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PREFACE

In 1818 in a booklet of some fifty pages, Leopold Zunz announced his discovery of an unknown and uninhabited continent which modern Jews were soon destined to apprehend.¹ A few hardy contemporaries in other sectors of Europe had already caught sight of a crag or shoreline of that continent, but Zunz was surely the first to see and sense the full expanse of its vast and variegated contours. And like other great explorers, Zunz would return time and again to map its terrain and unearth its treasures. No less astonishing, Zunz sailed without benefit of a fleet or a well-funded expedition. His single-handed effort and radical achievement, which would henceforth make history the homeland of Jewish self-perception and public discourse, welled up from an acute sense of historical consciousness, an almost fanatical commitment to get the facts straight, and an extraordinary medley of talents and tools. Spanning nearly a century of bitter turmoil, Zunz’s life of triumph and suffering, passion and pathos, scholarly seclusion and political activism has long deserved a biography in the round.

Without the remarkable survival of Zunz’s papers, however, that desideratum would be beyond our reach. Zunz threw out practically nothing that bore his name or handwriting or in which he may have been involved. Though often brief and intermittent, his diary is extensive for some of his seminal decades, and his continental network of correspondents yields a trove of letters and often a précis of Zunz’s response that constitutes, as Zunz well knew, a skeleton history of the movement he inspired. At his death in 1886, his papers were transferred to the Zunz Foundation (Stiftung) in Berlin, which had been created in 1864 on the occasion of Zunz’s seventieth birthday to provide him and his soul mate, Adelheid, with a modest pension for their twilight years.²

One of the earliest scholars to avail himself of that precious repository was Solomon Schechter, who at the invitation of Claude G. Montefiore had left Germany for England in 1882 and five years later published the first critical edition of a rabbinic work, Aboth d’Rabbi Nathan (The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan).³ Perhaps it was Schechter’s own interest in midrash that induced him in 1889 to write an essay on Zunz, the master of midrash, for a prize awarded him the following year. The empathy with which he recounted Zunz’s life and surveyed his study of midrash clearly reflected a kindred spirit. But Schechter had relied entirely on personal copies of Zunz’s works lent him by the foundation, without benefit of his unpublished papers, and thus held off publication. Inexplicably, Schechter, who had more than a passing interest in the history of Jewish scholarship and an affinity for Zunz, never returned to peruse those papers, and the essay languished until it was published posthumously by his son Frank and Alexander Marx, the librarian of the Jewish Theological Seminary.⁴ Invaluable though unfinished, the essay brought to light two guideposts for any future biographer of Zunz: his cautionary note to David Kaufmann, his gifted young admirer, that “those who have read my books are far from knowing me,” and his motto “genuine scholarship is generative” (echte Wissenschaft ist taterzeugend). In a nutshell, Zunz’s biography must be more than the sum of his books.⁵

The true excavator of Zunz’s nonacademic legacy was Ludwig Geiger. The son of Abraham Geiger, who had elegantly and effortlessly straddled the fields of religious reform and critical scholarship, Ludwig was no less a prolific scholar in the history and literature of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and nineteenth-century Germany. But given his paternity, he also devotedly edited a five-volume edition of his father’s correspondence and scholarly works, followed in 1910 by a richly probing portrait composed by a cluster of eight experts, for which he served as editor and to which he contributed a masterful biographical essay of book-length proportions.⁶ From the large number of choice primary documents in the Zunz archive that Geiger published from 1892 on and the teeming volume of Zunz correspondence in preparation when he died in 1919, one has the distinct impression that Geiger, had he lived, would have tried his hand at a full-scale biography of Zunz.⁷ Not only did he appreciate the importance and power of Zunz’s letters, he also demonstrated beyond dispute that no biographer worth his salt could ignore the drudgery of deciphering their minuscule handwriting.

In the final generation before the fall of Weimar, a number of younger scholars treated aspects of Zunz’s career on the basis of his papers, among them Ismar Elbogen, the reigning dean of German Jewish historians and, like Zunz, an authority on the history of the synagogue and its liturgy.⁸ His sensitive 1936 essay on Zunz came closer to encompassing the whole man than any previous portrait.⁹ And it was Elbogen, defying the Nazis, who arranged in 1938, before his own departure for New York in October, to have a large portion of the Zunz archive smuggled out of Germany and taken to the still embryonic and vulnerable Hebrew National and University Library in Jerusalem.¹⁰ Had Elbogen accepted the invitation of Columbia University in 1929 to fill the first chair in Jewish history at an American university, Zunz’s papers might well have been ravaged by Nazi nihilists.¹¹

Archives are the aquifers of Jewish scholarship, and the final link in this vital chain of guardians belongs to Nahum N. Glatzer, the longtime professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University. As a disciple and disseminator of Franz Rosenzweig, Glatzer contributed to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York a cache of 1,309 letters that were in the possession of the family. What linked them to Zunz was the fact that Rosenzweig was the great-grandson of Samuel Meyer Ehrenberg, the beloved surrogate father figure to Zunz and Isaak Markus Jost, both of whom he saved and nurtured when he assumed the directorship in 1807 of their Jewish school in Wolfenbüttel, still untouched by modernity. The 727 letters in the collection to Zunz and Jost by Ehrenberg and family over three generations attest the deep emotional bonds forged by fate.¹² They add to the correspondence preserved in Jerusalem a rare personal and intimate tone. By subsequently editing two magnificent volumes of Zunz letters, the first in 1958 from the Rosenzweig collection and the second in 1964 from the Zunz archive, Glatzer placed all future students of Zunz and the Wissenschaft movement in his debt.¹³

I first entered the hallowed but intimidating domain of these unpublished collections during a sabbatical year in Israel in 1974–75 and have since returned often to spend countless hours with Zunz and his compatriots. It is a demanding cohort that does not readily share its revealing contents with unappreciative outsiders. Over the ensuing years with their many detours, a spate of discrete essays based on my research clarified for me the landscape, deepened my vision, and emboldened me not to give up on a biography that would capture the scope, complexity, and coherence of the life’s work of a singular modern Jew. As my skill improved and my thinking ripened, so did the technology at my disposal. At the University of Halle, where in 1821 Zunz got his doctorate, Professor Giuseppe Veltri, then the director of the Leopold Zunz Center for the Study of European Judaism, and his team digitized a large portion (though far from all) of the Zunz Archive, while in New York the Leo Baeck Institute digitized its sprawling archival collection, including the Ehrenberg correspondence. It beggars the imagination to think what would have been the scale of Zunz’s achievement if the rare book and manuscript repositories that lay so painfully beyond his impecunious reach had been accessible with the tap of a finger.¹⁴