit turned it down. In a letter of November 27, 1838, Veit acknowledged that there was an audience for such a work and that Zunz’s editorship would probably enlarge it somewhat. Yet it was still too small to cover the costs, let alone reward Zunz with a reasonable return for his effort. Instead, Veit urged him to compose a historical sketch of Jewish literature on the basis of his biographical entries in the Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon (discussed later), which might then be followed up with his rabbinic chrestomathy.84 The exchange did not remain barren, for in 1840 Veit did publish an exquisite anthology of Hebrew writings from the Mishna to the nineteenth century. Though published anonymously under the title Auswahl historischer Stücke aus hebräischen Schriftstellern (A Selection of Historical Pieces by Hebrew Writers), the work betrayed the hand of a careful and competent editor. Its thirty-five selections provided a vivid sense of continuity, creativity, and diversity within Hebrew letters, with each passage reproduced in punctuated Hebrew, alongside a German translation and a few highly instructive notes. As indicated on the title page, the chrestomathy was intended “for theologians and historians, as well as for use in Jewish institutions of higher learning,” and was a tribute to Veit’s commitment to serious Jewish education.85 Its editor was Joseph Zedner, born in Glogau in 1804, and a member of a small cohort of younger scholars inspired by Zunz to enter the parlous field of Jewish scholarship. At the time Zedner served as a resident teacher of the

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children in the household of Adolf Asher, who had published Zunz’s Gottesdienstliche Vorträge in 1832, and in whose book trade he also worked. Zedner had excelled as a student of Talmud in the Posen yeshiva of Akiva Eger, the dominant Orthodox sage of his generation. Self-effacing to a fault, Zedner (or maybe Veit) may have thought that putting his unknown name on the title page of his anthology might actually impede its sale. By the 1840s Asher had become the main European agent for the acquisition of Hebrew books by the British Museum, and it was his close ties to its dynamic librarian Anthony Panizzi that enabled him to secure an appointment for Zedner in 1846 in its division of printed books.86 Failing health would eventually force Zedner to retire in 1869 after presiding over the growth of its Hebraica collection from six hundred volumes to eleven thousand and finishing in 1867 an 891-page printed cata logue. A fi xture inside this emporium of Jewish knowledge, Zedner would prove to be of inestimable value to Zunz and his protégé Moritz Steinschneider in their painstaking research.87 Because Zedner tutored not only the children of Asher but Asher himself, the scholarly world was soon to learn who had been behind the luminous anthology. In 1840–41 Asher produced a handsome two-volume English translation of the medieval Hebrew travelogue of Benjamin of Tudela (in Navarre).88 A merchant with a keen eye and diligent hand, Benjamin recorded his travels through the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds from approximately 1160 to 1173, creating a trea sure trove of specific communal, economic, and geographic information. Asher’s English translation was based on an accompanying Hebrew text, carefully punctuated, that was itself a composite of the first two printed editions of Constantinople in 1543 and Ferrara in 1556.89 At the end of his preface to volume 2, Asher graciously acknowledged “the valuable assistance of Mr.  Zedner, the editor of the Auswahl historischer Stücke without which I should not have been able to attain even that relative degree of perfection to which I humbly pretend.”90 The work was grand in conception and a model of collaboration. To contextualize Benjamin’s travels in the Baghdad Caliphate, Asher recruited Fürchtegott Lebrecht, who had studied with the Hatam Sofer in Pressburg and Wilhelm Gesenius in Halle and was a colleague of Zunz at the newly opened teachers’ seminary in Berlin, to write an extended history of the regime with special attention to its state in the period of Benjamin’s visit. In 1864 Lebrecht would be the first German scholar to call for a critical edition of the Babylonian Talmud in a small book that he warmly dedicated to Zunz on his seventieth birthday.91

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Asher’s other major collaborator was Zunz, who assisted him significantly in three ways. First, he provided him with numerous learned notes to his translation, identifying more fully the many individuals mentioned by Benjamin, especially in Provence and Italy. To his credit, though, most of the notes on the contents of the text were written by Asher himself. Second, Zunz composed a long essay on the literature of a geographic nature authored by Jews that consisted of 160 works in eight subject categories from the Bible to his contemporary Salomon Munk in Paris. Third, Zunz balanced that sweep with an essay focused entirely on the topography of the land of Israel as preserved in Kaftor va-Ferah by Estori ha-Parhi in 1322.92 Again the assemblage of facts was intended to lift the miasma of ignorance among Christian scholars and savants. A sense of truth and justice drove Zunz’s relentless excavations of the remnants of Jewish creativity. Let three examples illustrate their plenitude. The overall achievement of Asher’s project was to establish the veracity of Benjamin’s Itinerary, which Jost had vigorously contested in 1826, a stance he reiterated in 1832. At worst, he suspected The Itinerary to be a fabrication of a trip never taken; at best, a compilation thrown together after the fact.93 Thus Asher took aim at Jost early on for accusing Benjamin of omitting the name of the pope at the time he visited Rome: “But as there exists no edition of these travels, in which that name is not clearly stated, we confess our distrust of the Doctor’s judgement of our author, and assert that the conclusions of an historian who is guilty of such mistakes—we refrain from saying misquotations— ought not to be taken bona fide.”94 Later Asher took the offensive again, joined in yet another note by Salomo Juda Löb Rapoport, whose promised collaboration never really materialized, most likely because of his move in 1840 from Tarnopol to Prague to assume the post of its chief rabbinic judge.95 The collective hostility betrayed a distinct consensus that Jost had grievously erred in embarking on his historical narrative (and critical notes) long before the necessary excavations had been done. To drive home the point still further, Zunz brought to light two manuscripts of seminal importance: the diary of David Reuveni, the fearless adventurer who roused messianic fervor among the Conversos of Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century, and the work of Estori ha-Parhi on the sites, vegetation, and laws of the land of Israel.96 Zunz’s trustworthy friend Michael in Hamburg had a copy of the Reuveni diary in his collection and shared its contents freely with him. Zunz reported that “the manuscript contains 190 leaves in octavo and deserves to be printed. In the account David speaks in

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the first person.”97 Without embellishment, Zunz summarized Reuveni’s dramatic narrative in four riveting pages. In comparison, twelve years earlier Jost could not muster more than one paragraph, wrapped in doubt, that added nothing to what Gans had recounted in 1592, without his existential engagement.98 While Zunz’s exposure of the scholarly world to the diary of Reuveni would not yield a publication of the complete manuscript until the last decade of the nineteenth century,99 his extensive presentation of Estori ha-Parhi’s work bore immediate fruit. A native of Provence, ha-Parhi fell victim to the French expulsion of 1306 and cast about, translating in Barcelona some medical texts into Hebrew, before reaching Israel in 1313. During the next seven years he traveled the country amassing a host of geographic, historical, archaeological, and numismatic details. Uppermost in his research was a messianic undertone: the preparation of a digest of all halakhic matters pertaining to living in the land of Israel should a national restoration be in the offing. Since its first printing in 1549, Kaftor va-Ferah (Almond Blossoms, a play on haParhi’s name) had not garnered sufficient interest for a second printing until 1852 in Berlin by Hirsch Endelmann, who in his short list of authors who over the centuries had made mention of ha-Parhi fully translated Zunz’s biographical sketch into Hebrew. And that Asher’s name was listed on the title page as the book’s distributor surely confirms the causal connection.100 Nevertheless, when the seventh volume of Heinrich Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden came out in 1863, he gave ha-Parhi short shrift. Though he found Kaftor va-Ferah to be a multifaceted, interesting work, he did not deign to give Zunz or Edelmann any credit.101 The target of Zunz’s contention of Kaftor va-Ferah as a vital source of information on the geography of Palestine was Karl von Raumer, a professor of natural history at Erlangen, whose 1835 book on the subject had already gone into a second edition by 1838. Not only was Raumer oblivious to the importance of Jewish sources for the topography of Palestine, he sailed over in silence “1100 years of Jewish antiquity from Josephus to Benjamin of Tudela.” Moreover, “his whole work does not contain one single quotation from the Talmud,” and when cited, it is from a secondary source.102 To highlight Raumer’s benightedness, Zunz compared him to the Dutch Orientalist Adrian Reland, who had visited the land in 1695 and “devoted an equal degree of attention to the Talmud and the fathers of the church” in his erudite study of Palestine of 1714, which Zunz regarded as the pinnacle of seventeenth-century scholarship on Judaism. During the intervening century, ignorance coupled

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with ill will to exclude Jewish scholarship from the academic discourse: “When in the course of time Jewish literature shared the neglect which the Jews have suffered for centuries, their national works were considered unworthy of being noticed, and the writers on biblical geography only quoted Reland in lieu of any Jewish sources, and the more they quoted, the less did they understand their subject.”103 The translation of Hebrew texts was but one way of contending with the oblivion to which postbiblical Jewish history and literature had been consigned by German scholarship. Another was securing Jewish coverage in Germany’s most widely read book—the Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon. Brought by Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus to Leipzig from Amsterdam in the second decade of the nineteenth century, this multivolume encyclopedia was designed to appeal to a popular market hungering for knowledge and culture.104 The title conveyed the purpose of the repository: its contents were meant to make for good conversation.105 During the ensuing decade, the encyclopedia sold some 60,000 sets of six separate editions, at a time when German books rarely sold more than 750 copies.106 By the eighth edition (1833–37), Zunz had hitched his wagon to the Brockhaus meteor, now run by Friedrich Arnold’s two sons.107 As late as the tenth edition of 1851–55, Zunz remained the sole Jewish scholarly contributor, among the hundreds listed, except for Moritz Veit.108 Thus it is safe to say that Zunz authored or revised the multiple Jewish entries that began to appear, ranging from Aaron and Abraham to Saadia, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Benjamin of Tudela, Maimonides, and Mendelssohn. Nor did he shortchange Jewish ritual, with entries on circumcision, marriage, the Sabbath, and Day of Atonement, or Jewish institutions like the Sanhedrin, the rabbinate, and the synagogue or Jewish literary corpora like the Torah, the Talmud, and the Targumim (Aramaic translations of Scripture). Even the Samaritans, Essenes, and Sabbatians merited their own brief entries, as did a small clutch of his own scholarly contemporaries in central Europe. In the longer entries on the Hebrews, Hebrew language and literature, Jews, Judaism, Jewish literature, and Jewish education, Zunz amply displayed his erudition and conciseness, specificity and synthesis, respect for the past and sensitivity to the present. The entry on the Hebrews ordered the history of the Israelites from Abraham to the destruction of the First Temple according to the chronology Zunz had worked out for the Veit Bible.109 In the related entry on their language and literature, Zunz unabashedly intoned the world significance of their legacy: “The extraordinary influence which the religious knowledge of the Hebrews exercised on the nations of Christianity

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and Islam lent their national literature a universal significance. Furthermore, insofar as its antiquity and trustworthiness, its religious content and poetic power, this literature supersedes that of any other pre-Christian nation, and thus constitutes for the history of mankind and its spiritual development noteworthy monuments and reliable sources.”110 More specifically, Zunz granted credence to some of the conclusions of biblical criticism. Deuteronomy, for example, in its present form took shape shortly before the final years of the Kingdom of Judah. Other books of the Pentateuch also betrayed the signs of an authorship later than Moses, though their historicity and spiritual integrity remained intact. At the same time Zunz acknowledged that the events prior to Samuel and David bore a mythic sheen.111 The entry on the Jews is a similarly compressed history in which Zunz declared outright “that the Jews were the direct postexilic descendants of the earlier Israelites or Hebrews.”112 When writing on Judaism, Zunz conceded that with the canonization of the Tanakh in the second century bce “a noticeable difference from the ancient Hebrew religion [Hebraismus] became evident in the evolution of its concepts and praxis.”113 In the Middle Ages, Jews fared far worse under the Christians than under the Muslims and Zunz did not hesitate to spell out the bitter particulars.114 He also averred the extent to which Islam was indebted to Judaism.115 Since the sixteenth century, the lot of Jews in the German states had been especially fraught, which prompted Zunz to exclaim: “The only way to integrate the Jewish population into the organism of the Christian state without harm is by emancipation and inner development, and not by disabilities and conversionary institutes, to which some are again taking recourse.”116 The lengthy entry on Jewish literature enabled Zunz to strike a more consistently universal tone: “Since that time [when Judaism succeeded the religion of the Hebrews], Jewish literature, inappropriately named rabbinic, has taken part in the development of the human spirit without external encouragement. In the treasures of that pursuit, long insufficiently recognized, there is hidden the wealth of centuries and a store of the most varied creativity.”117 Zunz divided that unbroken expanse of literary development into nine periods, with the sixth from 1040 to 1204 when the vast majority of Jews were still in the Islamic orbit singled out as the most glorious. Under the influence of the Muslim renaissance, Jews wrote in a variety of secular fields and served as vital agents of cultural transmission from East to West. In the same innovative vein, Zunz cited the publication of the first printed Hebrew books in Ixar, Aragon, in 1485 and Lisbon in 1489. Finally, Zunz identified the onset of

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his own era of renewal during the lifetime of Moses Mendelssohn, “in which a burst of youthful energy breaks new ground in Jewish [nationalen] literature, not unlike the era from the 11th to the 16th centuries.”118 The fact that Zunz and Steinschneider placed a selection of these entries from Brockhaus in the first volume of Zunz’s Gesammelte Schriften, which was specifically devoted to his efforts for emancipation (Jewish and German), bespoke their primary intent.119 Zunz could not have found a more suitable vehicle for the distillation and dissemination of his awesome recovery of the untold, dispersed fragments of the Jewish past. Brockhaus afforded him a resounding platform to order and structure his vast knowledge in succinct form to convince an educated public that without any idea of the history and literature of postbiblical Judaism, the German ideal of Bildung (character formation through scholarship) was deficient and unjust. Without betraying his own high standards, Zunz wielded dispassionate scholarship with fierce purpose.

* * * The work that was destined to make the turn to critical scholarship in modern Judaism irreversible was Zunz’s 1832 study of midrashic literature, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt (The Historical Development of Sermons by Jews in their Worship Service).120 Unpacked, this compact title wedded the corpus of midrash to the institution of the synagogue. The sprawling and disordered literature of scriptural interpretation was no longer seen as a free-floating expression of the Jewish imagination, but as an instrument of religious edification set in the synagogue. The reconceptualization endowed the modern sermon with an ancient pedigree and the modern rabbinate with a function not associated with its medieval or eastern European counterparts. Zunz’s point of departure, to be sure, was a reaction to the hostile stance of the Prussian government from 1824 toward any semblance of religious reform, yet this origin never impaired the grandeur of his outcome.121 Nor did Zunz conceal his angst and anger. His foreword delivered a blunt fillip against the injustice of Prussia’s inconsistent and piecemeal policy of amelioration: “It is finally time to grant the Jews in Europe, especially in Germany, justice and freedom instead of [individual] rights and liberties. No more instances of wretched, humiliating privilege, but full-fledged, ennobling citizenship. We have no desire for rights allotted stingily, outweighed by an equal number of disabilities. We take no pleasure in good-hearted concessions; we loath privileges [obtained] surreptitiously.”122 In a passage that would arouse

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the ire of the censor, Zunz rejected the contention that Jewish religious practices and moral deficiencies were what impeded the extension of equality and condemned the ethical arbitrariness of the government: “Whether the Jews harm or benefit the body politic [dem Ganzen] does not depend on them but rather on civil society in general and the laws that devolve from it. Education, a faith community and family ties are the inalienable property of the individual. They are quite possibly a Jew’s sole possession and greatest good fortune and because he doesn’t trample on them, he is punished.”123 Zunz willingly admitted that over the past fifty years advances toward equality had been registered across Germany, unaided by any new resources for the understanding of Judaism. Statesmen and bureaucrats alike still take recourse to the tomes of earlier pedants: “The material (so-called) knowledge of Judaism today still remains at the level set by Eisenmenger 135 years ago, while the philological [knowledge] has not budged in 200 years.”124 Zunz was proud of the advances made by Jews since Mendelssohn, but lamented the absence of adequate institutionalization: “If emancipation and scholarship are not to be empty words or fancy articles of clothing, but the fountainhead of our moral life, which we have recovered after going astray in the wilderness for many years, then our institutions must nourish us— institutions of advanced learning, widespread religious education, dignified worship ser vices and purposeful sermons.”125 With this stunning work, Zunz would arm the synagogue with an escutcheon of nobility. In defining it toward the end of his book as “the expression of Jewish nationhood [Nationalität], the guarantor of its religious existence,” he perspicaciously anticipated its centrality in the era to come.126 Not surprisingly, the Prussian censor took offense at the foreword and demanded excision of one passage in particular that overtly questioned the right of the government to discriminate on the basis of religion. The authority of the law should be restricted to deeds and not opinions.127 Were that the case, Zunz affirmed, Jews would be more sympathetic to their faith. But the intervention came late. Asher, Zunz’s publisher, informed the authorities that the 760 copies scheduled to be printed had already come off the press and the 300 prepublication subscriptions were about to be sent out. With Zunz absent from Berlin for a much-needed rest, Asher was not prepared to tinker with the passage. At most, he offered to literally paper it over. After some vacillation, the authorities cleared the book unrevised for distribution, perhaps because Asher had convinced them that the select readership for which the book was intended would not be unduly roiled by the passage.128

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Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge is a masterpiece of analytic depth, synthetic power, and architectural virtuosity. It soars over more than two millennia of Jewish history from the early period of the Second Temple to the nineteenth century, identifying a library of midrashic creativity from the late books of the Hebrew Bible to the sermons revitalizing the contemporary German synagogue. Like the Tanakh, the book is divided into twenty-four units (chapters rather than books), subtly suggesting that history had now replaced revelation as the religious guide for modern Jews. The final chapter on the emergence of the modern synagogue throughout the Jewish world, swarming with a mass of facts and details, is a model of what Zunz had in mind when in the days of the Verein he had applied the German academic concept of “statistics” to the study of Jewish history, a wideangle photo of a moment in time. Indeed, much of the information packed into that chapter may actually have derived from the network of correspondents that kept the Verein abreast of the progressive transformation of Jewish life, for Zunz had kept its papers. No less striking, the chapter culminates in a paean to and program for reform of the rabbinate, the educational system, and the worship ser vice. Though Zunz countenanced eliminating irrational or desiccated ritual and the introduction of new ritual where needed, he much preferred the restoration of old ritual (like the sermon) that had fallen into disuse. Considerately applied, this threefold prescription should not end up with a landscape of warring factions. Above all, Zunz believed that it was the destiny of German Jewry to lead the way into modernity: “Regardless of the title the person giving the sermon may carry—be it preacher, rabbi, teacher or lay speaker—he must know how to find in Scripture and Aggada the word of God, in old and new practices true gold, in the present a genuine calling and for the hearts [of his congregants] the right language. Then will the godly spirit enter your Temple again, O Daughter of Zion. Then will it let itself be felt in stirring, inspiring words forging institutions fired by enthusiasm.”129 This rousing call to reform, which rested on the conviction that political emancipation enacted on principle called for religious reform enacted voluntarily,130 was set atop a mountain of fresh and enduring historical research. The earliest strata of Jewish literature, Scripture itself, evinced the fertility of midrash. Zunz’s most heralded contribution to biblical criticism was his contention that the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles constitute a single work authored somewhere between 312 and 260 bce.131 But equally originally, Zunz argued that the Chronicler wrote in a midrashic mode. Through freewheeling exegesis, he imbued older texts already sanctified with fresh mean-

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ing relevant for his own day. By virtue of subordinating himself to a canonized text, the midrashist gained freedom to innovate: “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. Th rough exegesis one [shed light] on what had grown dark.”132 In addition, Zunz asserted that even in other books of the Bible’s third division (Writings), given its late provenance, there abound instances of midrash on texts from its first two divisions (Torah and Prophets), which had attained the status of a canon long before: “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.”133 Midrash then created the paradox of a canon without closure, transmuting the language of revelation into a wellspring of infinite meaning, and in his survey of its generative power over two millennia, Zunz brought order and development to a chaotic body of opaque texts. Not only did he analyze and date those in print and often beloved, but he also enlarged the genre by touching on more than 110 works of aggada and midrash, including some 33 that had survived only in manuscript.134 On the basis of scattered quotations in other sources, he was even able to reconstruct the identity, structure, and content of yet other works that were extant in name only, which in one stunning instance when found fully confirmed his conjectures.135 On this assemblage of texts, Zunz imposed an elegant table of organization, whose earliest postbiblical layer crystallized into three genres of biblical translation, halakhic derivation, and aggadic expression. The category of aggadic creativity in turn evolved into works of either an ethical, historical, or exegetical complexion.136 In sum, the scheme showed the Bible to be the inexhaustible fountainhead of a bracingly diverse literature often written in the face of adversity: “The [1,500year] 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 inspiring thoughts.”137 On a deeper level, by spawning both halakha and aggada, midrash perpetuated the polarity of law and prophecy that had once invigorated the religion of ancient Israel. Creative exegesis expressed itself simulta neously in formats given to order and freedom, in a vast realm of behavior

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and interaction minutely regulated and a far smaller realm of the spirit governed by intuition and spontaneity: “In the body politic, law and freedom are akin to the head and heart of an individual. The head and the law design firm, cold rules, while freedom and a warm heart engender applications and exceptions. The constitution and the priesthood protect the law and the Ark, the visible axes of the nation, but it is the prophets and their words which guard the fire of freedom and the original idea, which in turn are not visibly passed on from generation to generation, but rather in each period are directly rekindled by divine inspiration.”138 Granted, Zunz’s study confined itself to the homiletical, that is the aggadic side of the literature, but in so doing it invested the modern sermon with a noble pedigree. It also brought Zunz back into the synagogue as its historian, where in due time his life’s work would crown him as its greatest preacher. Many years later Isaac Hirsch Weiss, born in Moravia in 1815 and the author of an ambitious and robust history of rabbinic Judaism, recalled in his memoir the impact of Zunz’s book on his own development: “From the day die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge came into my hands, I was drawn towards its author, and felt for him a disciple’s respect for his master. I studied his work as assiduously and carefully as I was wont to do the Talmud and Posekim [legal decisors].”139 The equivalence is a measure of the influence and the encomium stands for the reaction of an entire age cohort. With a single exemplar Zunz had launched a paradigm shift that would eventually cross denominational lines still in formation. The distinction belongs to Zunz not because he was the first to apply the critical tools of modern scholarship to the history of Judaism, but rather because of the powerful novelty and exquisite integration of his results.140 In truth, his adolescent Wolfenbüttel friend Jost published in quick succession a nine-volume history of the Jews between 1820 and 1828, which he ill-advisedly called Geschichte der Israeliten. Like Zunz’s work, Jost’s was assuredly prompted by the struggle for emancipation. But there the similarity ends. In Jost’s case a sense of urgency curtailed the time allotted to original research. Instead, he rushed to cobble together a comprehensive history that was a mile wide and an inch deep.141 In his own work Zunz cited him but three times, once to refute a point and twice in a passing reference.142 When Jost’s first volume appeared, Zunz quipped to Heine that perhaps it was written so poorly to make the later volumes stand out.143 On occasion he chided Jost for relying unduly on the dated, century-old L’Histoire des Juifs by the French Huguenot Jacques Basnage,144 and he surely concurred with Asher’s

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contempt for having dismissed the value of Benjamin of Tudela as a reliable source of geographical information. Overall, Zunz reproached Jost “for having immaturely put out such a long-winded work.”145 The above, however, is not meant to say that Jost’s survey was bereft of critical value. He crafted sophisticated, original excursuses on the validity of biblical criticism, on the conflicting tendencies in the different works by Josephus, and on the proper methodology for ferreting out of the Talmud reliable historical information.146 But what impaired Jost’s history beyond salvaging, aside from a narrative that rested on scant primary research, was its ideological coloration. Under the influence of David Friedländer and Lazarus Bendavid, who embodied the radical left wing of the Berlin Haskalah, Jost wrote with unconcealed animosity toward rabbinic Judaism as a pervasive aberration and corruption of Israelite Mosaism, later to be valorized by Ashkenazi Judaism.147 In a nutshell, Jost’s indictment of the legalism, duplicity, and insularity of the Talmud and the deplorable subservience of its adherents to its overbearing rabbinic elite conceded in full measure the contention of the opponents of emancipation that it was the Talmud that blocked the road to Prussian citizenship, a concession seized upon by Chiarini, as we have seen. Religious reform needed to precede political emancipation because Jewish degeneracy was self-inflicted: “If the charge that the Jews destroyed themselves is true, then the Pharisees bear the greatest guilt.”148 By implication, Eisenmenger was not wrong. Throughout, Jost employed degeneration as the governing trope of his thesis, whereas Zunz countered positively with that of development. Zunz accentuated the ferment inherent in the midrashic modality of rabbinic Judaism in contrast to Jost’s portrait of its halakhic ossification. For Zunz, midrash was conducive to outside influence and internal experimentation; for Jost, halakha enforced confinement, separation, and isolation. Granted that Zunz failed to examine the varied content of midrashic expression and eschewed taking up what agitated Jost, he could still invoke the creative capacity of rabbinic leadership to sustain and modulate the inspiration emanating from the textual deposits of divine revelation. Looking forward, Zunz mounted an image of the past that transcended the battle in which it was forged, while Jost’s retrogressive program never rose above the fray.149 The divergence of Zunz and Jost as historians was reinforced by a prickly personal relationship that blew hot and cold. A year older than Zunz, Jost also lost his father early and came to the Samson Free School a bit before him. In the years prior to Ehrenberg’s arrival, they bonded in their shared misery and

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deep love of Hebrew.150 They both remained eternally grateful to Ehrenberg for rescuing them from their medieval dungeon, and over the years he would do his utmost to ameliorate their personal estrangement. When Jost went off to study at Göttingen, as we have seen, he shared his experiences, thinking, and exuberance with Zunz in lengthy letters that longed for him to come and offered him free housing in his room: “We could accomplish so much together and exchange our ideas.”151 In Berlin, though, their interaction grew infrequent, a loss Jost gently bemoaned in a letter to Zunz when the latter was on the threshold of receiving his doctorate: “I am pleased that this mixup [a letter from Ehrenberg to Zunz that had come to Jost] gives me at least a chance to write to you and perhaps prompt an answer for your friend, who for the last five years has not exchanged a letter with you. If only! You are about to climb Olympus. May a greater power protect you to thwart the bearded tyrants from destroying all that is good with their thunderbolts. Work and become great for the present and the future. In any event, remember on occasion your admiring and loving I. M. Jost.”152 To Ehrenberg, Jost was more forthcoming when he reported on Zunz’s success as a preacher in Berlin: “That yesterday [Shabbat Bereishit, October 8, 1820] Zunz spoke masterfully, garnering well-deserved praise, simply confirms your expectations for this brainy fellow [vortrefflichen Kopfe]. He has now thrown himself fully into this profession and in time will come to excel. If only he were less cold toward his true friends! If he fears being envied, he is right, for I do envy him. But not for his gifts, which no one can acquire, but for the lovely trip which he [recently] had the good fortune to take” (Zunz had also preached well in Leipzig on the second day of Rosh Hashana).153 When Ehrenberg’s son Philipp came to Berlin in 1829 to study at the university, he befriended both Zunz and Jost, but found that their “rivalry” (his word) allowed only for an irritatingly insincere socializing when the couples met.154 Proximity induced neither contact nor collaboration, a fact in full view for all to see in their uncoordinated responses to Chiarini. That Jost was eager to help Zunz get prepublication subscribers for his Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge did not restore their lost intimacy,155 and when Jost moved to Frankfurt am Main in 1835 in order to join the respected faculty of its Philantropin Jewish high school, he did not bother to visit Zunz to say good-bye.156 Jost’s joy was briefly rekindled when Zunz contributed a few analects to his short-lived scholarly journal Israelitische Annalen (1839–41), but Jost’s acceptance of a piece by Eljakim Carmoly, a prolific but unscrupulous rabbischolar in Brussels for whom Zunz had only contempt, quickly soured the

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relationship again.157Jost did merit an entry from Zunz in the Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon, but one that was far more restrained than those he authored for Abraham Geiger, Zacharias Frankel, and Adolf Jellinek. The most he could bring himself to say was that Jost was “one of the most meritorious [verdientesten] of Jewish scholars in Germany.”158 The evidence suggests that for all of their similarities in background, work ethic, lifestyle, and devotion to Jewish scholarship, their differences ran far deeper, a study in contrasts. While Jost was a pedant and master of many languages, with a calm disposition who preferred the role of disengaged observer, Zunz was a fearless pioneer with a low anger threshold who plunged into the maelstrom of the days’ injustices. Unlike Jost, he was politically radical, religiously intense, and a cutting-edge Jewish historian. To his credit, Jost knew his limits and never entertained the folly of competing with Zunz. But then Zunz was a demanding and impatient man with a thin skin who could not suffer Jost’s faults graciously. He was incensed by Jost’s downplaying of his significance in his Neuere Geschichte der Israeliten of 1846–47159 and thought that Jost’s final major work, Geschichte des Judentums und seiner Sekten (1857–59), would have been better left unwritten.160 In his own final reckoning with Jost, who had died in 1860, in his intriguing Monatstage, Zunz curtly said, noting the day of his passing, “my schoolmate and friend of my youth.” Not a word more.161 Zunz, however, was never one to withhold his respect from scholars of merit. A sterling example was his lavish expression of gratitude to Shlomo Yehudah Rapoport toward the end of the foreword to his book. Zunz acknowledged outright that he cited his scholarship more than 110 times.162 Born in Lemberg in 1790 and a master of the totality of rabbinic literature that he had acquired in his youth, Rapoport was a gifted autodidact open to the outside world. Years later, Weiss would plausibly conjecture that Zunz’s essay on Rashi in 1823 had given Rapoport the incentive to undertake his own series of biographical essays, six of which appeared in Hebrew in short order from 1828 to 1831.163 His profiles of seminal rabbinic figures in the Islamic orbit from the tenth and eleventh centuries were intricate composites assembled from the most disparate sources that touched on innumerable tangents. Since much of Zunz’s research dealt with the same centuries, Rapoport’s expertise was of immense value to him for its critical acumen, profound learning, and pious empathy. Zunz was equally grateful to Rapoport for the additional information and insight generated by their three-year correspondence prior to 1832, especially the many nuggets from two large projects still in progress.

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Zunz once confessed to Philipp Ehrenberg in passing that it took him half a week of preparation to answer a letter from Rapoport.164 The correspondence continued after Zunz’s opus appeared, though not as often as Zunz would have liked. Periodically, he complained to Michael that he had not heard from Rapoport for many a moon. Zunz had put the two of them in touch with each other, for Michael was a treasure trove for every serious scholar.165 In a letter written on February 11, 1833, Zunz sought reactions to his book. He knew that he would never convince the “ignoramuses and obscurantists” for whom critical scholarship and sermons were taboo. He did have some doubts about his dating of Ezekiel and the books of Midrash Rabba, but remained firm in his view on Chronicles and antagonism toward the Zohar.166 The letter elicited from Rapoport, still in Lemberg and hounded by a horde of intolerant Hasidim, a surprisingly candid articulation of his own position: “I wish for reform, critical scholarship and German sermons. In my Anshe Shem [his unfinished biographical dictionary] I topple the Zohar from its perch [Throne] with irrefutable and illuminating proofs. But at some point we need to stop. If we want reform, we can’t stir up the ground [beneath us?]. . . . For my part, I know quite well how beneficial and necessary is lucid criticism on all books of the Bible. We ought to assign every book and yes every verse its time and place through arduous research, indeed seek to bring out its character. But it must be done with respect and circumspectly [Schonung].”167 In his answer of April 11, 1833, Zunz regretted the harshness with which he accused the author of Chronicles for “falsifying history” and promised in a second edition to soften his tone.168 Given the inextricable entanglement of religious reform with political emancipation, the correspondence circled back to the topic. At the end of 1837, newly arrived in Tarnopol to earn a living as its rabbi, Rapoport drew a distinction between the right of free inquiry and the prudence required for reform. He feared the abrupt introduction of radical change because so many not ready for it would be left behind: Time must be given the chance to play its part. If we were to force and accelerate it, it would wreak a terrible vengeance. Only a small segment is able to rush forward, embarking on a path [strewn] with thorns, at the end of which they would find themselves alone and forced to move in a new direction. Those left behind, and they constitute the majority, would be thrown still farther back and it

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would take many a century till they return to the point where fools had tossed them aside. . . . Still, I attest to you that I have always been a progressive and still am. . . . But because a ministry in Munich threatens to exclude our students unless they have permission to write on the Sabbath, should we immediately give in, we who have resisted every effort at coercion for so long? Should we throw our banner down in an instance to be trampled on [by others]?169 Unfortunately, all that has survived of Zunz’s reply is the cryptic summary he made for his files. By March 14, 1838, when he wrote, Zunz insisted that a schism was anathema to him: “The Karaites are offensive to me. I favor doing battle, not betraying.” And then Zunz directed Rapoport to a passage from his book where he envisioned reform as a consequence of emancipation and not a precondition: “A full-fledged emancipation needs a full-fledged reform, which would become manifest in institutions that protect both faith and scholarship and transmit the heritage of the fathers uncorrupted to the sons.”170 As early as 1833 Zunz informed Michael that Rapoport’s dire economic straits in Lemberg were preventing him from finishing his two major research projects and prompting him to think of moving to Germany.171 By 1836 Zunz asked Rapoport directly if he might be interested in taking the vacant post of chief rabbi in Berlin and whether he could deliver sermons in German.172 In the spring of 1840 the Berlin board turned to Zunz for confirmation of Rapoport’s fluency in German, to which he responded that his eleven-year correspondence with Rapoport, devoted almost entirely to matters of scholarship, was conducted, with few exceptions, in German. By way of evidence, he submitted a number of selections from Rapoport’s letters. Satisfied with Zunz’s verification, the search committee in the summer of 1840 dispatched Veit to negotiate with him, but in the meantime Rapoport had accepted a call to Prague, where he would stay until his death in 1867, without finishing either project.173 In his Brockhaus entry on Rapoport, Zunz spoke of him in the superlative as “one of the most outstanding Jewish scholars” and in his Monatstage went so far as to designate him “the Azariah de’ Rossi of our century, the founder of critical scholarship.”174 The tribute reflects not only Zunz’s lack of envy and sincere magnanimity but also the historical fact that the appreciation of critical scholarship arose in different corners of Europe simultaneously.

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While the dominance of German as the preferred language of discourse underscores the centrality of Germany in the epistemological revolution underway, it is indisputable that the paradigm shift, with more than one progenitor and scattered practitioners, knew no borders. Correspondence and journals in several languages were the lifeblood of an international coterie. A global vision indeed directed Zunz to commission a Hebrew translation of his Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge as it came off the press. In his diary he noted that in August 1832, one month after the German edition appeared, David Caro in Posen began a Hebrew translation. According to Zunz, the idea originated with Caro, but he quickly embraced it.175 In their collaboration, a faltering Haskalah movement combined forces with the ascending prominence of German science. Caro was the dominant maskil in Posen, the rabbinic seat of Akiva Eger and a bastion of traditional Judaism in Germany. In 1816 he had opened the city’s first modern school, an institution for the children of the privileged to prepare for their admission to a gymnasium or university. And four years later he authored a well-honed polemic for a total revamping of a sclerotic rabbinate, synagogue, and educational system.176 The lure of an agreement with Anton Schmid, the energetic Viennese Christian publisher of the journal Bikurei Ha’ itim (First Fruits), the cradle of the turn to critical scholarship in Galicia, to publish Caro’s translation would assure Zunz’s work some dissemination in Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, and destinations farther east.177 The Hebrew title was to be the generic Knesset Yisrael (The Assembly of Israel), suggesting the audience addressed rather than the institution to be reformed. Zunz told Caro that he wanted the Hebrew to be simple and lucid along the lines of Mendelssohn’s style, without pathos or flourish, which often detract from the idea being conveyed. Nor would Zunz countenance the inclusion of a Hebrew translation of his Rashi essay. Caro, it seems, had completed such a translation on his own, which Zunz would not release without his revisions and additions. Moreover, it simply did not belong.178 By March 1833 Caro had already translated and remitted eight chapters. Zunz found that his compact and crowded copybooks deprived him of marginal space for his notes and corrections. Some of Caro’s suggestions Zunz deemed worthy of pondering; others he rejected such as an extended discussion of the Septuagint. Not in this edition. But Hebrew quotations in his footnotes could certainly be moved into the narrative for his Hebrew readers and maybe even some new ones added.179 By August Zunz had edited the first copybook. At times the translation struck him as opaque and imprecise, in

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need of more polish. At others, his corrections deviated from the German original in order not to be misunderstood.180 But the revisions proceeded slowly. By April 1834 he had finished the second copybook. From page 85 on in his book, Zunz was no longer quibbling about Caro’s style or word choice, only matters of substance.181 Zunz admitted in his next letter that the slow pace was his fault: his heavy workload, his need to respond to criticisms of his book, and his burdensome correspondence.182 In contrast, Caro worked zealously and by June 1834 had finished the translation. The accompanying letter to that final copybook expressed regret at the delays but confidence in Zunz’s best efforts. As for a publisher, Caro could offer no advice other than to say that Schmid knew of him from his contributions to Bikurei Ha’ itim. Similarly, Caro was prepared to leave the size of his honorarium entirely to Zunz. What he wanted most of all was to get out an announcement in order to attract prepublication subscribers to the book to allay its cost. The Hebrew edition would certainly do better than the German, of which there were only two copies in Posen, his own and that of a friend. Christian scholars had little interest in rabbinic literature and educated Jews even less.183 Some ten months later Zunz returned the fully revised translation, though with reservations. He was still not wholly satisfied with Caro’s word choices and style, and many of his insertions displeased him. To revisit some subjects would have to await a second edition. Zunz still did not have a publisher and owed Caro a Hebrew foreword.184 Notwithstanding the inevitable delay, Zunz’s remove to Prague in September 1835 delighted Caro: “Now, honored Doctor, you are in my land, where Hebrew is still sought and beloved, [especially] in my city which is full of sages and writers [in Hebrew]. At last you will be able to work steadily for my, for your, for Knesset Yisrael. At your recommendation Landau [Moses Israel] here or Anton Schmid in Vienna would surely agree to publish the book.”185 But it was not to be. The Hebrew translation never saw the light of day and Caro may well have gone unremunerated.186 At his death on December 25, 1839, he left a finished manuscript. In Zunz’s final tribute to Caro in his Monatstage as an educator, reformer, and tireless translator, who “translated newer works from Hebrew or into Hebrew, leaving behind others unfinished,” he may have buried a guilt-laden allusion to their failed collaboration.187

chapter 4

The Break with Reform

By the 1840s Leopold Zunz could surely detect on the horizon a small emerging cohort of first-generation graduates of German universities studying Judaism through the lens of critical scholarship. Aspiring young rabbis and scholars looked to him as the undisputed founder and master of a new discourse for guidance, encouragement, and recognition in their effort to turn admiration into emulation. His network of correspondents took on the inchoate contours of a movement. A tribute letter by Abraham Geiger, the dynamic leader of Reform Judaism, to Zunz on the occasion of his seventieth birthday prompted him to recall the impact on him of Zunz’s biography of Rashi in 1823. A university student at the time, Geiger already wielded the tools and knowledge, though not yet the method and perspective, to do serious scholarship. The essay struck Geiger as revelatory when serendipity brought it to his attention: “It was like a mountain stream which becomes all the more refreshing and invigorating by virtue of the great obstacles which it has to overcome. The assurance with which you mastered the great wealth of your material, the light you shed on dark and pathless terrain, your edifying, illuminating progress through the arcades of medieval Jewish literature— all these afforded both refreshment and stimulation, though, instead of quenching my thirst, they only served to make it keener.”1 Sometime later, in April 1831, impatient with Zunz’s scholarly infertility, Geiger addressed him directly and urgently in a heartfelt letter. Still uncredentialed, Geiger wanted to give form and focus to a collective sensibility. Zunz should agree to head up another journal like his short-lived Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, in which serious Jews could collaborate in the production of scholarship to promote the civil and religious acculturation of their coreligionists. Though this letter went unanswered, Zunz’s Die gottesdi-

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enstlichen Vorträge strengthened Geiger’s resolve to persist: “At last, a clearing had been made in the wildly tangled forest of Jewish literature; long centuries of evolution lay exposed before the mind’s eye; the inner history, though merely hinted at, enriched our understanding. The book had a profound and refreshing effect upon me personally. But over and beyond this it was a landmark in Jewish history, a turning point in intellectual progress. New activity began in every field and there is none who would not gladly agree that he has received both impetus and instruction from this work.”2 By 1835 Geiger had launched his Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie (An Academic Journal for Jewish Theology), the second journal in German devoted to critical scholarship. With a doctorate in hand from Marburg and a rabbinic post in Wiesbaden, Nassau, and the author of a prizewinning study of Muhammad’s indebtedness to Judaism, Geiger had attracted a dozen first- and second-generation practitioners of Jewish scholarship, including Zunz and Jost, to be associated with and committed to writing for his journal. Zunz was on board, provided Geiger could recruit hard-working, religiously nonpartisan collaborators and a publisher ready to pay an honorarium for their contributions. Zunz was not shy about letting Geiger know of the journal’s shortcomings and was especially annoyed at the failure of the publisher to pay honoraria for volume 1. Always in need of income, Zunz insisted on proper compensation for his work, as he wrote Geiger on May 15, 1837: “I am prepared to work vigorously, but I have no time like Plato to teach for nothing.”3 During Geiger’s fifteen-month layover in Berlin patiently awaiting the indispensable Prussian citizenship that would enable him to assume a rabbinic post in Breslau, he drew especially close to Zunz, whom he visited often and from whom he learned “an immense amount.”4 When they parted, Geiger felt that he had acquired not only a colleague but also a friend. Ensconced in Breslau with a salary of 800 talers and a life contract, Geiger thanked Zunz on March 3, 1840, for mentoring and befriending him: “I cannot tell you, dear friend, how much you came to mean to me during my stay in Berlin. I will always regard living together with you as one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. I had the good fortune to share your friendship and grow in my own eyes. And I hope that I may reciprocate the intimacy which you showed me so graciously.”5 Though Zunz and Geiger would soon diverge on scholarly and ideological grounds, as we will see, Zunz obliged Geiger with a stream of fertile studies loaded with new data and far-reaching ramifications. Zunz was determined

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to do Jewish history from the bottom up and the world was his archive, which he accessed mainly through the kindness of friends and acquaintances. From the cata logues, manuscripts, and rare books that he assiduously scrutinized, he began to recover the identity and individuality of authors often mentioned in medieval chronicles and other texts, but veiled in obscurity. The modern sensibility bristled at a religious culture that privileged anonymity, often citing works by title only. The signature of midrashic anthologies was the missing identity of their authors or compilers. From 1832 on, much of Zunz’s painstaking research was devoted to sketching the profiles of unfamiliar literary figures composed of widely dispersed fragments of information.6 The absence of connecting tissue often accentuated the factual specificity of the disparate data. Where possible, Zunz tried to track the influence and afterlife of important works. At this undifferentiated stage of the field, Zunz roamed over a vast terrain, writing with equal authority on Jews under Islam and in Christendom from the third century to the eighteenth. The literary efflorescence of the Jews in Rome and Provence in the High Middle Ages in particular tended to garner the lion’s share of his effort. In these findings from his workshop, Zunz prodded later scholars to pursue subjects and leads he was the first to suggest. For example, on the basis of abundant talmudic sources, he crafted a solid, concise portrait of Rabbi Yochanan, the seminal spiritual leader of mid-third century Palestinian Jewry.7 Of a different order was Zunz’s effort to offset the unfairly negative biblical image of David’s invaluable general Joab, the son of Zeruiah, with a portrait drawn from midrashic and liturgical-poetic (paytanic) sources that, in contrast, treated him with far more empathy and admiration (we’ll return to the genre of midrashic biography).8 In yet another vein, Zunz shed some light on the obscure paytan (liturgical poet) Yosi ben Yosi, who in a fourteenth-century mahzor (a prayerbook for holidays) was described as an orphan with the family name Avitur. To his credit, Zunz sharply distinguished the few known piyutim (liturgical poems) of Yosi ben Yosi and the far richer legacy of the better known eleventh-century Sephardic paytan Josef ibn Avitur. But under the influence of the caption, Zunz inclined to identify Yosi as ibn Avitur’s son, who died without ever getting the title rabbi, a misfortune alluded to by the later moniker “the orphan.” Little could Zunz imagine as he assigned Yosi to the eleventh century in Provence that scholarship would one day regard him as the only Palestinian paytan known by name to have definitely composed liturgical poems for the synagogue prior to the Arabic conquest of 636.9

Figure 4. Though undated, this full-length photo of Abraham Geiger in the prime of life conveys a semblance of his vigor, intellect, and gravitas. Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York.

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In yet another probe, Zunz ventured into the Geonic period to trace the circulation of some of Saadia’s diverse writings and to fi x the dates of later tenth-century Geonim.10 He also added vital information to the biography of Abraham ben David in Provence, the stern critic of Maimonides’s majestic halakhic code, as well as to the biography of Kalonymos ben Kalonymos at the turn of the thirteenth century.11 In the latter instance, Zunz especially stressed his central role in the systematic translation of Arabic texts into Hebrew in both Provence and Italy, a cultural transmission of universal import to the history of the West that his protégé Moritz Steinschneider would bring to a resounding culmination nearly sixty years later in his monumental Die hebraeischen Übersetzungen des Mittlealters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (The Hebrew Translations of the Middle Ages and the Jews as Translators).12 Zunz augmented that novel thesis in his illumination of the philosophic productivity of Kalonymos’s younger contemporary in Rome Yehuda ben Moses Romano, the majority of whose works still languished in Italian archives awaiting their redemption.13 While in this piece, Immanuel of Rome, the era’s finest Hebrew poet, made only a cameo appearance as Yehuda’s close friend, in a longer piece three years later, Zunz gave him center stage, though tarrying at some length on the large and talented supporting cast that provided the fertile soil for his creativity.14 It is hard to avoid the impression that Steinschneider’s 1843 essay on Immanuel is not a direct follow-up of Zunz’s groundbreaking research on Italian Jewish culture from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth. Steinschneider had already fallen under Zunz’s sway, and both men were convinced that when given half a chance, Jewish creativity mirrored and enriched the culture in which it flourished.15 By setting Immanuel in Dante’s Rome, Steinschneider expanded and deepened the significance of his literary accomplishments, though not without disappointment at their perceived lack of gravitas. The essay quickly found favor with Zunz. “I am exceedingly pleased with your Immanuel,” he wrote to Steinschneider. “Such works 25 years ago were impossible. Your progress in covering ground [Mass], elegance and working through your material is visible.” And then Zunz added a few notes that Steinschneider might consider. Aside from the compliment, Zunz’s comment is a valuable indicator of how far the field had come.16 Zunz and Steinschneider were truly kindred spirits, destined to set the bar for Jewish scholasrship for the rest of the century. They shared a passion for dredging archives, an addiction to hard work, a mastery of the many layers of the Hebrew language, and an aversion to the rabbinate. Neither had

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the capability of Geiger to combine harmoniously the pulpit with critical scholarship without compromising either. That Geiger’s scholarship would retain their respect, despite deep disagreements, was a tribute to his stature as their equal. Steinschneider arrived in Berlin in November 1839 after a valuable one semester in Leipzig studying the Quran with Heinrich Fleischer, who was about to become Germany’s leading Arabist. Born in Prossnitz, Moravia, Steinschneider was twenty-two years younger than Zunz, the well-rounded product of a dual curriculum since childhood and five years of university studies in Prague and Vienna. During the next two years at the university in Berlin, before he would return to Prague in October 1841 to be closer to his parents in Prossnitz, Steinschneider befriended Geiger and turned Zunz into a willing mentor. In Adelheid he won a wise and warm confidant who felt that his words often fell short of expressing his feelings. At the piano Steinschneider introduced her to Italian music, the recall of which comforted her in the wake of her mother’s death in 1842. Zunz’s letters to Steinschneider always bore a postscript from Adelheid. In fact, the two of them also corresponded directly.17 In Prague till June 1845, Steinschneider gradually determined the career trajectory he would pursue. To support himself he taught at a Jewish school for girls, and in Auguste Auerbach he met a fellow educator whom he would marry in 1849 after a seven-year courtship. A tutor in the home of a local Jewish manufacturer, she was proficient in English, French, and Yiddish and was learning Italian. She also played the piano and sang, read both fiction and nonfiction, and harbored a deeply religious disposition that no longer expressed itself in strict ritual observance. With Rapoport and Sachs, to whom Zunz had introduced him, Steinschneider continued his Jewish studies and from Hirsch B. Fassel, the rabbi in Prossnitz, he obtained in 1843 the ordination necessary for most rabbinic posts.18 Steinschneider’s departure from Berlin intensified Zunz’s sense of academic loneliness. While the city was brimming with culture, no one showed any interest in Jewish scholarship: “Except for a few poor souls, who might do something if they could feed themselves, the field of Jewish studies is dead. . . . [ellipsis in the original] Lebrecht and I will deliver the eulogies.” In her own letter to Steinschneider, Adelheid quoted Leopold’s recurring lament: “If I only had Steinschneider here! Then he could work with me and my books would get edited.” And she added that Berlin was awash with idiots who loved the songs of Sophie Schröder-Devrient but had no ear for or interest in selihot

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(in Hebrew letters, penitential prayers for the holiday liturgy).19 From afar Zunz counseled, criticized, and encouraged Steinschneider in his research. One such undertaking was an annotated translation into German of Saadia’s philosophic opus of 933, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, obviously from the Hebrew translation by Yehuda ibn Tibbon and not the Arabic original, which would not be published until 1880. When a Leipzig publisher expressed an interest if Steinschneider would commit to buying fifty copies in addition to the fifty that he would get as complimentary copies, Steinschneider asked Zunz if the revived but anemic Cultur-Verein in Berlin could take twenty of them (for cash)? Zunz advised him to first submit his request directly to the board, after which Zunz would recommend the action. Though unproductive, the translation when coupled with his publications from the Prague period reflects the existential intensity of Steinschneider’s scholarly pursuits while teaching high-school girls full-time.20 Finally, after casting about futilely for other options, Steinschneider decided to return to Berlin. Prague proved to be for him no less inhospitable to critical Jewish scholarship than it had been for Zunz a decade earlier. The libraries were woefully inadequate and other practitioners too few in number. He was also on the cusp of overcoming the pull of family, as he told Adelheid in a cathartic letter of February 14, 1843: “I hope to go back home over Easter to expedite what I have to do. But what reasons can you pit against the love of parents and siblings who are not open to reasons? Is a sickly mother unfair if she wants to keep her son near her? And I must admit that the attachment to my family is the weakest part of my makeup [Herz], if one can say that. And yet I need to overcome it, if I’m not prepared to sacrifice my whole inner being [Leben]. You grasp now that under such circumstances, my head and heart are constantly being clobbered, positing an uncertain future as a small substitute for a painful present.”21 Moreover, Steinschneider was increasingly disinclined to take a pulpit. He would tutor until he could attain a pedagogic license and citizenship that would enable him to teach in a Jewish school. Above all, he confided in Zunz that it was his heart’s desire to work under his tutelage.22 A failure on occasion can be as instructive as a success. In the winter of 1842, the Jewish publisher Bär Löbel Monasch approached David Cassel with the bold idea of heading up an effort to produce an encyclopedia on Judaism for educated Jews (Real-Encyclopädie des Judentums). Monasch had opened his firm in Krotoschin, Posen, in 1833. In 1846 he would publish Heinrich Graetz’s doctoral dissertation Gnosticismus und Judentum and several years

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later his daughter Marie would become Graetz’s wife.23 Cassel was equally untested in 1842. In 1840 and 1841 he had published in Julius Fürst’s Orient a pioneering study of the superscriptions to the Psalms, for which in an expanded Latin version he earned a doctorate in 1842.24 The first installment of his German translation of and commentary on Yehuda Halevi’s Kusari also came out in 1841. Done with Heymann Jolowicz, the work was based on the Hebrew translation of Yehuda ibn Tibbon and not the Arabic original, which would eventually be published in 1887 though faultily. Cassel had recently moved to Wollstein, Posen, where Graetz had been born in 1817, and with his university education stood out as a notable intellectual. At first Cassel dismissed Monasch’s proposal as eminently worthy but far beyond his capability. When Monasch returned to him a year later, though, he relented, because he feared that the idea would be discredited if picked up by some unqualified and unscrupulous self-promoter.25 Cassel immediately turned to Steinschneider, his intimate friend from their days together in Berlin, to make it a joint venture with Cassel as editorin-chief and Steinschneider as editor of the sprawling subfield of Jewish literature. Two years younger than Steinschneider, Cassel hailed from Glogau along with his peers Sachs, Zedner, and Munk. Both men at the time were casting about for employment that would enable them to apply their formidable talents to advancing critical Jewish scholarship. Though their collaboration did not produce the encyclopedia envisioned, it did leave behind a cache of correspondence that attests the energy with which they tried and the roll call of a second generation of Wissenschaft scholars. Over the course of twentyeight months from March 12, 1843, to May 30, 1845, when both men would be reunited in Berlin, Cassel wrote a total of forty-five letters, often extensive, in which he recounted his numerous letters to potential contributors, his thoughts on the organization of material, and his opinion of other scholars. Cassel was acutely aware of his lack of scholarly heft, but neither he nor Steinschneider could persuade Zunz to assume the reins. He had had his fill of working for others with Brockhaus and was engrossed in his next book. But he did appreciate the value of a compact and well-informed summary of twenty-five years of Wissenschaft des Judentums and over time softened his initially adamant refusal with sage advice and even a willingness to edit some of the entries coming in.26 In truth, the cohort of older first-generation scholars kept their distance, in part not to be derailed from their own research, in part to protect their egos. Thus Cassel reported to Steinschneider about Jost’s comical vacillation: “He

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was indeed curious to hear the news of our encyclopedia, which he had seen in the papers. He is all for it, but cannot commit to participating till the celebrities [Coryphaeen] of our literature—Zunz, Rapoport, Geiger, Luzzatto— are listed as participants. Then he would willingly attach himself as ‘a tail to the lions’ [in Hebrew], despite being absorbed by a work on the Karaites that limits his time. Yet even then he would still have reservations about joining, for with his modest talents he might not be able to add much to the project. A real runaround [Schwanzerei, a play on the German word for ‘tail,’ Schwanz]!”27 Repeated overtures by Cassel eventually did yield minimal cooperation from Frankel, Geiger, Luzzatto, Rapoport, and Michael, but indisputably the bulk of the entries were to come from the likes of Sachs, Hirsch Baer Fassel, Gideon Brecher, Moritz Abraham Levy, Bernhard Beer, Selig Cassel (David’s brother), Lebrecht, Arnheim, Samuel Adler, Kirchheim, Jellinek, and Steinschneider. Steinschneider was particularly discouraged by the absence of the better-known first generation. Cassel assured him that they would come on board once they saw evidence of the project’s viability.28 What Cassel had in mind was the imminent publication of a volume of entries beginning with the letter A. Monasch was pressing to get it out in order to solicit prepublication subscribers, and much of the correspondence was in fact taken up with determining what names and topics merited an entry. In the end, the project died aborning. When Steinschneider settled in Berlin our paper trail runs out. Neither Monasch’s modest means nor Cassel’s superhuman efforts could offset the want of influential leadership, the inchoate state of the field, and the dispersion of its devotees. Nevertheless, aside from a glimpse of future practitioners, the project succeeded in conveying a maturing conceptualization of the field, even as its cultivators expressed their resentment at being outliers. The first word to the public came in 1843 in the form of a spare outline by Steinschneider of the definition, structure, and scope of the encyclopedia. It had been solicited by Cassel, who introduced it and commented on it along the way. Fürst published it in the pages of Der Orient, despite his open disdain for its lack of “critical and logical acuity” and “scholarly and philosophic substance [Takt],” because of the importance of the project. The intermingling of three voices underlined its undeniable complexity. Still, given its collaborative and embryonic nature, Cassel and Steinschneider welcomed the input of others.29 Steinschneider defined the domain of critical Jewish scholarship (Wissenschaft des Judentums) as comprising all knowledge pertaining to the past and present of the Jewish religion and the Jewish people. Conceptually, this

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historical sweep turned on the relationship between religion and peoplehood, with the former being the inner driving force of Judaism throughout, though after the loss of statehood expressing itself in the Middle Ages in national institutions like judicial autonomy. The methodology of the field was both historical and philosophical, which Cassel explained to mean that every concept or institution was to be reconstructed in terms of its origins, development, and influence and that no ritual phenomenon would be treated apart from its inherent idea.30 Steinschneider then proceeded to divide the gamut of Wissenschaft des Judentum into five subfields: religion, culture, literature, politics, and philology, with the study of Kabbalah included under religion in the subcategory of philosophy of religion or dogmatics. As for the demarcation between culture and literature, Steinschneider appeared to assign secular works deriving from the sciences, the arts, and the business world to the former and religious works of halakha, aggada, grammar, poetry, and even mathematics and medicine to the latter. It is at this juncture that Cassel weighed in with a critical caveat. The decisive criterion should be language. While Steinschneider restricted both subfields to works written in Hebrew and Aramaic, Cassel argued for expanding the notion of cultural history to include works written by Jews in languages other than Hebrew or Aramaic. Thus works in the vernacular wherever Jews lived belonged to their cultural and not literary history. Though the distinction did not eliminate all problems of classification, it did take the field well beyond Zunz’s 1818 redefinition of rabbinic literature to include nonreligious works only if written in Hebrew and Aramaic.31 The subfield of politics for Steinschneider was essentially the external history of the Jews. Like their cultural and literary history, it shared a universal dimension, since all three subfields interfaced with the general in which they unfolded.32 Even the subfield of philology was not narrowly conceived because as Zunz had implied in his discussion of Rashi’s glosses of Old French, Hebrew literature was a repository of linguistic fossils from all the languages in whose domains Jews had once lived.33 A year later at the founding conference of the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft) in Dresden, Steinschneider would expatiate on the subject in a sweeping tour de force.34 In contrast, his sketch of the encyclopedia in the Orient remained unfinished. Fürst’s inhospitable welcome had persuaded Cassel and Steinschneider to alter their tactics. A year later Cassel had Monasch publish a fi fty-five-page booklet written by him justifying and explicating the vision of the forthcoming

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Real-Encyclopädie des Judentums, primarily for their collaborators according to the title page. Though he incorporated what was left out of Steinschneider’s draft, his tone was charged with pain and resentment. In the academic world, he asserted, Jewish studies were as marginalized and ignored as were Jews in the body politic: “More than one can imagine, raw power still prevails in the realm of the mind to dictate discriminatory laws, to perpetuate prejudices and to subordinate the laws of the government to the arbitrary whims of hatred, deeply embedded opinion, habit and self-interest. A sad proof of how little in our day the mind has been freed of the body, the issue from the person and the object from the subject is provided by the recognition that Jewish scholarship enjoys among Christian scholars.”35 The time had come for the oppressed to tell their own story, which the critical scholarship of the past generation had boldly begun to do.36 Building on that foundation, the editors intended the encyclopedia as a vehicle of summation, collaboration, integration, and distillation to advocate for a presence for Judaism in the academic discourse. Only that which was relevant to understanding the Judaism of the present, its beliefs and value system, its history and literature, its customs and institutions, its languages and modes of communication would be included, hence the more circumscribed term Real-Encyclopädie denoting matter that was functional, factual, and utilitarian. The intended audience of the encyclopedia, however, was not only Christian academics and bureaucrats, but also Jews who while assimilating had absorbed the prejudices of their environment, and grown confused about their religion and ashamed of their coreligionists. For them, it was urgent to augment their knowledge base and self-respect: “Should we wait till the last ember of interest that a Jew might have for his history and literature goes out? Is it not the duty of everyone who still has a warm heart for his religion to apply his talents to preserving, elevating and advancing it? Unabashedly, we declare and every genuine Jew will surely concur, that Jews must deem it highly desirable that every aspect of Judaism be thoroughly and completely understood. The semidarkness that hovers over so much feeds bigotry rather than banishes it.”37 The operative assumption in regard to both audiences was that truth would prevail. The story simply had to get out. It required no special pleading or packaging. Put differently, in that embattled context, to tell the unvarnished truth was inherently apologetic. Unfortunately, the means were not commensurate with the need. Cassel spelled out poignantly the plight of those brave enough to pursue Jewish schol-

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arship. They work alone unaided by any prior research on their subject. Their primary sources, if known, are widely scattered, costing them more to visit Oxford or Parma than a pilgrimage to Jerusalem or Mecca for the faithful. They labor without expectation of recognition or remuneration and when they find employment, how little time does it afford for serious research? “Who would dare to indict and sentence, if one were frightened off by the mere thought of such labor and self-sacrifice, dropping out at the first detour? Or another who might stumble on the unpaved road taking down others with him? Or yet a third who might confuse the road with the goal or the end with the means, ‘chasing illusions because of poverty of mind’? Or a fourth who boasts of his wealth without warrant because in the dark, even a will-o’-the-wisp and wet wood can glow? Or a fifth who dares to enjoy the fruit that others sowed with the sweat of their brow and thus in the end ‘leaves the expert with nothing to say’?”38And yet Cassel persisted, driven by an intoxicating vision which represented a milestone in the coming of age of Wissenschaft des Judentums. The second half of his booklet essentially incorporated Steinschneider’s conceptualization enriched with a large dosage of detail.

* * * No decade of Zunz’s long life exhibits the intertwining of the three distinct strands of his public life more vividly than that of the 1840s. Without respite, he labored to advance the interests of German Jewry, the frontiers of critical Jewish scholarship, and the political liberty of German civil society itself. His post as director of Berlin’s Jewish Teachers’ Seminary gave him a semblance of financial security and professional status that enabled him to engage simulta neously on all three fronts. As the ferment of the decade intensified the pace of events, Zunz’s struggle to maintain his balance and integrity conveys a luminous image of the whole man. To preserve the coherence of that image, my narrative will unfold more or less chronologically rather than disentangle the strands of his buffeted career as did the three volumes of his collected writings. With the coronation of Frederick William IV as king of Prussia on October  18, 1840, the prospects for political reform quickened. To evince its patriotism, the board of the Berlin Gemeinde invited Zunz on September 26 to honor its commemoration with an appropriate address. Despite the short notice, Zunz informed the board immediately by letter, without clearing his

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calendar, of his acceptance, “for whenever the general welfare and progress are at stake, the honorable Jewish Community of Berlin will find my talents at its ser vice.”39 The coronation fell on the seventh day of Sukkot (Hoshana Raba) and was held in the sanctuary of the community’s synagogue. Mindful of the convergence, Zunz asserted unexpectedly his right to focus the weight of his elevated diction and direct address on the religious dimension of the moment, and not to enunciate pent-up Jewish grievances or demands of the new monarch to include Jews in the body politic as equal members. Other than an avowal of Jewish loyalty and an acknowledgment of the king’s divine right to rule, Zunz pursued a religious agenda. Our oath of allegiance must be accompanied by an intensification of our religious life. There is a pervasive tone of self-emancipation in Zunz’s charge. We must rebuild the fallen huts of David in order to imbue our children with a love of God and Judaism ere they leave us for worldly gain. The cultivation of our heritage, moreover, is not in conflict with the pious sentiments that stir our king, who seeks the well-being of all his subjects. So let us avail ourselves of his magnanimous spirit to be true to ourselves and earn the respect of our neighbors: “Thus do not offer our truthloving monarch a halfhearted and lukewarm expression of allegiance. Honor what is right and true, not the idols of our vanity and momentary benefit. If we are ashamed of our own faith, if we betray it for contemptible gain, then we are not being sincere either with God or our fatherland, but merely being unruly souls who give up their heirlooms for toys. Accordingly, my friends, let us show as much fear of heaven as of other human beings.”40 Zunz’s implicit message in this carefully honed address would soon become explicit. The acquisition of political freedom was not to be secured at the expense of religious freedom. As external political pressure mounted once again, Zunz stiffened his resolve not to barter and distanced himself from those who advocated it. The same month in which Frederick William IV ascended the throne, Berlin saw an exhibition celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Johann Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, which did not escape notice by Zunz. Among the many early printed works on display, there had not been a single Hebrew book. The omission triggered an angry outburst by Zunz in a short essay on the early history of Hebrew printing that appeared in 1844 in Geiger’s Zeitschrift. Its subject consisted of the evidence that Zunz had assembled on a family of printers in Prague (the Gersonides) who over five generations from 1513 to 1624 published an impressive list of Hebrew titles. The point of

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the study was to add an unknown chapter to the adoption of a revolutionary technology by Jews that served their cerebral religious culture. But Zunz used the story to append an introduction in which he unfurled how early that embrace actually took hold. From extant cata logues one could have readily identified the Italian towns that were the cradle of Hebrew printing and the substantial number of Hebrew incunabula and the more than one dozen localities where the first books printed were in Hebrew. Yet neither the imposing Berlin exhibition nor the learned author of a book on Gutenberg in the same year took any cognizance of that pioneering role. Sadly, German Jews were equally ignorant, witness the Berlin Jewish calendar of 5602 (1842), which dated the earliest Hebrew printed books to 1511!41 For Zunz, the absence of Jews from the Gutenberg anniversary was but another painful instance of the nonexistence of Jews in the global history of humanity. Deep-seated prejudice exiled the presence of Jews from scholarship no less than from society: “As victims of prejudice, Jews are shunned and matters Jewish misconstrued, so that one-tenth of the European intellectual world must protest in order to prove to the other nine-tenth for the tenth time that we don’t drink monks’ blood. The perception of Jews as an aberration in Damascus is equally operative in the anniversary celebration of printing. Malicious accusations are readily remembered, unlike notable contributions.”42 In this context, the ramification of Wissenschaft des Judentums could not be more far-reaching. Historical truth held the key for Jews to their rightful place in days of yore as in days to come. The brutal recrudescence of the blood libel in Damascus in the early months of 1840 confirmed for Zunz his staunchly held dark view of Jewish history. As news of the full scope of the travesty reached Europe, the board of the Berlin Jewish community turned again to him on May 22 with a plea that he respond to several egregious articles published by the influential Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung. Their unidentified, authoritative author lent credence to the accusation that Jews used Christian blood in their annual baking of matzot for Passover, and that the allegedly unexpurgated text of the Talmud still extant somewhere in the Orient might either contain injunctions specifically warranting ritual murder or misanthropic statements conducive to creating a climate in which such a crime could be committed. Zunz dropped whatever he was doing to write a hard-hitting rejoinder that was quickly published in the same venue. By June 4, he could note in his diary that the board had shortly remunerated him with an expression of gratitude totaling just under 28 talers.43

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Zunz’s opening gambit captured the shock of European Jewry at the exhuming of a canard long buried, which threatened to undo sixty years of progress: One accusation after another fell silent as ghosts fled light and hatred [was banished by] justice. The fields of theology, philosophy, morality, economics and aesthetics no longer conjured up reasons to harm Jews. As equality progressed and norms of ethics and wise governance gained ever more acceptance and the spirit of reconciliation flourished, the history of Jews shone forth, as an arc of freedom on the scholarly horizon, if only through tears of longendured pain. Important men and deep thinkers acknowledged the injustice done to Jews for so long. Pious associations owned up publicly to the spirit of intolerance, persecution, and hatred that had kept Israel oppressed for so long.44 It is at this hopeful juncture that the atmosphere of the West was suddenly poisoned from the East. But what emanated from there was ultimately of Christian provenance. And with a few choice examples, Zunz showed the antiquity and ubiquity of the blood libel in medieval Europe. In truth, “works of darkness thrive only among benighted nations.”45 Furthermore, Zunz exclaimed, for six hundred years now religious and secular leaders had denounced the blood libel as fraudulent and protected its intended victims. Nor did Zunz concede that the Talmud might be to blame. He was particularly irate at the concealed authority who admitted that he couldn’t find in the Talmud the culpable passages sent him from Damascus, but since they definitely accord with many other pronouncements therein, they could well be there.46 With equal vigor, Zunz contended that those opinions and ordinances in the Talmud directed at non-Jews reflected times fraught with danger, were unrelated to Christians, and had long been set aside by later rabbinic authorities.47 For all its historical and halakhic ammunition, Zunz’s defense was suffused with a weary undertone. He had covered much the same ground against Chiarini. The prospect of the Talmud returning to center stage in the unfinished debate over emancipation surely fi lled him with apprehension. As before, he refrained from even a single disparaging comment about the Talmud. Personal feelings were not allowed to becloud an objective exposition of the subject. Zunz astutely sent James de Rothschild, Mayer Amschel’s youngest

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son and founder of the Paris branch of the family bank, who was close to the French monarchy, a copy of his Damascus essay on June 3, 1840, asking him to bring it to the government’s attention and have it printed in the press. In addition to helping the victims, Zunz sought to make the public more aware of the trend toward critical scholarship among Jews, “for sadly here again [in Damascus] is an example of how poisonous prejudice flourishes solely on the soil of ignorance.”48 As already noted in my Introduction, the death of Nachman Krochmal on July 31, 1840, in Tarnopol complicated Zunz’s life with yet another task of public service. On his deathbed in the arms of his daughter and caregiver, Krochmal had asked that his unfinished Hebrew manuscript, the culmination of lifelong research and deep thought, be edited by Zunz. The author’s title of Moreh Nevukhei ha-Zeman (The Guide for the Perplexed of Our Time) not only alluded to Maimonides’s Moreh Nevukhim (The Guide of the Perplexed) but also subtly suggested the critical role of time in the nature of historical thinking. Though Krochmal never left eastern Galicia nor ever set foot in a gymnasium or university and took up the study of German only at age eighteen, he was determined to rid Judaism of unhistorical thinking. Zunz and Krochmal never met or corresponded and knew of each other only through their few published works and perhaps mutual colleagues like Rapoport, yet Zunz acutely sensed the profundity of the man and his value for the legitimation of Wissenschaft des Judentums in eastern Europe. Conversely, Krochmal’s deathbed wish was a tribute to Zunz’s worldwide renown.49 The go-between was Nathan Horwitz, a robust and respected physician married to Krochmal’s oldest child, Konegunde. Touched by the nature of the request “to snatch from oblivion the fruits of 30 years of pious, honest and penetrating research,”50 Zunz agreed to edit the manuscript, which arrived in Berlin in February 1841, but not to take responsibility for its publication. In April 1842 the two Horwitzes visited Berlin and cherished the hours spent in the Zunz household. A year later in a letter to Zunz, Horwitz related that whenever events darkened the horizon for him and his wife, they lifted the pall by recalling the warmth, wit, and wisdom of their conversations with the Zunzes “that made an excursion to Charlottenburg unnecessary.”51 In his diary Zunz noted that Horwitz also dispensed to him medications.52 The work progressed unevenly, in part because of the difficulty of the task and in part because of other responsibilities. At times Zunz would come to envy Krochmal’s remoteness from the field of battle, as he admitted to Horwitz in July 1843: “Busy on many literary fronts, holding down an official post

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and absorbed by the events and battles of the day, I envy on occasion those peaceful souls living modestly in their withdrawn circumstances, who have the good fortune to be forgotten by the world, oblivious to the turmoil in their midst and the pain all around them.”53 In 1845 Zunz took the time to pen and publish a deeply felt and tender portrait of Krochmal for German-speaking Jews. He admired the quality of his mind, the nobility of his character, and the willpower it took to overcome the obstacles and dangers in the path of a gifted autodidact living in a deeply traditional setting. Neither infirmity nor tragedy could dim his ardor to transgress the borders of compartmentalized scholarship. Beset by hostile forces, Krochmal sought refuge in solitude where he could study in silence and teach in safety. His written legacy deserved to be salvaged for future generations.54 By July 1846 Zunz had finished the editing of Krochmal’s manuscript, helped by the timely arrival of Steinschneider back from Prague in early 1845, whom he thanked in his introduction for tracking down the innumerable sources cited by Krochmal and copying segments of the manuscript in need of attention. No other name merited mention; linking the names of Krochmal, Zunz, and Steinschneider spanned, encapsulated and symbolized the past, present and future of Wissenschaft des Judentums at midcentury.55 The news moved Horwitz to celebrate the milestone with literary flair: “Surely, my esteemed Sir, in addition to all the immortal ser vices you have performed for the literature, science and history of Judaism, posterity will also gratefully acknowledge your enormous effort to gather the fragmentary but sincere studies of our father, meant to elevate our people, and to fashion them into an object of finished beauty. Without doubt, someday when all high minded souls will bring into the dark beyond (i.e., Galicia) a transfigured consciousness, those who remember Krochmal will bless you from above, you extraordinary man, for having fulfilled his last earthly wish with such noble self-sacrifice.”56 But alas, it would be another five years before Krochmal’s work would see the light of day. The manuscript reached Horwitz in March 1847 just as revolutions erupted across Europe. Zunz would not hear from him again until October 27, 1849, when Horwitz bemoaned the delay: “The storms and stress of the recent fateful period, that crushed with such animosity any appreciation of art and science, were responsible that copying [the edited manuscript] and negotiating with publishers dragged on forever.”57 Yet another two years were to pass before Abraham Krochmal, Nachman’s son, would beseech Zunz to urgently supply him with a title page and introduction. Regrettably, the printed book ended up swarming with errors and

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misprints because Abraham had absented himself from Lemberg during the protracted time it was typeset. The Hebrew date that Zunz attached to his introduction, nevertheless, resonated with commemoration: the 15th of the Hebrew month of Av in the Second Temple period was a joyous day of collective ritual courtship and in 1794, the Hebrew date of Zunz’s birth. He also signed the introduction with his Hebrew name, Yom Tov Lippman Zunz, signaling his connection to that long-forgotten festival and his unwavering loyalty to his patrimony. For his herculean effort, Zunz, who could ill afford to work without pay, asked only that Steinschneider be remunerated.58 The year 1840 also saw Zunz play an active role in the formation of a Cultur-Verein in Berlin. At a public meeting on June 10, an organizing committee of ten unveiled its statutes in between opening and closing remarks by Zunz and Sigismund Stern, the headmaster of a Jewish boys’ school, who would soon gain notoriety for eight rousing public lectures on “The Task of Judaism and Jews at the Present Time.” The author of the article in the press singled out for special mention the eloquence and incisiveness of Zunz for the cause. At the meeting’s end, those in attendance were asked to join the endeavor, a commitment that entailed an admission fee of a taler and a third and annual dues of five talers.59 On November 27, 1840, the committee submitted the resulting membership list to the presidium of the royal police, asking it to underline the names of those fifteen individuals it would like to see constitute the society’s governing board. Three weeks later the committee turned in a board list of fifteen members that included besides Zunz an impressive cadre of intellectuals, businesspeople, and leaders of the Berlin Jewish community.60 By January 2, 1841 the Verein’s board elected Zunz to be its director.61 The society was not a reiteration of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, despite the involvement of Zunz, Julius Rubo, and Joseph Lehmann in both. Its sole purpose was to support fi nancially projects and people that would promote art and culture among Jews. Thus Cassel could inform Steinschneider on June 6, 1843, that he had just received a stipend of 50 talers along with a complimentary letter from the society for the first published installment of his edition of the Kusari, which he had submitted for consideration.62 Similarly, the society provided a subvention for the publication by Salomo Gottlieb Stern in 1844 of the important Hebrew dictionary of Solomon Ibn Parchon finished in Salerno, Italy, in 1160. Among the tribute letters printed by Stern at the beginning of his edition was one from Wilhelm Gesenius, Germany’s premier academic scholar of biblical Hebrew, dated 1841,

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in which he praised Stern for his project but pleaded with him to publish his manuscript in square Hebrew letters or else Christian scholars unable to read the cursive letters known as Rashi script would find it inaccessible. And indeed Parchon’s text was printed in square letters, though not Rapoport’s introductory essay on the study of Hebrew grammar. In gratitude, Stern dedicated his volume to both the society and Zunz.63 At Zunz’s instigation, the society announced in July 1841 a prize of 200 talers for a quality essay on the topic of “what was, what is and what should the rabbi be?” The hefty sum matched the valence the society attributed to the subject.64 During their four-year separation, Steinschneider had written his fiancée, Auguste, back in Prague that he would not consider marriage until he had secured for himself an annual income of 200 talers.65 With no takers, Zunz in the name of the society in 1843 announced a related topic of lesser scope but greater depth, again for 200 talers. This time the topic called for a study of the rabbinate since 1782 with attention to its evolution in the largest Jewish communities and the most important German states. Also it was to examine how and where rabbis were currently trained. In addition to a historical introduction on the rabbinate prior to 1782, the essay was to include suggestions as to its future direction. The second subject fared no better than the first.66 In truth, Zunz himself was probably the only scholar in Germany who could have done justice to either topic. Although he was soon to take his leave of the society, it momentarily gave him a screen on which to project for all to see what weighed heavily on his mind. The nature of the rabbinate seethed with actuality. In 1841 Zacharias Frankel was ready to consider leaving Dresden for Berlin, if the community’s board could meet his terms. In a period of mounting internal expectation and strain, the board decided to fill its top rabbinic post, which it had left vacant since 1826. Frankel held an expansive, proactive, and hierarchical view of the rabbi as the engine of the community’s religious life and advocate of its political emancipation. To be chief rabbi of Berlin, Frankel demanded a lifetime appointment, authority over all religious matters such as marriage, supervision of all the community’s educational institutions including its teachers’ seminary, a salary of 2,500 talers plus a free parsonage, and an official invitation from the government.67 The implicit hubris offended Zunz. Until then their contacts had been friendly and frequent, facilitated in part by Bernhard Beer, who lived in Dresden and was close to both men. Like other budding scholars, Frankel turned to Zunz for counsel and encouragement.68 When his Vorstudien zu der Sep-

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tuaginta, his preliminary effort to uncover traces of rabbinic law and exegesis buried in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scripture, came off the press in 1841, Frankel sent a copy to Zunz, who responded approvingly: “You surprised and pleased me with your Vorstudien. If rabbis continue to move forward in this direction, their title will soon gain the welcome respect of their coreligionists, which the rabble, both Jewish and Christian, could never have dreamed of.”69 Still, the inflated salary in comparison to his own and the prospect of having to report to a chief rabbi rankled Zunz. Though there was little he could do about a salary adjustment (in March 1843 the seminary had but fourteen students),70 Zunz adamantly refused to tolerate the demotion in status.71 In the summer of 1843 while passing through Berlin, Frankel visited Zunz three times, only to be told point-blank that he would never consent to rabbinic authority as long as he was director of the seminary.72 When Prussia’s minister of religion turned down Frankel’s direct appeal on May 10, 1843, for an official government appointment, Frankel informed the board that October that he would stay in Dresden.73 Beyond the clash of strong wills and hurt feelings, a matter of principle was at play in this contest. On October 5, 1843, Frankel informed Abraham Muhr, the banker and religious conservative courting him in the name of the board, that he needed that government sanction to off set the strength of reform-minded men on the board led by Veit: “If Veit, as your letters suggest, sets the tone, then despite the respect his character deserves, one cannot say that his conception of Judaism resembles its traditional and congenial piety. Veit does not know Judaism, has never made himself at home in it, was never raised in it nor taken his stand within it. One can’t say he is estranged from it; he never befriended it. At most he is a political Jew forged by his post as board chairman.”74 Veit’s deep relationship to Sachs countered Frankel’s characterization. Indeed, it was Veit who engineered Sachs’s coming to Berln in early 1844 as its Prediger and associate rabbi. At this juncture, Veit shared Frankel’s attachment to tradition. The gulf between them emanated from Veit’s rejection of concentrating religious authority in the hands of the rabbi, a view adumbrated in the rank reduction offered Sachs. In a letter to Sachs dated August 25, 1842, just a few days before the search committee voted officially to invite Frankel as chief rabbi of Berlin, Veit enunciated his view on how the rabbinate ought to be structured: “The future rabbinate of Berlin, even with my beloved friend Sachs as a possible member, must forgo any desire for clerical despotism. Our prescriptive mantra is free development, a decidedly presbyterial constitution

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for the synagogue, the bishop with the presbyters together representing the religious will and religious need of the community. Toward that end, I believe, all churches must strive. We must not allow ourselves to get lost, to limp after Baal and create an Episcopal structure that can only lead us to regrettable conflicts.”75 And that was Zunz’s view as well: a level playing field of checks and balances in which the rabbinic role was largely consultative. In 1843 Zunz published separately his Kurze Antworten auf Kultus Fragen (Brief Answers Regarding the Synagogue). The questions had been asked of the board of the Posen Jewish community by the Prussian government, which in turn solicited Zunz’s input.76 While Frankel had long contended that the rabbi was the dominant religious personality in the Jewish community, its lifeblood and unifying force, embodying the loftiest principles of Jewish ethics, Zunz depicted a clerical functionary of limited sacerdotal duties and religious authority, serving at the pleasure of the community. Zunz implied that the rabbinate was an institution in flux, witness the two prize essay topics of the Cultur-Verein that found no takers.77 His minimal tasks, according to Zunz, encompassed presiding at rites of passage, rendering opinions in halakhic matters when asked, and preaching. The rabbi did not dispense religious education to either the young or old in Zunz’s profile, though every community absolutely needed a religious educator, nor was he indispensable for the conduct of religious services. In contrast to the past, the contemporary rabbi was more theologian than Talmudist, whose authority derived solely from the trust of his flock: “Since the community hired him, everything rests on its confidence in his morality, piety and scholarship. Yet he always remains the articulate teacher of the law and the chosen leader, though neither priest nor cleric [Geistlicher]. He does not constitute a separate estate and is [not inducted through] an investiture ceremony. As with all religious personnel [Kultusbeamten], employment and dismissal are contractual matters, although rabbis and preachers seek to be regarded as lifetime appointments.”78 What lay behind this inquiry and so much else going on at the time was the renewed interest of the Prussian government in taking up once again after twenty years of malevolent neglect the final status to be accorded Jews and Judaism in Prussian civil society. The Restoration had blunted if not reversed the promise of 1812, leaving educated Jews with few career choices, the organized community in legal disarray, and the state divided into eighteen jurisdictions governed by distinctly different sets of laws applicable to Jews.79 The suppression of all internal religious reform by the government compounded

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the incompleteness of the emancipation process. Moreover, the anticipation with which Prussian Jewry greeted the accession of Frederick William IV quickly turned to angst when in December 1841 he issued a cabinet order announcing his intention to abandon the goal of integration. A romantic admirer of Germany’s Christian Middle Ages, the king intended to strip Jews of their Prussian citizenship, release them from military ser vice, and relegate them to a separate self-governing political corporation. This wrenching reversal of fortune unleashed an unprecedented groundswell of protest. By early 1842 Ludwig Philippson had secured the signature of more than eighty Jewish communities on a petition declaring that ending the obligation of Jews to serve in the military would also end their emancipation. Breslau and Berlin submitted their own as did thirty-eight communities from the Duchy of Westphalia, twenty-six from Upper Silesia, and many others from the Rhineland. Shaken by the unrest among his more than two hundred thousand Jewish subjects, the king changed course in April 1842, dropping the plan to free Jews from army ser vice and setting in motion a broad government initiative to draft a single, uniform piece of legislation that would culminate in the deeply conflicted Judengesetz (Jewry law) of 1847. Though momentarily relieved by the shift, Prussian Jewry remained apprehensive for good reason: the medieval ideal of a Christian state still prevailed.80 The Prussian government proceeded cautiously in drafting its comprehensive Jewry law, in part because for the first time the bureaucracy would formulate the rules governing the internal organization of the Jewish community at the local and national levels omitted in 1812. Accordingly, it sought pertinent information and suggestions from all provincial governments and many Jewish spokesmen. In the process, the influence of Berlin was formative. Zunz had sent his Kurze Antworten in 1843 to both the Ministries of Religion and Interior.81 Rubo had likewise published in 1844 his response to the eleven questions submitted by the provincial government of Brandenburg to Berlin.82 Given his prominence, Veit also met intermittently with government officials and in 1843 saw fit to publish the first volume of Wilhelm Freund’s new journal Zur Judenfrage in Deutschland, which the Breslau philologist and Geiger ally intended as the mouthpiece of a Jewish lobby for political emancipation and religious reform.83 When the government finally came to drafting its legislation in 1845, two officials from the Ministry of Religion and Education met twice on February 27 and April 8 with a delegation composed of Muhr, Rubo, and Zunz.84 Among other things the trio’s subsequent lengthy memorandum of June 9

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stressed that the teacher was the only official indispensable to the religious life of every Jewish community. To upgrade the profession, they asked that teachers’ seminaries be opened in different regions of the country to whose maintenance the government would contribute. As for the rabbi, he was depicted as a dispenser of religious counsel, whose opinions were not obligatory, a derogation designed to protect the membership’s freedom of conscience. In case of religious conflict at the local level, a national commission in which the clergy (rabbis, teachers, and preachers) made up no more than one-third of the composition was to resolve the matter.85 In a supplementary memo on July 7, they specifically requested that the title rabbi be omitted entirely from the legislation, because it had become utterly fungible and subject to misuse.86 The delegation, in short, clearly hewed to the substance of Zunz’s Kurze Antworten and there is little doubt that his spirit pervaded the two memoranda submitted to the government in the wake of its meetings. The overt objective was to accommodate the phenomenon of religious diversity, while preserving a viable form of communal unity. By demanding the restriction of rabbinic authority, Zunz and his colleagues successfully lobbied for the eventual transformation of the local Gemeinde into a political body able to reconcile antagonistic religious groups through a policy of parity dictated by neutrality. If indeed the foundation of the twentieth-century Einheitsgemeinde (united community) with its separation of secular and religious functions was laid down in 1847, then Zunz must be regarded as its far-sighted founder.87 But Zunz’s involvement with the Judengesetz did not end with the consultations of 1845. The draft that emerged from the bureaucracy to be presented to the two chambers of Prussia’s first United Diet of provincial representatives in June 1847 dripped with suspicion of the Jews’ otherness and abounded with exclusionary provisions. Appalled by the retrogressive outcome, Zunz unburdened himself in two remarkable epistles to two different delegates prior to its convening. Though set apart in the tack taken in each, both explode in an eff usion of controlled anger expressed in cutting argumentation and searing language. Zunz was unable to stand by idly as the prospect of emancipation dimmed. In his letter to Hermann von Beckerath of the lower chamber (die Kurie der drei Stände) dated April 23, 1847, Zunz cast his argument in legal terms. The law, he contended, is always an expression of the general will of a group (eine Gesammtheit) and lawgivers its voice, with the law binding only the members of its group. True, Jews are legally part of Prussian civil society, but since they have no political rights and are excluded from the ranks of the bureau-

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cracy, the draft of the Jewry law is little more than one sector of the group imposing its will on another with a dictate that requires no justification. And its approval is now being sought from a body without Jews that knows nothing of Judaism or Jew-hatred. Whereas the law of 1812 moved in the direction of equality and meritocracy, the present proposal throws us back into the isolation of the Middle Ages. We would be Prussian citizens in name only, saddled with countless proscriptions and barriers that will turn us into a commercial caste. Jews with a higher education would be left only the choice to emigrate or convert. In short, the present legal chaos regarding Jews is preferable to the projected nightmare of a new ghetto. Three weeks later on May 12, Zunz sent an equally hard-hitting letter to Prince Felix von Lichnowsky of the upper chamber (die Herren-Kurie), which made its case in a historical vein. The draft, Zunz argued, elevates a thousandyear injustice to a legal principle: in a Christian state no Jew can be allowed to occupy an office in which he exercises authority over Christians, leaving Jews as unfree and inferior helots and pariahs. How dare Christianity insinuate that Judaism is a primitive religion when it has to its discredit a long history of hounding heretics, the Bartholomew Day’s massacre, and the mistreatment of native Americans? The draft implies that Jews are still not ready to be fully emancipated by willfully ignoring their progressive assimilation over the last thirty years. The tyranny of an ignorant majority presumes to brand Prussian Jewry with the mark of Cain. But Zunz is confident that public opinion, law, the freedom of the state, humanity, and ethics are all on the side of the Jews and hopes that every member of the Diet will feel it his obligation to uplift the oppressed.88 In the end, Beckerath came out in favor of emancipating the Jews, while Lichnowsky spoke vehemently and often against it.89 It mattered little, for the liberal Prussian constitution of December 5, 1848, extracted from the king by the revolution severed civil rights from religious persuasion, ending the long political nonage of Prussian Jewry. What deserves to be remembered was Zunz’s selfless role in defending the political interests of his coreligionists in a moment of crisis. In his combination of erudition, eloquence, courage, commitment, and political savvy he had no peers.

* * * Amid the uncertainty, apprehensiveness, and ferment coursing through Prussian Jewry in the 1840s, Zunz authored a series of occasional essays to stiffen

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its resolve not to betray its religious heirlooms for political gain. In a variety of voices, he invoked reverence for the past to counter the pressure and temptation of the present. Five of the six he published for maximum effect in the venue of a Jewish yearbook popular for its annual ritual calendar.90 Without these essays, the nuanced complexity of Zunz’s stance on religious reform would remain elusive. In volume 2 of Isidor Busch’s Kalender und Jahrbuch für Israeliten (1843), Zunz unexpectedly came out in defense of the week day ritual of donning tefillin (phylacteries) during morning prayer. Ritual has the power, he suggested, of inducing ethical behavior. The straps on the left arm are to restrain the right from inflicting harm, while those on the head are to inhibit the feet from taking off after sin. Ritual is a civilizing force that signals to our fellow humans that we represent a source of sympathy and comfort if not help. It is also a vehicle for preventing the dilution of memory. Again, Zunz employed direct address to make his rebuke and lament still sharper: The royal language which spoke to the Prophets lies in the dust, incomprehensible to the children who imbibed it as infants. And these children stomp on their cradle and mock their old mother. For this reason alone, it would be lovely if we still valued our customs, if we exerted ourselves to open our hearts to our sacred teaching and our sacred tongue. Above all, we must not glorify ourselves instead of God as we degrade our divine jewelry to trinkets. With such things we’ll never grab our youngsters. With ostentation we will never touch a soul or fill a temple. Can those who hunger be satisfied by shadows or those who thirst by vapors? Discard your foolish fashions and hold on to your ancient banner.91 If Zunz’s brief essay on tefillin was a cri de coeur, his essay on circumcision, published as a pamphlet of sixteen pages in Frankfurt in 1844, was a carefully reasoned responsum in which the dominant medium was history rather than halakha. Unlike the former, it had been solicited by none other than Amschel Mayer Rothschild, the oldest of the five Rothschild brothers and the head of the family bank in Frankfurt. A staunch defender of Orthodoxy, Rothschild was appalled by the radical campaign of a local cluster of young Reformers to deny the halakhic authority of the Bible and Talmud in general and the obligatory nature of circumcision in particular. In consternation, he turned to Zunz through the mediation of Samuel Bleichröder, his banking

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minion in Berlin, for help. Specifically, Rothschild wrote to Bleichröder on March 4, 1844, that the Reform assault on circumcision had prompted Solomon Trier, the city’s elderly Orthodox rabbi, to solicit responsa from rabbinic authorities on its current halakhic status. With none forthcoming from Berlin, the Reformers claimed “that in Berlin since the days of Mendelssohn, that is for more than a hundred years, it has been customary to permit the Israelites living there to decide if they wished to circumcise their boys or not. Hence this religious ceremony has been handled as an option without the local rabbinate or other religious official ever intervening.”92 It was to quash this contention unequivocally that Rothschild appealed to Zunz to fill the void.93 Zunz received that request from Bleichröder on March 17 and by April 2 he had sent the desired responsum to Rothschild with an accompanying letter. As in other instances when Jewish interests were at stake, Zunz complied with dispatch and devotion. This time he divided his analysis into three parts. First to contextualize circumcision within the corpus of Jewish law, Zunz surveyed the history of its taxonomy. As long as Israel lived in its own land, its legal system was not given to reflection or classification. All laws were prized equally and individually. It’s only in exile where Jews became aware of their otherness that their laws were subject to scrutiny, explication, and reordering. From Philo to Mendelssohn, Zunz succinctly discoursed on the permutations of halakhic classification. The point of the survey was to show the desiccation of the concept of ceremonial law from Simeon Duran in 1423, who first formulated the category to encompass all revealed legislation, to a contemporary textbook used to teach Judaism in the schools, in which the laws in this category were now listed as an appendix that dealt mainly with the externals of the worship ser vice, with the commandment of circumcision entirely omitted. The term “ceremony” suggests no more today than rituals that are bereft of meaning, superfluous, and burdensome.94 But circumcision is not a mere ceremonial rite. It is a religious institution with the same order of sanctity as the Sabbath, and the function of the second section was to flesh out that argument. Circumcision spans the fourthousand-year history of the Jewish people, running through Scripture, tradition, and history as a leitmotif. For Maimonides it was a twofold emblem of God’s love for Israel and of the love Jews have for one another, and it is for that reason that he located it in his code of Jewish law in the Book of Love, which also included the commandments pertaining to belief in one God, prayer, and tefillin. For the poets of the synagogue, circumcision became an emblem of fate, the blood of the infant foreshadowing the blood of the

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martyrs in days of darkness. In form and content, all of Judaism’s ceremonial laws were a product of history, embedded in Scripture by the exegesis of the Talmud: “But our youth are taught that the Talmud is neither sacred literature nor a law book nor a creation of the people nor an instrument of education.” What elevates circumcision to an institution is that at its core it is not the ceremony but the status of being circumcised on the eighth day that matters. To discard it saddles the individual with a perpetual transgression that repudiates the unity and continuity of the Jewish people: “A son left uncircumcised on principle will hardly remain loyal to Judaism on principle. An abolition of circumcision that is bound up with a repudiation of the Talmud and the Messiah [also planks of the Reformverein’s declaration], that is with our past and future, cuts the life of Judaism in half. In no way can suicide be a Reform.”95 In the third section Zunz then took up what ought to be the policy of the Jewish community toward those who refuse to circumcise their sons, a dilemma that Mendelssohn in his day could not have imagined.96 On the one hand, they no longer qualify as members, for to admit them would signal that Judaism stands for nothing. The radical Reformers, having stripped Judaism of all positive law, concrete praxis, and historical consciousness, actually advocate a non-Judaism. And yet, Zunz like Mendelssohn, condemned any formal act of exclusion. Excommunication was for him no less of an anathema: “We who have felt so often and painfully religious persecution can scarcely punish those who have left us with arbitrary means. Or [put differently], in an era in which light is marshaled against darkness we cannot allow our actions to give rise to ecclesiastical punishments or courts of heresy.”97 Zunz encapsulated his underlying conviction in his peroration. One never ought to surrender spiritual heirlooms for material goods nor a single religious practice for equality. Emancipation is not our ultimate goal in life and its inevitable achievement does not depend on us alone. In the meantime, if we cherish our heritage and history, the vestiges of discrimination will leave us unaffected. Strikingly, Zunz invoked a few lines from the end of Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, without identifying their source, to sanction his own stance: “Be steadfast in upholding the religion of your ancestors. . . . Stand fast in the place which Providence has assigned to you, and submit to whatever may happen to you.”98 Rothschild’s urgent request of Zunz enabled Zunz to address him with disarming candor in his accompanying letter of April 2. His request had both gladdened and saddened Zunz: gladdened because Rothschild’s confidence in him was in such marked contrast to the indifference that wealthy Jews usu-

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ally displayed toward critical Jewish scholarship. Their lack of support matched that of German governments. But the request also brought home to Zunz the painful gap between his high intellectual stature and low social status: “On the one hand, a life fully devoted to Jews, Judaism and scholarship with sundry, honorable invitations. On the other, a job in a rich community which I have served for 20 years that [pays me] with free housing and 500 talers a year. Where should the time come from, taken up with teaching, for responsa and who supports the people to whom Judaism appeals in crisis?” Having unburdened himself, Zunz turned to what he had written: “I have tried hard to clarify the issue, to establish firmly the sanctity of circumcision and to illuminate the right of the Jewish community vis-à-vis the sectarians. If my work falls not short of your expectations, it would please me to have it published in an unaltered, correct format. I hope that I have contributed something to the honor of our religion, of our antiquity and to peace in our community. At the very least, what I have written is the expression of what I believe.”99 At first glance, Zunz’s words and actions in the mid-1840s seem roundly inconsistent. To downgrade the authority of the communal rabbinate while defending the validity of tefillin and circumcision defied reconciliation. And Philipp Ehrenberg must have written him of his bewilderment, for in a letter on January 16, 1844, to him, Zunz took the trouble to explain himself. The intent of his outburst on tefillin was to silence the scoffers, not to revive donning tefillin. Zunz conceded that he could not achieve that nor was he sure he wanted to. But he could no longer stand the denigrations of Judaism’s cynics: “It is always better to bind oneself with tefillin than to heretics.” In the same letter Zunz accounted for his absence from the pages of Freund’s Zur Judenfrage. During the past summer while Zunz had visited the Ehrenbergs in Wolfenbüttel, as he and Adelheid often did, Veit broke with Freund and pulled out whatever Zunz had submitted to the journal, “thus sparing me the dubious honor of appearing in print alongside Freund. Since then Freund had become the enemy of Veit, Sachs and others and seems determined to wreak havoc here for his own good.” Overall, Zunz admonished Philipp that our fate is to fight as long as we live against the stupidity that comes either from within or without.100 Moreover, it was that break which explains why Veit’s company published only the first volume of Freund’s Zur Judenfrage, whose subtitle limited its purview to matters related to legal rights and freedom of conscience. By volume 2, now published in Breslau, and bearing a new subtitle, Freund had enlarged his journal’s scope to cover the political, religious, and social conditions of all

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Israelites in Germany.101 In truth, though, from the outset Zur Judenfrage identified itself with the growing chorus in Berlin and elsewhere for radical religious reform.102 Thus in volume 1, Sigismund Stern, at the helm of the boys’ school formerly run by Jost, published a long essay calling on the Prussian government to incorporate Judaism within the framework of the state as an established religion alongside the Evangelical and Catholic Churches. Historically in a Hegelian vein, this would be the third and culminating stage of Judaism’s millennial journey. In its first on its own land, religion and state were identical. In its long exilic period the two diverged as the Talmud divorced Judaism from the torrent of history. In its third and final stage, the era of emancipation, the mandate was to reintegrate the two by incorporating Judaism into the matrix of the state as an established religion. With the state embodying the general will of society, all established religions are obliged to abide by its laws without betraying their essence and unity. For Judaism too, the forms are susceptible to change, a right justified by the Talmud’s own revamping of biblical religion. In return for its subservience, Jews would gain full equality, state-sponsored religious reform, and the formation of communal structures at the local and national levels. In essence, the collaboration with the state facilitated a return to history.103 As Stern and his allies gained control of the affairs of the Cultur-Verein, Zunz refused a seat on the board. It’s not exactly clear when he had ceased functioning as its director. No longer in accord with the direction of the society, Zunz asked by letter on April 26, 1844, that “you allow me to apply my resources for what is best for the Jews and Judaism in my own way.”104 Similarly, when Stern went public in January 1845 to great fanfare with a series of eight lectures on “The Task of Judaism and the Jews at the Present Time,” Zunz informed Philipp that despite his fluent language and noble sentiment, Stern filled him with anxiety.105 Soon thereafter he told Philipp that he had stopped attending: “The lectures of Dr. Stern have already been subjected to harsh criticism here by both newspapers. After the second lecture in which Judaism was portrayed as the Ganaw [a robber] of Christianity, I did not return.”106 With Steinschneider, Adelheid shared the quip that it won’t be long before we’ll see whether this star (Stern) will appear on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).107 The founding of the Association for Reform Judaism in Berlin in the wake of Stern’s lectures elicited a still more caustic barb from Zunz, when he reported the event to Samuel Ehrenberg: “Nine days after the imminent eclipse of the sun [Sonnenfinsternis, taken as a double entendre] there will take place

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here a meeting of the Reformers of Judaism. They intend to discard the messiah [mashiah] and the dietary laws for emancipation. At their helm stand two fools and two ignoramuses. Should they get two apostates [meshumadim], they will have half the number of the apostles and maybe the same luck.”108 As for its eventual religious leader, Samuel Holdheim, Zunz had already contemptuously dismissed his insidious distinction between the political and religious dimensions of Judaism. In his essay on circumcision, he had rejected Holdheim’s reading of history. The destruction of the temple did not end the political component of Judaism nor did history dictate a return to Mosaism: “Before the goddess of history, whom these Reformers set over the God of Abraham, the symbols of Judaism will not long find much grace.”109 Zunz also adamantly refused Geiger’s invitation to attend the third of the rabbinical conferences that he was hosting in Breslau in June 1846 and that was to attract twenty-six rabbis: “I go only where I have been sent.”110 To Beer, he elaborated, “to theological conferences which no one convened or asked for and nobody pays attention to, I certainly don’t travel.”111 Indeed Zunz’s reservations ran deeper as he declared to Philipp: “Everything that bears the stamp of the rabbinical conferences or the Reform Association appears to me either a covert or overt form of Christianity.”112 Above all, Zunz loathed the assertion and restoration of rabbinic authority.113 In sum, then, Zunz’s posture on Reform called for separating it from the strug gle for emancipation. He inveighed against any politically motivated religious reform or anything that smacked of a quid pro quo or even selfcriticism to curry favor with those in power. His goal was a level playing field on which religious change would not be imposed from above by government or rabbinic authority. In the absence of coercion, reform could evolve organically in sync with reverence for the past and the needs of the present. Whereas Mendelssohn had secured continuity by anchoring it in revelation, Zunz embedded it in history. The present would not be allowed to stampede the past for either man.114 Inevitably, Zunz’s two essays on tefillin and circumcision precipitated a break with Geiger. The contact between the two men had grown infrequent when on March 19, 1845, Geiger broke the silence with an eloquent, forthright, and penetrating expression of his astonished disagreement. A robust correspondent, Geiger often used his letters as a workshop to bevel his thoughts and craft a point of view. In addition to the two essays, word had reached Geiger that Zunz had made his household strictly kosher. Nor was Geiger unmindful that whatever Zunz said and did sprang from deep conviction. The letter

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then turned on the role of ritual in Judaism. Geiger found the rite of tefillin to be based on an erroneous interpretation of Scripture that today had no more than the force of an amulet. Given that it also offends our cultural and aesthetic sensibility, why should it be imbued with new meaning? “That which is dead remains dead. The spirit that was formerly therein works in other ways and forms. To revive it is a futile labor and if it succeeded it would yield results that are only depressing, spirit-killing and ethically numbing.”115 The essay on circumcision distressed Geiger no less. The Frankfurt Reformverein, he thought, had erred in attacking a vital nerve of Judaism so incompetently: “But to defend circumcision so decisively just because it was always held and is still held in high regard, that I confess I did not like. It remains a barbaric, bloody act that fills the father with angst and the mother with morbid tension. The sense of sacrifice that once consecrated the act is gone and given its crude nature should not be firmed up.”116 The Reformers deserved better of Zunz. You can’t rebuild on ruins whose animating ideas have long vanished. Geiger too disagreed often with Holdheim, but he valued his ethical impulse and zeal for the truth: “I grant you that I love Holdheim, even though I can’t subscribe to every one of his positions nor regard every step taken as appropriate. I love him because I recognize in every word the fervor of an honest conviction and a lofty ethical view.”117 Finally, Geiger gave Zunz credit for turning kosher out of conviction and not because his post as seminary director required it. Yet Geiger finds the regimen off-putting: “The dietary laws are utterly bereft of spirit, severely impairing our social life. In truth, genuine brotherhood is more than reviving a separatist, pallid and dubious religious mind-set. To my mind everything is preferable to this elaborate branch of rabbinic law that runs from microbes to madness.”118 The crux of Geiger’s letter then was to deny the ancient ritual language of Judaism a normative role in the present. It had a voice, but no veto. Zunz did not rush to answer Geiger’s outpouring and when he did on May 4, he articulated his stance succinctly and bluntly. He appreciated that Geiger did not suspect him of having sold his ser vices in Frankfurt for 100 talers, as some were claiming: “I abhor a rabbinic hierarchy and disdain a Reform with dietary [milchdingen] planks. An attack against a defenseless Judaism from an antireligious viewpoint I will leave to those who enjoying doing that. The norm in matters of religion must be only that which is religious, widely valued and highly regarded as a vital legacy, though it is reserved to the more learned spirits (Maimonides, Ibn Ezra, Mendelssohn) to build on that foundation. We must reform ourselves and not our religion. It is the ex-

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ternal and internal abuses that ought to be attacked and not our inherited sancta. The denunciation of the Talmud is already the stance of apostates.”119 In closing, Zunz admitted that the lapse in his correspondence with Geiger was partly due to their growing religious divergence. As the embarrassing and futile folly around him grew in strength, Zunz found himself drawn ever more intensely back to scholarship: “So preferably write me about topics about which we conversed in earlier days.”120 Geiger’s stature as a scholar moved Zunz to avoid a total rupture. Zunz’s essay on circumcision also unsettled Veit, who gently reprimanded him by letter on June 22, 1844. While applauding the impressive fusion of history and theology by a critical scholar, Veit took umbrage at Zunz’s claim that “no one is free of sin and no one can boast of observing all the commandments.” For him that language reeked of too much theology; to transgress a ritual prescription is hardly a sin. More consequential, who would henceforth be included or excluded? Would both the uncircumcised son and his defiant father be unwelcome in religious services or even as members of the Gemeinde? As a Gemeinde president, Veit implicitly feared that Zunz’s lack of clarity would sow confusion and weaken communal bonds.121 Zunz was to publish three more occasional papers in 1845, 1846, and 1847 before he became engrossed in the uprisings of 1848. These too were meant to stem the rush to religious reform driven by political pressure. At the beginning of 1846, he explicitly pointed out the linkage for Samuel Ehrenberg: Toward the ephemeral events of the day I harbor a sovereign disdain. Every subjective initiative forces itself to the fore and then is gone. To these passing ephemera I count also the Prussian intention—just printed in the draft legislation for the Landtag [the pending meeting of the United Diet]—not to emancipate the Jews nor admit them to senior positions in the bureaucracy. How the civilized world of Europe will scoff at such a freshly softened form of the Middle Ages! I too will laugh along with the God of Psalm 2 [verse 4]. No doubt these decisions will exercise an influence on the intentions of the Reformers in Berlin. They will have to deny their Jewishness even more decisively, and—yet we shall see.122 Over his long career, Zunz punctuated no other decade with a similar spate of popular essays aimed at outsiders bent on harm or insiders bent on bailing out. The urgency of the moment forced him to plunge into the maelstrom.

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Zunz struck again in Busch’s Jahrbuch in 1845 with a lengthy excerpt in translation from one Solomon Alami, who had witnessed the catastrophic eruptions of Jew-hatred in Spain in 1391. Unbowed, he penned an ethical tract (Iggeret Musar) in which he took his Spanish Jewish contemporaries to task for their grievous religious shortcomings. Despite the devastation, the wealthy are selfish, materialistic, arrogant, and highly assimilated. They are unscrupulous in business and do nothing to alleviate the poverty and suffering of the downtrodden. They keep their sons from becoming rabbis and their daughters from learning Hebrew. And even the rabble is not without its share of faults.123 Alami’s tract had been last printed in Berlin in 1713, but went unmentioned by Jost in his history. Not until 1854 when Adolph Jellinek published a new edition in Leipzig would Alami begin to reenter Jewish consciousness.124 In deference to his audience, Zunz did not clutter his introduction with recondite information. He entitled his piece simply “Eine alte Stimme” (An Old Voice) and lauded it as “a beautiful testament that Judaism never let its adherents go astray, that in its teachings we always find the means and the courage to reprimand.” Zunz deemed it worth sharing in part because its social criticism depicted his own day and in part because Alami delivered it with felt pain and a redeeming conviction that his kinsmen were not worse than the Christians or Muslims.125 A year later in the same venue, Zunz burst forth again, this time in his own voice. Though the façade is a letter to a soulmate, his fury at the highpitched, never ending derogation of Judaism that marked the campaign for radical Reform resonated throughout. The letter was Zunz’s response to Stern, but far more importantly, it movingly expressed his conception of doing Jewish history. Zunz and his friend have fled the salons rife with denunciations to take a stroll in the gardens of Jewish literature hallowed by time in which a voice is heard to whisper: “Take note, each one finds here only what he seeks and the unloving, lazy, ignorant despiser brands only himself. Every thing is to be had in Jewish literature: domesticity and divinity, deep thought and lightheartedness, thunderstorms and May flowers.”126 At the heart of the enterprise loom individuals with their ideas and their actions. In the former we find ourselves as part of a greater intellectual matrix, in the latter we espy new horizons to be conquered. It is the historian who brings the two parts together so that the deeds illuminate the person whose devotion to an idea brings it to life. If the historian loves his subject, handling the evidence impartially and the actors fairly, then his readers will

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come to regard the individual as a beacon, thanking the God of history for its heroes. But how few such luminous individuals are known to us from Jewish history? At fault here is not the indifference of the public but the incompetence of its historians: You demand [says Zunz to his interlocutor] that the Jewish public must get to know those who for 2000 years have been the bearers of our literature, grasp their intentions, value their achievements and feel their suffering. From which leaders should they learn this? Certainly not from those who trample on every thing Jewish that is old, endlessly declaiming that only with them has the holy arrived. . . . Also not from those who burn Hebrew books, who wish to eradicate the language from our midst because it represents Palestine and the Middle Ages, parochialism and that which is out of date, and not from those [who claim] to have discarded the children’s shoes with which the divine covenant outfitted them. Those orators, once they come down from their lofty podium to do Jewish history, can surely give us only a depiction of warring fools, erring fanatics and brooding lunatics with their readers losing all interest in a predominantly Hebraic literature. If the bonds of language, history, religion, idea and nationality are so doggedly loosened, then don’t be astonished that our fashionable Jews quickly throw away their Hebrew books or sell them. No certified fool would bother himself with the men of this history.127 Similarly, Zunz’s wrath does not spare his few unnamed contemporary historians. Salvation will not come from them either. Bereft of deep research, their books consist of recycled material among whose heroes the author is always the greatest. In contrast, Zunz could not resist studding his letter with piquant nuggets of notable personae along with an isolated meritorious deed. The lucid specificity highlighted the human bridge to the past rendered inaccessible by the trash of scurrilous negativity: “It is better to praise Israel’s antiquity two or three times than to deface it once. . . . Wherever art declines, it was the artist who declined first.”128 In the face of a crescendo of caustic rhetoric that cast progress in terms of radical surgery, Zunz rose as an apostle of empathetic history, a humanistic discipline with the power to fertilize Jewish consciousness.

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In his final occasional paper of the decade Zunz moved from theory to practice by making the human more accessible. He seized upon the deeply ingrained religious practice of Yahrzeit, the annual commemoration of the day of death of a departed family member, to create a necrology of historical figures whose day of death was known. The calendar format was expansive: in this first installment Zunz covered the first three months of the secular year. But as his research unearthed fresh information, he would add new names and events to his gallery. Fabrication was not allowed to bolster the serendipity of the enterprise. The day of death had to be reliable, yet never left standing alone. To each name, Zunz appended a line or two conveying what he deemed memorable about the person being remembered. In embryo Zunz’s Yahrzeit calendar was a biographical dictionary, a pa norama of individuals who endowed Jewish history with its instruction and inspiration.129 The tone Zunz struck was reverential, not funereal. His introductory statement would remain unchanged from 1847 to 1872: Given that the muse of Jewish history seldom favors her devotees with the age of her heroes, we should be all the more thankful when the day of death is noted. Let us not press too hard as to why one person is considered and another more important overlooked. For where many are wronged and much goes unheard and some still lie buried waiting for a quickening love, we should not censure or judge, but rather preserve the memory of those who, if not singlehandedly surely as partners, labored mightily for a common idea. Accordingly, the following pages of remembrance are given over to all those who do not choose to ignore the spokesmen of the spirit if they be Jews or individuals who admired or defended things Jewish.130 Though we will return to this initiative in its final and richer iteration, it is important to recognize in this context its linkage with Zunz’s preoccupation with popularization. In a boldly imaginative move, he forged the old and the new into an appealing format that placed the individual at the heart of Jewish memory. In his epigram on the sage from Dessau, who had died on January 4, 1786, Zunz singled out for mention Mendelssohn’s two political tracts, his preface to the German translation of Menasseh ben Israel’s 1656 Vindiciae Judaeorum (A Vindication of the Jews) and his better known Jerusalem.131 The choices

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referenced the principles that informed his approach to reform. In his preface, Mendelssohn had condemned the exercise of any coercive power against dissenters by ecclesiastical authority. There is as yet no clergy, whether Christian or Jewish, sufficiently enlightened not to abuse such power.132 It was that principle that drove Zunz’s campaign to subordinate the communal rabbinate to lay governance. Likewise in Jerusalem Mendelssohn inveighed against bartering religious heirlooms for political rights, and Zunz was surely convinced that the sudden profusion of pronouncements for radical reform from Frankfurt to Berlin to Breslau to the posturing at the rabbinical conferences were all contaminated with ulterior motives. As he had written to Geiger the only acceptable criterion for religious reform was religion itself. In sum then, on the nexus between politics and religion, Zunz perpetuated the Mendelssohnian legacy. Uniquely his own, however, was the deep and abiding reverence for the past that sprang from his historical perspective and that replaced Mendelssohn’s belief in revelation. For Zunz it was the antiquity of institutions that tempered the impulse to subject them to quick, arbitrary, and impure triage. Zunz’s growing religious conservatism of the 1840s most assuredly did not rule out religious reform on principle. Despite his visceral intolerance of the commingling of alien domains, he never tossed aside the spirit and substance of the final chapter of his Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge. On the contrary, his religiously liberal disposition and approval of moderate religious reform were fi xtures of his private and public life. A few examples out of many need to be cited to underline just how nuanced was Zunz’s attitude toward reform. He had, for instance, no sympathy for the widespread philosophic penchant for national self-glorification through providential chosenness. Though close to Steinheim, Zunz rejected his defense of Judaism on grounds of revelation, a status that fated it for eternal combat against all expressions of paganism: I can’t go along with that antagonistic dichotomy between revelation and paganism [he wrote to Philipp Ehrenberg on May 1, 1836]. 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 set it in opposition to non-Judaism, that is, an apple does not taste like a non-apple. Nor

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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.133 Some fourteen years later, Zunz counseled his cousin Rosa on a matter of painfully personal import; her son was pleading for her approval to marry a Christian woman. His sensitive pastoral letter to her turned on the invalidity of force in matters of religion: 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, any promise of conversion in the future. Ecclesiastical coercion has already made humanity miserable enough. If you, however, do give your 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.134 Nor did Zunz waver on his commitment to reform when unalloyed. In a letter dated September 10, 1840, to Hyman Hurwitz, the first professor of Hebrew at University College London, Zunz laid out systematically the nature and extent of his vision of genuine reform. Hurwitz was part of a group that had seceded from Bevis Marks to establish in February 1842 the West London Synagogue of British Jews. Its first minister, David Woolf Marks, had asked Hurwitz to assist him in the drafting of its prayer book.135 Not surprisingly, the group reached out to Zunz for guidance. His generous compliance was not only quintessentially moderate but also stirring evidence of his undiminished concern for the welfare of the contemporary synagogue. Ideally, he wrote, reform needs to grow from below naturally in family life and adult education, other wise it will be no more than arbitrary altering, stripping away and tearing down what exists. By way of unacceptable reform, Zunz listed the butchering of the received liturgy, the breaking up of the annual

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Torah-reading cycle, the adopting of Christian hymns, violating the Sabbath, and dropping the second day of the pilgrimage festivals. Some very desirable reforms such as the organ, the confirmation of girls, and doing away with the repetition of the silent devotion (the amidah) should be introduced gradually to avoid dissension and fragmentation. Among the reforms that are truly needed Zunz stipulated the confirmation for boys, a wedding address, sermons, hymns, the recitation of the Haftarah (the weekly reading from the Prophets) and Psalms in the vernacular, a selective use of penitential prayers (selihot) and poems of lamentation (kinot), the dropping of Kol Nidre and kabbalistic accretions, the elimination of most of the piyutim for the festivals, and the restoration of the dignity of the worship ser vice by ending all customs that disrupt it such as jeering on Purim at the sound of Haman’s name, the sale of honors in the synagogue, and calling up congregants to the reading of the Torah. True to his colors, when Zunz came to speak of the religious leadership called upon to effect these changes, the only title he used was that of Prediger and not Rabbiner. Regardless, he must know his community, give no offense, and be devoted to the welfare of the whole: “Ignoramuses are worthless while hypocrites, egotists and obscurantists do little good. But those with a sense of calling and zeal, piety and love of Israel can move mountains and perform miracles.” In terms of the rules governing the synagogue ser vice, Zunz issued a cautionary note not to crush spirituality and spontaneity with an undue stress on uniformity. The individuality of each ser vice should be preserved. He counseled the retention of Hebrew and even the presence of small children and frowned upon privileging the rich and overdressing. Where possible the synagogue should have a daily minyan and where not, at least one on Mondays and Thursdays when the Torah is read. In closing, Zunz reached for the stars: “As long as your gaze has not lost sight of its holy goal, do not be taken aback by the dust the battle kicks up. In those battles, however, fear the weak more than the strong. If you give in on occasion, it will be more honorable to be right than to wish to be [always] right.”136 The moderation and gradualism in this remarkable document inhere in the implicit distinction between substance and execution. Zunz clearly restricted the changes he was willing to countenance largely to the level of execution, because reforms at the substantive level cut much deeper into the fabric of Judaism. Was it Zunz’s invisible hand that destined the Forms of Prayer (1841–42) of the West London Synagogue of British Jews to be, in the words

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of Jakob J. Petuchowski, “the most ‘traditional’ of all Reform liturgies?”137 Zunz’s responsum also offered a convincing performance of scholarship in the ser vice of the present, the historian as halakhist, without abuse of the genre’s integrity. Indeed, in all of the three arenas in which Zunz operated—the academic, the communal-religious, and the political—he repeatedly gave striking evidence that dispassionate scholarship did not require disengagement and conversely that engagement did not compel compromising academic standards.

chapter 5

A Clash of Scholarly Agendas

The break with Reform that permeates Zunz’s occasional essays from the 1840s is fully corroborated by the tone and texture of his scholarly masterpiece Zur Geschichte und Literatur (On History and Literature) from 1845.1 Both genres reflect the impact on him of the political turmoil in Prussia that stiffened his resolve to defend the autonomy and integrity of Judaism. Whereas history vindicated the right to reform for the angry young Zunz, it became an instrument of preservation for the mature scholar. Zur Geschichte und Literatur is a work of radical reorientation and inexhaustible wealth. Even its title mediated personal meaning. Zunz, whose ties to Wolfenbüttel ran deep, took it from its famous Duke August Library, where Johann Gottfried Lessing had presided as librarian during the last eleven years of his life (1770–81). During his tenure Lessing had created a journal by that name to bring to the attention of the learned public rare items from its heralded collection. The title denoted research in progress, an early but vital phase in the never-ending quest for reliable empirical knowledge.2 And this was indubitably Zunz’s intent as well. In fact, his keen interest in the history of Hebrew printing was nourished in part by the list of older Hebrew books published in Prague and preserved in the ducal library (which had been compiled for him by Philipp Ehrenberg).3 Once again Zunz orga nized the abundance of his material in line with a sacred grid, this time not the number twenty-four but seven, which is the veritable DNA of the narratives, festivals, and sacrificial system of the Pentateuch. Zur Geschichte und Literatur consists of seven distinct chapters. By association, the externals of the book, its title and structure, foreshadow the significance of its contents.4

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In his brief foreword, Zunz indulged in a flight of hopefulness, borne aloft by his own conviction that truth would prevail in the wake of the recent founding of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (the German Oriental Society): “In the realm of the spirit, neither privilege nor raw power is recognized, and reason (der Gedanke) is mighty enough to triumph over arrogance and injustice without arrogance and injustice. The association of Oriental philologists has already admitted Jewish literature into its purview. Its introduction into the academies and universities cannot be far off. As for me, I wanted minimally to achieve that my reader detect, if only between the lines, the connection between academic fields, the involvement of all in culture and progress and the presence of a liberating humanity.”5 The key to Zunz’s oft-cited opening chapter on Jewish literature lies in that reference to the German Oriental Society. Later in the chapter he touched cryptically on the effort by theologians to put the study of Arabic on an independent footing. The two comments confirm Zunz’s appreciation of the contemporaneous liberation of Arabic studies from their traditional mooring in the theological faculty, where they were consigned to the ancillary role of facilitating the study of the language of Hebrew Scripture. By 1830 more than half of Germany’s universities had a philologically trained professor of Arabic teaching in their faculty of philosophy, the locus for the academic study of the humanities.6 When Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, Germany’s preeminent Arabist in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, came to Leipzig in 1836 as its ordinarius for Oriental philology, his appointment was to the faculty of philosophy, though at first he had to withstand an onslaught intended to relocate him to theology.7 Fleischer imbued his off spring, the German Oriental Society, with his rare ethos of value-free scholarship, witness its founding academic conference in 1844, which had three of its fifteen presentations given by Geiger, Frankel, and Steinschneider.8 In 1845 Zunz accepted the personal invitation of Fleischer and his Halle colleague Emil Rödiger to join their society, thereby becoming one of its early members.9 And when Steinschneider returned in 1845 to Berlin, Fleischer wrote him approvingly: “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.”10 It is this extrication of Arabic from the dominance of theology that impelled Zunz to devote his opening chapter to the nature of Jewish literature and its disparagement at the hand of its Christian curators. Jews are a part of

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humanity and their literature also refracts the touch of the divine spirit. To comprehend the plenitude of that animating spirit, the university must submit the full gamut of world literature to its scrutiny. The particular, Zunz intoned, is the portal to the universal. And most assuredly, Jewish literature is far more varied than the theological legacy of a clerical class. The monopoly wielded by Christian theologians over its study is an academic debacle for the university and a political disser vice to the state. Zunz clearly implied that like Arabic literature, Jewish literature should be moved to the faculty of philosophy, where ideally scholarship on the other is no longer driven by the intent to subordinate and denigrate. Political equality must be rooted in the soil of empathetic scholarship, and ultimately devolves therefrom. Without a proper appreciation of Jewry’s past, no honor would ever be accorded its descendants by Prussia in the present.11 The intensity of Zunz’s rhetoric was fueled not only by a sense of injustice long suffered but also by the promising reorganization afoot in the university. Before plunging into a floodtide of par ticu lars, Zunz tarried to sweep the shoreline of Jewish literature from the time of Alexander to the last half of the eighteenth century. The intent was to show that the vista comprised every facet of human expression, that it yielded its contents only to nontendentious study, and that it was eminently worthy of the attention of German scholars.12 Zunz divided the time span into eleven periods leavened at three junctures by contact with Greek culture in the guise of Hellenism, Islam in its era of cultural ascendancy, and the Renaissance.13 As attested by “the golden age of the Jewish Middle Ages” in eleventh- and twelfth-century Spain, Jewish culture at its best was symbiotic. The point of Zunz’s book, however, was not to focus on Spain or Sephardic Jewry, but to counter the one-sided preference for and preoccupation with its literature that committed the creativity of other periods and places to history’s dustbin. At the end of his survey, Zunz addressed his Jewish readership directly to underscore the scope, balance, and openness of his agenda: In surveying our history, we are often taken by individual works and thinkers more quickly than by the sources and the goal of their thinking and knowledge, and in the rush for favorites, we trample unawares many flowers of Judaism, leaving faith and love far behind us. Thus we tarry at spots that speak to us because they serve passing needs, but leave whole periods unexamined. Because we don’t select our subjects for their own sake, but rather for some

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expected gain, we remain ensnared in prejudice. . . . History and justice are not the knowledge of a single epoch, arena or event. It is rather a body of knowledge that is comprehensive, integrated and balanced [gerechte]. Many a misunderstood century has provided the basis of contemporary life. But because this life discomforts those who are thriving outside of Judaism, they disdain the men of that era and scoff at their works.14 Zunz’s survey was but a précis of an entry on Jewish literature that he had first composed for the eighth edition of Brockhaus’s Konversations-Lexikon in 1834 and which he revised slightly for the ninth edition in 1845. Not only was the periodization more extensively worked out in Brockhaus, but the periods abounded with the names and often dates of the authors whose oeuvre distinguished their age. Zunz’s sustained perusal of primary sources filled an empty stage with a galaxy of eminent actors. Once again the individual predominated. The specificity of his research reinforced his claim that Jewish literature was universal by virtue of the genres and languages it encompassed and influences it absorbed, without ever compromising the integrity of its heritage. Moreover, “since that time (when Judaism emerged out of Hebraism), Jewish literature, which is wrongly called rabbinic, has played a role in the growth of the human spirit, despite the absence of any external encouragement. In the long unappreciated treasures of this activity lie buried the deposits of centuries and a repertoire of the most varied products, in which native and foreign wisdom coalesced in unbroken development.”15 Having made his case for the universal nature of Jewish literature, Zunz unexpectedly shifted to the world of Franco-German Jewry during the half millennium from 1000 to 1500. Nearly half of his book is devoted to a pioneering in-depth study of its literature in order to show that the most parochial sector of medieval Jewish culture was not wanting in universal significance. The end result was a cultural history of medieval Ashkenaz of lasting value. The one-sided preference of German Jews for the multifaceted legacy of Sephardic Jewry did violence to the underlying historical principle not to prejudge. Ignorance should never be a substitute for comprehensive knowledge. The judgment of history must rest on the totality of a nation’s creativity. Zunz chided his compatriots for their aversion to the religious intensity, expanse, and insularity of Ashkenazic Judaism. Given the militant nature of the medieval church, there was no neutral cultural space Jews could enter to derive the benefit of external stimulation. The exclusion threw them entirely on their own

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resources and colored every literary expression with a strain of religious rhetoric. Yet the surface uniformity belied the multiplicity of interests and genres that pulsated beneath. In contrast, Islam granted Jews access to its cultural domain, in consequence of which Jews wrote mainly in Arabic and their literature resonated with all the ferment and diversity that marked an Islam open to the legacies of the countries it conquered. It was this biculturalism that had appealed to educated German Jews since the Enlightenment, inducing them to shortchange their own Ashkenazic heritage. In a footnote, Zunz assigned Geiger to that company by referencing an essay of his that had come out in 1844. Therein Geiger had introduced an early unknown Ashkenazic lexicographer of biblical Hebrew by the name of Shimshon, while reiterating his own admiration for the superior work in this field by the more famous cohort of Sephardic Arabists. The imbalance in Jewish research deepened the abysmal ignorance of Christian scholars. By way of example, Zunz pointed to the 1834 work Les Juifs dans le moyen âge by Georges Bernard Depping, who had won a prize from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres and who mentioned only three Franco-German Jews—Rashi, Rabbenu Tam, and Petahia—with almost no reliable information. Moses de Coucy he made into a Spanish Jew. What Jewish historians disdain Christians will surely not value. Zunz acknowledged that with his 1823 essay on Rashi he had tried once before to effect a course correction.16 There can be no doubt that with his new book Zunz resumed his campaign against Reform, in part at least because the Reformers had co-opted so much of the Sephardic legacy to gird their religious agenda.17 His erudite, exhaustive, and empathetic study of Ashkenazic culture was but another aspect of the defense of tradition against unwarranted surgery. Zunz broke down his pre sentation of Ashkenazic culture into four types of literature: glosses to the Talmud, commentaries to the Bible, works of grammar, and ethical tracts. In each category Zunz extracted the names of the authors from the vast reservoir of books and manuscripts he had read over the years, identifying where and when they lived and what they wrote. Often the same individual worked in more than one genre, yet despite the overlap the former void suddenly teemed with untold names and knowledge. Zunz dissipated a cultural fog with substance, order, and clarity, in which influence, interaction, and relationships could now be plotted. Judaism is what forged the sprawling diversity into a cultural uniformity, and validated touching on

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a bevy of underdeveloped subfields related to the religious life. Thus theology, history, poetry, astronomy, medicine, and science also punctuated Ashkenazic literature, though often in inchoate form. What made Zunz an unadulterated advocate of Ashkenazic culture was his attractive illustration of its contents. In Zur Geschichte und Literatur he did not stop with an assemblage of specific externals. He stressed that the exegetes and halakhists of Ashkenaz were also its ethicists and that their standards and pronouncements exceeded those of their Christian neighbors.18 Thereafter Zunz translated ten well-chosen selections from rabbis ranging from the eleventh century to the fifteenth, compiling the most extensive translations from a medley of passages from Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pious) by  R. Yehuda ben Samuel, the main author of the most famous pietistic-mystical text of medieval Ashkenaz, who had died in 1217.19 What might have offended Zunz as a rationalist did not obscure the loftiness of the book’s ethical-religious sensibility.20 Sefer Hasidim was also a major source for Zunz in the fifty-six pages he devoted to the social history of medieval Ashkenaz. In this culminating chapter of his disquisition, Zunz balanced his prior study of individual luminaries with a masterful profile of the collective. With every statement meticulously documented, Zunz surveyed many an aspect of the customs, superstitions, educational practices, communal institutions, and economic circumstances of Franco-German Jewry. He commented on the status of women, the names used by men and women, the level of secular knowledge and Hebraic literacy, the rise and fall of talmudic learning, the emergence of an interest in the literal meaning of the biblical text, the unremitting hostility of the Christian world, and the inescapable insecurity of Jewish life. The portrait is a careful blend of concrete facts and broad trends, suff used with empathy that on occasion turned poetic. Zunz eloquently enunciated his purpose at the outset of his chapter: World history reflects the traces of our limitations. The history of those whose light we can’t bear we write blindly and the history of those whose right we can’t tolerate we write with brute force. Thus we learn of the depravity of the Carthaginians from their conquerors, the crimes of the Zealots from Josephus and the absurdities of today’s Jews from tenured professors. If the totality of history then suffers from such injustice, we should not be put off by the ill fate of individual periods. In the life of humanity, which is the

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domain of history, no period should be peremptorily abandoned to indifference and disparagement without scrutiny. A long forgotten epoch of Jewish literature can surely make the claim to be brought to mind again with enough love to win attention and enough fairness to win an unbiased verdict.21 The originality and richness of Zunz’s book demands and deserves multiple readings. No chapter confirms this exceptionalism more cogently than his unsurpassed 154-page essay on “The Remembrance of the Righteous.”22 Though broadly dealing with death, it is definitely not funereal. On the contrary, it is a philological study that swells into a theological treatise. Astutely, Zunz bypassed the well-worn question whether the Hebrew Bible had any concept of an afterlife, which many an opponent of emancipation cited as proof of the primitive nature of Judaism, to zero in on how Jews through the ages remembered and honored their dead.23 The focus on praxis allowed Zunz to take up the topic of an afterlife both implicitly and explicitly without ever becoming polemical. Starting outside the box with what appeared to be a minor and marginal subject, Zunz roamed majestically over all stages of Jewish history and every genre of Jewish literature to illuminate a panorama of concrete and theoretical issues. In the process, a vibrant religious sensibility enabled Zunz to imbue Judaism with unimagined diversity, development, and openness. Central to his project was to show the dynamic and enduring role of the Bible in the profusion of expressions over time by which to commemorate the memory and pray for the welfare of the dead. Collectively, the epigrams attested to a robust belief in an afterlife, while individually they displayed the procreative influence of the Bible in the formation of their idioms and images. The Bible bridged the ages: The sacred Bible, the soul of the Jewish polity, was the sole determinant of the spiritual life of our ancestors. It was the foundation on which theology and history, grammar and rhetoric would be developed, the arsenal in which the weapons for polemics and the treasure in which rules for living and balsam for comfort would be sought. It forged not only the subject but also the form of the literature. The language of the Bible and its articulation lent structure to the ideas and content of that literature, pervading it throughout. If the roots burrowed far and wide, dispensing ideas, the branches threw broad shadows over religion and poetry. [Thus]

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biblical phrases intertwined with the prayers of the synagogue and the images of the poets, giving epigrams their bite, wit its spice and letters their charm.24 Zunz unpacked many of the epigrams in three ways: he showed the indebtedness of their language to the Bible and beyond, explored the meaning of their content, and cited examples of their use from the expanse of rabbinic and medieval literature, including the Zohar. Along the way, he was meticulous in determining when and where each epigram first appeared. As the canvas expanded, Zunz’s ability to marshal relevant citations was truly remarkable. Perhaps most interesting, Zunz raised the prickly question whether Judaism also allotted a place to righteous gentiles in the world to come.25 Though the question was clearly apologetic, Zunz did not stack the deck. He acknowledged that the voice of popular opinion as preserved in later strata of midrash excluded righteous gentiles from resurrection and life eternal, primarily because of hard times. So did the Zohar, though it charitably relegated them to that level of hell closest to heaven.26 Overall, Zunz came up with three bodies of opinion: thoroughly or mildly particularistic and universalistic. The latter happily represented more than half of the seventy opinions that he had ferreted out, extending God’s love and justice to all humanity. Zunz singled out for special mention the sentiments of Isaac Arama in 1480 and Eliezer Ashkenazi a hundred years later that soared above their circumstances.27 More generally, when Jews were treated with a measure of humanity, the universal view regarding righteous gentiles tended to prevail.28 Zunz closed his tour de force in a lower register, stressing the importance of tombstones for the study of Jewish history. Not only do they yield vital data on the person buried in the grave, but in tandem with other tombstones and documents they lend themselves to genealogical reconstruction. Zunz decried the medieval penchant of Christian officials to confiscate and desecrate the tombstones of Jewish cemeteries for purposes of urban construction and urged Jewish communal leaders to better care for the heirlooms that survived.29 In sum, Zunz’s deep reverence for the past and acute sense of history combined to generate a triumph of pietistic history.

* * * It was not long before Zunz’s book provoked Geiger to resume their ideological altercation. Whereas that of 1845 was restricted to an exchange of letters,

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that of 1846 came in the form of an extended review by Geiger in the literary supplement of the leading Reform newspaper of the day. To his credit, he did not surprise Zunz. On a quick trip to Berlin at the end of 1845, Geiger visited Zunz to apprize him of his visceral reaction to the book. The conversation failed to yield a meeting of the minds and in a follow-up letter Geiger reiterated his agitation with characteristic eloquence and candor: I respect every intellectual endeavor and value those who undertake them. I commiserate with them and forgive them if they are forced to crawl forward in their labor, while hardship and misery weaken their intellectual élan. But I cannot acknowledge those gloomy realms in which barbarism compels them to reside as the peaks toward which we should be striving. With all due respect for the erudition that emerges in your book, I miss the buoyant impression which fresh research gives me, and your immersion in details cannot replace for me the lofty free spirit which should hold sway. I am completely open with you because that is my nature, because a long friendship demands that of me and because I don’t want to tell the public that which I have not told you first. That a book through whose different sections resonates one and the same disgruntled voice, namely a dissatisfaction with the strivings of the present, a demand to dig into the details of the collective [Corporativen] or as you call it the nation [Nationalen] while keeping away from the fresh streams of the advancing spirit—that such a book requires of me a review you can readily imagine. To meet that challenge I offered little resistance because your name and work impose on me a duty not to let the book pass by in silence.30 Geiger informed Zunz that he had already sent off his first installment. Three more were to follow in quick order.31 The speed with which he read Zunz’s new book and penned his lengthy review suggests the apprehension with which he anticipated its tenor and import. Geiger’s review did not disappoint. Though prolix, he raised a cluster of core issues with intense feeling and radiant clarity that delineated two conflicting views of Jewish scholarship. First, he contended that the purview of Jewish literature should be restricted to that which pertained to Judaism. Jewish literature was quintessentially a religious and not a national literature (Volksliteratur). Moreover, Geiger was perfectly comfortable with the nomenclature

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“rabbinische Literatur.” Zunz had cast his net too wide; Geiger denied that when medieval Jews wrote on science, astronomy, mathematics, or secular poetry and philosophy they were doing anything Jewish. These works simply reflected the disciplinary discourse of the time and place in which they lived. The fact that they were often written in Hebrew did not make them Jewish. The language denoted no more than the use of Latin by medieval Christians, namely the absence of a literary vernacular. For Geiger the Jews in exile no longer exhibited any national traits and did not produce a body of diverse literature akin to that of other medieval national groups. Behind Zunz’s broad conception of Jewish literature was a Diaspora Jewry that continued to display the characteristics of a national entity capable of producing a well-rounded body of national literature. Ironically, Geiger challenged Zunz’s notion of a Volksliteratur while reviewing a book of his whose subject matter almost fully accorded with Geiger’s own particularistic view of Jewish literature.32 But then herein lay the paradox of Zunz’s oeuvre: whereas theoretically he intoned the universalism of Jewish literature, he devoted the bulk of his research to its most religious, particularistic genres. Second, Geiger rejected outright Zunz’s accusation that Reform sought emancipation by trimming Judaism. On the contrary, it was that quest that triggered their interest in Judaism and its history. The struggle sharpened a sense of individuality and promoted a turn to Reform to express it. Reform in fact served as the seedbed for studying the past to nourish the present. Zunz’s charge that Reformers trampled the flowers of Judaism, leaving faith and love behind, outraged Geiger: We seek bread for our hunger, water for our thirst; our spirit needs fresh, invigorating nourishment and you trifle with us, offering us flowers that often smell bad. We want a faith that uplifts the spirit, inspiring deeds for the present, and you groom us as individuals who dream only about the remembrance of things past. We want a love that bears fruit and you feed us effeminate piety and heartless sentimentality. A participation in the past can rise only out of a fresh present. If Judaism shows itself to be a life force, then we shall know that this force must have been creative at all times and we will pay careful attention to its creativity. Should our participation be warmed by the cold air of grave sites from the past rather than that of our own heartbeat, then perhaps we might find work to watch over the corpses, but surely not to become partners working

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and striving for a vigorous present. It is perverse to consistently portray Reform as guilty of destroying and trampling on [Judaism], an insult that a Zunz should have left to blockheads. . . . Where life is revived, some shriveled leaves must fall; where the spirit stirs, some things will be cast off. But this is not mere arbitrary pushiness nor a conscious discarding done without love or faith.33 Geiger’s third point shrank the historical horizon still further. In addition to excluding that which was secular and including a hefty dose of presentmindedness to determine what to study, Geiger insisted that all periods of the past were not equally worthy of research. The literary achievements of Ashkenaz pale in comparison with those of Sepharad. Only in the realm of the latter can the spiritual thirst of the present be slaked. Influenced by the groundswell of rational thought among the Karaites, Spanish exegetes, grammarians, poets, and philosophers rose to heights unimagined in FrancoGermany: “Spanish Jews embraced the entire legacy of their Asiatic and African brothers, making it ever more valuable by conscientious cultivation. French and German Jews [in contrast] could not assimilate their multifacetedness. They threw themselves into talmudic study. Only on occasion could exceptional minds follow their healthy instincts in the study of the Bible without, however, rising above their contemporaries.”34 Overall, Geiger was put off by research bereft of spirit, by the profusion of names and welter of details, by the absence of generalization and cultural distillation. His impatience to reach meaningful conclusions and rush to judgment were antithetical to generating the time required for inductive, exhaustive, empirical investigation. Zunz let Geiger’s critique stand unrebutted not because he was averse to turning facts into values, as we have seen in his occasional essays, but because too much of the past still lay fallow, and where cultivated was not yet ready for harvesting. Two far briefer and more laudatory reviews appeared quickly in nonJewish venues, obviously intent on aiding Zunz to break out of the isolation to which Jewish scholarship was still confined. The first venue was the respected literary journal the Magazin für die Literatur des Auslands (The Magazine for Literature from Abroad), founded in 1832 by Joseph Lehmann, Zunz’s friend from the embattled days of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. Though unsigned, the one-page review bore the imprint of someone sympathetically disposed and familiar with the subject matter, whom Zunz identified

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later in his diary as Fürchtegott Lebrecht, his colleague at the teachers’ seminary. Zunz must have given him a copy as soon as the book came off the press. Lebrecht endorsed Zunz’s dark view of Jewish history and praised him for not touching up the bitter truth to pander to Germany’s Christian majority. Nor was Zunz reticent about excoriating the church for its misdeeds, even as he faulted Jews for their failings. Lebrecht took particular delight in Zunz’s striking juxtaposition of August 2, 1492, after which date Spanish Jewry was no longer tolerated on Spanish soil, and August 3, 1492, when Columbus set sail “to discover a new world and new freedom.”35 But this rare instance of popularization merely underscored the pervasive austerity of Zunz’s style, which Lebrecht felt obliged to question. The censure came from one intimately familiar with Zunz’s tendency to terseness and factualness and who deeply regretted the degree to which it deprived a broader public of the richness of his findings: “He seems not willing to concede that to popularize scholarship does not make it shallow nor to dispense bodies of knowledge widely by mediating them for popular consumption. On the contrary, they are precisely what make the achievement of the scholar a general good of lasting value.” Within context, this was a reprimand motivated by affection.36 Still more glowing was the tribute paid by Steinschneider in the pages of Serapeum, the German journal for library science. His biblical allusion to Nehemiah in the early vulnerable days of the Second Temple period suggests not only Zunz’s inspiring leadership but also the promise of Wissenschaft des Judentums to become the intellectual sanctuary for modern Jews: “Someone like Zunz, who not only laid the foundation stones of an academic discipline, but also—like those restorers of the Temple— continues tirelessly to construct it with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other, can easily dispense with the diplomas of scholarly societies and academies, the wreaths of prize essays, the praises of a minister-professor and even a university chair. Not so, however, the young field of critical Jewish scholarship, which to many seems to be a ghost because it is still a spirit without a body [that is without an institutional setting].”37 A more direct and combative response to Geiger’s strident review was delivered by Bernhard Beer in three installments in the final volume of Zacharias Frankel’s short-lived Zeitschrift für die religiösen Interessen des Judentums (Journal for the Religious Interests of Judaism), which briefly served as a platform for traditional-minded practitioners of critical scholarship. A clear reference to Geiger’s review early on suggests that Beer at least in part wrote to

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counter his assault. His tone, however, was less ideologically fraught and his treatment of material far closer to the substance of Zunz’s book.38 Beer softened the categorical articulation of some of Zunz’s views. He did not regard Reform as the death knell of Judaism, but lamented its insufficient respect for Jewish literature: “There were and are to this day other wise wholly admirable people who are ashamed to have a Hebrew book in their house.” It is this disposition that makes them prone to trade the past for the present. Without guidance from critical scholarship, Reform will often go astray. Nor did Beer accept Geiger’s argument that the quest for emancipation in Germany was what first stirred an awareness of the need for regeneration, Reform, and scholarship. The emergence of Reform elsewhere in Europe did not show the same constellation.39 Similarly, Beer rejected only partially Geiger’s contention that Jewish literature encompassed only that which was theological in nature. This deeply embedded Christian distortion not only denied Jewish literature its universal character but justified the exclusion of Jews from the German polity as Zunz rightly claimed. Yet Beer was reluctant to acknowledge a body of literature that was wholly secular. Whenever topics related to botany, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and architecture were taken up, he believed they always manifested a religious connection and spiritual dimension.40 But unequivocally, Beer endorsed Zunz’s concentration on the culture of Ashkenaz, daring to compare the achievement to God’s creation of Adam. As God had first gathered dust from the corners of the earth to form Adam and only then imbued him with a breath of life, so had Zunz first painstakingly gathered the remnants of Ashkenazic culture before inspiriting them with the touch of his genius.41 The purpose was to restore a semblance of balance to our understanding of Judaism. Ideally, Judaism had always comprised universal and particular components. But of late the preference for the cosmopolitan Spanish-Arabic heritage had overlooked the inward-looking Jewish legacy of Franco-Germany. Not only was this imbalance an impoverishment of contemporary Judaism, but it also violated the scholarly premise to approach all periods and literature with an open and impartial mind. In fact, Zunz did not go quite far enough. Beer would have liked to see a more thorough examination of the emergence, methodology, and internal divisions of the Tosaphists and more ethical pronouncements cited from the legal literature.42 Paradoxically, Beer’s criticism lent weight and cogency to his praise. In advancing Zunz’s agenda, Beer served as his amanuensis, without surrendering his independence.

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Beer was an exemplar of a cluster of Jewish laypersons in nineteenthcentury Germany who possessed the knowledge, interest, and wealth to play a vital supportive role in the cultivation of critical scholarship. A descendent of court Jews, Beer’s wealth enabled him to travel for pleasure and collect rare Hebrew books and manuscripts. In his review of Zur Geschichte und Literatur, he gave evidence of the depth of his engagement. On the basis of a recent trip to Leiden where he had examined a manuscript of the biblical commentary of Joseph Bechor Schor, he disputed Zunz’s depiction of him as a rare paragon of reason in Franco-Germany among twelfth-century exegetes.43 At his sudden death in 1861, Beer’s library contained 2,569 volumes of Hebraica and 1,544 of Judaica, among which were more than 60 incunabula, rare books, and manuscripts. His widow made the final decision to divide the collection, which also included some 863 general works, between the University of Leipzig and the recently opened Breslau Seminary, whose director, Zacharias Frankel, in turn honored the memory of his closest friend by naming the school’s library after him.44 Zunz frequently beseeched Beer to be on the lookout for him for unknown prayer books and piyutim, and matters of scholarship often punctuated their years-long correspondence. Zunz cherished him not only as a kindred soul but even more as an intimate friend in whose Dresden home he and Adelheid found refuge in many a summer.45 A lifelong resident of Dresden (1801–61), Beer proudly displayed a strong sense of local patriotism. In 1834 he earned a doctorate from Leipzig and in 1840 the rabbinic title morenu (our teacher) from the rabbinate in Prague.46 Like his learned father, he served at length as an energetic leader of the Dresden Jewish community, which in 1837 numbered 641 people, and provided robust political leadership in the fight for the emancipation of Saxonian Jewry.47 As we have seen, in 1830 Beer was quick to seize on Zunz’s historical definition of the talmudic corpus against Chiarini in his own defense of the Talmud in the hostile climate of Saxony.48 The citation may well have created the seedbed for their friendship. Likewise, in 1833 in the foreword to his collection of seven edifying religious addresses delivered annually in the synagogue on the anniversary of the 1807 founding of the society to support the local Israelite hospital, Beer cited Zunz’s recently published Die gottesdienstlichen Vortäge der Juden to identify the genre to which his addresses belonged.49 In addition to offering succor to a minority sorely discriminated against, Beer wanted to unveil irrefutable evidence that Dresden Jewry fully qualified to be liberated. Upon receiving a copy of the 132-page book from Beer with an apology for his oratorical shortcomings, Zunz graciously validated his effort: “No

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seed gets lost. With edifying talks, rhetorical perfection is less important than a noble sentiment and God-fearing tone. They will always be appreciated.”50 It is also noteworthy that unlike the young Zunz, who restricted himself solely to biblical prooftexts, Beer was not uncomfortable citing rabbinic as well as biblical prooftexts. Though critical scholarship was for Beer an avocation, he pursued it with the devoutness required of a vocation. Of his wide-ranging studies, his compilation of midrashic biographies was his most original and long-lasting contribution, and the one closest to his heart. Zunz had put the literature on the map and Beer pioneered the structural innovation to access its contents. To construct a matrix for some of its contents, tentacles, and verities, Beer recast scattered fragments related to a few of the central personae of Scripture into cohesive and fluent biographical narratives of popular appeal. The creation of a consciousness unencumbered by a historical sensibility, this material often lacked plausibility, but not insight into the life and times in which it was engendered. Midrash allowed a troubled present to find meaning in a sacred past, whereby the Bible remained relevant and consoling. To be sure, while the tales bore the imprint of their rabbinic transmitters, they resonated with the voice of the people.51 Somewhat short on theory, Beer nevertheless tried his hand at the biographical mode at least four times, if not five—on Cain and Abel (1843), Aaron (1855), Abraham (1859), and Moses (1861, posthumously and unfinished). His 1856 work on Das Buch der Jubiläen (The Book of Jubilees), though not thematically biographical, deserves to be included, because Beer regarded it and other apocryphal books as tributaries emanating from the midrashic wellspring.52 The most ambitious of his undertakings was the book-length Lebensgemälde biblischer Personen nach Auff assung der jüdischen Sage (Life Portraits of Biblical Personalities According to Jewish Folklore), whose subtitle specifically stipulated the life of Abraham (Leben Abraham’s).53 The main title clearly hints at a much larger project of which this was but the first part. Its rich array of endnotes often bordered on excursuses into esoteric terrain. The inelegant combination of legends designed to entertain, impress, and uplift a popular audience and dense research meant to inform scholars of the possible sources and influences of midrashic nuggets elicited a particularly unforgiving review from Moritz Steinschneider, a longtime friend to whom Beer had probably been introduced by Zunz when he settled in Berlin in 1845. Steinschneider believed that Beer had misguidedly produced a veritable mongrel (Zwitter), whose conflicting genres and purposes were irreconcilable.

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To work their charm, legends need a subjective and poetic frame of mind, a suspension of disbelief, which runs counter to the skeptical objectivity of critical scholarship. Tethered together, the genres work at cross-purposes, each undercutting the mind-set necessary to the other’s effectiveness. Some thirteen years earlier Steinschneider had in fact written boldly about applying the genre of saga to the Bible itself, and Beer’s failure to reference it surely contributed to his ill-tempered dismissal of Beer’s conceptualization as amateurish.54 The review caused Beer untold grief, partly because of his esteem for the younger man’s scholarly stature and partly because it violated their friendship. When Beer had heard from Frankel of Steinschneider’s pending trip to the Bodleian Library in the summer of 1850, he did not hesitate to ask him to compare its copy of an unpublished mystical text to one that Beer had recently acquired after a long search, even though incomplete.55 A week later Beer wrote him that there was no one other than Steinschneider in whose company he would rather travel to Oxford. And indeed in July 1851, Beer announced to Steinschneider from London that he, his wife, and his sister-in-law would like to visit him in Oxford.56 While he wanted to see the library, the women would do the town. Beer asked him to recommend a hotel and tell him as well where they might eat kosher.57 A wedding invitation that Beer sent Steinschneider in May 1858 for the marriage of his adopted daughter Franziska to Gerson Wolf of Vienna also attests the intimacy of their friendship.58 Hence Beer had every right to expect a supportive, if not sympathetic, reception from Steinschneider when in April 1859 he sent him a copy of his book. He declared in his letter that whatever he might earn from its sale would be earmarked eventually as a charitable gift toward a scholarly cause. It was also his hope, if his book found approval, to do a similar life of Moses.59 As Beer waited impatiently for Steinschneider’s verdict, he was honored in Dresden on July 13, 1859, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his marriage, his doctorate from Leipzig, and his unbroken record of public ser vice. Steinschneider went out of his way to list the small tribute book prepared for that occasion in his Hamazkir— Hebräische Bibliographie, adding generously that “the honoree is one of the few among living Israelites whose energetic efforts in behalf of scholarship, justice and humanity [are done] without a hidden agenda. They deserve and have found on all sides [proper] recognition.”60 Irrespective of these ties, Steinschneider adamantly refused to let personal considerations compromise his fierce efforts to hold Jewish scholarship to the highest academic standards.

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In his letter of December 15, 1859, to Steinschneider, Beer faulted him for his abuse of the pages of his journalistic clearing house for new publications by constantly passing harsh judgment on works of Jewish scholarship that crossed his desk. Beer, who had written several highly touted annual surveys of Jewish literature for Frankel’s Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (Monthly Journal for the History and Academic Study of Judaism), had long harbored the thought to create a venue for the dissemination of information on new books, and applauded Steinschneider when he turned that idea into reality. Beer addressed him now not only to prevent the erosion of their friendship in a wave of resentment, but also to be constructive. Given his esteem for Steinschneider, he could not remain silent. Steinschneider often lost sight of the larger contribution that a work might make because he obsessed on errors of detail: Jewish literature treated academically is still a young plant. It needs encouragement, not a critique that carps at every small mistake! Restraint should be abandoned only where the intent of an author is inappropriate. Other wise, errors of fact should be corrected with love. . . . As your old friend, who treasures you and would do everything to help you, I allow myself this admonition: In truth, what advances might Jewish literature make if you, Zunz, Frankel, Geiger, Rapoport and a few others could be brought under one roof, set aside all your religious differences and take control of the future of Jewish scholarship without mutual recriminations. . . . We want to be emancipated but do not emancipate ourselves from old failings. As for his own book, Beer would have welcomed receiving corrections from Steinschneider, but he never expected that his overall verdict would be so devastating: “My situation here is quite isolated, as you well know. In order to continue my research, I need to be encouraged, not put down. What have you actually accomplished when you deprecate my book because it may contain things that offend your taste. If I had had your catalogue [of Hebrew printed books in the Bodleian up to 1732, which was in press], etc. I could have considered still other manuscripts. For the life of Moses, God willing, I will ask you for many details.”61 True, Beer died long before he could complete that work. Yet the last word on the subject was to be his. Exactly fifty years later the first volume of Louis Ginzberg’s celebrated The Legends ofthe Jews was to appear in the United States

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employing the twofold structural format pioneered by Beer on a grander scale. Clearly Ginzberg had no compunctions about producing a “mongrel.” He too regarded midrash as the voice of the people mediated to posterity by literary and learned schoolmen. Like Beer, in part 1, which would eventually expand to four volumes of legends, he discarded the original exegetical format of midrash to construct a free-flowing narrative of high literary quality. And again the Bible’s dramatis personae constituted the nodal points around which the pericopes were aggregated. In part 2, yet to appear, which would culminate in two dense volumes of notes, Ginzberg simply ignored Steinschneider’s sage advice. His massive compilation of critical notes would take the study of midrash in countless new directions, even as he summed up seventy-five years of research that preceded his own. Contra Steinschneider, two readerships could be addressed within the framework of a single work.62 Ginzberg has very few references to Beer’s modest breakthrough and there is no overt acknowledgment of indebtedness.63 Nor is there evidence of his awareness of Steinschneider’s displea sure. And yet the striking similarity of structure in the work of both men along with an aversion to theoretical reflection on the nature of midrash points to an unappreciated kinship of spirit. The scholar to whom Beer was closest was Frankel. Beer had been instrumental in bringing him from Teplitz to Dresden in 1836, in securing the land for the erection of the Gottfried Semper synagogue with its novel Moorish interior design, and in aiding Frankel in crafting its modestly Reformed services.64 Thus Beer could write Zunz on December 8, 1840, with a mixture of relief and satisfaction: “At the moment I am engrossed in leading our synagogue. Thank God, I believe that we have achieved a moderate Reform that accords with our local needs and mores. To be sure, it will require a watchful eye and helping hand to maintain and improve it. Still, in the main we enjoyed much good will that enabled us to overlook petty irritants. The dignity of the ser vices has been secured and our reputation vis-à-vis the outside protected.”65 Frankel and Beer collaborated often in their intensive efforts to wrest from a deeply divided Saxonian government an amelioration of the retarded political status of the small number of Jews living in its jurisdiction, and Frankel’s biography of Beer, written after his death at the behest of his wife, is almost entirely devoted to recounting the stages of the protracted struggle in Saxony in the 1830s and 1840s.66 Nor did Frankel’s departure from Dresden in the summer of 1854 to assume the directorship of the Breslau Jewish Theological

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Seminary end their eighteen-year friendship. Beer was unable to attend the opening ceremony on August 10, 1854, but he did pay a quick visit three weeks later, after which Frankel wrote an eff usive letter that conveyed the depth of their bond: “Your affectionate lines have hardly eased the pain that your quick departure left in its wake. You recalled for me the joy of our living together for so many years. Indeed your brief appearance could be seen as a touch of revenge; you wanted to drive home what I have given up. But in truth you are far removed from any thought of revenge and hence I am quite confident that you will soon return to us. Your room—we have named it after you and are overjoyed each time we enter it that you have already stayed in it—is always prepared to welcome you. Moreover, you have seen for yourself that we have plenty of room for guests and certainly for you.”67 It was no accident that Beer’s review of Zunz’s Zur Geschichte und Literatur was published in Frankel’s Zeitschrift. The two men were also comrades in arms on the battlefields of Wissenschaft and Reform; in the first decade of the Monatsschrift, Beer was a frequent contributor. When Beer died on July 1, 1861, Frankel rushed a laudatory three-page obituary into the next issue in which he singled out the harmony with which his faith and his scholarship meshed.68 Frankel surely had in mind what Beer had declaimed axiomatically a few years earlier in the Monatsschrift: “Faith and knowledge definitely do not appear in Judaism apart, but constitute just about the root fact of its religious consciousness. Hence also in its literature they step forth intermingled. The fear of God is the soul of the scholarly knowledge of spirit, and pervades the entirety of its literary corpus.”69 Religiously, Beer was an avowed centrist, somewhat more appreciative of the legitimacy of the motivations that impelled the Reformers than Frankel. The changes of the past half century called for accommodation. In contrast to the strident inflexibility of David Cassel’s denunciation of the Berlin Reformers in 1845, Beer acknowledged their pain. The notable advances that Jews had registered educationally and economically rendered many of Judaism’s commandments too burdensome to observe any longer. To give the Reformers the faith, positive religion, and Judaism they want, we must approach them with empathy, scholarship, and a clear sense of boundaries. Further opprobrium, Beer feared, would only lead to schism. Taking his cue from the political arena, Beer called for addressing the growing religious polarization within the Jewish community in a spirit of “die richtige Mitte” (the correct middle) and did so in Frankel’s journal, where a clutch of centrists were trying to forge a middle ground.70

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While Beer went over Frankel’s draft of the regulations that would govern the conduct of the seminary, Zunz’s relationship to the institution and its director was nonexistent.71 In a letter to Beer dated November 7, 1854, Zunz related that he would have loved to examine the liturgical manuscripts (of mahzorim) in the private collection of Leon Vita Saraval of Triest, which became the foundation of the seminary’s library “but with the curators [of the Seminary], who in their program, would not mention my name even once, I can hardly get into contact.”72 A few weeks earlier on October 16, 1854, Zunz spoke of Breslau to Gerson Wolf more sarcastically: “I would enjoy hearing that in Vienna I merit mention on occasion, despite the fact that I have not yet attained, and probably never will, the lofty height of the tree of faith-basedscholarship [Glaubens-Wissenschaft] that has shot up in Breslau.”73 The estrangement notwithstanding, Frankel allowed Beer to publish in the Monatsschrift a fourteen-page review of Zunz’s liturgical studies, Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters (The Poetry of the Synagogue in the Middle Ages) and Die Ritus des synagogalen Gottesdienstes (The Liturgical Rites of the Synagogue), which came out in 1855 and 1859, respectively. Though Beer surveyed the contents of Zunz’s meticulous research conscientiously, he did not hide his distaste for the genre of piyut: “The entire paytanic method stands as a monument of decline and it is lamentable that world history shows such cultural epochs in which the ever restless human spirit must seek refuge in such contrived and warped poetry.”74 He much preferred the earlier stage of midrash where the artifice of language did not spoil the purity and fantasy of popular sentiment. The space devoted to Zunz is the more astonishing given Frankel’s jaundiced view of Die synagogale Poesie. On March 28, 1855, he wrote Beer that he had just received the book and a quick look was enough to convince him of its misanthropic undertone. True, Zunz had a warm feeling for the Judaism of the past, but the preoccupation with persecution, indeed the precise dating of each act of violence, was neither the product of empathetic research nor the task of the historian. As is well known, and to be explored more fully anon, Zunz devoted the second chapter of Die synagogale Poesie to an exhaustive list of calamities that had struck Jews in the Diaspora to account for the lugubrious tone of many a piyut written for use in the synagogue. The lachrymose thrust of the construct prompted Frankel to speculate on Zunz’s state of mind: It [this fi xation on persecution] is the eruption of a sick soul, of an entrenched dour disposition that feeds on whatever arouses pain

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and gloom. . . . He is not at present a friend of Judaism. His pronouncements and life attest to that. He confuses Judaism with Jews, who give him grief, whether deservedly or not doesn’t matter for the moment. As a result, he nurtures his anguish inwardly, even as he conceals it outwardly beneath a cold exterior. And he who mourns gravitates to those who mourn. That is why he favors the Jews of the past and in that favoritism he does in fact come up with some scholarly discoveries, which is all the more reason that the echo of the past is heard by him with great satisfaction.75 Beer’s relationship with Geiger did not fare as well as his friendship with Zunz or Frankel. Though it blossomed quickly at first, as their scholarly views diverged, it foundered. On August 10, 1838, Geiger reported euphorically to Beer that his election to the Breslau rabbinate had been approved by a fiftynine-to-one vote of the board: “Truly, every thing went for me so smoothly and with such gratifying success that I am quite stupefied.”76 A few months later, Beer inquired of Zunz how Geiger was managing in Berlin awaiting Prussian citizenship: “Does he visit you often? I care a great deal about his future and wish him all the best.”77 In the summer of 1840 Geiger made a special trip to the Beers’ newly acquired vacation home in Loschwitz to introduce his wife, Emilie, whom he had just married in Frankfurt a.M. From there they rushed to Berlin to visit the Zunzes and Bertha Beer assured Adelheid that she too would take a liking to Emilie.78 But by 1846, Beer found himself constrained to express his reservations about Geiger’s frontal assault on the Gemara’s competence to interpret the Mishnah correctly. While acknowledging that there were surely cases where the Gemara erred for one reason or another, Beer bristled at the depiction of the sages of the Mishnah and Gemara as bereft of rational tools of analysis and suggested that Geiger’s partisan spirit often predetermined the evidence he marshaled. Geiger, for his part, believed that his critics took refuge in that generalization whenever they found Geiger’s specific evidence irrefutable.79 It is that charge in turn that prompted Beer to go public with a number of examples where Geiger’s interpretation of the material seemed unwarranted. At the end of this counterattack, Beer appended a cautionary note for Graetz, Geiger’s nemesis in the controversy, as a nod toward evenhandedness. Graetz’s characterization of Maimonides’s understanding of the Torah’s sacrificial system as “exceedingly superficial” in his “Construction of Jewish History” offended Beer deeply: “Is it proper for us to label in this manner the carefully

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considered and thoroughly impartial theory of one of Judaism’s greatest teachers because it runs counter to our spur-of-the-moment [she-hen bin leilah] view!”80 The admonition articulated as well the reverence Beer expected of those subjecting sacred texts to critical scrutiny. Geiger’s Urschrift und Übersetzungen der Bibel of 1857 with its audacious and bracing argument for the development of rabbinic law dismayed Beer still more. Though he did not go public with his criticism, he distanced himself from Geiger for a good sixteen-month hiatus. But not before articulating his disapproval privately. From Geiger’s letter of December 2, 1857, it appears that Beer had accused him of being driven by a “suppressed, personal agenda,” which induced him to play fast and loose with the words and phrases of the biblical text. Geiger countered with his usual forthright candor and self-confidence: “Your view has such a firm grip on you that you are incapable of considering objectively a contrary view, which simply confirms my general theory: Every time a person is captive of what he thinks, and then looks through that lens, no matter how honestly and objectively, he will in all innocence still add, reconfigure and reinterpret to protect his view. . . . I am accustomed to being looked at askance by men who regard themselves as paragons of criticism. But then I have the weighty satisfaction [of knowing] that later people do accept quietly and unobtrusively what they previously had contested with all their might.” Moving from the general to the specific, Geiger let fly with a caustic dig at Frankel’s religious stance: “I can only assure you that my regard for you has not changed for a moment, even though I now recognize ever more sharply the consequences of the patchwork theology and patchwork scholarship that seeks to cover over every crack with painted strips. I lament seeing you enter the ranks of those who elevate the lazy theory of straddling the middle to a fanatical cause (that is, becoming a strident centrist).”81 Beer stayed silent until April 1859, when the publication of his Leben Abraham’s induced him to send Geiger a copy with a covering note. Only Geiger’s appreciative response has survived. With an undertone of sarcasm, he welcomed Beer back as a penitent and thanked him for not having taken his criticism public. Yet the sting of Beer’s suspicion of him had not fully subsided. Geiger averred his undiminished respect for Beer, but bemoaned seeing him still among the followers of Frankel’s timid thrusts at theologizing and historicizing. As far as Geiger was concerned, Beer was still incapable of understanding his Urschrift.82 Thereafter, the letters grew less frequent, shorter, and more reserved. The divergence in scholarship had become insurmountable and disaffecting. In one

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of his last letters to Beer, Geiger summed his sense of vindication: “Otherwise we remain ever busy. I read your work, you mine, and we each know that our intentions are honorable. I tell myself: my view that the Gemara in part did not understand the Mishnah and in part did not want to has been so quickly accepted, despite having been vigorously contested at first, [that it] assures me that other conclusions of my research will fare no worse. To which you shake your head in laughter. But in vain!”83 By then Beer was engrossed in the dissemination and defense of Frankel’s pathbreaking 1859 study Darkhe ha-Mishnah (The Ways of the Mishnah). To introduce German academics to its massive scope, novelty, and conclusions, Beer rushed off a detailed, sympathetic review for the pages of the Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft, which since its inception served as an invaluable nexus for the convergence of Wissenschaft des Judentums with the burgeoning field of Oriental studies. As background, Beer sketched a concise history of Halakha that was far less fraught with internal strife than Geiger’s reconstruction. Moreover, because he regarded the Gemara’s main purpose to be the deduction of legal decisions from the text of the Mishnah rather than providing a commentary on it, he was willing to concede instances of unwitting misunderstanding: “In consequence, an impartial viewpoint could be easily affected, though largely unbeknownst, giving many an old formulation of the Mishnah a meaning that would accord with the circumstances of its interpreter.”84 Thus in passing, Beer tempered the crux of Geiger’s argument about the gap between the Gemara and the Mishnah by eliminating any trace of willful manipulation or analytic opacity. Thereafter, Beer described in order the rich content of Frankel’s study along with giving a frequent aside of an independent critical opinion. Frankel’s biographical profiles of mishnaic teachers, for example, would have benefited from also considering the pseudepigraphic tracts attributed to them. Since Frankel refused to defend himself publicly against the assault onhis book mounted by Samson Raphael Hirsch in the pages of his mouthpiece Jeschurun, Beer filled the void.85 He had already inveighed against Hirsch’s conception of Judaism in 1839, when he found Hirsch’s defense of the totality of Jewish law utterly bereft of discernment. All mitzvoth were not equally valid and certainly not uniformly filled with potent religious meaning.86 Now on February 5, 1861, he issued an urgent appeal to all rabbis, preachers, communal leaders, teachers, and learned men committed to traditional Judaism and convinced of its compatibility with basic scholarship to speak out in behalf of a Judaism informed by “Intelligenz und Wissenschaft.” He denounced the

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arrogant and arbitrary exegesis of Hirsch as transforming Judaism into a system awash with subjective symbols and repudiated a Judaism that rested solely on blind faith. In particular, he was incensed by the crude ad hominem insults hurled at Frankel himself.87 Frankel regarded the appeal as a masterpiece and praised Beer for foregrounding the violence done to the dignity of Judaism and the legitimacy of critical scholarship.88 In the few months left to Beer, the correspondence of the two men was absorbed by the controversy. By depicting Beer in his obituary as a man whose own faith was deepened by critical scholarship, Frankel touched on the existential nerve that flared in fury against Hirsch.89 Zunz was distressed by the news of Beer’s sudden passing and immediately sent off to his wife a letter of condolence whose restraint resonated with compassion: “My heart impels me to write to you despite my feeling that my words are fruitless, perhaps even painful. Instead of the visit that I was awaiting, came the news of what we suffered. Jews have few men like Dr. Beer and Zunz even fewer friends . . . [ellipsis in the original]. But why am I praising your lost jewel; is that called comforting? I am in fact not coming to comfort, but merely to show that I mourn and grieve with you. Universal recognition, the mourning of many, memory and time will slowly alleviate your pain. Above all, take care of yourself and if I can be of help to you in any way, you must turn to me.”90In retrospect, Beer was a true centrist and rare bridge builder who instinctively held polarities in balance. Despite the enormous power of Zunz’s research on Ashkenazic Judaism, his book did not reorder the agenda of Wissenschaft des Judentums. The general cultural interest in Orientalism in German (and Western) art and literature coupled with the existential stake of German Jewry in the recovery of the cultural legacy of Sephardic Jewry defied dislodging the bias. In fact, two major works of Jewish scholarship on the heels of Zur Geschichte und Literatur, if anything, reinforced it. In 1845 Michael Sachs, now in Berlin, published in Veit’s press his influential anthology Die religiöse Poesie der Juden in Spanien (The Religious Poetry of the Jews in Spain), with exquisite translations of poems by more than a dozen poets and extensive commentary. Moreover, the commentary put forth an original and attractive characterization of the inner spirit of midrashic literature to complement Zunz’s reconstruction of its external façade. Based on proximity of time and place to the Bible, the rabbis functioned intuitively and unself-consciously. The tools of Islamic grammar, lexicography, and rationalism shattered that kinship, distancing Sephardic exegetes from the biblical text. But Sachs was a torn soul and in the end went

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with the worldliness, sophistication, religious sensibility, and poetic distinction of the Sephardic literary legacy.91 The other work to offset the impact of Zunz’s heroic effort came from none other than his protégé, Moritz Steinschneider. When the multivolume German version of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Die allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste (The General Encyclopedia of the Sciences and Arts), approached Zunz for an entry on Jewish literature for its next updated volume, Zunz declined (wearied by his work for Brockhaus, which may have inspired the invitation in the first place) and recommended it consider Steinschneider, who was up to the task. By February 13, 1848, he could write his fiancée, Auguste Auerbach, that his book-length entry had been accepted uncut. His majesterial survey published in 1850 not only launched his scholarly career but also offered a roadmap to Jewish scholarship for decades to come. His architectural finesse compressed some sixteen hundred authors and their works into an organic matrix of periods and genres that covered a postbiblical literature of twenty-five hundred years in multiple languages. Unlike Sachs, Steinschneider employed the malleable category of folklore to explicate midrash, but agreed that Islamic rationalism ended the insularity, naïveté, and anonymity critical to its creation and creativity. More germanely, he highlighted the systematization, science, linguistic versatility, philosophic thinking, and individualism that penetrated Jewish culture from Islam with a surge of new topics, names of barely known authors and books, and references to unpublished manuscripts. Nor was he reticent about stressing the inferiority of Ashkenazic culture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries “where the light of Arabian science had not penetrated, where the sunshine of culture and humanity had not warmed the soil and where systematic superstition reigned in both schools and society.”92 Steinschneider’s entry earned him a quick invitation to the Bodleian Library at Oxford to prepare a cata logue of its Hebrew printed books, which gave him access to the greatest collection of Hebrew manuscripts in Europe. In short order, his monumental four-volume Bodleian cata logue with its 9,559 entries and countless references to unpublished manuscripts along with his subsequent cata logues of Hebrew manuscripts in Leiden, Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin served to entrench the study of Sephardic Jewry in the forefront of Jewish studies in the era of its geographic diff usion. Solomon Schechter’s dramatic recovery of the Cairo Geniza in 1896–97 would sustain that ranking deep into the next century.93

chapter 6

A Time of Upheaval

In the early months of 1848, the streets of Europe erupted with the fury of a forest fire in dry weather in yet another effort to demolish the bollards of the ancient regime. As in 1789 and 1830, the conflagration emanated from Paris. By the end of February, Louis Philippe had fled the city, triggering in rapid order insurrections all the way to the Russian border. For the Jews in the German lands the upheaval held out the promise of completing their political emancipation, blocked since the Congress of Vienna in 1816. Despite formidable obstacles, Jews had begun in the interval the painful process of moving economically and socially from the periphery to the center of the German polity in which they lived, evincing ever more signs of acculturation, especially in urban areas. By 1849 Berlin was home to 9,594 Jews, a jump of some 1,350 since 1846, or 2.3 percent of the city’s population. Though their economic profile was still way out of kilter, 90 percent had entered the middle class. Of the city’s largest bankers, merchants, and textile manufacturers, they constituted approximately half. Reflecting that degree of integration, the Berlin City Council in January 1849 would petition the United Diet in vain to grant Jews in Prussia full legal equality. Concomitantly, in March 1848, ten to sixteen Jews died on the barricades in Berlin, corresponding to at least 4 to 5 percent of the 183 revolutionaries killed.1 The portentous nature of that unexpected clash and its proximity agitated Zunz greatly. The night of March 18–19, he slept fitfully and fearfully in his clothes and in the morning began to record for Philipp and Julie the cascade of events in journalistic fashion with as much concreteness and precision as possible.2 At a funeral for one of the revolution’s Jewish casualties on March 26, Zunz consoled the survivors and mourners with biblical imagery and universal tones.3 Wagons and horses of fire had swept up the martyrs for justice and

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freedom as the voice of God honored each one by name. Their patent of nobility was the imminent end of censorship and freedom of the press, the revolution’s first great achievement.4 Donning the garb of a German patriot, Zunz called on all to erect on their graves watered by the mourners’ tears a society that knows no rank: “Thus let us enact a law that will be the same for all and cultivate a heart sympathetic to all that is noble. Let us eliminate every institution that discriminates against specific echelons of society and oppresses and harms specific classes. If we remain united then we will become true to ourselves. And soon our fatherland will don festive attire to honor the heroes it celebrates.”5 While in the heavily encumbered Vormärz period from 1816 to 1847 German Jews were politically active, if at all, only on the local level, some 150, according to Jacob Toury, rose to prominence on the national level during the caesura of the revolution.6 Elected to no national office, Zunz spoke frequently and publicly in Berlin with exceptional authority by virtue of his political engagement and the acumen of his political thought. By May 1, 1848, he had been chosen by the 110th Election District to be an elector for both the Frankfurt Parliament and the Prussian National Assembly.7 With the government refusing to surrender its deeply conservative three-class voting system, some eight hundred to nine hundred Berlin electors could vote for the vetted number of candidates eligible to represent the city as deputies in each body.8 Moreover, when Zunz spoke his addresses were covered by the press. On October 4, 1849, the eighth Volksverein (one of the nine local political clubs aligned with the democrats) elected Zunz to be its chairman by a vote of 172 to 62.9 Prior to his election on September 20 and following it on October 12, he delivered a two-part discourse on the nature of democracy, the second installment of which the democratic-leaning Berlin National-Zeitung called inspiring and reported on at length: “The lecture made a deep impression on the audience. A pause of silence greeted it at first, followed by an exuberant and long-lasting bravo.”10 After finishing part 2, Zunz was beseeched by many to have his lecture published for wider circulation, a wish with which he readily complied.11 Adelheid attended a repeat performance by Zunz before the ninth Volksverein. Women were not admitted, she told Philipp and Julie in a postscript to a letter dated October 10, 1849, because the space was too small. As an invited guest, however, she even got to sit on the dais, from which she marveled at the rapture with which an audience of several hundred hung on every word. Adelheid approvingly accentuated Zunz’s sense of mission: “I never realized that

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Zunz could speak so simply and vigorously in such a popular vein along with his customary logical acuity. . . . The education of the people is probably the only thing that one can do for a freedom not yet come. Much is still murky. My Zunz’s spirit is so lofty that he has no need to treat the circumstances of the moment in detail. He speaks like a messenger of God. The police present were the most attentive.”12 Zunz’s political profile displayed still other noteworthy characteristics. He was far older than most activists. Toury estimates that only 4 percent of those on the national stage were over the age of fifty, with the vast majority under forty. When the insurgency struck Berlin, Zunz was five months shy of his fi fty-fourth birthday.13 Despite his age, the uninterrupted intensity of his engagement was so all-absorbing that it brought his scholarship to a complete halt. His letter to Philipp on February 24, 1850, after the letdown of the revolution’s suppression provides a metric of his involvement: For four days now I am once again a secret democrat, that is I am no longer the chairman of a [political] club. I declined to run for the head of the local chapter of the People’s Party [the democratic Volkspartei that Zunz had helped found at the beginning of 1849], although three clubs had already designated me as their president. I shall wait for better times. I don’t want to bang my head against the new law governing political clubs [which would come out on March 11 and end the Volkspartei and all other political clubs]. . . . During the last 28 weeks, during which I was the chair of the eighth Volksverein, I held between 110 and 120 meetings and assemblies and had more to do with the police than ever in my whole life.14 From the get-go, as Adelheid appreciated, Zunz labored energetically to ready his fellow Prussians to exercise their newly won political rights responsibly and wisely. A working democratic system needed a citizenry that understood its principles and procedures and embraced its values. Public education was the vital precondition for transforming Prussia’s authoritarian political culture. As an apostle of freedom and equality, Zunz tended to confine himself to theory and morality and to skirt the hot political conundrums polarizing clashing interests. He unabashedly identified himself as a democrat and like Johann Jacoby, whose views were far too liberal to win a seat in the Frankfurt

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Parliament from his native Königsberg, he avowed that freedom granted from above was neither viable nor virtuous. Like Jacoby, he regarded Frederick William IV’s imposed constitution of December 5, 1848, for all its virtues, as a form of false popular sovereignty. A nation must achieve freedom through its own efforts, “for indeed a free constitution evolves only out of a free representative body and a free representative body only out of a free people.” And to that end, Zunz sought to ready the ground with a panoply of unassailable laws protecting the rights of the individual.15 Zunz’s radical politics made him somewhat of an outlier. According to Toury, only 14 percent of German Jewish activists sided with the democrats, whereas 50–55  percent stayed with the conservatives and 30–35  percent cautiously identified with liberals of a moderate ilk.16 Overall, the vast majority of the activists were ready to accept a constitutional monarchy as the best way to realize both individual freedom and national unification.17 Even Jacoby as early as April 1848 in private correspondence admitted that a republican form of government at the time went well beyond the will and capacity of the German people: “As matters now stand, given the low level of political education of our people and the overtly expressed antipathy to a republic, there is little doubt that the power and freedom of Germany, which all of us wish to bring about, can be achieved only via a democratic-constitutional monarch.”18 From the fervor of Zunz’s advocacy, it does not appear that this was a concession he would have been eager to make. In truth, Zunz felt a strong affinity for Jacoby. In a letter to Beer dated November 6, 1848, he celebrated Jacoby’s brave words to Frederick William IV the day before in Potsdam. On November 2, the king, emboldened by the retaking of Vienna by General Alfred von Windischgrätz for the Hapsburgs, appointed as his new prime minister the reactionary Count Frederick William Brandenburg. Jacoby, who had won a seat in the Prussian National Assembly from Berlin, failed to convince it at its meeting in Berlin to challenge the king’s authority directly. Instead, it sent a delegation of twenty-five deputies to Potsdam, including Jacoby, to appeal to the king to undo the appointment. Disdainfully, the king turned his back on the delegation as he read the request and rejected Jacoby’s plea not to spurn it. But spurn it he did without comment and moved abruptly to leave, when Jacoby declaimed for all to hear: “That is the misfortune of kings, that they do not want to hear the truth.” The next evening, Zunz reported, many of Berlin’s residents honored Jacoby with a torchlight parade that had started near where the Zunzes lived. Well

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informed about the events in Potsdam, Zunz crowned Jacoby with the talmudic accolade that he was one of those rare individuals who acquire their place in heaven in a single hour.19 By November, however, the tide had turned. Thirteen thousand Prussian troops reentered Berlin that month and with the imposed constitution for Prussia the following month, the government reasserted control of events. Acting on the principle that “gegen Democraten helfen nur Soldaten” (against democrats only soldiers can help),20 Frederick William rejected the offer of the imperial crown by the Frankfurt Parliament in March 1849 and its proposed constitution for the German Empire in April, effectively disbanding the body. After the Württemberg government dispersed the rump parliament of some 136 delegates elected to Frankfurt who had reconvened in Stuttgart, the Prussian government ordered Jacoby to return to Königsberg from Switzerland to stand trial for high treason for participating in the Stuttgart parliament. Despite the prospect of a gruesome execution of the death sentence if convicted, Jacoby returned of his own free will to be exonerated at his trial on December 8, 1849, by an eight-to-four vote of the jury. Zunz drafted the grateful tribute sent to Jacoby on December 19 by the Berlin Volkspartei: For many years now you have defended the interests of the people and the people know it. . . . [You are] a herald of justice and truth. The charges brought against you were an indictment of the Volkspartei, a condemnation of the effort to raise up the German people and a defeat for the warriors against slavery. That is why we wish you and us good fortune in your exoneration, surely the dawn and harbinger of that freedom which alone can lay the foundation of a just state. . . . May the knowledge to have in the heart of the people a pillar of support comfort you for past suffering, if comfort is still in order in a battle in which the certainty of justice guarantees the certainty of victory.21 In a cause of such ultimate consequence neither Jacoby nor Zunz could be cowed into silence by intimidation. If fear failed to curb Zunz’s public role, those who loved him feared for him. As the Prussian government regained its resolve and dominance, Samuel Ehrenberg candidly and anxiously expressed his apprehension to Zunz from Wolfenbüttel on November 22, 1848:

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I am not without fear for you. If only your fervor for the revolution [euphemistically die gute Sache] will not provoke you to say something publicly that might entangle you in matters unpleasant, if not downright dangerous. With spies again everywhere and words and deeds interpreted however one wishes, moral gravitas has lost its power. It needs only the wink of an evil rogue to throw the most innocent person under suspicion, to have him taken away and held without trial. For with that, justice has achieved its goal. Why subject yourself to martyrdom if there is nothing to be gained? But you counter that the rule of tyrants cannot last when the entire country rises up against it. On the contrary, I fear that it will prevail through bayonets and shells [Kartätschen] because its tactics have been well planned in advance and its actions marked by unity. The revolution in contrast lacks points of cohesion and unity in its operations. Ehrenberg signed his heartfelt admonition, “your loyal father.”22 In his somewhat lighthearted response, Zunz appreciated his revered mentor’s solicitousness and assured him that Berlin had grown quite boring. Since political gatherings had been suspended, he stayed home at night and spoke nowhere publicly. Whether the king’s edict to relocate the Prussian National Assembly out of Berlin to the nearby town of Brandenburg would make things better or worse remained to be seen. In the meantime, the timorous ones and the flatterers filled Berlin’s servile papers.23 But there is no gainsaying the perspicacity of Ehrenberg’s words. The roller-coaster revolution in the German lands would falter and fail, among other reasons because of a plethora of vectors in tension and an absence of a center of gravity.24 No less anxious about Zunz’s fraught outspokenness was Bernhard Beer in Dresden. Though long at the forefront of the fight to alleviate the heavy yoke of discrimination borne by the few Jews in the Kingdom of Saxony, Beer confronted the revolution with a far more tempered demeanor. With the defenders of the status quo still in retreat, Bertha, his wife, shared with Adelheid on July 11, 1848, their uncertainty about the outcome. Because Bernhard had no time at the moment to write, she penned the letter and he the postscript. The role reversal prompted her to quip that it marked the beginning of emancipation for women! More seriously, given her bewilderment at the course of events, she felt more comfortable writing about her state of mind:

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Freedom, equality and enlightenment, these beloved sisters, which always hovered as ideas in my fantasy, were suddenly proclaimed all at once and I greeted them jubilantly. But all too soon omens of light took on other forms. Raw power, anarchy and loss of faith replaced them and I awoke out of my lovely dream. . . . Yet I have not lost my courage. To get well, we often need to go through crises and danger is part of illness. Yesterday Archduke John [whom the Diet of the German Confederation had elected as its imperial regent] came through here. Will he be the healing doctor? I wish him illumination and strength. He is already bent by age. Won’t the burden be too heavy for his shoulders?25 In contrast, Zunz harbored no doubts. A few days earlier on June 28, 1848, he had written the Beers in a state of euphoria mixing Jewish and Christian images. Beer’s previous letter had reached Zunz in Wolfenbüttel, where he had come to celebrate in the bosom of his surrogate family the festival of Shavuot, commemorating the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai: “But since revelation never ceases, neither will science which provides insight into its workings, even though its forms change. Indeed, revolutions seem to me the proof for the vitality of science, which has become incarnate and for this very reason dismays the clergy whose morsel of bread is about to be snatched from their mouth.”26 No friend of extremism, Beer tried to get Zunz to moderate his democratic rhetoric. But Zunz bristled at the suggestion. His political views were not external to who he was: “I don’t want to be anything other than what I  am. Your wish that I consider being less democratic is understandable, but not its underlying assumption that it is a function of will. In this I detect Frankel’s influence, right?”27 Beer quickly denied the attribution. His counsel emanated from his own cherished conviction: “My principle has always been the words of the prophet [Isaiah]: ‘You shall triumph by stillness and quiet [in Hebrew].’ Rashness usually blows back [stürzen gewöhnlich zurück]!”28 In his next letter, Zunz graciously backed off. Neither man had the time to dispute from afar and so many of their hopes had already gone up in smoke: “If our views then on the means and methods to ameliorate the lot of mankind don’t fully overlap, both of us still seek an ethical goal and neither of us will give up working for it. Contrary to my wishes to be for the time being on the sidelines, I have again been dragged into the chairmanship of a Volksver-

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ein. But the day must come when the potentate will give way to true equal rights.”29 The delicateness of Zunz’s formulation calmed Beer, though he still felt obliged to explain himself more fully: “I have simply always felt that when the multitude is enlisted to collaborate in its usual way at ameliorating the lot of mankind, a highly contentious generation will arise. Though it too sets for its goal to better the lot of mankind, disorder will result, because it seeks too much at once. So it is today. On the heels of Waldek’s radicalism [Franz Benedict Waldek from Westphalia, along with Jacoby a leader of the democrats] comes again the so-called Christian state. One extreme begets another!”30 The divergence of views underscores just how independent and singular were Zunz’s politics. The centrist position of Beer, Riesser, Veit, Frankel, and Sachs and countless others, with its expression of loyalty to governments in power and preference for a constitutional monarchy, was a legacy of the deepseated fear of the mob, which drove Jewish communities throughout the Middle Ages to align themselves with the central authority that dominated the territory in which they resided. Reigning kings, princes, and bishops were amenable to economic considerations, while the fury of the mob was beyond influence. Despite his incomparable knowledge of medieval Jewish history, Zunz did not tremble at the prospect of extending equal rights to the masses.31 In this regard, Zunz’s political addresses are also noteworthy for their consistent universalism. Not once did he use his podium to mount a case for emancipating the Jews. The absence of parochialism contrasted sharply with the intense advocacy of Jewish interests adopted by many an engaged Jewish spokesmen. Nor is it connected in any way with the aversion to Judaism harbored by estranged Jewish democrats.32 Zunz’s silence is rather to be accounted for by his long-held conviction that Jewish emancipation could not be gained in isolation. As early as 1837 he had written to Frankel, a battler for Jewish equality in Saxony, that “all over medieval privileges stand in the way for Jews. Jewish emancipation moves in step with that of general freedom. Christians are also fighting for their emancipation.”33 Jews no longer needed to convince the authorities of their rapid assimilation and plead for their reward. They are now to be emancipated by right and not goodwill. Only when their status is embedded in a political matrix of equality and freedom for all will their status be enhanced and secure. And with the insurrections, Zunz saw these universal principles on the march. On March 5, 1848, he wrote to Philipp in a state of exuberance at the crumbling of medieval privilege and prejudice across Europe: “What am I

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doing? Nothing. Reading papers, speaking, not sleeping at night, raging and rejoicing alternately. This immortal February has made me half sick. Eight years ago today the dog Ratti-Menton in Damascus raged and Thiers [Adolphe Thiers, French foreign minister], the snake, took cognizance of him. Today both are forgotten and Cremieux is a minister [Adolphe Cremieux, minister of justice in the provisional government]. The moneyed aristocracy, the bureaucracy, the black police of the Church [the Jesuits], Metternich’s diplomacy— all are rattled by this fever. The day of the Lord is coming. Perhaps by Purim [on March  19] Amalek will already be laid out.”34 Thus given their linkage the universal advanced the particular. Moreover in Berlin, Jews were politically prominent. Zunz counted some 64 Jewish electors, possibly even 80, out of a total of 1,248.35 Nor was Zunz unsettled by the rash of anti-Jewish violence that often accompanied the insurrections. To Samuel Ehrenberg, who feared that disorder would quickly devolve into attacks against Jewish lives and property, Zunz wrote reassuringly on March 3, 1848: “No need to fear for the Jews. I can’t guarantee that there won’t be excesses against them. That could even happen to non-Jews. But the principle of freedom and equality moves forward: London, Tuscany, France, even Germany and Hungary are proof.”36 Two weeks later he reiterated his confidence to Philipp and Julie, who like Samuel and many others feared the outbreak of pogroms: “The fury of the mob in some regions will pass without a trace just like other disturbances, and freedom will remain. With these thoughts I will recall tomorrow the memory of Amalek (on the Sabbath before Purim) and the next day that of Haman (on Purim). You too should not allow the excesses of small towns to blur the lovely vista of a large free world.”37 Even when the revolution failed miserably, Zunz did not lose sight of the big picture. In May 1851 he informed Beer that he was resuming his public lectures on Jewish literature from the year 1500 to 1800. For publication, they will still need a few years to ripen: “For the affairs of the Jews[, however,] I no longer worry. They have become one with the freedom of the nations and this is on its triumphant way, even if staying out of sight.”38 Zunz wrote Beer in a similar upbeat vein in February 1852: “The question of the day is whether slavery and barbarity or freedom and progress? All else is not worth the few seconds it takes to say.” Zunz urged Beer not to draft any more petitions: “Such things are now unnecessary and superfluous, most assuredly a disgrace for the Jews to beg again for judicial appointments. . . . Go rather for a hefty walk and then to recover, write me a few

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hiddushim [fresh scholarly insights].”39 With the fate of Europe and its Jews interlocked, Zunz could again take up his pioneering scholarship with equanimity. He had promoted the political education of the German public with distinction.

* * * A closer look at Zunz’s addresses will readily show the sophistication of his political thinking, the breadth of his illustrative material, both historical and contemporary, and the structural elegance of his tightly knit, well-rounded argumentation. Zunz rose quickly to prominence in Berlin’s political arena. As we have seen, by May 1, 1848, he was elected by the 110th Electoral District as an elector for the concurrently convening Prussian and Frankfurt a.M. National Assemblies, and three days later he was awarded the honor of addressing a citywide meeting of all electors. His cryptic diary entry preserves a sense of his self-effacing idealism. Zunz spoke on freedom, religious hatred, and unity. The first consisted of justice and love. To eradicate the second, he said, would take justice, life, and science. As for the third, he asked himself poetically: “Whether I should work as a blade of grass in the bright sun or a seed hidden from view?”40 Bravely and selflessly, he chose the former. By the time he appeared before the large 4th Electoral District of Berlin on February 1, 1849, his thoughts were fully developed. A week earlier Zunz had been selected by yet another district (the 214th) as one of its electors (for the lower house of the Prussian National Assembly) and from the tone and substance of his remarks, he made clear what type of man would garner his vote: “Only someone of resolute character and untarnished life, who does not say cold is warm and warm cold, who never practices legal sophistry or diplomatic cunning or lies when these would redound to the benefit of his own party. Moreover, he must fight his opposition with legitimate weapons and not with the force available to him at the moment to crush a weaker opponent. On such a man can the public rely because he would be guided by his conscience. He may err—for all of us err, but he would never deceive us.”41 Zunz pulled no punches in disapproving of Frederick William’s imposed constitution. It was one-sided and granted without consultation. The function of the upper house with its highly restrictive representation was solely to control the actions of the lower house. Above all, the constitution was undemocratic because it did not emanate from the people.42

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The crux of Zunz’s conception of democracy was the notion of freedom, to which he devoted the first half of his remarks. Freedom is a composite of equality and justice from which self-government arises. And self-government is the culmination of individual self-control, an indispensable virtue that Zunz defined as subordinating personal interests to the welfare of the whole. When achieved collectively, self-control morphs into self-government in which the individual citizen and the nation become one and law expresses the will of the individual, that is self-imposed legislation: “If true freedom lives in a nation, then true law results. We obey this law for it is actually our own will. The individual recognizes in the law that which inheres and should inhere in him.”43 The formulation is succinct and will be amplified in later speeches, but its compressed vocabulary and trend of thought already bring to mind Rousseau, whom in an 1861 address Zunz called “the Columbus of constitutional theory.”44 In The Social Contract Rousseau grappled to reconcile civic freedom with natural freedom: “The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.”45 Rousseau contended that in moving from the state of nature into a civic state through a compact, the individual enters a body politic of which he is a sovereign part: “Again, the Sovereign, being formed wholly of the individuals who compose it, neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs; and consequently the sovereign power need give no guarantee to its subjects, because it is impossible for the body to wish to hurt all its members. We shall see later on that it cannot hurt any in particular.”46 The extent to which Zunz drew his political inspiration from French rather than German luminaries is but another marker of his bracing independence. The speech was published and distributed in some six thousand copies.47 Zunz’s full-throated exposition of “The Principles of Democracy” over two sessions of the eighth Volksverein on September 20 and October 12, 1849, is a fabric of deep thought, arresting historical references, and memorable imagery. In between on October 4, the Volksverein elected Zunz as its chair.48 Despite the steady comeback of the old regime, Zunz spoke without inhibition. The police were never absent from political gatherings. On August 30, in fact, a police official had abruptly and without explanation ended a meeting of the eighth Volksverein as it debated a petition protesting a proposal of the Prussian upper house aimed at disbanding all civilian militias. Zunz drafted

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and submitted to the police presidium the next day a complaint in the name of the board that the act was unlawful and the policeman be admonished, if not punished. To fully appreciate the courage of Zunz’s abandon, the context in which he spoke must always be borne in mind.49 What prompted Zunz to launch into an analysis of the nature of democracy was the sense that not all who fervently wanted it had a clear idea of what they wanted. Accordingly, he contended that democracy rested on a tripod of principles including equality, coming of age (Mündigkeit), and togetherness. Once the idea is unfurled, it will surmount the forces arrayed against it. The church could not undo the astronomy of Galileo or crush the Protestantism of the rebellious Beggars in the Low Lands of the sixteenth century. The first principle of democracy, therefore, is equality, that is a total absence of privilege. Inequality evolves from five sources: descent, religion, race, labor, and wealth with the first three predetermined by birth, the last two less so. In scrutinizing them, Zunz’s sense of injustice rose to fever pitch. Among the consequences of religious hatred cited, Zunz condemned the denial in 1849 by the British House of Lords, with its bishops in the forefront, of a seat in the House of Commons to a duly elected Jew from London (Lionel de Rothschild) simply because he was a Jew. Slavery was particularly abhorrent to Zunz. Only among plantation owners and slavetraders does skin pass as a certificate of aristocracy: “Whoever has the misfortune of being an African Negro, that is to have black skin, is either kidnapped or brought as a slave to Christian America. Treated worse than animals, one quarter usually die in voyage. During the eight years from 1840 to the end of 1847, over 111,000 were murdered, that is 13,879 yearly. While with us, cholera, a fate decreed by heaven, takes every 18 weeks 3400 sacrifices, the black gold diggers [die schwarzen Geldseelen] in white color sacrifice without surcease 4800 innocent people every 18 weeks.”50 In sum, the law must treat all people equally, irrespective of pursuit or prosperity, recognizing God’s image in each one while proffering assistance to the many who are unfortunate.51 Equality for Zunz is largely a negative principle, underlining what the government cannot deprive one of. But democracy also requires the engaged commitment of every individual. Hence the unusual term “majority.” To acquire the practical, ethical, and intellectual ability to function in a democratic state takes education, experience, and maturity. Only time and effort will enable people to soften their selfishness, to value others and the general good, to bear no grudge and to think positively: “The nation that has come of age must not resemble the child who is still a minor, who when struck by a tree or a

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stone strikes the tree or stone, and once having done that, thinks the hindrance is removed. Forward! That is the watchword. No one should let his own wealth cause him to lose sight of the wealth of the nation.”52 Finally, a sense of togetherness, of shared destiny, is the culmination of the first two principles. Universal suffrage is the way the people express their will and determine the direction of the state. And once elected, legislators must transcend the wishes of their constituencies and heed the bidding of what’s good for everyone. The education, political culture, and individual integrity to foster the procedures and institutions indispensable for democracy can emerge only from persistent collective effort: “When the increasing maturity of the individual, his growing political sophistication and deepening ethical disposition awaken in ever widening circles an appreciation for the whole; when concern for the welfare of all stirs us as deeply as worry for what belongs to us; and when finally the nation internally operates on the basis of one for all and all for one, then will the fire of patriotism, the fire of national freedom burn in our breast and from this workshop, shared action will come forth as refined metal.”53 The end result will be a state governed by tranquility in which there are no officials with titles and subjects without rights, but only citizens devoted to the well-being of the whole.54 To be sure, Zunz’s lecture was redolent with lofty sentiments, yet its girders were a coherent political theory buttressed by apt historical evidence. He had set forth a blueprint for democracy at a time when the prospect for its construction out of a menagerie of suspicious and authoritarian states had faded from the horizon. With similar courage, Zunz spoke as a German patriot without hiding his Jewish identity. The roots of Zunz’s easy command of general history and Western political theory surely go back to his university days, as we have seen. No less formative though, were the eight years he toiled at the Haude- und Spenersche paper as its foreign correspondent. The drudgery of wading through tons of print must have left him with a massive amount of information on and a deep understanding of restoration Europe, even as it sharpened his eye for concrete data and telling details. In short, he came to his political activism with a well-stocked arsenal of knowledge, a set of well-honed journalistic skills, and a long-standing liberal bias. That equipment coupled with his conviction that genuine scholarship must be generative, somehow of benefit to humanity, made of Zunz the most political of all German Jewish scholars from 1818 to 1933. The components of his inner life were in constant ferment and cross-fertilization.55

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On April 6, 1848, the Prussian government, reeling from the barricades in Berlin and eager to calm the street, issued some liberal principles that would guide the crafting of the promised Prussian constitution. Among them stood out the declaration that henceforth the exercise of civil and political rights would no longer be encumbered by religious identity. That restrictive linkage had effectively revoked since 1822 the opening of academic appointments to qualified Jews as stipulated by Prussia’s emancipation of 1812.56 It was that intended change that induced Zunz to submit on July 25 to Adalbert Ladenberg in the Ministry of Religion a concise request to create in the philosophy faculty of the University of Berlin a full professorship in Jewish history and literature and to consider inviting him to fill it. Zunz stressed that the deliberations on the Jewry law of 1847 in the United Diet had been governed by a discourse that was utterly outdated and thoroughly bigoted. No other subject taken up by the Diet was marked by such a display of shameful ignorance: “No experts on Jewish matters were involved because scholarship like the Jews was confined to a ghetto. The ghetto has now been sprung but the banishment is still not lifted.”57 By November 1848 a committee of Berlin’s renowned professors—August Boeckh, with whom Zunz had studied, Leopold von Ranke, Julius Heinrich Petermann, and Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, the dean of the philosophy faculty at the time—returned to Ladenberg a decidedly unfavorable opinion. They lauded Zunz’s eagerness to have Jewish scholarship interface with general scholarship and lamented the ignorance that prevailed on the subject in the United Diet. But they rejected the pragmatic thrust of Zunz’s argument as a violation of the university’s value-free ethos. A history of discrimination does not constitute a valid reason for creating a professorship. Moreover, equality has now been extended to the Jews and there is every expectation that they will soon cease being a foreign political entity. To their credit, they no longer wish to remain a state within a state with their own off-putting laws and practices. Assimilation will effect their eventual integration, and the last thing the university should do is support and strengthen Jewish identity, thereby perpetuating Jewish apartness. Basically, the university had no professorship for subfields. The generic fields of history, philosophy, antiquity, and Orientalism were each covered by a single full professor. The goal of the university was to graduate well-rounded generalists with an appreciation for research and an understanding of the nature and history of each field. The subfields were addressed at the level of research by students writing a second dissertation (Habilitationsschrift) to qualify

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to teach as a lecturer (Privatdozent). It was within that template that the committee welcomed the instruction and research for which Zunz was calling. Subfields needed to sprout from the bottom up. Above all, the university did not want to be an academic training ground for rabbis: “The bearers of the Jewish religion are a priestly caste. To train priests or rabbis is a task for seminaries, not universities, and most certainly not for a philosophy faculty which, unbound by dogma, pursues scholarship with a spirit of free inquiry. Should Jewish philosophy demand of a philosophy faculty to take up the thought of a Philo or Maimonides, that does not require creating a professorship anymore than it would for Arabic or scholastic thought. Even Greek philosophy, the most original of all, does not enjoy such a privilege.”58 In retrospect, Zunz had made his move too early. He must have known that structurally and ideologically the Prussian university was not readily amenable to the inclusion of new fields and disciplines. His cause would have been better served if he had cast his plea in terms of value-free scholarship rather than as an aid to fairer legislation on matters Jewish. And yet this substantive rebuke was not wholly unsympathetic. The committee did not rule out the pursuit of Jewish scholarship at the lower rungs of the academic ladder, and it would be that opening, counter to the wishes of the committee, that would encourage ever more rabbinical students seeking the nimbus of a doctorate to write dissertations on Jewish subjects. In due time, not only did a doctorate become emblematic of the rabbinate in all three of Germany’s religious movements, but the shared academic ethos of critical scholarship in both the seminary and the university preserved the German rabbinate as a learned profession.59 Notwithstanding, the rejection of several requests to create lecturerships in facets of Judaica in Berlin in 1850 and 1853 underscored the tenacious ambivalence in the Prussian government to act on its professed liberal principles.60 Unbeknown to Zunz, Geiger was impelled by the sudden change in political climate to also seek a full professorship in Jewish literature at the University of Breslau. In 1847 Geiger had been in Berlin to lobby the first United Diet on its pending Jewry law and used the occasion to visit Zunz. Time seemed to have alleviated their estrangement, for back in Breslau he reported to his intimate friend and gifted pedagogue Jakob Auerbach, “with Zunz I had a highly interesting discussion. He greeted me in the old manner as a friend and also again when I left.”61 With the eruption of violence, however, their views were to diverge politically as they had religiously and Judaically. Geiger was a man of the middle and an avowed moderate. To another close

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friend and rabbinic colleague, Bernhard Wechsler, he described himself in the midst of the turmoil: “You know that I am not a person who lives in and for the moment. But rather one who always draws together the present with the past and the future, and therein finds his equilibrium, because he does not let himself be swept away by overheated hopes anymore than driven to despair of all success.”62 Geiger favored reform, but feared revolution, which unleashed the passions and defied good judgment. Reality cannot be altered overnight.63 Genuine reform is a gradual process. In marked contrast to Zunz, Geiger was not a democrat. He chided the democrats for abstaining from the elections to the Erfurt Parliament in early 1850 called by Frederick William to revise a Prussian constitution he thought too liberal and to lay the groundwork for a semblance of union among the German states. Geiger was ready to settle for what was attainable rather than to hold out for the ideal.64 Similarly, he parted company with them on the issue of the separation of church and state. Unregulated, religious institutions were prone to the vagaries of silver-tongued orators. Constitutional government that rested on the will of the people, Geiger believed, was a trustworthy oversight agency.65 Given these political differences, the tone of Geiger’s petition to the minister of religion on December 18, 1849, is softer and more tactful, making its case in academic rather than political terms. While the new field of postbiblical Jewish literature was already taught by associate professors in the Austrian universities of Vienna and Prague, it was entirely overlooked in Berlin, though Christianity in both its iterations was fully covered. The omission of Jewish literature also ran counter to the university’s mandate to study the full gamut of human knowledge, within which literature was surely not the least creative or important: “While the literature of the most remote nations, even if isolated and without influence on the course of humankind, enjoy[s] consideration and a presence at the universities, one literature stands orphaned that has intersected mightily in the course of the education of humanity, the knowledge of which would throw open for the first time an understanding of the contemporary cultural condition of the Jews— a tribe repeatedly discussed, often misunderstood and disdained, yet impossible to ignore, given how deep are its roots in the veins of our country.” At the end, Geiger suggested himself to fill the position and added a curriculam vitae that highlighted the contribution of his numerous philological studies to the illumination of texts critical to the history of Christianity and Islam. Despite his care, forethought, and renown there is no

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evidence that Geiger’s answer was any different than that of Zunz. The initiative went unmentioned in Ludwig Geiger’s superb biography and bibliography of his father.66 The Prussian government displayed as little interest in the acquisition of Jewish manuscripts and rare books for its libraries as in academic appointments for scholars of Jewish studies at its universities. On June 10, 1846, the sudden death of Heimann Joseph Michael at age fifty-four in Hamburg deprived Zunz of a cherished friend, master of medieval Jewish literature, and discerning collector of its scattered remains. The pain of that loss still echoed in the language of his Monatstage (1872), when he spoke personally of Michael as “having been torn from our midst on that day.”67 In his foreword to Steinschneider’s hastily prepared printed cata logue of Michael’s collection, Zunz tenderly eulogized his little-known comrade in arms as one of those men “about whom no one has heard while quietly at work, only to realize at their death what they had accomplished in seclusion.”68 According to the catalogue, the collection comprised 862 manuscripts, which included some 1,300 individual texts and works and 5,471 printed books. Sixty of the manuscripts were autographs and  30 of the books were incunabula printed before 1493.69 A year before Michael’s death, Zunz praised his private collection as the greatest of its kind in existence.70 Zunz discovered Michael’s library on an extended trip to Wolfenbüttel, Kassel, Bielefeld, and Hamburg during the summer of 1832 after completing the manuscript of Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge. As we saw, he was out of Berlin when the Prussian censor took offense at his foreword. In Hamburg, Meyer Isler introduced him to Michael, who immediately enabled Zunz to spend September poring over his treasures. For a few years the two had been childhood playmates in Hamburg, where Michael was born in 1792 and to which Zunz’s parents moved in 1795.71 In his letter of thanks, delayed by an illness that confined Adelheid to her bed and room for three weeks after they had returned home, Zunz could hardly contain his joy at Michael’s companionship, generosity, and learning, often dispensed at the expense of his own work. Now that Zunz could at last go back to his research, he realized just how much he missed Michael’s library. Berlin lacked anything comparable and Zunz did not have the funds to travel to other important repositories. In fact, currently unemployed (not long before, he had given up his job at the Haude- und Spenersche Zeitung) and with slim employment prospects in Berlin, he was ready to move to Hamburg. Unabashedly, he asked if Michael could find him a job as someone’s amanuensis.

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A weekly salary of 25 marks (1,300 a year) would be minimally sufficient. God would provide the rest. Most of all, aside from a modicum of status, the job must grant a third to half of the day for his own research. Despite the overriding practical agenda, Zunz did not fail to conclude this first letter of their fourteen-year correspondence with several scholarly questions.72 Michael was not a rabbi, but a successful businessman, whose wealth facilitated his love of learning. A gifted and zealous autodidact, Michael spent long hours of study in his youth, which left his health impaired and his biographical dictionary of medieval sages with 1,230 packed entries unfinished. Forty-five years after his death, Adolf Berliner regarded its meticulous, reliable, and unsurpassed research still worthy of publication.73 In 1907 he also published what survived of the Michael-Zunz correspondence, conducted in German but written in Hebrew script. Their shared commitment proved invaluable to Zunz and he never failed to acknowledge his indebtedness.74 Thus, as we have seen, his knowledge of Reuveni’s diary derived solely from the manuscript in Michael’s collection, about which Michael had informed him at length.75 His knowledge of Azariah de Rossi’s answer to his religious critics (Metsaref la-Kesef [The Purification of Silver]) also came from Michael, who had the manuscript in Azariah’s own hand.76 Michael’s presence, however, was most conspicuous in Zunz’s cultural history of medieval Jewry, prompting special mention in his foreword: “I feel especially indebted to Mr. Michael for the readiness with which he allowed me to use his library and to consult his biographical studies, not to speak of our highly instructive correspondence over many years.”77 When he came to write the nearly 150year history of Hebrew printing in Prague later in the volume, Zunz pointed out that between a quarter to a third of those volumes were to be found in Michael’s collection.78 These multiple acknowledgments were meant not only to repay Michael for his largess but also to prod him to publish. In a letter dated November 19, 1844, Zunz poignantly admonished his friend: “My esteemed friend, your two letters with news of the recent enrichment of your library left me more sad than happy. Of what benefit are all these treasures, if they go unused? And of what value is our short life if nothing remains for the world? . . . A lovely cata logue of your manuscripts and books or a volume of your history of authors, from which I myself have already learned so much, would be something that the world could use and give you a sense that you have not lived in vain.”79 Michael’s unexpected death then not only hit Zunz with a grievous personal loss but loomed as yet another setback for Wissenschaft des Judentums

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in Germany. Zunz was acutely mindful that in the 1820s neither Jewish nor government money was forthcoming to keep the unique and renowned private collection of David Oppenheimer with its 4,500 printed books and 780 manuscripts in Germany, when it was purchased in 1829 by the Bodleian Library in Oxford.80 Upon news of Michael’s demise, Zunz sprang into action to prevent a similar loss. On June 23, 1846, he wrote Isler in Hamburg, who was equally distressed by the prospect, that the only realistic source of funding would be the Prussian government. Unlike Isler, Zunz put no stock in the emergence of a Jewish Maecenas or in a direct appeal to the Jewish public.81 But before approaching the government, Zunz needed to know from Isler with whom to get in touch regarding the asking price, whether a price had already been fi xed, and if any offers had been tendered. At the same time, Isler on his own issued a general appeal on the front page of the cultural section of Der Orient to acquire the Michael collection for the public library of Hamburg, which already held the largest number of Jewish manuscripts in Germany and where Isler had just begun to work: “It is now nearly 20 years since 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 for its Jews in particular, that this collection should remain here.”82 By the end of July, Zunz was satisfied with the rough handwritten catalogue he had received from Isler. It gave him the information he needed for his proposal, though it was not yet suitable for submission: “For this purpose we will need a properly printed cata logue or one written clearly in square Hebrew characters,” which would not be ready for another two years.83 Zunz dared not wait. The threat of an offer from England was overriding. He had secured an expression of interest in the collection from the Royal Library in Berlin and by August 17 submitted his request to Prussia’s minister of education and religion, J. A. F. Eichhorn. Most of the request consisted of a wellinformed description of the library’s holdings on which Zunz put a price tag of 17,000 talers. As to the value of this library to Prussia, Zunz stressed that its size, scope, and many rarities would give rise to a body of scholarship that would finally lay to rest the ingrained, outdated, and erroneous perceptions of Judaism still abroad in Germany: “The more outdated books and others are still being copied in the field of Jewish knowledge, the more often people

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step forward with isolated quotations snatched from nowhere, the more urgently do we need better research aids. Only in this way will works be possible, which are inconceivable without such research aids. We will not move beyond what is outdated without such fresh and thorough study of the sources.”84 In other words, a new epistemology of Judaism was the necessary foundation for the emancipation of the Jews. Without it, social integration would always lag behind legal status. It took Eichhorn exactly three short days to respond negatively to Zunz’s request: “I cannot take up the purchase of the library.”85 Behind his curt, cold, and swift rebuff may have been his preoccupation with the preparation of the government’s draft for a new Judengesetz to be submitted to the United Diet, though the convergence of matters political and academic should have induced him to ponder the linkage more deeply. In any case, Zunz’s fear came to fruition in 1848. Thanks to the adroit management of Adolf Asher, a dominant figure in the international book trade, who had purchased the collection to resell, Michael’s books went to the British Museum and his manuscripts to the Bodleian, transforming Eng land into the undisputed Mecca for serious practitioners of critical Jewish scholarship.86 As Zunz rushed forth in 1848 to do battle with the ancien régime, his financial base fell apart. The teachers’ seminary in Berlin proved to be a shortlived haven. Its closure to his credit neither ended nor diluted the intensity of his political activity. By the beginning of 1850 reports emanated from Berlin in Der Orient that the seminary’s demise was retribution for Zunz’s radical politics.87 The explanation seemed plausible enough: his politics had cost him the support of the plutocrats at the helm of the Gemeinde. The facts, however, belie the appearance. According to Zunz’s diary, the board of the Gemeinde made the decision to close the seminary on August 24, 1848, effective January 1, 1849. At a meeting of the school board on February 22, 1849, it approved the pending shutdown and informed Zunz that it regarded him as unsuited to give his students the practical education they needed to succeed, as if he bore at least some of the responsibility for the closing.88 But correspondence from the early years of the seminary confirms that Zunz enjoyed his students’ respect and devotion. On his birthday on August 10, 1841, moved by their esteem and gratitude, they thanked him for being their “ father, benefactor and teacher,” monikers that suggest intimacy rather than eminence. Nearly two years later, eight of his students encouraged by his ready accessibility asked him for a course on

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the history of Jewish literature, the knowledge of which they thought critical to both their personal and professional lives.89 What did occur in January 1849 was that the Gemeinde board ceased paying Zunz’s salary, which by year’s end had still gone unpaid. By January 27, 1853, nothing had changed. Neither Zunz nor Lebrecht, the core faculty of the seminary, had received their unpaid salaries from the final year nor their promised pension. For Zunz that totaled 2,100 talers, which he opined sarcastically, must have helped to reduce the community’s annual, cumulative deficit. The shabby treatment of both men by Germany’s largest and wealthiest Jewish community, he added bitterly, was surely without parallel. In closing his letter, Zunz instructed the board that if it secured funds to pay only one of them now, “I implore you to take care of Mr.  Lebrecht first and to forget about me for a while.” Not before 1855 did the board agree to a final settlement with Zunz in which the pension would kick in only that year, hence not making up for all that Zunz had lost during the interval.90 The importance of these pathos-filled letters is that they point to the real reason that sealed the seminary’s fate: the Berlin Gemeinde simply ran out of money to sustain it. As early as 1847 in the wake of the Judengesetz, the Jewish community in Berlin began to experience a precipitous decline in its revenue. The uprisings in 1848 weakened the communal bonds still further, delayed the necessary reorganization of communal governance, and muted government oversight. The confirmed promise of individual emancipation in the Prussian constitution of December 5, 1848, triggered the need to rethink the scope and purpose of the organized Jewish community. Amid the confusion, cohesion plummeted. Secular members on principle ceased paying their communal taxes as did the members of the Reform fellowship, which sought incorporation as a separate Gemeinde from the government. Many others simply exited out of indifference.91 To counter the Gemeinde board’s decision, the seminary’s lay leadership invoked its rising number of applications, its need for a larger facility to accommodate them and its singular national mission. Zunz weighed in as well as he informed his surrogate cousins Philipp and Julie on March 23, 1849: The seminary is till now only theoretically closed. It functions as before, though without the admission of a second class. All teachers are still being paid. As headmaster, I could still pull that off. For myself, I could not and dared not intervene. At the moment a committee charged with drafting regulations for the election of

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new [communal] officers is at work. Once there are officers, then we will have somebody with whom to negotiate. Given the dubious nature of all matters right now, it is hard to say if the seminary will survive in its present form. If not, perhaps I will find employment in some other way. I am still drawing my 300 talers as a consultant to the Gemeinde. Since I anticipated disruptions like this one, I have been able from time to time with the help of my Adelheid to set aside some money for a rainy day.92 To no avail. With no new students in 1848, the die was cast, bringing the ten-year history of the teachers’ seminary to a premature and ignominious close. The instability in the orga nized community in Berlin was surely the proximate cause for its downfall, but the long-term cause for its failure to attain the national stature originally envisioned by Zunz and Veit had every thing to do with the parochial mind-set of German Jews, who were as fragmented religiously as were their German compatriots nationally. Whether he liked it or not, Zunz’s welfare was tethered to the solidity of the Berlin Jewish community. In 1845 he had persuaded its board to put him on a retainer of 300 talers to serve as its scholar in residence. Innumerable times over the past two decades the leadership had solicited him to place his unique expertise at its ser vice in time of need. Zunz’s strapped financial circumstances prompted him now to ask the board to turn that piecework into permanent, if part-time employment. He could no longer meet his expenses on a salary of 700 talers as seminary director supplemented by another 200 talers for housing. The cost of purchasing books and manuscripts, traveling for research, and conducting his global correspondence exceeded the funds at his disposal. But as so often, Zunz articulated a mundane matter with a conceptual formulation of resounding importance. Critical scholarship was hardly a luxury for a Jewish community buffeted by indifference and religious polarization from within and venomous hostility from without. Rarely had the social benefit of authentic scholarship been more eloquently stated: If it is true that every group [Gesammtheit] exists to the extent that it has a sense of itself, that it knows what it is, wants and should be, then there is no group in greater need to have constant clarity on crucial matters regarding its existence than the Jews. A sufficient answer, however, can only come from critical scholarship, deep reflection about the fundamentals of Judaism and serious, nonpartisan research

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into its history. Only when we have been instructed about the origin and gradual development of the religious institutions transmitted to us by our ancestors can we come to a conclusion whether to preserve them or adjust them to the altered needs of the age. Surrounded by hostile forces which berate us just for staying loyal to our religion, it is only through critical scholarship that we can present the authentic content of our religious life. It is only with its help that we can thoroughly refute the countless charges, prejudices and distortions that are often trotted out against us with a sheen of deep learning. The critical study of Judaism is far from being an unnecessary luxury. It has for Jews and Judaism an immediate practical side. If indeed educated people have ignominiously undervalued critical scholarship, then Jews by virtue of ignoring the critical study and grounding of Judaism violate the most fundamental of duties, the duty of self-preservation.93 But the retainer could not offset the loss of Zunz’s basic salary and housing allowance, despite the sangfroid with which he had reported his plight to Philipp and Julie. The closing of the seminary was a saga that unfolded in full view of the public. Many must have sensed the precariousness and humiliation to which Zunz was inadvertently subjected. On December 25, 1849, Steinschneider conveyed the pathos of Zunz’s circumstances to Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, Germany’s leading young Orientalist in Leipzig, mentor to many Jewish students including Steinschneider, and Zunz’s admirer: “The local Jewish seminary will close by Easter, because the community 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 Hapsburg regency had fallen with the failure of the Frankfurt parliament).”94 Among the noteworthy features of Zunz’s political career was that it did not end in 1850 with the triumph of the counterrevolution. As democrats fled into exile, Zunz fell silent to resume his dormant scholarship. But that inner emigration ended in the 1860s when political activity began to revive. Zunz spoke publicly in a political vein at least five times between 1860 and 1865.95 His commitment to education for citizenship had not lessened nor had his espousal of democratic ideals. Fearless as ever, Zunz continued to speak with unalloyed independence. In the spirit of Rousseau, he stressed again what the individual had to do to become a boon to society. Key to that evolution is the ability to earn a living. Someone who disdains the effort to become compe-

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tent and find contentment in his work and livelihood will rarely mature into a full human being and active citizen: “How can we expect that a person who has failed to figure out a small challenge will be able to handle a big one?”96 And the task of the citizen is to generate the greatest good for the greatest number. To bear in mind how he can contribute to the common good, he must cultivate an inner disposition that combines an appreciation for what the Greeks called the good and the beautiful, a sense of justice, and a love of humanity. Wherever that disposition is at work, history moves forward. Speaking in 1862, Zunz closed by citing the ongoing Civil War in America, “which is being punished because a large part of its population dismissed a love of humanity and a love of country in order to make money. If that struggle should be brought to a fruitful conclusion, then ethical passion must be its root and a strong sense of justice, the trunk of its tree. A competent individual can only arise wrapped in all three relationships: a child marked by purity of soul, an adolescent who cherishes work and an adult capable of participating in the body politic. Only in tandem will they give assurance for a state of law [Rechtsstaat].”97 The other persona manifest in Zunz’s later addresses was Henry Thomas Buckle, whom we have met before, whose two-volume unfinished History of Civilization in England seemed to confirm Zunz’s methodological anticipation of comprehensive history.98 What excited Zunz about Buckle politically was his global vision, liberal politics, embrace of skepticism, and view of the role of knowledge as the key to human progress. Accordingly, he sought to show that “the growth of European civilization (and that of England in particular) was solely due to the progress of knowledge and that the progress of knowledge depended on the number of truths which the human intellect discovers and on the extent they are diff used.”99 These ideas animated Zunz’s address on “Revolution” of July 1865, a word associated with “democrat” in the political lexicon of the time.100 Mentioning Buckle by name, Zunz admitted that we still lack a world history that would account for the fate of nations in terms of the silent revolutions effected in their midst by the discovery and diff usion of new ideas: “ Invisible revolutions are nothing but intellectual acts. New inventions and discoveries effect major changes in every manner of life and travel, as well as in the mores and needs of people and nations. Untold numbers of things undergo change because ideas and things are inextricably linked. Th ings attached to outmoded ideas go under, replaced by new ideas, with the whole process unfolding unnoticed over many generations.”101

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The upshot of this discourse was to highlight the nexus between two different modes of change: the silent revolutions of mind that eventually erupt into bloody social conflict. The seeds of the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were sown by Hus and Luther long before. When their ideas became the guarded possessions of the people, they rose to demand freedom of thought and speech from the repressive authorities of church and state. Closer to his own day, Zunz heralded the principles of freedom and equality unfurled by the French Revolution that shook the entrenched privileges of the aristocracy and the church and in time became the legacy of a large swath of Europe. Yet Zunz never lost sight of the link between the individual and the nation: “This is in fact the remarkable attribute of the human spirit, that by virtue of struggle it gains victory over the group as in the life of the individual. The more a person has refashioned himself to yield an ethical and intellectual good, the more instructive, interesting, fruitful and beneficial does his life become for the group and humanity.”102 The individual then is the engine for both the advances and setbacks of progress. It is the lonely intellectual adventurer who lays bare the lies and errors of institutional oppression, and its unfettered, scarred victims in times of revolution often propel the revolution to acts of barbaric extremism. In sum, revolutions are the product of ideas, enunciated at first by isolated warriors. When finally internalized by the group, words turn into deeds, as they did so strikingly in the just concluded Civil War in America: The most grand and terrible [instance of truth triumphant] we have recently witnessed in the victory of the Union. Years ago some already insisted that if America fails to do away with slavery, the institution would destroy it. Realizing this, Americans mustered the energy to risk every thing to reconcile the freedom of its citizens with the freedom of human beings, because they had adopted a constitution that extended the freedom of all human beings also to the Negro. . . . The great victory, eventually achieved in this frightful revolution, emerged gradually from fresh ideas regarding human worth and economic life, the welfare of the state and the equality of all human beings in defiance of all the prejudices that were operative at the time.103 Zunz’s global vision animated his scholarship as well as his politics. Both were cut from the same humanistic fabric. Toward the end of a pioneering

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essay on the history of the Jews in Sicily, Zunz tarried for a moment to elicit the undertone of consolation that he detected in the date that brought down the curtain on the millennial history of the Jews in Spain: “The day of departure on which the temporary delay (of three months) for Spanish Jewry ended, the 2nd of August 1492, was the fast day of Tisha be-Av, long stamped as a day of calamity. But with the very next day consolation arrived, though inaudible to those in agony: on the 3rd of August, Columbus set sail to discover a new world and a new freedom.”104 The conjoining of these disparate events was surely a remarkable instance of historical imagination.105 In retrospect, Zunz’s popular lectures of the 1860s exhibited an unbroken continuity of spirit and scope with the sentiments unabashedly expressed at the height of the revolution. The fervor and euphoria of 1848–50 were not the passing, if furious, reaction to an upheaval of massive proportions, but the forceful articulation of deeply held political convictions. While Zunz’s scholarship was quintessentially German, his politics paradoxically were distinctly French and English. Similarly fraught were the avowed universalism of his political thought and the uncompromising particularism of his scholarship. These antipodes, though, were not the inconsistencies of a reclusive scholar, but rather the settled strategy of a militant centrist determined to keep polarities bravely in balance.

chapter 7

Poetry and Persecution

With the suppression of the revolution and the restoration of order in Berlin, Zunz threw himself back into his massive historical study of the liturgy of the synagogue. Despite the soldiers quartered in his home, Zunz distanced himself from the events of the day.1 He wrote to Philipp and Julie on December 5, 1850, that he no longer read any newspaper. He was now living half in the past and half in the future and dismissed the all-important happenings around him as frivolities.2 Yet it was by no means clear how without employment he would manage to sustain a household. The death of Ruben Samuel Gumpertz on March 9, 1851, provided him with unexpected relief.3 Born in 1769, Gumpertz was a second cousin to Zunz (their fathers were the sons of sisters) and in his will left him a bequest of 1,000 talers, enough to live on frugally for two years. When Zunz visited him a few days before he died, Gumpertz gave him as well an edition of the Talmud printed in Amsterdam that had once belonged to Philipp Samson, who had founded the Talmud school in Wolfenbüttel to which Leopold was sent after the death of his father. Samson was also the father of Gumpertz’s wife.4 Nearly thirty-nine years earlier Gumpertz had given Zunz a less valuable set of the Talmud printed in Berlin along with unbound volumes of Herder which cost him three and a half talers to bind.5 Though Gumpertz’s estate came to no more than 400,000 to 500,000 talers, according to Zunz’s information, as a young banker he lent Berlin’s merchant guild 40,000 talers to build a new stock exchange.6 Zunz regarded him as the last representative of the Mendelssohn-Friedländer era.7 By 1809 Gumpertz had already become an active member of the board of the Berlin Jewish community and an advocate for emancipation and religious reform. Gumpertz’s influence certainly helped launch Zunz on his abortive career as

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a preacher in Berlin.8 Both men, moreover, shared a vitriolic disdain for the contemporary embodiment of the traditional rabbinate, which Gumpertz enunciated in 1820 in his notorious opinion to the Saxon government that rabbis were little more than supervisors of Judaism’s dietary laws (Kauscherwächter), and Zunz reiterated in his 1846 memorandum to the Prussian government when he counseled the omission of the title and office of rabbi from the pending Judengesetz.9 Gumpertz was both a collector of rare Jewish books and a consumer of Jewish knowledge. He attended the courses that Zunz offered to the public and bought tickets that went unsold to augment the instructor’s slight income.10 In 1836 Zunz dedicated his commissioned study on Jewish names to his cousin, whose name appeared therein, signing it “with esteem and affection.”11 In 1844 when Zunz sent him his essay on circumcision, Gumpertz responded wittily with a mixture of disbelief, admiration, and support. Had it been written in Hebrew he would have thought it to be the work of the medieval German pietist Yehuda he-Hasid (twelfth century). Substantively, he agreed with Zunz’s stance but lacked the courage to express it. He cautioned Zunz to brace himself for the floodtide of criticism that would surely come his way.12 Deteriorating health caused Gumpertz in August 1845 to end the Sabbath meals with friends that he had hosted for years in his home. Both Zunz and his colleague on the seminary faculty, Fürchtegott Lebrecht, attended faithfully. The latter also prepared the cata logue of Gumpertz’s valuable library.13 When Zunz tried to raise 7,000 talers to purchase the manuscripts of Michael’s library as a gift to the royal library in Berlin, Gumpertz quickly proffered 1,000 talers.14 With his death, Zunz lamented the loss of yet another private library vital for his research.15 Berlin had long been the destination of young Jews who wished to pursue the emerging field of Jewish scholarship, and by 1850 their organization included a critical mass of aspiring rabbis and teachers. On October 9, its board approached Zunz as the founder of the field to enrich the membership with some formal instruction. He happily obliged it with a course on the history of Jewish literature that began on October 24, attracting eighteen students and meeting twice weekly until March 31, 1851.16 After a break for Passover, he resumed on May 8, teaching this time until the end of July. Yet a third round of thirty-four lectures began in December 1852 and ran until March 31, 1853.17 By then Zunz had been joined by Sachs, who taught a course on the biblical book of Proverbs, and Heinrich Graetz, who lectured on Jewish history.

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Graetz had arrived in Berlin in September 1852.18 At age thirty-five he was recently married, the father of a baby girl, and out of work. His directorship of the Jewish school in Lundenberg (Moravia) ended with its closing. His relationship with Samson Raphael Hirsch, his mentor and then chief rabbi of Moravia, had also unraveled.19 The stay in Berlin, though, proved to be brief and productive. He secured Veit’s agreement to publish the first volume of his Geschichte der Juden (A History of the Jews— actually vol. 4, 1853) and an invitation from Frankel and his trustees to join the faculty of their Jewish Theological Seminary about to be opened in Breslau.20 Joseph Lehmann, a friend of Zunz from the days of the Verein, a railroad magnate, and editor of Das Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes (Periodical for Foreign Literature) had approached Graetz in Berlin on behalf of the board. He also provided the board with a vivid, firsthand description of scholarly talent: Every evening between 7 and 8, in the building of the Boys’ School of the Jewish community, a lecture is delivered before Jewish divinity students, Dr. Zunz lecturing on rabbinic literature, Dr. Graetz on Jewish history and Dr. Sachs on the Proverbs of Solomon. The lectures are well attended by about 25 or 30 prospective rabbis, who take notes industriously, and by a dozen Jewish scholars who come as visitors [Hospitanten]. . . . Zunz was obviously making an inspiring impression upon his audience; his dry subject was rendered spicy by piquant observations on Eisenmenger and Karpzow, Wagenseil and Richard Simon, and not a few innuendoes touching the present. In the evening I heard Sachs, he had just begun the introduction to the exegesis of Proverbs. It seemed to me on the whole that he was a little too abstruse, although there was no dearth of beautiful thoughts expressed in a manner still more beautiful. Dr. Graetz is a young man much praised by competent judges. Report says that his lectures bristle with new data and results; I myself have not heard him. He is said to have lived in Breslau at one time, and he came here from Lundenburg, his last residence, at the suggestion of Dr. Sachs. The institution of these three lecture courses on six evenings was proposed by the school trustees of the Jewish community. They have appropriated the means for carrying them on (about 1200 Reichstaler) from the legacy fund of the Talmud Torah School. Their right to do this has been contested in certain quarters, but for

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the present they are supported by the authorization of the communal directors and the approval of the intelligent [sic].21 It was in the context of this convergence that Zunz and Graetz first met, giving rise to an emblematic story that augured the start of a prickly relationship. When Sachs had occasion to introduce Graetz to Zunz, he added that Graetz was about to publish a book on Jewish history, to which Zunz retorted acerbically, “Another history of the Jews?” Unabashed, Graetz fired back, “Yes, but this time a Jewish history!”22 Zunz’s impatience clearly sprang from an intolerance for surveys bereft of spadework. Thus when Steinschneider departed on April 29, 1850, on the first of his five trips to the Bodleian Library at Oxford to begin compiling a new cata logue of its Hebrew books printed before 1732, Zunz took note of his departure in his diary, recalling wistfully his own first and only working visit in August 1828 to the great library of David Oppenheimer, then in Hamburg but soon to be acquired by the Bodleian. Like Steinschneider, Zunz added, he too was thirty-four, just a few weeks older than his protégé.23 The following summer as Steinschneider began studding Zunz’s work with invaluable new data, Zunz wrote enviously that “you are sitting at the fountain for which I thirsted in days long ago.”24 In 1858 as Steinschneider’s multivolume cata logue neared publication, Graetz wrote to him on May 14, asking to favor him with a copy for six to eight weeks. He had just completed a new volume of his history covering the period from the end of the Talmud to Maimonides on the basis of the primary and secondary sources available to him: “The research which you have deposited in your catalogue for the Bodleian is, as you can imagine, unknown to me. But you like me and the learned public must regret that the treasures that you have uncovered at the fountainhead of Jewish literature remain buried in an inaccessible cata logue rather than becoming a blessing for all and a fertilizing spore for new research.”25 Graetz assured Steinschneider that he would acknowledge by name whatever he might cite from his work. Two weeks later, not having heard from Steinschneider, he wrote again more insistently: “It would pain me greatly to have to inform the public in the foreword to my book that I was unable to avail myself of your findings.”26 While there is no evidence that Steinschneider granted Graetz’s second request, Graetz did omit any put-down of him as threatened in the foreword to his new volume published in 1860. Instead, he took a swipe at Zunz, whom Steinschneider revered and cherished, with an impulsive and gratuitous slap that he would come to regret. Graetz also prided himself on using only

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primary sources, yet found Zunz’s work which swarmed with them of little help: “Dr.  Zunz’s more bewildering than illuminating heaps of notes and arid lists of names hardly facilitated my work.”27 Graetz’s slight may also have been provoked by Steinschneider’s encomium to Zunz in 1857. After nine years of hard labor, he completed the second section of his ambitious catalogue, which registered 3,460 authors and their works with the entry on Zunz as the last. In gratitude for the seminal contributions of Zunz’s scholarship and steadfast counsel in the production of his vast compendium, Steinschneider decided to honor his sixty-third birthday with a separate pamphlet of that entry entitled Die Schriften des Dr. L. Zunz. His footnotes provided this first bibliography of Zunz’s writings with added value, and the closing tribute from his 1846 review of Zur Geschichte und Literatur reprinted on the dedicatory page saluted Zunz as the indomitable pioneer of critical Jewish scholarship.28 In contrast, Graetz’s antagonism toward Zunz comingled with his anger at Steinschneider burst forth in a welter of criticism on specific issues in his preliminary essays meant to ground the geographic and chronological swath of volume 5. When volume 7 of Graetz’s Geschichte appeared in 1863, Zunz admitted to Philipp and Julie that he no longer took notice: “I only know that [his work] does not suffer from reliability.”29 No one other than his beloved Adelheid meant more to Zunz than his fatherly friend Samuel Ehrenberg, who died unexpectedly and peacefully on October 21, 1853, a few days past his eightieth birthday.30 In 1846 he had had the joy of seeing his son Philipp succeed him as the director of the Samson Free School, which he had led for thirty-nine years.31 Some two years before in his history of the institution, Philipp had caught in a line the significance of his father’s achievement: “The history of the Samson Free School is in miniature the cultural history of the Jews during the last 50 years.”32 During his tenure 211 youngsters were admitted and twenty-seven confirmations conducted. In 1807 Zunz had been the first. Not only did Ehrenberg introduce this new rite of passage into north-central Germany, but since 1827 he had expanded it to include girls.33 His redemption of Zunz and Jost from “purgatory” surely made him also the godfather of the Wissenschaft movement. For all his openness to the values of modernity, though, Ehrenberg never relinquished his love of the Hebrew language. In 1851 he completed a history in Hebrew of Rome up to Constantine on which he had worked for forty years.34 Failure to find a publisher did not deject or deter him. He immediately began a Hebrew translation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which he finished three months before his death.35

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An educator of compassion, grace, and gravitas, Ehrenberg filled the void in Zunz’s life created by the death of his father in 1802, while his home and family offered Zunz the emotional haven lost when he left his mother in 1803 to come to Wolfenbüttel. The bonds of affection extended to the next generation. Leopold arranged in January 1847 for Philipp to meet Julie Fischel and her family, whom the Zunzes had befriended during their abortive stay in Prague in 1835–36, and when informed of their engagement, Leopold shared with Julie what the announcement meant to him: “What affects the Fischels and Ehrenbergs affects me also. Now since the two of you have become one, I will sink 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.” Adelheid would come to love Julie like the daughter she never had.36 But there was another Julie in the Ehrenberg family, Philipp’s sister, who died on February 6, 1847, a few days after giving birth to a daughter. On February 9, the day Zunz had written to Julie Fischel, Philipp wrote to him to break the devastating news: “This letter is a sad one, but I cannot spare you the pain. You share every thing with us, in joy and sorrow. At the very same moment that I happily bring the one Julie into our family circle, the other Julie leaves us. The contrast doubles the impact of the awful pain.”37 Leopold received Philipp’s letter on the 10th and immediately sent Samuel an eloquent and heartfelt letter of condolence, pleading with him not to forget that in Berlin there are also hearts that beat for him like children for their father.38 On August 11, 1847, in Prague, Zunz and Rapoport officiated at Philipp and Julie’s wedding.39 On October 29, 1853, Philipp asked Zunz, who had known his father for forty-seven years, whether he could not compose a modest biography that he would publish at his expense. By February 12, 1854, Zunz sent back his finished manuscript, a down payment on a debt that could never be repaid.40 The deeply felt reverence with which Zunz marshaled his memories is intimated in the uncharacteristically grandiloquent opening words of the biography: To observe a life withdrawn from the bustle of the world flowing quietly, refreshingly and fruitfully, grants the soul a plea sure akin to beholding nature in its noiseless but ceaseless activity. In the presence of both we are captivated by wondrous forces and harmonious events. While in the latter [we witness] the work of an unknown, steadfast hand, in the former we stand before the workshop

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of a spirit taking in its fragrant love. Whoever on his journey has revived himself by a spring, resting under the shade of a tree and eating of its fruit, whoever at the start of life has felt the blessed hand of a noble soul on his head who remains ever by his side [offering] wise admonishment or counsel born of life-experience both of which are always [imbued] with sincerity and love, such an individual is no longer a merely a curious onlooker of nature or an eavesdropping psychologist. Rather he humbly bows in gratitude for the good deeds bestowed , and rises at the sight of such ethical perfection to express a fraction of his gratitude with a personal portrait.41 Samuel David Luzzatto was as critical to Zunz for his research on medieval Hebrew poetry as Ehrenberg was for his emotional well-being. The two were not to meet till 1863 when Zunz visited him in Padua on a research trip to Italy, yet bonded long before through their active participation in the small republic of Hebrew letters.42 Their intimate correspondence spanned nearly thirty years and was conducted in Hebrew. Unlike Zunz, Luzzatto enjoyed the stability of an academic post in the rabbinical school of Padua founded in 1829, but no greater financial security. The loss of loved ones also darkened his family life all too often.43 A master and lover of the Hebrew language in all its iterations, Luzzatto collected avidly whatever survived of its literature in medieval manuscripts. On March 21, 1839, a date reverentially noted by him, he acquired the divan of the renowned Spanish Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi and a year later published forty-four of its poems, punctuated but sparsely explained, and three of his letters. Luzzatto’s subsequent publication in 1864 of the entire divan consisting of eighty-six poems, again punctuated but more fully explained, was a watershed event.44 His location in Padua, moreover, gave Luzzatto greater access to manuscripts surfacing in Italy from the Middle East and North Africa.45 Luzzatto, unencumbered by ego, was generous with his erudition and collection to a fault. He had been immensely helpful to Sachs in the preparation of his Die religiöse Poesie der Juden in Spanien (The Religious Poetry of the Jews in Spain—on which more anon) with its superb German translations published by Veit in 1845. In a profuse acknowledgment of his indebtedness in the foreword, Sachs thanked Luzzatto for their extended correspondence in which he shared with him treasures from his own collection and guided

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him to others. Though Sach’s accomplishment could not be gainsaid, Luzzatto was displeased that he had chosen to translate only Sephardic poets, denigrating by implication their Ashkenazic counterparts, and still worse consigning the Hebrew originals to the back of the book without any trace of punctuation.46 Luzzatto had been helping Zunz for several years in the dark when in December 1838 he finally asked him in a tone of exasperation, what is the nature of the book you are working on, “for my only hope and desire is to show the rich glory of our language, to enhancing its honor and that of its writers and to revive the love of it in the heart of our people.”47 Zunz responded quickly thanking Luzzatto for his critical notes and copies of poems and then spelled out his intentions: “You should know that in my book I will take up the penitential prayers of the Ashkenazim [selihot], the dates of their authors and what happened to them, the content of their prayers and the customs of their fast days. I hope to publish therein things rare and unknown. And may you be blessed if you don’t keep from your servant early piyutim [liturgical poems in general] with which God has blessed you. As I have already said, I am embarrassed to ask for more. I am reluctant to stretch out my hand for extensive copying and thus repeat that I only wish the opening lines of the selihot.”48 Because of Zunz’s interest in the liturgy of the High Holy Days, Luzzatto began to pay attention to mahzorim (prayer books with the liturgy for festivals) and in turn sent Zunz a printed copy of the Roman mahzor. In his letter of November 7, 1839, he also vented his anger at Delitzsch and Fürst, for whom he had copied samples of early poems of which they made no use. Finally, Luzzatto thanked Zunz for the copy of his essay on Rashi, which had arrived on the day before Yom Kippur and which he had read instantly. It deepened his love of Zunz, “for who is more beloved to me of all our sages after the Talmud than Rashi? So I said that I am pleased to have worked so diligently till now to serve this Ashkenazi [i.e., Rashi]. To be the arms-bearer of my beloved Rashi has been my task.”49 For the next fifteen years Luzzatto was at Zunz’s beck and call, answering his numerous queries, copying the first and last lines of countless piyutim, some at length, acquiring new manuscripts and mahzorim to share, and composing long letters. His short letter from September 8, 1852, brought with it a precious personal gift. Luzzatto had just bought Die Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums from 1839 in which he found Zunz’s initial foray into medieval Hebrew poetry, a long and careful study of the liturgical rite of Avignon. He

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found at least two errors that had to be corrected and then moved on to beseech Zunz to accept the enclosed two of the last pages from the Salonika mahzor, which I particularly love because I prayed from it all the days of my youth. The signature of Rabbi Benjamin found very special favor in my eyes and I learned from it when I came to write the introduction to Kinnor Naim [A Sweet Harp—Luzzatto’s own volume of poetry from 1825]. The mahzor was missing pages and when I left (Trieste) I took these two pages and four pages of kinot [dirges for Tisha be-Av] composed by R. Benjamin. If you wish I can send them to you another time. For now, God has blessed me recently with a complete copy of the mahzor as a gift which pleased me no end because it reminds me of my youth.50 Luzzatto was a critical scholar with strong traditional convictions. Though a consumer of secular knowledge from childhood and a master of Italian, he never regarded emancipation as the summum bonum. He abhorred rationalism and its medieval Sephardic luminaries and lauded the ethics of Judaism over the philosophy of Athens. Above all, the revelation of the Torah and the historicity of its narratives constituted the bedrock of his faith.51 Thus a falling out between Luzzatto and Zunz, for all their mutual respect and collaboration, was always a possibility. It occurred eventually in September 1856, when Zunz reprimanded Luzzatto for denouncing alleged rationalist interpretators of the Torah in a manner that would please Kabbalists. The criticism troubled Luzzatto because he sensed therein a repudiation of prophecy and revelation, and he had long refused on principle to aid anyone who undermined the faith of Israel that, he had believed, alone preserved its identity. For fifty years, Luzzatto averred, he had labored to fortify the belief in the Torah of Moses. Should rationalism ever prevail, Israel’s ability to withstand the lure of assimilation would be gravely impaired. To make matters worse, around the same time Luzzatto belatedly came across Heine’s moving tribute to Ludwig Marcus penned in 1844 on his death. Heine’s eulogy turned into a meditation on the fate of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, in which both had been active members. As we have seen, Heine chose to single out Zunz’s heroic steadfastness to its vision as a life of self-sacrifice born of a noble caprice (der grossmütigen Grille seiner Seele). The attribution did not sit well with Luzzatto. A caprice was too insub-

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stantial to secure Israel’s future in a world of endless temptation. In consequence, Luzzatto broke off all contact with Zunz, ignoring his letters and even the copy of his Die Ritus which he had sent him when it came out in 1859. Finally on September 13, 1861, Luzzatto broke his silence. Age had muted his consternation: “With the passing of many days and my advancing years and being in the dark 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 perseverance 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 [authors of piyutim] call out to me from the grave.”52 No less influential, Zunz’s books were free of theology, unmarred by the religious controversies estranging the two men. Stung by the rebuke of the paytanim themselves, Luzzatto added to his confession a guilt offering, a list of the piyutim at the end of a beautifully illuminated manuscript of the Passover Haggadah.53 Zunz answered Luzzatto’s precious letter quickly with an admixture of joy and wit. After voicing his pain at the punishing interval, he thanked the paytanim long buried “whose rebuke showed you the straight path, returning you after six years of shmitah [the biblical injunction to let the land lie fallow in Israel every seventh year] to the tent of Yom Tov [a double entendre, Zunz’s Hebrew name meaning holiday]. Whatever you did was surely for the sake of heaven and I will not rant against your behavior. On the contrary, I will gladly accept whatever you can tell me and will not cease to be grateful for your writings.”54 Almost four years to the day of this letter, Luzzatto died on September 29, 1865. Though the surviving correspondence between them during the remaining years is sparse, the collaboration did not falter. On May 8, 1865, Zunz dropped Luzzatto a final note in German: “My book is now being printed. Its effort to establish the author of each piyut and seliha in chronological order is rather a preparatory work for a history of this literature than an actual history of it.”55 The modesty of Zunz’s announcement belies the enormity of the work that went into this preliminary stage of research, even as it attests the candor of his character. Not long after Zunz returned to the tranquility of his study, he ventured forth briefly again into the maelstrom of everyday distractions to defend the honor of the growing cohort of Jewish scholars taking up Oriental studies. In 1845, as we saw, Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer in Leipzig, well on the way to becoming Germany’s leading Orientalist, founded the Deutsche

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Morgenländische Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society, hereafter DMG).56 His nonjudgmental, nonsectarian, nonparochial ethos was vividly on display a year before in Dresden at the first nationwide gathering of German Orientalists, where the decision was taken to found the society a year later in Darmstadt. Of the fifteen learned papers presented at the Dresden conference, three were delivered by Jews— Geiger, Frankel, and Steinschneider, who still lacked a doctorate. Jews also represented some 20 percent of the forty-nine scholars in attendance. Early on Fleischer had approached Zunz to join, becoming in May 1846 the seventieth member of the new society.57 In 1852 the DMG with a membership now of over three hundred elected Professor Heinrich Ewald of Göttingen as its president. A master of the Hebrew Bible and many a Semitic language, Ewald was as contentious as gifted. Flashes of intuition rather than rigorous methodology marked his prodigious scholarship. Not only Fleischer’s polar opposite in temperament and style, he also deeply resented the Halle-Leipzig leadership of the DMG. Thus he used the occasion of his first presidential address in 1853 to repudiate Fleischer’s exclusion of any reference to contemporary politics. On the contrary, he insisted, the society had an obligation to provide the public with clarity and guidance on the nature of Islam when Christians in its domain were being forced to convert with the connivance of Christian regimes in Europe, nor did he have any patience for those who might dispute that responsibility: “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?” Behind Ewald’s accusation of Jewish arrogance lay his penchant to generalize in his controversies with Jewish scholars, attributing their “erroneous” views to the character flaws of all Jews. When Zunz read Ewald’s presidential address in the next issue of the society’s journal, he wrote to Fleischer in a state of apoplexy: “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

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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!” And, Zunz continued, how were people to understand what Ewald meant by “the new Jews” and their “conceits”? Surely the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (Journal of the German Oriental Society) did not support them. It barely reported on developments in the field of Jewish studies. The names of Krochmal and Rapoport, 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 defense. But did Goliath really need to fear David? Having vented his hurt, Zunz closed by asking Fleischer for a public rebuke: “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 the ethos of Germany [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 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 knows that he is slightly unhinged, the tragic-comic figure of the field. And yet a presidential address is a matter of record that has 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 honor 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. To comply, Fleischer had to negotiate delicately between Ewald’s ego and Zunz’s anger. An adroit political sensibility helped him wield a strategy that satisfied the latter without humiliating the former. Later that same year in the

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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. 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, to have all kinds of religious polemic only as a subject of dispassionate historical consideration before us, in every other regard behind and beneath us. When in 1844 German Orientalists of different persuasions laid the foundation for the (DMG), it was stated, unprompted 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, (Andreas Schleiermacher’s) opening address at the start of our Society (as its first president) put forth in the same vein, still more lofty and general considerations. These demands should be valid for all of us forever— and to recall them now is again timely.58 Fleischer’s file contains no further letters from Zunz that might have expressed his appreciation. What did come in, however, was the essay Fleischer had solicited, 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 delayed its actualization until 1910, when Eliezer Ben Yehuda published the first volume of his monumental dictionary of the Hebrew language, destined to be completed only in 1959, and then by other hands. Fittingly, Ben Yehuda quoted from Zunz’s essay to vindicate his life’s work.59 Fleischer’s defense of value-free scholarship, in

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retrospect, could not have been more handsomely rewarded. Zunz’s fearless intervention in turn had defended for Wissenschaft des Judentums an academic island of acceptance and integration outside a university system still riddled with prejudice. Jewish studies would continue to be a respected subfield in the work of the German Oriental Society. It’s not clear whether Ewald knew that Zunz was behind the reaffirmation of the DMG’s policy on value-free scholarship. His gratuitous assault on Zunz’s scholarship in 1860 suggests that he was lying in wait for a reprise. The discovery of a parchment fragment with Hebrew script in Göttingen gave Ewald a chance to issue a report to his colleagues on its startling salience. In truth, the passages were but a few stanzas from the evening ser vice for the eighth day of Passover and for the first day of Sukkot, all of which appeared in countless printed mahzorim and siddurim. But oblivious to their provenance, Ewald heralded a breakthrough find, adding a note in which he dismissed in one fell swoop the scholarly value of Zunz’s recently published two volumes on liturgy (Die synagogale Poesie and Die Ritus). For Ewald, Zunz was no more than “an utterly one-sided Jew lost in the biases of his hatred.”60 The combination of gall and ignorance compelled a retort. Zunz bristled at the contempt for Jewish scholarship. He wrote Isler that he was not surprised by Ewald’s illiteracy, “for German scholars even when they are professors of Hebrew, know less about Jewish literature than that of Mongolia.”61 In his rebuttal he scoffed that the faculty in Göttingen would have been better served had they turned to a synagogue cantor. As for Ewald, Zunz insisted that he was utterly unqualified to pass judgment on his work: “Scholars lost in the bigotry of Jew hatred, arrogantly contemptuous of all that Jews produce and understanding nothing of their scholarship have no right to judge me. Mr. Ewald remains obligated to present proof for his many claims.”62 Despite Isler’s assistance in Hamburg, Zunz could find no suitable venue, either political or Jewish, for his rebuttal. The absence of a rejoinder by Zunz confirmed once again just how isolated the practitioners of Wissenschaft des Judentums still were.63 Not until 1865 and then only glancingly did Zunz return to Ewald’s insult. In the opening chapter of his Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie (A Literary History of Synagogue Poetry) in which he lamented the still abysmal state of research on the liturgical poetry of the synagogue, Zunz gave by way of example the report submitted to a learned society in Göttingen in 1860 on a page from an old mahzor not unworthy of a monk from the fifteenth century.

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The mention of the university spared Zunz the need to identify by name the scholar whose well-known brazenness was undaunted by ignorance.64

* * * The Literaturgeschichte was the third volume of a trilogy of studies by Zunz on the history of Jewish liturgy. Each bore the resonant noun “poetry” in its title (Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters of 1855 and Die Ritus des synagogalen Gottesdienstes of 1859, which on the page facing the title page read Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters, zweite Abteilung [part 2]), signaling their intimate connectedness and the claim that they were part and parcel of the universal genre of poetry.65 Together they realized a scholarly agenda that Zunz had first enunciated in 1818 in the essay that launched his epistemological revolution: “A history of the [liturgical] rite of the synagogue would be at this juncture in particular a desirable, if difficult undertaking.”66 An extended footnote conveyed the advanced state of Zunz’s conceptualization of the task. Among the topics to be studied were the spirit and nature of the ser vices, their status in the codes, their influence on the worshipers, the forms and contents of the prayers, and the opinions of non-Jewish writers. Nor did Zunz shy away from intoning the utility of the research: “Should the treatment of this project be executed competently, by region and period, it would happily yield results helpful to evaluating mistakes made, improvements that are quite futile and changes already under way.”67 To be sure, Zunz’s trilogy turned out to be utterly different, but his fidelity to the agenda, despite long lapses, never abated. Each volume expanded and deepened the scope of the study. The first treated the penitential (selihot) and liturgical poems (piyutim) as literature with Zunz translating portions of some 226 poems into spare, felicitous German that minimized the paraphrasing and maximized the rhyme and meter of the original when present. The second embedded the individual poems in the matrix of the liturgical rites in which they originated or were preserved. And finally, the third volume with its subsequent addendum of 1867 focused on the poets themselves and their biographical data and poetic oeuvre that Zunz had painstakingly unearthed.68 Overall Zunz referenced 5,964 piyutim and nearly 1,000 paytanim, despite the daunting fact that the majority of both were either unpublished or unknown. The staggering nature of that achievement prompted Steinschneider to quip that Zunz had managed to write the history of a literature not yet extant.69 What helped was the coincidence that during the 1850s Steinschneider was

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cata loguing the old Hebrew printed books in the Bodleian, which gave Zunz access to the treasures buried in that greatest of collections of Hebraica in Europe, an assist that Zunz repeatedly acknowledged in his footnotes. Thus during his first summer at Oxford, Steinschneider could report to Zunz that on July 19, 1850, he finished compiling a list of 314 selihot from five different manuscripts. By September 30 he had found another twenty.70 Later visits would yield many more.71 Steinschneider’s most dramatic early discovery came in the summer of 1851 when he discovered the long-lost but often quoted siddur of Saadia Gaon, a somewhat defective manuscript of 247 pages. On the basis of the firsthand information provided him by Steinschneider, Zunz was able to include this liturgical milestone in his sketch of the global evolution of synagogue prayer.72 While Zunz was surely not the first of his contemporaries to broach the subject of medieval Hebrew poetry, his work was singular in design, depth, precision, and evenhandedness. Of that coterie, Franz Delitzsch at age twenty-three astounded the nascent field of Jewish scholarship in 1836 with a mile-wide, inchdeep survey of Hebrew poetry from the close of the Hebrew Bible down to the Haskalah (the Hebrew Enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) redolent with insight and empathy. It constituted a worthy sequel to Herder’s celebrated analysis of biblical poetry published a half century earlier. Rumored to have been the child of a Jewish father,73 Delitzsch was to emerge as the finest Christian Hebraist of the nineteenth century. The lasting influence of his Zur Geschichte der jüdischen Poesie (On the History of Jewish Poetry) lay in the valence attributed to its periodization. He was to rank the three centuries of Spanish-Hebrew poetry from 940 to 1240 with the valueladen rubrics of the golden age (940–1040), the silver age (1040–1140), and the age of the roses among the thorns (1140–1240). The luminosity of the nomenclature destined the tags to stick, despite their distortions and constrictions.74 Close on Delitzsch’s heels was Leopold Dukes, born in Pressburg in 1810 but ever on the move in search of manuscripts and funding, who added valuable German monographs on Gabirol and Al-Harizi in 1837 and on Moses ben Ezra in 1839.75 To his credit, his translations were accompanied with the text of the Hebrew original, often excavated from an archive. On his way to composing a history of Hebrew religious poetry from the end of the Talmud to the eighteenth century, Dukes was able to publish in 1841 a list of the names of more than two hundred Hebrew poets he had garnered from archival material, many of whom had until then eluded the ken of bibliographers and

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scholars.76 A year later he tried his hand at a comprehensive survey, which given its shallow, speculative, and unhistorical character was little more than an introduction for beginners. Its most fatal flaw, though, was Dukes’s noisy preference for Sephardic piyut whose worldliness and sophistication, he believed, raised it far above the linguistic deficiencies and cultural insularity of the Ashkenazim.77 No less prone to the “myth of Sephardic supremacy” was Michael Sachs’s 1845 volume on the Religiöse Poesie der Juden. Clearly motivated by a desire to show that medieval Jews had crafted a poetic corpus that matched the universal standards of science, philosophy, and literature, Sachs drew his poets entirely from the Hebrew bards of Spain. Despite his bias, Sachs did not indulge in bashing the Jews of Ashkenaz. On the contrary, his tone was consistently positive, pervaded by empathy for Judaism and an appreciation of poetry. Uncluttered with explanatory notes, Sachs’s masterful translations aggregated by author filled the first half of the volume, obviously to be read and enjoyed on their own as authentic samples of religious literature. His profiles of the poets and interpretations of their poems in the second half lent the serious reader context and coherence. Unfortunately, unpunctuated originals tucked away in a Hebrew appendix, perhaps to reduce cost, marred the scholarly value of the work.78 Zunz had an unexpected hand at a critical juncture of the anthology. Sachs had decided to close it with a poem by Nachmanides that struck him as an unadorned expression of deep religious sentiment. To grasp its mystical allusions, Sachs turned to Zunz, who provided him with an extensive philological explanation of its sundry kabbalistic references.79 The theme of the poem was the exile of the soul from its divine homestead. A spark of the divine, the soul descends through the sefirot (the spheres of the divine topography) taking bodily form, journeys on earth through a minefield of temptations, and eventually returns to the source of its being. The poem’s penitential mood and repeated use of the noun “King” at the end of each of its sixteen stanzas clearly signaled its locus to be the Rosh Hashana liturgy with its theme of human repentance in the face of divine judgment. Undaunted by its linguistic and theological conundrums, Sachs rendered Nachmanides’s poem into a limpid and supple German translation that preserved the rhyme pattern of each stanza as well as its royal refrain. Missing, however, were three stanzas whose dense content, Sachs confessed, defied his ability to render them succinctly in poetic form, a testament to his artistic and religious integrity.80

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While Sachs elegantly set the standard for translation, Luzzatto diligently expanded the contours of the field. In 1848 he published an alphabetical list of 516 medieval Hebrew religious poets. The jump from Dukes’s list culminated a seven-year search for mahzorim and manuscripts, especially from Asia and Africa. Not yet ready to publish his list of poems, which was the ultimate goal, Luzzatto deferred to the wishes of his German colleagues, among whom was certainly Zunz, to publish his shorter list of poets. Since Luzzatto mentioned where possible the mahzor or rite from which he knew the name of the paytan, he briefly described in his introduction the different mahzorim (from southern France, North Africa, Italy, the Balkans, Persia, and even the Karaites) that served as his main source. For Provence, he relied entirely on Zunz’s exhaustive list in his Zur Geschichte und Literature, which included valuable biographical data. By the time of his death in 1865, Luzzatto had amassed a total of 2,077 piyutim by 642 paytanim.81 In 1857 Elieser Landshuth, a Hebrew publisher in Berlin and devoted scholar of liturgy, put out the first volume of his pioneering biographical dictionary of paytanim. The second and final volume came out in 1862, dedicated to Yom Tov Lippman bar Menahem better known as Dr. Zunz, “whose words of Torah [the author] drinks in thirst.”82 While the Hebrew onomasticon has an old-world exterior, it was clearly the work of a critical scholar. Footnotes punctuate the entries as do personal references to contemporary practitioners of Wissenschaft, especially Zunz.83 When finished, Landshuth had identified 331 paytanim and 2,747 piyutim.84 Without doubt, then, Zunz did not work alone, though indisputably his trilogy would elevate the field to a new level statistically, conceptually, historically, and philologically. After more than 150 years and the exponential yield of the Cairo Geniza, scholars continue to consult his groundbreaking philological insights, authorial identifications, and poetic interpretations.85 The astounding statistics that Zunz compiled over decades reflected unrelenting laborious effort. His correspondence with friends abounds with pleas for materials unknown to him. Zunz was not even averse to turning to an outsider, a non-Jew, whom he believed might be in a position to be of help to him. His letter, for instance, to the Prussian consul in Damascus from May 18, 1857, is telling proof that Zunz left no stone unturned. Johann Gottfried Wetzstein was an Arabist who had studied for a decade with Fleischer in Leipzig before receiving his consulship in 1848. The letter does not imply any prior contact. At the time, Zunz was absorbed by Die Ritus and Wetzstein was located

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in a part of the world rich in liturgical remnants hard to come by. The letter is a model of forethought and adroit composition as well as a pellucid statement of the extent of his research agenda. Its directness of expression was neither apologetic nor self-conscious: Do not be puzzled that a stranger assaults you with a question. If my book on Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1855) has reached you—which I doubt—you would grasp how important this matter is to me. May that importance incline you to forgive me, if I now seek you out from afar. For you to understand what I want, I will begin with a few details that I can’t assume you are familiar with. Among Jews in matters related to the rite of their public worship, there are divergent communities, each with its own prayer book. Best known are the German and Portuguese communities. In some cities in Europe, more often in the Orient, there are in one and the same city different communities with each one of course having its own synagogue and prayer book. These prayer books come either in a single volume for the entire year— consisting of one or several sections—or in different volumes bearing different names such as Tefilla [in Hebrew] for weekday and Sabbath ser vices, Mahzor for holidays, Tahanunim or Selihot for fast days, Kinot for the day [commemorating] the destruction of Jerusalem. Generally, the non-German and non-Polish communities include everything in one volume. After this introduction, I have the following questions: What different communities in regard to their (liturgical) rites are there among the Jews in Damascus and what printed prayer books does each one use? Should you, esteemed Sir, be acquainted with someone reliable who might help you, then, I would press to ask for precise information in regard to these prayer books: title, place, year and format. Now let me freely voice a second request that weighs heavily on me and that is vital for my book. Is it possible that in Damascus or Haleb there are communities that use their own prayer books modeled on the rite of Sicily, Romania [Greece], Mostarab [i.e., native Orientals in contrast to immigrants], Aragon, Catalonia, indeed, the prayer books of any Jews who are not German, Polish, Spanish or Italian[?] These prayer books [tend to] survive either in manuscript (which is less likely) or in printed editions. In case of

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the latter, you should buy for me one copy of each and send it to me here directly. Also manuscripts, if not excessively expensive, would be of interest to me. I would gratefully reimburse your wife for the incurred expenses. And herewith I commend myself and my entreaty to your generosity of spirit. There is no evidence that Wetzstein ever responded to Zunz’s entreaty nor does Zunz ever thank him in a footnote.86 Liturgical poetry is by definition institutionally based. Although that setting was certainly implied in the work of his contemporaries, Zunz made it explicit with a grand formulation. For him the synagogue was a dynamic theater of divine-human encounter in which the covenantal relationship between God and Israel took the shape of unbroken dialogue. With the reading of the Torah and the Prophets delivering the word of God and the recitation of Psalms conveying the joy or anguish of Israel, the synagogue transmuted the static structure of the Hebrew canon into an effervescent sacred drama. Zunz opened his Die synagogale Poesie with a short chapter on the Psalms because they were the liturgical forerunners of medieval piyutim. Neither the voice of the people nor the voice of God ever fell silent. As midrash plumbed the meaning of revelation, piyut depicted the misery of Israel’s survival in exile: “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 the 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.”87 The conception served to vindicate Zunz’s earlier claim that the synagogue was the expression of Jewish nationality and the guarantor of its religious existence.88 Indeed, as the master historian of both midrash and piyut, Zunz endowed the modern synagogue with a legacy worthy of the imposing Moorish edifices rising across Europe and America. The conception also took aim at the supersessionist staple of Christian historiography that demarcated the destruction of the First Temple in 586 and the ensuing Babylonian exile as the fatal beginning of Israel’s irremediable decline into oblivion. As early as 1814 Zunz’s future professor of Bible in Berlin, Wilhelm de Wette, apodictically posited the periodization in his handbook

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on the Old Testament: “Hebrew we call the Israelites in their natural setting before the exile; Jews those in their artificial setting after the exile, in which they exhibit a totally different character.”89 In contrast, Zunz denied that the Babylonian exile had effected a fundamental change. The nature of the synagogue sprang from a First Temple paradigm. Its literature was novel in substance, but not in essence, a creative force of renewal rather than an artificial construct of religious petrification.90 In exile the synagogue reverberated with the history of the Jewish people. Liturgy mediated its political travails and religious sentiments, its ethical values and theological views, its anguished protests and fervent hopes for redemption. As a public forum, the synagogue engendered literature to forge and fortify national consciousness, though given the insecurity of exile, the dominant tone of the piyut and especially its penitential genre (selihot) tended to be lugubrious. Its poetry was not written in a vacuum, but confronted God with the suffering of a persecuted and despised minority. Accordingly, Zunz felt compelled to devote his second chapter to a meticulous rehearsal of the calamities Jews endured from the Roman emperor Constantine to the Holy Roman emperor Charles V in the sixteenth century (i.e., from the ascent of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire to its fragmentation in the face of the Reformation), a dark millennium governed by unimagined cruelty, abysmal ignorance, and the complicity of religious leadership.91 Along the way Zunz gave a few choice examples of piyutim that preserved the collective memory of a specific act of violence. He also refused to draw nefarious distinctions: Jews suffered no less under Muslim hegemony than under Christian.92 His pathos extended remarkably even to non-Jews such as slaves and heretics who so often fell victim to the same unholy alliance: “Churchmen, whose murderous deeds gained the upper hand in England around 1150 and beyond, have long manifested their gentleness in the slaughter of the Albigensians, Waldensians, Protestants and heretics. Israel’s seliha [penitential poetry] constitutes but one page of this book.”93 For all the secular ethos that inhered in Zunz’s project, there was continuity in format and content with an earlier age. The structure of the book with martyrdom setting the context for the poetry resembled the format of the medieval Memorbuch. An aid to collective memory at the local level, the Memorbuch came into prominence in Ashkenazic communities following the First Crusade. As eruptions of violence increased, its necrology soon overshadowed its list of local notables. The book was kept on the Bimah (the ser vice leader’s table called Almemor, whence the name) because of its prayers

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for special occasions, a location that symbolized the vulnerability uppermost in the minds of many.94 In terms of content, Zunz adhered uncompromisingly to what Salo W. Baron after World War I would call the lachrymose view of Jewish history. It was a view that had gained credence and currency among Sephardic thinkers after the calamitous expulsions from Spain in 1492 and the torturous century that preceded it in both Spain and Germany.95 Immanuel Wolf (Wohlwill) had endorsed the view fully in his opening theoretical essay, “Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judentums” (Conceptualizing a Science of Judaism), in the first issue of the Verein’s scholarly journal: “For the history of European Jews in the Middle Ages consists largely of a series of experiments which the enemies of this unfortunate people staged in order to oppress it.” Zunz quoted Wolf in bringing his own chapter to a close, but conspicuously omitted his qualifying next sentence: “Only the history of European greed on the fields of America and Africa has deeds of greater shame to show.”96 The intensity of feeling that the subject evoked in Zunz did not allow him to soften his judgment. His final words justified the survey by restating in searing fashion the intimate connection between liturgy and history: “In the main this survey should serve to facilitate our understanding of prayer in the synagogue. It accounts for the reasons behind the rage and embitterment, it opens the sources of the tears and shows the pains and wounds. We feel the suffering, hear the curses and share the hopes. The harsh words in these Jewish psalms have not as yet cost any Christian his life. They are the urgent, bloody screams of hundreds of thousands rising from the earth, which can be transformed into words of conciliation only by love, never through sneering contempt, only through justice, never through acts of oppression.”97 Underlying this intrinsic linkage between persecution and poetry operated a larger conception of Jewry’s dark ages. In a note penned in 1860 but never finished, Zunz called Israel a truncated nation (in partibus). As such, stripped of its sovereignty and homeland, it never gave rise to historians, for truncated nations were merely objects of aggression and victims of suffering, for which chroniclers and poets were sufficient. Historians record and reflect on the deeds of independent actors. Given its passivity, Israel lost the capacity and need for historical research. Instead, it relied solely on parsing the words of its sacred texts: “With the demise of the Jewish state and the dispersion of its people, every believer could see that Israel’s history was finished and comprehensible. Left was only to grasp the content of revelation and to order life accordingly in the hope [the fragment breaks off at this point].” Despite its

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inchoate state, the drift of Zunz’s thought was unmistakable: the synagogue reflected the state of Jewish powerlessness.98 Two tangents of Zunz’s study reinforced the linkage as well: his focus on the genre of seliha and his attention to the liturgical legacy of Ashkenazic Jewry. As a penitential mode of prayer, selihot dealt with the arduousness of exile, attributing Israel’s fate as a deserved consequence of its sins, even as they protested God’s manifest absence and feared indifference. For Zunz selihot were not a subcategory of piyut but an equal coordinate.99 Within the liturgy they replicated the dialectic that marked the structure of the entire worship ser vice. Drawing on the font of midrash, piyut delivered a semblance of God’s teaching, whereas the seliha voiced the plight of a community in distress. Zunz took the tenor of the selihot to be emblematic of the totality of Israel’s sojourn in exile.100 What added to the darkness of the poetic landscape was Zunz’s extensive treatment of Ashkenazic piyut. To be sure, he acknowledged and celebrated the corpus of Sephardic luminaries, witness his unrivaled tribute to the stature of Yehuda Halevi: Every one of his many works is elegant, clear, brimming with warmth and substance. He always finds the right word and most fitting verse from the Bible. A great spirit [manifests] itself in the confines of small words. The individual parts of his poems appear to move like the limbs of an organic being, as if the whole worked itself out without the input of the poet. And this life was imbued by a God-graced spirit whose purity cannot be sullied by dirt, [a spirit] warmed by a holy fire, whose strength extends over centuries, accompanied by an incisive mind that never goes astray in dark byways. As fragrance and beauty are inherent in the rose, so is it with Yehuda, word and verse, meter and rhyme lie in the soul of the poem. As with true works of art and always with nature [itself], we are never disturbed by an extraneous, affected or alien word.101 But this veneration of Halevi and of the poetic quality of Sephardic piyut in general never erupts in outbursts of denigration of Ashkenazic piyut. The wretchedness of the conditions of Jewish life in Germany filled Zunz with unparalleled empathy: “If we take ourselves in 1146 from Spain to Germany, we leave a land in which Islam is imposed on its Jews and enter one in which

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the cross kills. Here poets experienced only tragedy and hence their songs are tragic.”102 A genuine talent and feel for poetry permeates Sephardic liturgy, because its authors were first and foremost poets who also wrote piyutim. Ashkenazic liturgy in contrast arose out of unrelieved suffering. In Italy, Greece, Germany, and France 250 paytanim produced 1,200 selihot, and if those who wrote 5 or more are subtracted, Zunz contended, we are left with 215 paytanim as the authors of 750 selihot. In Spain its five most renowned poets alone composed some 1,000 selihot, in addition to a raft of secular poetry. The numbers highlight the predominance of the poetic impulse in Spain.103 Yet when it came to the language of the paytanim, long a bone of contention, Zunz sided with the Ashkenazim. He regarded the exclusive use of biblical Hebrew by the Sephardim as a form of classicism in emulation of Arabic poetry. But in this instance “a strict purism was voluntary poverty, which to its detriment rejected the treasures of the mishnaic period.”104 For him the linguistic creativity of Kalir (Qillir) allowed Ashkenazic paytanim to utilize all layers of Hebrew: “No language can live without new forms and for the paytan Hebrew was not a dead language. Exacting grammarians, exemplary poets and Bible-addicted Karaites all have employed such neologisms, indeed fashioned them. . . . It is only that Kalir . . . excels in daring and talent. Indeed many a Kalir creation ought to be reappropriated for [modern] Hebrew.”105 Zunz went on to buttress that general defense of Kalir with a trenchant study of the vocabulary, terminology, and grammatical forms of paytanic Hebrew, the results of which he carefully listed by subject in the twenty-six appendices of his Die synagogale Poesie. By identifying the piyut or paytan where each linguistic innovation was to be found, Zunz showed that paytanic Hebrew exhibited constant development throughout its millennial history. Moreover, the invaluable results of his painstaking research established the literature on a firm lexicographical foundation.106 The selihot and piyutim that Zunz subjected to meticulous scrutiny were not free-floating expressions of individual sentiments. By virtue of their incorporation in and preservation by the liturgical rite of organized communities, these poems voiced the collective setbacks and longings of identifiable groups. The communal setting transformed them into a national literature, and it was the function of Die Ritus to bring out the vitality of this dimension. Zunz joined the issue not at the emergence of the basic rabbinic structure of synagogue prayer, which became standardized early and universally, but at its interstices, which gave rise to an efflorescence of religious poetry. The result

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was a global panorama of breathtaking communal energy, variety, and individuality set in a tight historical framework. In particular Zunz illuminated the dynamics of differentiation: the influence of Christian practice, the dominance of custom over law, and the impact of parlous local events. Zunz was even able to compile a list of forty local fast days commemorating past moments of crisis and their imprint on the liturgy.107 By the fourteenth century the local worship ser vice had become less receptive to poetic enrichment, while in the following centuries the introduction of the printing press and papal censorship of Hebrew texts and the broadening influence of Kabbalah added a countervailing leveling influence.108 Finally, with emancipation came a resurgence of liturgical differentiation, which in antiquity was effected by distance and now by a combination of freedom and apathy.109 In sum, Zunz’s scholarship projected a global pattern of engaged diversity within defined parameters that surely extended far beyond itself: “Undeterred by shortsighted enemies of piyut and enemies of Jews who defend piyut, [the advancing human spirit] pursues the goal set by genuine scholarship where freedom, knowledge and love will turn the words of poets into the actions of nations and the different rites into one.”110 Notwithstanding the recurrent oppression and constant insecurity, the synagogue stood out as a theater of great literature. Its collective voice spoke with individuality, passion, and literary flair, and Zunz was determined to convey a taste of its content and language. Toward that end he translated passages from some 226 piyutim. Unfortunately, Die synagogale Poesie omitted the Hebrew original, making it difficult to mea sure the quality of Zunz’s achievement. In 1884 on the occasion of Zunz’s ninetieth birthday, Adolf Berliner published a sample of those originals along with Zunz’s translations.111 There is no doubt that it was Zunz’s intent to bring the poems close to the reader. His translations are not slavishly literal. Though he does retain the rhyme, meter, and stanza structure of the original, he is not beyond compressing, transposing, shortening, paraphrasing, and altering images when necessary. The conciseness and fluency of his translations permit them to soar, even as their surface simplicity and suppleness belie the effort made to achieve the effect. Zunz wielded a refined poetic sensibility that enabled him to serve as an advocate of Israel’s poetic legacy. A long Kalir piyut in which a single syllable ended every line merited Zunz’s unrestrained praise: “By design and execution, grand and gripping! Its images [are] thoughtful, attractive and its articulation [is] nearly flawless. No European language can replicate the thunderbolts of its repetitive rhyme, while an excess of words dim its bolts of

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lightening.”112 Despite the hurdle of language, Zunz never unpacked Kalir by turning his poetry into prose. In this particular case, he managed to endow his concise translation with a rhyming scheme of his own.113 In closing Die Ritus, Zunz, as he had done at the end of his essay on Rashi in 1823, made a revealing allusion to Herder, “whose love-drenched spirit had also paid attention to midrash and medieval Jewish poetry.”114 The footnote to that tribute cited Herder’s late foray into the turn-of-the-century debate in Prussia on whether to ameliorate the status of its Jews. Herder called for taking up the question solely on pragmatic grounds, excluding from it all religious considerations. Decisive was only what is good for the state and on these grounds Herder counseled a policy of equal access to education, which in time would erode parochial pride, religious shackles, outdated moral norms, and an excessive commercial profile.115 What appealed to Zunz was not only the humanity of Herder’s approach to emancipating the Jews but also his exceptional familiarity with postbiblical Jewish literature. The essay entitled “Die Bekehrung der Juden” (The Conversion of the Jews) ended with a passage from the Talmud and Herder’s German translation of “Lekha Dodi,” the piyut welcoming the Sabbath in the Friday evening worship ser vices, which he erroneously attributed to Yehuda Halevi.116 Elsewhere Herder had looked at midrashic parables and narratives through the lens of my thology, unperturbed by the rabbinic wont to recast literary creativity as biblical exegesis.117 In short, few nineteenth-century Christian scholars came close to matching Herder’s knowledge and appreciation of Jewish literary creativity in exile. And this was precisely the point of Zunz’s huge effort: to confirm Herder’s intuition and empathy. Jews too were the authors of great poetry. Political impotence did not reduce Jews to literary silence or dependence. Given Herder’s early paean to biblical poetry, especially the Psalms, he surely would have resonated to their role and afterlife in the synagogue as drawn by Zunz and welcomed the resulting poetic corpus as a vital window on the individuality of the Jewish people.118 As Zunz wrote, Herder hovered over his shoulder. With his Die synagogale Poesie out, Zunz mulled over their affinity: “The arrogance of the fanatic and the martyr’s basket (filled with food offered in cultic worship at his grave) bring one to ponder the value and esteem of human beings. Herder the human being [der Mensch] is greater than Goethe the poet or than W. Humboldt the thinker. The third investigates, the second creates, the first loves.”119 Prior to turning from poems to poets, Zunz reiterated his belief in the basic coherence of the totality of Jewish literature. Like every field of human

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endeavor, it was governed by a pattern of organic growth that moved gradually from simple to complex forms of expression without caesuras or sudden leaps: Such is the tightly connected forward thrust from the presence of the Pentateuch to the written Talmud. Similarly, midrash and Targum open and close in specific periods wholly dominated by them. Indeed, [our] national history suggests that individual forms of expression decline or merge with others. There is never a jump from one genre to another or a miracle that favors one. If we apply this law to piyut, then it was operative from the time that piyut emerged naturally to progress gradually toward its [eventual] demise. Now since the older midrash and the Geonim before 800 know nothing of Pizmon and Qerovah and all simple prayer texts belong to the early posttalmudic centuries, and furthermore since the poetic piyut is first detected in the ninth century and then occasionally along with the paytan’s name in the tenth century, we are entitled to declare in conjunction with the law of interconnectedness that the emergence of an artistic literary style did not appear before 770. In sum, piyut arose out of midrash somewhere between the older and younger aggada and parallel to the formation of the masoretic apparatus and mysticism till the early decades of the twelfth century, when grammarians replaced the Masoretes, exegetes students of midrash and philosophers mystics.120 While Zunz acknowledged the paradigm of development, his argument for continuity and his documentary evidence for the vitality of the synagogue in exile mounted a telling refutation of the supersessionist view of Jewish history that informed the work of Christian savants and German philosophers alike. Zunz’s massive study of piyut, ironically, was undertaken during the very decades that the genre was rapidly being winnowed from the liturgy of the contemporary synagogue. It was not his intention to stanch or reverse that outflow. Long before nearing completion of his study, he expressed his view candidly in a letter to Salomon Plessner on November 6, 1838. Plessner was religiously deeply conservative. At the time he lived in Berlin as a Jewish educator and the two men knew each other personally. A year before, Plessner

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had published a collection of thirteen addresses on prayer delivered in 1836 in the setting of Saturday morning synagogue ser vices. In the course of his impassioned and learned vindication of tradition, he also offered an uncompromising brief for the retention of piyutim in the mahzor. Plessner was familiar with the nascent critical scholarship on the subject, and in a long note hailed Zunz for having identified a Yehuda Halevi piyut that had been incorrectly attributed to someone else.121 In gifting Zunz with a copy of his book, Plessner asked if he might write a review. Zunz’s response was appreciative and respectful. He lauded Plessner for the many lovely, true, and timely comments that punctuated his book, but declined to review it. As for retaining the piyutim, Zunz was dubious that what had fallen from favor and faded from consciousness and been replaced with more suitable forms of worship could be revived: “There is hardly a greater admirer and lover of piyut than me, yet I cannot take up their cause with any enthusiasm. On the contrary, they must be replaced in public worship with alternatives. . . . The steep falloff in worship and religion is the best proof that piyutim are of no avail. The lofty goals that your lectures rightly posit must be achieved in other ways. So even if we don’t agree on the means, we surely can agree in our uncorrupted fervor for the truth and what is best for Israel.”122 And yet when the first volume of Michael Sachs’s nine-volume edition of the traditional mahzor according to the rite of Polish, Bohemian, Moravian, and Hungarian Jews came out in 1855 covering the liturgy for the first day of Rosh Hashana, Zunz softened his tone. Its publisher, the company of Moritz Veit, had sent him a copy, hoping for a review, which Zunz declined to write. But he did offer unstinting praise that the company rushed into the Vossische Zeitung on September 21 just prior to Yom Kippur. Zunz welcomed Sachs’s accurate, fluent, and elegant translations of the liturgy’s many piyutim: Through the medium of a prayer book these poems will reach more people than through studies by a scholar. Perhaps one or another person who till now has recited his piyutim mechanically will henceforth be rattled by their content to read them with feeling and even take a second look. The poems whose meter are preserved in translation belong to the most renowned of poets. . . . For the first time German worshippers can read in poetic language the [numerous] yozer, qerovah and beautiful teqiata [piyutim whose names derive from their locus in the liturgy] of Eleazar ben Kalir

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and Yose ben Yose. The latter especially inspire respect for the masterly craftsmanship of the translator.123 Zunz’s encomium was resoundingly confirmed by the many editions of Sachs’s mahzor. The reliability of its Hebrew text, its many brief instructive and critical notes, and the unfailing precision and literary quality of its translations made Sachs’s achievement the gold standard of German prayer books.124 Zunz’s admiration notwithstanding, he did not alter his basic opinion that the repertoire of piyut was unsuited for the modern temperament. It was Steinschneider, Zunz’s cherished protégé, involved in the deliberations on the worship ser vices for Sabbath and festivals intended for the magnificent new Moorish synagogue in Berlin under construction in the mid-1860s, who confirmed that appreciation did not mean approval. The evolving complexion of the community’s membership, the death of its Reform-resistant rabbi in January 1864, and the new edifice rising on Oranienburgerstrasse presented the Gemeinde board with a grand opportunity to introduce some overdue liturgical adjustments. With Zunz absorbed in finishing the third volume of his trilogy, the board turned to Steinschneider for the necessary expertise. After preliminary discussions, he submitted in May 1863 a succinct and elegant opinion on a bevy of contentious issues. Without invoking Zunz by name, Steinschneider relied heavily on his research and adopted many of his sentiments. Thus he clearly had in mind Die Ritus when he cautioned the board not to craft a siddur that presumed to serve as a model for all of German Jewry. The sanctity of local autonomy granted Berlin no more than the right to accommodate the religious needs and tastes of its own members. As for the piyutim, Steinschneider took recourse to Zunz’s fundamental contention of the inextricable connection between poetry and persecution to justify the elimination of many from the mahzor: The old liturgy bears unavoidably the imprint of its time and circumstances. The religious poetry of the Middle Ages is unintelligible and inconceivable without knowledge of the suffering and persecution which find their expression therein. It is the exiled nation which awaits its redemption and restoration and can scarcely pray for these without pleading for justified revenge on its oppressors. The individual, cut off from the joys of life, is readily inclined to regard this world as a vale of tears, from which death alone can redeem and lead to the reward of salvation. Not that this was essen-

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tially Jewish; rather it became so by virtue of the external fate of the nation. This is the reason for the predominantly mournful tone of the liturgy, which, to be sure, has still not lost all justification even today, though it definitely should be curtailed. Likewise, every thing that resembles a plea for vengeance should be removed.125 Zunz would not have tinkered with one word of that summary. Overall Steinschneider’s call for a “conservative Reform” (his formulation) bestowed a name on Zunz’s determined quest to balance a deep respect for the past with a keen awareness of the needs of the present.126 For all their significance and resonance, Zunz’s books sold slowly and often went in search of a publisher. His Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge, published in 1832, took nineteen years to sell out,127 and without a publisher for his Die synagogale Poesie, he considered publishing the manuscript at his own expense. But as he finished it, a rare stroke of good fortune came his way. His sixtieth birthday on August 10, 1854, triggered a substantial gift of 800 talers from Frederick David Mocatta in London, whom Zunz neither knew nor ever met. Mocatta was a young Sephardic bullion broker with a passion for philanthropy, a lively interest in Jewish history, and an affinity for religious reform. In a letter from August 7, 1854, Mocatta transmitted to Zunz the unannounced gift in the name of a clutch of his English admirers who hoped that it would lessen the strain of his work. Moved by the generosity and recognition, Zunz wrote back on his birthday: “To be sure, I have devoted my modest ability to the study of Judaism, or better to the truth which makes men free. But since I am not used to financial support, your generous gift stirred me all the more. The book that I am completing I had even considered publishing at my expense. Thus your unexpected sum, veritably a gift from heaven, came at the right time. It also arrived at a happy moment because today I have turned 60.”128 When Zunz visited England the following May and June, Mocatta was away on a trip to Palestine, though Zunz left him two copies of his Die synagogale Poesie, which had just appeared. In his belated expression of thanks, Mocatta resonated especially with Zunz’s dark view of Jewish history: Men are more prone to be poetical in Trouble than in Joy, for Sorrow softens the heart, and makes it more impressionable to tender influences, whilst Joy is apt to dull the fineness of our sympathies. Thus, I fear, we neither have, nor are likely to have

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again in our present happier position, many more of those heartfelt, and soul-stirring Elegies which burst forth so passionately from the breasts of our forefathers, groaning under cruel Tyranny, and barbarous oppression. Such being the case it is a cause of much satisfaction to find that there exist in these more happy though perhaps more prosaic times those who like yourself are pleased to rescue from Oblivion the History of past suffering, which in our Hebrew Nation is almost synonymous with that of past greatness.129 Zunz’s next letter to Mocatta on April 20, 1857, mirrored the pending publication of Die Ritus. He explained that the material he had collected would require another three volumes beyond Die synagogale Poesie. To cover the expected expenses, he would need an assurance of £600: “The Bodleiana, without a particular interest for the subject (of Judaica)[,] has over the last 30 years expended for this field £4500. Why should the power brokers in Israel also not contribute a bit, especially since the return will cover most of the outlay? I trust you will not dismiss indifferently the matter out of hand. Your character and concern for Israel assure me that you won’t. Perhaps you will even take the lead. It would be a great honor for me if prominent men in England would undertake that my life’s work come to fruition, for without such assistance it may well languish.”130 Despite the pathos of the appeal, Mocatta after some consultation quickly replied that the sum far exceeded the extant level of interest. He could raise no more than £150 or £200. “Are there no rich Jews in the large towns and capitals of Germany who are willing to bear their part in bringing to light a work of so large and striking an interest?” he asked. “We here would willingly bear our portion, but alone we could by no means suffice.”131 Of course, Mocatta’s rejoinder touched on the deep-seated predicament of Zunz’s scholarly enterprise. Rejected by the animus of the university world and barely funded by the patricians of the Jewish community, Wissenschaft des Judentums was sustained by the iron resolve of its lonely heralds. But Zunz’s appeal had not fallen on deaf ears. By 1864 Mocatta and his friends returned to do more than their fair share. As Zunz turned seventy on August 10, he unexpectedly received a munificent gift of 1,400 talers from his coterie of distant admirers, who continued to appreciate the enduring value of his scholarship. Zunz wrote with repressed emotion: “It is a distinct honor for me that men far removed from me and for whom I have never performed

Figure 5. Portrait of Zunz at seventy by Z. W. Bojarski at peace with himself after the completion of his oeuvre. The inscription in Zunz’s hand reads: “Genuine scholarship is generative.” The 1794 date of birth is also given by Zunz in Hebrew characters. Courtesy of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

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any ser vice take such a deep interest in me and seek to comfort my old age. May heaven repay you the joy you have brought to me and may I always be witness to nothing but your well-being.”132 With the publication of Die synagogale Poesie in 1855 Zunz was finally able to travel to England and Paris to do research for the volumes to come. He and Adelheid were away from Berlin from April 25 to July 4. During the twelve days at the British Museum, the twenty days at the Bodleian, and the three at the Bibliothèque Nationale, he examined a total of 180 manuscripts and 100 printed books.133 In London while Leopold was ensconced at the British Museum, Adelheid visited Sir Isaac Lyon and Caroline Goldsmid, when unannounced Queen Victoria and Prince Albert dropped in to admire the flowers in the Goldsmid green houses. In the hour-long conversation that followed Adelheid impressed the royal couple with her wit and command of English.134 In Paris Leopold and Adelheid visited Heine twice on June 26 and 28.135 He had been confined to his “mattress crypt” for the past seven years. He greeted them jubilantly, extending his hands, the only parts of his body that he could still move. When they got back to Berlin, Adelheid gave Julie a poignant description of the experience: We sat for a long time on his bed which consisted of layers of mattresses on the flat floor. I looked at his animated, beautiful face with its streaked beard pressed as if in mourning. The memories, the present constricted my throat. He did not notice that tears fell from my eyes, for his eyes were closed, and only once did he lift up his right eyelid as if he wanted to see us. “Zunz has lost some hair, other wise he looks the same. Zunz and Apollo Belvedere never change.” To which Zunz retorted “Apollo Miesvedere” (the ugly rather than the beautiful), which amused Heine no end, so that he repeated it when we returned a second time. My soul was stirred by a mix of pain and joy as I listened to him complain gloomily, haplessly and then the ever biting, witty humor would break through that made us laugh heartily.136 The two visits confirmed resoundingly that the bonds of friendship were still intact, despite years of separation. Heine finally succumbed on February 17, 1856. Zunz noted his death in his Monatstage without the usual comment, a silence full of meaning.137

chapter 8

Days of Twilight

Approaching his eightieth birthday, Zunz brought his scholarly productivity to a close with an unalloyed and unapologetic essay on biblical criticism. After several decades of preoccupation with the historicization of halakha, GermanJewish scholarship seemed poised to expand into the minefield of the Hebrew Bible, long dominated by Protestant scholars. In 1874 and 1875 Heinrich Graetz finished his highly touted Geschichte der Juden with the first two volumes, which covered the history of ancient Israel from the patriarchs down to the Maccabees. For the biblical period, Graetz tended to follow the biblical narrative, spiced with bursts of imagination and features of the local landscape that had impressed him on his recent trip to Palestine.1 Simultaneously, Abraham Geiger in Berlin introduced biblical criticism into the curriculum of his newly founded Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums with elegantly systematic and incisively pointed lectures. He began with an exhaustive foray into lower criticism to determine the original language of the biblical text, methodically surveying the older translations to recover the underlying Hebrew text. Toward that end he also scrutinized the language of the Samaritan Bible.2 Overall, the research deepened the basic contention of his Urschrift from 1857 with many examples that the earliest stage of biblical exegesis was altering the text itself. In part 2 of these lectures, Geiger ventured into higher criticism independent of traditional scruples. Thus he concluded that the book of Joshua was a postexilic work, that not all the tribes experienced the bondage of Egypt, and that they conquered Canaan piecemeal.3 Geiger also read Genesis politically as a tract laying claim to the land whose anthology of family disputes reflected the unbridgeable rift between the kingdoms of Judah and Israel during the First Temple period.4 There is little doubt that had Geiger not died in 1874 at age sixty-four at the

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height of his academic powers, his contributions to biblical scholarship would have been formidable. In contrast, Zunz’s “Bibelkritisches” (Biblical Criticism) was as unadorned as its blunt title, little more than an awesome display of laser-like philological acumen. His goal was to date key books of the Bible and his method was entirely internal. The few footnotes suggested that Zunz’s manifold conclusions derived largely from a lifetime of reading the text deeply. The absence of a roadmap and a theoretical framework, however, made for a bewildering density of details that betrayed a measure of undue haste. Yet on a small scale, “Bibelkritisches” was as much of a breakthrough as Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur, though intended for different audiences. If the latter was aimed at Christian scholars who disdained the study of postbiblical Jewish literature, the former seemed eager to persuade Jewish scholars that biblical scholarship was a valid and vital subfield of Judaica. In both cases, Zunz bravely fostered a new frontier; the reconceptualization of postbiblical Jewish history in the face of new knowledge and the application of a critical methodology without preconditions. Empirical research and critical thinking, Zunz declaimed in 1873 at the end of his first essay, had the task to rein in the imagination of poets and priests.5 And that ethos colored his work with a thoroughly secular complexion. Zunz began with Deuteronomy not only because he regarded it as the oldest book of the Pentateuch, dating it to the reign of Josiah in 622 bce, but also because its vocabulary, ritual institutions, and humane spirit set it apart from the later composite collection of eighty-eight chapters from the song of Moses in Exodus to the end of Numbers, which struck him as largely priestly in origin.6 Interestingly, Zunz did not make the centralization of the cult in Deuteronomy the crux of his dating, though he recognized in chapter 12 fragments reflecting disparate strata pertaining to the consumption of meat.7 The poetry of Moses’s final blessings in chapter 33 was the oldest fragment in Deuteronomy and his song of the sea the oldest in Exodus.8 Throughout Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers Zunz detected an autocratic priestly voice insistent on unconditional obedience, whereas Deuteronomy exhibited a fatherly voice more attuned to the welfare of the individual.9 Chapter 19 of Leviticus, however, was closer in spirit to the humane strain of Deuteronomy than to the harsher tone of the book in which it was set.10 Yet another body of evidence confirmed the early dating of Deuteronomy, namely, the abundance of its vocabulary that reappeared in Jeremiah, though the spirit of the two books diverged markedly.11 As for his chronological tem-

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plate, Zunz dated Ezekiel to the Persian period between 440 to 400 bce with his name an invention unknown to Chronicles or to anyone between Nebuchadnezzar and Ezra.12 Ezekiel ran into scribal resistance before being admitted into the Canon by virtue of being the last of the prophetic books.13 Leviticus was later still, the product of an era with a dominant priesthood and a fullblown sacrificial system.14 Moreover, its closing litany of promises and punishments for fidelity or infidelity to God was drawn from Deuteronomy and Ezekiel.15 For Zunz, Numbers came before Leviticus while parts of Exodus were older still.16 Given that template, how much historicity was left to the Pentateuchal narratives? Zunz’s answer was embedded in a widely shared developmental scheme that moved in stages from the genres of myth to saga to history. All nations of culture have between the eras of myth and history a middle period consisting of heroes, prophets and songs. Songs about heroes were fashioned out of dark sagas and mythic notions. Poets and prophets, concerned more about immediate effects than historical truth, join with princes and priests to attend to matters of right and law. It is only when education and knowledge become more widespread that [poets and prophets] are distinguished from writers, philosophers and historians. Thus the historical knowledge of the third period follows after the miracles of the first and the heroic sagas of the second, which is not to say that there is no prose literature in the second or poetry in the third. In the history of Israel this second period runs from David to just prior to the reformation of Josiah. The prophet Ezekiel belongs to the third period.17 Noticeably, there is some fluidity in the grid. On the basis of that grid, Zunz constructed a table that aligned the heroes of Greece and Israel chronologically from the eighteenth to the ninth centuries bce. The absence of written documents for either cohort identifies these figures as epic creations of the poetic imagination. With no line of the Hebrew Bible older than 900 bce, it is the task of critical scholarship to determine what might be historical.18 Zunz put no stock in the recurring rubric of forty years or the oft-repeated claim of the sojourn in the wilderness lasting forty years.19 A welter of thematic and philological insights brought Zunz to the general conclusion that Exodus and Numbers were the reworking of

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ancient poems and sagas and not genuine historical narratives.20 The same held true for Genesis, whose authors were chronologically far removed from the stories they related.21 In chapters 2, 3, 4, and 11 of Genesis Zunz claimed to see epic material that stemmed from Assyria and East Asia, which is why in the first two chapters God is referred to by his generic rather than personal name.22 As a finished text, he chose to date Genesis to the late eighth century bce, in part because its author knew the names of towns from the period of the monarchies.23 The political backdrop induced the author to personify the often warring kingdoms in the figures of Joseph and Judah in the last third of the book.24 It was Zunz’s intention to publish his “Bibelkritisches” in the ZDMG, the journal of the German Oriental Society, where his scholarship had long been welcomed, in two installments. Since 1870 he had published therein five philological nuggets and indeed the first part of his “Bibelkritisches” appeared in 1873.25 However when Zunz submitted the second installment in early 1874, the journal’s new editor promised to run it in the next issue, but then backed off with a vague assurance of eventual publication. Piqued by the delay, Zunz accepted his offer to return the piece, which was then published in 1875 as a whole in volume 1 of his collected works. That same year Zunz’s nemesis, Heinrich Ewald, published a contemptuous seven-page review in Göttingen of Zunz’s initial twenty-page piece of biblical criticism already in print. Ewald scoffed at the presumption that Jewish scholars had anything to contribute to a field that had been dominated by Chrisitan savants for some three hundred to four hundred years. The outburst convinced Zunz that it was Ewald who had quashed the publication of his second installment.26 Substantively, Geiger tended to agree with Ewald’s view that Zunz’s first installment did not break new ground. On July 13, 1874, he wrote to Theodor Nöldeke, who had recently moved to Strassburg, Germany’s newest university, where he would dominate the field of Oriental studies for the next four decades: “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 eff ectively, 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.”27 Geiger rightly sensed that Zunz’s motivation was to legitimate for Jewish scholars a field fearfully skirted by them until now. Nor had Zunz missed his intended audience by publishing in the ZDMG. He knew that given the deep engagement of Jewish scholarship with research on medieval Jews in the Islamic orbit and the

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openness of the society to that scholarship, the DMG had many Jewish members.28 What prompted the timing and haste of Zunz’s entry into the field was most likely his awareness that both Graetz and Geiger were about to do the same. Graetz’s first two volumes were on the horizon and Geiger surely had no intention of excluding biblical criticism from his Lehranstalt as Frankel had from his seminary. Anticipating both, Zunz put forth an unvarnished model of empirical research uncolored by religious partisanship, in which the key to historical reconstruction was the rigorous application of philological tools. Graetz’s swift and categorical rebuttal in 1874 staunchly defending the traditional exilic date for Ezekiel and robustly rejecting the existence of sundry sources for Genesis suggests that Zunz had hit his target audience.29 In time Graetz would draw a dogmatic distinction between the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible, affi rming the unity and preexilic canonization of the former while submitting the latter to both lower and higher criticism.30 A preoccupation with dates is what united Zunz’s biblical criticism with his Yahrzeit calendar. Given the proximity of their publication, Zunz must have worked on them intermittently, if not simultaneously. In contrast, though, Die Monatstage des Kalenderjahres (The Days of the Month of the Calendar Year), which came out in 1872, showed that he had not lost his ability to reach a popular audience. He was still able to write in two registers at the same time. Basically a commemorative booklet arranged by days of the year, Die Monatstage recorded the date of death of some seven hundred men and twenty-two women (largely though not exclusively Jewish), and of sixty-eight instances of Jewish persecution.31 Jewish ritual had long sanctified the date of death of loved ones as an annual occasion for religious devotion at home and in the synagogue. Bearing an inscription of the date of death, the tombstone also served as a visible marker. Zunz had published the first sample of his calendar in 1847 during the very decade in which he authored a cluster of popular essays meant to fortify Jewish consciousness and commitment.32 Over the years as he recovered the day of death of other individuals, his collection grew. Not for naught did the subtitle of Die Monatstage read “a remembrance of departed ones,” echoing the language of the Yahrzeit and the Yizkor (memorial) ser vice for the dead. On one level the calendar was deeply personal, enabling Zunz to encapsulate in a sentence or two why he thought each person or event worth remembering. His opinions especially about contemporaries were often quite piquant,

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as we have seen. Generally, though, Zunz admitted only those whose legacy he deemed to be salutary. Yet on another level, the calendar conveyed not only vital knowledge to a broad audience but also values essential to the historical enterprise. Precision in dating was as crucial in the quest for reliable facts as in the ritual of commemoration. The calendar provided a memory box that ordered the past to nourish and enlighten the present. Similarly, by shifting it from the religious to the secular domain, Zunz highlighted the importance of the individual in determining the course of human events. Thus his calendar included non-Jews whose life work advanced Jewish interests: the Muslim philosopher Averroes (under Ibn Roschd), who died on December 10, 1198, and “29 of whose writings, translated into Hebrew or Latin, secured a place in Jewish literature”; Johannes Buxtorf the younger, who died on August 16, 1664, “the editor of a Talmudic dictionary, the translator of the Kusari and the Moreh (Nevukhim) (into Latin) and author of many tracts that advanced the knowledge of the Hebrew language and its literature”; and finally, Anton Schmid, who died in Vienna on July 26, 1855, at the age of ninety, “the Daniel Bomberg of the nineteenth century, who since 1794 was active in the publication of Hebrew books.”33 Overall, Die Monatstage is a charming little book, an expression of Zunz’s political liberalism, religious evenhandedness, and deep commitment to Jewish continuity. Those who had betrayed Judaism went unmentioned. Spinoza made the grade, but merited no comment. And on those whom Zunz looked upon with favor, he could wax eloquent, such as Abraham Ibn Ezra, who had died on January 23, 1167, “equally renowned as a poet, grammarian, exegete and theologian, an outstanding mathematician and astronomer, short of money but rich in wit, a born enemy of all empty heads, whose poetry deserves to be collected.”34 In sum, Zunz did not produce a synopsis of Jewish history as would Cecil Roth years later in his The Jewish Book of Days, but rather a format resembling the memorial plaque of a synagogue that was concisely informative and spiritually uplifting and eminently expandable.35 On August 10, 1874 Zunz celebrated his eightieth birthday amid a throng of friends, admirers, and well-wishers. Nine days later his beloved Adelheid died after an incapacitating illness of five excruciating months that ended their marriage of fifty-two years. Unsparingly, he recorded the ordeal in his diary: “Adelheid first complained on March 14, went to bed on the afternoon of April 4 and died on Tuesday August 18 at 8 a.m. For 3/7th of a year she could not turn in bed. She has left me impoverished and orphaned, without any conso-

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lation. I have never known anyone like her.”36 Six months later in the weekly Torah portion of Mishpatim (and these are the rules) he detected a consoling allusion that underscored what a singular role Adelheid had played in his life. After the revelation at Mount Sinai, God promised Moses to guide him through the wilderness: “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).” The Hebrew letters for angel (malakh) decoded stood for Adelheid. As God’s presence had never left Moses after Sinai, so too did God beneficently send Leopold a guarding angel to guide him toward his destiny.37 During her ordeal Adelheid was cared for by Catholic nurses who helped her in bed at night and two physicians. She took no medicine. Zunz himself would have gone without food were it not for his sister-in-law and her daughter who alternated in buying groceries and cooking for him. Writing on May 4 to friends, he said that he had not yet given up hope for a recovery, though for the time being he wished not to be visited. Every visitor outside of close family was a burden.38 Bereft of his soul mate, Zunz clung tightly to the Ehrenberg family. Two months after her death he bared his anguish in a distraught letter to Victor, Philipp and Julie’s son and a law student of great promise: I have read in tears your kind, lovely letter more than once. You belong to the few who feel my loss and understand my grief. With my Adelheid I have lost every thing, even myself. Can an intimate meeting of minds, a mutual affection and esteem of 54 years be shaken off like an overcoat? My wife loved, admired, understood, tolerated, cared for, served and humored me; she nearly singlehandedly sustained my relationship to others and my persistence in my work, or at least promoted them both. Now I am denuded. I have no heart that supports me and no one needs mine. I am bluntly speaking superfluous. Even a dog can eat and drink, in fact better than an unfortunate widower.39 A self-revelation of such painful poignancy to a twenty-three-year-old student surely attested that Zunz’s love for the Ehrenbergs extended undiminished to the third generation. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 1864, Zunz had seen fit in thanking his many well-wishers to give public expression to Adelheid’s indispensable role by his side: “I have been inwardly stirred and overjoyed by the

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overwhelming expression of affinity and affection that have come my way in tribute. Not least because of my dear wife, my beloved Adelheid, who for 42 years in joy and sorrow has been my pillar and helpmate. Her insight, nobility and contentedness have enabled me to devote my life to scholarship.” 40 Shortly after Adelheid’s death, Fürchtegott Lebrecht published a tribute of his own, which touched Zunz, who sent it to a list of fifty-three relatives and friends.41 Lebrecht was a student of Moses (Hatam) Sofer in Pressburg who went on to study with Gesenius in Halle. In the 1840s he was Zunz’s colleague at the Berlin Teachers’ Seminary and in 1856 became the main instructor and librarian at the Veitel Heine Ephraimsches Lehranstalt, where Steinschneider also taught part-time. Lebrecht’s lasting contribution to scholarship was his pioneering research toward a critical edition of the Babylonian Talmud.42 In the fall of 1829, Lebrecht related, he came to Zunz with a letter of recommendation from Gesenius and was immediately invited to join his Saturday evening salon “in which Frau Doctor was not only the hospitable hostess who poured the tea, but also the center of the enticing conversation. . . . To each one of her guests this cultivated and sensitive woman was able to spontaneously offer a pleasant remark and all agreed that Zunz’s good fortune owed much to his wife.” 43 The pall that hung over the celebration of Zunz’s eightieth birthday was momentarily lifted by the unexpected presentation to him of the title page of volume 1 of his collected writings (Gesammelte Schriften), a project that the board of the Zunz Foundation (Zunzstiftung) had undertaken to honor the milestone.44 The foundation had been set up a decade earlier at his seventieth birthday, when a dozen members of the Berlin Jewish community raised 1,800 talers to fund it. During the lifetime of Leopold and Adelheid the interest from the endowment was to go to them in semiannual payments as a pension. Upon their deaths, it would be earmarked to promote serious Jewish scholarship.45 Solomon Neumann, a great admirer of Zunz and supporter of critical scholarship, took the initiative to create the foundation, which secured government approval in October 1865. He was to head the foundation devotedly for forty years. A democrat like Zunz, he sat on the Berlin City Council for nearly fifty years, while as a physician he staunchly advocated improved public health. Neumann was also among the founders of Geiger’s institute for advanced Jewish studies in 1872.46 The editorial work that brought Zunz’s Gesammelte Schriften to fruition was done by Steinschneider. He conceptualized the content of each volume

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Figure 6. A photo of Moritz Steinschneider from 1900 at age eighty-six still at the top of his game at work in Berlin’s royal library, where since 1869 he had headed up the collection of its Hebrew books and manuscripts. Courtesy of the Photoarchiv der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

and knew where the material was to be found. Zunz was only marginally involved, approving the arrangement and lightly editing individual items.47 The threefold division corresponded roughly to the three domains of Zunz’s career: the political, the communal, and the scholarly. In addition to an addendum of some fifty pages of political addresses, volume 1 gathered theoretical pieces that implicitly, if not explicitly, demanded the admission of Jewish scholarship into the discourse of the German academy. Volume 2 assembled occasional essays that dealt with internal issues pertaining to the Jewish community. And volume 3 was a rich sample of analytic notes and essays of a purely scholarly nature.48 The publication of Zunz’s collected works in three volumes in 1875–76 coincided with the publication of Geiger’s collected works in five volumes (including a full volume of his letters) edited by his son Ludwig in 1875–78 and combined to set an inspiring standard of engaged scholarship for future generations.

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The three inert volumes of his collected writings, of course, could not replace the vibrant presence of his Adelheid. Zunz never regained his composure nor the will to seek comfort in his research. Physical ailments compromised his mental state still further. Cared for by his niece Theodore Meyer, the unmarried oldest daughter of his deceased sister, Julie, who had lived in Bielefeld,49 Zunz fell into a state of somnolence, sullenly awaiting his longedfor death. Visitors were few; his letters grew infrequent and ever shorter; he no longer read the daily papers, except for the liberal Vossische Zeitung and of that only a small part; and seldom opened a book from his library.50 The intrusion of the young David Kaufmann into Zunz’s life in 1874, however, filled the void slightly, rattled his lethargy somewhat, and forged a relationship resonant with irony. Kaufmann’s persistence was to create an unusual intergenerational correspondence of some two hundred letters that spanned the last twelve years of his life and illuminated his loneliness.51 Born in 1852 in Moravia, Kaufmann came to the Breslau Seminary in 1867 as a bright fifteen-year-old gymnasium student to study in its lower division.52 Within two years he began his studies at the university and completed his dissertation on Saadia Gaon’s religious philosophy in 1874. Overlapping, he started rabbinical school in 1872, gaining his ordination by January 1877.53 In short, Kaufmann lived up to his promise, a gifted and energetic dual degree program student. He studied with Frankel, the seminary’s director, for eight years prior to the latter’s sudden death in February 1875 and came to revere him.54 He also fell under the sway of Graetz. Thus Kaufmann’s profile was not prone to endear him to Zunz. Zunz disliked Frankel and Graetz in equal measure and derided their brand of scholarship as Glaubenswissenschaft (his term), whose parameters and conclusions were dictated by tenets of faith.55 Most exacerbating, the seminary fell short of his hard-fought-for ideal of institutionalizing critical Jewish scholarship as a bona fide field of research within the German university. During the planning stage for the Breslau Seminary in 1853, Zunz had been asked for his thoughts. In his candid brief, he was dubious that teachers and rabbis could be educated in the same institution. If the funds available were insufficient for both, he deemed a teachers’ seminary to be more important. The job description of the modern rabbi remained fluid because still in formation. Above all, he feared the religious excesses that might arise in a student dormitory. The need for a synagogue could easily give rise to the deficiencies of the old beis midrash “where less attention was paid to civility, culture, knowledge and morality than going to ser vices. Better no rabbinical

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school than a new seedbed for hypocrisy, darkness and intolerance.”56 Accordingly, when invited to give an address at the opening of the Lehranstalt in Berlin on May 6, 1872, Zunz declined.57 Kaufmann’s first letter to Zunz on March 21, 1872, asked him about an essay by Eduard Gans on the legal status of Jews in ancient Rome that had appeared in the first number of the ZWD in 1822 edited by Zunz. It went unanswered.58 Undeterred, Kaufmann tried again two years later, sending him this time a review of Zunz’s recently published Deutsche Briefe (German Letters), which Kaufmann had printed in the Schlessische Presse. The silence with which the papers greeted Zunz’s protest against the steady debasement of the German language in the public arena piqued Kaufmann to write his review. This time Zunz replied immediately and thankfully: “I had never hoped to accomplish anything. I just felt that it was my duty to raise my weak voice against the threatened ruin of a language fashioned by Lessing, Goethe and others.”59 By the time Kaufmann responded on August 8 with an elegant expression of adulation, Adelheid was near death: “Highly esteemed Sir, please allow a young man to declare that your name and works have not ceased to arouse among the young the ardor to honor and thank you. With special fervor and feeling, your birthday elicits the wish in young hearts that you may still be granted long, long years of undiminished physical well-being and intellectual clarity, so that you may move among us as a bright uplifting exemplar.”60 By accident or intuition, Kaufmann had slightly assuaged Zunz’s abiding hunger for recognition of his work. On August 12 a painfully distracted Zunz invited Kaufmann to write him again but to be patient with his irregular and belated replies.61 In the ensuing correspondence, Kaufmann’s letters were far longer, brimming with news and opinions. Zunz’s short and melancholy ripostes exhibited only flashes of his former self. He apologized all too often for the barrenness of their content, though his celebrated wit and style broke through at times even in his articulation of prosaic matters. On November 27, 1876, for example, he confessed: “Although I have nothing to announce and despite the 366th commandment, do not be boring (according to the Talmud there are 365 negative commandments), I begin a letter to you that you won’t believe that I have renounced our correspondence entirely. Indeed, I write not because I have material for a letter, but rather once again to elicit from my correspondents news about the world. For what is not printed in the Vossische Zeitung—of which I barely read a tenth—remains unknown to me.”62

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Regardless, Kaufmann persisted partly out of reverence for Zunz, partly because of his commitment to serious scholarship, and partly because of an interest in the history of the Wissenschaft movement. His precocious brilliance, respectful self-confidence, and robust energy helped surmount their nearly sixty-year age differential and divergent career paths. Soon enough Zunz informed Kaufmann that “on the basis of my correspondence of 60 years, one could compose a chapter of Jewish history; to be sure, it must fall into honorable and competent hands.”63 By November 1875 Kaufmann revealed to Zunz in response to his inquiry that he intended to go into the rabbinate. Despite the prevailing ignorance and hypocrisy in Jewish life, he was hopeful that things would and must get better “and to work toward that end I deem a worthy, if not rewarding task.” Moreover, he added, before his death Frankel had told his students of his intention to affirm publicly his conviction that German Jewry would soon experience a spiritual renewal. Kaufmann asked Zunz for a word of encouragement, which he declined to offer:64 “Here in Germany apathy and estrangement, there [in Austria-Hungary] barbarism and clericalism increase. Whoever is honest and enlightened ends up stupid or a hypocrite. I have no faith in Frankel’s judgment.”65 Nearing ordination Kaufmann applied for a rabbinic position in Berlin, an application that brought him to the city in 1876 to preach on Shavuot and the High Holy Days. On both trips he visited Zunz, fulfilling “the quiet yearning of my youth to get to know you.”66 His sermons were well received but did not land him the job. He seems to have come across a bit too observant for the membership of the community. More lasting was the publication of the seven sermons he had delivered in Berlin, which he wanted to dedicate to Zunz: “From my stay in Berlin nothing remains except the uplifting recollection of the hours spent in your company. Let me at least express my thanks by placing your name on the front page of the sermons that rendered me the good fortune to come into your neighborhood.”67 Kaufmann’s disappointment over Berlin’s rejection was short-lived. Six months after ordination he settled in Budapest to assume his position on the faculty of the Landes-Rabbinerschule (National Rabbinical School of Hungary) scheduled to open on October 4, 1877, and where he would stay until his premature death in 1899.68 The contrast to Zunz’s tortuous and often humiliating career path could not have been more striking. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century critical Jewish scholarship had achieved a mea sure of institutionalization in a network of rabbinical

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schools across western Europe, largely influenced by the curriculum and graduates of Breslau. For a growing band of second- and third-generation practitioners, these schools provided a haven for full-time teaching and intensive research. Zunz even aided Kaufmann’s cause with a letter of recommendation to the search committee: “I have gotten to know Dr. David Kaufmann in Breslau as an educated, proficient, scholarly and upright man. If you set forth your expectations clearly and he promises to meet them, you will need no further assurance.”69 After a year on the job, Kaufmann treated Zunz to a memorable expression of his euphoria: “I return at least with ever new fervor [from the distressing political scene in Austria] and enjoy being able to devote my energy to research in the dynamic field of Jewish studies. The resurrection of our history from its grave of manuscripts holds for me a stirring fascination.”70 Notwithstanding, Zunz’s opinion on the appropriate venue for Jewish studies remained unchanged. A year before Kaufmann’s good fortune he reiterated his long-held view unequivocally: “The disparagement of Jewish authors, even those baptized, will go on in Germany as long as Jewish history and literature are not taught by Jews who are full professors at every university. As soon as this progress is realized, the early pains [in Hebrew—hevlei mashiah] of the messianic era will begin.”71 Prominently implicit in this statement was the conviction that in this bitter era of embattlement the field must be taught by insiders. The oppressed needed to regain control of the history of their oppression. Steinschneider fully shared Zunz’s hostile view that rabbinical schools prolonged the ghetto-like existence of Jewish scholarship. He declined on principle an invitation by Moritz Lazarus to teach at the new Lehranstalt in Berlin or even to attend its opening ceremony. His presence, he wrote on April 22, 1872, would be misconstrued to mean that he had altered his well-known stance.72 And again on October 1, 1876, Steinschneider turned down Meyer Kayserling’s invitation to participate in the opening exercises of the Budapest rabbinical school. This time he minced no words: Institutions to sustain the profession of the rabbinate in the form taken during the past few centuries currently promote systematic hypocrisy and scholarly immaturity. What is scientific in regard to Jewish history and literature must not shun the air of the university and must be made accessible to Christians. The task of our time, it seems to me, is rather to temporarily endow lecturers (Privatdozenten) for Jewish history and literature in the philosophical faculties and

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thereby compel governments to create professorships and academic institutions in which matriculated gymnasium students could prepare themselves for the study of Hebrew literature. Above all, no boarding schools in which the bad behavior, rudeness and beggarliness of yeshiva bochers would be preserved and touched up.73 If the final words of Steinschneider’s barrage echoed the words of Zunz, it was surely because the subject came up more than once in their conversations during Steinschneider’s visits to his home. Zunz’s essay on biblical criticism directly challenged the ability of Breslau and Budapest to practice value-free scholarship. While still a student at the former, Kaufmann manifested unease with its tone, methodology, and conclusions. He readily admitted that for him Judaism did not rest on the age of its foundational texts but rather on the experience that came with the observance of its ritual. A religion grounded in philology was inherently unstable. But Zunz’s elliptic style and penchant for lists, he feared, served to undermine faith as his critics contended.74 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 alter the opinion of the obscurantists, his whole life attested to his determination to stand up for Jews and Judaism.75 Beyond protesting his indifference 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 poetic imagination.76

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Kaufmann chose to back off and accept Zunz’s statement of principle. In his subsequent review of volume 1 of Zunz’s Gesammelte Schriften, he even saw fit to defend the inclusion of the 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 the body of the Old Testament, even though the cut causes pain to the beliefs of many. Here there is no trace of that base popularity which would elevate the common man to both juror and judge, because in this matter it fears the [opinion 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.”77 But that defense was not to be repeated by Kaufmann in his final laudatory biography of Zunz for the prestigious dictionary of German biographies (Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie). In fact, despite its exceptional length, Kaufmann chose to pass over the essay in silence.78 The omission could well reflect the painful and protracted exclusion of Ignaz Goldziher from teaching at Budapest’s rabbinical school by its faculty from 1877 to 1900 at a time when the city’s university also withheld its chair of Oriental studies from him.79 By 1900 Goldziher, Hungarian by birth and proud identification, was recognized as one of Europe’s foremost Orientalists. Back in 1876, however, he had jeopardized his appointment with a prodigious study of Mythology Among the Hebrews that matched Zunz in the radicalness of its treatment of the received text of the Hebrew Bible, though utterly different in purpose, subject matter, and methodology.80 As a first book the work was for his career sheer folly, convincing the faculty that Goldziher was a free thinker. In his embittered diary, Goldziher held the Moravian Breslau gradu ates—Wilhelm Bacher and Kaufmann—responsible for keeping him out during the very decades when he was most in need of an academic post and scholarly recognition.81 Given that backdrop, Kaufmann may have believed that it was prudent not to mention Zunz’s dissection of the Hebrew Bible, let alone defend it. For him, the validity of biblical criticism was no longer a theoretical issue. The enthusiasm with which Kaufmann greeted the publication of George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda in 1876 soon burst into his correspondence with Zunz. On March 20, 1877, he opened his letter with Eliot’s eloquent translation of Zunz’s encomium to Jewish suffering that introduced the chapter on the subject in Die synagogale Poesie: “If there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes

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precedence of all the nations; if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they are borne ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and actors were also the heroes?“82 At the end of the passage, Kaufmann asked Zunz with a twinkle: “Do you recognize yourself in the splendid garment in which George Eliot has clothed you?” Ruefully, he added, “When will German poets acquire the requisite knowledge and good taste which England’s foremost poet attests here?”83 It is noteworthy that Eliot placed this striking passage in its original German as the literary lead-in to the chapter in which the consumptive, inspired Mordecai revealed to Deronda his vision of a national rejuvenation of Judaism in its native land of Israel.84 The juxtaposition of themes clearly implied that Eliot regarded political restoration as a termination of exile. For Eliot, the redemptive vision was not spawned by fear of anti-Semitism but by the cost of assimilation, a contested process that induced Jews to repress the national component of their religious identity and even to baptize their children at birth. Parochial in nature, however, the restoration was to bear a universal good.85 Kaufmann hurriedly channeled his enthusiasm into an extensive review that was immediately published in the MGWJ, edited at the time by Graetz, Kaufmann’s teacher. The embers of Jewish nationhood were not yet extinguished in Breslau. Kaufmann appreciated that in her intricate plot, Eliot had crafted a well-researched and exceptionally positive portrayal of Judaism. Unequivocally, he declaimed: “In the hall of fame [kept by] the Jewish people, among all the tributes offered over the ages by ingenious men, Daniel Deronda will occupy a place of honor as the proudest emblem of English esteem.”86 Kaufmann shared his review with Eliot and by June 7, 1877, could report to Zunz that she had replied at length. Her intent had been to counter Christian prejudice with a noble depiction of Judaism that might also enhance Jewish self-respect. Eliot’s confirmation of Kaufmann’s reading of her book consoled him that his large investment of time in doing the review had not been for naught, though he bemoaned that “our Jews, of course, are too obtuse for such a tribute. The messianic ideal for them has become worthless.”87 Despite the unexpected recognition, Zunz was far less stirred by Eliot than Kaufmann. There is no evidence that he read the book or even Kaufmann’s review. In their exchange of letters he made only a single cryptic reference that summed up the disappointment of a lifetime: “Although Eliot cites me, I remain unknown to the power brokers [Gewalthabern].”88 In his diary, however,

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Zunz did note the death on March 17, 1879, of Adolf Strodtmann, who had published a translation of Daniel Deronda into German a year after it appeared and a decade earlier a finely contextualized and thoroughly sympathetic biography of Heine.89 Had Die Monatstage come out a decade after its final publication in 1872, there can be little doubt that Strodtmann, an outspoken democrat and writer of continental scope, would have merited an honorable mention. Determined to bolster Zunz’s spirits, Kaufmann returned to Deronda once more with a comment from George Henry Lewes, Eliot’s de facto husband since 1854 and a gifted writer in his own right. Lewes sought to explain to Kaufmann the impulse that prompted Eliot to give such prominence to Zunz in her novel: “There is no good work done in this world that does not create gratitude in all who can see that it is good; Prof. Zunz has done so much to earn the gratitude of men.” To underline the compliment, Kaufmann added, “This is the way that the famous philosopher and biographer of Goethe, G. H. Lewes, writes.”90 Kaufmann did his utmost personally to herald the enormousness of Zunz’s many-sided achievements. As the three volumes of Zunz’s Gesammelte Schriften came off the press, Kaufmann published two crisp and informative reviews in the non-Jewish literary magazine Die Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes (Magazine for Literature from Abroad). Looking over the collection when finished, Kaufmann contended that each volume embodied a vital dimension of the man: the first the fighter, the second the Jew, and the third the scholar. And what united them into a force of nature was Zunz’s unconditional love for his people: “We may consider a phenomenon like Leopold Zunz from any side we wish, we will never fail to affirm that its roots lie in Judaism. To be sure, a mind like his, saturated with the best of all ages, rises above the narrowness and confinement in which it was born to the pinnacle of education and human thought, while preserving the imprint and individuality of its origins.”91 Kaufmann was acutely aware of Zunz’s deep-seated angst that he had labored in vain and that his scholarship suffered from malevolent neglect. Early on he dismissed as fantasy Kaufmann’s contention that there was a large body of public opinion that held his life to have been a precious good: “Till today not only have princes, barons, priests, soldiers, bureaucrats, judges, titans of commerce, artists, sailors, industrialists and actors not bothered themselves with me and my books, but also workers, cooks, peasants and so forth. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Japa nese, orthodox and

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heterodox, rabbis, [ritual] slaughterers and [Torah] scribes (the last three in Hebrew) do the same. . . . Over the last 50 years some 32 authors and books have made mention of me and my writings.”92 Behind that cynicism, exacerbated by Adelheid’s death, simmered an obsessive preoccupation with the reception of his work. In truth, Zunz’s diary was a catchall notebook in which more than half the space was devoted to a meticulous and exhaustive record of the coverage garnered by his scholarship and public career. Arranged roughly in the order his publications appeared, the bibliography not only noted who and where someone interacted with Zunz but also summarized and often quoted what was said. Zunz cast his net widely. Thus when in April 1850 the editors of a German periodical believed Zunz’s political prominence merited a profi le, he copied it in his notebook: “The eighth Volksverein [a political club aligned with the democrats] has as its president Dr. Zunz. He is the Director of the Jewish Seminary and an exceptionally worthy and amiable man. His serious, steady Franconian-like face and his long hair hanging down to his shoulders give him the veritable appearance of a German professor, which he actually is! He is fond of citing appropriate and impactful examples from the Bible and wields extensive knowledge.”93 In a scholarly vein and more typical of his notations, he summarized and quoted the use of his early biblical research in his Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge by Wilhelm Vatke in 1835 in his application of Hegel to the developmental study of biblical religion (Die biblische Theologie, wissenschaftlich dargestellt: Die Religion des Alten Testament nach den canonischen Büchern entwickelt): “Page 350, he adopted my view regarding Ezra as well as the year 260 (p. 379). Page 502 note 1 ‘Zunz seeks to push Ezekiel into the Persian period (pp. 158–62). But I find the reasons unpersuasive. His argument of Ezekiel’s dependence on the language of the Pentateuch, should be reversed. Ezekiel’s suggestions for cultic reform must be older than similar statutes in the Pentateuch, as clearly observed by Gramberg, Krit. Schriften, part 1, p. 214.’ ”94 Keeping tabs also allowed Zunz to vent his spleen. His numerous entries on Ludwig Philippson bristled with contempt: “In the year 1856 he asserts that he has done more for the internal affairs [ für das innere Judenthum!] [sic] of Judaism than I have. I busy myself with Rashi’s coat, etc.; Rashi’s coat would never busy itself with Philippson. . . . In 1875 (no. 14 March 30, p. 218) he writes that my critical scholarship on the Bible does not have much value. The criteria are nearly all external, not hard to refute or reconcile. In his address on

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May 6, 1872 at the opening of the Hochschule he makes no mention of me, since it is actually he who founded die Wissenschaft des Judentums.”95 An inveterate listmaker and compiler of statistics, Zunz also kept score on the number of authors who cited his works. In 1866 he jotted down that up to June of that year, the tally stood at 310, of whom one quarter were Christians. By October 1871 he observed morosely that 100 of them had already died. Somewhat later, the number of those who took notice of his work neared 400, of whom 231 had sent him their publications, including 29 Christians. Zunz, moreover, even detected that another 26 authors availed themselves of his research without crediting him by name.96 Unfortunately, it is hard to square these figures with the far lower number of 32 in his October 5, 1875, letter to Kaufmann. Zunz compiled much of this information in the years after Adelheid’s death as his stamina waned. The recurring insertion of the somber fact that an individual had died suggests a time when his own mortality weighed heavily upon him. But there is more to this summing up than undue professional sensitivity from which Zunz suffered grievously. The preservation of his papers and the ordering of the bibliographical impact of his scholarship and public career were intended for future historians of the Copernican turn he effected. Zunz was not unmindful of just how radical was his epistemic rupture with traditional Judaism, and while he endured the loneliness of being ahead of his time, he wanted to be sure that its eventual historians would do him justice. It is for that reason that he cuttingly dedicated the log of his life’s journey, Das Buch Zunz, to “future individuals of integrity” who would have the distance and perspective to accord him the understanding and recognition that his contemporaries withheld.97 The young David Kaufmann, cut from a different cloth, was one of the few who fully grasped his significance. As Zunz’s voice fell silent, Kaufmann took up his lifelong campaign to anchor political equality for Jews and Judaism in their rightful place in the cultural history of the West. In 1878 Kaufmann authored a withering condemnation of the continued exclusion of Jewish studies from German universities. Among the chairs for new disciplines there was still none for Wissenschaft des Judentums. The creation of honorary professorships that paid in prestige rather than money (by implication his mentor Graetz at the University of Breslau) was merely a ploy to deflect Jewish pressure. While the core of the essay was to herald the two recent testimonials in 1876 and 1878 by the German Christian botanist Matthias Jakob Schleiden on the

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role of Jews in the revival of the sciences in the Middle Ages and on their simultaneously unremitting religious martyrdom, the language was saturated with explicit and implicit references to Zunz. The essay rested firmly on his conviction that the university and its scholarship had the capacity to elevate public discourse and resolve social tensions. Against the backdrop of the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Berlin and Vienna at the time, Kaufmann closed his tirade with a favorite Zunz epigram: “Ideas are powerful enough to triumph over arrogance and injustice without [recourse to] arrogance and injustice.”98 Kaufmann also came to Zunz’s defense when he no longer commanded the weapons to defend himself. In 1884 Ludwig Techen published an eighty-page doctoral dissertation on two parchment manuscripts in the royal library of the University of Göttingen that consisted of piyutim from a mahzor. Along the way he saw fit to hurl a bundle of insults at Zunz’s trilogy on liturgy: Zunz overwhelms the reader in these books [Die synagogale Poesie and die Ritus] with citations and references that are of no help, with explanations that really are none and that merely confuse the uninitiated. The literary and historical information on many of the selihot poets is absolutely not clear. The translations strive to be poetic, but are even less so than the originals. . . . Artistically speaking, Zunz’s penchant to cast subjective, unimportant and worthless material into bombastic language cedes nothing to the well-known style of Graetz. His constant admiration of his own nation seems unwarranted. From the first book I derived little instruction, from the second almost none.99 Techen was equally indignant and irreverent at what he found to be the impenetrability of Zunz’s Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge: “for everyone can tell at a glance that one cannot grasp the nature of the literature from this book.”100 Outraged by Techen’s impudence and ignorance, Kaufmann quickly published a strident correction in the journal of the Austrian Oriental Society (April 15 and May 15, 1885).101 For him, Techen’s dissertation threw the academic integrity of Göttingen, which deemed it worthy of a doctorate, into question, and for this reason he placed his review in a non-Jewish venue. At issue was something far greater than a scurrilous attack on Zunz. No other

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academic discipline would have approved a work of such inferior and prejudicial quality: “This is the fruit of a reality that Botocudos [in Brazil] and Gypsies have chairs at German universities, but a literature that intersects with the history and literature of all nations like Jewish literature is left [standing] at the door. There was a time when Christian scholars of Judaica would come down from their Parnassus in acknowledgment [of what they did not know] to a Jew who would initiate them into the wisdom of the rabbis and the knowledge of new Hebrew [postbiblical]. Wasn’t there to be found in Göttingen a Hebrew who had recited selihot and piyutim in his childhood and could still instruct doctors to be?“102 Kaufmann sent Zunz a copy of his review that ran over the two issues of the journal. On May 18, 1885 Zunz answered languidly and laconically: “About the good-for-nothing [Shlumiel] you mention I know nothing and care not a bit about him and his ilk, except for the angel of death and the Messiah [both in Hebrew]. Regarding anti-Semitism, since it has been around since Pharaoh [in Hebrew], I no longer worry. Ninety years old and not well, I find even an angel discomforting.”103 In addition to Kaufmann two other Breslau graduates, Moritz Rahmer in Magdeburg and Bernhard Ziemlich in Nuremberg, issued written denunciations of Techen’s travesty.104 Notwithstanding Zunz’s estrangement from Breslau, its soft version of dogmatic scholarship had not eroded their appreciation of Zunz’s achievement. After nearly seventy years since 1818 when Zunz launched the turn to critical scholarship, Wissenschaft des Judentums was still an embattled field consigned to its own turf. While Techen remained silent, Paul de Lagarde, who was his dissertation adviser, intervened with a vicious counterattack. Perhaps its undue length prevented him from finishing it before Zunz’s death.105 Lagarde came to Göttingen in 1869 as Ewald’s successor, a master of both classical and Semitic languages committed to publishing a critical edition of the Septuagint, the fi rst and most famous Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.106 Lagarde was a formidable foe, a master of vituperation full of animus for Bismarck and his imperial Germany, for liberalism and its commercial ethos, and for an Evangelical Church still hobbled by Paul, Luther, and remnants of Judaism.107 A seasoned polemicist, Lagarde defended Techen by taking the offensive against Zunz. He contended verbosely with ample sarcasm that the latter’s translations were no more than rhymes and ditties fit for a beer hall: “Jews who like Zunz’s translation deceive themselves in regard to their education

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and competence, resembling the apprentices of tailors who parade in front of maidservants on Sunday in their grossly checkered pants, red neckties and cheap watch chains and on Monday brag that yesterday they were admired all over as cavalry officers [dressed] in civies.”108Furthermore, the selection made by Zunz was utterly one-sided animated solely by resentment and hatred. Nor did Lagarde accept quiescently Zunz’s list of persecutions. Not only were they asserted without proof, but they failed to acknowledge the underlying culpability of Jewish moneylending and financial greed.109 Having skewered Die synagogale Poesie, Lagarde proceeded to find fault with Zunz’s other major works. The midrashic texts identified and dated in Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge were never analyzed for their content and Zur Geschichte und Literatur simply spewed with hatred for every thing European. Finally, the fatal flaw that runs through Zunz’s liturgical trilogy is an absence of method.110 As for Techen, Lagarde intervened on his behalf because the ridicule of him was in truth a denigration of his adviser. Techen had fulfilled exactly what was expected of him. To bring the manuscripts to light, Techen did not have to be a historian of Jewish liturgy or an expert in synagogue ritual or conversant with the Jewish calendar. His dissertation was essentially a cata logue of manuscripts compiled with the standards of that genre at Göttingen. Nor were his mistakes in deciphering the text egregious for a student of classical rather than Semitic philology.111 Lagarde closed with a parting shot at all of German Jewry. As a cultural critic, he had spoken often already about die Judenfrage (the Jewish question), which is certainly “also a racial question, but any person inclined to ideas would never deny that spirit can and should overcome race.”112 Lagarde felt entitled to speak his mind on the subject for he had studied Judaism for a lifetime and treated his many Jewish students equitably and decently. German Protestants were not guilty of intolerance. What offended them was the degree to which Jews asserted their otherness and their accumulation of wealth by unscrupulous means. Jews had learned what they could do, but not yet what they should refrain from doing:113 No student of human nature would deny that Zunz and his followers are driven by hatred and insolence and not by love, neither love of scholarship nor love of country. He is not surprised that Zunz therefore garners an assessment different from that

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accorded the modest and ever brave S. Munk or S.D. Luzzatto, truly exotic in appearance but living in his subject matter, or L. Dukes, whom we regard as hilariously Jewish but in marked contrast to Zunz always striving to get to the bottom of an idea. None of them feel particularly German, but rather Jewish (and this is my point) without a hidden agenda. They love Judaism wholeheartedly, bringing their people closer to the people of Herder. In contrast, we feel so utterly remote from Zunz and company, as if we lived on a different planet.114 The fury of Lagarde’s fusillade drove Kaufmann back into the fray and caused him to drop the professional politeness that marked his three letters to Lagarde from 1880 and 1884.115 Kaufmann was particularly incensed by his use of Lipman instead of Leopold as Zunz’s first name in the title of his essay. True, Yomtov Lipman was the Hebrew name by which he was called to the Torah in the synagogue, but outside the synagogue, he always used the name Leopold, despite the fact that Lipman was an old German name. Alluding to Lagarde’s own name change in 1854, Kaufmann averred that “a name is the bearer’s most personal property with which no one has a right to trifle, [a matter of respect] that Prof. Lagarde is least likely to be unfamiliar with.”116 The use was clearly a cynical ploy to denigrate Zunz as an outlier. Kaufmann reminded Lagarde of the put-down he had merited from a respected colleague on another occasion: “To tug at the mane of a dead lion is not an act of heroism.”117 Two factors determined the lugubrious tone of Zunz’s poetic selection in Die synagogale Poisie. The book by Michael Sachs had relieved Zunz from treating again the finest specimens of Sephardic religious poetry.118 More importantly and contrary to Lagarde, Jewish suffering did give rise to great poetry: “Suffering and penitential prayers [selihot] go together like lightning and thunder, pain and tears.”119 No one before Zunz had fully fathomed the deep interconnectedness of these twin aspects of the medieval Jewish experience. Thereafter Kaufmann showed at length how utterly flawed was Lagarde’s command of postbiblical Hebrew literature: “You may be great and renowned in 100 fields, in this one field you lack judgment and a voice. You have actually testified now against yourself and publicly renounced your authority to render an opinion here. . . . Let no one dare to say that a linguistic expert has shown that medieval synagogue poetry is ‘rubbish’ and anyone who admires

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Figure 7. The modest tombstones of Adelheid and Leopold Zunz, with their barely legible German inscriptions, in the Schönhauser Allee cemetery of the Jewish community of Berlin. Photograph by the author, taken in 1985.

it ‘deserves no place in Germany!’ ”120 To close on a positive note, Kaufmann appended a peroration worthy of Zunz’s achievement: This poetry has thousands upon thousands of poems to show, among which are pearls that glisten and can be set next to the gems of any literature. Therein the dead language of Zion was revived amidst the travails of its children. Intimacy and fluency, sweetness and fervor charm the reader. How can such richness blossom in such poverty, such beauty in such misery? And all this should separate us “rendering us odious to every German and estranging us forever?” No, a thousand times no! That is not a judgment bespeaking the spirit of a nation that gave birth to Herder, Goethe and Rückert, that looms like a light tower from which emanates light for the literature of the world.121

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On March 17, 1886, at age ninety-one, Zunz’s prolonged twilight finally turned to night. His funeral was conducted four days later on Purim in the imposing new Moorish synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse filled with hundreds of mourners. Rabbis Sigmund Maybaum of the Hochschule and Manuel Joel of the Breslau Seminary delivered the eulogies, while the organ and choir accompanied the ser vice. At its closing a large throng followed the wreath-bedecked coffin on foot to the old cemetery on Schönhauser Allee where Leopold was laid to rest next to Adelheid, his soul mate.122

Epilogue

Emblematic of the explosion of new knowledge ignited by Zunz is the iconic staged photograph of Solomon Schechter poring over the hoard of manuscripts in Cambridge that he had ransacked from the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo in the winter of 1896–97.1 He fully sensed the transformative impact of its vast holdings and the generations of scholars it would take to unravel them. The photo enables us to visualize the perseverance, drudgery, loneliness, and skill required to master the piles of written remnants of a culture and era not our own. To his lasting credit, Zunz never tried to soften the stark impact of his new knowledge by recourse to the medieval strategy of claiming it to be tucked away in Judaism’s esoteric tradition. That had been the manner by which Jewish elites since the twelfth century often assimilated new bodies of scientific, philosophic, and mystical knowledge into the authoritative corpus of Jewish texts. Creative exegesis, whether in the hands of Kabbalists, Abraham Ibn Ezra, or Maimonides, was the instrument by which novelty was reconciled to that which had been given. In the first half of the nineteenth century Nachman Krochmal, living in an environment far less hospitable to free inquiry, still interpreted isolated talmudic pronouncements expansively to make them anticipate and accord with conclusions arrived at solely by critical scholarship.2 The photo also epitomizes Zunz’s ceaseless quest for new knowledge. The received image of Judaism in 1818 rested on but a fraction of the literary texts it had engendered over the past millennium and a half. Its universe consisted largely of dark matter inaccessible to a state of mind encumbered by dogma or animus. To be sure, Zunz’s acquisition of new knowledge did not have the good fortune of a big bang à la Schechter, yet its implications and ripple effect were destined to be global. From the beginning his target audience was the world outside the Jewish community—the bureaucracies of the German states and the professoriate of their universities, which still viewed Judaism through the lens of Eisenmenger. Single-handedly, Zunz forged a radical revision based on an abundance of new

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sources to assault their ignorance, resistance, and contempt. No loss impeded his campaign more than the transfer to England of the private libraries of Oppenheimer, Michael, and Mordecai and Ephraim Bisliches.3 Finally in 1863, before finishing his Literaturgeschichte, he managed his first trip to Italy, whose libraries according to Zunz held more than three thousand Hebrew manuscripts, far more than any other country in Europe. To break up what was a taxing journey, Zunz stayed for nine days with Moritz Lazarus in Bern.4 In Parma he spent some two weeks examining more than 120 codices in the library of the priest and professor Giovanni Bernando de Rossi, the last of the great Christian Hebraists, who had died in 1831. Though de Rossi’s cata logue of Hebrew manuscripts was superior to those of other collections in Italy, Zunz was to write that “de Rossi loved his treasures of parchment but not their authors and the absence of love and high regard gave rise to error and ignorance.”5 After Parma Zunz traveled to Padua to visit for a day with Luzzatto, which was to be their first and only meeting. Upon his return home, Zunz wrote an essay, “On the Hebrew Manuscripts in Italy,” in which he stressed that the antiquated, error-filled catalogues of Hebrew manuscripts in European libraries merely reflected the prevailing and undiminished neglect of Jewish history and literature by the academic world: To the dark side of European culture belongs the treatment of Jews and Judaism. Jewish morality and ritual are viewed unfavorably even by advanced nations, set aside as insignificant, unfamiliar to the educated and a matter of indifference to the masses. How many humanists are troubled by the fate of the Jews? How many historians by their history? Which jurist studies the civil law of the Talmud? How many members of the academy can read Hebrew and how many professors can write it? Scholarly works whose subject is Judaism and whose author is Jewish are rarely read or bought by Christians. . . . For two hundred years now there has been no philological activity in this field and for one hundred no historical activity either. For what recently has been forthcoming, including bibliographical aids, we are solely indebted to unemployed Jews!6 While the bulk of Zunz’s essay was devoted to correcting quite a number of de Rossi’s entries to his cata logue, he closed with an overt and blunt attack

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against the Papacy for denying access to Jewish scholars to its unmatched archival collection: “Should outdated and error-riddled [cata logues] remain untouched irrespective of [new] moral and intellectual knowledge? This warning is meant especially for Rome where books are withheld from the research of scholars, suspected works not admitted, suspected visitors expelled from the library and [people] loll around rather than work. That is how Andres and Adler already 80 years ago depicted the monks, the guardians of eternal darkness, who hate every thing that thinks and speaks, that stirs and moves, a ghost in broad daylight.”7 On the subject of the Papacy, the scholarly and political tracks of Zunz’s career once again converged. In regard to the emancipation of its Jews and the opening of its archives, Italy still lagged behind developments in northern Europe. Switching to the vocative, Zunz called on the people of Italy to rid themselves of the shackles of the church in Rome as they had recently done in Florence, Bologna, Parma, Turin, and Milan and thereby also to free up its Hebrew manuscripts: “Europe thirsts for the advance of freedom and Italy for the demise of the Church’s power just as thought [thirsts] for the right expressive word. When dawn breaks on the day that the tricolor of unity, freedom and the federation of nations flies over the Capitol, then will the chains of the Jews and their books be sprung and the science that frees and the love that illuminates will enter the halls of the Vatican.”8 In retrospect then, Zunz’s scholarship was unmistakably political. To be viable, the extension of equality to Jews hinged on granting Judaism its rightful place in the cultural firmament of the West, if not the world. Integration was a two-tier process, political and cultural, and each required a new understanding of Judaism that rested primarily on exhuming the literary creativity buried in archives across Europe and beyond. Planted in a social context polluted by centuries and layers of contempt, emancipation would not long endure. It is also no accident that his early masterpieces were triggered by government acts of discrimination. For in tandem with the effort to alter the negative representation of Judaism embedded in German culture went the conviction that emancipation for Jews could not be attained in isolation. It was inextricably part of a larger political transformation underway that would culminate in freedom and equality for all sectors of German society. The political fate of Jews and Germans were linked. By plunging into the revolution of 1848, Zunz shifted his formidable talents to another front, but did not deviate from his ultimate agenda. His unabashedly democratic sentiments were in

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consonance with his intensely revisionist construction of Judaism. Zunz spoke comfortably and powerfully in both a universal and particular register. It is only within this ever-roiling context that the quality of Zunz’s scholarship can be fully appreciated. Its dispassionate austerity was its greatest achievement. Zunz’s work was singularly unapologetic. Though a deeply engaged scholar, he did not indulge in special pleading, pandering, or burnishing his material. Nor did he hurry to publish. Like Nietzsche, Zunz was “a teacher of slow reading.”9 It took time to compile the data and to submit them to philological analysis. The new had to be defensible with conclusions anchored in the complex and textured construct that the plethora of new facts allowed him to craft. In his pursuit of a more accurate picture of the past, he was prepared to let the facts be determinative. Despite relentless external pressure, he steadfastly refused to subordinate his scholarly ethos to his political ends. The surface equanimity of his profusion of details always concealed a tempest of strong emotions. And that accumulation of empirical evidence amounted to a weighty refutation of the Christian claim that rabbinic Judaism was little more than a lifeless legal torso relegated by Christianity to the dustbin of history. Undeniably, Zunz’s work was predicated on a deep-seated conviction that eventually the truth would prevail. The historian’s obligation was merely to unfurl it unadorned. As he had averred in the introduction of his ZGL in 1845, one need not take recourse to arrogance and injustice to overcome the products of arrogance and injustice.10 Zunz’s rational bent came to the fore again in his enthusiasm for August Theodor Stamm’s ringing progressive manifesto Die Religion der Tat (The Religion of Action), which came out in 1852. A young Berlin doctor, social critic, and atheist, he deplored the destructive history of religion, urged human action informed by reason and lauded the universal role of Judaism in advancing civilization. Not long after it appeared, Zunz recommended it to Julie Ehrenberg to assuage her grief over the death of her sister.11 And in 1860 Adelheid informed her that Stamm was even an occasional visitor to the Zunz household.12 Zunz’s epigram that true scholarship was generative (“echte Wissenschaft ist taterzeugend”) certainly encapsulated the spirit of Stamm’s small book. On a deeper level, it reiterated the paradox of Zunz’s present-mindedness in that value-free scholarship could be the seedbed for political values. Jewish mysticism obviously fell victim to such a disposition. In 1878 Zunz received a letter from an admirer in London with three questions related to

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Kabbalah. After protesting his age and infirmity, Zunz roundly rejected any consideration of the subject: “The so-called Kabbalah of the Middle Ages, a daughter of superstitions and lies [with] its names for angels [shemos], Zoharic nonsense [shtus] and the like no longer merits our attention; scholarship has other tasks.” Admittedly, the young Zunz of 1818 with his impressive command of the sources of the Zohar displayed more patience with, if not sympathy for, the subject.13 In sum, Zunz effected a turn to secular history in which the guiding presence of a supreme being had been removed. Yet for all the rupture, there were continuities. Zunz shared with his ancestors a hatred for Christianity, visceral contempt for Jews who converted to it, a predilection to see the leitmotif of diaspora history in terms of insecurity and persecution, and, above all, a privileging of the synagogue as its central institution.14 Ironically, however, and notwithstanding his secular ethos, Zunz devoted the bulk of his research to the religious history of Judaism. As the synagogue emerged to give public and private expression to Judaism in the context of the “assimilation project,”15 Zunz invested it with a noble pedigree. By reshaping the synagogue as the locus of midrash and piyut, he foregrounded the spiritual and responsive nature of Judaism. While it remained a largely literary religious culture, it was no longer perceived to turn solely on its legal axis. The imaginative, creative, and poetic legacy that Zunz had recovered, ordered, and interpreted gave generations of medieval Jews a voice in an unbroken sacred dialogue. Th is new knowledge, painstakingly assembled and reconstituted, decisively altered the image of what had transpired in the past. Yet Zunz was ever mindful of the gap between his aspirations and his accomplishments. In his printed letter of thanks to the many who had written him on his seventieth birthday, Zunz acknowledged the discomfort the realization caused him: “Indeed, the addresses and notes with their over-the-top praise made me painfully aware of the distance between what I set out to do and what I actually did. Still, even this knowledge has its benefit.”16 In the same modest vein, it is not out of character to imagine that Zunz, ever ready to share his knowledge with inquiring younger scholars, was at times overcome by the same understandable sense of frustration that Schechter felt as he sorted the hoard of manuscripts in Cambridge that he had salvaged from Cairo: “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

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for one generation. It will occupy many a specialist, and much longer than a lifetime. However, to use an old adage, ‘It is not thy duty to complete the work, but neither art thou free to desist from it.’ ”17 By the time Zunz passed from the scene, though, his life had forged a legacy of enduring power. Driven by the curiosity and courage to know, he had written the history of the synagogue as a seminal forum of literary creativity. Toward that end he launched a never-ending search for new sources of information about the Jewish past. He likewise destined the medium of history to become the dominant mode of modern discourse for debating the merits of conflicting ideologies. Though he failed to gain admission for Wissenschaft des Judentums into the curriculum of the German university, he showed the need for a proper institutional setting for the cultivation of the field.18 In consequence, the rabbinic seminaries that arose to fill the vacuum were imbued with a decidedly academic ethos, producing religious leaders of a scholarly bent. Still, his failure to overcome the resistance of the university to Jewish studies meant, as he had feared, that the political emancipation of German Jewry was fated to remain incomplete, never to be matched by the emancipation of its cultural history from its intellectual isolation. In dark days, that denial would ominously augur the impermanence of the former. Finally, Zunz’s turn to history engendered ever-new subfields as it expanded and penetrated other centers of Jewish life beyond the borders of Germany, where it would eventually become ensconced in the realm of higher education. All in all, a record of pioneering achievements compiled by an extraordinary man of vision, talent, integrity, courage, iron will, and redeeming humanity.

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a b b r ev i at i o n s

AZJ

Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums

Braun, I

Johann Braun, Judentum, Jurisprudenz und Philosophie: Bilder aus dem Leben des Juristen Eduard Gans (1797–1839), 1997

Braun, II

Johann Braun, Eduard Gans:Briefe und Dokumente, 2011

CAHJP

Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem

DBZ

Das Buch Zunz

DMG

Die Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft

EJJS

European Journal for Jewish Studies

Geiger, NS Abraham Geiger’s Nachgelassene Schriften, 5 vols., 1875–78 Glatzer, I

Nahum N. Glatzer, Leopold and Adelheid Zunz, An Account in Letters, 1815–1885 1958

Glatzer, II

Nahum N. Glatzer, Leopold Zunz: Jude— Deutscher—Europäer, 1964

GSAPK

Geheimes Staatsarchiv–Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin

GV

Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt

HB

Hebräische Bibliographie

248

Ab b re v i a t i o n s

HUCA

Hebrew Union College Annual

HUC-JIR

Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion

JHIW

Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw

JI

Jahrbuch für Israeliten, new series

JJGL

Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur

JPSA

Jewish Publication Society of America

JQR

Jewish Quarterly Review

JSS

Jewish Social Studies

JTSA

Jewish Theological Seminary of America

JTSL

Jewish Theological Seminary Library

KJI

Kalender und Jahrbuch für Israeliten, ed. Isidor Busch, Vienna

LBI

Leo Baeck Institute

LBIYB

Leo Baeck Institute Year Book

LBO

Literaturblatt des Orients

LJ

Liberales Judentum

MGWJ

Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums

NLI

National Library of Israel, Jerusalem

PAAJR

Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research

WZJT

Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie

Ab b re v i a t i o n s

ZDMG

Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft

ZGJD

Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland

ZGL

Zur Geschichte und Literatur, 1845

ZRIJ

Zeitschrift für die religiösen Interessen des Judentums

Zunz, GS

Leopold Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, 3 vols., 1875–76

ZWJ

Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1823

249

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notes

pr eface 1. Leopold Zunz, Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur: Nebst Nachrichten über ein altes bis jetzt ungedrucktes hebräisches Werk (Berlin, 1818). 2. NLI, ARC, 40 792, Z1–4, 12. 3. Shneor Zalman Schechter, Aboth d’Rabbi Nathan (New York, 1945), v. 4. NLI, ARC, 40 792, Z12; Solomon Schechter, “Leopold Zunz,” Studies in Judaism, 3rd series (Philadelphia, 1945), 84–142, 279. 5. Solomon Schechter, “Leopold Zunz,” 84, 117. 6. Ludwig Geiger, ed., Abraham Geiger’s Nachgelassene Schriften, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1875–78); Ludwig Geiger, ed., Abraham Geiger: Leben und Lebenswerk (Berlin, 1910). 7. NLI, ARC, 40 792, V2. In his introduction to the volume of letters in preparation, Geiger revealed that when he first read through Zunz’s correspondence he was touched by a sense of the holy (28). The invaluable publications by Geiger will be noted as used in the narrative. 8. Michael A. Meyer, “Without Wissenschaft Th ere Is No Judaism”: Th e Life and Th ought of the Jewish Historian Ismar Elbogen (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2004). 9. Ismar Elbogen, “Leopold Zunz zum Gedächtnis,” Fünfziger Bericht für die Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin (Berlin, 1936), 14–32. 10. Gotthold Elyakim Weil, “Arkhiyon Zunz” (Hebrew), Kiryat Sefer, 34 (1959–60), 231–40. 11. Meyer, “Without Wissenschaft,” 9. 12. Nahum Norbert Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (New York, 1961), xiii; as for the correspondence, see the meticulous inventory prepared in 1973 by Ilse Turnheim, LBI, Samuel Meyer Ehrenberg Collection, AR, 4025. 13. Nahum N. Glatzer, ed., Leopold and Adelheid Zunz: An Account in Letters (London, 1958); idem, Leopold Zunz: Jude— Deutscher— Europäer (Tübingen, 1964). 14. The home page for the Zunz Archive is http://www.jewish-archives.org; for the LBI archives, see http://www.lbi.org /digibaeck.

introduction 1. Ismar Schorsch, “The Production of a Classic: Zunz as Krochmal’s Editor,” LBIYB, 31 (1986), 281–315; idem, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H., 1994), 166.

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2. Th e Writings of Nachman Krochmal (Hebrew), ed. Simon Rawidowicz, 2nd enlarged ed. (Waltham, Mass., 1961), Zunz’s introduction, 2:7. Zunz’s third axiom is clearly a reformulation of the talmudic hierarchy that ranks the study of Torah above observance, because study should culminate in observance (BT, Kiddushin, 40b). 3. See above x. 4. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, Z1–4; Leopold Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1875–76). 5. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, Z15, 16; Ismar Schorsch, “Wives and Wissenschaft: The Domestic Seedbed of Critical Scholarship,” Gender and Jewish History, ed. Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore (Bloomington, 2011), 40. 6. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, F1, V12. 7. Ibid., C 13 (DBZ), 1856: 73.27. 8. Ibid., C 13 (DBZ), 1856: 73.25. 9. I. M. Jost, Neuere Geschichte der Israeliten in der ersten Hälfte des XIX. Jahrhunderts, 3 vols. (Breslau, 1846–47), 1, 314. In a letter to Adelheid dated July 16, 1847, Zunz vented his spleen: “It now seems as if the Jewry law [for Prussia in 1847] is about to be cooked up by the State Council. Perhaps it will come out as animated [geistvoll] as Jost’s Cultural History, which pushes Philippson to the fore and me to the back, cutting me up into pieces while serving up Geiger [whole] like a well cooked pikeperch. But I am resigned not to get my due from such small and insignificant souls [Tafeldecken]” (LBI, AR, 3648, series III, subseries 2). By 1859, Jost’s appreciation of Zunz had grown more magnanimous (see Isaak Markus Jost, Geschichte des Judentums und seiner Sekten, 3 vols. [Leipzig, 1857–59], 3, 344–45; also see NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 [DBZ], 133). 10. Hermann Cohen, Jüdische Schriften, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1924), 1, 332. In 1880 at Marburg, Cohen was the only Jew on a faculty of 31 and in Prussia in 1885, out of a total of 248 full professors (Ordinariate), Cohen was one of eight (i.e., 3.2 percent) who were still Jewish (Andreas D. Ebert, Jüdische Hochschullehrer an preussischen Universitäten [1870–1924] [Frankfurt a.M., 2008], 283–84). 11. Gershom Scholem, “Some Reflections on Wissenschaft des Judentums” (Hebrew), Devarim Bego, ed. Avraham Shapira (Tel Aviv, 1975), 389–91; on the meaning of this passage, see Peter Schäfer, “Gershom Scholem und die Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Gershom Scholem: Zwischen den Disziplinen, ed. Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith (Frankfurt a.M., 1995), 135–42. By 1922 Scholem had formulated his negative critique of Wissenschaft des Judentums and Walter Benjamin urged him to publish it in his new literary journal, Angelus. Scholem indicted the German Jewish turn to history as a pathetic bourgeois attempt to domesticate Judaism, a decidedly nonbourgeois phenomenon. That Scholem did not publish it then is understandable. Who would have taken such an onslaught by a freshly minted Ph.D. seriously? Why he chose to do it in 1944 remains mystifying. Scholem later admitted that writing it in Hebrew rather than German allowed him to express himself without restraint (Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin— Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft [Frankfurt a.M., 1976], 139–40). 12. Just two more of Zunz’s favorite adages to highlight his devotion to rational discourse: In a letter to Julie Ehrenberg, Samuel Meyer’s daughter-in-law, dated April 15, 1851, Adelheid referred to a sketched portrait of Zunz on which he had inscribed the rhyming couplet: “The messiahs announced by prophets saddle us with tyrants” (Den Messias worauf Propheten sannen, den bringen uns— die Tyrannen) (Nahum N. Glatzer, ed., Leopold and Adleheid Zunz: An Account in Letters [London, 1958], 233). Similarly, the portrait collection of the JTSL includes a lithograph of a handsome young Zunz at fifty done by Paul Rohrbach on the basis of a portrait

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by Julius Muhr, beneath which is the following adage in Zunz’s telltale script and signature: “The thought is powerful enough to vanquish arrogance and injustice without recourse to arrogance and injustice” (Der Gedanke ist mächtig genug ohne Anmassung und Unrecht über die Anmassung und Unrecht zu siegen) (see JTSL, ARC, portrait collection, PNT G2026; also see Gustav Karpeles, Jewish Literature and Other Essays [Philadelphia, 1895], 338). 13. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 158–62. 14. Anthony T. Grafton, “Rediscovering a Lost Continent,” New York Review of Books, October 5, 2006, 44.

chapter 1. born in battle 1. Ismar Freund, Die Emanzipation der Juden in Preussen, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1912), 2, 282; see also Michael A. Meyer, ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, 4 vols. (New York, 1996– 98), 2, 51; and Anthony Grafton, “Wilhelm von Humboldt,” American Scholar (Summer 1981), 371–81. 2. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 17, 20. The Samson Free School had been founded in 1786 by Philipp Samson as a traditional Beit Midrash teaching mainly Talmud. Arriving as a sixteen-year-old in 1789, Ehrenberg himself spent five years there as a student. By 1807, without benefit of any formal schooling, he returned as an experienced pedagogue with a broad knowledge of Hebrew, Jewish texts, math, and foreign languages (Leopold Zunz, Samuel Meyer Ehrenberg, Inspektor der Samsonschen Freischule zu Wolfenbüttel [Braunschweig, 1854], 9–19). 3. Fritz Bamberger, ed., Das Buch Zunz: Künftigen ehrlichen Leuten gewidmet: Eine Probe (Berlin?, 1931?), 20. 4. Ibid., 11; Peter Wagner, Panu Derech— Bereitet den Weg (Detmold, 1994), 47. 5. Bamberger, Das Buch Zunz, 49; Markus Brann, “Mitteilungen aus dem Briefwechsel zwischen Zunz und Kaufmann,” JJGL, 5 (1902), 190. 6. Ismar Elbogen, “Zum Andenken an Leopold Zunz. Zunz: Mein erster Unterricht in Wolfenbüttel,” JJGL, 30 (1937), 136–37. On the genealogy of Zunz’s ancestors, see David Kaufmann, “Die Familie Zunz,” MGWJ, 38 (1894), 481–92; Markus Brann, “Dr. Leopold Zunz und seine Frank furter Ahnen,” MGWJ, 38 (1894), 493–500. 7. Nahum N. Glatzer, Leopold and Adelheid Zunz: An Account in Letters, 1815–1885 (London, 1958), 3–4 (hereafter Glatzer, I). 8. Bamberger, Das Buch Zunz, 19. Zunz, though, was not without a few close relatives, a sister Julie in Bielefeld, born in 1796, and grandparents in Detmold, who died in 1827 and 1828. In 1818 Zunz returned to Detmold for the fi rst time since his birth and found some handwritten letters of his father, which stirred him deeply. He also had cousins in Teplitz and Dresden, whom he and Adelheid visited on occasion (NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 [DBZ], 18, 30, 48, 50; Wagner, 129–31). In the spring of 1836, Adelheid stayed with Rosa Zunz in Teplitz (LBI, Ar, 3648, series III, subseries 2, box 1, folder 72, Adelheid to Leopold, June 1, 1836). According to David Kaufmann, when Zunz came to Berlin, he could easily have stayed with his wealthy second cousin, Ruben Samuel Gumpertz, but preferred to live in the household where he served as tutor (“Leopold Zunz,” Gesammelte Schriften von David Kaufmann, ed. Markus Brann, 3 vols. [Frankfurt, a.M., 1908–15], 1, 335–36). 9. Glatzer, I, 1–4; Nahum  N. Glatzer, Leopold Zunz: Jude— Deutscher— Europäer (Tübingen, 1964), 76 (hereafter Glatzer, II).

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10. Brann, “Mitteilungen,” 128. Herz was the aunt of Felix Eberty, a great-grandson of Veitel Ephraim, who in 1826 at age fourteen converted out (see Steven M. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community [New York, 1994], 92, 130). Zunz’s diary contains a list of some sixtyfive names of students whom he tutored individually from October 1815 to June 1846. By each name Zunz recorded the subject he taught. He also listed at least eight schools in which he had at some point offered instruction. Clearly when in need of income, Zunz could and did fall back on teaching and tutoring (NLI, ARC 4o 792, C13-1, 177). 11. Salo Baron, Die Judenfrage auf dem Wiener Kongress (Vienna, 1920); Meyer, GermanJewish History, 2, 24–36. 12. Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (Berlin, 1781), and 2nd vol. (Berlin, 1783); for context, see Reinhard Rürup, “The Tortuous and Thorny Path to Legal Equality—‘Jew Laws’ and Emancipatory Legislation in Germany from the Late Eighteenth Century,” LBIYB, 31 (1986), 3–33; Robert Lieberles, “Dohm’s Treatise on the Jews— A Defence of the Enlightenment,” LBIYB, 33 (1988), 29–42. 13. Glatzer, II, 83. 14. Bamberger, 19; Fridrich [sic] Rühs, Über die Ansprüche der Jude nan das deutsche Bürgerrecht, second improved and expanded printing (Berlin, 1816); reprinted by Karl Christian Ernst von Benzel-Sternau, Anti-Israel: Eine Projüdische Satire aus dem Jahre 1818 (Heidelberg, 2004), 51–124. 15. Rühs, Über die Ansprüche der Juden, v. 16. Ibid., 7–12, 15–19, 20–22, 24–28, 42–62. 17. Ibid., 6, 32–34, 39. 18. Dohm (1783), 177. 19. Ibid. (1781), 26–28, 104–5, 153–54; Rühs, Über die Ansprüche der Juden, v. 20. Jakob Friedrich Fries, Über die Gefährdung des Wohlstandes und Charakters der Deutschen durch die Juden (Heidelberg, 1816), 10, 12, 15, 22–23, reprinted by Benzel-Sternau, 125–53; see also Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 74–91. 21. Sigmund Zimmern, Versuch einer Würdigung der Angriff e des Herrn Professor Fries auf die Juden (Heidelberg, 1816), 3. Jakob Weil, a Jewish educator in Frankfurt a.M., who had earlier written in defense of the Talmud and the rabbis, also dared to take on Rühs and Fries in his Bemerkungen zu den Schriften der Herren Professoren Rühs und Fries über die Juden und deren Ansprüche auf das deutsche Bürgerrecht (Frankfurt a.M., 1816). Weil asked, what brought about the change in public opinion regarding Jewish aspirations? When Dohm wrote, people agreed with his view and now they rage against any extension of citizenship. In the interval what had Jews done to bring about this coarsening of the public debate? Did they not fight alongside fellow Germans against the French? Did not fifty-five Jewish officers lose their lives at Waterloo? The resurgence of medievalism, Weil answered, was due solely to the Congress of Vienna, which put Jewish emancipation squarely before the public. The obscurantists erupted in its wake, took recourse to the arsenal of (Johann Andreas) Eisenmenger, and gained the ear of academics (1–9). On Weil as a youthful pioneer in the study of Aggada, see Maren R. Niehoff, “Jacob Weil’s Contribution to a Modern Concept of Haggadah,” LBIYB, 41 (1996), 21– 49. On the corrosive anti-Jewish sentiments among university students at the time, see Uriel Tal, “Young German Intellectuals on Romanticism and Judaism— Spiritual Turbulence in the Early 19th Century,” Salo Wittmayer Baron Jubilee Volume, 3 vols. (Jerusalem, 1974), 2, 919–38. Recently Werner Tress went beyond the flood of local details to correlate the disparate, sundry

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eruptions of anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany after the Congress of Vienna into a repercussive national whole. He rightly stressed the seminal and cohesive influence on public opinion exerted by the defamatory essays of German professors and the degree to which they compelled Jewish university students to forge their own academic discourse (see Werner Tress, “Akademischer Nationalismus und jüdische Wissenschaftsbewegung,” Von der jüdischen Aufklärung über die Wissenschaft des Judentums zu den Jüdischen Studien, ed. Christina von Braun et al. [Berlin, 2014], 15–44). 22. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 26; D 1:2. 23. Ibid., D1: 2, 1. 24. Ibid., 2, 3. The works that Zunz referenced in this passage are the infamous Johann Andreas Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judentum, 2 vols. (Frankfurt a.M., 1700; Königsberg, 1711); Gottfried Selig, Der Jude: Eine Wochenschrift 9 vols. (Leipzig, 1768–72). The identity of Rohrer’s Reisebeschreibung eludes me. 25. Johann Braun, Judentum, Jurisprudenz und Philosophie: Bilder aus dem Leben des Juristen Eduard Gans (1797–1839) (Baden-Baden, 1997), 18. 26. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, B10:8. 27. Friedrich Rühs, Die Rechte des Christenthums und des deutschen Volks (Berlin, 1816), 2, 9–11, 29, 35–36, 50–52, 56–57; on Ewald’s defense of emancipation, see Johann Anselm Steiger, Johann Ludwig Ewald (1748–1822): Rettung eines theologischen Zeitgenossen (Göttingen, 1996), 315–52. 28. Friedrich Rühs, Handbuch der Geschichte des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1816), 141–51, Eisenmenger quotation on 141. Stefan Rohrbacher is not guilty of an overstatement when he writes that “the history of anti-Semitism in Germany in the nineteenth century can at least partially be written as a reception history of Eisenmenger and that often key dates in this history are connected with the name Eisenmenger” (“ ‘Gründlicher und Wahrhafter Bericht’: Des Orientalisten Johann Andreas Eisenmengers Entdecktes Judenthum [1700] als Klassiker des ‘wissenschaftlichen’ Antisemitismus,” Reuchlin und seine Erben, ed. Peter Schäfer and Irina Wandrey [Ostfi ldern, Germany, 2005], 185). 29. Originally published as a stand-alone essay: Leopold Zunz, Etwas über die rabbinische Litteratur: Nebst Nachrichten über ein altes bis jetzt ungedrucktes hebräisches Werk (Berlin, 1818). See Baron, Die Judenfrage, 178–206; Meyer, German-Jewish History, 2, 27–30. 30. Leopold Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1875–76), 1, 31n. 1. 31. Ibid., 1. 32. Ibid., 5. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 4. Jost had left Wolfenbüttel before Zunz to study in Göttingen. In his second letter to Zunz dated March 1, 1814, he reported exuberantly on his inexpensive circumstances and the warm reception accorded him by his teachers. Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Germany’s most renowned professor of the Hebrew Bible, was tutoring Jost three hours a week in Arabic and had already promised him, despite the fact that he was his only student, to continue tutoring him right through the summer. In speaking of his progress and satisfaction, Jost took up the subject of their shared mastery of the Hebrew language as the key to understanding Judaism. The passage is noteworthy because it underscores the shift away from Hebrew as an absolute to an instrumental value, that is, from an emblem of national pride, a medium of communication, and an uncontaminated language of literature to a largely philological tool. Though Zunz may not as yet have personally negotiated that shift, by the time he came

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to write Etwas, he clearly had recognized the failure of the Haskalah’s national project. “You too,” Jost wrote, “are much engaged with these matters, as you have often told me, but perhaps I may be permitted to assert that you view them incorrectly. While we are studying the long dead, quite impoverished Hebrew language, it cannot be our intent to master it as such in order to eventually write it with exceptional elegance, but rather to regard it as a mere tool for studying carefully the spirit of our religion. Were it a language of scholars like Latin, were it rich enough to be able to describe a field of learning [eine Wissenschaft] clearly and philosophically, then it would merit the time we spend on it to write it with exceptional beauty. But even when it served Jews as a scholarly vehicle, it was insufficient to develop a topic scientifically [wissenschaftlich], given how often one had to take recourse to Arabic, Greek or Aramaic terms in order to express a thought poorly. How then can we hope in the face of these circumstances, even with the most determined diligence, to regain a language that would be the mother of but one-thousandth part of humanity and perhaps fully mastered by no more than one-millionth? And what will the world of science actually gain if after enormous effort we will have reached that end? Candidly, we do not have a single book in Hebrew that could serve as a model for us in philosophy or any other field. “Our study of Hebrew will take a totally new turn once the effort we expend on it is intended to clear up obscurities in Scripture and to show that reason can attain thereby a clear idea of the essence of our religion and banish the forces of Orthodoxy. This requires, however, a completely different way of studying Hebrew. We would then no longer force Hebrew on German ways of thinking by expressing our thoughts in seemingly related Hebrew words, while actually losing the primary meaning of those words. It should be our task to first fathom the true meaning of individual Hebrew words, to understand their basic notions and to observe the adjustment of meanings to the ideas of the age. Even the study of grammar must be altered, for the Christian textbooks of a Vater, the lectures of a Gesenius and Eichhorn are far deeper than all the works of our grammarians. Only then will we be able to translate the words. With the Hebrews who always spoke in visual images, words are fluid, and we will fail miserably if we act superficially or impute to them a German connotation. What is it that we need to do then? Nothing less, my Lippmann, than [acquire] a relatively complete knowledge of the evolution of human thought, of the life-options of the Hebrews in the Orient, of their favorite ideas that emerge from their way of life and finally of the ebb and flow of Hebraic culture during the 1500 years in which the nation functioned. Moreover, we must fully tear ourselves away from the firmly fixed Masora, taking into account only the consonants and not the vowels. For the Masoretes, given their ignorance, punctuated entirely erroneously” (NLI, ARC, 4o 792, G15). As for the valence ascribed to Hebrew by the Berlin Maskilim, see Shmuel Feiner, “Isaac Euchel— ‘Entrepreneur’ of the Haskalah Movement in Germany” (Hebrew), Zion, 52 (1987), 440–43. Also see Yaacov Shavit, “A Duty Too Heavy to Bear: Hebrew in the Berlin Haskalah, 1783–1819; Between Classic, Modern and Romantic,” Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A Language in Exile, ed. Lewis Glinert (New York, 1993), 111–28. Jost’s dismissive view of the Masora echoes the stance of Eichhorn over against that of Moses Mendelssohn. See Eduard Breuer, The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). 35. Zunz, Etwas, 6–7. 36. Hans-Joachim Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments von der Reformation biszur Gegenwart (Moers, Germany, 1956). 37. Zunz, Etwas, 3. 38. Ibid., 7. 39. Ibid., 8. 40. Ibid., 9.

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41. Ibid., 9n.3. 42. Ibid., 12n.2. 43. Ibid., 10. 44. Ibid., 14, 19. 45. Ibid., 21. 46. Ibid., 17. 47. Ibid., 27. Zunz’s lofty conception of philosophy as the ultimate unifying expression of history’s multiplicity of phenomena surely resembles August Boeckh’s and perhaps even that of Hegel (Ernst Bratuscheck, ed., Encyclopädie und Methologie der philologischen Wissenschaften von August Boeckh [Leipzig, 1877], 18–19, 265–66, 273–74; J. N. Findlay, Hegel: A Reexamination [London, 1958], 144–48). 48. Zunz, Etwas, 2. 49. Peter Schäfer, “Judaistik—jüdische Wissenschaft in Deutschland heute: Historische Identität und Nationalität,” Saeculum, 42 (1991), 199–216. 50. Zunz’s official transcript dated October 1, 1819, has him acknowledging “that he had also registered [gehört] for the lectures by Prof. Rühs on ancient history, but because of his absence was unable to secure an attestation [from him]” (NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C1:5). 51. Bratuscheck, iii. 52. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 25, 28, 29, 31. See also Anthony Grafton, “Juden und Griechen bei Friedrich August Wolf,” Friedrich August Wolf: Studien, Dokumente, Bibliographie, ed. Reinhard Markner and Giuseppe Veltri (Stuttgart, 1999), 16; also Giuseppe Veltri, “Altertumswissenschaft und Wissenschaft des Judentums: Leopold Zunz und seine Lehrer F. A. Wolf und A. Böckh,” Markner and Veltri, Friedrich August Wolf, 42. 53. According to Boeckh, Wolf had put forth both the concept and term in Halle in 1786 (Bratuscheck, 38). 54. Zunz, Etwas, 27; Bratuscheck, 18–19; Luitpold Wallach: Liberty and Letters: The Thoughts of Leopold Zunz (London, 1959), 79. 55. Cf. Wallach, Liberty and Letters, 71–80; idem, “The Scientific and Philosophical Ground of Zunz’s ‘Science of Judaism,’ ” Historia Judaica, 4 (1942), 51–70. 56. It was Wolf who bestowed the name on the field. See Friedrich August Wolf, “Darstellung der Altertums-Wissenschaft,” Museum der Alterthums-Wissenschaft, 1 (1807), 30. 57. Ibid., 16–19; Bratuscheck, 265–66, 273–74. 58. F. Wolf, 57. 59. Rühs, Über die Ansprüche der Juden, 6. 60. Josephus, trans. Ralph Marcus, 9 vols. (London, 1951–63), 7, Jewish Antiquities, book 12, lines 196–223. 61. Rühs, Über die Ansprüche der Juden, 12. 62. Zunz, GS, 1, 205. 63. Ibid., 205–6; Zunz reiterated this periodization in his Zur Geschichte und Literatur (Berlin, 1845), 22; cf. Wallach, Liberty and Letters, 81–82.

chapter 2. a messianic moment 1. Glatzer, II, 125. 2. At some point Zunz entered into his diary a list of about 140 names of those who had graced their salon between 1824 and 1841. It included friends and acquaintances from near and

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far as well as Christians like the Bible scholar Franz Delitzsch and the writer Karl Gutzkow. Zunz underlined the names of the Christians (NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13-1, 180). 3. [Fürchtegott Lebrecht], Adelheid Zunz: Ein Angedenken für Freunde (Berlin, 1874); Ismar Schorsch, “Wives and Wissenschaft: The Domestic Seedbed of Critical Scholarship,” Gender and Jewish History, ed. Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore (Bloomington, 2011), 27–43. 4. A copy of the dissertation is in NLI, ARC, 4o 792, D2-1; Monika Richarz, Der Eintritt der Juden in die akademischen Berufe (Tübingen, 1974), 105; Edward Frederick Miller, The Influence of Gesenius on Hebrew Lexicography (New York, 1927). Gesenius thought highly of Zunz’s essay on Rashi (see Eugen Mittwoch, “Aus Briefen von W. Gesenius, E. Rödiger, J. L. Saalschütz und J. Ch. Fr. Tuch an Fr. S. F. Benary,” MGWJ, 42 [1934], 205). 5. Zunz, GS, I, 30–31. 6. Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H., 1994), 71–92. 7. Raphael Jospe, Torah and Sophia: The Life and Thought of Shem Tov Ibn Falaquera (Cincinnati, 1988), 42 n.56. 8. Ismar Freund, Die Emanzipation der Juden in Preussen, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1912), 1, 456; Johann Braun, Eduard Gans: Briefe und Dokumente (Tübingen, 2011), 131 (hereafter Braun, II). 9. Glatzer, I, 6. 10. Ibid., 11. 11. Glatzer, II, 89. 12. Richarz, 99. 13. Braun, II, 31–32. 14. Richarz, 99 n.40; Neue Deutsche Biographie, 5 (1961), 350. 15. Deborah Hertz, Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (New Haven, Conn., 1988), 229–39; Steven M. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community (New York, 1994), 121–22. 16. Michael A. Meyer, “Ganz nach dem alten Herkommen,” Bild und Selbstbildung der Juden Berlins zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik, ed. Marianne Awerbuch and Stefi JerschWenzel (Berlin, 1992), 139. 17. Richarz, 87, 206–17; Jost, letter in LBI, AR 4295. 18. Richarz, 214–15. Zimmern had been a member of the short-lived Berlin Wissenschaftszirkel in 1816, which preceded the founding of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschafts der Juden (see Hanns Günther Reissner, Eduard Gans: Ein Leben im Vormärz [Tübingen, 1965], 32, 34, 39–42). 19. Braun, II, 69–81, quotation on 69. 20. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 238. 21. Glatzer, II, 2; on Zunz’s account of the name change, see Markus Brann, “Mitteilungen aus dem Briefwechsel zwischen Zunz und Kaufmann,” JJGL, 5 (1902), 159–209, esp. 191, 6 (1903), 120–57. 22. Glatzer, I, 13–14. 23. LBI, AR 4294, letter dated September, 28, 1822. 24. Cf. Glatzer, II, 20–23; Albert Hoschander Friedlander, “The Wohlwill-Moser Correspondence,” LBIYB, 11 (1966), 275–76; Alexander Altmann, “Zur Frühgeschichte der jüdischen Predigt in Deutschland,” LBIYB, 6 (1961), 7 n.25. 25. Glatzer, II, 107; Glatzer, I, 17. 26. For example, NLI, ARC 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 1855: 73.11: “Selig Cassel, der dritte Paulus, und Theodor Creizenach verlassen die Juden und begiessen sich; sie gehen in die Pfade von Gans, Benary, Rosenberg, Stahl, etc.”

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27. Leopold Zunz, Die Monatstage des Kalenderjahres: Ein Andenken an Hingeschiedene (Berlin, 1872); Glatzer, II, 69. In a letter to Abraham Geiger on February 3, 1836, Zunz asked him pointedly why he saw fit to note the recent death of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in his journal. (Ludwig Geiger, “Leopold Zunz und Abraham Geiger,” LJ [1916], 133. The brief obituary appeared in WZJT 2 [1836], 196–97.) 28. Zunz, Die Monatstage, 26. On January 27, 1826, Zunz had written to his friend Isak Noa Mannheimer that “Dr. Gans returned here from Paris 23 days ago and is still the same open, lovable and lively person, except that by nature he is now fully captivated by that which formerly seemed to him most repulsive. He is an unbaptized Hegelian Christian.” (Markus Brann and Moses Rosenmann, “Der Briefwechsel zwischen Isak Noa Mannheimer und Leopold Zunz,” MGWJ, 61 [1917], 89–116, 293–318, quotation on 295.) 29. Glatzer, II, 107. On the Verein, see Sinai (Siegfried) Ucko, “Geistesgeschichtliche Grundlagen der Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Wissenschaft des Judentums im deutschen Sprachbereich, ed. Kurt Wilhelm, 2 vols. (Tübingen, 1967), 1, 315–52; Reissner; Schorsch, From Text to Context, 205–32; Johann Braun, Judentum, Jurisprudenz und Philosophie: Bilder aus dem Leben des Juristen Eduard Gans (1797–1839), (Baden-Baden, 1997), 9–45 (hereafter Braun, I); Edith Lutz, Der “Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden” und sein Mitglied H. Heine (Stuttgart, 1997). My intention in this chapter is to highlight Zunz’s dominant role in the activities of the Verein, captured vividly if belatedly by Heine in his salutation to Zunz in a letter from May 1826: “To Dr. Zunz, Judge designate of Israel, Vice-President of the Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews, President of the Institute for the Science of Judaism, Editor of the Society’s Journal, Member of the Committee for Agriculture, Librarian. . . . I shall stop at this last title, for I am sending you herewith a copy of my latest book for the Society’s library.” (S. S. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy. A Study of His Portraits of Jews and Judaism, [Oxford, 1983], 189). 30. Reissner, 176. 31. NLI, ARC 4o 792, G27, letter dated May 4, 1863; Adolf Strodtmann, H. Heine’s Leben und Werke, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1884). 32. Strodtmann, Heine’s Leben, 1, 291. 33. CAHJP, P47/13. Moses Moser was alternately secretary and trea surer of the society. In Berlin he worked as a bookkeeper and later partner in the banking firm of Moses Friedländer. Moser and Heine were close friends (see their intimate correspondence in Briefe von Heinrich Heine an seinen Freund Moses Moser [Leipzig, 1862]). Julius Rubo in 1824 with a doctorate in law became the long-standing syndic of the Berlin Jewish community. 34. Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 3 vols. (New York, 1964), 2, 465. 35. Uriel Tal, “Young German Intellectuals on Romanticism and Judaism— Spiritual Turbulence in the Early 19th Century,” Salo Wittmayer Baron Jubilee Volume, 3 vols. (Jerusalem, 1974), 2, 921. 36. Holborn, 2, 460–67. 37. Jacob Katz, “The Hep-Hep Riots in Germany of 1819” (Hebrew), Zion, 38 (1973), 62–108; cf. Eleonore O. Sterling, “Anti-Jewish Riots in Germany in 1819: A Displacement of Social Protest,” Historia Judaica, 12 (1950), 105–42. 38. LBI, AR 4294, letter dated December 22, 1819. 39. Ibid., AR 4294, letter dated July 25, 1820. On the missionary society, see David Smith, “The Berlin Mission to the Jews and Its Ecclesiastical and Political Contexts 1822–1848,” Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft, 30 (1974), 182–90. 40. Isaak Markus Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten, 9 vols. (Berlin, 1820–28), 3, notes to book 11, 158–59. In an autobiographical essay by Jost from 1859 that dealt with events in Berlin in the

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1820s in which he was involved, Jost expatiated on an audience he had with Prussia’s Kultusminister Karl Sigmund Franz Altenstein in May 1822. When they concluded the purpose of their meeting, Altenstein asked Jost why he did not consider seeking a post in the ser vice of the Prussian state. Jost answered that a job in the civil ser vice carried a prerequisite that he couldn’t fulfill. When the minister pressed him as to what considerations were holding him back from pursuing such an honorable career, Jost affirmed, none other than his conscience. He would never profess a faith that did not accord with his convictions. Altenstein ended the conversation on a dark note: “I don’t know why this should be an impediment. But I am not God, just a servant. Up till now the law has not been opposed [to Jews in government ser vice]. But there is a case before us that you are well aware of [regarding Gans] and I fear that it will be resolved in a way that will frustrate all young hopes” “Eine Abschnitt aus meinem Wirkungskreise,” AZJ [1859], 178). Whether Jost’s recall of that conversation has been embellished for posterity or not, the fact remains that his loyalty to the religion of his birth never wavered and his pursuit of Jewish scholarship endured to the end. As for Altenstein, he was determined to defend the value of the conservative theory of the Christian state against the liberal views of Karl August von Hardenberg, Prussia’s chancellor from 1810 to 1822 (Braun, II, 126–29). 41. Braun, I, 9–12. 42. Glatzer, II, 123–24. 43. Cf. Braun, I, 30. 44. Braun, II, 54. 45. Ibid., 47–57. 46. L.  L. Hellwitz, Die Organisation der Israeliten in Deutschland (Magdeburg, 1819), 28. 47. Ibid., 48–52. 48. Glatzer, II, 100. L. M. Büschenthal was a gifted poet and prose writer in both German and Hebrew, who died at age thirty-four on December 27, 1818. Zunz honored his memory with an affective necrology (Zunz, GS, II, 145–46). The first to identify Zunz as the author of this tract was Moritz Steinschneider, Die Schriften des Dr. L. Zunz, zu seinem 63. Geburtstage (Berlin, 1857), 11. In 1846, Hellwitz went to war against the rabbinical conference held in Frankfurt a. M. in July 1845 for denying him admission because he was deemed to be only a part-time Prediger at best. In consequence, he accused the rabbis of saddling German Jewry with a new form of reviled clerical hierarchy (Herr Obervorsteher Hellwitz und die Rabbinerversammlung [Frankfurt a.M., 1846]. See also Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity [New York, 1988], 426 n.108). 49. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 207. 50. Braun, II, 107–8. 51. NLI, ARC 4o 792, B12–36. 52. Braun, II, 109. 53. Ibid., 126. On Munk, see Ismar Schorsch, “Converging Cognates: The Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” LBIYB, 55 (2010), 12–13. 54. Braun, II, 132; Glatzer, II, 124. 55. Braun, II, 121, 146. 56. Zunz, GS, II, 221–25. 57. Braun, II, 101. 58. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 210. 59. NLI, ARC 4o 792, B11–20.

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60. Reissner, 29. 61. Stephan Born, ed., Heinrich Heines sämtliche Werke, 12 vols. (Stuttgart, 1886), 9, 198. 62. NLI, ARC 4o 792, B11–19. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., B11–21. 65. Ibid. 66. Salman Rubaschoff, “Erstlinge der Entjudung: Drei Reden von Eduard Gans im Kulturverein,” Der jüdische Wille, 1 (1918), 201. 67. ZWJ, 539. 68. Braun, II, 63. Gans’s exuberance at the time dripped with elitism: “Deputies of Israel, not elected by the nonsensical voice of the people, but summoned by superior intelligence and by a deeply felt need, fulfi ll the mission you have set for yourselves, using the awesome power [Machtvollkommenheit] granted you. Let our dealings henceforth consist not merely of words and let our clashes in the days to come be no more than [a manifestation] of tireless rivalry” (63). 69. Ibid., 131. 70. Morris  U. Schappes, ed., A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, 1654–1875 (New York, 1971), 141–47, 157–58, 602. 71. Reissner, 87. 72. Peter Wagner, Panu Derech— Bereiten den Weg (Detmold, 1994), 48. 73. Reissner, 86–89. 74. Braun, II, 110. 75. Reissner, 95. 76. Zunz, “Grundlinien zu einer künftigen Statistik der Juden,” ZWJ, 523–32; Immanuel Wolf, “Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judenthums,” ZWJ, 16–18; Schorsch, From Text to Context, 224; Mitchell B. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford, Calif., 2000), 8, 13. Zunz confided in his diary that “meine Grundlinien der Statistik already contains the skeleton for the historical structure of Buckle’s History of Civilization in England” (“Meine Schriften,” JJGL, 30 [1937], 142). Henry Buckle’s first volume came out in London in 1857 and the second in London in 1861. He died of typhoid fever in Damascus in 1862, leaving his work unfinished. In 1865 Zunz recommended Buckle to Philipp and Julie Ehrenberg as a historian of worldwide, revolutionary significance (Glatzer, II, 441). What excited Zunz was Buckle’s brave attempt to reduce the complexity of historical causation to “scientific” laws in which the exercise of intellect and diff usion of knowledge determined the course of national histories. At the beginning of his diary Zunz copied out Buckle’s ringing declaration that “education for freedom—without which men cannot become free—requires self-control, a sense of self and individual autonomy” (NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13, 4). 77. NLI, ARC 4o 792, B7: 25–27. 78. Rubaschoff, 30; Schorsch, From Text to Context, 205–18. 79. Rubaschoff, 113. 80. Immanuel Wolf, “On the Concept of the Science of Judaism,” trans. Lionel E. Kochan, LBIYB, 2 (1957), 194. 81. Ibid., 194–95. 82. NLI, ARC 4o 792, B10–12. 83. Reissner, 60. 84. Glatzer, I, 34.

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85. Ibid. 86. Rubaschoff, 116, 200; ZWJ (reprint, Hildesheim, 1976). 87. NLI, ARC 4o 792, B3–21. 88. Kurt Wilhelm, ed., Wissenschaft des Judentums im deutschen Sprachbereich, 2 vols. (Tübingen, 1967). 89. Eduard Gans, “Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Juden im Norden von Europa und in den slavischen Ländern,” ZWJ, 103–4. 90. Ibid., 98–99. 91. Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten, 4, notes to book 14, 257. 92. Eduard Gans, “Gesetzgebung über Juden in Rom nach den Quellen des römischen Rechts,” ZWJ, 50–51. 93. Idem, “Die Grundzüge des mosaischen-talmudischen Erbrechts,” ZWJ, 446–47. 94. Leopold Zunz, “Salomon ben Isaac, genannt Raschi,” ZWJ, 277–384. 95. Idem, “Über die in den hebräisch-jüdischen Schriften vorkommenden hispanischen Ortnamen,” ZWJ, 128. 96. Ibid., 116–24. 97. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 209. 98. Glatzer, I, 37, 42. 99. Ibid., 43. 100. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 208. 101. Ibid. 102. NLI, ARC 4o 792, B13–50. 103. Ibid., B3–37, 38. 104. Ibid., B3–37. 105. Ibid., C4–59. 106. Ibid., B13–4. 107. Ibid., B3–77. 108. Hans-Joachim Bechtoldt, Jüdische deutsche Bibelübersetzungen vom ausgehenden 18. bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 2005), 179, 192; cf. Ismar Schorsch, “Zunz on the Hebrew Bible,” JQR, 102 (2012), 437. 109. Reissner, 176. 110. NLI, ARC 4o 792, B3: 34–35. 111. Braun, II, 157. 112. Ibid., 192–93, 195. 113. Strodtmann, Heine’s Leben, 1, 316–17; on the fate of the Verein, see also Moser’s letter to Wohlwill, May 3–4, 1814, in Friedlander, 296–97. 114. NLI, ARC 4o 792, C4, Zunz’s letter to the directors, July 2, 1821; his letter to Adelheid is in LBI, AR 3648. 115. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 46. 116. Mordechai Eliav, Jewish Education in the Period of Enlightenment and Emancipation (Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1960), 166–67. 117. NLI, ARC 4o 792, B3–13. 118. Ibid., B3: 24–25. 119. NLI, ARC 4o 792, V2–3, letter dated October 3, 1820. Glatzer unwisely published only the first part of this revealing letter (Glatzer, I, 18–19). On Joseph Wolf, a teacher at the Jewish school in Dessau since its founding in 1799 and the first German Jew to preach in German from 1805 on, see David Sorkin, “Preacher, Teacher, Publicist: Joseph Wolf and the Ideol-

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ogy of Emancipation,” From East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750–1870, ed. Frances Malino and David Sorkin (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 107–25. 120. Zunz, GS, 2, 100. 121. Braun, II, 93. 122. LBI, AR 3648, letter dated August 31, 1821. Zunz was still addressing Adelheid in the formal third-person plural. 123. Sigmund Maybaum, “Aus dem Leben von Leopold Zunz,” Zwölfter Bericht über die Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums in Berlin (Berlin, 1894), 10. 124. On Saturday, July 27, 1822, Zunz did deliver a sermon entitled “Unglückseligkeit” (Misery) that related to Tisha be-Av. The date corresponded to the Ninth of Av in the Hebrew calendar, but since the only fast ever observed on a Shabbat is Yom Kippur, Tisha be-Av would have been deferred by a day, hence beginning Saturday evening after sundown. Zunz’s sermon turned on Moses’s lament from the opening portion of Deuteronomy, always read on the Sabbath before the fast, “I can no longer bear the burden of you myself” (1:9). After forty years in the wilderness, the growth in the number of Israelites and the constancy of their resistance to God’s guidance exceeded Moses’s endurance in governing alone. Zunz made fleeting mention of Tisha be-Av and the destruction of the temple, though without any allusion to its ritual of commemoration. With the aid of a passage from the prophet Haggai (2:4, 9), on the threshold of erecting the Second Temple, Zunz was able to shift effortlessly between the sins of the past and present. Neither generation had the faith to overcome its moral failings in order to seize the opportunities at hand. Zunz identified with Moses and castigated his congregants. And Tisha be-Av ends up as a symbol of failure rather than a rite of mourning. Without our knowing the configuration of its observance in the Beer Temple, it is hard to figure out when Zunz actually absented himself (Maybaum, 11; Zunz, Predigten gehalten in der neuen Israelitischen Synagoge zu Berlin [Berlin, 1846], 184–95). 125. NLI, ARC 4o 792, C4. 126. Ibid. 127. Brann and Rosenmann, “Der Briefwechsel,” 97. 128. HUC-JIR, Klau Library, Kirschstein Collection, 5/2. 129. Zunz, Predigten, vi–vii. 130. Ibid., vii. 131. Ibid., ix–x. 132. On Zunz’s sermons, see Alexander Altmann, “Leopold Zunz als Prediger,” LBIYB, 6 (1961), 3–59; cf. Maren R. Niehoff, “Zunz’s Concept of Haggadah as an Expression of Jewish Spirituality,” LBIYB, 43 (1998), 3–24. 133. Zunz always cited the verses from the Bible first in Hebrew, and it is noteworthy that his transliteration followed the Sephardic and not Ashkenazic pronunciation (Predigten, 17, 29, 42, 54, 80, 94, 105, 132, and 145; see Schorsch, From Text to Context, 77). 134. Zunz, Predigten, 48–49. 135. Ibid., 84.

chapter 3. into the wilderness 1. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, D32-3. 2. Lazarus Bendavid, whom Zunz held in high regard, had served as editor of the paper with sagacity during the French occupation of Germany (Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon,

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10th ed., 15 vols. [Leipzig, 1851–55], 2, 497). Moritz Veit, a relative of Bendavid, brought a semblance of order to his profuse papers after his death on March  28, 1832, and then on December 30, 1832, turned them over to Zunz, who kept them until his death. Born in 1762, Bendavid, a prominent intellectual, had written two essays for Zunz’s Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums on the Hebrew Bible marked by uninhibited historicization (NLI, ARC, 4o 792, A3-1, G24-625.1; ZWJ, 197–230, 472–500). Veit’s informative and affectionate obituary on Bendavid was published in July 1832 in the Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, nos. 199 and 200, preserved in CAHJP, P47). 3. Erich Widdecke, Geschichte des Haude-und Spenerschen Zeitung (Berlin, 1925); Sigmund Maybaum, “Aus dem Leben von Leopold Zunz,” Zwölfter Bericht über die Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Berlin, 1894), 12, 16; the correspondence with Spener and Spiker is in NLI, ARC, 4o 792, G23-590.6, 590.9, 590, 11, 600.23. Zunz’s letter of resignation is dated June 30, 1831 (NLI, ARC, 4o 792, G23-529.1). On the reason for his resignation, see Ludwig Börne, Börne Werke in zwei Bänden (Berlin, 1976), 2, 94; Ludwig Geiger, “Zunz im Verkehr mit Behörden und Hochgestellten,” MGWJ, 60 (1916), 246. 4. Ismar Schorsch, “Wives and Wissenschaft: The Domestic Seedbed of Critical Scholarship,” Gender and Jewish History, ed. Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore (Bloomington, 2011), 35–36. 5. For his like, we need to turn to Simon Dubnow in Russia (see Viktor E. Kelner, Simon Dubnow: Eine Biographie [Göttingen, 2010]). 6. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 48; see also Maybaum, 16. 7. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 45, 52, 53. 8. Ibid., 53; [Leopold] Zunz, “Schulschriften,” GS, 2, 226–36. 9. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 53; Maybaum, 13–16. 10. Maybaum, 5. 11. Ibid., 6; Hermann Vogelstein, “Beiträge zur Geschichte des Unterrichtswesens in der jüdischen Gemeindezu Königsberg i. Pr.,” Sechs und dreissigster Bericht über den ReligionsUnterricht der Synagogegemeinde zu Königsberg i. Pr. für das Schuljahr 1902/1903 (Königsberg i. Pr., 1903), 16–17. 12. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 60; Maybaum, 17 n.1; Zunz, GS, 2, 135–42. Though Zunz recorded Lewandowski’s age at the time as nineteen, he was actually born in 1821 and had just recently arrived in Berlin, a chronology that would have made him by far the youngest of Zunz’s students. It is hard to account for Zunz’s error. 13. LBI, AR, 3648, series III, subseries 3, section B, letter dated March 25, 1832. 14. Erich Zimmermann, “Erinnerung des Hamburger Bibliothekars Meyer Isler (1807– 1888),” Zeitschrift für Hamburgische Geschichte, 47 (1961), 45. 15. LBI, AR, 3648, series III, subseries 3, section B, Zunz to Isler, November 27, 1832. 16. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, F1-1, 11–12. 17. Maybaum, 28; Schorsch, “Wives and Wissenschaft,” 42 n.33. 18. Meyer Kayserling, ed., Homiletisches und literarisches Beiblatt als Anhang zur Bibliothek jüdischer Kanzelredner, 1 (Berlin, 1870), 10–11. 19. Maybaum, 32. 20. Ibid., 54; NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 65. 21. Maybaum, 54 n.2; NLI, ARC 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 65a. 22. Ruth Kestenberg- Gladstein, Neuere Geschichte der Juden in den böhmischen Ländern (Tübingen, 1969), 29.

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23. Maybaum, 54. 24. Ibid., 54. 25. Glatzer, I, 92. 26. Schorsch, “Wives and Wissenschaft,” 42 n.33. 27. Glatzer, II, 185. 28. Glatzer, I, 94, letter datedMay 27, 1836. In his response (November 21, 1836), Zunz honed his critique: “The high and mighty [kezinim] have the idée fixe to turn young people only into craftsmen. Hence their institutions are without intellectual content. Nothing will change as long as business people alone fund worship ser vices [Kultus] and scholarship” (Glatzer, II, 189). 29. Maybaum, 57; NLI, ARC 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 66; Schorsch, “Wives and Wissenschaft,” 38. 30. NLI, ARC, 4 o 792, C13 (DBZ ), 67; Jacob Jacobson, Die Judenbürgerbücher der Stadt Berlin, 1809–1851 (Berlin, 1962), 57; Hans Günther Reissner, Eduard Gans: Ein Leben im Vormärz (Tübingen, 1965), 176. On January 25, 1838, Riess allowed Zunz to discontinue his visits. After entering the fact in his diary, Zunz exclaimed in Hebrew: “Praised be God who separated me from the wayward” (NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 [DBZ], 70). 31. Jüdisches Lexikon, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1927–30), 4, cols. 398–99; Ludwig Geiger, ed., Michael Sachs und Moritz Veit: Briefwechsel (Frankfurt a.M., 1897), 45; NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C2, 26. 32. Geiger, Sachs und Veit, 26–27; LBI, AR 4025, Jost to Ehrenberg, letter dated December 12, 1839: “M. Veit’s becoming the head of the community will most likely be beneficial for Zunz, for he is not only his friend but also an admirer of scholarship. His influence will surely be felt in communal affairs.” 33. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 66; Geiger, Sachs und Veit, 2, 5, 11. 34. NLI, ARC, 4 o 792, C13 (DBZ ), 69. In October 1837 Zunz’s former employer, the Spenersche Zeitung, sought to have him return as its editor, but Zunz declined. His preference to work in the Jewish community seemed about to be realized (69). In his negotiations with the school trustees of the Gemeinde, Zunz fiercely defended his authority to determine the curricula of the school and to exercise religious autonomy (Maybaum, 62). 35. NLI, ARC, 4 o 792, C13 (DBZ ), 71; Geiger, Sachs und Veit, 27. For a concise history of Berlin’s jüdischesSchullehrer-Seminarium, see Andreas Brämer, “ ‘Making Teachers . . . Who Do Not Treat Their Profession as an Occasional Business’: Leopold Zunz and the Modernization of the Jewish Teacher in Prussia,” EJJS, 7 (2013), 151–70. 36. L. Geiger, “Zunz im Verkehr,” 258–59. 37. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 163. 38. Geiger, Sachs und Veit, 27. 39. Ludwig Geiger, “Zunz und das Berliner Provinzialschulkollegium,” LJ (1915), 110–11. 40. Maybaum, 62 n.1; NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 73. 41. Zunz, GS, 2, 127. In his own remarks at the opening, Veit spoke in a political vein. The creation of a Jewish teachers’ seminary should not be seen as a rejection of integration. While the emancipation of 1812 made Jews part of the body politic and rendered their organized community a religious association, elementary education in Germany is and ought to be thoroughly suff used with religious values, praxis, and instruction. It is this circumstance which warrants separate Jewish Volksschulen, which in turn require the professionalization of the teaching staff. As the leading Jewish community in Germany, Berlin is eager to meet this shared need and indeed hopes eventually to enlarge its seminary with a program for training

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rabbis (Das jüdische Schullehrer-Seminarium [Berlin, 1840], 9–17). Not surprisingly, this informative pamphlet was published by Veit’s company. 42. Zunz, GS, 2, 112–15; Bernhard Beer, Imre joscher: Religiös-moralische Reden (Leipzig, 1835), 126–27; Christhard Hoffmann, “Constructing Jewish Modernity: Mendelssohn Jubilee Celebrations with German-Jewry, 1829–1929,” Towards Normality? Acculturation and Modern German-Jewry, ed. Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter (Tübingen, 2003), 38–42. 43. Zunz, GS, 2, 102–12. 44. Zunz, “Beleuchtung der Théorie du judaïsme Chiarini’s,” GS, 1, 272–73; Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, 3 vols. (Oxford, 2010–12), 1, 294–302. By 1826 the rabbinical school had twenty-five students and by 1831, eighty-three (302). 45. Arnold Ages, “Luigi Chiarini— A Case Study in Intellectual Anti- Semitism,” Judaica, 37 (1981), 76–89. In 1832 Chiarini fell victim to an epidemic of cholera, having published only two volumes of his translation (78). 46. L’Abbé Luigi Aloisi Chiarini, Théorie du Judaïsme, 2 vols. (Paris, 1830), 1, 43–49. Chiarini dedicated his work “to his majesty, the imperial and royal Nicholas I, Emperor of all the Russians and King of Poland.” 47. Zunz, GS, 1, 295–96. 48. Ibid., 285–86. In December 1830 Bernhard Beer in Dresden quickly appropriated Zunz’s historical definition of the Talmud for his own campaign for the emancipation of the Jews in Saxony (see his Denkwürdigkeiten für Sachsen, 49 [December 11, 1830], 379). The friendship that would blossom between the two men is treated in Chapter 4. 49. Zunz, GS, 1, 286. 50. See especially Céline Trautmann-Waller, Philologie Allemande et Tradition Juive: Le parcours intellectuel de Leopold Zunz (Paris, 1998), 196–201. 51. Adam Mintz, “The Talmud in Translation,” Printing the Talmud, ed. Sharon Liberman Mintz and Gabriel M. Goldstein (New York, 2005), 121–41. 52. Zunz, GS, 1, 296. 53. Isaak Markus Jost, Was hat Herr Chiarini in Angelegenheiten der europäischen Juden geleistet? (Berlin, 1830), Vorwort. 54. Zunz, GS, 1, 290. Chiarini’s laudatory reference to Jost reads as follows: “It is rare to find among individuals of his nation a writer who possesses a more perfect knowledge of Judaism than he. Mr. Jost has proven by his example as well as by his critical discussions that the Talmud is the principal source for the history of the Jews, from which it follows necessarily that he who does not know the Talmud will never be in a position to write a similar history” (Chiarini, 1, 137–38). 55. Jost, Chiarini, 49. 56. Mintz, 121–41. Ephraim Moses Pinner’s project to translate the Babylonian Talmud went no further than one volume, his semicritical and scholarly literal translation of the tractate Berakhot (Berlin, 1842). Writing on the heels of the recent blood libels in Damascus and Rhodes, Pinner argued that as long as the Talmud remained untranslated, Jews could be cavalierly accused of almost any depravity (8). Like Chiarini, and not uninfluenced by his project, Pinner dedicated his volume to Czar Nicholas I, who had obliged him by purchasing one hundred copies in advance of publication. While the names of Jost and Ehrenberg were to be found among the prepublication subscribers, that of Zunz was missing. Some forty years later following the publication of August Rohling’s Der Talmud jude in 1871 and the ensuing yearslong scandal, Moritz Steinschneider enunciated what had become the regnant aversion to

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translation: “A complete, literal translation of the Babylonian Talmud . . . is neither necessary nor readily feasible. But a few tractates are suitable, such as the one dealing with fast days, which is historically important” (“Geschichte der Juden von der Zerstörung Jerusalems bis zur Gegenwart,” Jahresberichte der Geschichtswissenschaft, 6 (1883), 42). Two years later, Heinrich Graetz concurred: “A translation of the Talmud is impossible. Only charlatans would celebrate such a prospect. However, a pre sentation of the ethics of the Talmud [which Graetz advocated] is something that is feasible” (“Die Schicksale des Talmud im Verlaufe der Geschichte,” MGWJ, 34 [1885], 541). Th at Graetz and Steinschneider, who rarely agreed on anything, spoke in unison on this subject is a mea sure of the existential angst induced by the recurring assaults on the Talmud by the inveterate opponents of equality and integration. Thus it is not surprising that a full translation had to await the gumption of an outsider like Lazarus Goldschmidt beginning in 1896. 57. LBI, AR, 3648, series III, subseries 3, section B, letter dated December 18, 1830. 58. Gabriel Riesser, “Über die Stellung der Bekenner des Mosaischen Glaubens,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Meyer Isler, 4 vols. (Frankfurt a.M., 1867–68), 2, 25–33. 59. LBI, AR, 3648, series III, subseries, 3, section B. 60. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, V2–5, 203, Isler to Zunz, letter dated January 7, 1831. Jost confided to Ehrenberg that he strongly disapproved of the title Riesser had chosen for his periodical and wrote him so himself (LBI, AR, 4025, letter dated December 7, 1832). 61. LBI, AR, 3648, series III, subseries 3, section B, Zunz to Isler, letter dated August 20, 1831. 62. Ibid., letter dated November 27, 1832. On Riesser, see Arno Herzig, Gabriel Riesser (Elbert & Richter Verlag, [2008?]). 63. Riesser’s theology amounted to little more than a purified Mosaism minus its ritual exterior, including the Sabbath and dietary prescriptions. Indeed, all medieval externals were doomed for extinction. What remained was a disposition of the heart that worshipped a universal God of truth, love, and justice. To his credit, Riesser did not defend Judaism on religious grounds. In a letter to Zunz that accompanied a copy of his refutation of the Heidelberg theologian Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus on emancipation, Riesser insisted that the inadequacy of his religious knowledge was irrelevant because Jews needed to wage their campaign with political arguments. Moreover, Riesser believed that too many religious reforms were being made with an eye to placating the civil authorities (NLI, ARC, 4o 792, G20, letter dated June 12, 1831). By 1843, if not earlier, Zunz had rejected the strategy of removing religion from the political discourse. Jews had to defend their particularity: “A cause should be represented from its center. Every marginal stance ends up doing harm.” To argue solely in universal terms leaves us vulnerable when we seek to perpetuate our particularity after emancipation. “As Jews we can justify ourselves before the bar of reason and justice only in terms of the essence of Judaism” (Hans Joachim Schoeps, “Aus dem Briefwechsel Steinheim-Zunz,” JJGL, 31 [1938], 283–84, Zunz to Steinheim, letter dated October 19, 1843). 64. Der Jude, no. 14, September 21, 1832, 111–12, and no. 15, October 9, 1832, 119–20. 65. Maybaum, 59 n.1; Adolf Berliner, Briefwechsel zwischen Heimann Michael und Leopold Zunz (German in Hebrew characters) (Frankfurt a.M., 1907), 32–33, 34, 40. On April 11, 1836, Zunz explained to Michael his reasons for abandoning Prague: “My views and principles do not accord with the political and religious constitution of the Praguers. So it is better for me to leave. I also don’t like to be subordinate to rabbis and lay leaders. I can spend my time more fruitfully than being involved in this joke of an affair” (39).

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66. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 67. The official letter from the community board carried the date August 15, 1836 (C2-25). Perhaps Zunz’s notation reflects a preliminary oral request. On October 24, 1836, the trustees thanked Zunz for his submission and gave him an honorarium of 100 talers (C2-26). Cf. Maybaum, 59. 67. Leopold Zunz, Die Namen der Juden, GS, 2, 18. 68. Ibid., 25, 43. 69. Ibid., 79. 70. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, G27, letter dated December 17, 1836. 71. Ludwig Geiger, “Aus L. Zunz’ Nachlass,” ZGJD, 5 (1892), 239–40. 72. Geiger, Sachs und Veit, 8. 73. Ibid., 8–9. 74. In the years 1838–39, 1848, and 1855. Veit’s letters to Zunz from the late 1830s reflect the intensity of his engagement. He recruited the team of translators, worked out the division of labor, and pushed for completion. Before turning over the translations to Zunz for editing, he reviewed them himself. As honorarium Veit offered Zunz 150 talers for editing and an additional sum for the chronological table. Zunz requested an additional 100 talers which Veit stretched to grant him (NLI, ARC, 40 792, G24-625-4, 5). 75. Ibid., C13 (DBZ), 66 (Veit asked Zunz on March 5, 1836), 70 (Zunz began his translation of Chronicles in March 1838 and finished by October). Harry Torczyner, ed., Die heilige Schrift. Neu ins Deutsche Uebertragen, 4 vols. (Frankfurt a.M., 1934-37), 1, vii. 76. My personal copy is the fourteenth edition:,Torah, Neviim Ketuvim. Die vier und zwanzig Bücher der Heiligen Schrift, unter der Radaction von Dr. Zunz published in 1898 by J. Kaufmann in Frankfurt a.M. In the Zeittafel(the chronological table) at the end, the last date is 330 bce. Zunz’s notation reads: “Alexander of Macedonia, King of Jawan (Greece) puts an end to the Persian monarchy (duration 208 years), see Daniel 8:5, 21; 11:2–3. The Jews come under Greek rule” (14). In Moritz Steinschneider’s early bibliography of Zunz’s writings in 1857 (actually a reproduction of the final entry under individual authors in his Catalogus Librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana [Berlin, 1852–60], cols. 2774–80), he lists the “Zeittafel über die gesammte heilige Schrift” as a separate publication (M[oritz] St[einschneider] Dr. L. Zunz zu seinem 63. Geburtstage[10. Aug. 1857] [Berlin, 1857], 7 no. 13). 77. Azariah de’ Rossi, Meor Ainayim, trans. with introduction and annotations by Joanna Weinberg (New Haven, Conn., 2001), 451–525. The rabbinic source for the figure of thirty-four years is to be found in Dov Baer Ratner, ed., Midrash Seder Olam (New York, 1966), 141 (chapter 30). 78. David Gans, Zemah David, ed. Mordechai Breuer (Jerusalem, 1983), 163; (see above, 5). 79. Ibid., 57–58, 62–63. 80. Leopold Zunz, “Toldot R. Azariah min ha-Adumim,” Kerem Chemed, 5 (1841), 139– 40. In Kerem Chemed, 7 (1843), 119–24, Zunz published addenda to his original essay. 81. Marcus Brann, “Mitteilungen aus dem Briefwechsel zwischen Zunz und Kaufmann,” JJGL, 5 (1902), 183. 82. D. Gans, 13–22. 83. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, D1-1. 84. Ibid., G24-625.29. From Veit’s letter it is not clear how Zunz raised the idea of “eine rabbinische Chrestomatie” with Veit. I have not yet found a letter by Zunz to that eff ect. 85. Auswahl historischer Stücke aus hebräischen Schriftstellern vom zweiten Jahrhundert bis auf die Gegenwart (Berlin, 1840).

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86. Gregor Pelger, Wissenschaft des Judentums und englische Bibliotheken (Berlin, 2010), 157, 165. 87. Ibid., 182; Moritz Steinschneider, “Josef Zedner,” Gesammelte Schriften von Moritz Steinschneider, ed. Heinrich Malter and Alexander Marx (Berlin, 1925), 631. 88. Adolf Asher, ed. and trans., The Itinerary of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1840–41). Asher fittingly dedicated the first volume to Alexander von Humboldt. In a letter to Zunz dated March 28, 1845, Jost was highly critical of Asher’s “error-laden translation” and continued to downplay Benjamin’s reliability, except for a few isolated instances. Had he been invited to participate in the project, Jost claimed, the outcome would have been enhanced (NLI, ARC, 4o 792, G15). 89. Asher, The Itinerary, 2, xviii. 90. Ibid., 2, vii. 91. Ibid., 2, 318–92. F[ürchtegott] Lebrecht, “Handschriften und erste Ausgaben des Babylonischen Talmud,” (part 1), Wissenschaftliche Blätter aus der Veitel Heine Ephraim’schen Lehranstalt (Beth ha-Midrasch) in Berlin (Berlin, 1862), 1–114. 92. Asher, The Itinerary, 2, 26, 28–30, 32, 34, 41; 230–317; 393–448. 93. Isaak Markus Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten, 9 vols. (Berlin, 1820–28), 6, 257, 376, and idem, Allgemeine Geschichte des israelitischen Volkes, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1832), 2, 412. 94. Asher, The Itinerary, 2, 18. 95. Ibid., 2, 39, 30–31;Moritz Steinschneider, “Rapoport,” Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1925), 624. 96. Asher, The Itinerary, 2, 271–74, 260–63. 97. Berliner, Briefwechsel, 67; Asher, The Itinerary, 2, 273. 98. Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten, 8, 188; D. Gans, 138. 99. A. Z. Eshkoli, ed., David Hareuveni (Jerusalem, 1940), 210–11. 100. Parchi, Caftor wa-pherach, ed. Hirsch Edelmann (Berlin, 1852), ix–xi. Although Julius Sittenfeld printed the book, A. Asher distributed it. 101. H[einrich] Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, 11 vols. (Berlin, Magdeburg, Leipzig, 1853–75), 7 (Magdeburg, 1863), 285. 102. Asher, The Itinerary, 2, 394. 103. Ibid., 102. Karl von Raumer, Palästina (Leipzig, 1835). For his Jewish sources, Raumer listed Josephus, Philo, and the Talmud (3), though citations from the latter two were conspicuously absent. For the period after the destruction of the Second Temple, Raumer devoted a few pages to Christians in Palestine in the Middle Ages, before closing with a brief description of its inhabitants in the nineteenth century. Given the land’s undiminished sacredness, it remains of world significance (319–28). I suspect that the appearance of Raumer’s book and success is what prompted Zunz to advise Asher to counter with the edition of Benjamin of Tudela. In a letter by Zunz to Steinheim dated April 19, 1843, and delivered personally by Asher on a trip to Hamburg, Zunz spelled out what Asher meant to him: “Mr. A. Asher from Berlin, my most valuable friend, a book seller like few others, a lover and promoter of Jewish literature, the editor and commentator of Benjamin of Tudela and a buyer of old Mahzorim [festival prayer books]. The latter, however, you should set aside for me. [Other wise] please show him whatever is worthwhile” (Schoeps, “Aus dem Briefwechsel,” 271–72). 104. Abraham Berger, “The Brockhaus’ Konversations-Lexikon: A Study of Its Development and Its Influence on the Growth of Other Popu lar Encyclopedias” (M.S. thesis, Faculty of Library Ser vice, Columbia University, 1938), 3–7.

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105. Ibid., 13. 106. Ibid., 22, 32. 107. Ibid., 22; Maybaum, 33; see also Zunz’s letter to F. A. Brockhaus dated May 1, 1847 (NLI, ARC, 4o 792, F1-1, vi, 33). 108. The names of the countless contributors are listed in vol. 16, with Veit and Zunz appearing on page xxviii. On May 15, 1837 Zunz wrote Geiger that he had provided Brockhaus with some forty entries, sixteen of which were entirely new (NLI, ARC, 4o 792, F1-3, 9). 109. Brockhaus, 7, 528–29. 110. Ibid., 531. 111. Ibid., 531. 112. Zunz, “Juden,” GS, 1, 86. 113. Zunz, “Judentum,” GS, 1, 99. 114. Zunz, “Juden,” GS, 1, 88–89. 115. Zunz, “Judentum,” GS, 1, 100. 116. Zunz, “Juden,” GS, 1, 96, quotation on 98. 117. Zunz, “Jüdische Literatur,” GS, 1, 101–2. 118. Ibid., 105, 107, quotation on 110. 119. Zunz, “Juden,” “Judentum,”and “Jüdische Literatur,” GS, 1, 86–114. 120. [Leopold] Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt (Berlin, 1832). 121. Alfred Michaelis, ed., Die Rechtsverhältnisse der Juden in Preussen (Berlin, 1910), 61–62. 122. Zunz, Vorträge, iii–iv. 123. Ibid., v. 124. Ibid., viii. 125. Ibid., x. 126. Ibid., 454. 127. Ibid., v. In denying the state authority to coerce in matters of opinion and conviction, Zunz followed Mendelssohn (see Jerusalem, trans. Allan Arkush [Hanover, N.H., 1983], 61). 128. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, G7, letters by Asher to Zunz, August 14, 1832, and August 22, 1832. See also L. Geiger, “Aus L. Zunz’ Nachlass,” 238. Zunz’s close friend from the days of the Verein Moses Moser apparently interceded on his behalf as well (Ludwig Geiger, “Moser, der Freund Heine’s,” Frankfurter Zeitung, July 15, 1891). The first printing of Zunz’s opus would not be sold out until 1851 (NLI, 4o 792, C13 [DBZ], 73.7). 129. Zunz, Vorträge, 448–81, quotation on 481. 130. Ibid., 454. 131. Ibid., 32–33. 132. Ibid., 35. It is noteworthy that Zunz placed his depiction of Chronicles at the beginning of his chapter on midrash. 133. Ibid., 36. 134. Ibid., 306 n.a, 482–83. 135. Ibid., 81–82, 88–89, 190–91, 202–26. Regarding Zunz’s reconstruction, identification, and dating of this early Palestinian midrash arranged according to the festivals, see Bernard Mandelbaum, ed., Pesikta de Rav Kahana, 2 vols. (New York, 1962), 1, 7–8. The first scholar to discover and publish an incomplete version of the original text was Salomon Buber (Pesikta [Lyck, 1868] for Meqize Nirdamin). In his glowing tribute to Zunz, Russian-born critical scholar Senior Sachs singled out Zunz’s reconstruction of this lost midrash as the epitome of his pioneering scholarship (Hamagid [Hebrew] [Lyck, 1878–79], 321). On the remark-

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able acuity and validity of Zunz’s judgment in the dating of midrashic texts, see Günter Stemberger, “Leopold Zunz—Pioneer of Midrash Research,” Judaica Minora, ed. Stemberger, vol. 2 (Tübingen, 2010), 690–705. 136. Zunz, Vorträge, 98. 137. Ibid., 307–8. 138. Ibid., quotation on 321–22, 339–40. See also Johannes Sabel, Die Geburt der Literaturaus der Aggada (Tübingen, 2010), 57–60. 139. Isaak Hirsch Weiss, “Leopold Zunz,” JQR, 7 (1895), 374–75. In the Hebrew original Zikhronotai (Warsaw, 1895), 137–38. 140. No Christian scholar showered Zunz’s book with more praise than Anton Theodor Hartmann in Rostock. In the mid-1820s Hartmann, a professor of theology who had studied with Johann Gottfried Eichhorn at Göttingen, turned to Zunz repeatedly for instruction and guidance on biblical and rabbinic matters. Though it is not clear why the correspondence lapsed in 1826, Hartmann paid tribute to Zunz’s objectivity, erudition, and fertile originality in an extensive review of his book soon after it came out. Published in a respected academic venue, the review systematically and sympathetically laid out the findings and arguments of the work. Hartmann did not fail to conceal where he differed from Zunz, but always with brevity and respect. His admiration for the man was all the more noteworthy because he opposed granting Jews equal rights as long as they felt bound by the dictates of the Talmud (“Jüdische Alterthümer,” Leipziger Literatur-Zeitung, nos. 210–12 [September 1833]). Hartmann’s letters to Zunz are in NLI, 4o 792, G14-256. As for his political views, see Anton Theodor Hartmann, Grundsätze des orthodoxen Judenthums mit Beziehung auf des Herrn Dr. Salomon’s Sendschreiben (Rostock, 1835), and idem, Johann Andreas Eisenmenger und seine jüdischen Gegner in geschichtlich literarischen Erörterungen kritisch beleuchtet (Parchim, 1834). I thank Prof. Edward Breuer of the Hebrew University for bringing Hartmann’s review to my attention. 141. Ismar Schorsch, “From Wolfenbüttel to Wissenschaft,” From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H., 1994), 237, 250 n.19. 142. Zunz, Vorträge, 309 n.b, 416 n.d, 426 n.b. 143. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, G27, letter dated June 2, 1823. 144. Zunz, GS, 3, 192. 145. Schorsch, “From Wolfenbüttel to Wissenschaft,” 235. 146. Ibid.; Ran Hacohen, Reviving the Old Testament (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv, 2006), 54– 77; Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten, 4 (1824), 233, 264–94. 147. Schorsch, “From Wolfenbüttel to Wissenschaft,” 237–42. 148. Ibid., 240. 149. On the linkage between prophecy and midrash (i.e., aggada), see the illuminating essay by Maren R. Niehoff, “Zunz’s Concept of Haggadah as an Expression of Jewish Spirituality,” LBIYB, 43 (1998), 3–24. 150. Isaak Markus Jost, “Vor einem halben Jahrhundert,” Sippurim, 3 (1854), 141–68. Jost lost his father in 1803. His mother had come from Wolfenbüttel and her father secured a place for him in the Samson’schen Stiftung. When Jost gained admission to the gymnasium in Braunschweig in 1809, he wrote that his fate as an autodidact had finally ended. 151. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, G15-313.3. March 1, 1814. In 1854 Jost wrote of his one and a half years spent in Göttingen as truly liberating, a period in which the shackles of the past were tossed aside and German modes of thought and patriotic sentiments internalized. His Jewish peers at the university, he recalled, were all on the threshold of converting (“Vor einem halben Jahrhundert,” 161).

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152. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, G15, letter dated September 21, 1820. In a previous letter by Jost to Zunz on July 10, 1817, Jost reconciled himself to Zunz’s decision to discontinue his teaching. Since Jost’s school operated out of his home, Zunz’s teaching had at least brought the two of them together. Now, however, that he had stopped, a disgruntled Jost expressed the hope “that friendship will take its place and serve to bring you here on occasion” (NLI, ARC, 4o 792, G15-313.10). 153. LBI, AR, 4025, letter dated October 9, 1820. 154. Schorsch, “From Wolfenbüttel to Wissenschaft,” 249 n.8. 155. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, G15, letter dated October 13, 1831. 156. Glatzer, II, 182. 157. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, F1–5, 17, Zunz to Jost, November 21, 1841. 158. Brockhaus, vol. 8 (1853), 504. 159. Glatzer, II, 252. 160. Glatzer, I, 286. Raphael Kirchheim of Frankfurt a.M., a lay practitioner of critical scholarship and recent author of an impor tant Hebrew study of the Samaritans (Karme Shomron [Frankfurt am Main, 1851]), gave Jost’s work a more favorable reception. Despite rejecting a number of points large and small made by Jost, Kirchheim appreciated his focus on the internal, religious development of Judaism and the softer tone in his treatment of rabbinic Judaism (AZJ [1857], 303–6). 161. Leopold Zunz, Die Monatstage des Kalenderjahres: Ein Andenken an Hingeschiedene (Berlin, 1872), 63. Jost’s unexpected death in 1860 spurred Kirchheim to quickly pen a laudatory and heartfelt obituary (AZJ [1860], 720–21). 162. Zunz, Vorträge, xii–xiv. 163. Weiss, 367; in the Hebrew original, 132. 164. Glatzer, I, 80. Rapoport published his biographical essays in Bikurei Ha’ itim, vols. 8–12. The latest and finest study of Rapoport’s embattled career is Nathan Shifriss’s Hebrew University doctoral dissertation “Shlomo Yehuda Rapoport (Shir, 1790–1867) Torah, Haskalah, Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Beginnings of Modern Jewish Nationalism” (Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 2011). 165. Berliner, Briefwechsel, 3–4, 10, 12, 32–33, 35. 166. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, F3–7.6. 167. Ludwig Geiger, “Aus M. Veits Nachlass,” AZJ, 1895, 236. 168. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, F3–7.6. 169. Geiger, “Veits Nachlass,” 236. 170. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, F3-7.7; Zunz, Vorträge, 454. 171. Berliner, Briefwechsel, 12. 172. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, F3-7.7, July 31, 1836. 173. Ibid., C13 (DBZ), 73.1; Geiger, “Veits Nachlass,” 236. Vol. 1of Erekh Milin, Rapoport’s projected Hebrew encyclopedia on rabbinic literature, came out in Prague in 1852, but covered only the letter aleph. Many of its entries amounted to stand-alone essays, whose wideranging, penetrating scholarship was enough to fill one with deep regret that no other volumes were ever forthcoming. Nor did he manage to publish even a single volume of his biographical dictionary. The combined untold loss to scholarship prompted Steinschneider to close his obituary in 1867 with the bitter barb that “it took the Prague rabbinate 27 years to consume a rare genius” (Steinschneider, “Rapoport,” 628). 174. Brockhaus, 12 (1854), 564; Zunz, Monatstage, 57.

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175. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C13 (DBZ), 59; also F1-1, 27–28. 176. Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment in the Nineteenth Century (Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 2010), 58; David Caro, Techunoth Harabanim (Hebrew) (Vienna, 1823). Notwithstanding that early call for reform, Caro roundly criticized Abraham Geiger in 1837 for his condemnation of Judaism in reference to the status of women in Jewish law. His bottom line for his German coreligionists was not to barter reform for emancipation (David Caro, “Über die Würde der Frauen in Israel,” AZJ [1837], 345–47, 370–72). 177. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, F1-1, 27–28, Zunz to Caro, April 29, 1834. 178. Ibid., F1-1, 2, letter dated December 8, 1832. In 1840 a Hebrew translation of Zunz’s Rashi essay did appear (Shimshon Bloch Halevi, Toldot Shlomo Yitzhaki Rashi [Lemberg, 1840]). Bloch accompanied his translation, which had been finished already in 1830, with his own critical notes. There is no evidence that Zunz ever authorized the translation. 179. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, F1-1, 6, letter dated March 22, 1833. 180. Ibid., F1-1, 13, Zunz to Caro, August 27, 1833. 181. Ibid., F1-1, 27–28, Zunz to Caro, April 29, 1834. 182. Ibid., F1-1, 35, letter dated November 27, 1834. 183. Ibid., G10-110.8, letter dated June 17, 1834. 184. Ibid., F1-2, 2–3, letter dated April 10, 1835. 185. Ibid., G10-110.12, letter dated November 19, 1835. 186. Steinschneider, Schriften des Dr. L. Zunz, 6 n.9. When Schechter wrote his admiring essay of Zunz in 1889, the Caro translation was still extant. According to a Hebrew postscript from Caro that Zunz inscribed on a flyleaf of his personal copy, Caro had begun his translation on August 18, 1832, and finished it on December 3, 1833. Caro expressed his deep indebtedness for the knowledge and illumination that he had derived therefrom and declaimed that “a firm and pure spirit in reference to the God of Israel and his Torah hovers over every aspect of this book and will engage those who dwell in the tents of the house of study.” Zunz added that he fi nished his editing of the translation on April 7, 1835, at 6 p.m. (Solomon Schechter, “Leopold Zunz,” Studies in Judaism, 3rd series [Philadelphia, 1945], 139–40). Philipp Bloch, since 1871 rabbi in Posen, could still examine the translation in the 1880s and concluded that the Hebrew was not entirely literal because Caro gave primacy to rendering the content as clear and intelligible as possible. Still Zunz gave his approval with just a few marginal notes. But in the end, Bloch surmised, no publisher was ever found (Philipp Bloch, “Die ersten Culturbestrebungen der jüdischen Gemeinde Posen,” Jubelschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstage des Prof. Dr. H. Graetz [Breslau, 1887], 213–14). Caro’s translation survives to this day in the library of the Alliance IsraéliteUniverselle (call number H106A). I also suspect that neither Caro nor Zunz could find a publisher willing to bear the cost of publication. The Hebrew edition by Hanoch Albeck is definitely not based on Caro’s translation (Ha-Derashot be-Yisrael, 2nd ed. [Jerusalem, 1954], 9, 32 n. 38). 187. Zunz, Monatstage, 69.

chapter 4. the br eak with r efor m 1. Ludwig Geiger, ed., Abraham Geiger’s Nachgelassene Schriften, 5 vols.(Berlin, 1875–78), 1, 303–4. The translation comes from Max Wiener, ed., Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism (Philadelphia, 1962), 142–43.

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2. Geiger, NS, 1, 307–8; the translation is from Wiener, 145–46. 3. NLI, ARC, 40 792, F1-3, 9. Geiger’s journal Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie appeared irregularly from 1835 to 1847. For a list of contributing members, see vol. 2 (1836), the unnumbered page following the title page. 4. Geiger, NS, 2, 148. 5. Ibid., 5, 153. I am not sure that the phrase “mit Ihnen zusammenleben zu können” means that Geiger lived in the Zunz household. I have found no other reference to support that reading. Hence I take it to mean simply living in the same city as Zunz. Once the ordeal was over, Geiger took pride in his exceptional endurance and self-denial. Zunz’s regard for Geiger, as he wrote to Meyer Isler on November 6, 1839, was equally high, an exemplar of what the rabbinate should become: “Geiger’s disposition, knowledge and scholarly acumen constitute a harmonious whole. I know few like him. Many write and rage but the number of the elect is small, most being gold-plated rather than gold. In Sodom, the so-called Prussian capital, there would be only a small public for him” (Ludwig Geiger, “Leopold Zunz und Abraham Geiger,” LJ [1916], 137). 6. The apostle of individuality in the study of history was Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of Berlin University, where Zunz had studied, who sanctified it as the vehicle in which ideas, emanations of the divine spirit that pervades the universe, manifest themselves (see his 1821 lecture to the Prussian Academy “On the Historian’s Task,” History and Theory 6 [1967], 57–71; also see Paul R. Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Biography, 2 vols. [Columbus, 1978–80], 1, 280–85). 7. Zunz, GS, 3, 136–39. Th is was actually an encyclopedia entry from 1842, but reflected Zunz’s preoccupation with the individual in history. 8. Ibid., 162–65. Zunz treated the lineaments of midrash here as saga. 9. Ibid., 143–45. Ezra Fleischer, Shirat ha-Kodesh ha-Ivrit bi-Ymey ha-Beynayim (Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1975), 11, 118. 10. Zunz, GS, 3, 132–36. 11. Ibid., 145–50, 150–55. 12. Ibid., 152–53. On Kalonymos ben Kalonymos, see Moritz Steinschneider, Die hebraeischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (Berlin, 1893; reprint Graz, 1956), 330–32. 13. Zunz, GS, 3, 155–61. 14. Ibid., 177–85. 15. Ibid., 177; Gesammelte Schriften von Moritz Steinschneider, ed. Heinrich Malter and Alexander Marx (Berlin, 1925), 272. 16. Steinschneider, Gesammelte Schriften, 271–308; Alexander Marx, “Zunz’s Letters to Steinschneider,” PAAJR, 5 (1933–34), 117. 17. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G23, (Steinschneider to Zunz, letter dated April 26, 1842); Marx, “Letters,” 116; Ismar Schorsch, “Moritz Steinschneider: The Vision Beyond the Books,” Studies in Steinschneider, ed. Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal (Leiden, 2012), 3–36. 18. Marx, “Letters,” 152; idem, “Moritz Steinschneider,” Essays in Jewish Biography (Philadelphia, 1947), 123–24. 19. Marx, “Letters,” 119. 20. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G23 (Steinschneider’s question of Zunz, dated October 12, 1843); Marx, “Letters,” November 27, 1843, 122 (Zunz’s answer). The Saadia translation was a collaborative effort done with Julius Barrasch, but went unpublished because Steinschneider wanted

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a more reliable Hebrew text than he had access to (see Henry Malter, Saadia Gaon: His Life and Works [Philadelphia, 1921], 375–76). 21. NLI, 40 792, G23. 22. Ibid., letter dated February 22, 1844. 23. Reuven Michael, Heinrich Graetz: The Historian of the Jewish People (Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 2003), 29, 44–47; idem, Heinrich Graetz: Tagebuch und Briefe (Tübingen, 1977), 155–56, 201–2. 24. Der Orient, nos. 50–51 (1840), nos. 7–8 (1841); AZJ (1918), 114. 25. David Cassel, trans. and ed., Das Buch Kusari des R. Jehuda ha-Levi (Leipzig, 1853), foreword; JTSL, ARC, 108, David Cassel correspondence, Cassel to Steinschneider, letters dated March 12, 1843, and April 13, 1843. 26. JTSL, ARC, 108, David Cassel correspondence; Marx, “Letters,” 120. 27. JTSL, ARC, 108, David Cassel correspondence, letter dated August 28, 1843). 28. Schorsch, “Moritz Steinschneider,” 26. 29. Literaturblatt des Orients, July 25, 1843, col. 465. 30. Ibid., col. 470 n.6. 31. Ibid., cols. 491–92, 502; Schorsch, “Moritz Steinschneider,” 23–24. 32. Literaturblatt des Orients, col. 502. 33. Ibid., col. 503. 34. Schorsch, “Moritz Steinschneider,” 11. 35. Plan der Real-Encyclopädie des Judentums (Krotoschin, 1844), 5. 36. Ibid., 22. 37. Ibid., 23. 38. Ibid., 14. 39. The board’s letter to Zunz was dated October 1, 1840 (NLI, ARC, 40 791, C2-45). However in his diary he noted that an invitation had already been extended to him on September 26, which I take to have been oral (C13-1, 73.2). In any case, his gracious response was dated October 4, that is two days after the written invitation had reached him (HUC-JIR, Klau Library, Kirschstein Collection, 6/14). 40. Zunz, GS, 2, 123–24. 41. Ibid., 3, 192. 42. Ibid., 191. 43. NLI, ARC 40 792, C13-1, 73.1. On May 21 Veit had already written to Zunz: “Have you seen the newest article ‘The Jews in Damascus’ in the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung? The opinion piece ‘From the Saale’ requisitioned by the editor is an act of unmatched infamy and requires a learned refutation. Don’t you feel yourself called to do this?” (G24-625.35). On the travesty in Damascus, see Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Aff air: “Ritual Murder,” Politics and the Jews (Cambridge, 1997), 271–72. 44. Leopold Zunz, “Damaskus, ein Wort zur Abwehr,” GS, 2, 161. 45. Ibid., 163. 46. Ibid., 165. 47. Ibid., 167–69. 48. NLI, ARC, 40 792, F1-5, 3. In his letter, Zunz referenced a letter he had sent on February 28, 1837, to the president of the Académie Royal des inscriptions along with three of his recent works—his refutation of Chiarini, his Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge, and his Namen der Juden. Writing in French, Zunz described in a sentence the subject of each book. The point

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was to apprize the French academic elite of the critical scholarship on Judaism beginning to flourish in Germany. The absence of an acknowledgment by the president is what prompted Zunz’s bitter comment to Rothschild on the connection between bigotry and ignorance (the draft of Zunz’s letter to the Académie is in NLI, ARC, 40 792, F 1–5, 27–28). In May Rothschild had asked Zunz to recommend a tutor for his children, perhaps a Jewish university student ready to seek his fortune in Paris (C13-1, 73.1). About to leave Paris on a trip, Rothschild asked Salomon Munk to convey his appreciation to Zunz and explain why he withheld the essay from the French press. Even the few papers that were inclined to defend the Jews relied on the facts emanating from Damascus, that is, a contaminated source. In addition, experience had shown just how negligible was the effect on public opinion of such an essay. As promised by Munk, however, the essay was quickly published in the new French Jewish monthly Archives Israélites, 1 (1840), 426–32, 471–75 (Munk’s letter to Zunz dated July 7, 1840, was published in a French translation by Celine Trautmann-Waller, Philologie allemande et tradition juive [Paris, 1998], 306–7). 49. Ismar Schorsch, “The Production of a Classic: Zunz as Krochmal’s Editor,” LBIYB, 31 (1986), 281–315. Krochmal had published at least one essay in Kerem Hemed, 4 (1839), 260– 74, before his death. A couple came out posthumously in the same journal (5 [1841], 51–98, 9 [1856], 14–19). 50. Schorsch, “Zunz as Krochmal’s Editor,” 284. 51. Ibid., 297. 52. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13-1, 96. 53. Schorsch, “Zunz as Krochmal’s Editor,” 299. 54. Zunz, GS, 2, 150–59. In his Monatstage des Kalenderjahres: Ein Andenken an Hingeschiedene (Berlin, 1872), 43, Zunz celebrated Krochmal as “the one who revived critical scholarship among Galician Jews ; a Mendelssohn for a small circle, a Maimonides for a larger one.” 55. Th e Writings of Nachman Krochmal (Hebrew), ed. Simon Rawidowicz, 2nd enlarged ed. (Waltham, Mass., 1961), Zunz’s introduction, 2:7. 56. Schorsch, “Zunz as Krochmal’s Editor,” 308. 57. Ibid., 311. 58. The Writings of Nachman Krochmal, Zunz’s introduction, 2:7; Schorsch, “Zunz as Krochmal’s Editor,” 289. 59. Der Orient (1841), 175. 60. NLI, ARC, 4o 792, C1-66. 61. Ibid., C13–1, 94. 62. JTSL, ARC, 108, David Cassel correspondence. 63. Salomo Gottlieb Stern, ed., Mahberet he-Aruch, Salomonis Ben Abrahami Parchon Argonensis (Hebrew) (Pressburg, 1844). For the statutes of the Cultur-Verein, see Der Orient (1841), 174–76. 64. Zunz, GS, 2, 209. 65. Schorsch, “Moritz Steinschneider,” 16–17. 66. AZJ (1843), 579–80. 67. AZJ (1895), 272,(1898), 404. At its meeting on August 29, 1842, the search committee finally approved Frankel as its choice. It also agreed to drop its insistence on a ten-year appointment for a life contract, but set the salary at 2,000 talers (AZJ [1898], 462; CAHJP, P47/2). Against the backdrop of a long-standing relationship, Frankel tried to reassure Zunz by letter (November 15, 1842) of his noninvolvement in the deliberations of the board regarding the

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extent of his authority: “If I come to Berlin as its rabbi, I will not only strengthen the relationship marked by the friendship and esteem that I have for you, but also seek at all cost to expand it. The prospect of being near you and living close by has exercised a great influence on my much desired decision to accept the rabbinic post there” (NLI, ARC, 40 792, G12-187.12). 68. Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: Th e Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H., 1994), 191, 261. 69. NLI, ARC, 40 792, F1-2, 32.letter dated November 21, 1841. 70. Glatzer, II, 221. 71. NLI, ARC, 40 792, F2, 33a, Zunz to Veit, January 25, 1843. 72. Glatzer, II, 223. 73. AZJ (1898), 570, 607. 74. Ibid., 607. Notwithstanding that portrait, three weeks later Frankel wrote Veit directly inviting him to write for his new journal (Zeitschrift für die religiösen Interessen des Judentums). In the interim, Frankel seems to have realized that Veit was actually a centrist like himself (see Ludwig Geiger, “Zum Andenken an Moritz Veit [geb. 13. Sept. 1808],” MGWJ 52 [1908], 532– 34). As early as 1836 Frankel had written Muhr that he was wary of the hostility of the Prussian government’s crushing of all religious reform in Berlin and that he favored improvements that would alienate no one (AZJ [1898], 357). In his Monatstage, 33, Zunz praised Muhr as a skillful lawyer and tested friend, who as early as 1813 had warned not to tear down the old pillars in order to replace them with toys (modernen Tand). 75. Ludwig Geiger, ed., Michael Sachs und Moritz Veit: Briefwechsel (Frankfurt a.M., 1897), 69–71, 82–83. Sachs was to be paid a salary of 1,200 talers and 300 talers for housing (82). Veit forcefully advised Sachs not to attend the rabbinic conference in Braunschweig (84). 76. Moritz Steinschneider, Die Schriften des Dr. L. Zunz, zu seinem 63. Geburtstage (Berlin, 1857), 8 n.16. 77. Zunz, GS, 2, 208–9; on Frankel, see Schorsch, From Text to Context, 13–15. 78. Zunz, GS, 2, 208–9. 79. Zur Judenfrage in Deutschland, 1 (1843), 10–11. 80. Horst Fischer, Judentum, Staat und Heer in Preussen im frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1968), 158–66. The brief submitted by the Berlin board on March 4, 1841, vindicating the identity switch of German Jewry from Poland (Ashkenaz) to Spain (Sepharad) underscored the political benefit of the Sephardic mystique (GSAPK, Rep. 77/ Tit. 30/ Nr. 85/ III). Th is fi le also contains a cross section of the petitions submitted in 1842 by other Jewish communities throughout Prussia. See also IsaakMarkus Jost, Nachträge zu den Legislativen Fragen betreff end die Juden im Preussischen Staate (Berlin, 1842). 81. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 35. 82. Julius Rubo, Die Rechtsverhältnisse der jüdischen Gemeinen (Berlin, 1844), 1–3. 83. On Veit’s meeting in early 1840 with Karl Sigmund Altenstein, Prussia’s venerable minister of education and religion, shortly before his death, see Geiger, Sachs und Veit, 34–35. Also see Erik Lindner, “Zwischen Biedermeier und Bismarck: Moritz Veit, ein engagierter Verleger, deutsch-jüdischer Politiker und Gelegenheitsdichter,” Buchhandelsgeschichte, 2 (1996), B72– B73. On Freund, see Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity (New York, 1988), 420 n.36, 426 n.113. 84. Denkschrift zu dem Entwurf eine Verordnung die Verhältnisse der Juden betreff end: Beilagen der Denkschrift . . . über die Verhältnisse der Juden, soweit solche die bürgerlichen Verhältnisse derselben betreff en (Berlin, 1847), 72–79.

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85. Ibid., 80–98. 86. NLI, ARC, 40 792, D24a-2. 87. While the liberal Prussian constitution of December 5, 1848, granted all Prussian citizens equal civil rights and thus superseded the first half of the Jewry law of 1847, which had dealt parsimoniously with Jewish civil rights, the second half of the law, which governed extensively the internal operation of the local Jewish community, remained in effect, with modest changes over time (see Ismar Freund, Die Emanzipation der Juden in Preussen, 2 vols [Berlin, 1912], 2, 521; Alfred Michaelis, ed., Die Rechtsverhältnisse der Juden in Preussen [Berlin, 1910], 229–330). 88. Ludwig Geiger, “Leopold Zunz’s Arbeiten für das Judengesetz 1847,” Im deutschen Reich, 23 (1917), 245–50. Zunz’s outrage spoke for many. Some three hundred Jewish notables signed a petition submitted to the United Diet in 1847 expressing their collective dismay at the regressive draft of the government’s proposed legislation (Der Orient [1847], 161–63, 169–72, 177–79). 89. L.Geiger, “Leopold Zunz’s Arbeiten,” 250. 90. Leopold Zunz, “Tefi llin,” KJI, 2 (1843), 133–38; idem, “Nachman Krochmal,” KJI, 3 (1844), 111–22; idem, “Eine alte Stimme,” KJI, 4 (1845), 77–84; idem, “Ein gefundener Brief,” KJI, 5 (1846), 163–71; idem, “Sterbetage,” KJI, 6 (1847), 82–94. 91. Zunz, GS, 2, 175–76. 92. NLI, ARC, 40 792, F2-1, 35. 93. On the circumcision fight in Frankfurt, see Robert Liberles, Religious Confl ict in Social Context (Westport, Conn., 1985), 52–65; also see Ludwig Geiger, “Zunz’ Gutachten über die Beschneidung,” AZJ (1916), 449–52. 94. Zunz, GS, 2, 191–97. 95. Ibid., 198, 199. 96. Ibid., 198. 97. Ibid., 202. 98. Ibid., 203; Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem (Frankfurt, 1787), 173; idem, Jerusalem and other Jewish Writings, ed. and trans. Alfred Jospe (New York, 1969), 104. 99. NLI, ARC, 40 792, F2-1, 35. 100. Glatzer, II, 226. Zunz had explained the intent of his tefillin essay in much the same caustic vein to his friend Salomon Steinheim in Hamburg two months earlier (see Hans Joachim Schoeps, “Aus dem Briefwechsel Steinheim-Zunz,” JJGL, 31 (1938), 284–85). 101. Zur Judenfrage in Deutschland, 2 (Breslau, 1844). The subtitle now read: Monatsschrift für Besprechung der politischen, religiösen und socialen Zustände der deutschen Israeliten. 102. Samuel Holdheim, Geschichte der Entstehung und Entwickelung der jüdischen Reformgemeinde in Berlin (Berlin, 1857), 59–69. 103. Sigismund Stern, “Das Judenthum als Element des Staats-Organismus,” Zur Judenfrage in Deutschland, 1 (1843), 125–65. 104. NLI, ARC, 40 792, F2-1, 36. A month before, on March 29, 1844, as he sent off his responsum on circumcision to Rothschild, Zunz wrote Samuel Ehrenberg: “I am about to become the buttress [die Stütze] of Judaism. First I brought out the nobility of tefillin; now I must defend circumcision and I already see Shabbat coming. I began by resurrecting critical scholarship. Then I needed to advocate the sermon [derasha], the names [Jews may use], the free development of the synagogue [Kultus] and even the Torah itself. Yet here I receive only a parsonage allowance and 500 talers. But surely a reward (word missing in the original) in the world to come won’t elude me” (Glatzer, II, 228–29).

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105. Glatzer, II, 232; Sigismund Stern, Die Aufgabe des Judenthums und der Juden in der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1845). 106. Glatzer, II, 233. What Stern had contended with unimpeded Hegelian flair was that Judaism after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 ce ceded the world stage to Christianity. While Judaism contracted into a dormant state of self-preservation, Christianity, but an extension of Judaism, brought Judaism to the pagan world. The time had at last come to abandon the protective armor of the Talmud and reenter history to contest the vestiges of paganism in the world and in Christianity itself (Die Aufgabe, 39–75). 107. Marx, “Letters,” 129–30. 108. Glatzer, I, 129. On the steps taken to form the Reform Association and the alienation animating them, see Arthur Galliner, Sigismund Stern: Der Reformator und der Pädagoge (Frankfurt a.M., 1930), 56–61. As early as November 1843, Zunz expressed his annoyance to Stern in a curt letter at being excluded from a meeting to which a number of the board members of the Cultur Verein had been invited (Galliner, 176 n.38). 109. Zunz, GS, 2, 199–200. Zunz alluded here to Holdheim’s essay “Unsere Gegenwart,” in Zur Judenfrage in Deutschland, 2 (1844), 149–71, in which he argued that many a current religious law and practice originated as a piece of civil law in ancient Israel and thus warranted shedding. Cf. Celine Trautmann-Waller, “Holdheim and Zunz: From the Question of Rabbinic Authority to a New Defi nition of Ceremonial Law,” Redefining Judaism in an Age of Emancipation, ed. Christian Wiese (Leiden, 2007), 228–40. The analysis lacks contextualization. 110. For the number of attendees, see Ludwig Geiger, ed., Abraham Geiger: Leben und Lebenswerk (Berlin, 1910), 116; quotation on Glatzer, II, 240 n. 2. 111. Glatzer, II, 238. 112. Glatzer, I, 139. 113. Ibid., 124; Ludwig Geiger, “Zunz’ Tätigkeit für die Reform (1817–1823) mit einem Anhang (1840),” LJ (November 1917), 113. 114. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Philadelphia, 1973), 550–51. 115. Geiger, NS, 5, 181. 116. Ibid., 182. 117. Ibid., 181–82. On their divergent religious postures, see Jakob J. Petuchowski, “Abraham Geiger and Samuel Holdheim: Their Differences in Germany and Repercussions in America,” LBIYB, 22 (1977), 139–59. 118. Geiger, NS, 5, 183. 119. Ibid., 184. 120. Ibid. 121. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G24-625.53; quotation from Zunz’s essay on circumcision on Zunz, GS, 2, 202. 122. Glatzer, I, 135. 123. Zunz, GS, 2, 177–82. 124.   I.  A. Benjacob, Otzar ha- Sefarim (Hebrew) (Vilnius, 1880), 12 (no. 238); Adolph Jellinek, R. Salomo Alami: Sittenlehre, 2nd ed. (Vienna, 1872); Isaak Markus Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten, 9 vols. (Berlin, 1820–28), 8, 30–40. 125. Zunz, GS, 2, 177. 126. Ibid., 122.

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127. Ibid., 185–56. The interplay between ideas as a generative force and individuals as their realization is precisely what Humboldt had stressed in his 1821 lecture “On the Historian’s Task.” Few understood Zunz, the avatar for individuality, better than Solomon Schechter. In a commencement address at Jews’ College in 1901, Schechter impressed the essence of Zunz’s ethos, without mention of his name or the driving role of ideas, on his audience with poetic charm: “Nowadays we are not always in a praying mood. With Hegel, some of us, perhaps, believe that thinking is also praying. But the sensation we experience in our work is not very 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 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 (that) come(s) to light again after a disappearance of centuries, crying for sympathy and mercy. . . . You dare not neglect it and slay this soul again. Unless you chose to become another Cain, you must be the keeper of your 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 find is that of suffering, and you even doubt with him if the garb in which he makes his reappearance is that of an honest skeptic— souls can only be kissed through the medium of sympathy” (“The Ideal of a Jewish Theological Seminary,” Jews’ College Jubilee Volume, ed. Isidore Harris [London, 1906], cli). 128. Zunz, GS, 2, 190. 129. Zunz, “Sterbetage.” 130. Ibid., 87. 131. Ibid., 88–89. 132. Michah Gottlieb, Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible (Waltham, Mass., 2011), 50–52. 133. Glatzer, II, 186. As early as 1828, Zunz must have written in a similar vein to Benjamin de Castro in Altona, whom Adelheid had befriended on her month-long visit to Hamburg in 1827. See his letter to Zunz dated June 29, 1828, in which he summarized Zunz’s view and sought to learn more (NLI, ARC, 40 792, G10). De Castro was also a friend of Salomon Steinheim (Schoeps, “Aus dem Briefwechsel Steinheim—Zunz,” 263, 267). Despite their theological divergence, Zunz and Steinheim remained close (see Schoeps). In his Monatstage, 28, Zunz commemorated Steinheim as “the Philo of our century, a poet and philosopher and a valiant fighter in matters affecting his brethren.” On Steinheim’s unconventional theology, see Joshua O. Haberman, Philosopher of Revelation: The Life and Thought of S. L. Steinheim (Philadelphia, 1990). 134. Glatzer, II, 320. 135. Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry (Oxford, 1992), 35–36. 136. L. Geiger, “Zunz’ Tätigkeit für die Reform,” 119–20. A responsum on the organ is another eloquent testament to Zunz’s preference for organic development over ideologically driven reform. On January 8, 1864 (Zunz always noted down the day a letter arrived) he had received an inquiry from the government of Lower Hesse whether the organ accords with traditional practice? Zunz responded at length on the same day affirming that whatever halakhic obstacles once existed have long been overcome. In addition to citing the relevant literature, Zunz averred that over time quite a few synagogues inside and outside Germany had introduced the organ, especially in larger cities. An edifying ser vice was surely to be preferred to the recitation of incomprehensible Hebrew phrases. Nevertheless, Zunz cautioned against

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the use of force. “The inner harmony of the community is a great good, of greater value than music” (NLI, ARC, 40 792, C4). 137. Jakob J. Petuchowski, Prayerbook Reform in Europe (New York, 1968), 68.

chapter 5. a cl ash of schol arly agendas 1. Leopold Zunz, Zur Geschichte und Literatur (Berlin, 1845) (hereafter ZGL). 2. Bernd Reifenberg, Lessing und die Bibliothek (Wiesbaden, 1995), 1, 50–51, 81–83. 3. Zunz, ZGL, v. 4. Ibid., vii–viii. 5. Ibid., iv. 6. Sabine Mangold, Eine “weltbürgerliche Wissenschaft”— die deutsche Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 2004), 132. 7. Ismar Schorsch, “Converging Cognates: The Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in Nineteenth- Century Germany,” LBIYB, 55(2010), 6; cf. Hans-Georg Ebert and Thoralf Hanstein, eds., Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer— Leben und Wirkung (Frankfurt a.M., 2013), 21. 8. Schorsch, “Converging Cognates,” 23. 9. Ibid., 25; Die Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 1845–1895: Ein Ueberblick (Leipzig, 1895), 45. Zunz retained his official membership certificate dated May 1, 1846 (NLI, ARC, 40 792, C 9–10). 10. Schorsch, “Converging Cognates,” 15. 11. Zunz, ZGL, 1–21. To quote Zunz’s pungent peroration: “This consistently unprotected literature, never funded and often hounded, whose authors never belonged to the mighty of the earth, has a [body of] history, philosophy and poetry which is the equal of other literatures. Once this is granted, will not its Jewish authors and indeed all Jews attain citizenship [in the realm] of the spirit? . . . Will there not then flow from the fountainhead of scholarship a spirit of humanity throughout the land [das Volk], promoting understanding and harmony? The extension of equality to Jews in theory and practice [in Sitte und Leben] will emanate from the extension of equality to the academic study of Judaism” (ZGL, 21). Zunz was convinced that Eisenmenger’s voluminous and venomous Entdecktes Judentum in the eighteenth century had quashed the interest in and empathy for Judaism and its literature that had flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In chapter 1 of his ZGL, which dealt with the subject, Zunz referenced a total of ninety-three Christian Hebraists who had left their mark over these three centuries. The emancipation of the study of Judaism from theology was for Zunz a prerequisite for the political emancipation of the Jews, and that called for shifting the subject from the faculty of theology to that of philosophy (see Gianfranco Miletto, “Zunz and the Hebraists,” EAJS Newsletter, 15 [2004], 50–60). 12. Zunz, ZGL, 3. 13. Ibid., 22. 14. Ibid., 28. The first scholar to rank periods in the history of Spanish Jewish literature with the colors of gold and silver was Franz Delitzsch in his 1836 Zur Geschichte der jüdischen Poesie (Leipzig, 1836) (see Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism [Hanover, N.H., 1994], 83). 15. Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon, 8th ed., vol. 5 (Leipzig, 1834), 809; idem, 9th ed., vol. 7 (Leipzig, 1845), 718; Zunz, GS, 1, 101–2.

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16. Zunz, ZGL, 157–58. On this crucial point, Zunz deserves to speak for himself: “If now that [cultural] theater [of Ashkenaz] has been overlooked even by Jewish historians (not to speak of non-Jewish historians) or handled as a stepchild, it was not the luster of Spain or the unusual nature of certain types of Franco-German Jewish literature that alone obstructed their view. Rather it was the reaction against anything Jewish that prevailed in the wake of the Enlightenment that seemed to me a grievous wrong when I wrote my life of Rashi and that young scholars, I must admit, still adopt” (158). The last reference is to Abraham Geiger’s essay “Schimschon, ein Lexikograph in Deutschland,” WZJT, 5 (1844), 413–30, in which he unveiled his discovery in a barely concealed tone of condescension. Depping quickly translated his prize-winning work into his native German, G. B. Depping, Die Juden im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1834). 17. On the origin, diff usion, and longevity of the Sephardic mystique in Germanspeaking Jewry, see Schorsch, From Text to Context, 71–91; also see now more fully Carsten Schapkow, Vorbild und Gegenbild: Das iberische Judentum in der deutsch-jüdischen Erinnerungskultur (Cologne, 2011). 18. Zunz, ZGL, 122–23. 19. Ibid., 76. 20. Ibid., 135–42. The exemplary passage on the manner in which pious Jews should relate to non-Jews that Zunz chose to translate (135–36) would be reproduced in full by Hermann Cohen in 1888 in his defense of the binding nature of the Talmud on contemporary Jews, including the ethical norms it prescribes for the treatment of non-Jews (Hermann Cohen, “Die Nächstenliebe in Talmud,” Jüdische Schriften, 3 vols. [Berlin, 1924], 1, 145–74, the passage itself on 167–68). The noteworthy context was a suit brought by the public prosecutor in Upper Hesse against the slander of Judaism that turned on these two issues by an anti-Semitic agitator in a recent Reichstag election campaign. The court had solicited the opinions of Cohen and Paul de Lagarde and subsequently saw fit to convict the defendant to fourteen days’ imprisonment and the cost of the proceedings. In retrospect, Cohen’s utilization of Zunz in a critical juncture was a tribute to the latter’s perspicacity that prejudice dies slowly (for context, see Cohen, Jüdische Schriften, 1, 338–39; Ulrich Sieg, Germany’s Prophet: Paul de Lagarde and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism [Waltham, Mass., 2013], 202–13). 21. Zunz, ZGL, 157–213, quotation on 157. 22. Ibid., 304–458. 23. Peter Gay, ed., Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary (New York, 1962), 135–36, 436–37; Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti- Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 40–41; Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Philadelphia, 1973), 541; Frank  E. Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 185–86. 24. Zunz, ZGL, 349. 25. Ibid., 371. 26. Ibid., 377. 27. Ibid., 384, 386. 28. Ibid., 385. 29. Ibid., 394–404. 30. Geiger, NS, 5, 186–87, letter dated December 26, 1845. 31. Abraham Geiger, “Recension: Zur Geschichte un Literatur, von Dr. Zunz,” LiteraturBlatt zum Israeliten des 19. Jahrhunderts (1846), 2–8, 65–68, 69–72, 81–82.

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32. Ibid., 3–5. 33. Ibid., 7. 34. Ibid., 66. 35. [Fürchtegott Lebrecht], “Recension: Zur Geschichte und Literatur von Dr. L. Zunz,” Magazin für die Literatur des Auslandes(1845), 591. As for the identification of Lebrecht, see Ismar Elbogen, “Zunz: Meine Schriften,” JJGL, 30 (1937), 155. 36. [Lebrecht] “Recension,” 591. 37. Moritz Steinschneider, “Recension: Zur Geschichte und Literatur von Dr.  Zunz,” Serapeum, February 15, 1846, 45. 38. Bernhard Beer, “Zur Wissenschaft des Judenthums,” ZRIJ, 3 (1846), 264–70, 346–52, 472–79, reference to Geiger on 268. 39. Ibid., 268. On June 23, 1846, Beer wrote Zunz that he had sent off the first installment of his review in which he disputed Geiger’s claim that Reformers are not surrendering Judaism to the dictates of emancipation: “I spoke in your vein.” At the same time, Beer expressed his satisfaction that Zunz agreed with his earlier criticism of Geiger’s overstated contention that the Gemara repeatedly misunderstood the meaning of the Mishnah (NLI, ARC, 40 792, 11; for Beer’s rebuttal of Geiger on the Mishnah, see “Bemerkungen in Bezug auf eine Aeusserung des Herrn Rabbiner Dr. Geiger,” ZRIJ, 3 [1846], 183–90). 40. Beer, “Zur Wissenschaft,” 269. 41. Ibid., 346; cf. Targum Yerushalmi and Rashi on Genesis 2:7. 42. Beer, “Zur Wissenschaft,” 472–74, 477–78. 43. Ibid., 476; as for Zunz on Schor, see ZGL, 198–99. With the publication of Abraham Geiger and S. L. Heilberg’s Nitei Naamanim (A Delightful Sapling—Isa. 17:10) (Breslau, 1847), the emergence of a small circle of Jewish Bible commentators in northern France in the twelfth century who interpreted the text according to its literal meaning became the focal point of scholarly interest and contention. Geiger was fascinated by the sudden presence of a rational exegetical discourse in the heartland of a Jewish culture steeped in Talmud and midrash. In consequence, he scoured public archives and private collections for further evidence of its legacy. Nitei Naamanim was the first publication of his findings. His opening salvo resoundingly proclaimed the larger significance of his philological research: “In the interpretation of biblical texts, the religious consciousness of an age expresses itself definitively” (1). Beer was not convinced and on May  31, 1848, as revolution roiled the streets of Europe, he shared his skepticism with Zunz: “It seems to me that the sudden transition from the midrash loving Rashi to the sober rationalism of Rashbam [R. Samuel ben Meir, his grandson, d. c. 1174] has not yet been historically accounted for. Geiger describes [the phenomenon] without going into the reasons, which must be investigated because soon after Rashbam this rational approach comes to an end. Frankel thinks that Rashbam wrote his commentary only to counter Christian prelates and that is why he stayed away from [citing] midrashim. But that still needs to be proven. I would welcome your esteemed opinion on the subject, if the current moment allows you the leisure” (NLI, ARC, 40 792 part 2, 11–1).To his credit, Geiger had downplayed the rupture between Rashi and his rationalist disciples. Rashi himself displayed a keen sense for the literal meaning of many a biblical text (Nitei Naamanim, 11–15). In 1855 Geiger returned to the subject with a fresh sample of texts (Parschandatha [Leipzig]) in which he did try to account for the sudden and brief appearance of the nonmidrashic discourse (8–10, 33). Geiger’s overall objective in this and related research was clearly to document the fate of peshat (the effort to understand authorial intent) in the history of Judaism.

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44. Gerson Wolf, Catalog der Bibliothek des sel. Herrn Dr.  Bernhard Beer in Dresden (Berlin, 1863), xlvi–xlix, l. 45. Zacharias Frankel, Dr. Bernhard Beer (Breslau, 1863), 192. 46. Wolf, Catalog, xxviii, xxxii. 47. Bernhard Beer, Betrachtungen über den Gesetzentwurf, eine Modification (Dresden, 1837), 9. This brief is temperate in tone, grounded in empirical evidence, and done without fawning, bespeaking an author of courage, self-respect, and sharp intellect. 48. Chapter 3, note 48. 49. Bernhard Beer, Imre joscher: Religiös-moralische Reden (Leipzig, 1833), xx. 50. NLI, ARC, Ms Var 236, 57, letter dated June 21, 1833. 51. Bernhard Beer, Lebensgemälde biblischer Personen nach Auff assung der jüdischen Sage: Leben Abraham’s (Leipzig, 1859), foreword. 52. HB(1859), 100–101. 53. Bernhard Beer, “Charakteristik biblischer Personen,” LBO, 1843, cols. 342–47 (deals with Cain and Abel); idem, “Aaron der Hohepriester und Friedenstifter,” JI, 2 (Vienna, 1855), 1–17; idem, Leben Abrahams; idem, Leben Moses nach Auff assung der jüdischen Sage (Leipzig, 1863); Das Buch der Jubiläen und sein Verhältniss zu den Midraschim (Leipzig, 1856). 54. See Ismar Schorsch, “Moritz Steinschneider: The Vision Beyond the Books,” Studies on Steinschneider, ed. Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal (Leiden, 2012), 25. 55. JTSL, ARC 108, box  2, letter dated April  17, 1850. The manuscript in question was Me’ irat Einayim by the thirteenth-century Spanish kabbalist Isaac of Acre, on which see Eitan P. Fishbane, A Light Before Dawn: The Inner World of a Medieval Kabbalist (Stanford, Calif., 2009), 7–13, 49–100. 56. JTSL, ARC 108, box 2, letter dated April 26, 1850. 57. Ibid., letter dated July 17, 1851; according to Wolf, his son-in-law, Beer observed the laws of kashrut whenever he traveled (Wolf, Catalog, viii). 58. JTSL, ARC 108, box 2, letter dated May 16, 1858. 59. Ibid., letter dated April 7, 1859. 60. HB(1859), 80. In his letter of November 24, 1859, Beer thanked Steinschneider for highlighting his honor, but then scolded him for failing to mention in his recent Leiden Catalogue that Beer had been the first to examine and write about its codex of Schor’s Bible commentary in Beer, “Zur Wissenschaft,” 476–77. The scolding could not have put Steinschneider in a good mood to write his long-awaited review of Beer’s Leben Abrahams (for Beer’s letter, see JTSL, ARC 108, box 2). 61. JTSL, ARC 108, box 2. Beer’s surveys appeared in the MGWJ, 2 (1853), 41–56, 81–96 and 3(1854), 14–28, 249–68 under the title “Die neuere jüdische Literatur und ihre Bedeutung.”In 1857 Beer reprinted them as a separate publication of ninety-four pages, probably at his own expense ( Jüdische Literaturbriefe [Leipzig,]). 62. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols. (Philadelphia, 1909–38; reprint 1946– 54), 1, preface. For a closer look at the Legends, see Galit Hasan-Rokem and Ithamar Gruenwald, eds., Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews (Detroit, 2014), where Beer does not appear. 63. In his Abraham narrative, Ginzberg seems to footnote Beer’s work five times (vol. 5, 208 n.6, 222–23 n. 81, 84, 224 n. 86, 226 n. 102). On Moses, but once (vol. 4, 89–90), a reference to Beer’s short essay “Eldad und Medad in Pseudojonathan,” MGWJ, 6 (1857), 346–50, in which Beer brought a midrash cited by Jerome that both men were actually halfbrothers of Moses. For whatever reason, Ginzberg, who brought material from Jerome innumerable times,

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omitted any mention of Jerome when discussing the possibility that E dad and Medad might have been half brothers (vol. 3, 253; vol. 6, 89–90). Ginzberg likewise made no mention of Beer’s essay on Aaron. Beer merits no discussion in Johannes Sabel, Die Geburt der Literatur aus der Aggada (Tübingen, 2010). 64. See Frankel’s letters to Beer from 1835 and 1836 in JHIW, Breslau Jewish community fi les, no. 1167. Also see the invitation extended by Beer on May 22, 1835, in Moritz Güdemann, “Zacharias Frankel: Von Ihm und über Ihm,” MGWJ, 45 (1901), 251. 65. NLI, ARC, 40 792, part 2, 11. 66. Frankel, Dr. Bernhard Beer. 67. JHIW, Breslau, 1167, letter dated September 15, 1854. 68. Zacharias Frankel, “Nekrolog,” MGWJ, 8 (1861), 318–20. 69. Bernhard Beer,”Die neuere jüdische Literatur und ihre Bedeutung,” MGWJ, 3 (1853), 86. 70. David Cassel, Woher? Und Wohin? (Berlin, 1845); Bernhard Beer, “Allgemeine theologische Bibliographie: Woher und Wohin? Von Dr. D. Cassel,” ZRIJ 2 (1845), 236–39. In private, Beer spoke with less restraint, witness his letter to Zunz dated April  14, 1845: “Holdheim’s sterile publications really begin to make me sick. He is truly outdoing Eisenmenger. The other participants in last year’s rabbinical conference [in Braunschweig] have also grown sterile and are hardly edifying” (NLI, ARC, 40 792, part 2, 11). According to Zunz’s diary, Holdheim visited him on August 14, 1839, “the first and last time” after which he wrote “a second Paul.” I suspect that both the fact and the opinion were added later. The asterisk by Holdheim’s name also indicates that Holdheim had passed away in the meantime (NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13–1, 73). Holdheim, however, did make it into Zunz’s Die Monatstage des Kalenderjahres (Berlin, 1872) with the neutral pendant “preacher and advocate of the Reform Association” (47). 71. The copy of the Statut für die Comerzien Rath Fraenckelsche Stiftung, “Jüdisch” Theologisches Seminar in the JTSL, Sylvia and Harry Rebell Digital Collections, has two pages of Beer’s handwritten notes signed by him as an addendum. 72. NLI, ARC, Ms Var, 57. 73. Ibid. 74. Bernhard Beer, “Recensionen und Anzeigen,” MGWJ, 8 (1859), 176–89. From Beer’s letters to Zunz dated December 24, 1858, and April 12, 1859, it seems as if the initiative to write the review was his and not Frankel’s. Three years earlier (June 11, 1856), Beer had expressed his disappointment that Zunz did not provide any information about the paytanim who authored the piyutim in his synagogale Poesie. Beer knows that the information will be forthcoming in a later work, but Zunz should have alerted his readers in his foreword as to the ordering of his material (NLI, ARC, 40 792, part 2, 11). 75. JHIW, Breslau, 1167. Fifteen months later (June 11, 1856), Frankel critiqued Zunz on other grounds: “From another angle, I fi nd distressing the pettifogging pedantry. Zunz began the trend, making himself thereby into a dry mummy. Yet he is brilliant and sparks of genius shoot forth from everywhere. And then the assistants and students come along and think they have to study and emulate the master, stuffi ng themselves full of book titles and names, which is enough to make them scholars. What is deplorable about Zunz is that often he gives something no more than a fleeting glance and then comes out with a howler” (JHIW, Breslau, 1167). On Frankel more generally, see the splendid biography, fi rmly planted in archival research, by Andreas Brämer, Rabbiner Zacharias Frankel (Hildesheim, 2000).

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76. NLI, ARC, Ms Var 236, 17. 77. NLI, ARC, 40 792, part 2, 11, letter dated February 8, 1839. 78. Ludwig Geiger, Abraham Geiger: Leben und Lebenswerk (Berlin, 1910), 72; NLI, ARC, 40 792, part 2, 11, letter dated October 24, 1840. 79. Beer, ZRIJ, 3 (1846), “Bemerkungen,” 183–90; for Geiger’s defense, see 184 in the same issue. 80. Ibid., 190. On Graetz’s attack on Geiger’s mishnaic studies, see Ismar Schorsch, ed. and trans., Heinrich Graetz: The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays (New York, 1975), 35–36. For Graetz’s slight of Maimonides, see “Die Construction der jüdischen Geschichte. Eine Skizze,” ZRIJ, 3 (1846), 84. 81. NLI, ARC, Ms Var 236, 17. As for Zunz’s opinion of Geiger’s Urschrift, see his letter to Philipp and Julie Ehrenberg, dated September 11, 1857: “The Urtext has scholarly value, but is tendentious, the assurance of the author not withstanding” (Glatzer, I, 286). On Jost’s Geschichte des Judentums und seiner Sekten, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1857), which had also just come out, he was merciless: “had it not been written, no one would have missed it” (286). 82. NLI, ARC, Ms Var 17, letter dated April 21, 1859. 83. Ibid., letter dated April 23, 1860. Geiger’s radical effort to throw doubt on the Gemara as a reliable expositor of the Mishnah reverberated throughtout the rest of the century and beyond. For a systematic, searching, and engaged comparative study of the contributions of some fifteen Wissenschaft scholars to the subject, see Chanan Gafni, The Mishnah’s Plain Sense (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv, 2011). 84. Bernhard Beer, Review of “Hodegetica in Mischnam,” ZDMG, 14 (1859), 323–33, quotation on 325. 85. See Frankel’s letter to Beer dated January  20, 1861: “At the start of the uproar, I wanted to come out forcefully. But after thinking it over carefully and quietly, I concluded that this would only lead to an ugly squabble from which I would gain nothing, because people would naturally expect of me an angry riposte. I am thus for the moment silent in order to expose this modern Jesuitism in Judaism. I am silent for now because brawling and denouncing are beneath my dignity. And to treat the matter dispassionately would be hard for me. Moreover, such a tone would convey the wrong impression. People would see in it the defense of an offended individual rather than that of a Judaism and science that had been wronged” (Andreas Brämer, “Revelation and Tradition: Zacharias Frankel on the Controversy Concerning the Hodegetica in Mishnam from His Letters to Bernhard Beer,” JQR, 5(1998), 179. 86. Bernhard Beer, AZJ (1839), 127–28. 87. Bernhard Beer, “Aufruf,” AZJ (1861), Supplement (Beilage) no. 6. 88. Brämer, “Revelation,” 179, letter dated February 7, 1861. 89. Zacharias Frankel, “Nekrolog,” MGWJ, 10 (1861), 320. 90. NLI, ARC, Ms Var 236, 57, letter dated July 7, 1861. Beer had died on July 1. In his Monatstage, Zunz commemorated him as a man “who had erected for himself a memorial in the hearts of men as in Jewish literature” (37). 91. Michael Sachs, Die religiöse Poesie der Juden in Spanien (Berlin, 1845), 159–62, 167, 184, 195, 202–3. As early as 1839, Sachs had informed Veit of his determination to do justice to the spirit of midrash. He bristled at the analytic and dissecting rationalism of the Reformers: “Through chemical analysis they want to understand the components of the organism and through this knowledge to create and reconstitute life” (Ludwig Geiger, ed., Michael Sachs und Moritz Veit: Briefwechsel (Frankfurt a.M., 1897), 25, quotation on 35). Geiger disparaged

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Sachs’s work as wrought “in his superficial romantic-aestheticizing manner” (“Recension” ZGL, 67). 92. Moritz Steinschneider, Jewish Literature (London, 1857, reprint New York, 1965), 63; see also Jüdische Literatur von Moritz Steinschneider: Index der Autoren und Personen Verzeichness (Frankfurt a.M., 1893). More generally, see Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal, eds., Studies on Steinschneider, (Leiden, 2012), xx–xxvi; Schorsch, “Moritz Steinschneider.” 93. Shimeon Brisman, A History and Guide to Judaic Bibliography, 1 (Cincinnati, 1977), 40–45; Ismar Schorsch, “Kataloge und kritische Forschung,” Münchner Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur, 5 (2011), 9–23. It was Adolf Asher, the purveyor of Continental books and manuscripts to the British Museum and the Bodleian Library, who had brought Steinschneider to the attention of the Bodleian’s chief librarian, the Rev. Buckeley Bandinel (Bodleian Library, Library Records Manuscripts, d. 1079; letter from Steinschneider to Bandinel dated March 28, 1849).

chapter 6. a time of upheaval 1. Jacob Toury, “Der Eintritt der Juden ins deutsche Bürgertum,” Das Judentum in der deutschen Umwelt, 1800–1850, ed. Hans Liebeschütz and Arnold Paucker (Tübingen, 1977), 241; Rüdiger Hachtmann, “Berliner Juden und die Revolution von 1848,” Jüdische Geschichte in Berlin, vol. 2, ed. Reinhard Rürup (Berlin, 1995), 53–58; Nahum N. Glatzer, “Leopold Zunz and the Revolution of 1848,” LBIYB, 5 (1960), 139. 2. Glatzer, II, 267–72. 3. Ibid., 273. 4. Zunz, GS, 1, 301–2; Der Orient, no. 13 (1848), 97–98. The biblical imagery was drawn from 2 Kings 2:11. 5. Zunz, GS, 1, 302. 6. Jacob Toury, Die politischen Orientierungen der Juden in Deutschland (Tübingen, 1966), 65. 7. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 73–27; also Glatzer, II, 275n.2. Glatzer’s copy of Zunz’s hectic schedule during the years of the revolution is somewhat marred by omissions. 8. Berlinische Nachrichten, April 15, 1848, no. 91. 9. Glatzer, II, 275n.2. 10. National-Zeitung, October 14, 1849, no. 357. 11. Ibid., October 21, 1849, no. 369; Zunz, GS, 1, 308–16. 12. Glatzer, II, 310–11. 13. Toury, Die politischen Orientierungen, 66. (Peter Wagner, Panu Derech— Bereiten den Weg [Detmold, 1994], 127). 14. Glatzer, II, 315–16. 15. Zunz, GS, 1, 305–6. Zunz delivered these remarks in February 1849, several months after Frederick William had retaken control of events. On Königsberg’s rejection of Jacoby, see Edmund Silberner, ed., Johann Jacoby: Briefwechsel, 1816–1849 (Hanover, 1974), 451. 16. Toury, Die politischen Orientierungen, 98. 17. Ibid., 78. 18. Silberner, Jacoby: Briefwechsel, 421. Dated April 12–13, 1848, the letter was written by Jacoby from Frankfurt a.M. to Simon Meyerowitz in Königsberg. Meyerowitz, a liberal

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intellectual, hailed from Lithuania and lived in Königsberg as a Privatgelehrter. He was among Jacoby’s closest friends. In 1834 he converted into the Evangelical Church (Edmund Silberner, Johann Jacoby: Politiker und Mensch [Bonn-Bad Godesberg, 1976], 25–26). The lines preceding the quotation are not unimportant: “A republic, in my opinion, is the only form of government worthy of a free, politically sophisticated nation. It is best suited to solve the country’s economic problem, the great task that lies ahead of us. But it would be sheer folly to fabricate a republic [and then] impose it forcefully on a great nation. Such an effort can only lead to anarchy or despotism” (Silberner, Jacoby: Briefwechsel, 421). 19. NLI, ARC, Ms Var 236/57; Walter Grab, “Der deutsch-jüdischen Freiheitskämpfer Johann Jacoby,” Juden in Vormärz und in der Revolution von 1848, ed. Walter Grab and Julius Schoeps (Stuttgart, 1983), 363. 20. Johann Jacoby, Gesammelte Schriften und Reden, 2 (Hamburg, 1872), 63. 21. Ibid., 69–86; Grab, “Der deutsch-jüdischen Freiheitskämpfer,” 368; quotation from Silberner, Jacoby:Briefwechsel, 602–3; Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 3 vols. (New York, 1964–69), 3, 76–87. By his own admission, Zunz never enjoyed a personal relationship with Jacoby. At most he saw him from afar two or three times (Markus Brann, “Mitteilungen aus dem Briefwechsel zwischen Zunz und Kaufmann,” JJGL, 6 (1903), 130. 22. Glatzer, I, 212. 23. Glatzer, II, 295. 24. Holbern, 99–108. 25. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G6-12.1 26. Glatzer, II, 280. 27. Ibid., 301. The letter is dated March 8, 1849. 28. NLI, ARC, Ms Var 236/57, letter dated April 27, 1849. The reference is to Isaiah 30:15. 29. Glatzer, II, 306, letter dated August 12, 1849. 30. NLI, ARC, Ms Var 236/57, letter dated October 7, 1849. 31. Broadly speaking, see Toury, Die politischen Orientierungen, 81–83 and Hachtmann, 60–67. Specifically on Frankel, see Adolf Kober, “Jews in the Revolution of 1848  in Germany,” JSS, 10 (1948), 158, and MGWJ, 2 (1853), 3–4; on Riesser, see Moshe Rinott, “Gabriel Riesser,” LBIYB, 7 (1962), 26; on Sachs, see Margit Schad, Rabbiner Michael Sachs (Hildesheim, 2007), 101–2. On the political strategy of medieval Jewry, see Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H., 1994), 118–32; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Diener von Königen und nicht Diener von Dienern, (, 1993); and Lois C. Dubin, “Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, the Royal Alliance and Jewish Political Theory,” Jewish History, 28 (2014), 51–81. 32. To mention but a few: for Jellinek, at the time preacher in Leipzig, see Klaus Kempter, “Adolf Jellinek und die jüdische Emancipation: Der Prediger der Leipziger jüdischen Gemeinde in der Revolution 1848/49,” Aschkenas, 8 (1998), 179–91; for Philippson, see Toury, Die politischen Orientierungen, 93–94, 97, and Johanna Philippson, “Ludwig Philippson und Die Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums,” Das Judentum in der deutschen Umwelt, 1800–1850, eds. Hans Liebeschütz and Arnold Paucker (Tübingen, 1977), 278–85; for Julius Fürst, see Katharina Vogel, “Julius Fürst (1805–1873): Wissenschaftler, Publizist und engagierter Bürger,” Bausteine einer jüdischen Geschichte der Universität Leipzig, ed. Stephan Wendehorst (Leipzig, 2006), 52; for Isak Noa Mannheimer, Zunz’s friend, in Vienna, see Salo Baron, “The Revolution of 1848 and Jewish Scholarship,” part 2, PAAJR, 20 (1951), 1–16. In Worms, its preacher and highly

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active moderate religious reformer, Abraham Jakob Adler, was like Zunz an unadulterated democrat, but also an arch apologist for Judaism. His sarcastic denunciation of the forces of reaction in Rhine-Hessen in February 1849 led to his incarceration, though not to a trial. The aff air left his health impaired (see Michael A. Meyer, “Religious Reform and Political Revolution in Mid-Nineteenth Century Germany: The Case of Abraham Jakob Adler,” German-Jewish Th ought Between Religion and Politics, ed. Christian Wiese and Martina Urban [Berlin, 2012], 59–81). On the correlation between Jewish indifference and radical politics, see Toury, Die politischen Orientierungen, 73–74. 33. NLI, ARC, 40 792, F1, bk. 3, 2. 34. Glatzer II, 262–63. 35. Ibid., 298. 36. Ibid., 261. 37. Glatzer, “Leopold Zunz,” 132, letter dated March 17, 1848. Zunz’s exuberance may have gotten the better of his judgment, though his information was surely spotty. Evidence identifies some sixty localities in Alsace and another eighty in southern Germany in particu lar in which violence was perpetrated against Jews (see Reinhard Rürup, “The European Revolution of 1848 and Jewish Emancipation,” Revolution and Evolution: 1848 in German-Jewish History, ed. Werner  E. Mosse, Arnold Paucker, and Reinhard Rürup [Tübingen, 1981], 33–41). Given that the violence subsided all over by May 1848, Zunz may not have been wrong in the long run (39). 38. Glatzer, II, 330. 39. Ibid., 338, letter dated February 29, 1852. 40. Ibid., 275n.2. 41. Zunz, GS, 1, 307. 42. Ibid., 305. 43. Ibid., 304. 44. Ibid., 318. 45. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (London, 1993), 191. 46. Ibid., 194. 47. Glatzer, II, 275n.2. It is worth bearing in mind that Zunz grew up in the shadow of the French Revolution. In Hamburg, he recorded in his diary, one of the oldest melodies to imprint itself in his memory was the “Marseillaise.” A portrait of Napoleon also hung in the Zunz home (Fritz Bamberger, ed., Das Buch Zunz: Eine Probe [Berlin, 1931], 12). The subsequent ascendancy of French dominance east of the Rhine and the eventual dismantling of the medieval German reich may well have left him with a predisposition for things French. 48. Glatzer, II, 275n.2. 49. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G23-584. 50. Zunz, GS, 1, 308–16, quotation on 309. 51. Ibid., 310–11. Zunz also shared Rousseau’s conception of labor as the key to ownership. Whereas Rousseau articulated the principle in regard to land (197), Zunz applied it to all wealth (“Ein durch Arbeit erzeugtes Kapital,” 310). 52. Zunz, GS, 1, 313. 53. Ibid., 313–14. 54. Ibid., 315. 55. See above, my Introduction, n. 12, on Zunz’s conviction that scholarship must be of social benefit. I do not think that Zunz’s motto “echte Wissenschaft ist taterzeugend”—genuine

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scholarship is generative—was Zunz’s own formulation. Zunz had the habit of writing down stray quotations from other writers that caught his fancy. The above motto appears in Zunz’s Nachlass on a loose sheet along with a few other choice quotations (such as “Gewissensfreiheit ist der Untergang der Kirchenstaaten”—freedom of conscience is the downfall of religious regimes). Regrettably, Zunz did not record the source of these passages (NLI, ARC, 40 792, C8-84). Beneath his engraved portrait at seventy by Z. W. Bojarski in which he appears at peace with himself, Zunz inscribed the adage along with the year of his birth in German and Hebrew and his signature (JTSL, ARC, portrait collection, PNT G1595). 56. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 51–70. 57. Ludwig Geiger, “Zunz im Verkehr mit Behörden und Hochgestellten,” MGWJ, 60 (1916), 335. 58. Ibid., 339–40. 59. Admittedly, in 1850 the Prussian constitution enshrined the principle of academic freedom into law: “Die Wissenschaft und ihre Lehre ist frei.” By 1864 Privatdozenten represented some 20  percent of the teaching faculty of a Prussian university (see Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University [Oxford, 2009], 256–58). On the emergence of the modern German rabbinate, see Schorsch, From Text to Context, 9–50. 60. L. Geiger, “Zunz im Verkehr,” 341–46. At the end of 1849, Sachs also applied for a lectureship in Jewish literature and history at Berlin to no avail (Schad, 108). In his diary, Karl Varnhagen, who respected Sachs highly, wrote on April 25, 1850: “Regarding the current status of Jews in the country, the government operates as if nothing had changed. Sachs would like to teach here at the university, but the authorities are against him as [they were] earlier against Zunz” (Schad, 109, n.466). 61. Geiger, NS, 5, 194. 62. Ibid., 199. 63. Ibid., 202, 206–7. 64. Ibid., 206–9. 65. Ibid., 200; idem, Literatur-Blatt zum Israelit des 19. Jahrhunderts, May 28, 1848, 172–73. 66. Geiger’s petition is preserved in GSAPK, Rep. 76Va, sekt. I, tit IV. nr. 2, bd. 1. Th is same fi le contains an appeal by Jost to J.A.F. Eichhorn, recently appointed minister of education and religion, dated January 24, 1841, to make an exception in his case to the exclusion of Jews from academic appointments in light of his extensive ser vice to the state and scholarship. Jost was probably emboldened by Eichhorn’s note to him in 1833 on the publication of his Allgemeine Geschichte des israelitischen Volkes, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1832). Eichhorn’s brief, impersonal response to Jost dated March 8, 1841, based his rejection on Frederick William III’s order of 1822. Ludwig Geiger’s silence in his Abraham Geiger: Leben und Lebenswerk (Berlin, 1910) is resounding.In 1836 Geiger had issued a call to create a Jewish theological faculty at a German university. He disdained the model of a stand-alone seminary as in Padua and Metz because it failed to redeem Jewish scholarship from its status as an orphan (“Die Gründung einer jüdisch-theologischen Facultät, ein dringendes Bedürfniss unserer Zeit,” WZJT, 2 [1836], 1–20). In 1837 Ludwig Philippson mounted a public campaign to raise money to fund Geiger’s idea, though by the end of 1839, having attracted no more than 10,000 talers, he admitted defeat. Wealthy Jews had shown no interest (Philippson, 259–61). From the start, Zunz viewed the project skeptically as he informed an enthusiastic Isler: “Why have I said nothing about the projected faculty? [Isler must have asked] [B]ecause I don’t want to discourage [anyone],

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for I give it no credence. All who now advocate it will be doubly disappointed: first nothing will come of it; second, if anything does, it will be something other than what its backers had in mind, that is, a German preacher or Rav [rabbi, in Hebrew] like Hirsch or— and this I don’t believe for a moment— a professor who as theologian will have no influence on Jews or Judaism. In addition, Germany is just now the most unsuitable place for this joint effort. Of what value are the so-called consistories in France? A bunch of bureaucrats, may God protect us from such clericalism. But you, it seems to me, have high hopes and want to write in support. Don’t let me deter you. Perhaps I live under the influence of the many disappointments that I have endured” (NLI, ARC, 40 792, V2.4, 552–53, letter dated February 7, 1838). After reading Isler’s article, Zunz wrote (April 13, 1838): “Every thing therein is correct, except that the things necessary to succeed are missing—the state, an academic need, the participation of the rich. Pay careful attention: it will most likely be a hollow consistory that obstructs or an unfortunate, useless, schismatic lecturer. In Germany this will never come to pass. Yet hoping for the Moshiah (Messiah) is always nice” (Glatzer, I, 102–3). On principle, Zunz believed that an appointment to a Protestant theology faculty or even the creation of a Jewish theology faculty would not take Jewish scholarship out of its ghetto. That could be achieved only with an appointment to a faculty of philosophy. In this regard, the committee of Berlin professors turned Zunz’s request in 1848 on its head. Furthest from his mind was a professorship that would prepare students for the rabbinate. 67. Leopold Zunz, Die Monatstage des Kalenderjahres: Ein Andenken an Hingeschiedene (Berlin, 1872), 33. 68. Leopold Zunz, foreword, Ozrot Chajjim. Katalog der Michaelschen Bibliothek, by Moritz Steinschneider (Hamburg, 1848), i. 69. Ibid., ii–iii. 70. Leopold Zunz, ZGL, 244. 71. See above, 8; NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 59. 72. Adolf Berliner, ed., Briefwechsel zwischen Heimann Michael und Leopold Zunz (Frankfurt a.M., 1907), 1–2; see above, 59. 73. Idem, ed., Or ha-Hayyim (Hebrew), 2nd ed., with additions and corrections by Shlomo Zalman Halberstam (Jerusalem, 1965). 74. Berliner, Briefwechsel. 75. See above, 76–77; Adolf Asher, ed., Th e Itinerary of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, 2 (Berlin, 1840–41), 270, 272–73, 280. 76. Leopold Zunz, “Toldot R. Azariah min ha-Adumim,” Kerem Chemed, 5 (1841), 151–52. 77. Zunz, ZGL, v. 78. Ibid., 268; see above 104–15. 79. Berliner, Briefwechsel, 84. 80. During Zunz’s five-week stay in Hamburg in August– September 1828, he had worked for five days in the Oppenheimer library. It was his first contact with the collection (NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 [DBZ], 51). 81. Glatzer, II, 236–37. 82. Der Orient, June 25, 1846, no. 26, 197. Isler had just begun to work for the library (NLI, ARC, 40 792, V2.4, letter from Zunz to Isler congratulating him on the job, dated March 25, 1832). 83. Glatzer, II, 239. 84. L. Geiger, “Zunz im Verkehr,” 333.

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85. Ibid. 86. Gregor Pelger, Wissenschaft des Judentums und englische Bibliotheken (Berlin, 2010), 127–39. As early as June 14, 1846, Asher informed Zunz by letter from London that he had already approached the British government about acquiring Michael’s library (NLI, ARC, 40 792, F1-3, 31). 87. Der Orient (1850), no. 3, 9; no. 4, 14; AZJ (1850), 618. 88. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 95. 89. Ibid., G23, second letter dated May 18, 1843. 90. Ibid., F 2-2, 19–28. 91. Ludwig Geiger, Geschichte der Juden in Berlin (reprint, Berlin, 1988), 197–205; Jacob Toury, “Die Revolution von 1848 als innerjüdischer Wendepunkt,” Das Judentum in der deutschen Umwelt, 1800–1850, ed. Hans Liebeschütz and Arnold Paucker (Tübingen, 1977), 369– 75; Schad, 102–5. Ironically, Zunz chaired a general meeting of Gemeinde members convened on September 14, 1848, to take up the task of drafting a new constitution for governance of the orga nized community. The meeting elected a committee of seven for the task, which in turn chose Zunz to serve as its chairman. According to his diary (NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 [DBZ], 73.27), Zunz served in that capacity until January 27, 1849. By September 18, the committee circulated a declaration articulating its intentions. Zunz’s name headed the list of signatories and its spirit, if not its language, was vintage Zunz. All justified requests for reform of worship ser vices were to be met. The aesthetic treatment of form, though, had to match the truth of the inner idea without sacrificing it to ornamentation. The business of the community was to be conducted democratically. All dues-paying members would be eligible to vote and be elected to office. Neither wealth nor birthplace was to be determinative. Above all, the Gemeinde would exercise its newly acquired sovereignty to run a panoply of sacred and vital institutions to perpetuate Judaism (Der Orient [1848], no. 42, 329–30; a copy of the printed declaration is preserved in NLI, ARC, 40 792, C 3–44). 92. Glatzer, II, 302–3. On the closing, see also  M. Holzman, Geschichte der jüdischen Lehrer-Bildungsanstalt in Berlin (Berlin, 1909), 67–73; Andreas Brämer, “ ‘Making Teachers . . . Who Do Not Treat Their Profession as an Occasional Business’: Leopold Zunz and the Modernization of the Jewish Teacher Training in Prussia,” EJJS, 7 (2013), 151–70. 93. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C3-53.1, Zunz’s memorandum dated March 24, 1845. 94. Ismar Schorsch, “Moritz Steinschneider: The Vision Beyond the Books,” Studies on Steinschneider, ed. Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal (Leiden, 2012), 20. 95. Zunz, GS, 1, 316–54; NLI, ARC, 40 792, C8-8 (entitled “Über Einheit” and delivered November–December 1860 to the Verein junger Kaufleute). 96. Zunz, GS, 1, 328. 97. Ibid., 332. 98. See Chapter 2, note 76. 99. Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, 2 vols. (London, 1857, 1861), 1, 265. 100. Walter Grab, “Die revolutionäre Agitation und die Kerkerhaft Leopold Eichelbergs,” Gegenseitige Einfl üsse deutscher und jüdischer Kultur, ed. Walter Grab (Tel Aviv, 1982), 138. 101. Zunz, GS, 1, 349. 102. Ibid., 351. 103. Ibid., 353.

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104. Zunz, ZGL, 526; see Schorsch, From Text to Context, 334, 343n.4; see above, 142. 105. In his coverage of the Spanish expulsion nineteen years later, Heinrich Graetz ignored Zunz’s juxtaposition (Geschichte der Juden, 8 [Leipzig, 1864], 351 n.2, 358 n.4, 380).

chapter 7. poetry and persecution 1. Glatzer, I, 231. 2. Glatzer, II, 324. That same day Adelheid had written to Julie Ehrenberg: “Here [in Berlin] there is nothing but soldiers. I myself am housing two for the last eight days and must do so until January” (Glatzer, I, 231). And more than a year later the Zunz household was still without privacy as Leopold reported to Samuel Ehrenberg on January 25, 1851: “Instead of two soldiers we now have (without board) a harmless non-commissioned officer. But the order to quarter soldiers has already triggered a new tax” (Glatzer, II, 326). 3. Ibid., 329. 4. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 73.7; David Kaufmann and Max Freudenthal, Die Familie Gomperz (Frankfurt a.M., 1907), 210, 214. 5. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 38. 6. Glatzer, II, 330; Kaufmann and Freudenthal, 205. 7. Glatzer, II, 330. 8. Sigmund Maybaum, “Aus dem Leben von Leopold Zunz,” Zwölfter Bericht über die Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums in Berlin (Berlin, 1894), 8–9. 9. Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: Th e Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H., 1994), 28, 37. 10. Kaufmann and Freudenthal, 211. 11. Ibid., 210. 12. Ibid., 212. 13. Ibid., 212–13. 14. Ibid., 214. 15. Glatzer, II, 330. 16. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 73.5. 17. Ibid., 73.7, 73.8, 73.9; see also D22, 4. 18. Philip Bloch, “Memoir of Heinrich Graetz,” History of the Jews, by Heinrich Graetz, 6, (Philadelphia, 1956), 46. 19. Ibid., 43–44; Reuven Michael, Heinrich Graetz: Tagebuch und Briefe (Tübingen, 1977), 204. 20. Michael, Tagebuch, 204–5. 21. P. Bloch, 46. 22. Ibid., 60. According to Beer in a letter to Zunz dated March 14, 1853, when Graetz came to Dresden to talk with Frankel about joining the faculty of the seminary about to open in Breslau, he had nice things to say about Zunz’s lectures (manches Schöne) (NLI, ARC, 40 792, part 2, 11). 23. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 73.5, 51; Alexander Marx, “Moritz Steinschneider,” Essays in Jewish Biography (Philadelphia, 1947), 133–34. 24. Alexander Marx, “Zunz’s Letters to Steinschneider,” PAAJR, 5 (1933–34), 133.

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25. Michael, Tagebuch, 229–30. 26. Ibid., 230. 27. Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, 5 (Magdeburg, 1860), vi. By November 1866 Graetz still did not have a copy of Steinschneider’s cata logue in hand. For information therein he turned to his former student Joseph Perles, then rabbi in Munich. On November 23 he finally sought permission to borrow it for eight days. In returning it belatedly on January 31, 1867, Graetz admitted that it made for a good read but contained primarily things of secondary importance (LBI, AR, B. 414, 4884). 28. Moritz Steinschneider, Catalogus Librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana (Berlin, 1852–60), cols. 2774–80; Die Schriften des Dr. L. Zunz, zu seinem 63. Geburtstage (10. Aug. 1857) (Berlin, 1857); for the tribute, see above 142. 29. Glatzer, II, 419. For expressions of Greatz’s animus, see Heinrich Graetz, “Die Anfänge der neuhebräischen Poesie,” MGWJ, 8 (1859), 405 n.a, 9 (1860), 26 n.1, 27, 60; idem, “Die mystische Literatur in der gaonaischen Epoche,” MGWJ, 8 (1859), 67, 110; also idem, Geschichte der Juden, 5, 274 n.1. 30. Glatzer, I, 255. 31. Leopold Zunz, Samuel Meyer Ehrenberg: Inspektor der Samsonschulen Freischule zu Wolfenbüttel (Braunschweig, 1854), 20, 40. 32. Ibid., 38. 33. Ibid., 39–40. 34. Glatzer, I, 240–41. 35. Zunz, Ehrenberg, 43. 36. Ismar Schorsch, “Wives and Wissenschaft: The Domestic Seedbed of Critical Scholarship,” Gender and Jewish History, ed. Marion  A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore (Bloomington, 2011), 30. Not only was Philipp nearly twice Julie’s age, but Dresden was far from Prague and her family. As she agonized whether to accept a prospective engagement offer, Leopold copied for her a charming poem by Words worth, “We Are Seven,” that affi rms the conviction that separation, even death, need not mean absence. On December 29, 1846, Adelheid sent it to Julie, all seventeen stanzas in English in Leopold’s handwriting (Glatzer, I, 162; LBI, AR 3648, box 1, folder no. 88). The range of Zunz’s knowledge is endlessly astonishing. 37. Glatzer, I, 174. 38. Ibid., 176. 39. Schorsch, “Wives and Wissenschaft,” 30. 40. Glatzer, I, 257, 263–64. 41. Zunz, Ehrenberg, 3. 42. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 73.15. 43. Morris B. Margolies, Samuel David Luzzatto (New York, 1979). 44. Both editions were reprinted in a single volume by Joseph Hauben, Shadal Magish mi- Shirei R. Yehuda Halevi (Israel, 1996). 45. Eisig Gräber, ed., Iggrot Shadal, 2 vols. in 9 parts (Przemysl, 1882–94; reprint, Jerusalem, 1967), 1158. 46. Michael Sachs, Die religiöse Poesie der Juden in Spanien (Berlin, 1845), vii; Gräber, 779, 977; Schorsch, Text and Context, 84, 91 n.46. 47. Gräber, , 576. 48. NLI, ARC, 40 792, F1-4, 34, letter dated January 9, 1839. 49. Gräber, , 648–50, quotation on 648.

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50. Ibid., 1151–52; Leopold Zunz, “Ritus der Synagoge von Avignon,” AZJ (1838), nos. 144, 147, 151; (1839), nos.3, 12, 18, 20, 21, 30, 72, 83, 89, 103; (1840), no. 11. The paytan to whom Luzzatto referred here was Benjamin Halevi bar Meir Ashkenazi. According to Zunz, he hailed from Nuremberg and served as rabbi in Salonica. In 1555–56 he published the voluminous mahzor he had edited for his community, appending to its order of kinot two anguished, personal laments to commemorate the death of his firstborn son in 1534 and the death of four more children within five weeks during a plague in 1548 (Leopold Zunz, Nachtrag zur Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie [Berlin, 1867], 49; Mahzor Salonica, JTSL, 1758:7). I thank my colleague Prof. Menahem Schmelzer for directing me to the mahzor from which Luzzatto prayed in his youth in Trieste and to its appended kinot. 51. Samuel David Luzzatto, “Derekh Eretz o Attitzizmus” (Ethics or Athens) (Hebrew), Zion (Hebrew), 1 (1841), 81–93; Shmuel Feiner, “A Critique of Modernity: S. D. Luzzatto and the Anti-Haskalah” (Hebrew), Samuel David Luzzatto: The Bi- Centennial of His Birth (Hebrew), ed. Robert Bonfil, Isaac Gottlieb, and Hannah Kasher (Jerusalem, 2004), 145–65; Margolies. 52. Ismar Schorsch, “Leopold Zunz on the Hebrew Bible,” JQR, 102 (2012), 448–49. 53. Gräber, , 1377–78. 54. NLI, ARC, 40 792, F3–5.8, letter dated September 22, 1861. 55. Margolies, 55; NLI, ARC, 40 792, F3-10.12. 56. See above, 132. 57. Ismar Schorsch, “Converging Cognates: The Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in Nineteenth- Century Germany,” LBIYB, 55 (2010), 3–38. Zunz saved his membership certificate; see NLI, ARC, 40 792, C9–10. As for being the seventieth new member of the society, see Die Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 1845–1895: Ein Überblick (Leipzig, 1895), 45. 58. Schorsch, “Converging Cognates,” 24–28, Fleischer’s footnote, 27. 59. Ibid., 27. 60. Zunz recounted the incident in “Zunz an Ewald: Ein Wort zur Verständigung,” in NLI, ARC, 40 792, F-1-9, 19–20. 61. NLI, ARC, 40 792, V2.4, 582. September 27, 1860. 62. Zunz, “Zunz an Ewald.” 63. Ludwig Geiger published the pertinent documents of this painful episode for Zunz; see “Ein ungedruckter Aufsatz von Leopold Zunz,” AZJ, 1916, 437–38. Years before, Zunz had expressed to Ehrenberg (December  22, 1837) his admiration for Ewald’s political courage (NLI, ARC, 40 792, V2.3). 64. Leopold Zunz, Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie (Berlin, 1865), 11. 65. Leopold Zunz, Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1855); idem, Die Ritus des synagogalen Gottesdienstes (Berlin, 1859); idem, Literaturgeschichte. 66. Zunz, “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur” (1818), GS, 1, 8. 67. Ibid., 9. 68. Zunz, Nachtrag zur Literaturgeschichte. Zunz’s brief foreword epitomizes his historical ethos: “A work dedicated to appreciating the recovery of lost monuments rather than [to heralding] famous ones demands patient perseverance. Only on the basis of precise information and knowledge do familiarity, empathy and solid historical judgment emerge. I therefore regard it as a duty to the readers of my Literaturgeschichte not to withhold from them the ever expanding material becoming available for a fuller appreciation of its authors; namely, additions to the legacies of 100 writers, data on more than 80 poets not yet mentioned and some 500 items omitted from my book.”

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69. The numbers come from Israel Davidson, Ozar ha-Shira ve-ha-Piyut (Hebrew), 4 vols. and supplement (New York, 1924–38), 1, xvi; for Steinschneider’s quip, see Ismar Elbogen, “Leopold Zunz zum Gedächtnis,” Fünfzigster Bericht für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin (Berlin, 1936), 25–26. 70. NLI, ARC, 40 792, F3-10.3. 71. Ibid., F3-10.5. 72. Zunz, Die Ritus, 11, 19; Henry Malter, Saadia Gaon: His Life and Works (Philadelphia, 1921), 329. 73. Siegfried Wagner, Franz Delitzsch: Leben und Werk (Munich, 1978), 16–26. 74. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 83; idem, “Moritz Steinschneider: The Vision Beyond the Books,” Studies on Steinschneider, ed. Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal (Leiden, 2012), 14–17. The cognoscenti of Jewish scholarship found Delitzsch’s book riddled with errors, instances of plagiarism, and research done for him by Julius Fürst. In a scholarly journal edited by Jost, he felt obliged to add an irate footnote to an anonymous review by someone from Galicia who claimed that Delitzsch took material from Zunz’s Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt (Berlin, 1832) more than sixty times while citing his source but once (Israelitische Annalen’ [1840], 120). 75. Leopold Dukes, Ehrensäulen und Denksteine (Vienna, 1837); idem, Moses ben Esra aus Granada (Altona, 1839). 76. Der Orient (1841), cols. 569–72. 77. Leopold Dukes, Zur Kenntniss der neuhebräischen religiösen Poesie (Frankfurt a.M., 1842). In the following decade Dukes switched to study the secular poetry of Sephardic literati (Leb Dukes, Nahal Kedumim[Hebrew], 2 [Hannover, 1853], foreword. 78. Sachs, Die religiöse Poesie; Schorsch, From Text to Context, 83–84. 79. Sachs, Die religiöse Poesie, 329 n.1. 80. Ibid., 329. The poem by Nachmanides had already been published by Abraham Geiger, Melo Chofnajim (A Handful), (Berlin, 1840), Hebrew section, 39–41, without translation or commentary. In 1935 Gershom Scholem translated it afresh and fully as a morsel of transcendent consolation to a beleaguered German Jewry (“Hymnus vom Schicksal der Seele,” Almanach des Schocken Verlags auf das Jahr 5696 [Berlin, 1936], 86–89). 81. Der Orient (1848), cols. 481–85, 547–54, 573–76, 614–18; Davidson, 1, xvi. 82. Elieser Landshuth, Amude ha-Aboda (Pillars of Worship) (Hebrew), 2 vols. (Berlin, 1857–62; reprint, New York, 1965). 83. Still, Landshuth was inclined to give too much credence to the origin of U-Netane Tokef in the martyrdom of R. Amnon (45–46). Cf. Zunz, Literaturgeschichte, 108. In 1827 Jost had already declared the oft-repeated tale a fable (Geschichte der Israeliten, 7, 246–47). On the context and meaning of the “fable,” see Ivan Marcus, “The Sanctification of the Name in Ashkenaz and the story of R. Amnon of Mainz” (Hebrew), Sanctity of Life and Martyrdom: Studies in Memory of Amir Yekutiel (Hebrew), ed. Isaiah Gafni and Aviezer Ravitzky (Jerusalem, 1992), 131–47. 84. Davidson, 1, xvi. Landshuth claimed nearly four hundred paytanim and three thousand piyutim (2, appendix, xxxiii). 85. Menahem  H. Schmelzer, Studies in Jewish Bibliography and Medieval Poetry (New York, 2006), Hebrew section, 2, 95, 138, 154. 86. GSAPK, Nachlass Johann Gottfried Wetzstein, Kasten 6, Mappe Z. 87. Schorsch, “Leopold Zunz on the Hebrew Bible,” 442.

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88. Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge, 454. 89. Schorsch, “Zunz on the Hebrew Bible,” 442 n.36. 90. Cf. Isaak Markus Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten, 9 vols. (Berlin, 1820–28), 3, 136, notes to 11th book, 152–53. 91. Zunz, Die synagogale Poesie, 9–58. 92. Ibid., 13,19. 93. Ibid., 15. 94. Zunz, Die synagogale Poesie, 22; idem, Die Ritus, 9; Bernhard Purin, ed., Buch der Erinnerung: Das Wiener Memorbuch der Fürther Klaus- Synagoge (Fürth, 1999). Schorsch, From Text to Context, 338–39. Ismar Elbogen derived the term from the Arabic name for the pulpit in the mosque, Alminbar (Der jüdische Gottesdienst, 2nd ed. [Frankfurt a.M., 1924], 473). I thank my colleague Prof. Raymond Scheindlin for pointing this out to me, though he wonders how the Arabic term came to be used in Christian Europe. 95. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 376–88. 96. Immanuel Wolf, “Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judenthums,” ZWJ, 13. For an English translation by Lionel E. Kochen, see Wolf, “On the Concept of the Science of Judaism,” LBIYB, 2 (1957), 194–204. 97. Zunz, Die synagogale Poesie, 58. Zunz’s book was not appreciated in all Jewish circles. In 1857 Leopold Stein, then the liberal rabbi in Frankfurt am Main and the host and chair of its 1845 national rabbinical conference, published a derisive lampoon of it by a local colleague, Eljakim Carmoly, in his monthly Der israelitische Volkslehrer (“Die Leiden des Dr. Zunz,” 1, 15–24). In his introductory note (15), Stein declared Zunz’s latest work to be lamentably deficient. The medieval liturgy of the German-Polish rite contained no exceptional poetry and Zunz’s rhymed translations could not conceal the lack of content. What was praiseworthy in Zunz’s effort was his crisp and affective list of persecutions, despite its frequent errors and omissions. The intent of Carmoly’s assault was in part to correct some of those lapses. Concurrent with Zunz’s martyrology were the publications of reliable German translations with critical notes of Shevet Yehuda in 1855 (Hanover) and Emek Habakha in 1858 (Leipzig) by Meir Wiener, a master teacher in Hannover and diligent student of medieval Jewish martyrology and history. Given their mutual interests and respect, Wiener and Zunz were in correspondence. On March 18, 1858, Zunz responded positively to Wiener’s edition of Emek Habakha with some supplementary notes of his own, but disputed with biting displea sure Wiener’s reference to Carmoly’s lampoon regarding conflicting details on the bloody incident in Bray, France, in 1190: “Author and editor who degrade Israel’s history of suffering have defamed themselves” (Guido Kisch, “Zunz Briefwechsel mit Meir Wiener,” HUCA, 38 [1967], 244. The reference to Carmoly is in Wiener’s edition of Emek Habakha, 36, 175 n. 157a. For a recent lucid analysis of the sources on the Bray massacre, see Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence [Princeton, N.J., 2006], 258–65). 98. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 73-13c. 99. Moritz Steinschneider, Jewish Literature (London, 1857; reprint, New York, 1965), 340. 100. Zunz, Die synagogale Poesie, 129; Zunz, GS, 1, 129–30. 101. Zunz, Die synagogale Poesie, 231. 102. Ibid., 246. 103. Ibid., 332. 104. Ibid., 117.

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105. Ibid., 122. 106. Ibid., 365–485. Prof. Menahem Schmelzer regards Zunz’s scrutiny of paytanic vocabulary as unsurpassed to this day (in an e-mail on January 26, 2015, after kindly reading this chapter). 107. Zunz, Die Ritus, 127–30. 108. Ibid., 129, 147–53. 109. Ibid., 173. 110. Ibid., 178. 111. Adolf Berliner, ed., Synagogal-Poesieen (Berlin, 1884). 112. Zunz, Die synagogale Poesie, 67. 113. Ibid., 67–69; Berliner, Synagogal-Poesieen,18–21. 114. Zunz, Die Ritus, 178; Leopold Zunz, “Salomon ben Isaac, genannt Raschi,” ZWJ (1823), 381. 115. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Herders Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, 24 (Berlin, 1886), 61–75. 116. Ibid., Lekha Dodi,” 26 (Berlin, 1882), 422–44. 117. Idem, “Jüdische Parabeln,” Herders Sämmtliche Werke, 26 (Berlin, 1882), 358–69. On Herder’s views on literature, history, and language, see the incisive summaries by Anne Löchte, Johann Gottfried Herder (Würzburg, 2005), 41, 62, 83–84. For his approach to the Hebrew Bible, see Daniel Weidner, “Politik und Ästhetik: Lektüre der Bibel bei Michaelis, Herder und de Wette,” Hebräische Poesie und jüdischer Volksgeist, ed. Christoph Schulte (Hildesheim, 2003), 46–55. 118. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie, 3rd ed., ed. Karl Wilhelm Justi, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1825). 119. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 73.12; see also Schorsch, From Text to Context, 248; cf. Celine Trautmann-Waller, Philologie Allemande et Tradition Juive (Paris, 1998), 153–54, 191, 204. 120. Zunz, Literaturgeschichte, 26. To be sure, the rich paytanic contents of the Cairo Geniza have fundamentally altered Zunz’s chronology (see Leon J. Weinberger, Jewish Hymnography: A Literary History [London, 1998], 1–18). 121. Salomon Plessner, Die kostbare Perle oder das Gebet (Berlin, 1837), 236–60, 241n.b; on the Halevi piyut, see Davidson, 2, 79, 1746. On Plessner’s relationship to Veit, see above, 71. 122. NLI, ARC, 40 792, F1-1, 25–26, letter dated November 6, 1838. On Plessner, see AZJ (1838), 405–7. 123. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G24-625.70, letter dated September 18, 1855. 124. Michael Sachs, Festgebete der Israeliten (Israel’s Festival Prayerbook) 9 vols. (Berlin, 1855–56); Margit Schad, Rabbiner Michael Sachs (Hildesheim, 2007), 393–98. 125. Ismar Schorsch, “Moritz Steinschneider on Liturgical Reform,” HUCA, 53 (1982), 241–61, quotation on 251–52 (translation on 259). 126. Ibid., 254, 261. Some nineteen years earlier, Frankel had called his religious posture “gemässigte Reform” (moderate reform) (see “Über Reformen im Judenthume,” ZRIJ, 1 [1844], 27). I have not as yet found a copy of Steinschneider’s Gutachten among his papers. However, in a notebook entitled “Moritz Steinschneiders handschriftlicher Nachlass” there is the following entry: “Denkschrift für die Gemeinde, Grundzüge für die Agende des neuen Gotteshauses (für den Berliner Vorstand ausgearbeitet im Jahre 1863)” (JTSL, ARC, 108, 11/4, no. 48, xi). 127. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 73.7.

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128. Ismar Elbogen, “Briefwechsel zwischen Leopold Zunz und Frederick David Mocatta,” Occident and Orient, Gaster Anniversary Volume, ed. Bruno Schindler (London, 1936), 147. 129. Ibid., 148. 130. Ibid., 149. 131. Ibid., 149–50. 132. Ibid., 150. 133. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 73.11. 134. Schorsch, “Wives and Wissenschaft,” 35. 135. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 73.11. 136. Glatzer, I, 282. The moniker “mattress crypt” was Heine’s; see S. S. Prawer, Heine the Tragic Satirist (Cambridge, 1961), 144. After their second visit on June 28 Adelheid wrote that selfsame day from Paris to Moritz Kirschstein, a Jewish educator in Berlin, former student of Zunz, and close family friend. Their visit had lasted an hour. As Heine regained his composure from a bad night, the conversation alighted: “We could not stop laughing nor cease wondering how such a sick body could host such an exuberant spirit” (see Hugo Bieber, ed., Heinrich Heine: Gespräche [Berlin, 1926], 393). 137. Leopold Zunz, Die Monatstagedes Kalenderjahres: Ein Andenken an Hingeschiedene (Berlin, 1872), 9.

chapter 8. days of t wilight 1. Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, 1 (Leipzig, 1874), 2 (Leipzig, 1875). On Graetz’s trip to Palestine in 1872, see Reuven Michael, Hirsch (Heinrich) Graetz: The Historian of the Jewish People (Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 2003), 124–27. 2. Abraham Geiger, “Einleitung in die biblischen Schriften,” Geiger’s Nachgelassene Schriften, 4 (Berlin, 1876), 18–67. 3. Ibid., 175, 137–38. 4. Ibid., 223–37. 5. Leopold Zunz, “Bibelkritisches,” GS, 1, 217–70; “As long as poets and priests labor for effect, historians and philosophers dare not tire of investigating [the underlying] causes,” 242. 6. Ibid., 260. 7. Ibid., 217–18. 8. Ibid., 226, 247–48. 9. Ibid., 260. 10. Ibid., 259. 11. Ibid., 219–22. 12. Ibid., 241. 13. Ibid., 233. 14. Ibid., 237. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 252, 255. 17. Ibid., 226–27. Steinschneider had long preceded Zunz in distinguishing between these genres, in “Zur Sagen-und Legendenkunde,” ZRIJ, 3 (1846), 281–90. In his Mythology Among the Hebrews (London, 1877), Ignaz Goldziher employed a similar developmental model to deconstruct biblical narratives back into their mythological substraturm. More generally, see George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany (Chicago, 2004).

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18. Zunz, “Bibelkritisches,” 243. 19. Ibid., 243–44. 20. Ibid., 245. 21. Ibid., 267. 22. Ibid., 263. 23. Ibid., 270. 24. Ibid., 268. 25. Zunz, GS, 3, 31–80. 26. Ismar Schorsch, “Leopold Zunz on the Hebrew Bible,” JQR, 102 (2012), 432. 27. Geiger, NS, 5, 364. 28. Ismar Schorsch, “Converging Cognates: The Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in Nineteenth- Century Germany,” LBIYB, 55 (2010), 3–36. 29. Schorsch, “Zunz on the Hebrew Bible,” 450. 30. Michael, Graetz: Historian, 130–47; Schorsch, “Zunz on the Hebrew Bible,” 450–51. 31. Leopold Zunz, Die Monatstage des Kalenderjahres: Ein Andenken an Hingeschiedene (Berlin, 1872), 70–80. 32. See above, 115–19, 124–27; also see Moritz Steinschneider, Die Schriften des Dr. L. Zunz (Berlin, 1857), 15. 33. Zunz, Die Monatstage, 66, 46, 35. 34. Ibid., 9, 4. 35. Cecil Roth, The Jewish Book of Days, revised ed. (New York, 1966). The first edition came out in London in 1931. 36. Ismar Schorsch, “Wives and Wissenschaft: The Domestic Seedbed of Critical Scholarship,” Gender and Jewish History, ed. Marion  A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore (Bloomington, 2011), 40. 37. At the spot in his diary where Zunz first recorded the date when he and Adelheid were engaged (May 21, 1821), he now wrote in Hebrew fifty-three years later the verse from Exodus 23:20, reading the word malakh (angel) as an acronym for Adelheid—marat lili idel kalatkha (Mrs. Lili Idel your bride) (NLI, ARC 40 792, C 13 [DBZ], 36). 38. NLI, ARC 40 792, F3-2.5. 39. Glatzer, I, 341. 40. Schorsch, “Wives and Wissenschaft,” 40. 41. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 73-20. 42. Jüdisches Lexikon, 3 (Berlin, 1929), col. 1003. 43. Fürchtegott Lebrecht, Adelheid Zunz: Ein Angedenken für Freunde (Berlin, 1874). On other efforts by Gesenius on behalf of Lebrecht, see Eugen Mittwoch, “Aus Briefen von W. Gesenius, E. Rödiger, J. L. Saalschütz und J. Ch. Fr. Tuch an Fr. S. F. Benary,” MGWJ, 82 (1934), 208–11. Lebrecht’s trailblazing demonstration of the need for a critical edition of the Bavli was his “Handscriften und erste Ausgaben des Babylonischen Talmud,” part 1, Wissenschaftliche Blätter aus der Veitel Heine Ephraim’schen Lehranstalt (Beth ha-Midrasch) in Berlin (Berlin, 1862), 1–114. 44. Markus Brann, ed., Gesammelte Schriften von David Kaufmann, 3 vols. (Frankfurt a.M., 1908–15), 1, 364. 45. Statut der Zunz- Stiftung (Berlin, 1886), HUC-JIR, Klau Library, Kirschstein Collection, 9/1. 46. Jüdisches Lexikon, 4 (Berlin, 1930), cols. 469–70.

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47. NLI, ARC, 40 792, Z15; Zunz, GS, 3, 297–301. 48. NLI, ARC, 40 792, Z16-14d. 49. Glatzer, I, 239; Glatzer II, 72. 50. Markus Brann, “Mitteilungen aus dem Briefwechsel zwischen Zunz und Kaufmann,” JJGL, 5 (1902), 179–82, 6 (1903), 142. 51. Mirjam Thulin, Kaufmanns Nachrichtendienst (Göttingen, 2012), 286–87. Brann published mainly the letters of Zunz, tending to neglect those of Kaufmann (though not altogether). In her superb biography of Kaufmann, Thulin did full justice to his side of the correspondence. I want to thank Dr. Thulin for placing at my disposal her transcription of the Kaufmann letters that Brann decided to omit. 52. Thulin, 40. 53. Ibid., 45–46. 54. Ibid., 43–44; NLI, ARC, 40 792, G16a-356. 1-98, Kaufmann to Zunz, letters dated November 19, 1875, January 14, 1876. 55. See above, 150–51, 184–86. 56. Ludwig Geiger, “Eine Denkschrift von Zunz,” LJ 1 (1908–9), 353; reprinted in Das Breslauer Seminar, ed. Guido Kisch (Tübingen, 1963) 61. 57. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 73.20g. 58. Brann, “Briefwechsel,” 5, 162. 59. Ibid., 163; Leopold Zunz, Deutsche Briefe (Leipzig, 1872). 60. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G 16a-356. 1-98. 61. Brann, “Briefwechsel,” 5, 164. 62. Ibid., 179. 63. Ibid., 171, letter dated July 21, 1875. 64. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G 16a-356. 1-98, letter dated November 19, 1875. 65. Brann, “Briefwechsel,” 5, 176, letter dated January 12, 1876. 66. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G 16a-356. 1-98, letter dated March 17, 1876. 67. Ibid., letter dated March 20, 1877. 68. Thulin, 47; Ferdinand Rosenthal, “David Kaufmann,” Gedenkbuch zur Erinnerung an David Kaufmann, ed. Markus Brann and Ferdinand Rosenthal (Breslau, 1900), iii. 69. Rosenthal, “David Kaufmann,” xxxix, n.1. 70. Brann, “Briefwechsel,” 6, 127, letter dated October, 25, 1878. 71. Ibid., 5, 179, letter dated August 21, 1876. 72. Alexander Marx, “Steinschneideriana II,” Jewish Studies in Memory of George  A. Kohut, ed. Salo W. Baron and Alexander Marx (New York, 1935), 519–20. 73. Ibid., 520–21. The copy in Steinschneider’s handwriting in Kayserling’s papers at the NLI, ARC, v. 894, is dated October 1, 1876, and not September 24, 1876, as printed by Marx. 74. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G 16a-356. 1-98, letter dated May 8, 1875. 75. Brann, “Briefwechsel,” 5, 167–68, letter dated May 5, 1875. 76. Ibid., 168–69. 77. Brann, Gesammelte Schriften von David Kaufmann (hereafter GS von David Kaufmann), 1, 366–67. Zunz was embarrassed by Kaufmann’s kudos but 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 Sacré-Coeur.

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Love is extended and preserved, truth, demolished and discarded” (Brann, “Briefwechsel,” 5, 169; letter dated June 16, 1875). 78. Brann, GS von David Kaufmann, 1, 333–51. 79. Ignaz Goldziher, Tagebuch, ed. Alexander Scheiber (Leiden, 1978), 228. 80. Ismar Schorsch, “Beyond the Classroom: The Enduring Relationship Between Heinrich L. Fleischer and Ignaz Goldziher,” Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer— Leben und Wirkung, ed. Hans-Georg Ebert and Thoralf Hanstein (Frankfurt a.M., 2013), 95–102. 81. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 86–89. See also Schorsch, “Zunz on the Hebrew Bible,” 452–53. 82. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G 16a-356. 1–98; Leopold Zunz, Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1855), 9. 83. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G 16a-356. 1-98. 84. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 2 vols. (New York, 1876), 2, chapter 42, 125. 85. Ibid., 146. 86. David Kaufmann, “George Eliot und das Judentum”; Brann, GS von David Kaufmann, 1, 48. 87. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G 16a-356. 1-98. 88. Brann, “Briefwechsel,” 5, 185, letter dated June 19, 1877. 89. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 74; Adolf Strodtmann, Daniel Deronda von George Eliot, 8 vols. (Berlin, 1876); idem, H. Heine’s Leben und Werke, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1867). 90. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G 16a-356. 1-98, letter dated July 5, 1877. 91. Brann, GS von David Kaufmann, 1, 372–73. 92. Brann, “Briefwechsel,” 5, 173–74, letter dated October 5, 1875. 93. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 105. 94. Ibid., 161. 95. Ibid., 148. See Ismar Elbogen, “Zum Andenken an Leopold Zunz: Meine Schriften,” JJGL, 30 (1937), 141–72. Zunz’s compilation was rendered still more valuable by the substantial addenda of E. D. Goldschmidt and Immanuel Bernfeld (141). The above passages, however, along with many others were deleted. 96. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C13 (DBZ), 168–71. 97. Fritz Bamberger, ed., Das Buch Zunz: Künftigen ehrlichen Leuten gewidmet (Berlin?, 1931?). 98. Brann, GS von David Kaufmann, 1, 13. See above, Introduction, note 12. On the reverberations set off by the Schleiden essays, see Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti- Semitism, 1870–1914 (New York, 1972), 43–44; also see Charles Manekin, “The Genesis of Die Hebräischen Uebersetzungen des Mittelalters,” Studies on Steinschneider, ed. Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal (Leiden, 2012), 507–11. 99. Ludwig Techen, Zwei Göttingen Machzorhandschriften (Göttingen, 1884), 17. 100. Ibid., 18. 101. David Kaufmann, “Paul de Lagarde’s jüdische Gelehrsamkeit,” Brann, GS von David Kaufmann, 1, 214. 102. Ibid., 212. 103. Brann, “Briefwechsel,” 6, 155. 104. Paul de Lagarde, “Lipman Zunz und seine Verehrer,” Mitteilungen, 2 (Goettingen, 1887), 111–17 (Lagarde reprinted them in full). In contesting Lagarde’s calumnies, Adolf Berliner did not come to the defense of Zunz as much as to his own against Lagarde’s hostile review (Mitteilungen, 2, 163–82) of his edition of Targum Onkelos (Adolf Berliner, Professor

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Paul de Lagarde nach seiner Natur gezeichnet [Berlin, 1887]). In a short review of Berliner’s selfdefense, Moritz Güdemann, yet another early graduate of Breslau and now rabbi in Vienna, took Lagarde to task for constantly eliding the terms “national” and “German” and thereby underscoring the alien status of Germany’s Jewish citizens (Elizabeth Hollender, “ ‘Verachtung kann Unwissenheit nicht entschuldigen’—Die Verteidigung der Wissenschaft des Judentums gegen die Angriffe Paul de Lagarde’s 1884–1887,” Frankfurter Judaistische Beiträge 30 [2003], 196). 105. Lagarde, “Lipman Zunz,” 2, 111. 106. Robert Hanhart, “Paul Anton de Lagarde und seine Kritik an der Theologie,” Theologie in Göttingen, ed. Bernd Moeller (Göttingen, 1987), 271–74. 107. Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Garden City, N.Y., 1965), 25–128; Ulrich Sieg, Germany’s Prophet: Paul de Lagarde and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism (Waltham, Mass., 2013). 108. Lagarde, “Lipman Zunz,” 144–45. 109. Ibid., 142–44, 149. 110. Ibid., 146–49. 111. Ibid., 153, 155. 112. Ibid., 159. 113. Ibid., 159, 161. 114. Ibid., 161. 115. David Polnauer, “David Kaufmanns Briefe an Paul de Lagarde,” Sonderdruck von der Zeitschrift UDIM, 16 (1992), 1–16. 116. Kaufmann, “Lagarde’s jüdische Gelerhsamkeit,” 215. 117. Ibid., 220. 118. Ibid., 220–21. 119. Ibid., 224. 120. Ibid., 249–50. 121. Ibid., 250. In her aforementioned essay, Hollender meticulously surveyed the gamut of critical opinions expressed publicly by Jewish scholars in the face of the Techen travesty and Lagarde’s unbridled cover-up, concluding that by the 1880s the long-standing exclusion of Wissenschaft des Judentums from German universities had been ensnared and reinforced by the contemporaneous resurgence of German anti-Semitism (“ ‘Verachtung kann Unwissenheit,’ ” 203–4). 122. NLI, 40 792, Z9b-127–28; AZJ (1886), 230–31. With the death of Heinrich Fleischer in the summer of 1888, Kaufmann was unanimously elected to take his seat on the academic council of the Zunz Foundation, which he filled until his own death in 1899 (Thulin, 341–46).

epilogue 1. Adina Hoff man and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash (New York, 2011), 88. The Schechter photo adorns the book’s jacket. 2. Nachman Krochmal, The Writings of Nachman Krochmal, ed. Shimon Rawidowicz (Hebrew), 2nd enlarged ed. (Waltham, Mass., 1961), 142, 144 (of Moreh Nevukhei ha-Zeman); Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation. Esotericism in Jewish Thought and its Philosophical Implications, (Princeton, N.J., 2007), 36–43.

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3. Mordecai and Ephraim Bisliches of Brody were zealous collectors of Hebrew books and manuscripts. In 1850 Zunz prepared a cata logue of their manuscripts Ha-Palit (The Fugitive) that was published in Berlin. After no buyer or donor was forthcoming in Berlin, Steinschneider selected sixty-two of its eighty manuscripts for purchase by the Bodleian. In his review of the cata logue in “Cata log wertvoller hebräischen Handschriften von Dr. L. Zunz und S. Sachs,” Serapeum 12 (1851, 42–48, 60–64), he wrote with mixed emotions: “It was a joy for me to see the modest Bislich collection in the Oppenheim room of the Bodleiana as an appendage to its Michael collection, once the ‘city of intelligence’ for a third time could not provide a library for such trea sures . . . nor barely a publisher for their cata logue of four quires” (43). 4. Glatzer, II, 423. Glatzer also reproduced from Zunz’s diary the itinerary of his trip, which ran from May 20 to July 31 (424). Th irty years younger than Zunz, Lazarus had long befriended and admired him. On Lazarus’s role in facilitating Zunz’s trip, see Moritz Lazarus’ Lebenserinnerungen, ed. Nahida Lazarus and Alfred Leicht (Berlin, 1906), 492–99. 5. Zunz, GS, 3, 6. On de Rossi, see Shimeon Brisman, A History and Guide to Judaic Bibliography 1 (Cincinnati, 1977), 85–87. 6. Zunz, GS, 3, 1. 7. Ibid., 12. 8. Ibid. 13. In 1874 Adolf Berlin, born in 1833 and much influenced by Zunz, spent three months in Rome scrutinizing the Hebrew manuscripts of its libraries. Once permission was secured to use the Vaticana, the library was open no more than one hundred days a year for but a few hours each day. Equally inhospitable, the confi ned space of the reading room was restricted to sixteen readers at one time (Adolf Berliner, Gesammelte Schriften, 1, Italien [Frankfurt a.M., 1913], 33, 157–58, 176, 178). But perseverance paid off. When Berliner left on May 2, the Vatican librarian told him, “You can return whenever you want; the Vaticana will always be open for you” (208). 9. Quoted by Giuseppe Veltri, Language of Conformity and Dissent (Boston, 2013), 98. 10. Zunz, ZGL, iv. 11. Glatzer,I, 246; August Theodor Stamm, The Religion of Action (London, 1860). 12. Glatzer,I, 294. Zunz’s correspondence contains an undated letter by Stamm inviting Zunz to the meeting of a political group that he was organizing. Stamm acknowledged that Zunz was not yet ready to join, but given his sterling political credentials, his presence would hearten all those attending. Stamm addressed Zunz as “mein werter, herrlicher Freund” (my worthy and esteemed friend). If the letter could be dated to the first two years of the 1848 revolution, it would mean that their relationship predated the publication of Stamm’s book (NLI, ARC, 40 792, G23-595). 13. NLI, ARC, 40 792, G23-579. The letter by Leopold Seligmann was dated November 12, 1878 on which Zunz wrote the draft of his response. 14. Jacob Katz, Between Jews and Gentiles (Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1960); Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor (Seattle, 1982). 15. Paula E. Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley, 1998), 31. 16. NLI, ARC, 40 792, C-13, addressed to Adolf Berliner, at the time Prediger in Arnswalde. 17. Solomon Schechter, “A Hoard of Hebrew Manuscripts II,” Studies in Judaism, 2nd series (Philadelphia, 1945), 29–30. In 1860 it was knowledge of Zunz’s scholarly largess that prompted Berliner to turn to Zunz for counsel (NLI, ARC, 40 792, G8-60/1). In his incompa-

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rable Die Hebraeischen Uebersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (Berlin, 1893; reprint, Graz, 1956), Steinschneider thanked Zunz above all for sharing with him his vast knowledge of manuscripts to be found in both public and private libraries (x). 18. The repeated failures by Jewish scholarship to win the respect of German Protestant scholars or garner a single chair at a German university during the second empire have now been masterfully consolidated, studied, and narrated by Christian Wiese, Wissenschaft des Judentums und protestantische Theologie im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Tübingen, 1999).

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bibliography

archives Archives de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, Klau Library, Cincinnati Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw Jewish Theological Seminary Library Leo Baeck Institute, New York National Library of Israel, Archives, Jerusalem Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin–Preussischer Kulturbesitz

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Index

Page references in italics indicate illustrations. 1848 revolution, 56, 115, 156–64, 176, 289n37 academic appointments: exclusion of Jews, 25–27, 169–72, 290n60, 290–91n66; Goldziher and, 229; Zunz and, 60 academic discourse, 78, 102, 254–55n21. See also university policies, professorships, and scholarship acculturation/assimilation of Jews, 102, 156, 169; Chiarini’s view, 66; Eliot’s view, 230; Geiger’s view, 141; Rühs’s view, 12–13; Sephardic Jewry, 32–33; view of the Verein, 38–39; Zunz’s study of, 70, 244. See also anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism; emancipation of Jews Adler, Abraham Jakob, 288–89n32 afterlife, 137 Alami, Solomon, 124 Almond Blossoms. See Kaftor va-Ferah Altenstein, Karl Sigmund Franz, 259– 60n40 Altertumswissenschaft (study of the Greco-Roman world), 19, 21–22 American Civil War, 179–80 anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, 30, 234–35, 254–55n21, 303n121; 1848 revolution and, 164, 289n37; Eisenmenger and, 17–18, 255n28; Rühs and, 12–15; the Talmud and, 66–68. See also university policies, professorships, and scholarship Asher, Adolf, 75–76, 269n103, 287n93 Ashkenazic Jewry, 134–37, 141, 143, 154, 282n16. See also Sephardic Jewry assimilation. See acculturation/assimilation of Jews Association for Reform Judaism, 120. See also Reformers of Judaism

attacks on/critiques of Zunz, 228; Beer Temple and, 51–52; de Lagarde, 235–37; Frankel, 285n75; Geiger, 139–41; Graetz, 185–86; Jost, 27–28; Techen, 234–35 Auerbach, Isaac Levin, 51 Averroes (Ibn Roschd), 220 Beer, Bernhard, 142–54, 266n48, 283n39, 283n43; Frankel and, 148–49, 153–54, 286n85; Geiger and, 151–53; Ginzberg and, 148, 284–85n63; Graetz and, 151–52; on Hirsch, 153–54; on Holdheim, 285n70; on religious reform, 143, 148–49; Steinschneider and, 145–47; Zunz and, 143–45, 154, 161–65, 285n74 Beer, Bertha, 161–62 Beer Temple, 47–48, 51–52, 263n124 Bendavid, Lazarus, 34, 263–64n2 Ben Ezra synagogue. See Cairo Geniza Benjamin Halevi bar Meir Ashkenazi, 295n50 Benjamin of Tudela, 75 Berliner, Adolf, 173, 206, 302n104, 304n8 Berlin Jewish Teachers’ Seminary, 62–64, 103, 175–77, 265n41 “Bibelkritisches” (Biblical Criticism), 215–18, 228–29 Bible, 42, 215, 219; midrash and, 83; role of, 19, 137–38; translation of, 45–46, 62, 71–72 biblical criticism and exegesis, 88; Geiger and, 215–16, 283n43; Goldziher and, 229; Zunz and, 4, 79, 82–83, 215–19, 228–29, 232. See also Rashi (R. Shlomo Yitshaki) Bisliches, Mordecai and Ephraim, 240, 304n3 Bleichröder, Samuel, 116–17 blood libel (Damascus), 105–6

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Boeckh, August, 21–22 Book of the Pious. See Sefer Hasidim Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary, 144, 149–50, 224, 227–28 Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon, 78–80, 87 Brotwissenschaft, 26–28 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 179, 261n76 Budapest rabbinical school. See LandesRabbinerschule (National Rabbinical School of Hungary) Busch, Isidor, 116 Büschenthal, L. M., 33, 260n48 Buxtorf, Johannes (the younger), 220 Cairo Geniza, 155, 240, 244–45 calendars. See chronology document (biblical calendar); Die Monatstage des Kalenderjahres Carmoly, Eljakim, 297n97 Caro, David, 90–91, 273n176, 273n186 Cassel, David, 98–103, 109 Chiarini, Luigi, 66–67 Chorin, Aron, 60 Christian Hebraists, 197, 241, 281n11 chronology document (biblical calendar), 72–74, 78 circumcision, 116–19, 121–23, 278n104 civil rights, 156–63, 278n87. See also emancipation of Jews Cohen, Hermann, 4, 252n10, 282n20 conversion of Jews and converts, 26–28, 40, 68. See also acculturation/assimilation of Jews Cultur-Verein (Berlin, 1840), 109–10, 120. Damascus essay, 105–6 Daniel Deronda, 229–31 Darkhe ha-Mishnah (The Ways of the Mishnah), 153 dates and historical dating, 73, 134. See also chronology document (biblical calendar) The Days of the Month of the Calendar Year. See Die Monatstage des Kalenderjahres dead, honoring of, 137, 202–3. See also Yahrzeit de Castro, Benjamin, 280n133 de Lagarde, Paul, 235–37, 302–3n104 Delitzsch, Franz, 197, 281n14, 296n74 democracy and democrats, 157, 162, 166–68, 171, 180

Depping, Georges Bernard, 135 de’ Rossi, Azariah, 72–73 de Rossi, Giovanni Bernando, 241 de Sacy, Sylvester, 44 Deuteronomy, 216–17 Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society, DMG), 132, 191–95, 218 die deutsche Synagoge, 47–48 de Wette, Wilhelm, 63–64, 201–2 dietary laws. See kashrut discrimination, 144, 161, 242. See also anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism; religious discrimination “A Draft on Jewish Matters in Need of Improvement,” 15 Dukes, Leopold, 197–98 Duran, Simeon, 117 education reform, 7, 21. See also Jewish education Ehrenberg, Philipp and Julie, 119; correspondence with the Zunzes, 127, 156–58, 163–64, 176–77, 182, 214, 293n2; engagement and marriage, 187, 294n36 Ehrenberg, Samuel Meyer, 9, 253n2; correspondence, 120, 123, 160–61, 164; death, 186–88; Zunz and, 8, 11, 25–26, 61–62, 160–61 Ehrenberg, Victor, 221 Ehrenberg family, 221 Eichhorn, J. A., 174, 290–91n66 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 255–56n34 Eisenmenger, Johann Andreas, 17–18, 66, 255n28 Elbogen, Ismar, x–xi. Eleazar ben Kalir, 205 Eliezer Ben Yehuda, 194 Eliot, George, 229–31 emancipation of Jews, 7, 11, 39; 1848 revolution and, 56, 156–57; Beer and, 161, 266n48; France, 17–18; Germany, 30; Italy, 242; opposition to, 85, 113–14; Prussia, 18, 25, 112–15, 278n88; religious reform and, 85, 118, 120–21, 127, 273n176; study of Jewish literature and, 175, 281n11; Veit and, 265–66n41; Zunz and, 3, 33, 79–82, 89, 156–57, 163, 242, 245, 281n11. See also civil rights epigrams, 137–38, 234, 243 equality. See democracy and democrats

Index essays (Zunz), 104, 115–16, 123–26, 181, 223; “Bibelkritisches,” 215–18, 228–29; on blood libel, 105–6; circumcision, 116–19, 121–23, 278n104; on Hebrew dictionary, 194; “On the Hebrew Manuscripts in Italy,” 241–42; Rashi, 42–43, 90, 189; “The Remembrance of the Righteous,” 137–38; tefi llin, 116, 119 Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur (On Rabbinic Literature), 7, 14–15, 18–20, 216 Ewald, Heinrich, 192–93, 195, 218 Fleischer, Heinrich Leberecht, 97, 132, 178, 191–95 Frankel, Zacharias, 110–11, 276–77n67, 277n74; Beer and, 148–50, 153–54, 286n85; journals, 147; on Zunz, 150–51, 285n75 Frankenheim, Moritz Ludwig, 26 Frederick Wilhelm III (king), 25 Frederick William IV (king), 103, 113, 159–60, 165, 171 French Jewry, 32. See also emancipation of Jews French Revolution, 180, 289n47 Freund, Wilhelm, 113, 119–20 Fries, Jakob Friedrich, 13 Gans, David, 5, 72–73 Gans, Eduard, 26–29, 32, 34, 36, 39, 41–42, 259n28 Geiger, Abraham, 92–95, 95, 97, 274n5; Beer and, 151–53; biblical criticism and exegesis, 215–16, 283n43; collected works, 223; on Frankel, 152; on Jewish literature and scholarship, 135, 139–40; petition for academic appointment, 290–91n66; Zunz and, 92–93, 121–23, 139, 170–71, 218–19 Geiger, Ludwig, x, 171, 290–91n66 Gemeinde (Berlin), 53, 103–4, 114, 175–77, 210, 292n91 gentiles, righteous. See righteous gentiles German Oriental Society, DMG. See Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft Gesammelte Schriften von Dr. Zunz (Collected Writings), 2–3, 80, 222–23, 229, 231, 301–2n77 Geschichte der Israeliten, 84–85 Zur Geschichte und Literatur (On History and Literature), 131–32, 136, 149 Gesenius, Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm, 25, 109

325

Ginzberg, Louis, 147–48, 284–85n63 Goldziher, Ignaz, 229, 299n17 Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt (The Historical Development of Sermons by Jews in Their Worship Ser vice), 80–82, 90–91, 93, 273n186 Graetz, Heinrich, 77, 98, 184, 266–67n56; Beer and, 151–52; Steinschneider and, 185–86, 294n27; works, 215; Zunz and, 185–86, 219 Gumpertz, Ruben Samuel, 182–83 Gutenberg and movable type, 104–5 Hamburg, 45–46, 48, 50, 59, 68–69, 172 Handbuch der Geschichte des Mittelalters (A Handbook on the History of the Middle Ages), 17–18 Hartmann, Anton Theodor, 271n140 Haude- und Spenersche Zeitung [newspaper], 55–56, 168 Hebrew Bible. See the Bible Hebrew language and literature, 19–20, 55, 220, 255–56n34; anthologies, 74; Bisliches collection, 304n3; Bodleian Library at Oxford, 155, 197; British Museum collection, 75; dictionaries, 109–10, 194; encyclopedias, 272n173; Italian manuscripts, 241–42; liturgical, 205; Luzzatto and, 188; Mendelssohn and, 65; translations and encyclopedia entries, 76–79; Vatican collection, 304n8. See also Caro, David; ha-Parchi, Estori “On the Hebrew Manuscripts in Italy,” 241 Hebrew poets and poetry, 197–98, 205; liturgical, 199–201; persecution and, 203–5, 297n97. See also Immanuel of Rome; piyutim and paytanim (liturgical poems and poets); Yehuda Halevi Hebrew printing, 104–5, 131 Heine, Heinrich, 29, 37, 190, 214, 259n29, 299n136 Hellwitz, Levi Lazarus, 33, 36, 260n48 Herder, Johann, 207 Hirsch, Samson Raphael, 153–54 historians, 44, 241; of Ashkenaz, 282n16; Buckle, 179, 261n76; of Israel, 203; Jewish literature and, 124–25, 280n127; Jost, 4, 76, 84–85, 87; role of, 243, 280n127; Zunz, 74, 84–85, 87, 201

326

Index

The Historical Development of Sermons by Jews in Their Worship Ser vice. See Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt On History and Literature. See Zur Geschichte und Literatur Holdheim, Samuel, 121–22, 285n70 Horwitz, Nathan and Konegunde, 107–8 Hurwitz, Hyman, 128 Ibn Avitur, Josef, 94 Ibn Ezra, Abraham, 220 Ibn Falaquera, Shem Tov, 25 Ibn Roschd. See Averroes (Ibn Roschd) Immanuel of Rome, 96 integration, political and cultural, 33, 113, 169, 175, 242. See also acculturation/ assimilation of Jews; emancipation of Jews Islam, 192; influence of, 154–55; influences on, 79; Jews and, 94, 133, 135 Isler, Meyer, 59, 68–69, 290–91n66 Italy, 241–42. See also Hebrew language and literature; Luzzatto, Samuel David Jacoby, Johann, 158–60, 287–88n18, 288n21 Jewish- Christian relations, 32–33. See also acculturation/assimilation of Jews; emancipation of Jews; Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden Jewish community of Berlin. See Gemeinde (Berlin) Jewish education: Berlin, 57, 62–64, 175–77, 183–85; Caro and, 90; reform of, 29, 58, 82; Veit and, 71, 74; Zunz and, 35, 57–58. See also Berlin Jewish Teachers’ Seminary; Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary; Landes-Rabbinerschule (National Rabbinical School of Hungary) Jewish history, 82; David Gans and, 5, 72; Graetz and, 183–85; Jewish literature and, 41, 124; research and writing, 4, 73, 94, 96, 103–4; Rühs’s view, 12–13; Zunz and, 17–18, 22–23, 44, 82, 94, 96, 125–26, 203, 227. See also tombstones; Wissenschaft des Judentums Jewish literature, 78–80, 132–43, 147, 281n11; anthologies and surveys, 74, 155; exclusion from universities, 171, 233, 235; Jewish history and, 41, 124; Zunz and, 1, 55, 183, 207–8. See also Etwas über die rabbinische

Literatur; Hebrew language and literature; rabbinic literature Jewish mysticism. See Kabbalah Jewish studies. See Wissenschaft des Judentums Johlson, Joseph, 60–62 Jost, Isaak Markus, 10, 252n9, 255–56n34, 290–91n66; appreciation of, 272n160; Asher and, 76, 269n88; Chiarini and, 67, 266n54; on conversion of Jews, 30–31; death, 272n161; education, 271nn150–151; on rabbis and rabbinate, 31, 84–86; religion and, 30–31, 259–60n40; on Talmud, 68, 85; Verein and, 40–41; Zunz and, 4, 11, 27–28, 84–87, 272n152, 286n81 Judaism, critical study of. See scholarship, critical Der Jude, 69 Zur Judenfrage in Deutschland, 113, 119–20 Judengesetz [Jewry law], 113–15, 183 Kabbalah, 243–44 Kaftor va-Ferah (Almond Blossoms), 76–77 Kalir (Qillir). See Eleazar ben Kalir kashrut (dietary laws), 31, 121–22 Kaufmann, David, 224–26, 301n51; sermons, 226; support for Jewish studies and professors, 233–34; Zunz and, 229, 231, 234, 237–38, 301–2n77; Zunz Foundation and, 303n122 kezinim (the high and mighty), 61–62, 265n28 Kirchheim, Raphael, 272n160 Knesset Yisrael. See Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt Krochmal, Abraham, 108–9 Krochmal, Nachman, 1, 107–8, 240, 276n54 Ladenberg, Adalbert, 169 Landes-Rabbinerschule (National Rabbinical School of Hungary), 226–27, 229 Landshuth, Elieser, 199 Lazarus, Moritz, 241, 304n4 Lebensgemälde biblischer Personen nach . . . (Life Portraits . . . ), 145 Lebrecht, Fürchtegott, 75, 142, 222 Lehmann, Joseph, 184 Lessing, Johann Gottfried, 131 Lewandowski, Louis, 59 Lewes, George Henry, 231 libraries, 172–75, 214, 241–42

Index Life Portraits. See Lebensgemälde biblischer Personen nach liturgical poetry. See piyutim and paytanim (liturgical poems and poets); synagogue and liturgy liturgical reform, 48–53, 210–11 The Liturgical Rites of the Synagogue. See Die Ritus des synagogalen Gottesdienstes liturgy, study of. See synagogue and liturgy Luzzatto, Samuel David, 188–91, 199, 241 Maimonides (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon [Rambam]), 117, 151–52 Mannheimer, Isak Noa, 51 Memorbuch, 202–3 Mendelssohn, Moses, 65, 117–18, 126–27, 270n127 Meyer, Theodore, 224 Meyerowitz, Simon, 287–88n18 Michael, Heimann Joseph, 69, 88, 172–74 midrash and midrashic texts, 74, 80, 82–85; Beer and, 145, 150; Ginzberg and, 148; Herder and, 207; influence of, 201, 204, 208; Sachs and, 154, 286n91; Veit and, 71; Zunz and, 85, 94, 201, 270–71n135. See also Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt; piyutim and paytanim (liturgical poems and poets) Mocatta, Frederick David, 211–12 Monasch, Bär Löbel, 98 Die Monatstage des Kalenderjahres (The Days of the Month of the Calendar Year), 219–20 Moreh Nevukhei ha-Zeman (The Guide for the Perplexed of Our Time or The Guide for Those Perplexed by the Notion of Time), 1, 107 Moser, Moses, 34–35, 259n33 Muhr, Abraham, 111 Munk, Salomon, 34, 275–76n48 music in the synagogue, 59, 129, 280–81n136 Nachmanides (Rabbi Moses ben Nachman [Ramban]), 198, 296n80 names and name formation, 27, 43–44, 69–70, 237 Napoleon, 11, 32, 289n47 Neumann, Solomon, 222 Noah, Mordecai Manuel, 37 Nöldeke, Theodor, 218

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organ music. See music in the synagogue Orientalists and Oriental studies, 153–54, 191–95. See also Chiarini, Luigi; de Sacy, Sylvester; Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft; Fleischer, Heinrich Leberecht; Goldziher, Ignaz; Reland, Adrian Papacy and the Vatican library, 242, 304n8 ha-Parchi, Estori, 76–77 penitential prayers (selihot), 189, 196, 204. See also piyutim and paytanim (liturgical poems and poets) Philippson, Ludwig, 113, 232–33, 290– 91n66 philosophy, 20, 257n47 Pinner, Ephraim Moses, 266–67n56 piyutim and paytanim (liturgical poems and poets), 94, 150, 189, 191, 196; Ashkenazic, 204–5; Beer and, 150; communal and historical aspects, 205–10, 244; influence of midrash, 201, 204, 208; influence of suffering and calamity, 202; Steinschneider and, 210; Zunz translations of, 206–7. See also Landshuth, Elieser; Luzzatto, Samuel David; penitential prayers (selihot) Plessner, Salomon, 71, 208–9 Poetry of the Synagogue in the Middle Ages. See Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters political editing, 55–56, 168 political emancipation. See emancipation of Jews political essays and speeches, 115–16, 163, 166, 179–80 political rights of Jews. See emancipation of Jews preaching career, 28, 47–48, 50–53, 60–61, 84, 86. See also sermons Prediger (preacher), 47–49, 262–63n119. See also sermons prejudice. See religious discrimination primary sources. See scholarship, critical professional pursuits, 26–28, 57–62, 265n34. See also Jewish education; political editing; preaching career; scholarship, critical; teaching career Prussia, 112–15. See also emancipation of Jews; university policies, professorships, and scholarship

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rabbinate, rabbinic Judaism, rabbinical schools, and rabbis, 110–12, 114, 170, 245; Geiger’s view, 122; Gumpertz’s view, 183; Jost’s view, 31, 84–85; opposition to, 36; reform of, 82; Steinschneider’s view, 227; Weiss and, 84; Zunz’s view, 15, 61–62, 82, 112, 114, 121, 224, 227. See also under names of individual rabbinical schools On Rabbinic Literature. See Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur rabbinic literature, 25, 74, 79, 101; David Gans’s view, 42; exclusion from universities, 18–19; Rapoport and, 272n173. See also See also Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur; Talmud Rapoport, Shlomo Yehudah, 87–89, 272n173 Rashbam (R. Samuel ben Meir), 283n43 Rashi (R. Shlomo Yitshaki), 42–43, 90, 189, 283n43 Reformers of Judaism, 116–23, 135, 140–41; Beer’s view, 143, 149–50; Geiger’s view, 140–41; Zunz’s view, 120–23 Reland, Adrian, 77 Die Religion der Tat (The Religion of Action), 243 Die religiöse Poesie der Juden in Spanien (The Religious Poetry of the Jews in Spain), 154, 188–89, 198 religious discrimination: Cassel’s view, 102; Eliot’s view, 230; Zunz’s view, 80–81, 105, 157, 177–78, 242 religious reform, 88–89; Beer’s view, 143; Caro’s view, 273n176; political emancipation and, 85, 112–14, 120; Zunz’s view, 33–34, 46–49, 82, 115–16, 120–24, 127–29. See also Freund, Wilhelm; Geiger, Abraham; liturgical reform “The Remembrance of the Righteous,” 137–38 research and primary sources. See scholarship, critical Reuveni, David, 76–77 Riess, David Jacob, 62 Riesser, Gabriel, 68–69, 267n63 righteous gentiles, 138 ritual, 82, 116–18, 122. See also circumcision; tefi llin Die Ritus des synagogalen Gottesdienstes (The Liturgical Rites of the Synagogue), 150, 196, 205–7, 234 Rothschild, Amschel Mayer, 116–18

Rothschild, James (de), 106–7, 275–76n48 Rousseau, 166, 289n51 Rühs, Friedrich, 12–21, 16, 22 Sachs, Michael, 61–62, 154–55, 286n91; academic appointments and, 290n60; Hebrew poetry and, 198, 209–10; Luzzatto and, 188–89; sermons, 71 Samson Free School, 7–8, 186, 253n2 Saturday night salons, 24, 257–58n2 Saxony, 148, 161, 266n48 Schechter, Solomon, 155, 240, 244–45, 280n127 Schleiden, Matthias Jakob, 233–34 Schmid, Anton, 220 scholarship, critical, 7, 38–39, 55, 89, 169, 243; curtailment of/impediment to, 56, 169, 240–41, 304n8; Judaism and, 69, 92–93, 107, 142–44, 175, 275–76n48; methodology, 19–20, 42–44; social aspects, 2, 177–78, 289–90n55. See also biblical criticism and exegesis; Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt; Jewish history; Jewish literature; Wissenschaft des Judentums Scholem, Gershom, 4, 252n11 Schor, Joseph Bechor, 144 Sefer Hasidim (Book of the Pious), 136 selihot. See penitential prayers Sephardic Jewry, 32, 43, 134–35, 141, 154–55, 198, 204–5. See also Ashkenazic Jewry sermons, 52–54, 56–57, 80–82, 84; Berlin, 3; Leipzig, 48–49; Passover, 54; Shavuot, 53; Shmini Atseret, 48; Tisha be-Av, 51–52, 263n124. See also preaching career Simhat Torah, 48–49 social justice, 2, 289–90n55. See also democracy and democrats; emancipation of Jews Society for the Culture and Critical Study of the Jews. See Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden speeches, lectures, and addresses, 2–3, 38, 64–65, 103–4, 156–58, 163; academic aspects, 164, 183–84; political aspects, 165–68, 178–81. See also preaching career; sermons Sprout of David. See Zemah David Stamm, August Theodor, 243, 304n12 Stein, Leopold, 297n97 Steinheim, Salomon Ludwig, 59–60, 127, 280n133

Index Steinschneider, Moritz, 2–3, 5, 96–102, 223, 266–67n56; Beer and, 145–47; Graetz and, 185–86, 294n27; as liturgical arbiter, 210–11; on rabbinical schools, 227–28; works and cataloguing, 108–10, 155, 304n3; Zunz and, 132, 142, 178, 185–86, 196–97, 222–23 Stern, Salomo Gottlieb, 109–10 Stern, Sigismund, 109, 120, 124, 279n106 Strodtmann, Adolf, 29, 231 Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters (Poetry of the Synagogue in the Middle Ages), 150, 194–96, 201, 205–6, 234, 237, 297n97 synagogue and liturgy, 80–82, 84, 129, 201–2, 280–81n136; historical aspects, 208; literature and, 206–7; as locus of midrash, 244; as a reflection of Jewish powerlessness, 203–4; Zunz’s studies, 182, 196. See also Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters Talmud: Eduard Gans’s view, 42; Jost’s view, 68, 85; religious reform and, 66–68; translation of, 66–68, 266–67n56; Zunz’s view, 64, 66–68, 105–6. See also blood libel (Damascus); Chiarini, Luigi teacher training, 62–64, 265–66n41. See also the rabbinate, rabbinic Judaism, rabbinical schools, and rabbis teaching career, 175–77, 183–84, 254n10 Techen, Ludwig, 234–35 tefi llin, 116, 119, 122 Tisha be-Av, 51, 263n124 tombstones, 138 Torczyner, Harry, 71–72 university policies, professorships, and scholarship, 11–12, 18–19, 303n121; Prussia, 37, 169–72, 233, 290n60; social aspects, 234. See also academic appointments; anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism; Jewish literature; Wissenschaft des Judentums Veit, Moritz, 29, 62, 111–12, 265n32, 277nn74–75; Freund and, 119; Jewish education/scholarship, 71, 74; support for Bible translation, 268n74; Zunz and, 123 Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for the Culture and Critical Study of the Jews), 15, 39–47, 259n29

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von Beckerath, Hermann, 114–15 von Dohm, Christian Wilhelm, 11, 13 von Humboldt, Alexander, 70 von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 7, 274n6 von Lichnowsky, Felix (prince), 115 von Raumer, Karl, 77, 269n103 The Ways of the Mishnah. See Darkhe ha-Mishnah (The Ways of the Mishnah) Weil, Jakob, 254n21 Weiss, Isaac Hirsch, 84 West London Synagogue, 128–29 Wetzstein, Johann Gottfried, 199–201 Wiener, Meir, 297n97 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1–5, 100–103, 108, 154, 177–78, 252n11; acceptance of, 195; Beer and Frankel, 149; exclusion from universities, 169–72, 233, 235, 245, 303n121, 305n18; Krochmal and, 107; lack of support for, 118–19; Michael and, 173–74; social justice and, 2; Steinschneider’s view, 142. See also academic appointments; university policies, professorships, and scholarship Wohlwill, Immanuel. See Wolf (Wohlwill), Immanuel Wolf, Friedrich August, 21–22 Wolf (Wohlwill), Immanuel, 37–39, 46, 203 Wolf, Joseph, 262–63n119 worship ser vice. See piyutim and paytanim (liturgical poems and poets); religious reform Yahrzeit, 126, 219–20 Yehuda Halevi, 204 Yosi ben Yosi, 94. See also ibn Avitur, Josef Zedner, Joseph, 74–75 Zemah David (Sprout of David), 5, 72–73 Zimmern, Sigmund Wilhelm, 13, 27 Zunz, Adelheid (Bermann), 2, 24–25, 157–58, 214; correspondence, 50, 97; death, 220–21, 238; marriage, 221–22 Zunz, Leopold, 5, 213, 238, 252n12; childhood and education, 8, 11–15, 18, 21, 25; death, 239; diary, 232, 261n76; recognition of, 211–12, 231–33; relatives, 253n8 Zunz Bible, 71 Zunz Foundation (Zunzstiftung), 222