Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch
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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