Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch

gifted young Jew caught in the cross-currents of a conflicted Prussian state and society, Leopold Zunz faced a future of uncertainties. If Samuel Ehrenberg had salvaged his youth, Adelheid Bermann, his wife to be, would soon become the critical enabler during his storm-tossed career. As he playfully reported to Ehrenberg in January 1822, “I have known my bride since May 1819; her consent [to be engaged] I got in May 1821 and the wedding will probably be in May 1822. Aren’t you impressed with my love of chronological order?”¹

      The courtship suggests a romantic relationship unencumbered by outside interference, that would culminate in a fifty-two-year childless marriage embedded in deep love and mutual respect. Though Zunz’s scholarship was beyond her, Adelheid appreciated its significance and supported it wholeheartedly. For years she hosted a Saturday evening salon in their modest apartment that gave Leopold a setting in which to fascinate friends and newcomers, scholars and literary figures, Jews and Christians.² During the week, after a long day apart (for Zunz often from 5 A.M. to 7:30 P.M.), they would spend the evening in intimate conversation, sharing their political, literary, and philosophical interests, often reading passages and whole books to each other, with Leopold usually in the role of instructor. As the years wore on, he taught her chess and even geometry. They were averse to taking solitary trips for any length of time and when they did, their long letters written at the end of a day or over several shared unflinchingly their experiences, thoughts, and yearnings. Adelheid was an eager, adept, and expressive correspondent, and her postscripts to many of Leopold’s letters to mutual friends served to broaden and deepen the relationship between the families. Above all, the correspondence that emanated from the Zunz household abounds in their affection and solicitousness for each other. And when Adelheid died an excruciatingly painful death in 1874, Zunz’s steely resolve in the face of adversity, which owed so much to her unbroken faith in him, gave way to bitter self-pity.³

      By the time that Leopold met Adelheid, he was nearing the completion of his doctoral dissertation on Shem Tov Ibn Falaquera, a thirteenth-century Spanish Jewish philosopher. On December 21, 1820, he submitted his handwritten Latin copy to the philosophy faculty in Halle, which awarded him his doctorate on January 2, 1821, though surprisingly the signature of Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius, its rising authority on biblical grammar and lexicography, was not on it. It would be Gesenius, in a career at Halle that spanned thirty-two years, who would make the university the favorite destination of Jewish students in Oriental studies in the first half of the nineteenth century.⁴

      In his forty-five-page work, Zunz methodically delineated Ibn Falaquera’s persona, ideas, and context. Earlier he had already announced at the end of his Etwas his intention to publish the Hebrew text along with a Latin translation of Ibn Falaquera’s Sefer Ha-Ma’alot (The Book of Degrees), a discourse on Jewish ethics grounded in theology. Zunz’s motive in this instance went beyond rescuing a valuable relic of Jewish thought from the dustbin of history: “Nicer hopes [than purely academic] have helped to sweeten our arduous labor: The hope to awaken a desire for thorough and fruitful research on the foremost works of the Jewish people, while always bearing in mind a sense of the whole, and the hope that bringing to light the best of rabbinic literature might banish the prejudice in which it is generally held.”⁵ What is noteworthy in this apologetic gambit is that Zunz’s choice came to rest on a sample from the Sephardic orbit, which aligned him squarely with the increasingly pervasive preference of disgruntled Ashkenasic intellectuals for an authentic Jewish model of living in two worlds.⁶ To his credit, he would soon refocus his scholarship onto the legacy of Ashkenaz (Germany). His high scholarly standards, however, would deter him from ever publishing Ibn Falaquera on the basis of but a single faulty manuscript.⁷

      The acquisition of a doctorate by a Jew in Restoration Prussia did not pave the way to employment and career advancement. By August 1822, King Frederick William III, citing popular unrest, reversed the article of the liberal 1812 emancipation edict that declared Jews eligible for academic appointments and communal offices. The decision effectively closed off Prussia’s extensive public sector to Jews.⁸ And it was precisely that barrier that prompted Ehrenberg to counsel Zunz already in his first semester to pursue a course of study that would lead to a job: “Though I am happy that you have a chance to immerse yourself in studies that you love, I am deeply concerned, given the present tenor of Jewish-Christian relations, that it will be of little benefit to you to spend your best years on them. I confess that I wish for your sake that you would take up a Brotwissenschaft [a course of study that would put some bread on your table].”⁹

      Nearly two years later, Ehrenberg returned more insistently to what must have been a delicate subject: “You are not wrong to study what you love, but shouldn’t you give some thought to your future? You know on the basis of personal experience that a Jew must learn a Brotwissenschaft, because he can’t become a teacher at a university. I very much want to hear your opinion regarding this life (as opposed to the study of antiquity).”¹⁰ Zunz shot back in earnest jest: “For a Brotwissenschaft, a Jew can take up only medicine, and since I’m unwilling to do that, I must believe that young philologians will not be any worse off than young ravens.”¹¹

      The dilemma was not Zunz’s alone. Despite obstacles and the prevailing atmosphere, Jews gravitated quickly to Prussia’s universities in the age of their ascendancy. When Berlin opened in 1810, Jews quite possibly represented some 7 percent of its matriculated students, a number which by 1834 had probably risen to several hundred.¹² The law faculty in Berlin did not even award doctorates to Jews because they could not exercise the authority invested in the degree, and though Eduard Gans, Zunz’s friend and compatriot, had started there, he secured his law degree from Heidelberg in 1819.¹³ The first Jew in Berlin to earn his doctorate from its philosophy faculty was Moritz Ludwig Frankenheim, also from Wolfenbüttel, though it was only after his conversion in 1827 that he was appointed as an associate professor of physics in Breslau and eventually in 1850 promoted to full professor.¹⁴

      The constant frustration of rising expectations clearly contributed to the three waves of conversions that swept over Berlin from 1770 to 1830. Some sixteen hundred baptisms averaged about twenty-seven per year. During the first wave from 1770 to 1800, the total may have reached as high as 7 percent, of which two-thirds were children and 60 percent women. The flight affected especially family units among the upper echelon and the young. After 1810, with Jews heading for the universities, the number of male converts rose to 59 percent, while the number of women dropped to 41 percent.¹⁵ For all of Prussia, some twenty-two hundred Jews chose to opt out between 1820 and 1840,¹⁶ and among them were many university students painfully trapped in the gulf between expanding educational opportunities and a narrow band of occupational choices. From Berlin Jost reported to Ehrenberg on August 31, 1819, that “people here constantly ask, ‘Why would a Jew study [at the university], since without a livelihood there is no way he can make any use of it?’”¹⁷

      Thus typically, when Sigmund Zimmern (see above), the son of a Heidelberg banker and close friend of Gans, sought an appointment as associate professor from the local juridical faculty, it concurred unanimously that Heidelberg should not be the first university to take such a problematic step, which would discomfit not only sister institutions but all of Germany. Zimmern obliged by converting and immediately garnered an appointment as a full professor.¹⁸ Gans held on a few years longer. On May 3, 1821, he submitted to Prussia’s Ministry of Education a tightly reasoned brief against the inconsistency and untenability of Prussia’s policy to withhold academic appointments from Jews, in consequence of which Berlin’s juridical faculty had stonewalled his efforts over the last two years. In his covering note, Gans claimed to be a victim of “persecution, torment and rejection”: “I belong to that unfortunate class of human beings that is hated because uneducated and persecuted because it educates itself.”¹⁹

      No one was more afflicted by this tantalizing bridge to nowhere than Leopold Zunz, and it is not surprising to learn from Jost’s letters to Ehrenberg that he wrestled with the idea of converting. To be sure, their friendship forged in a shared youth of misery had quickly cooled once Zunz arrived in Berlin, but there is no reason to suspect that Jost would have misled his beloved mentor, to whom he effusively dedicated the first volume of his Geschichte der Israeliten