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CHAPTER 3

Into the Wilderness

Among Zunz’s papers there is an intriguing list of nineteen pages of Hebrew works compiled by him in December 1823. On its title page he identified it as “a list of Hebrew works read and extensively excerpted by me, some of which I also used and cited in my published writings.” Page 2 consists of some 25 manuscript titles, while pages 3 through 19 list alphabetically another 465 titles of works in print, though often not readily accessible. If five years earlier in Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur Zunz had unveiled a stunning vision of the expanse of medieval Jewish literature for the German academic world, the list of what he had carefully studied by the end of 1823 gives resounding testimony to his resolve to immerse himself in as many of its particulars as possible. Zunz appears to have read whatever came to hand to gain command of the field’s contours, borders, and linguistic features. The dating of the list served notice that Zunz was determined to salvage the tool kit of critical scholarship from the wreckage of the Verein. Haunted by the ephemeral state of his primary sources, Zunz would tirelessly continue to buy manuscripts and rare Hebraica, despite his impecunious circumstances.¹

From a financial standpoint, the next two decades would plague him with bouts of acute insecurity. As of January 1, 1824, Zunz worked at the Haude- und Spenersche Zeitung, the most prestigious of Berlin’s three daily papers, as its political editor.² Given the government’s heavy-handed censorship in the wake of the Karlsbad Decrees of 1819, which advanced the restoration of absolutism throughout the Germanic Confederation after the defeat of Napoleon, the job amounted to little more than briefly chronicling political happenings abroad on the basis of anodyne passages selected and translated from the local press. Toward that end, Zunz would peruse daily two Italian, two English, three French, and eleven German newspapers, coming in at 7:30 in the morning and returning home often not earlier than 1:30 in the afternoon, or a total of thirty-seven to thirty-eight hours a week. By March 15, 1827, Zunz finally secured a written contract that fixed his salary at the annual rate of 900 Reichstaler, while obligating him to appear at work from 8 A.M. to 1 P.M. each day the paper was published. Though its publishers, Johann Karl Spener until 1826 and Samuel Heinrich Spiker thereafter, were both favorably inclined to England and France, much to Zunz’s liking, when the paper turned against the Polish uprising in 1831, Zunz resigned at the end of the year, partly because Jews were in the ranks of the rebels against the harsh czarist regime.³

The tedium of the job may have been numbing, but it indisputably equipped Zunz with an exceptional fund of political knowledge and a keen understanding of the political arena. In the years to come he would repeatedly draw on that wellspring in his efforts on behalf of the emancipation of Prussian Jewry and his deep public involvement in the revolutions of 1848, an agenda fully shared with his wife. Thus when Adelheid wrote Leopold from Hamburg in 1827 about her dismay at the news of the sudden death of George Canning, England’s short-lived liberal Tory prime minister, he responded with a pained outburst: “On my way home I learned of Canning’s death, which utterly shattered me. Few of the people who sit on thrones or nearby have touched me as deeply as this man, and now fate has snatched him away in mid-life, amid a thousand plans and looming wars, while thousands of knaves, monks and rotten judges stuff their fat bellies.”⁴ Zunz was destined to become not only the most politically engaged of all German Jewish Wissenschaft scholars but also the most radical in his political views.⁵

Beyond tedium, the job also sharply curtailed the amount of time and energy available to Zunz for scholarship. Years later he would estimate that over the eight years of his employment, he went through a total of sixty-six thousand individual papers.⁶ As a part-time scholar, Zunz’s focus wavered. In 1825 in the spirit of Wolf and Boeckh, he sketched the outline of an encyclopedic survey of the nascent field of Jewish critical scholarship, divided into four divisions encompassing eighty-six rubrics. Thirty years later he opined that twenty-one of them he actually researched and brought to print himself. Though the project came to naught, he entertained it as late as March 1829, when Heine took him to see a publisher. More lasting, the rubrics lent his research a roadmap that guided his omnivorous consumption of primary sources and provided files to order his findings. One of those rubrics was entitled “anything pertaining to religious services” (zum Gottesdienst Gehöriges) and by August 1829 Zunz had finally decided to write a book on the sermon in the synagogue. Dismissively, he confided in his diary that “one doesn’t get very far with such decisions, though farther than the Bourbons with Polignac” (a sardonic reference to the abbreviated tenure of Jules de Polignac, the prime minister just prior to the July revolution of 1830 of Charles X, the last of the Bourbon house to rule in France).⁷

By September 1825 Zunz was also back in the employ of the board of the Berlin Jewish community, when he agreed to serve as the director of its newly founded, officially sanctioned Jewish communal public school for an annual salary of 360 talers. By November 1826 after ten months of operation, the school could show an enrollment of sixty-nine students in two upper classes and one preparatory class for children ages five to eight or nine. The curriculum for the upper classes included a total of thirty-four and thirty-two class hours per week with six and seven of them respectively devoted to the study of Judaism and Hebrew. The remaining hours were distributed over nine secular subjects designed to ready the youngsters for business, farming, the crafts, or advanced study. Zunz authored not only the curriculum but also a set of fourteen stern rules governing student behavior in class and toward each other.⁸ Thus by 1826 Zunz had secured the kind of community sponsorship for Jewish education that he had failed to achieve in the name of the Verein back in 1823.

But parsimonious funding by the community frustrated Zunz’s short tenure. Despite the construction of a new facility for the boys’ school, the girls’ school never came to fruition. Moreover, the community continued to subvent the Talmud Torah of the Orthodox sector, thereby denying the new boys’ school a potential pool of sorely needed applicants. A severe shortage of staff also forced Zunz to spend his afternoons at the school teaching in the classroom rather than doing administration. When at last in 1829 a merger of the two schools seemed within reach, Orthodox pressure kept the directorship out of Zunz’s hands, whereupon he resigned in September.⁹

What had motivated Zunz to endure this exasperation was not only the need for additional income. A few years earlier when applying to be head of the community school in Königsberg, he had already enunciated forcefully a conception of Jewish education attuned to a radically new age in which the loyalty of the next generation would be an act of personal volition:

Religion, as it ought to be taught, is the foundation of all education—of all ennobling thought and behavior—the mother of all magnanimity of spirit and the guide beyond the grave. Till now among Jews religion is mismanaged by two enemies: (a) by superstition that educates for us bigots, lazybones and ignoramuses and (b) by sophistry that saddles us with hypocrites, egotists, deviants and irreligious people. Unalloyed instruction in religion does not give children over to dry-as-dust history or incomprehensible miracles or antipathy toward Christianity—as the school teachers of that religion everywhere [currently] inoculate children with hatred for Jews with their mother’s milk. It [that unalloyed instruction] does not consist of terrible rote memorization of texts or in scientific proof of superstition. Rather it seeks to excite the spirit of the child for religion through affecting words and even more affecting example, to give them support for the storms of life, to implant the gentle virtue of love in their heart and to endow them with the good fortune which is the lot of anyone who believes in providence.¹⁰

In conjunction with that full-throated articulation, Zunz insisted on the importance of a supportive ambience. The instructor must be an educated, credentialed, and ethical man. The child’s home life must be in consonance with what he learns at school and the family must attend a German synagogue with a reformed Hebrew worship service. While not all children should be expected to master Hebrew, all should at least learn to read it and be able to translate a few select passages. Finally, the ceremony of confirmation that culminates the child’s education must not entail an oath of allegiance. It should be no more than a show of his command of Judaism, a body of knowledge that cannot emanate from an inert catechism, but only from a teacher who embodies what he teaches. Though Orthodox intervention from Berlin torpedoed Zunz’s prospects for an invitation to come to Königsberg, his words again evinced the intensity of his religious commitment. Moreover, the maturity of his holistic view of Jewish education coupled with his three quick forays into the field during the 1820s (Königsberg, the Verein, and Berlin) strongly suggests that he held it to be a calling of a higher priority than the rabbinate.¹¹

With the loss of his income from the Haude- und Spenersche Zeitung at the end of 1831, Zunz’s economic stability unraveled. In May 1832 he was offered the directorship of the Veitel Heine Ephraimsche Lehranstalt in Berlin, an institute set up and endowed in 1774 by Frederick the Great’s court Jew Veitel Heine Ephraim to teach Talmud as sanctioned by tradition. By mid-October the offer was withdrawn and Zunz was left with a meager teaching load of six hours a week of Bible, Hebrew, and German, which from February to May 1833 netted him no more than 50 talers for eighty hours of instruction. Among his students, as Zunz noted in his diary years later, was none other than nineteen-year-old Louis Lewandowski from Wreschen, Poland, who would in due time become Berlin’s renowned composer of synagogue music and choir director. Some forty-two years later, Zunz would be invited to grace the celebration of Lewandowski’s twenty-fifth anniversary in office with a stirring address on the role of music in religion and the synagogue.¹²

In mid-October, with the top job at the Lehranstalt going to someone else, Zunz decided to look for a job as a bookkeeper, and a month later he turned to his close friend in Hamburg, Meyer Isler, the nephew of his beloved mentor, Samuel Meyer Ehrenberg, who had himself a half-year before secured a job in the city’s public library.¹³ Forty years later in 1872 Isler would rise to the helm of the institution, an emblem of the city’s long-standing liberalism.¹⁴ In Berlin Zunz suffered from a twofold deprivation: no job and few friends. He asked Isler to look around for him in Hamburg. He would be ready to serve as someone’s personal secretary, provided the job did not rob him of all free time. He had also recruited his new friend Gabriel Riesser, who lived in Hamburg, to keep his eyes open: “Given the unlikelihood that anything is going to come my way here where I live, Berlin is becoming steadily more repugnant to me…. [And] indeed you are well aware of my preference for Hamburg.”¹⁵

Zunz reiterated his plea six months later more urgently to his good friend Solomon Ludwig Steinheim in Altona, a physician with a theological bent and poetic spark, in a letter dated July 21, 1833. Perhaps Steinheim could find or create something for him as a tutor or even a bookkeeper. As long as the job would pay him 1,500 marks (500 talers) and leave him time for research, he would grab it: “Here everything leaves me cold and I cannot hold out much longer. My small sum of money is running out and no rich Jew gives a damn [unterstützt] about scholarship. I had never imagined that a man who had learned a bit would have such a hard time finding [next word illegible] respect. What’s more, I don’t need much. Please don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. Would my presence in Altona be advantageous to me?”¹⁶

Zunz’s dire straits compelled him to leave no stone unturned and in the fall of 1833 he allowed his name to be submitted for a rabbinic post in Darmstadt. Among the laudatory letters of recommendation was one by Gans, whose conversion had garnered him the academic trophy that eluded Zunz: “There is no one in Europe who with comparable knowledge has penetrated so deeply into [Jewish and rabbinic literature]. If the views regarding the appointment of Jews were not so superficial and mean-spirited, as they generally are, Dr. Zunz would long ago have found recompense for his selfless efforts in a university career. Alongside this scholarly equipment, Dr. Zunz commands a great gift for eloquence, which he amply displayed in his post as preacher here [in Berlin] and which is confirmed by his printed collection of sermons.”¹⁷ The tribute attests a friendship still intact as well as an act of courage to speak the unvarnished truth. To allay the traditionalists in Darmstadt, Zunz even secured a certificate of rabbinic ordination from the aged Aron Chorin in Arad, the inveterate Hungarian sage of the first generation of reformers in central Europe.¹⁸

But all to no avail. The growing resistance of the traditionalists in both Darmstadt and Berlin persuaded Zunz to quash his candidacy. On June 15, 1834, he wrote Joseph Johlson, the Frankfurt am Main educator, who had been the first to encourage him to apply: “I have withdrawn, lost all desire for Jewish employment. Hopefully here [in Berlin] I will find enough to live on (in Hebrew); whatever time is left over will be devoted to scholarship. I would love to take a research trip to Paris and Oxford, but what Jewish capitalist would give money for that! Were I a horse or a singer or an unscrupulous clown [Heuchler] …” (continuation omitted by Maybaum).¹⁹

Zunz’s timely withdrawal averted a painful mishap. That was not the case with the new Reform Association in Prague, which in January 1835 began courting him to become its first Prediger. Deteriorating conditions induced him to elicit a three-year offer following a successful site visit in May that met all his demands. The Zunzes left Berlin on September 10 bitter that no counter offer had been forthcoming from some local quarter, though gratified by the sixty-three people who had come to say good-by.²⁰ In Prague Zunz was greeted by the heavy hand of the Hapsburg censor, whom he had to assure that the three cartons of books he was bringing were his property and to agree that the Hebrew works stipulated on a short list would never be sold, lent, or even leave his hands.²¹ Though still one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe with some ten thousand Jews,²² Prague quickly disaffected Zunz. By October 25 he wrote Steinheim that he was suffering from a want of science, people, books, newspapers, and freedom and sought to leave.²³ And on November 6, he turned to a bureaucrat in Berlin whom he had befriended with a request to facilitate his return: “I have been here 50 days and it feels like 50 years. Everything seems to me old, decrepit and indifferent. Only my friends and relationships in Berlin, my lively independence, even though darkened at times by trouble … [what follows omitted by Maybaum]. Even when I preach, it is humanity that excites me, not Prague. Recalling your words to me when I left that if I ever needed help, I now come to you. For the moment, let’s keep it a secret. My intention is to return, for which I need permission (from the government) and sustenance…. I seek a post or provisional appointment of 4[00] to 600 taler, that would allow me some free time.”²⁴

Ehrenberg did not take kindly to Zunz’s abrupt change of plans and on December 12, 1835, countered by letter with a dose of common sense. First impressions should not be given undue weight. Soon enough you will be in the parsonage promised with your own kitchen, making new friends. Time for research and the books needed to do it will also eventually materialize. Above all, Ehrenberg reminded Zunz that he had gained economic security and urged him to fulfill his three-year contract: “You must erase Berlin from your thoughts like a departed friend, otherwise life will bring you no joy.” There is no work for you on the horizon in Berlin.²⁵

Zunz did not rush to answer and by the time he did on May 1, 1836, his spirits had rebounded. Adelheid would be back in Berlin by June (where serendipitously the first to greet her would be Gans)²⁶ with Leopold to follow in August. His successor, Zunz reported, would be Michael Sachs, who would occupy the post until 1844, before coming to Berlin as its associate rabbi and preacher. The heart of the letter, though, gave vent to his disenchantment with the caliber of Jewish lay leadership: “As for me, I am cured of all rabbinic work, etc. While I would be pleased to see men of noble disposition and solid education at the head of Jewish religious life, the [current] Jewish aristocracy [kezinim—the high and mighty] is a crude rabble bereft of ideas and power. Indeed, I have put these moneybags [Geldseelen] entirely out of mind, and recognize only those who combine scholarship and religion as the aristocracy from which holiness can emanate. Neither Maimonides nor Mendelssohn were kezinim.”²⁷

Again Ehrenberg counseled moderation. In Zunz’s heated critique of the high and mighty, he sensed a disturbing undertone of misanthropy. They alone are not entirely to blame for the sorry state of affairs. The rabbis who need to work with them share some responsibility: “Just as I cannot tolerate rabbis who unduly curry favor with them [the kezinim] or bow and grovel before them, suffering gladly whatever they might do, I cannot tolerate rabbis who do not respect them and, so to speak, throw out the baby with the bath water. They [the kezinim] are a necessary evil on earth that we must suffer and endure, as God does. Only those who bear evil patiently can find therein a measure of comfort.”²⁸

The Prague trauma reconciled Zunz to Berlin, where he would live ever after. Realizing his error, Zunz chose to return without a job in hand or the prospect of one, to the astonishment of his friends, but not before taking a cure at the spa in Franzenbad on the way back to calm his frayed nerves, a pleasant expense in which he otherwise never indulged.²⁹ This time, however, small assignments began to come his way from men of means who sensed the added value that Zunz brought to Berlin. Even before he arrived back, David Jacob Riess, a wealthy jewelry merchant, a former member of the short-lived Verein, and an elder of the Gemeinde board, contracted him in July 1836 to visit him weekly for 300 talers a year.³⁰ The following month the board of the community commissioned Zunz to compose a brief rebutting the Prussian decree of 1828 forbidding Jews to take Christian forenames. In just over two months, Zunz submitted a masterpiece of erudition showing the historical travesty of the government’s action. Under the title Namen der Juden, it appeared in December 1836 and earned Zunz an honorarium of 100 talers. By March 1841 the government softened its original ordinance by restricting it to forenames intimately associated with the Christian faith (on the tract itself, more anon).³¹

Most auspicious for Zunz was the election of Moritz Veit in 1839 as head of the governing body of the organized Jewish community.³² A publisher by profession and admirer and close friend of Sachs, Veit understood and appreciated Zunz fully. While Zunz’s masterpiece on midrash (to which we shall return) had inspired him to undertake the study of the underlying rabbinic texts with a learned tutor, Veit had prevailed on Zunz and a cohort of three others in 1836 to do a new translation of the Hebrew Bible into German. With Zunz as editor, Sachs and Heymann Arnheim did the lion’s share of the translating. From the outset, Veit was fully engaged to ensure that the final product would be popular as well as critical. In 1838 his company published it in a single compact volume.³³

Like Zunz, Veit was dismayed at the derelict condition of Jewish education in Berlin and quickly conceptualized a bold and comprehensive reorganization at the pinnacle of which would sit a modern teachers’ seminary with a national mission. Zunz’s name as director came to mind immediately with the subject being broached as early as July 1837.³⁴ Nevertheless, several years elapsed before the city school board approved his appointment and permitted the dismantling of the outdated but long-standing yeshiva (jüdisches Seminar—Talmud Tora zu Berlin), which dispensed primarily instruction in Talmud to poor adolescents from Posen.³⁵ During that interminable delay, Zunz had occasion to unburden himself to his former professor of Bible, Wilhelm de Wette. At the time Zunz made his preliminary excursion to Prague, de Wette had visited Berlin from Basel, where he had taken refuge in the university after being forced out of Berlin for his political and academic liberalism. Since de Wette’s departure in 1819 the two had had no contact, yet Zunz nurtured a sense of kinship with a fellow victim of Prussian autocracy to whom he was also intellectually indebted. The letter enabled Zunz to depict for de Wette his current predicament without asking of him anything more than a sympathetic ear:

If I take the liberty of writing to you, my esteemed teacher, I do so on the presumption that my name will at least remind you of the young student who in 1816–19 had the good fortune to hear your lectures and benefit from conversation with you. I missed seeing you again during your trip in 1835 to north Germany, of which I heard while in Prague, and by my return at the end of May, you had left. Still I had the satisfaction of hearing from you through a few friends with whom you had spoken. Though our external relationship was ephemeral, the internal one was everlasting. For I thank you for the introduction [Einsicht] to biblical criticism and along with F. A. Wolf what I in fact possess of a critical perspective. If I have not fully perfected myself in Wissenschaft des Judentums, which is the content of my life, it is the adversities with which a Jewish scholar has to contend that are responsible. He needs to do so much just to survive, rarely has the funds to travel and lacks an audience to animate him. How great is the need to create a chair for Jewish literature at our universities. Ignorance, prejudice and injustice prevail in everything that pertains to the social and historical factors regarding Jews. Neither scholarship nor the general welfare nor harmony nor morality benefit when Jewish students are taught with such disdain and condescension, devoid of all love. Thus were the Roman plebians, the first Christians, the oppressed Swiss and others abused, and yet they triumphed. Likewise the fate of the Jews moves along a steady ascent, even though I won’t live to see it here in Germany.³⁶

De Wette, who cited Zunz’s findings on the authorship and scope of the biblical books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles in his own work,³⁷ must have answered this poignant sample of Zunz’s epistolary elegance and fearless candor, though the evidence is lacking. The letter also shows the comfort Zunz must have garnered in linking his own fate to a cause greater than his own.

Some six months later in a brief drafted by Zunz and submitted to the city school board to accelerate its compliance, whose cogency and concision pleased Veit no end,³⁸ he described the widespread erosion in the study of Talmud and made the case for professionalizing the training of Jewish educators:

The study of Talmud has long ceased to be in Italy, France, England, Germany and to a great extent in Poland the staple of their schools, especially the public ones [des Volkes]. Only prospective rabbis and learned men and an occasional pietist immerse themselves in Talmud. For all the others it is remote. Even those who studied it as young boys abandon it. Talmudic texts have no market. Jewish educators in Germany find jobs not because of talmudic expertise but because of solid knowledge and appropriate education. The raw Talmudist goes hungry. In truth, it is these factors which have pushed Talmud Torahs onto the track of seminaries, and the one in Berlin suffers its deplorable existence because it is unaware of what is taking place.³⁹

At last on January 4, 1840, the city school board approved Zunz’s curriculum for the seminary with instruction due to begin on April 27. Zunz’s annual salary was set at 500 talers plus another 120 for housing.⁴⁰ At the celebratory opening on November 18, Zunz delivered the keynote address and as he so often did at these public events, he rose above the moment to limn the big picture in a few choice words. The essential purpose of a modern teachers’ seminary was to sustain Jewish unity and survival by strengthening an inchoate sense of belonging to an ancient dispersed people: “How can this sense acquire a language if it does not imbue our consciousness, our property [Besitz], our love. That we are an Israelite collective [Gesammtheit], wish to be and must be, that everyone of us grow up and mature in this awareness, for this we need bearers of this knowledge, institutions of the spirit to preserve the holy fire, which turn single embers of coal into a common glow and the hard metal of the heart into a flowing stream.”⁴¹ After an excruciating decade of insecurity and humiliation, Zunz had finally reached a safe haven that could nourish his soul as well as his body.

* * *

Zunz’s vast store of knowledge, razor-sharp mind, and trenchant prose made him the spokesman of choice for Judaism in times of crisis and celebration. The role generated many a memorable occasional paper. An early instance was his address at the commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Moses Mendelssohn on September 10, 1829, at which 120 Berlin notables gathered at the Society of Friends, a religiously liberal fraternal organization founded in 1792, to be edified by the words of Jost, Moser, and Zunz. With a locus outside the synagogue on a day other than Mendelssohn’s Yahrzeit (the customary day of religious commemoration), the event bespoke a nascent rite of German Jewry’s emerging civil religion. Similar commemorations took place in five other cities across Germany, culminating in the formation in each one of them of a local Mendelssohn organization to advance the integration of its youth.⁴²

For his part, Zunz accentuated the undiminished influence of Mendelssohn’s singular career. His character, indifference to fame, embrace of a simple life, calm in the face of adversity, loyalty to his people, and reconciliation of faith and reason were virtues that continue to elicit admiration. Abreast others, he stood at the dawn of German literature, extracting wisdom from heaven and implanting it in the hearts of many of his countrymen. As expected, Zunz celebrated Mendelssohn’s translation of the Torah with its run of 750 copies and subsequent reprints, which eventually effected “the banishment of eastern barbarism,” by which Zunz meant the eradication of Yiddish (Judendeutsch) and an end to the subordination of German synagogues and schools to the deficient and uncouth products of Polish yeshivot. It was German, Zunz proudly declared, that now reverberated in the public and private lives of German Jews. And yet in a semblance of noteworthy balance, Zunz also emphasized the literary quality of Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings, whose clarity of thought, deep knowledge, and uncluttered language matched his German, making him the most important Hebraist of his century. In both languages Mendelssohn taught without presumption and loved without wounding, and even when content became dated, the beauty of expression and nobility of thought remained. Though Mendelssohn was a man of his time, Zunz elevated him with his tribute to a cultural icon.⁴³

The gravity of an attack against Judaism a year later drew from Zunz a quick and forceful response. In 1830 Luigi Chiarini, an Italian-born and educated priest and professor of Oriental and Semitic languages at the University of Warsaw, published a two-volume diatribe against the Talmud in French called Théorie du Judaïsme. Chiarini was a key member of a Christian committee founded in Warsaw in 1825 to overcome Jewish resistance to assimilation, for which purpose it immediately set up a rabbinical school with a five-year program to train teachers and rabbis for the religious institutions of the Jewish community. According to Zunz, in 1828 Warsaw’s Jewish population of 30,446 supported 215 Talmud-Schulen (yeshivot) with an enrollment of 2,482 young men, four elementary schools with another 298 boys, and a single girls’ school of 60–80 pupils. The intent of this Old Testament Believers’ Committee was to wean the young from a Judaism defined by the Talmud, and toward that end it commissioned Chiarini to translate the Babylonian Talmud into French. In 1829 the Russian government endorsed the effort with a subvention of 1,200 talers.⁴⁴ Chiarini’s nearly eight-hundred-page Théorie du Judaïsme was to serve as the translation’s introduction, though in fact by laying out the road map for reforming Judaism all over Europe, it rendered the translation redundant.⁴⁵

Zunz recognized the work’s implicit threat to move the Talmud back again to center stage in the unending debate over emancipation. The want of acculturation among Jews politically, economically, and culturally derived solely from their religion, which rested squarely on the Talmud. The need for its translation, Chiarini argued, was that without it Christians would never fully grasp the warped and deformed nature of Judaism. Despite Eisenmenger’s achievement, it remained unrevealed.⁴⁶ In brief, Chiarini contended in great detail that talmudic Judaism was a radical departure from the pristine religion of the ancient Israelites that could be reversed only by a relevant Mosaism. Yet for Zunz to take him on was a delicate matter, because, as we have seen, the Talmud discomforted him also, especially in its contemporary iteration.

Rather than refute the plethora of Chiarini’s claims, Zunz zeroed in on the reliability of his underlying evidence. With cold precision, he uncovered that of the one hundred passages from the Talmud and rabbinic literature cited by Chiarini, some eighty of them were lifted directly from Eisenmenger with the rest taken from still other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century secondary sources. Hence, either the Talmud was already sufficiently revealed by the Christian humanists or Chiarini lacked the competence to do it.⁴⁷

But then Zunz felt compelled to declare what the Talmud actually was not dogmatically but historically: “The Talmud is not the source but only a monument of Judaism, which, to be sure, as the oldest is recognized and revered, though many components of Judaism (customs, institutions and ideas) were modified by the rabbis without detracting from its veneration. Thus in the Talmud—as in the Pentateuch and the Mishna—two contradictory things come together: authority and nonauthority. A further development and modification of Judaism is evident from Jewish sources since the 7th century, from Jewish praxis and from the nature of Jews in different countries.”⁴⁸ Zunz appended as well a list of six features of the talmudic dialectic that made it clear that not everything to be found therein was meant to be binding.⁴⁹ In short, a historical perspective effected a momentous shift away from a normative text to a testament teeming with remnants of Jewish life in antiquity. Monuments are not sources of authority, but generators of reverence rooted in memory. Without fanfare, Zunz had historicized the Talmud by transmuting it from a repository of eternal verities and injunctions into a legacy of human wisdom and experience. The later development of Judaism no less than the talmudic text itself contravened the imputed absolute authority of the Talmud.⁵⁰

As for a translation of the Talmud, a question that would roil German Jewry for the rest of the century, Zunz was not averse to the idea.⁵¹ The enterprise had to be free of extraneous tendencies and produce a faithful and comprehensible rendition. Though attuned to possible misuse by Germans unfriendly to Jews, Zunz displayed as yet no anxiety about losing control of a literature utterly foreign to Western sensibilities.⁵²

Zunz published his learned tract with the publishing house of the Berlin paper at which he worked, the reason most likely for its quick appearance. At the time, Jost’s response to Chiarini was still in press. The interval allowed him in the foreword to express his embarrassment. Neither had been aware of the other’s intention. Clearly, living in the same city was not enough to restore a friendship that had frayed (on which more anon). Jost praised Zunz’s effort guardedly as “very compressed but still rich in content.”⁵³ To be sure, they covered much the same ground, though Jost may have wanted to distance himself from Chiarini because he overtly held the first six volumes of Jost’s Geschichte der Israeliten in high regard. In a cryptic comment in his own essay, Zunz highlighted the problematic nature of the linkage: “Indeed the author [Chiarini] seems to know of Judaism, whose theory he propounds, only from hostile [fremden] reports, especially those by a nineteenth-century scholar full of unbelievable animosity toward all of rabbinic literature.”⁵⁴ The allusion certainly accords with the tenor and substance of Jost’s early volumes (see above) and delivers a harsh, if veiled rebuke. Without admitting guilt, Jost had to clear his name.

Like Zunz, Jost harbored no reservations about a full translation of the Talmud. Provided it abided by scholarly standards, it could enrich the study of a broad swath of the ancient world by “yielding interesting disclosures about the intellectual character, the knowledge base and political and religious details of Jews as well as of the Persian empire in the early Christian centuries, strengthening our linguistic competence and finding as yet undetected historical connections.”⁵⁵ For Jost the potential universal benefit offset what in the wrong hands might be turned into a Jewish liability. Irrespective of these early weighty endorsements, unremitting assaults on the Talmud to come would forge a consensus among German Jews not to provide still further grist for the toxic mill of anti-Semites by translating the Talmud in full.⁵⁶

While other of Zunz’s occasional pieces were to be written at the behest of communal leadership, there is no evidence that his refutation of Chiarini was officially solicited. The duplicity, intent, and backers of the tract spurred Zunz to action. Gabriel Riesser, a young Hamburg lawyer, had just burst onto the German scene with a rousing plea for equal rights for Jews. Upon reading it, Zunz shared his appreciation with his Hamburg friend Isler: “I am pleased by Dr. Riesser’s book as I am with every new tract written with sincerity.” Zunz’s tract belonged to the same genre, though in his letter to Isler his mood quickly turned sour and acerbic: “It is a veritable misfortune to write for Jews. Rich Jews take no note of it. Learned [i.e., traditional] Jews can’t read it and Jewish idiots review it.”⁵⁷

In Riesser Zunz found a fellow warrior, who like himself spurned the baptismal font to advance his career. In his opening salvo, Riesser indicted the tortuous system of disabilities by which German governments coerced young Jews to convert. Resorting to strength in numbers, Riesser called on Jews to form local clubs across Germany to lobby their governments and to avow personally not to baptize their children.⁵⁸ In his next letter to Isler on April 28, 1831, Zunz applauded the strategy and sought more specific information on the club Riesser had formed in Hamburg. In a postscript, Adelheid chided Isler for taking her to be a dunce in that he had depicted Riesser so pedantically for her: “Yet it was all right and I thank you for it, since … 1000 voices have already sung his praises to me. Zunz and I read his book together and enjoyed greatly the incisiveness of his language and the truth it bore. I would like to get to know him better.”⁵⁹

By July Isler could report little progress. In Hamburg Riesser alone was engaged, but on too many fronts. His hasty diversion to battle with a liberal theologian from Heidelberg, who continued to declaim the non-German national character of the Jews, had delayed the club to move beyond talking, as did the appearance of Riesser’s announced paper Der Jude.⁶⁰ In his animated response, Zunz condemned the medieval bigotry of Hanseatic cities like Hamburg. Their autonomy was the source of their illiberalism: “Only the large, uplifting life of a state can promote freedom.” Zunz did not make light of conversation. It would arouse others and eventually lead to action. However, Reisser should not squander his time by answering every “barking dog.” Above all, Zunz was excited by the prospect of Reisser’s paper and layed out at great length the steps it would take to succeed, obviously drawing on his own experience in journalism. Zunz even promised to write for Riesser as soon as he could make time: “Still I must caution that an enterprise like this demands patience, endurance, vision, help, money and luck.”⁶¹

When Riesser spent time in Berlin in 1832, he and Zunz drew closer. Riesser visited often and Zunz bemoaned his departure as he wrote Isler: “For Berlin, I was often together with Riesser, often in our home. Now that he is leaving, the old emptiness returns. Those here become ever more estranged from me. My friends from the days of the Verein, if still alive, have either left Berlin or Judaism. I have no one here to work with me on my agenda. I am eager to see how long this can go on.”⁶² Thus the two men had bonded politically, ethically, and strategically, despite deep religious differences.⁶³ Isler’s quick and laudatory review of Zunz’s Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden just after it came out in Riesser’s paper exhibited for all to see the concord and collaboration among the three men. In light of the medieval creativity that Zunz had unfurled, Isler hoped that the fixated focus on the Talmud by the opponents of equal rights for Jews would finally be dislodged.⁶⁴

For Zunz a defense of Judaism was always an occasion to advance the frontiers of Jewish scholarship. His lofty sense of calling would not allow a momentary need to compromise his long-term objective. His aforementioned monograph on Jewish names attests his consistent quest for balance. As early as July 1834, his diary shows an entry that indicates that he was at work on the subject, as do his frequent requests for names of Jewish men and women in medieval France and Germany of Heimann Michael in Hamburg, who placed his friendship, private collection of Hebraica, and deep Jewish learning at Zunz’s disposal.⁶⁵ When the elders of the community officially invited Zunz on August 5, 1836, to submit a brief contesting the constraints imposed on Jewish parents in naming their children, they relied on their knowledge of his prior interest. Zunz’s swift compliance would surely have been unlikely without his accumulated store of data.⁶⁶

A keen eye for social history drives the sweep and specificity of Zunz’s tract. Names encoded the places in which Jews lived and the influence of their surroundings. Organized chronologically and geographically, the essay was the study of a barometer of assimilation over two millennia. In the welter of data, Zunz detected recurring patterns and relationships. Jews never restricted themselves to biblical names nor were their choices ever curbed by law. Wherever they lived, they availed themselves of names current in the local language, though often when in transition combining them with older biblical names. “For language, like sunlight,” he argued, “is a common good, unsuited for distinctions of castes and sects.”⁶⁷ Zunz was no less attentive to the names of women in different periods. While they did not need liturgical names, it became the custom in the Middle Ages to give male children theirs at circumcision.⁶⁸ For both, however, irrespective of time and place, he strove to understand the linguistic factors at play in name formation, at the end of which he unequivocally asserted that there is no Christian language nor, for that matter, a Muslim, monotheistic, or Lutheran one: “Names then belong always to a people and a language, never to a church or a dogma or to a political or religious point of view. In short, there are no Christian names.”⁶⁹

It did not take long for a few men of discernment to recognize that Zunz had authored a work of lasting value. A few days after publication, Prussia’s renowned explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt complimented Zunz with an accolade drawn from his own endeavors: “Never has this subject, so intimately tied to the fate of this ancient tribe, been treated with such thoroughness and historical contextualization. In heaven’s vault the names of the stars teach us which nation in Spain pioneered the study of astronomy. The geographical names in North America attest the origins of the settlers. In the forenames of the Hebrews we can read the wanderings of this hounded people.”⁷⁰ One week later Veit thanked Zunz less poetically, but with equal fervor:

[Your book] refreshes like every ripe fruit of intellect and erudition. You have shown again that the most penetrating study of details does not suppress the unimpeded view of the whole, the warm feeling and historical sympathy for the circumstances and dispositions of the past and present, but rather grounds and strengthens them. In truth, it is high time that in this field of literature, those men come forward as leaders who in their intellectual training can actually be regarded as exemplary authorities. Neither shallow glibness nor gross pedantry can gain the kind of success for which you aimed and achieved…. The tone and temper in which you have written has given Jews an enormous amount of satisfaction. In the pamphlets of revenge [nekomoh-Büchelchen] of our nation your book must forever remain marked in red. Amen.⁷¹

These and other voices of appreciation must have momentarily assured Zunz that he had not labored in vain.

What set Veit apart from his lay peers is that he was deeply engaged with Judaism and its sacred texts. He admired the ability of Sachs to mediate the wisdom, beauty, and power of midrash through the eloquence and conviction of his sermons. He scolded Sachs, who always spoke freely and often spontaneously, for not taking the trouble to write down the best of his often inspiring sermons on Saturday evening after the conclusion of the Sabbath.⁷² Veit was eager to publish such a collection to extend Sachs’s influence beyond Prague. In 1837 Veit committed himself to studying midrashic texts for four hours a week in the original with Salomon Plessner, a traditional scholar whose piety matched his learning. While Veit was thrilled with his progress at gaining an understanding of the creative nature and abundant meaning of midrash, he was increasingly captivated by the ascetic and mystical intensity of his teacher, who despised all outward show and material desire.⁷³ During his tenure at the helm of the Berlin community, Veit quickly emerged as a compelling force for Jewish education, communal reorganization, Jewish scholarship, and a modern yet traditional rabbinate.

Not only did Veit initiate the new Bible translation edited by Zunz, but his firm published three separate editions by 1855.⁷⁴ To be sure, Zunz translated only the final two books of Chronicles, but his editorial work and reputation made the Zunz Bible, as it became known, the most often printed and widely appreciated of all the many German-Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible produced between 1783 and 1937. As late as 1934, Harry Torczyner, the editor of the last of these translations noteworthily sponsored by the Jewish community of Berlin and a distinguished scholar of Semitics, saw fit in his introduction to invoke the achievement of Zunz as still an inspiring milestone: “In our desire [to be as faithful to the Hebrew text as possible] we feel a special kinship to the Bible translation put out by Leopold Zunz a century ago. Despite what in content and form might be improved upon today, its unpretentious character still constitutes for our Bible an invaluable signpost.”⁷⁵

As an added bonus, Zunz’s meticulously worked out chronological appendix imbued the lives and events recounted in Scripture with a semblance of historical veracity. Spread over fourteen pages, the table tabulated its data in two parallel columns according to the Jewish (anno mundi) and Christian (anno domini) calendars from creation to 330 BCE, when Alexander of Macedonia humbled the Persian Empire. In a third parallel column, Zunz succinctly mentioned the significance of each date. For example, in the signage for the year 330 BCE, Zunz enclosed in parentheses “duration 208 years,” signaling his rejection of the erroneous rabbinic calculation of only thirty-four years for the time in which Jews had allegedly lived under Persian rule.⁷⁶

The discrepancy was at the heart of the Renaissance debate between Azariah de’ Rossi in Italy and David Gans in Prague at the short-lived dawn of critical scholarship in the Jewish world. In his pathbreaking effort to reconcile the indigenous sources of Jewish tradition with the avalanche of outside sources brought forth by the Renaissance, de’ Rossi in his Me’or Enayim (The Light of the Eyes) in 1573, among other things, vigorously disputed the validity of the Jewish creation calendar, with its most indefensible link being the reduction of Persian rule from Cyrus to Alexander to but thirty-four years.⁷⁷ Notwithstanding, in 1592 David Gans, no less conversant with the legacy of the Renaissance, published his chronicle Zemah David (The Sprout of David) in which he reaffirmed the standing of dogmatic history and rejected any intermingling of Jewish and general history. Since the sources of Jewish history were revealed texts, they were far more reliable than the secular sources of general history.⁷⁸ In consequence, Gans’s chronicle is binary, sacred and secular: in the first part on the basis of the creation calendar, he recounted year by year a truncated version of Jewish history, drawing only on Hebrew and Aramaic texts, while in the second he constructed an entertaining narrative of general history, culminating in the history of Bohemia. Often the availability of non-Hebraic sources permitted Gans to supplement his sparse account of Jewish turning points such as the Maccabean revolt, the translation of the Septuagint, and the uprisings against Rome in part 2. The strategy of separate and unequal allowed Gans to salvage the inviolability of the thirty-four-year calculation for the Persian period.⁷⁹ On the other hand, it must be recognized that the ample attention paid to secular history potentially diminished the insularity of dogmatic history.

It is not surprising that Zunz would side firmly with de’ Rossi on this issue and many others. Indeed, just three years after the publication of the Veit Bible, Zunz published an encyclopedic Hebrew essay in Kerem Chemed on de’ Rossi’s tome and times, though not a deep analysis of its contents. Zunz’s canvas teemed with details on the literary history of Italian Jewry, which he justified with his operative principle that the mastery of the microcosm should precede any pronouncements about the macrocosm. He hailed de’ Rossi as a modern who understood that scholarship alone could distinguish between what is true and false.⁸⁰ And he disseminated his research in a Hebrew journal, which ironically came out in Prague where Gans had lived, in order to win a beachhead in eastern Europe for the cause of critical scholarship.

Yet Zunz was not without a sentimental attachment to Gans. Zemah David had given Zunz his first taste of history, when he stumbled upon it in the Samson Free School in the forlorn days before the arrival of Ehrenberg.⁸¹ How are we to explain that Zunz began his biblical calendar with Adam and Eve and their sons Cain and Abel and that his first recorded date was the birth of their later son Seth in the year 130 after creation? Gans opened his chronicle with the identical date; in fact, Zunz followed his chronology without deviation down to the death of Joseph in 2309 BCE, or more than two-thirds of the time span he would cover.⁸² That overlap is a significant nod to Gans. Not wishing to leave a chronological vacuum for the popular audience for which the Veit Bible was intended, Zunz set aside his critical stance and took refuge in the company of an old friend.

He may also have learned from Gans the more vital lesson of context. If history is an endless game of chess, dates make up its chessboard. The beginning of historical knowledge is the accurate dating of its pieces. Among Zunz’s papers is an astonishing forty-page document consisting of a handwritten chronicle composed by him that enumerates in order the years from 529 to 1820 with the sporadic omission of some. Alongside each year, Zunz recorded a noteworthy historical datum or several, the overwhelming number of which came from general history. For example, for 1436 Zunz noted “first printing press,” for 1492 “the discovery of America” and “Jews expelled from Spain,” for 1517 “Luther’s Reformation,” for 1776 “abolition of torture in Austria,” and “Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith),” for 1806 “abolition of slavery in Great Britain,” for 1812 “the Jews of Prussia gain citizenship,” and for 1815 “a German worship service for Jews in Berlin.” Toward the latter half of the eighteenth century, the data become more numerous. The clean state of the document (with an occasional insertion) suggests that it may point to a project Zunz undertook during his university years.⁸³ The amount of information packed into the chronicle bespeaks a zeal to master the landscape of general history, while the chronological grid underlines the supreme importance of dating, two pursuits that would distinguish his future career as a Jewish historian. But they were also values that already found expression in the secular part of Gans’s 1592 chronicle and which might have left an indelible imprint on the fertile mind of a callow adolescent.

Zunz’s deepening relationship with Veit prompted him to submit to Veit in the year the Bible translation came out a proposal to publish a chrestomathy of rabbinic passages to be selected, translated, and annotated by him. The idea may have recommended itself to Zunz as a plausible follow-up to his overview of midrashic literature of 1832 (Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, on which more anon), which related largely to the externals of the corpus, or perhaps as a correction of the one-sided treatment inflicted on rabbinic literature by Jost. The format of an anthology was a common vehicle of European scholarship to introduce ancient languages and literature to uninformed scholars and educated laity alike. After due consideration, however, Veit turned it down. In a letter of November 27, 1838, Veit acknowledged that there was an audience for such a work and that Zunz’s editorship would probably enlarge it somewhat. Yet it was still too small to cover the costs, let alone reward Zunz with a reasonable return for his effort. Instead, Veit urged him to compose a historical sketch of Jewish literature on the basis of his biographical entries in the Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon (discussed later), which might then be followed up with his rabbinic chrestomathy.⁸⁴

The exchange did not remain barren, for in 1840 Veit did publish an exquisite anthology of Hebrew writings from the Mishna to the nineteenth century. Though published anonymously under the title Auswahl historischer Stücke aus hebräischen Schriftstellern (A Selection of Historical Pieces by Hebrew Writers), the work betrayed the hand of a careful and competent editor. Its thirty-five selections provided a vivid sense of continuity, creativity, and diversity within Hebrew letters, with each passage reproduced in punctuated Hebrew, alongside a German translation and a few highly instructive notes. As indicated on the title page, the chrestomathy was intended “for theologians and historians, as well as for use in Jewish institutions of higher learning,” and was a tribute to Veit’s commitment to serious Jewish education.⁸⁵

Its editor was Joseph Zedner, born in Glogau in 1804, and a member of a small cohort of younger scholars inspired by Zunz to enter the parlous field of Jewish scholarship. At the time Zedner served as a resident teacher of the children in the household of Adolf Asher, who had published Zunz’s Gottesdienstliche Vorträge in 1832, and in whose book trade he also worked. Zedner had excelled as a student of Talmud in the Posen yeshiva of Akiva Eger, the dominant Orthodox sage of his generation. Self-effacing to a fault, Zedner (or maybe Veit) may have thought that putting his unknown name on the title page of his anthology might actually impede its sale. By the 1840s Asher had become the main European agent for the acquisition of Hebrew books by the British Museum, and it was his close ties to its dynamic librarian Anthony Panizzi that enabled him to secure an appointment for Zedner in 1846 in its division of printed books.⁸⁶ Failing health would eventually force Zedner to retire in 1869 after presiding over the growth of its Hebraica collection from six hundred volumes to eleven thousand and finishing in 1867 an 891-page printed catalogue. A fixture inside this emporium of Jewish knowledge, Zedner would prove to be of inestimable value to Zunz and his protégé Moritz Steinschneider in their painstaking research.⁸⁷

Because Zedner tutored not only the children of Asher but Asher himself, the scholarly world was soon to learn who had been behind the luminous anthology. In 1840–41 Asher produced a handsome two-volume English translation of the medieval Hebrew travelogue of Benjamin of Tudela (in Navarre).⁸⁸ A merchant with a keen eye and diligent hand, Benjamin recorded his travels through the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds from approximately 1160 to 1173, creating a treasure trove of specific communal, economic, and geographic information. Asher’s English translation was based on an accompanying Hebrew text, carefully punctuated, that was itself a composite of the first two printed editions of Constantinople in 1543 and Ferrara in 1556.⁸⁹ At the end of his preface to volume 2, Asher graciously acknowledged “the valuable assistance of Mr. Zedner, the editor of the Auswahl historischer Stücke without which I should not have been able to attain even that relative degree of perfection to which I humbly pretend.”⁹⁰

The work was grand in conception and a model of collaboration. To contextualize Benjamin’s travels in the Baghdad Caliphate, Asher recruited Fürchtegott Lebrecht, who had studied with the Hatam Sofer in Pressburg and Wilhelm Gesenius in Halle and was a colleague of Zunz at the newly opened teachers’ seminary in Berlin, to write an extended history of the regime with special attention to its state in the period of Benjamin’s visit. In 1864 Lebrecht would be the first German scholar to call for a critical edition of the Babylonian Talmud in a small book that he warmly dedicated to Zunz on his seventieth birthday.⁹¹

Asher’s other major collaborator was Zunz, who assisted him significantly in three ways. First, he provided him with numerous learned notes to his translation, identifying more fully the many individuals mentioned by Benjamin, especially in Provence and Italy. To his credit, though, most of the notes on the contents of the text were written by Asher himself. Second, Zunz composed a long essay on the literature of a geographic nature authored by Jews that consisted of 160 works in eight subject categories from the Bible to his contemporary Salomon Munk in Paris. Third, Zunz balanced that sweep with an essay focused entirely on the topography of the land of Israel as preserved in Kaftor va-Ferah by Estori ha-Parhi in 1322.⁹²

Again the assemblage of facts was intended to lift the miasma of ignorance among Christian scholars and savants. A sense of truth and justice drove Zunz’s relentless excavations of the remnants of Jewish creativity. Let three examples illustrate their plenitude. The overall achievement of Asher’s project was to establish the veracity of Benjamin’s Itinerary, which Jost had vigorously contested in 1826, a stance he reiterated in 1832. At worst, he suspected The Itinerary to be a fabrication of a trip never taken; at best, a compilation thrown together after the fact.⁹³ Thus Asher took aim at Jost early on for accusing Benjamin of omitting the name of the pope at the time he visited Rome: “But as there exists no edition of these travels, in which that name is not clearly stated, we confess our distrust of the Doctor’s judgement of our author, and assert that the conclusions of an historian who is guilty of such mistakes—we refrain from saying misquotations—ought not to be taken bona fide.”⁹⁴

Later Asher took the offensive again, joined in yet another note by Salomo Juda Löb Rapoport, whose promised collaboration never really materialized, most likely because of his move in 1840 from Tarnopol to Prague to assume the post of its chief rabbinic judge.⁹⁵ The collective hostility betrayed a distinct consensus that Jost had grievously erred in embarking on his historical narrative (and critical notes) long before the necessary excavations had been done.

To drive home the point still further, Zunz brought to light two manuscripts of seminal importance: the diary of David Reuveni, the fearless adventurer who roused messianic fervor among the Conversos of Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century, and the work of Estori ha-Parhi on the sites, vegetation, and laws of the land of Israel.⁹⁶ Zunz’s trustworthy friend Michael in Hamburg had a copy of the Reuveni diary in his collection and shared its contents freely with him. Zunz reported that “the manuscript contains 190 leaves in octavo and deserves to be printed. In the account David speaks in the first person.”⁹⁷ Without embellishment, Zunz summarized Reuveni’s dramatic narrative in four riveting pages. In comparison, twelve years earlier Jost could not muster more than one paragraph, wrapped in doubt, that added nothing to what Gans had recounted in 1592, without his existential engagement.⁹⁸

While Zunz’s exposure of the scholarly world to the diary of Reuveni would not yield a publication of the complete manuscript until the last decade of the nineteenth century,⁹⁹ his extensive presentation of Estori ha-Parhi’s work bore immediate fruit. A native of Provence, ha-Parhi fell victim to the French expulsion of 1306 and cast about, translating in Barcelona some medical texts into Hebrew, before reaching Israel in 1313. During the next seven years he traveled the country amassing a host of geographic, historical, archaeological, and numismatic details. Uppermost in his research was a messianic undertone: the preparation of a digest of all halakhic matters pertaining to living in the land of Israel should a national restoration be in the offing. Since its first printing in 1549, Kaftor va-Ferah (Almond Blossoms, a play on ha-Parhi’s name) had not garnered sufficient interest for a second printing until 1852 in Berlin by Hirsch Endelmann, who in his short list of authors who over the centuries had made mention of ha-Parhi fully translated Zunz’s biographical sketch into Hebrew. And that Asher’s name was listed on the title page as the book’s distributor surely confirms the causal connection.¹⁰⁰ Nevertheless, when the seventh volume of Heinrich Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden came out in 1863, he gave ha-Parhi short shrift. Though he found Kaftor va-Ferah to be a multifaceted, interesting work, he did not deign to give Zunz or Edelmann any credit.¹⁰¹

The target of Zunz’s contention of Kaftor va-Ferah as a vital source of information on the geography of Palestine was Karl von Raumer, a professor of natural history at Erlangen, whose 1835 book on the subject had already gone into a second edition by 1838. Not only was Raumer oblivious to the importance of Jewish sources for the topography of Palestine, he sailed over in silence “1100 years of Jewish antiquity from Josephus to Benjamin of Tudela.” Moreover, “his whole work does not contain one single quotation from the Talmud,” and when cited, it is from a secondary source.¹⁰² To highlight Raumer’s benightedness, Zunz compared him to the Dutch Orientalist Adrian Reland, who had visited the land in 1695 and “devoted an equal degree of attention to the Talmud and the fathers of the church” in his erudite study of Palestine of 1714, which Zunz regarded as the pinnacle of seventeenth-century scholarship on Judaism. During the intervening century, ignorance coupled with ill will to exclude Jewish scholarship from the academic discourse: “When in the course of time Jewish literature shared the neglect which the Jews have suffered for centuries, their national works were considered unworthy of being noticed, and the writers on biblical geography only quoted Reland in lieu of any Jewish sources, and the more they quoted, the less did they understand their subject.”¹⁰³

The translation of Hebrew texts was but one way of contending with the oblivion to which postbiblical Jewish history and literature had been consigned by German scholarship. Another was securing Jewish coverage in Germany’s most widely read book—the Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon. Brought by Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus to Leipzig from Amsterdam in the second decade of the nineteenth century, this multivolume encyclopedia was designed to appeal to a popular market hungering for knowledge and culture.¹⁰⁴ The title conveyed the purpose of the repository: its contents were meant to make for good conversation.¹⁰⁵ During the ensuing decade, the encyclopedia sold some 60,000 sets of six separate editions, at a time when German books rarely sold more than 750 copies.¹⁰⁶ By the eighth edition (1833–37), Zunz had hitched his wagon to the Brockhaus meteor, now run by Friedrich Arnold’s two sons.¹⁰⁷ As late as the tenth edition of 1851–55, Zunz remained the sole Jewish scholarly contributor, among the hundreds listed, except for Moritz Veit.¹⁰⁸ Thus it is safe to say that Zunz authored or revised the multiple Jewish entries that began to appear, ranging from Aaron and Abraham to Saadia, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Benjamin of Tudela, Maimonides, and Mendelssohn. Nor did he shortchange Jewish ritual, with entries on circumcision, marriage, the Sabbath, and Day of Atonement, or Jewish institutions like the Sanhedrin, the rabbinate, and the synagogue or Jewish literary corpora like the Torah, the Talmud, and the Targumim (Aramaic translations of Scripture). Even the Samaritans, Essenes, and Sabbatians merited their own brief entries, as did a small clutch of his own scholarly contemporaries in central Europe.

In the longer entries on the Hebrews, Hebrew language and literature, Jews, Judaism, Jewish literature, and Jewish education, Zunz amply displayed his erudition and conciseness, specificity and synthesis, respect for the past and sensitivity to the present. The entry on the Hebrews ordered the history of the Israelites from Abraham to the destruction of the First Temple according to the chronology Zunz had worked out for the Veit Bible.¹⁰⁹ In the related entry on their language and literature, Zunz unabashedly intoned the world significance of their legacy: “The extraordinary influence which the religious knowledge of the Hebrews exercised on the nations of Christianity and Islam lent their national literature a universal significance. Furthermore, insofar as its antiquity and trustworthiness, its religious content and poetic power, this literature supersedes that of any other pre-Christian nation, and thus constitutes for the history of mankind and its spiritual development noteworthy monuments and reliable sources.”¹¹⁰ More specifically, Zunz granted credence to some of the conclusions of biblical criticism. Deuteronomy, for example, in its present form took shape shortly before the final years of the Kingdom of Judah. Other books of the Pentateuch also betrayed the signs of an authorship later than Moses, though their historicity and spiritual integrity remained intact. At the same time Zunz acknowledged that the events prior to Samuel and David bore a mythic sheen.¹¹¹

The entry on the Jews is a similarly compressed history in which Zunz declared outright “that the Jews were the direct postexilic descendants of the earlier Israelites or Hebrews.”¹¹² When writing on Judaism, Zunz conceded that with the canonization of the Tanakh in the second century BCE “a noticeable difference from the ancient Hebrew religion [Hebraismus] became evident in the evolution of its concepts and praxis.”¹¹³ In the Middle Ages, Jews fared far worse under the Christians than under the Muslims and Zunz did not hesitate to spell out the bitter particulars.¹¹⁴ He also averred the extent to which Islam was indebted to Judaism.¹¹⁵ Since the sixteenth century, the lot of Jews in the German states had been especially fraught, which prompted Zunz to exclaim: “The only way to integrate the Jewish population into the organism of the Christian state without harm is by emancipation and inner development, and not by disabilities and conversionary institutes, to which some are again taking recourse.”¹¹⁶