Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity

By Ismar Schorsch

In 1818, with a single essay of vast scope and stunning detail, Leopold Zunz launched the turn to history in modern Judaism. Despite unending setbacks, he persevered for more than five decades to produce a body of enduring scholarship that would inspire young Jews streaming into German universities and alter forever the understanding of Judaism. By the time of his death in 1886, his vision and labor had given rise to a historical discourse and intellectual movement that devolved into vibrant sub-fields as it expanded to other geographic centers of Jewish life.

Yet Zunz was a part-time scholar, at best, in search of employment that would leave him time to study. In addition to his pioneering scholarship, he was as deeply engaged in ending the political tutelage of German Christians as the civil disabilities of German Jews. And to his credit, these commitments did not come at the expense of his loyalty to the Jewish community, which he was ever ready to serve.

Zunz once quipped that "those who have read my books are far from knowing me." To complement his books, Zunz left behind a treasure trove of notes, letters and papers, documents that the distinguished scholar of German Jewish culture, Ismar Schorsch, has zealously utilized to write this, the first full-fledged biography of a remarkable man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Oct 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9780812293326

Book preview

Leopold Zunz

LEOPOLD ZUNZ

CREATIVITY IN ADVERSITY

ISMAR SCHORSCH

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

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

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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

Introduction

Chapter 1. Born in Battle

Chapter 2. A Messianic Moment

Chapter 3. Into the Wilderness

Chapter 4. The Break with Reform

Chapter 5. A Clash of Scholarly Agendas

Chapter 6. A Time of Upheaval

Chapter 7. Poetry and Persecution

Chapter 8. Days of Twilight

Epilogue

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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 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 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 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 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 fifty-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 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 particular 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 services 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.

Most assuredly then Zunz was not an antiquarian. The first 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.

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 catalogues 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.

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 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 everything 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 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 service 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

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 fifty-three. 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.

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 mid-November 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 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 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 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 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 service 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 gruffness of yeshiva bahurim, deficient and useless learning in school, Talmud, the absence of any language or practical instruction, poorly paid teachers and inattention to German."

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.

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