Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch
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without deviation down to the death of Joseph in 2309 BCE, or more than two-thirds of the time span he would cover.82 That overlap is a significant nod to Gans. Not wishing to leave a chronological vacuum for the popular audience for which the Veit Bible was intended, Zunz set aside his critical stance and took refuge in the company of an old friend.
He may also have learned from Gans the more vital lesson of context. If history is an endless game of chess, dates make up its chessboard. The beginning of historical knowledge is the accurate dating of its pieces. Among Zunz’s papers is an astonishing forty-page document consisting of a handwritten chronicle composed by him that enumerates in order the years from 529 to 1820 with the sporadic omission of some. Alongside each year, Zunz recorded a noteworthy historical datum or several, the overwhelming number of which came from general history. For example, for 1436 Zunz noted “first printing press,” for 1492 “the discovery of America” and “Jews expelled from Spain,” for 1517 “Luther’s Reformation,” for 1776 “abolition of torture in Austria,” and “Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith),” for 1806 “abolition of slavery in Great Britain,” for 1812 “the Jews of Prussia gain citizenship,” and for 1815 “a German worship service for Jews in Berlin.” Toward the latter half of the eighteenth century, the data become more numerous. The clean state of the document (with an occasional insertion) suggests that it may point to a project Zunz undertook during his university years.83 The amount of information packed into the chronicle bespeaks a zeal to master the landscape of general history, while the chronological grid underlines the supreme importance of dating, two pursuits that would distinguish his future career as a Jewish historian. But they were also values that already found expression in the secular part of Gans’s 1592 chronicle and which might have left an indelible imprint on the fertile mind of a callow adolescent.
Zunz’s deepening relationship with Veit prompted him to submit to Veit in the year the Bible translation came out a proposal to publish a chrestomathy of rabbinic passages to be selected, translated, and annotated by him. The idea may have recommended itself to Zunz as a plausible follow-up to his overview of midrashic literature of 1832 (Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, on which more anon), which related largely to the externals of the corpus, or perhaps as a correction of the one-sided treatment inflicted on rabbinic literature by Jost. The format of an anthology was a common vehicle of European scholarship to introduce ancient languages and literature to uninformed scholars and educated laity alike. After due consideration, however, Veit turned it down. In a letter of November 27, 1838, Veit acknowledged that there was an audience for such a work and that Zunz’s editorship would probably enlarge it somewhat. Yet it was still too small to cover the costs, let alone reward Zunz with a reasonable return for his effort. Instead, Veit urged him to compose a historical sketch of Jewish literature on the basis of his biographical entries in the Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon (discussed later), which might then be followed up with his rabbinic chrestomathy.84
The exchange did not remain barren, for in 1840 Veit did publish an exquisite anthology of Hebrew writings from the Mishna to the nineteenth century. Though published anonymously under the title Auswahl historischer Stücke aus hebräischen Schriftstellern (A Selection of Historical Pieces by Hebrew Writers), the work betrayed the hand of a careful and competent editor. Its thirty-five selections provided a vivid sense of continuity, creativity, and diversity within Hebrew letters, with each passage reproduced in punctuated Hebrew, alongside a German translation and a few highly instructive notes. As indicated on the title page, the chrestomathy was intended “for theologians and historians, as well as for use in Jewish institutions of higher learning,” and was a tribute to Veit’s commitment to serious Jewish education.85
Its editor was Joseph Zedner, born in Glogau in 1804, and a member of a small cohort of younger scholars inspired by Zunz to enter the parlous field of Jewish scholarship. At the time Zedner served as a resident teacher of the children in the household of Adolf Asher, who had published Zunz’s Gottesdienstliche Vorträge in 1832, and in whose book trade he also worked. Zedner had excelled as a student of Talmud in the Posen yeshiva of Akiva Eger, the dominant Orthodox sage of his generation. Self-effacing to a fault, Zedner (or maybe Veit) may have thought that putting his unknown name on the title page of his anthology might actually impede its sale. By the 1840s Asher had become the main European agent for the acquisition of Hebrew books by the British Museum, and it was his close ties to its dynamic librarian Anthony Panizzi that enabled him to secure an appointment for Zedner in 1846 in its division of printed books.86 Failing health would eventually force Zedner to retire in 1869 after presiding over the growth of its Hebraica collection from six hundred volumes to eleven thousand and finishing in 1867 an 891-page printed catalogue. A fixture inside this emporium of Jewish knowledge, Zedner would prove to be of inestimable value to Zunz and his protégé Moritz Steinschneider in their painstaking research.87
Because Zedner tutored not only the children of Asher but Asher himself, the scholarly world was soon to learn who had been behind the luminous anthology. In 1840–41 Asher produced a handsome two-volume English translation of the medieval Hebrew travelogue of Benjamin of Tudela (in Navarre).88 A merchant with a keen eye and diligent hand, Benjamin recorded his travels through the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds from approximately 1160 to 1173, creating a treasure trove of specific communal, economic, and geographic information. Asher’s English translation was based on an accompanying Hebrew text, carefully punctuated, that was itself a composite of the first two printed editions of Constantinople in 1543 and Ferrara in 1556.89 At the end of his preface to volume 2, Asher graciously acknowledged “the valuable assistance of Mr. Zedner, the editor of the Auswahl historischer Stücke without which I should not have been able to attain even that relative degree of perfection to which I humbly pretend.”90
The work was grand in conception and a model of collaboration. To contextualize Benjamin’s travels in the Baghdad Caliphate, Asher recruited Fürchtegott Lebrecht, who had studied with the Hatam Sofer in Pressburg and Wilhelm Gesenius in Halle and was a colleague of Zunz at the newly opened teachers’ seminary in Berlin, to write an extended history of the regime with special attention to its state in the period of Benjamin’s visit. In 1864 Lebrecht would be the first German scholar to call for a critical edition of the Babylonian Talmud in a small book that he warmly dedicated to Zunz on his seventieth birthday.91
Asher’s other major collaborator was Zunz, who assisted him significantly in three ways. First, he provided him with numerous learned notes to his translation, identifying more fully the many individuals mentioned by Benjamin, especially in Provence and Italy. To his credit, though, most of the notes on the contents of the text were written by Asher himself. Second, Zunz composed a long essay on the literature of a geographic nature authored by Jews that consisted of 160 works in eight subject categories from the Bible to his contemporary Salomon Munk in Paris. Third, Zunz balanced that sweep with an essay focused entirely on the topography of the land of Israel as preserved in Kaftor va-Ferah by Estori ha-Parhi in 1322.92
Again the assemblage of facts was intended to lift the miasma of ignorance among Christian scholars and savants. A sense of truth and justice drove Zunz’s relentless excavations of the remnants of Jewish creativity. Let three examples illustrate their plenitude. The overall achievement of Asher’s project was to establish the veracity of Benjamin’s Itinerary, which Jost had vigorously contested in 1826, a stance he reiterated in 1832. At worst, he suspected The Itinerary to be a fabrication of a trip never taken; at best, a compilation thrown together after the fact.93 Thus Asher took aim at Jost early on for accusing Benjamin of omitting the name of the pope at the time he visited Rome: “But as there exists no edition of these travels, in which that name is not clearly stated, we confess our distrust of the Doctor’s judgement of our author, and assert that the conclusions of an historian who is guilty of such mistakes—we refrain from saying misquotations—ought not to be taken bona fide.”94
Later Asher took the offensive again, joined in yet another note by Salomo Juda Löb Rapoport, whose promised collaboration never really materialized, most likely because of his move in 1840 from Tarnopol to Prague to assume the post of its chief rabbinic judge.95 The collective hostility betrayed a distinct consensus that Jost had grievously