Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch

The field of Jewish studies in Germany would ever after bear the name of that beleaguered undertaking.⁸⁸ Collectively, its authors, especially Gans and Zunz, who each wrote three of its pieces, respectively, showed with conceptual power and stunning detail the potential for critical scholarship to reshape the understanding of Judaism. Whether dealing with its external or internal history, their essays are secular in tone, inductive in method, and generally nonpartisan.

      Methodologically, they move in different directions. In his exploration of the earliest traces of Jews in northern Europe and Slavic lands joined by the German language, Gans illustrated the inescapable need to consult non-Jewish sources to do Jewish history. The essay focuses in particular on Jews in England before 1066, for which Gans listed more than a dozen primary and secondary English sources indispensable for the subject.⁸⁹ Nor can a reliable internal history of any Jewish settlement be done prior to knowing something of its external history.⁹⁰

      The same methodological message reverberated in Gans’s study of Jewish legal status in the Roman Empire and medieval Christian Europe, which Jost was quick to praise in his own history.⁹¹ The essay relied entirely on Greek and Roman sources. Laws, however, functioned differently in different periods. In pagan Rome, polytheism was tolerant and not obsessed with truth and hence the law protected Jews. Intergroup tensions erupted in the social arena from Jewish allegiance to Jerusalem and pagan ignorance of Judaism. With Christianity in possession of the truth, deviation often ran afoul of public opinion. It was actually church theology that tempered Christian animus with its reverence for the Old Testament and its expectation of an eventual conversion at the end of days. The self-contradictory nature of Christian policy toward the Jews down to his own day triggered an outburst of present-mindedness that brought down the wrath of the censor on the passage: “How long will this destructive half-measure still last? Has history not amply taught that between two options, the only choice is either to embrace the principle of salvation through a single church, in consequence of which Jews should be banished from the earth and the resulting chasm filled with their lifeless bones, or to forget about the Jews in matters of law and then fill the chasm with their reborn spirits? Only that which lies in the middle is evil.”⁹²

      Beyond the utilization of non-Jewish sources, Gans argued tellingly for the employment of comparative research. The body of terms, institutions, ideas, ritual, and purportedly historical events found throughout rabbinic literature needed to be brought out of its isolation. Many of these items bore a resemblance to items in cultures with which Jews interfaced, and similarity implied the possibility of influence. Gans had already set out in this direction in his essay on Jewish legal status in the Roman Empire, when he tried to align the titles of Jewish officials mentioned in the Roman codes with the titles of Jewish officials in rabbinic literature. His majestic essay on the principles of inheritance law in the Bible and Talmud also firmly planted its terminology and practices within the Roman world. The comparative approach led to large conclusions. While Gans regarded the Hebrew Bible as the highest expression of the Oriental world, he contended that the Talmud was a product of the Westernization of Judaism. Continuity lay in the fact that the Talmud acted as the expositor of Mosaic law, but in so doing the Talmud was open to the influence of the societies through which it passed. And Gans offered a bevy of examples of rabbinic terms relating to marriage that resemble Roman practice and terminology. As for talmudic inheritance law, he credited it with taking the disparate fragments and allusions of biblical practice and forging them into a well-ordered, inflected legal system, indeed one that compared favorably with that of Roman law.⁹³

      If then a keen eye for relevant non-Jewish sources and plausible instances of comparative material greatly sharpened the perspective on the Jewish past, Zunz’s methodological breakthrough in the handling of conventional Jewish sources was no less critical in the contextualization of historical phenomena. This was the dramatic achievement of his biographical essay on Rashi, the swan song of the scholarly seminar and the Verein itself. Texts long sanctified by tradition could be induced to yield unimagined information when subjected to new questions. Zunz’s goal was to strip Rashi, the classic eleventh-century commentator on the Bible and Talmud, of the nimbus of saga and mythology. Veneration had buried the Rashi of history. There was only one way to do a critical biography, and that was to read the works of Rashi themselves. By an exhaustive reading of all he had written and a rigorous application of philological analysis, Zunz was able to assemble the profile of a man of his age (d. 1105), who did not know Arabic or Persian or Latin, who had never met Maimonides, and who in fact was unfamiliar with the exegetical creativity of Spanish Jewry. Moreover, his command of French was far greater than German. Zunz was also able to identify the works that Rashi actually wrote and the works of others that he knew and used. Some eighty such works made up his own library. Overall, Zunz’s biography was a remarkable display of erudition, acumen, and discipline. With new tools and perspectives, Zunz was destined to mine and extract from the classical corpus of Jewish literature untold new information and significance.⁹⁴

      The importance of the Rashi essay also derived from the challenge it threw up to the dominant preference for Sephardic Jewry, which Zunz had shared up to that point with the rest of the society. His doctoral dissertation had been on a thirteenth-century Spanish Jewish philosopher and an earlier essay of his in the journal had focused on the difficult task of identifying Spanish place names in the Hebrew literature of the Iberian Peninsula. The essay was a model of a methodology that could be used on any geographical area in which Jews once resided. Zunz felt obliged to vindicate his choice with another intrusion of present-mindedness:

      The study of Jewish literature draws us primarily there (to Spain) because a literature is actually to be found there. Among all the efforts of the Jewish people since their political decline, there are none comparable to those of the Spanish era, where Jews attained a level equal to that of Europe, if not higher. There men lived worthy of renown. There was not only a dead language as a cherished legacy from their forefathers, but also a living, comprehensible, cultural language. Devotees of poetry and science competed with the Moors. Even its external history was more important, vital and fascinating after the barbarism of the Gothic era than anywhere else. Indeed, ethics and education became so ingrained that even the most distant settlement of Jews fleeing Spain was distinctively marked by them.⁹⁵

      But Zunz was on his way to overcoming the bias. The Rashi essay signaled a momentous step to correct the imbalance.

      The lasting value of the essay on Spanish place names, however, is that in its sweeping theoretical prelude, Zunz enunciated a fuller version of the methodology that undergirded the new science of Judaism. In spare language, he sketched the evolution of Jews out of Israelites in the Roman period, the decentralization of Jewish settlements, the cohesive role of Judaism as a religious-political construct, and, finally, a delineation of eleven periods of Jewish history from the earliest time to his own day. To put this all together and to integrate the external and internal dimensions required a labor of intense specificity: where and when did a person live or was a book written and in what setting did an event take place? Each fact was a single but critical stone for a building under construction. In addition to the qualifications requisite of all modern historians, Jewish historians needed to have the well-rounded knowledge to detect internal developments in Judaism, an ability to see details against the backdrop of the whole, and a critical understanding of all of Jewish literature. As for the Hebrew sources in which place names appeared most often, Zunz listed four types: chronicles and travel books; halakhic responsa; inscriptions on coins, buildings, and tombstones; and communal record books. Zunz also drew attention to the reference works available for consultation.⁹⁶ Taken together, the bold essays by Gans and Zunz laid out in both theory and practice the arduous spadework ahead.

      In retrospect, the journal’s modest reception made it a symbol rather than a success. After reading the third number, Heine wrote Zunz that he found the German of the journal abominable and impenetrable.⁹⁷ Ehrenberg concurred. Only two copies sold in Braunschweig. Good Jews found its discourse far too learned.⁹⁸ In a letter to Ehrenberg on April 18, 1823, Zunz wrote in defense by crisply restating the journal’s intent: “The journal is certainly not a Jewish paper and not designed to educate the Jews of Braunschweig. We have enough vehicles for education right now. But to create for Judaism some status and respect and gradually to arouse and unite the better minds