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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.