Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch
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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
Introduction
From the outset of his career, Leopold Zunz had been committed to disseminating the breakthrough of Wissenschaft des Judentums—its methodology, perspectives, tools, and early results—to fellow Jews in eastern Europe. For that purpose, the medium had to be Hebrew. Thus on the basis of strategy and esteem, Zunz readily accepted the deathbed wish of Nachman Krochmal in 1840 to edit his unfinished and disordered Hebrew manuscript, eventually to bear the title Moreh Nevukhei ha-Zeman (The Guide for the Perplexed of Our Time or equally correct The Guide for Those Perplexed by the Notion of Time). Though the two had never met, the Galician autodidact and the German gymnasium and university graduate both embodied in their respective domains the turn to history in the study of Judaism. The state of Krochmal’s manuscript reflected the adversity in which he persevered as a resident of a Jewish world that bitterly denied and thwarted the right of free inquiry. Had Zunz not assumed the burden of editing it, the fruit of Krochmal’s lifelong research and fortitude would have sunk into oblivion for decades, if not forever.1
In his own introduction to the book, which appeared in 1851 in an edition rife with errors not his fault, Zunz chose to articulate for his eastern European audience the ethos that informed his scholarship, and probably that of Krochmal as well. First, the critical study of Judaism requires a command of its entire literary heritage: “The Oral and Written Torah are inextricably linked. No prophet or sage stands alone; no rabbinic statement or homily (midrash) exists in isolation. Particulars can be grasped only in light of the whole, and the whole only via understanding the particulars. If access to the early books is closed to us, we will be confounded by the later ones.”
Second, the practitioners of critical scholarship must acquire an equally comprehensive mastery of disciplines and bodies of knowledge outside their own field: “Indeed, it is our obligation to study and teach every science and intellectual tradition just like the great minds of Israel proclaimed and practiced. Ancient books are for us the mirror in which we can observe the daily life of all peoples, even if they are but the appearance of the deeds and not the deeds themselves…. Only by combining the particulars of events into a plausible construct will they become fathomable. Without an acute sense of time in general, the events, customs and decrees identified with our ancestors that rested on some foundation, as well as their polemics and homilies, will be sealed to us.”
Finally, and unexpectedly, Zunz asserts that the new learning is not an end in itself, but an instrument by which to improve the human condition. The quest for truth serves to make us advocates for justice. Social activism and the life of the mind are not mutually exclusive. Or in the forceful words of Zunz: “The goal of Torah and science, the goal of opening our hearts to the spiritual is to do what is good and right. Those who have studied books and not learned to be of help to humanity, who love knowledge but not the supreme source of spirituality, their actions will attest that they have not reached the rank of a true sage. For the spiritual realm is not grasped except by a combination of clarity of mind and purity of heart. And as that realm engulfs us, it will inspire us to seek the good of all. Then shall we learn not to strive for wealth or glory, nor do scholarship out of envy or spite, nor expect recompense in this world or the next, but rather out of love for the truth, the good and the eternal.”2
This unambiguous explication of Zunz’s ethos unpacks for us the meaning of his cryptic motto that true scholarship is generative. The reliability, coherence, and cogency of dispassionate scholarship are implicitly and overtly aimed at effecting change in a world still darkened by myth and prejudice. For Zunz, scholarship is ultimately an ethical enterprise.3 The interconnectedness of its disparate realms is strikingly evident in the organization of his Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings). Initiated and funded by the Zunz Foundation to honor his eightieth birthday in 1874, the three volumes came out quickly over the following two years.4 The driving force behind the project, however, was Moritz Steinschneider, a key member of its academic advisory board and Zunz’s disciple, friend, and kindred spirit. The death of Adelheid Zunz, Leopold’s soul mate of fifty-two years, just eight days after his birthday, had thrown Zunz into a state of inconsolable