Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch
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would surely have been unlikely without his accumulated store of data.66
A keen eye for social history drives the sweep and specificity of Zunz’s tract. Names encoded the places in which Jews lived and the influence of their surroundings. Organized chronologically and geographically, the essay was the study of a barometer of assimilation over two millennia. In the welter of data, Zunz detected recurring patterns and relationships. Jews never restricted themselves to biblical names nor were their choices ever curbed by law. Wherever they lived, they availed themselves of names current in the local language, though often when in transition combining them with older biblical names. “For language, like sunlight,” he argued, “is a common good, unsuited for distinctions of castes and sects.”67 Zunz was no less attentive to the names of women in different periods. While they did not need liturgical names, it became the custom in the Middle Ages to give male children theirs at circumcision.68 For both, however, irrespective of time and place, he strove to understand the linguistic factors at play in name formation, at the end of which he unequivocally asserted that there is no Christian language nor, for that matter, a Muslim, monotheistic, or Lutheran one: “Names then belong always to a people and a language, never to a church or a dogma or to a political or religious point of view. In short, there are no Christian names.”69
It did not take long for a few men of discernment to recognize that Zunz had authored a work of lasting value. A few days after publication, Prussia’s renowned explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt complimented Zunz with an accolade drawn from his own endeavors: “Never has this subject, so intimately tied to the fate of this ancient tribe, been treated with such thoroughness and historical contextualization. In heaven’s vault the names of the stars teach us which nation in Spain pioneered the study of astronomy. The geographical names in North America attest the origins of the settlers. In the forenames of the Hebrews we can read the wanderings of this hounded people.”70 One week later Veit thanked Zunz less poetically, but with equal fervor:
[Your book] refreshes like every ripe fruit of intellect and erudition. You have shown again that the most penetrating study of details does not suppress the unimpeded view of the whole, the warm feeling and historical sympathy for the circumstances and dispositions of the past and present, but rather grounds and strengthens them. In truth, it is high time that in this field of literature, those men come forward as leaders who in their intellectual training can actually be regarded as exemplary authorities. Neither shallow glibness nor gross pedantry can gain the kind of success for which you aimed and achieved…. The tone and temper in which you have written has given Jews an enormous amount of satisfaction. In the pamphlets of revenge [nekomoh-Büchelchen] of our nation your book must forever remain marked in red. Amen.71
These and other voices of appreciation must have momentarily assured Zunz that he had not labored in vain.
What set Veit apart from his lay peers is that he was deeply engaged with Judaism and its sacred texts. He admired the ability of Sachs to mediate the wisdom, beauty, and power of midrash through the eloquence and conviction of his sermons. He scolded Sachs, who always spoke freely and often spontaneously, for not taking the trouble to write down the best of his often inspiring sermons on Saturday evening after the conclusion of the Sabbath.72 Veit was eager to publish such a collection to extend Sachs’s influence beyond Prague. In 1837 Veit committed himself to studying midrashic texts for four hours a week in the original with Salomon Plessner, a traditional scholar whose piety matched his learning. While Veit was thrilled with his progress at gaining an understanding of the creative nature and abundant meaning of midrash, he was increasingly captivated by the ascetic and mystical intensity of his teacher, who despised all outward show and material desire.73 During his tenure at the helm of the Berlin community, Veit quickly emerged as a compelling force for Jewish education, communal reorganization, Jewish scholarship, and a modern yet traditional rabbinate.
Not only did Veit initiate the new Bible translation edited by Zunz, but his firm published three separate editions by 1855.74 To be sure, Zunz translated only the final two books of Chronicles, but his editorial work and reputation made the Zunz Bible, as it became known, the most often printed and widely appreciated of all the many German-Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible produced between 1783 and 1937. As late as 1934, Harry Torczyner, the editor of the last of these translations noteworthily sponsored by the Jewish community of Berlin and a distinguished scholar of Semitics, saw fit in his introduction to invoke the achievement of Zunz as still an inspiring milestone: “In our desire [to be as faithful to the Hebrew text as possible] we feel a special kinship to the Bible translation put out by Leopold Zunz a century ago. Despite what in content and form might be improved upon today, its unpretentious character still constitutes for our Bible an invaluable signpost.”75
As an added bonus, Zunz’s meticulously worked out chronological appendix imbued the lives and events recounted in Scripture with a semblance of historical veracity. Spread over fourteen pages, the table tabulated its data in two parallel columns according to the Jewish (anno mundi) and Christian (anno domini) calendars from creation to 330 BCE, when Alexander of Macedonia humbled the Persian Empire. In a third parallel column, Zunz succinctly mentioned the significance of each date. For example, in the signage for the year 330 BCE, Zunz enclosed in parentheses “duration 208 years,” signaling his rejection of the erroneous rabbinic calculation of only thirty-four years for the time in which Jews had allegedly lived under Persian rule.76
The discrepancy was at the heart of the Renaissance debate between Azariah de’ Rossi in Italy and David Gans in Prague at the short-lived dawn of critical scholarship in the Jewish world. In his pathbreaking effort to reconcile the indigenous sources of Jewish tradition with the avalanche of outside sources brought forth by the Renaissance, de’ Rossi in his Me’or Enayim (The Light of the Eyes) in 1573, among other things, vigorously disputed the validity of the Jewish creation calendar, with its most indefensible link being the reduction of Persian rule from Cyrus to Alexander to but thirty-four years.77 Notwithstanding, in 1592 David Gans, no less conversant with the legacy of the Renaissance, published his chronicle Zemah David (The Sprout of David) in which he reaffirmed the standing of dogmatic history and rejected any intermingling of Jewish and general history. Since the sources of Jewish history were revealed texts, they were far more reliable than the secular sources of general history.78 In consequence, Gans’s chronicle is binary, sacred and secular: in the first part on the basis of the creation calendar, he recounted year by year a truncated version of Jewish history, drawing only on Hebrew and Aramaic texts, while in the second he constructed an entertaining narrative of general history, culminating in the history of Bohemia. Often the availability of non-Hebraic sources permitted Gans to supplement his sparse account of Jewish turning points such as the Maccabean revolt, the translation of the Septuagint, and the uprisings against Rome in part 2. The strategy of separate and unequal allowed Gans to salvage the inviolability of the thirty-four-year calculation for the Persian period.79 On the other hand, it must be recognized that the ample attention paid to secular history potentially diminished the insularity of dogmatic history.
It is not surprising that Zunz would side firmly with de’ Rossi on this issue and many others. Indeed, just three years after the publication of the Veit Bible, Zunz published an encyclopedic Hebrew essay in Kerem Chemed on de’ Rossi’s tome and times, though not a deep analysis of its contents. Zunz’s canvas teemed with details on the literary history of Italian Jewry, which he justified with his operative principle that the mastery of the microcosm should precede any pronouncements about the macrocosm. He hailed de’ Rossi as a modern who understood that scholarship alone could distinguish between what is true and false.80 And he disseminated his research in a Hebrew journal, which ironically came out in Prague where Gans had lived, in order to win a beachhead in eastern Europe for the cause of critical scholarship.
Yet Zunz was not without a sentimental attachment to Gans. Zemah David had given Zunz his first taste of history, when he stumbled upon it in the Samson Free School in the forlorn days before the arrival of Ehrenberg.81 How are we to explain that Zunz began his biblical calendar with Adam and Eve and their sons Cain and Abel and that his first recorded date was the birth of their later son Seth in the year 130 after creation?