Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch
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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