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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 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 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 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 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 categories simply by scrutinizing the dated, incomplete and faulty catalogues 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 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 still to be regarded as barbarians.⁵⁷ Only in the study of the earliest stages of Greek mythology did it seem warranted to cast a fleeting glance at the primitive mythology 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 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.