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CHAPTER 2

A Messianic Moment

As an intellectually gifted young Jew caught in the cross-currents of a conflicted Prussian state and society, Leopold Zunz faced a future of uncertainties. If Samuel Ehrenberg had salvaged his youth, Adelheid Bermann, his wife to be, would soon become the critical enabler during his storm-tossed career. As he playfully reported to Ehrenberg in January 1822, “I have known my bride since May 1819; her consent [to be engaged] I got in May 1821 and the wedding will probably be in May 1822. Aren’t you impressed with my love of chronological order?”¹

The courtship suggests a romantic relationship unencumbered by outside interference, that would culminate in a fifty-two-year childless marriage embedded in deep love and mutual respect. Though Zunz’s scholarship was beyond her, Adelheid appreciated its significance and supported it wholeheartedly. For years she hosted a Saturday evening salon in their modest apartment that gave Leopold a setting in which to fascinate friends and newcomers, scholars and literary figures, Jews and Christians.² During the week, after a long day apart (for Zunz often from 5 A.M. to 7:30 P.M.), they would spend the evening in intimate conversation, sharing their political, literary, and philosophical interests, often reading passages and whole books to each other, with Leopold usually in the role of instructor. As the years wore on, he taught her chess and even geometry. They were averse to taking solitary trips for any length of time and when they did, their long letters written at the end of a day or over several shared unflinchingly their experiences, thoughts, and yearnings. Adelheid was an eager, adept, and expressive correspondent, and her postscripts to many of Leopold’s letters to mutual friends served to broaden and deepen the relationship between the families. Above all, the correspondence that emanated from the Zunz household abounds in their affection and solicitousness for each other. And when Adelheid died an excruciatingly painful death in 1874, Zunz’s steely resolve in the face of adversity, which owed so much to her unbroken faith in him, gave way to bitter self-pity.³

By the time that Leopold met Adelheid, he was nearing the completion of his doctoral dissertation on Shem Tov Ibn Falaquera, a thirteenth-century Spanish Jewish philosopher. On December 21, 1820, he submitted his handwritten Latin copy to the philosophy faculty in Halle, which awarded him his doctorate on January 2, 1821, though surprisingly the signature of Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius, its rising authority on biblical grammar and lexicography, was not on it. It would be Gesenius, in a career at Halle that spanned thirty-two years, who would make the university the favorite destination of Jewish students in Oriental studies in the first half of the nineteenth century.⁴

In his forty-five-page work, Zunz methodically delineated Ibn Falaquera’s persona, ideas, and context. Earlier he had already announced at the end of his Etwas his intention to publish the Hebrew text along with a Latin translation of Ibn Falaquera’s Sefer Ha-Ma’alot (The Book of Degrees), a discourse on Jewish ethics grounded in theology. Zunz’s motive in this instance went beyond rescuing a valuable relic of Jewish thought from the dustbin of history: “Nicer hopes [than purely academic] have helped to sweeten our arduous labor: The hope to awaken a desire for thorough and fruitful research on the foremost works of the Jewish people, while always bearing in mind a sense of the whole, and the hope that bringing to light the best of rabbinic literature might banish the prejudice in which it is generally held.”⁵ What is noteworthy in this apologetic gambit is that Zunz’s choice came to rest on a sample from the Sephardic orbit, which aligned him squarely with the increasingly pervasive preference of disgruntled Ashkenasic intellectuals for an authentic Jewish model of living in two worlds.⁶ To his credit, he would soon refocus his scholarship onto the legacy of Ashkenaz (Germany). His high scholarly standards, however, would deter him from ever publishing Ibn Falaquera on the basis of but a single faulty manuscript.⁷

The acquisition of a doctorate by a Jew in Restoration Prussia did not pave the way to employment and career advancement. By August 1822, King Frederick William III, citing popular unrest, reversed the article of the liberal 1812 emancipation edict that declared Jews eligible for academic appointments and communal offices. The decision effectively closed off Prussia’s extensive public sector to Jews.⁸ And it was precisely that barrier that prompted Ehrenberg to counsel Zunz already in his first semester to pursue a course of study that would lead to a job: “Though I am happy that you have a chance to immerse yourself in studies that you love, I am deeply concerned, given the present tenor of Jewish-Christian relations, that it will be of little benefit to you to spend your best years on them. I confess that I wish for your sake that you would take up a Brotwissenschaft [a course of study that would put some bread on your table].”⁹

Nearly two years later, Ehrenberg returned more insistently to what must have been a delicate subject: “You are not wrong to study what you love, but shouldn’t you give some thought to your future? You know on the basis of personal experience that a Jew must learn a Brotwissenschaft, because he can’t become a teacher at a university. I very much want to hear your opinion regarding this life (as opposed to the study of antiquity).”¹⁰ Zunz shot back in earnest jest: “For a Brotwissenschaft, a Jew can take up only medicine, and since I’m unwilling to do that, I must believe that young philologians will not be any worse off than young ravens.”¹¹

The dilemma was not Zunz’s alone. Despite obstacles and the prevailing atmosphere, Jews gravitated quickly to Prussia’s universities in the age of their ascendancy. When Berlin opened in 1810, Jews quite possibly represented some 7 percent of its matriculated students, a number which by 1834 had probably risen to several hundred.¹² The law faculty in Berlin did not even award doctorates to Jews because they could not exercise the authority invested in the degree, and though Eduard Gans, Zunz’s friend and compatriot, had started there, he secured his law degree from Heidelberg in 1819.¹³ The first Jew in Berlin to earn his doctorate from its philosophy faculty was Moritz Ludwig Frankenheim, also from Wolfenbüttel, though it was only after his conversion in 1827 that he was appointed as an associate professor of physics in Breslau and eventually in 1850 promoted to full professor.¹⁴

The constant frustration of rising expectations clearly contributed to the three waves of conversions that swept over Berlin from 1770 to 1830. Some sixteen hundred baptisms averaged about twenty-seven per year. During the first wave from 1770 to 1800, the total may have reached as high as 7 percent, of which two-thirds were children and 60 percent women. The flight affected especially family units among the upper echelon and the young. After 1810, with Jews heading for the universities, the number of male converts rose to 59 percent, while the number of women dropped to 41 percent.¹⁵ For all of Prussia, some twenty-two hundred Jews chose to opt out between 1820 and 1840,¹⁶ and among them were many university students painfully trapped in the gulf between expanding educational opportunities and a narrow band of occupational choices. From Berlin Jost reported to Ehrenberg on August 31, 1819, that “people here constantly ask, ‘Why would a Jew study [at the university], since without a livelihood there is no way he can make any use of it?’”¹⁷

Thus typically, when Sigmund Zimmern (see above), the son of a Heidelberg banker and close friend of Gans, sought an appointment as associate professor from the local juridical faculty, it concurred unanimously that Heidelberg should not be the first university to take such a problematic step, which would discomfit not only sister institutions but all of Germany. Zimmern obliged by converting and immediately garnered an appointment as a full professor.¹⁸ Gans held on a few years longer. On May 3, 1821, he submitted to Prussia’s Ministry of Education a tightly reasoned brief against the inconsistency and untenability of Prussia’s policy to withhold academic appointments from Jews, in consequence of which Berlin’s juridical faculty had stonewalled his efforts over the last two years. In his covering note, Gans claimed to be a victim of “persecution, torment and rejection”: “I belong to that unfortunate class of human beings that is hated because uneducated and persecuted because it educates itself.”¹⁹

No one was more afflicted by this tantalizing bridge to nowhere than Leopold Zunz, and it is not surprising to learn from Jost’s letters to Ehrenberg that he wrestled with the idea of converting. To be sure, their friendship forged in a shared youth of misery had quickly cooled once Zunz arrived in Berlin, but there is no reason to suspect that Jost would have misled his beloved mentor, to whom he effusively dedicated the first volume of his Geschichte der Israeliten (A History of the Israelites) in 1820, on a matter of such existential import.²⁰ Jost knew from Ehrenberg’s letter to him just prior to Zunz’s departure for Berlin that he was even displeased that Zunz had adopted the first name Leopold for Lippman, when he began to teach in Wolfenbüttel: “Now a word regarding the name Leopold: I find it intolerable when Jews change their forenames in order to erase any outer trace of their origin. For the ghetto Jew [dem Stockjuden] no amount of concealment will help and for the educated Jew it is a disgrace to deny his origin. Did Moses Mendelssohn call himself Moritz or was he less respected as Moses? Just stop thinking and acting Jewish! The name is wholly irrelevant.”²¹ Jost touched glancingly on Zunz’s state of mind first in a letter dated April 6, 1819: “Zunz visits me rarely. Baptism is very much on his mind, although he struggles mightily against the idea and doesn’t really want to have anything to do with it. He is too far ahead of his co-religionists to be appreciated, let alone nurtured by them.”²² The generosity and perspicacity of the compliment confirm the truthfulness of the news. Zunz’s medley of extraordinary gifts would destine him to be an outlier.

Three and a half years later, after much had transpired, including the termination of Zunz’s abbreviated tenure as preacher at the Beer Temple (on which more anon), Jost returned to the subject at greater length and in a tone far more critical. Though Zunz no longer appeared to be wavering, he had apparently earlier informed many, as had Jost, of his intention to convert:

About other news from here, regarding the dismissal of Dr. Zunz, which in a crude circular included many reproaches of me for speaking out freely against the piety of a preacher once close to the baptismal font and whose story of his most recent widely criticized behavior will soon appear in print—all this you surely know full well. Those presumptuous plans only gingerly hinted at have now collapsed…. I have always admired Zunz’s talents, but held his use of them to be inappropriate. He really has the power to do much good here, but lacks the necessary sagacity. First, he took the whole world into his confidence about his plan to convert to Christianity. Then by taking the post as preacher, he wanted to quash the rumor. And finally, to gain control over the truth, he became zealous, imprudent and provocative. The public ignored him and I did not counter his slights, except to speak the truth, as I always do, and overlook the insults.²³

Hence Zunz’s ruminations about converting were no secret and not out of line with the angst of his peers.²⁴ The conversion of Jost’s younger brother Simon, a student of law, in 1820 certainly did not escape Zunz’s attention.²⁵ Once over the decision, Zunz never reconsidered. Not only did he personify the virtue of fidelity in stormy weather, but he became the scathing critic of those who jumped ship. His diary abounds with sardonic comments about prominent converts,²⁶ while few merit mention in his unique Yahrzeit calendar (Die Monatstage des Kalenderjahres) of 1872 with its 722 names of Jews and Christians, men and women, whose known day of death allowed for memorialization.²⁷ For instance, Zunz conspicuously omitted the name of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, even as he made an exception of Eduard Gans, Hegel’s preeminent legal disciple, though only for his work for the Verein (the subject of this chapter). Noting his premature death on May 5, 1839, Zunz recalled: “Professor Gans … converted to Christianity on December 12, 1825 in Paris, but [his] most admirable years of development fell between 1818 and 1823, a period which Laube in his biography skipped over entirely.”²⁸

* * *

The Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (the Society for the Culture and Critical Study of the Jews) was founded in Berlin on November 7, 1819, by seven men who, except for Gans, were not native to Berlin and five of whom were under thirty. Zunz described the initiative to Ehrenberg a few months later as an effort to unite the best minds of German Jewry to promote culture and critical scholarship among their compatriots. In consequence, its active membership to the bitter end remained fairly homogeneous, socially marginal, decidedly bookish, and disastrously small in number.²⁹ Heinrich Heine joined for a short stint in August 1822 while in Berlin,³⁰ and when his immensely diligent and utterly sympathetic first biographer, Adolf Strodtmann, began his undertaking, Zunz prevailed upon him not to omit the story of the Verein: “Nearly all the advances [made by] Jews in the academic, political and civil arenas, as well as their initiatives in the reforms of their schools and synagogues have their roots in the activities of that association and its handful of members.”³¹ Zunz never discarded the papers of the Verein and placed them at the disposal of Strodtmann, who wove them into a colorful tapestry he called “Das junge Palästina,” analogous to his later chapter on “Das junge Deutschland.” Both told the story of idealistic youth in rebellion against the hidebound conservatism of entrenched elders in the entangled fields of religion and politics. As communicators, though, the former never matched the latter: “The Young Palestine, as we would like to call these heralds, who [were] way ahead of their time in anticipating the era’s new ideas, had not yet learned to package their liberal wisdom in a popular idiom, as did The Young Germany so effectively a decade later.”³²

Still, by evocatively corroborating Zunz’s judgment, Strodtmann put the Verein on the historiographical map. Nor would the memory of its messianic fervor ever dim for Zunz. In 1839, he wrote his friend the Berlin publisher and communal leader Moritz Veit that “the Verein survived 39×40 days [Zunz often expressed his feelings in arithmetic terms], and those days in which Gans, Moser, Heine, Zunz and Rubo, ignoring their own welfare, devoted themselves wholly to the interests of their people [nationalen Interessen]—were they not more comely than our own day with its heartless self-centeredness?”³³

By November 1819, the prospects for full emancipation in the states of the German Confederation were rapidly receding. Liberals and Conservatives had united in their suspicion of the Jews. The recently founded Burschenschaften, the organized expression of student agitation for national unification across Germany, did not accept Jews as members,³⁴ and in its celebration at the Wartburg Castle in October 1817 of the tercentenary of Luther’s Reformation and the more recent battle of Leipzig, among the books its members burned was Saul Ascher’s 1815 denunciation of their chauvinism, Die Germanomanie.³⁵ The murder of a reactionary playwright in Mannheim on March 23, 1819, by a radicalized university student gave Austria’s chancellor Metternich a chance to extract from the diet of the German Confederation in Frankfurt a web of repressive measures and principles.³⁶ And in the late summer of 1819, rhetoric erupted into violence against Jews and their property as riots leapfrogged across towns in southern and western Germany, though not in Prussia, where the promise of 1812 was undercut administratively.³⁷ Thus when the Prussian government ordered all Christian children attending Jewish private schools to leave by September 15, 1819, Jost, one of the founders of the Verein, was forced to close his school by the start of the new year. The loss of income suddenly made him dependent on the goodwill of friends, such as Israel Jacobson, his former benefactor, who had helped him financially to open the school and now gave him the tidy gift of 800 Reichstaler. Jost proudly told Ehrenberg that he accepted only what he actually needed.³⁸

A second factor served to increase the urgency to find refuge among one’s own. Internally, the erosion of faith among many Jews was weakening their resolve to withstand the adversity from without. Jost’s own estrangement from traditional Judaism exemplified the state of mind. In a long epistle to Ehrenberg from July 1820, Jost described in detail the expensive effort of an English missionary society founded in 1810 and operating in Berlin to convert Jews through suasion. He lauded it but doubted its efficacy because the society was perversely focused on converting religious rather than irreligious Jews. Moreover, Jost abhorred a Christianity dominated by clergy no less than a Judaism subservient to rabbis: “I am far from admiring clerical Christianity [Pfaffenchristenthum], although I can’t deny approving of the Christianity of the New Testament because it is a pure and purged Judaism, and our Judaism only a debased Christianity. But these poor Englishmen are as impoverished in learning as loaded with money. They are theologically naïve enough to convince themselves that observant Jews are more likely to convert than free thinkers, and thus they take aim at bearded rabbis …, starting a religious fight that alienates free thinkers, who till then had admired Christianity.”³⁹

The hostility toward rabbinic Judaism, with its elaborate legalistic superstructure, was indeed a staple of the Verein and though long gone from its ranks, Jost unfurled it in a highly personal diatribe in the third volume of his history in the context of rejecting the talmudic claim that the whole corpus of dietary laws requiring the separation of meat and milk derived from a single biblical verse:

This misunderstanding is all the more noteworthy since Moses himself relates that Abraham set before the angels (who visited him after his circumcision) meat and cream, making it clear that in doing so Abraham gave no offense to God. Yet the rabbis assert that Abraham already observed the most minute of rabbinic injunctions. Indeed, the statement doesn’t even deserve to be rebutted. Yet one sees that not only have millions been blinded by such views and burdened with innumerable laws, but also rendered anxious by the myriad related details. How many noble works could have been produced in the time stolen by their study or the sacrifices made by their observance. To be sure, it is not advisable to lightheartedly sever the fetters of a religion once adopted, but the time has come that seminars be given on the basis of Scripture that erect an authentic building in which the Mosaist [Jost’s neologism] can abide by the principles of his synagogue with dignity. Whoever may be offended by this wish, should teach me something better, show me the infallibility of human statements and I will gladly retract it. But who after a deep examination of the spirit of Rabbinism can suppress the anguish that seizes the heart, when seeing the thousands and millions blinded by these terrible errors, confined in the pursuits and bedeviled by obsessive anxiety in the face of such phony piety on every side. One can read traces of spiritual bondage in their faces, which block the entrance of more salutary knowledge. Moses never intended this to be the outcome of God’s law!!⁴⁰

The consternation of this outburst connotes the existential crisis that drove the founders of the society into their rescue operation. Besieged from without and bereft from within, they fought on two fronts with little more than their wits and their will.

The inspiration and energy for the organization came from Gans and Zunz. Gans, who had two years earlier tangled with Rühs himself over the reputation of his father, a failed banker,⁴¹ became its president on March 11, 1821, and articulated its Hegelian ideology with eloquent power. Zunz provided the administrative heft. As he wrote to Ehrenberg on January 15, 1822, he was currently the Verein’s vice president, editor of its scholarly journal, about to appear, and chair of its network of correspondents as well as head of its scientific and educational institutes. He also sent him a copy of the Verein’s newly printed statutes, which after protracted consultations with the government and several revisions, the government said required no official approval.⁴² Since every one of its four lines of activities was also the object of a separate set of bylaws, it is readily apparent that while for the first two years of its existence the society was absorbed with organizing itself, the deliberations explored many a question essential to a minority in transit from the margins of a Christian body politic to its heartland.⁴³ Napoleon had compelled French Jewry to resolve such questions in 1806 when he convened an Assembly of Notables in Paris followed by a Sanhedrin in 1807, whereas the refusal of the Prussian government either to finish emancipating its Jewry or reorganizing its communal structure sowed the seeds for decades of bitter internal strife.

In an effort to persuade the government to extend its approbation to the work of the Verein, Gans embedded his plea of April 1820 in an elaborate historical argument. To prove that Judaism was no impediment to Jews adopting the language, livelihood, and culture of their host societies, Gans summoned the history of Sephardic Jewry, with special emphasis on the assimilated descendants in modern France, England, and Holland. In contrast, such opportunity was not afforded Ashkenazic Jewry in medieval Christian Europe. With the Renaissance the gulf between Jew and Christian deepened even further, in part because the study of the multivolume Talmud, now readily available in print, came to monopolize the intellectual life of Polish Jewry. And yet since Mendelssohn, German Jews had given ample evidence of their ability to remake themselves, only to face now mounting public impatience and government ambivalence, which threatened to upend the process. Gans presented the society as totally committed “to eradicating all articles of faith and morality, manner of living and thinking which set Jews apart in civil society by a broad and useful spiritual makeover.”⁴⁴ Gans offered to collaborate with the authorities toward an eventual fusion of Germans and Jews. While the government should lower the legal barriers, the society would work internally to counter Jewish resistance to assimilation.⁴⁵ The Verein regarded itself as a vital force for regeneration.

In an emancipation tract authored by Zunz in the fall of 1818 for Levi Lazarus Hellwitz, a Westphalian advocate of modernization whose name it bore, Zunz also argued historically that Jews deserve citizenship and can be rejuvenated. Christian contempt had led to their degradation in exile. The miserable fate of the Greeks under the Turks, the Moors under the Christians, and the Christians in Egypt proves indisputably that oppression always corrodes character. Conversely, freedom and education transformed the lowly settlers of North America into a blessed nation. German Jews are no longer a mirror image of their still benighted Polish brethren. Reflective of the distance traveled is the fact that there are (at the time) some forty important German writers who are Jewish.⁴⁶ Along with full emancipation, Zunz called for a cleansing of the public discourse on Jews and state assistance in the reformation of an insular rabbinate and a dilapidated school system. Most unexpected was his invocation of a French-type Sanhedrin under government auspices that would restructure Jewish life at the local and national levels and issue a new code of Jewish law in which only the Bible would be sacrosanct.⁴⁷

Overall, this sophisticated but unrealistic roadmap delineated what was to be expected of Jews, Christians, and the state in making space for Jews marked by political equality and social integration. As Zunz recounted to Ehrenberg in a letter, the initiative was not his. He had been commissioned to salvage the remnants of an earlier effort. After studying the material, he dictated the final coherent and cogent text in just two days, for which, he bitterly noted, he received neither acknowledgment nor compensation: “Büschenthal [Zunz’s friend and the original author, who had died] has the money, Hellwitz the fame, the workers their pay, the Jews a word in their behalf and I, the prime mover, need to go to the publisher and buy my own thoughts for six groschen.”⁴⁸

The Verein created four lines of activity to wage its two-front war, two on the external front and two on the internal. The educational arm and the correspondence archive were deployed to counter Christian disdain and government suspicion, while the scholarly institute and journal were mounted to earn respect from Christian academics, engender pride among Jews, and identify what was eternal in Judaism. Put differently, the embrace of German culture would facilitate assimilation and the application of critical scholarship would cultivate a sense of continued apartness, if only inwardly. The cultural agenda would be hands on, the academic theoretical. The advocacy of religious reform, however, was not in the cards, because the government bristled when it misread Cultur as Cultus.⁴⁹

In November 1821, Gans appointed Zunz to replace the disgruntled and ineffective Joel Abraham List, the society’s first president and one of its older members, as the head of the educational institute,⁵⁰ and in one week’s time Zunz had drafted a statute of thirty-one planks. Its opening paragraph announced the society’s intent to establish “a free school for those coreligionists who are devoted to science and art, but unable to attend a school or gymnasium, with the hope to awaken an appreciation for the world of science among suitable coreligionists.” The instruction would be offered without tuition, but only to Jewish boys thirteen or older who had a clear interest in pursuing a career in scholarship, business, education, preaching or the rabbinate, music, painting, or architecture and construction. The faculty would consist of Verein members who were obligated to teach at least three hours a week without pay.⁵¹

The next month (December 1821), Gans reported to Zunz that during the past semester he had been teaching ancient history and Latin four hours a week. His most promising student in both was a young man recently arrived from Glogau on the Oder by the name of (Salomon) Munk, fairly fluent in reading Latin prose and poetry, though without any appreciation for the beauty of good poetry.⁵² Munk one day would be heralded as the discoverer and editor of the Arabic original of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed and as professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France. In his next report to Zunz in April 1822, Gans spoke of teaching Greek as well. Of his nine students, Munk still stood out: “Munk grasps quickly, though could be more productive. He is learning a lot and conducts himself well. To be noted, however, he is excessively attached to rabbinic Judaism [Rabbinismus] out of sheer perversity.”⁵³

By the end of October 1822, Julius Rubo and Moses Moser replaced Zunz, probably at his request.⁵⁴ Nevertheless, growth remained precariously slow. While in April 1822, Gans could report in his presidential address that a total of twelve students had been taught by nine instructors, in his next address a year later, he spoke of fourteen students and twelve teachers and hinted at a possible merger of the society’s program with that of the long-standing Free School in Berlin.⁵⁵ Behind the comment was an impassioned plea by Zunz in the winter of 1823 to the elders of the Berlin Jewish community to promote such a merger by assuming financial responsibility for the far stronger school that would result. Led by Lazarus Bendavid (a member of the Verein) without remuneration, the forty-five-year-old Free School lived from hand to mouth. According to Zunz, of its fifty-six students, only six paid. As for the society’s school, it had instructed twenty-two students out of an applicant pool of forty. Were the community willing to fund the merger, Zunz went on, the members of the Verein would gladly commit to teaching without pay. The emergent Free School would be of such high quality that paying students would soon appear. Above all, it would bring credit to the Jewish community of Berlin and ensure its future, for “the prosperity or decline of schools and synagogues are decisive in determining our progress and sanctity or our retreat and ruin.”⁵⁶

Not only was this appeal infused with common sense, but also filled with intense conviction, a foreshadowing of Zunz’s lifelong dedication to the priority of Jewish education. But a communal board, which in October 1821 had refused to allow the society’s course offerings even to be announced at its synagogue services because the society’s existence had not yet been approved by the government, was unlikely to consider favorably a request fraught with expense.⁵⁷ By the start of 1824, it no longer mattered; the Verein had gone out of business.⁵⁸

The second arm of the Verein to focus on the world outside was its correspondence archive. According to Moser, who as its temporary head delivered a preliminary report to the membership on its mission in March 1822, it was the last of the Verein’s four arms to be launched.⁵⁹ Moser had come to Berlin in 1814 and worked in the banking firm of David Friedländer’s son Moses.⁶⁰ Heine later would laud his understated and compassionate dedication to laboring for the good incognito, and it was most likely Moser who drafted the twenty-four paragraphs of the archive’s statutes.⁶¹ While yet another instance of the society’s reach exceeding its grasp, the document underscored the importance of comprehensive information on the Jewish world in the fight for emancipation and against defamation.⁶²

The objective of the archive was to create an ever-expanding network of correspondents inside and outside Germany to generate information that would eventually enrich the deliberations of the scholarly institute and the publications of the journal. The guidelines stipulated the scope of the information sought: on recent events regarding Judaism and the involvement of noteworthy individuals; on new writings related to Judaism and their authors; on little known or utterly lost works about Judaism, whether by Jews or non-Jews; on the past or present moral, religious, political, and economic condition of Jews at all social levels and in all regions of the body politic; on advances in culture and ethics registered by Jews collectively; and finally on contributions made individually by Jews in the arts and sciences or civic and national life. Verein members were obligated to participate actively by securing correspondents outside Berlin or by sending in reports themselves on anything newsworthy as quickly as possible.⁶³

A few examples of the archive in action will readily suggest its ambitious expanse. The earliest submissions came from Hellwitz, a recent member of the Verein, in the form of copies of a complaint to the Prussian chancellor from the Jewish community (israelitische Corporation) in Westphalia dated May 1821 and his official response of December 9, 1821, and a subsequent report from February 26, 1822, on the state of Westphalian Jewry, probably written by Hellwitz himself.⁶⁴ The inventory list also shows an excerpt from an unpublished chronicle on the history of the Jews in Teplitz and another from a newspaper in Warsaw dated February 18, 1822, that printed the edict of Czar Alexander I, ordering the immediate disbanding of the traditional local Jewish communal structure (the Kahal) throughout Poland.⁶⁵ In charge of both the archive and journal, Zunz published the edict in the third and final number of his Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Journal for the Academic Study of Judaism) (ZWJ) along with Gans’s full-throated approval, given first in one of the many sessions of the scholarly institute (wissenschaftliches Institut).⁶⁶

Gans took the occasion to reiterate the society’s rebellion against the rabbinic and moneyed leadership of the traditional Jewish community. Both were oppressive relics from its medieval past, no less than serfdom, the duel, and the fourfold faculty structure of the university. In Poland, Gans contended, the rabbinate had stagnated, turned inward, and sunk into scholasticism. It also forged a fateful alliance with the wealthy, which, akin to the medieval alliance of churchmen and nobles, dominated the governance of the Jewish community. Whereas the rabbinate had been under assault now for decades, Gans was especially stirred by the czar’s attack against the power of the wealthy: “Far more ruinous and enervating than the most stupid and crude rabbinism is the monopoly of money, because the former promotes ignorance while the latter decadence. One can only hope that the ingenuity with which a wise prince has stanched here a barely noticed source of cultural deprivation might prompt some imitation in our German Fatherland, namely a closer look at the governance of the Jewish community.”⁶⁷

The confidence with which Gans had addressed his fellow rebels on the first anniversary of the founding of the Verein on November 21, 1820, was long gone by the end of 1823. Then, he had believed that a cluster of intellectuals driven by a sense of calling could pull off unaided the hardest revolution of all: “The overturning and remaking of consciousness. In this no power or intrusion from without is of value. A psychic evil needs a psychic healing. You will effect it.”⁶⁸ By 1823 the Prussian government had not only quashed all refashioning of Jewish worship, but also reversed itself on appointing Jews to university faculties.⁶⁹

The interconnectedness of the society’s activities is also manifested in its courtship of Mordecai Manuel Noah, the most prominent American Jew of his day. Word of his 1819 project to found a settlement on Grand Island near Buffalo, New York, for Jews persecuted in Europe stirred messianic embers, reinforced by news of a similar undertaking in the Upper Mississippi and Missouri Territory by William Davis Robinson, an enterprising Christian merchant.⁷⁰ In two successive meetings on December 29, 1821, and January 5, the Verein heatedly discussed endorsing Noah’s project and encouraging Jews to emigrate. Immanuel Wolf (later Wohlwill) spoke for the majority when he declaimed: “Over there is a land of freedom and tolerance, where even Jews will not be treated as strangers. Over there one can begin a new, resourceful life which will serve to promote the rebirth of the Jews.”⁷¹ But Gans and Zunz, who had an uncle living in New York,⁷² prevailed in convincing those in attendance that advocating emigration exceeded the purview of the society’s statutes and might readily displease the government. They proposed no more than turning the matter over to the archive and inviting Noah to become an associate member and correspondent of the Verein. And on January 1, 1822, between the two meetings, a letter in stilted English signed by Gans, Zunz, Moser, and one Leo-Wolf, a physician and corresponding member from Hamburg, went out to Noah.⁷³ The value of the letter lies in its hunger for information about Jews in America—“their progress in business and knowledge, and the rights allowed them in general, and by each state”—which when disseminated would dispose at least some “to leave a country where they have nothing to look for but endless slavery and oppression.”⁷⁴

Heine, who had come to Berlin in the summer of 1821 and joined the society at Gans’s behest, defiantly counseled the students he taught in its educational program to leave Germany for England and America: “In those countries, it would not occur to anyone to ask, what do you believe or don’t believe? Everyone can seek bliss in his own fashion.”⁷⁵

Finally, the reports and documents accumulating in the Verein’s archive would become the fragments for an eventual collage of Judaism and its innumerable components. Bearing the technical name Statistik, such a composite had nothing to do with numbers, but rather with a snapshot of a present moment sociologically viewed as comprehensively as possible. If history faced the past, Statistik focused on a slice of time in the present, with documentary evidence being the building blocks of both. In the last of his three essays published in the ZWJ, Zunz validated the long term mission of the archive by co-opting the eighteenth-century German concept of Statistik into the embryonic field of Jewish studies. Bereft of a galvanizing state, Judaism would serve as the fulcrum that gave coherence to the totality of the Jewish experience. Ultimately, Jewish history consisted of a myriad of “statistically” studied moments; it would take scholars some eighty years to approach the sweep of Zunz’s vision of historical sociology.⁷⁶

Zunz had first lectured on the nature of a Jewish form of Statistik in the Verein’s scholarly seminar, as had Wolf on his conception of what constitutes the field of Jewish studies. Both lectures subsequently appeared in the society’s journal, ten of whose sixteen essays had first been rolled out in the seminar. The overlap was intended, for the seminar’s bylaws drafted by Zunz (with thirty-five separate articles) stressed that Judaism was to be subjected to critical scholarship in a free and objective spirit. The seminar was to meet frequently and each member was obliged to regularly share his research. Even associate members living outside Berlin were expected to submit at least one paper every six months. The gravitas of its agenda inevitably constricted its membership. Of the twenty-five papers given over the course of forty-five sessions during the lifetime of the Verein, sixteen came from the seminar’s three founders—Moser, Gans, and Zunz.⁷⁷ Thus the seminar served as the laboratory for testing and collaborating on research, which would eventually be distilled for publication in the journal. The intimate connection requires that these two arms of the Verein’s activities be treated together, though each had its own elaborate set of statutes.

If the school and archive were oriented toward the external state of the Jewish condition, the seminar and journal concentrated on its internal state. Not only did the high-minded rhetoric of the society concede at least partial Jewish responsibility for the deplorable condition of German Jewry, but it also granted the legitimacy of the government’s demand for the social homogeneity of all its citizens. Accordingly, the Verein espoused an agenda of total assimilation that would drastically shrink the scope of Judaism, eliminate all external differences, produce a radically altered rabbinic leadership, and return Judaism to its Mosaic foundation. In an age saturated with Hegelian idealism that believed ideas to be the engine of human events, the society invested in identifying and formulating the essential idea of Judaism as the centripetal force that would offset the centrifugal stress of total assimilation. Jewish singularity and influence historically were always to be found in the realm of ideas and values and not in the annals of statecraft or military prowess. Though Zalman Shazar (then Rubaschoff) when he republished Gans’s three presidential addresses in 1918–19 called them “the first fruits of dejudaization,” he knew full well that neither Gans nor the Verein advocated religious conversion. Political accommodation yes, but not religious betrayal. The society was acutely aware of the differences between the demands of the state and those of the church. Nor was it oblivious to the suffering of Jews at the hand of the church in the Middle Ages. But the Verein was desperate for Jews to reenter history after nearly two millennia on the sidelines. The mantra of the age was reconciliation and toward that end the Verein demanded the completion of the emancipation process, which would bestow the freedom Jews needed to regenerate themselves.⁷⁸

The Verein’s preferred weapon of combat was critical scholarship, an empirical and rational science of universal import. Research would muster the data to convince the authorities of the contributions of Judaism to humanity and the right of Jews to find their place in the present political configuration. Internally, it would craft a narrative over time that would steel the resolve of Jews to remain distinct, if not apart, or in Gans’s resonant metaphor “as a current … in the ocean.”⁷⁹ Aimed at two audiences then, scholarship would simultaneously be a source of truth and pride.

With the nomenclature Wissenschaft des Judenthums as opposed to Wissenschaft der Juden, Zunz avoided the atomization implicit in the use of the plural Juden. Jews were now defined as individuals who played out their lives on a chessboard called Judaism, even as the expansive scope of that board recast it as a cultural rather than a theological grid. Clearly echoing Zunz’s Etwas, Wolf declared in the opening essay of the journal: “If we are to talk of a science of Judaism, then it is self-evident that the word ‘Judaism’ is here being taken in its comprehensive sense—as the essence of all the circumstances, characteristics and achievements of the Jews in relation to religion, philosophy, law, literature in general, civil life and all the affairs of man—and not in that more limited sense in which it is only the religion of the Jews.”⁸⁰ Yet, ironically, what kept those divergent strands together for Wolf was Judaism’s unique God idea, which fructified even its most secular extensions.⁸¹

The sense of urgency that drove Gans, Moser, and Zunz to bring the Verein’s journal to life quickly was not shared by Jost. By resolution the society had decided to elect two editors and give them full autonomy. It would retain only a right to be consulted. Its primary responsibility was to get members to contribute samples of their work. Jost was exceedingly displeased by the exclusion of the Verein from managerial authority and at a meeting on April 20, 1820, aired his views at length. The purpose of the journal was to be a mouthpiece of the society and therefore it was improper for the Verein to forgo all supervision of the editors. Instead of a loose relationship between the Verein and the journal, Jost demanded a detailed set of bylaws and even a written contract with the editors that would spell out how future conflicts would be resolved. By way of a peroration, Jost cautioned that “it would be far better to proceed slowly and deliberately than to harm the project with rash decisions.”⁸² With Gans in disagreement, Jost’s proposal failed to garner support. And by May 14, he had withdrawn from the Verein.⁸³

Some two years later in a discursive letter to Ehrenberg, Jost depicted the gulf that estranged him from his peers and friends:

[The Verein] is an outpouring of unabashed self-importance of the dumbest nonsense [Dünkels] of a few young people, who arrogantly imagine to be able to change a whole nation which they barely know. The results match the underlying premises, witness the boastful, laughable statutes, the childish criticism of everything that exists and the unreadable journal. What comes along to do some good must proceed modestly and young men who share the same goal must pave for themselves a calm road…. Moreover, the Verein, as yet unapproved by the authorities, operates illegally. I have nothing against an association of Jewish intellectuals [committed] to educating their errant brothers, but they must first give evidence that they themselves are educated…. That is why I hold myself aloof from a cause which I helped initiate with great excitement.⁸⁴

But this self-revelatory epistle from August 1822 illuminates a much larger landscape. The dark horizon facing Prussian Jewry filled Jost with foreboding and resignation. Jews who attended a university had no alternative but to convert. If we don’t push Jews, Jost declaimed, to learn to work with their hands, a whole generation will go over to Christianity. And rightly so, for what binds them to their religion but childhood memories? What is more, Jost continued, the state cannot extend equality to Jews as long as they refuse to marry Germans. A state consists of a single national entity that must be a unified whole. How can the state tolerate a minority that believes it possesses the truth and will not socialize? Can such a minority ever show true patriotism? We are worse off than our persecuted ancestors, he contended, because we no longer find consolation in our faith. What can possibly compensate young intellectuals who wander around unemployed and hungry in order to preserve the name Jew? Faith is a bugaboo that vanishes as soon as it is derided. Jost was quick to assure Ehrenberg that he was no friend of desertion, but who can swim against the rapids of our day? Each person lives but once.⁸⁵

Despite Jost’s abrupt departure, the first issue of the Zeitschrift came out in March 1822, with two more numbers thereafter in 1823, in all a single quarto volume of 539 pages.⁸⁶ At its meeting on August 11, 1822, the Verein decided to pay both Zunz, its editor, and contributing essayists for their services.⁸⁷ The field of Jewish studies in Germany would ever after bear the name of that beleaguered undertaking.⁸⁸ Collectively, its authors, especially Gans and Zunz, who each wrote three of its pieces, respectively, showed with conceptual power and stunning detail the potential for critical scholarship to reshape the understanding of Judaism. Whether dealing with its external or internal history, their essays are secular in tone, inductive in method, and generally nonpartisan.

Methodologically, they move in different directions. In his exploration of the earliest traces of Jews in northern Europe and Slavic lands joined by the German language, Gans illustrated the inescapable need to consult non-Jewish sources to do Jewish history. The essay focuses in particular on Jews in England before 1066, for which Gans listed more than a dozen primary and secondary English sources indispensable for the subject.⁸⁹ Nor can a reliable internal history of any Jewish settlement be done prior to knowing something of its external history.⁹⁰

The same methodological message reverberated in Gans’s study of Jewish legal status in the Roman Empire and medieval Christian Europe, which Jost was quick to praise in his own history.⁹¹ The essay relied entirely on Greek and Roman sources. Laws, however, functioned differently in different periods. In pagan Rome, polytheism was tolerant and not obsessed with truth and hence the law protected Jews. Intergroup tensions erupted in the social arena from Jewish allegiance to Jerusalem and pagan ignorance of Judaism. With Christianity in possession of the truth, deviation often ran afoul of public opinion. It was actually church theology that tempered Christian animus with its reverence for the Old Testament and its expectation of an eventual conversion at the end of days. The self-contradictory nature of Christian policy toward the Jews down to his own day triggered an outburst of present-mindedness that brought down the wrath of the censor on the passage: “How long will this destructive half-measure still last? Has history not amply taught that between two options, the only choice is either to embrace the principle of salvation through a single church, in consequence of which Jews should be banished from the earth and the resulting chasm filled with their lifeless bones, or to forget about the Jews in matters of law and then fill the chasm with their reborn spirits? Only that which lies in the middle is evil.”⁹²

Beyond the utilization of non-Jewish sources, Gans argued tellingly for the employment of comparative research. The body of terms, institutions, ideas, ritual, and purportedly historical events found throughout rabbinic literature needed to be brought out of its isolation. Many of these items bore a resemblance to items in cultures with which Jews interfaced, and similarity implied the possibility of influence. Gans had already set out in this direction in his essay on Jewish legal status in the Roman Empire, when he tried to align the titles of Jewish officials mentioned in the Roman codes with the titles of Jewish officials in rabbinic literature. His majestic essay on the principles of inheritance law in the Bible and Talmud also firmly planted its terminology and practices within the Roman world. The comparative approach led to large conclusions. While Gans regarded the Hebrew Bible as the highest expression of the Oriental world, he contended that the Talmud was a product of the Westernization of Judaism. Continuity lay in the fact that the Talmud acted as the expositor of Mosaic law, but in so doing the Talmud was open to the influence of the societies through which it passed. And Gans offered a bevy of examples of rabbinic terms relating to marriage that resemble Roman practice and terminology. As for talmudic inheritance law, he credited it with taking the disparate fragments and allusions of biblical practice and forging them into a well-ordered, inflected legal system, indeed one that compared favorably with that of Roman law.⁹³

If then a keen eye for relevant non-Jewish sources and plausible instances of comparative material greatly sharpened the perspective on the Jewish past, Zunz’s methodological breakthrough in the handling of conventional Jewish sources was no less critical in the contextualization of historical phenomena. This was the dramatic achievement of his biographical essay on Rashi, the swan song of the scholarly seminar and the Verein itself. Texts long sanctified by tradition could be induced to yield unimagined information when subjected to new questions. Zunz’s goal was to strip Rashi, the classic eleventh-century commentator on the Bible and Talmud, of the nimbus of saga and mythology. Veneration had buried the Rashi of history. There was only one way to do a critical biography, and that was to read the works of Rashi themselves. By an exhaustive reading of all he had written and a rigorous application of philological analysis, Zunz was able to assemble the profile of a man of his age (d. 1105), who did not know Arabic or Persian or Latin, who had never met Maimonides, and who in fact was unfamiliar with the exegetical creativity of Spanish Jewry. Moreover, his command of French was far greater than German. Zunz was also able to identify the works that Rashi actually wrote and the works of others that he knew and used. Some eighty such works made up his own library. Overall, Zunz’s biography was a remarkable display of erudition, acumen, and discipline. With new tools and perspectives, Zunz was destined to mine and extract from the classical corpus of Jewish literature untold new information and significance.⁹⁴

The importance of the Rashi essay also derived from the challenge it threw up to the dominant preference for Sephardic Jewry, which Zunz had shared up to that point with the rest of the society. His doctoral dissertation had been on a thirteenth-century Spanish Jewish philosopher and an earlier essay of his in the journal had focused on the difficult task of identifying Spanish place names in the Hebrew literature of the Iberian Peninsula. The essay was a model of a methodology that could be used on any geographical area in which Jews once resided. Zunz felt obliged to vindicate his choice with another intrusion of present-mindedness:

The study of Jewish literature draws us primarily there (to Spain) because a literature is actually to be found there. Among all the efforts of the Jewish people since their political decline, there are none comparable to those of the Spanish era, where Jews attained a level equal to that of Europe, if not higher. There men lived worthy of renown. There was not only a dead language as a cherished legacy from their forefathers, but also a living, comprehensible, cultural language. Devotees of poetry and science competed with the Moors. Even its external history was more important, vital and fascinating after the barbarism of the Gothic era than anywhere else. Indeed, ethics and education became so ingrained that even the most distant settlement of Jews fleeing Spain was distinctively marked by them.⁹⁵

But Zunz was on his way to overcoming the bias. The Rashi essay signaled a momentous step to correct the imbalance.

The lasting value of the essay on Spanish place names, however, is that in its sweeping theoretical prelude, Zunz enunciated a fuller version of the methodology that undergirded the new science of Judaism. In spare language, he sketched the evolution of Jews out of Israelites in the Roman period, the decentralization of Jewish settlements, the cohesive role of Judaism as a religious-political construct, and, finally, a delineation of eleven periods of Jewish history from the earliest time to his own day. To put this all together and to integrate the external and internal dimensions required a labor of intense specificity: where and when did a person live or was a book written and in what setting did an event take place? Each fact was a single but critical stone for a building under construction. In addition to the qualifications requisite of all modern historians, Jewish historians needed to have the well-rounded knowledge to detect internal developments in Judaism, an ability to see details against the backdrop of the whole, and a critical understanding of all of Jewish literature. As for the Hebrew sources in which place names appeared most often, Zunz listed four types: chronicles and travel books; halakhic responsa; inscriptions on coins, buildings, and tombstones; and communal record books. Zunz also drew attention to the reference works available for consultation.⁹⁶ Taken together, the bold essays by Gans and Zunz laid out in both theory and practice the arduous spadework ahead.

In retrospect, the journal’s modest reception made it a symbol rather than a success. After reading the third number, Heine wrote Zunz that he found the German of the journal abominable and impenetrable.⁹⁷ Ehrenberg concurred. Only two copies sold in Braunschweig. Good Jews found its discourse far too learned.⁹⁸ In a letter to Ehrenberg on April 18, 1823, Zunz wrote in defense by crisply restating the journal’s intent: “The journal is certainly not a Jewish paper and not designed to educate the Jews of Braunschweig. We have enough vehicles for education right now. But to create for Judaism some status and respect and gradually to arouse and unite the better minds in Israel, that can only be done through critical scholarship and it is our goal to keep the journal at that level.”⁹⁹ Sylvester de Sacy in Paris, France’s renowned Orientalist and the mentor of Germany’s rising generation of Orientalists, courteously thanked Zunz on October 7, 1822, for his free copy. But he cautioned that given the paucity of Jewish and gentile sources for many periods of Jewish history, the term “Judaism” might often end up replacing facts with speculation. And he added prophetically “that Germany is hardly the place where anyone will appreciate the usefulness and difficulty of the work to which you are dedicating yourself.”¹⁰⁰ Most lamentable, the journal reached few hands. The first number in the spring of 1822 had been printed in a run of five hundred copies at a total cost of 124 talers. As late as 1839, Zacharias Frankel admitted to Zunz that neither he nor his close friend Bernhard Beer, who had a fine personal library of Judaica, nor anyone else in Dresden had ever seen a copy of the journal.¹⁰¹

Two other projects that Zunz thought through for the Verein give still further evidence of its unrestrained élan, uncanny insight, and totally inadequate means. In January 1822, Gans had asked him to draft statutes for a Verein library. By November 3, he submitted to the plenum a document of twenty-nine articles that suggested the future collection be divided between original and auxiliary works. Original works were to be authored by Jews or deal with Jews and Judaism and fall in one of twelve discrete categories of literature. In contrast, auxiliary works had to be crafted by non-Jews or ex-Jews and likewise deal with Jews and Judaism. Some eight categories defined their substance and scope.¹⁰² At the conclusion of Zunz’s presentation, the assembled members adopted his proposal unanimously. Eleven months later on October 5, 1823, Zunz would make his final quarterly report on his creation.¹⁰³ Though it was destined for the dustbin, the sweep and refinement of Zunz’s vision fully anticipated some of the modern conundrums in the collecting of Hebraica and Judaica.

The society also entertained the grandiose idea of a new German translation of the Hebrew Bible. The initiative came from its affiliate in Hamburg headed by Gotthold Salomon, one of the two preachers in the employ of the city’s Temple Association, though it was left to Zunz to make the case for the project in Berlin at a plenary session on August 31, 1823.¹⁰⁴ In his usual learned and methodical way, Zunz argued that historically, unlike the medieval church, Judaism never disparaged the translation of its Scripture. As examples, he cited the highly regarded Arabic translation of Saadia, the Spanish translation published in Ferrara in 1553, the two Judeo-German translations of Jekutiel Blitz and Josel Witzenhausen in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and of course that of Mendelssohn. But the need for a new translation was always commensurate with changes in language, taste, and opinion: “Thus what is lacking at this moment when German sermons and German religious education ought to be reintroduced into our synagogues is a completely new Bible translation, in accord with an agreed upon plan, that is inexpensive, compact and readily accessible.” According to the agreement between the two chapters, the translation would be carried out in Hamburg, but revised in Berlin, which would also raise the large sums needed to fund the project. Though the printing of the translation would be done in Hamburg, Berlin would be listed as the official publisher.¹⁰⁵ Even the guidelines for the actual execution of the translation had been agreed upon.¹⁰⁶ Despite some moments of contention, Berlin adopted the proposal.¹⁰⁷ Unfortunately, the lifespan of the Verein was nearing its end and the fruition of the forethought would not become manifest until the late 1830s, when two independent translations of the Hebrew Bible, one done single-handedly by Salomon and the other merely edited by Zunz, came out within a year of each other.¹⁰⁸

The final meeting of the Verein took place on February 1, 1824, with but five members in attendance. Gans reported that thus far the Berlin community leadership had shown no interest in the Verein’s offer to assist in the reform of its worship service. Samuel Schönberg, born in Hungary in 1794 and a member since July 1821,¹⁰⁹ lamented the declining interest of the entire membership in the work of the society. Gans promised to convene an extraordinary meeting to discuss the matter on the following Saturday, though there is no evidence that it ever took place.¹¹⁰ Before Gans left Berlin in April 1825 to convert in Paris in December, he turned over the papers of the Verein to Zunz as requested with a note: “As I regard the Society as de facto finished, so is my presidency. If you are of a different mind, you are free to assume the reins as acting president.”¹¹¹ By March 1826, Gans had secured an appointment in Berlin as an associate professor.¹¹² Not only did Zunz preserve the papers, but he vowed to soldier on alone. In the summer of 1824, he delivered a heartrending eulogy on the Verein in a letter to Wohlwill, who had changed his name from Wolf in 1822 and moved to Hamburg in 1823:

I have come to the point of no longer believing in a Jewish Reformation. We must hurl a stone at this ghost in order to be rid of it…. The Jews and Judaism that we wanted to remake are wholly fragmented, the booty of barbarians, fools, money changers, idiots and communal leaders. Many solstices from now will find this lot still unchanged—fragmented, streaming into the Christian religion of necessity [Nothreligion], without backbone or principle, some still clad in old rags shoved aside by Europe, vegetating and with dry eyes looking for the donkey of the Messiah or some other long-eared animal, some thumbing through paper money, others through popular dictionaries, sometimes rich, sometimes bankrupt, sometimes oppressed, sometimes tolerated. Among German Jews their own scholarship [i.e., traditional learning] has died out, and for European scholarship they have no appreciation because they are untrue to themselves, estranged from the very idea and slaves solely to that which is of benefit to them…. In truth the Verein never existed. Five to ten inspired men found each other and like Moses dared to hope in spreading their spirit. But that was a delusion. What alone survives this flood is the science of Judaism. It lives, even if for hundreds of years it lies fallow. I confess that next to my submission to God’s judgment, this science is my comfort and support. These storms and experiences will not bring me into conflict with myself. Because I realized that I was preaching in the wilderness, I stopped preaching so that I would not be disloyal to my own words. Sapiente sat [a word to the wise is sufficient].¹¹³

* * *

The intensity of Zunz’s engagement with die deutsche Synagoge matched his devotion to the Verein. On May 20, 1820, he began to preach in the modernized worship service in the spacious home of Jacob Herz Beer and continued thereafter every two weeks. Upon receipt of his Prussian citizenship in June 1821, Zunz succeeded two months later in gaining from the synagogue’s directors an official appointment as its Prediger (preacher). Thus in a letter dated August 31, 1821, from Altona, he could proudly inform Adelheid that after their marriage, she would be addressed as “Frau Predigerin” (madam preacher).¹¹⁴

The importance of that post was that it enjoyed official status. The Prussian government had long loathed private religious services for fear of diminished control, and when the community’s existing Heidereutergasse building required renovation to accommodate a growing membership, the Beer Temple became one of three temporarily sanctioned sites for services.¹¹⁵ The German nomenclature for the innovation expressed the underlying discontent with the incumbent traditional establishment. Indeed in terms of education, function, and authority, the Prediger posed a radical alternative to the religious leadership of the traditional yeshiva-trained rabbi. Until then the usual setting for such breakaway services had been in schools founded by maskilim (enlightened Jews who wrote in Hebrew) since Mendelssohn, which often floundered on the periphery of the organized community.¹¹⁶ At the meeting of the society on July 7, 1822, Gans had proposed that it take the initiative to organize the proliferating preachers throughout Germany into an independent organization in which the Verein would have a nominal presence through two deputies. While Zunz supported the idea, Rubo argued against it on the grounds that the action would violate the warning of the government to stay out of matters religious (Cultus) and that the office of Prediger was still too unstable and ephemeral. An eight-to-three vote approved the proposal, but like many of the Verein’s bright ideas, it died aborning.¹¹⁷ At its next meeting, Gans, on a roll, proposed having Zunz’s scholarly institute vet the candidates applying to preach at the High Holy Day and Passover services of the biannual Leipzig fairs with their aggregate of Jews from all over Europe. That proposal too was approved, along with the amendment that only preachers or men conversant with Hebrew literature be allowed to conduct the evaluations.¹¹⁸

There was good reason for the society to take up the cause, if ever so carefully, for die deutsche Synagoge; worship had much greater resonance than Wissenschaft. In 1820 Zunz had been invited to preach in Leipzig at the dedication of its German worship service on Shmini Atseret. On October 3, at the end of the festival, an elated Zunz wrote Ehrenberg an upbeat report, whose rich details limn the scope and political import of liturgical reform as well as Zunz’s own religious posture. The nascent reform services in Hamburg, where the Verein had its only official branch, inspired the initiative in Leipzig, and the participation of four children from Hamburg who had come specifically for the dedication, highlighted the patrimony. The University of Leipzig accommodated the group with space on its premises. On Simhat Torah Joseph Wolf delivered the sermon, while Zunz led the German parts of the service, read the Torah, and accepted the honor of completing the annual public cycle of Torah reading with the final chapter of Deuteronomy (Hatan Torah). A Jew from Brody later expressed his delight with Zunz’s Torah reading, which Zunz told Ehrenberg he did with grammatical precision but no cantillation. Zunz also related that on Simhat Torah he observed the Hasidim from Shklov at their services auctioning off the recitation of biblical verses while “smoking, yelling, eating and singing like the barbarians in New Zealand.”

But Leipzig did more than nourish his contempt. The infectious promise of liturgical reform to advance the prospects of emancipation stirred his political imagination:

The effect of this never-before-seen celebration is indescribable. You can compare it to a storm, whose whirlwind erupts in one spot and then moves on taking everything with it. Polish Jews, [along with] others either pious, or enlightened, or from abroad, and even Christians, etc.—none were unsatisfied—and word thereof is going out to all parts of Germany with yesterday’s or today’s mail. Both dedicatory sermons will be printed. Thus far those who attended our services came from 30 cities, including Lissa, Brody, Bucharest, Vienna, Munich, Dresden, Elberfeld, Cracow, Cassel, Florence, Amsterdam and Frankfurt on the Main. I hope the institution will last and exert no small influence on Breslau, where a synagogue is now being built. Indeed, a Jew from Fürth intends to gather signatures for a German synagogue…. Aren’t there men in Braunschweig who could advocate the creation of a reformed worship service? Precisely at this moment, we should be collecting signatures in Seesen, Wolfenbüttel, Blankenburg and Gandersheim. In fact, I will argue that we do exactly that so that the German Bundestag might realize just who and how many favor a German synagogue. We should not be deterred by their small number, for I hope their stature will outweigh the number.¹¹⁹

In other words, it was vital that German officialdom be made aware of the religious transformation underway. The German synagogue proved not only that Judaism was rapidly adapting itself to German modes of belief and practice but also that Jews were amply ready to assume the responsibilities of citizenship. Zunz’s Leipzig sermon on “The Call to Proceed” propounded the need to shift away from rabbis to prophets, from law to morality, from external piety to inwardness, and from particularism to universalism. What God demands of us is deeds not words, dignity and decorum rather than wild outbursts, and love of God and our fellow human: “For whenever we have wrought something great or written something beautiful, it was neither passivity nor laziness, neither sensuousness nor selfishness that created it, but rather intellectual energy, rational thought and unlimited trust in God.”¹²⁰ Zunz’s tight-knit sermon displayed that he was no stranger to the genre. His language was measured, his sentences cadenced, and his ideas sharply articulated. The palpable sincerity of his conviction, moreover, animated the whole.

Toward the end of August 1821, Zunz, in need of a break, went with Gans and Rubo to Hamburg, ostensibly on Verein business. The composition of the group prompted Gans to entertain Moser later with the following sardonic quip: “Three Jewish doctors on a journey squeezed into a coach, each with four letters to his name, and not an M.D. among them!”¹²¹ Though Zunz was particularly glum and uncommunicative during the two-day journey, his invigorating month-long stay firmed up his resolve to work for the welfare of German Jewry. Shortly after his arrival and the warm reception accorded him, he shared with Adelheid, still only his fiancée, his excitement at being part of a movement that extended far beyond Berlin:

I am pressed from all sides to preach here at least once. But I have not decided yet…. I am fascinated here by the convergence of the German worship service with matters pertaining to the Jews. Berlin, Breslau, Vienna, Leipzig and southern Germany are all in constant contact with the business life here. And the activity ignited by the god Mercury serves the interests of Jehovah. But the greatest plus is that this place has a few proactive, eager, knowledgeable and determined men, who do not wait till they are pushed, but act on their own with energy. I am firmly convinced that until the present sclerotic and cowardly generation dies out and one born in freedom arises, which will fight for its own salvation, that is for human rights and knowledge, no good will emanate from the Jews themselves. I hope upon my return to Berlin to be active in behalf of the Jews.

At this juncture in his letter, Zunz broke into a romantic mode. The presence of a soul mate imbued him with the confidence to endure the hardships attendant to his mission, even as it impelled him to be forthright: “Do not wonder, my devoted partner [Treueste], that in my letters I touch upon this topic so often. My whole life is a text to this unending subject, although the world has not always known or fathomed it. Here where I am both aroused to new action and feel a sense of satisfaction in conversing with you, I am touched with longing for you and the wish to be worthy of you, so that you might share in the earnestness of my views and strivings. It seems to me that the more fervently I work for the good of my brothers, the deeper I long for you. And even though I am inclined to laugh at this gush of emotion, I still feel that it did me some good.”¹²²

Unfortunately, Zunz’s tenure as one of the two official preachers of the Beer Temple lasted no longer than one year. By September 12, 1822, he had submitted his resignation. But a few months earlier, the temple had been the site of his marriage to Adelheid.¹²³ As his relationship with the temple leadership deteriorated, charges and countercharges filled the air. A special committee of nine members to resolve the differences submitted its report on September 9. Of the four charges against Zunz, the committee found merit in only one, that Zunz had improperly departed from the synagogue at the moment services for Tisha be-Av were about to begin: “Granted that the divine [Gottesgelehrter] should heed his inner conviction, it is expected that he also take into account what the moment calls for.” Obviously at this point in his life, Zunz had discarded the observance of the twenty-five-hour summer fast commemorating the destruction of Jerusalem’s two temples.¹²⁴

In contrast, the committee made short shrift of the charges brought by Zunz—that the leadership of the temple was responsible for its decline, that it had violated Zunz’s right as a preacher, and that after his jeremiad on the grave condition of the temple, the leadership encouraged its disaffected membership to call for his removal, without the courtesy of a hearing. The special committee, however, did not entirely exonerate the leadership. Much of the friction and misunderstanding so rife in this clash could have been avoided if the leadership had taken the time to draft a set of bylaws governing the operation of the temple, and its future welfare demanded that it do so immediately. As for Zunz, the committee instructed him henceforth to abide by the instruction of the temple’s official leadership.¹²⁵

The outcome only exacerbated Zunz’s irascible disposition. After a letter of protest to the special committee on September 11, he submitted his resignation to the temple board the following day.¹²⁶ A few weeks before, Zunz had summarized for his friend Isak Noa Mannheimer, destined to replace him briefly in Berlin and then go on to an illustrious career in Vienna, his own abbreviated misadventure in Berlin:

Since September 1821, I have not given a sermon in which I have not intermingled clear and vague references to the improvement of the Temple. I also personally brought to people’s attention inappropriate practices and opposed their misconstrued and unauthorized liturgical regulations, etc. I drafted for them statutes, suggested [in conjunction with Isaac Levin Auerbach (the other preacher and a founding member of the Verein)] changes in the prayers. Nothing helped. Thus on August 17, I gave a sermon on the downfall of the Temple, which did not spare the board and set forth irreligion, vanity, arrogance and love of money as the reasons for the downfall. In consequence, the board that I had not spared fell into a frenzy. They incited people [who had not been in the Temple at the time], intimidated my friends, worked over the faint-hearted and finally on Tuesday August 20 notified Temple members of a meeting on Sunday August 25 to decide on Dr. Zunz’s attack against the community and the board…. Thus has this wretched Temple confirmed what I said, that it lies in ruins.¹²⁷

By November 22, 1822, Zunz had a contract in hand to publish a selection of his sermons by the 1823 Easter fair in Leipzig. For each quire he was promised one louis-d’or (five talers in gold).¹²⁸ The resulting volume of sixteen sermons gave Zunz the final word in his battle with the temple. More important, it modeled for a genre still in formation the highest religious and literary standards. The “new Jewish synagogue” embodied for Zunz the desperately needed synthesis of Eastern piety and Western culture, by bringing together salient ancient Hebrew prayers and ceremonies with choral singing and edifying German sermons. Nor were sermons in the vernacular anything new; they had already enriched the early synagogues in Italy, Spain, Germany, and Holland: “Only the organ, a few prayers, hymns and ritual modifications are new but also unessential.”¹²⁹ And it was in such a synagogue “that I found a place to proclaim God’s word. My sermons spoke candidly and without one-sided partisan contamination about what Jews are now in need of, particularly here. For virtue and truth are more important than fashion and glamour.”¹³⁰

Zunz tried manfully to address both sides of the deep rift in Berlin Jewry. Only a fair and sensitive joining of the old and new synagogues could engender the harmony to overcome the ravages of the ages. So Zunz dedicated this volume not only to those who heard his sermons but also to a spectrum of those still attached to the old synagogue, to men and women hungry for God’s word, and to young people who had already abandoned God: “And above all I dedicate them to the attention of those few, who, after bringing about the downfall of this synagogue and disdaining the voice of truth and spurred on by evil intentions, brought me with their meanness and madness to the point of giving up my post as preacher, irrespective of income and vanity, so as not to violate my honor, my principles, my conscience and indeed the welfare of the whole. I shall seek other fields in which I will be able to employ my talents unhindered for the good of my coreligionists.”¹³¹

It is abundantly clear that Zunz’s resignation was meant to forestall his dismissal. The presence (and influence?) of Gans on the special committee was not enough to quell the uproar and save his appointment. The breakup surely did not endear the society to the Gemeinde (the official Berlin Jewish community, which sponsored the synagogue) and must have dimmed still further any prospect of an alliance. The episode also made crystal clear how unsuited Zunz was for the emerging post of preacher, one of the few career options available to him. Zunz failed because he was too religious for his congregants. His sermons display not a shred of duplicity. Deep faith and absolute conviction in the truth of his words, regardless of his selective observance of Jewish practice, were what generated the force of his eloquence and the fluency of his delivery. To be sure, Zunz could be impatient and uncompromising, but in the end his lofty religious expectations of an essentially wavering congregation and not any character faults did him in.¹³² In the absence of written rules of governance, Zunz’s zeal blurred the implicit distinction of roles.

Yet the image of Judaism to emerge from his sermons was decidedly biblical rather than rabbinic. Though always tied to the Torah portion of the week or the festival of the moment, the sermon was animated by the spirit of the prophets.¹³³ Its function now was no longer to instruct an observant congregation in the specifics of Jewish observance, but rather to convince one that consisted of many indifferent and estranged Jews that Judaism was a source of universal ethics and personal meaning. Its prophetic patrimony and apocalyptic tone, alas, often slipped into unrelenting rebuke. Still, on occasion, like the prophets of old, Zunz could light up a subject with a memorable simile. In a sermon on the beauty of harmony in the family, Zunz waxed poetic: “The love of family resembles the rays of the sun, which though they break down into seven colors, yet warm and light only when all seven are united as one. A house is bereft of true love if it is present in divided form, if there is love of parents but no love of children or either one goes unreciprocated.”¹³⁴

In Zunz’s presentation and advocacy of Judaism, its essentially legal and exegetical nature is gone. Thus in his sermon commemorating Shavuot and the giving of the Ten Commandments, Zunz spoke only of the first, which serves as their theological preamble. Much of the sermon dwelt on the deleterious consequences of polytheism. Ultimately, our belief in a single, all-encompassing God is not a function of revelation, but knowledge acquired and amassed through human effort. And this Kantian aversion to heteronomy was accentuated in a Passover sermon that expatiated on the nature of freedom. To shun license, freedom must be restricted by law, but only that law which we legislate for ourselves. Implicitly, a law imposed from without lacks moral worth: “The higher freedom, however, will not be conquered through a God-sent savior. It is not a consequence of the criminal court with which God threatens the unjust…. In yourselves, my friends, in yourselves do people become free! Free your will, your word and deed—and then you will be free, even in the clothing of a slave, and you will speak up to monarchs more sharply than monarchs will speak down to you.”¹³⁵

In sum, Zunz was an early master of two new fields, homiletics and scholarship, the pulpit and the lectern, the only one of his generation equally at home in both, even as they rapidly evolved and diverged. With the closing down of the Beer Temple by the government in 1823, the expiration of the Verein in 1824 and the darkening employment horizon, Zunz’s enormous talent, unharnessed and unfocused, cast about for another haven.