Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch
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.
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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