Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch

      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