Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch

Jost knew from Ehrenberg’s letter to him just prior to Zunz’s departure for Berlin that he was even displeased that Zunz had adopted the first name Leopold for Lippman, when he began to teach in Wolfenbüttel: “Now a word regarding the name Leopold: I find it intolerable when Jews change their forenames in order to erase any outer trace of their origin. For the ghetto Jew [dem Stockjuden] no amount of concealment will help and for the educated Jew it is a disgrace to deny his origin. Did Moses Mendelssohn call himself Moritz or was he less respected as Moses? Just stop thinking and acting Jewish! The name is wholly irrelevant.”²¹ Jost touched glancingly on Zunz’s state of mind first in a letter dated April 6, 1819: “Zunz visits me rarely. Baptism is very much on his mind, although he struggles mightily against the idea and doesn’t really want to have anything to do with it. He is too far ahead of his co-religionists to be appreciated, let alone nurtured by them.”²² The generosity and perspicacity of the compliment confirm the truthfulness of the news. Zunz’s medley of extraordinary gifts would destine him to be an outlier.

      Three and a half years later, after much had transpired, including the termination of Zunz’s abbreviated tenure as preacher at the Beer Temple (on which more anon), Jost returned to the subject at greater length and in a tone far more critical. Though Zunz no longer appeared to be wavering, he had apparently earlier informed many, as had Jost, of his intention to convert:

      About other news from here, regarding the dismissal of Dr. Zunz, which in a crude circular included many reproaches of me for speaking out freely against the piety of a preacher once close to the baptismal font and whose story of his most recent widely criticized behavior will soon appear in print—all this you surely know full well. Those presumptuous plans only gingerly hinted at have now collapsed…. I have always admired Zunz’s talents, but held his use of them to be inappropriate. He really has the power to do much good here, but lacks the necessary sagacity. First, he took the whole world into his confidence about his plan to convert to Christianity. Then by taking the post as preacher, he wanted to quash the rumor. And finally, to gain control over the truth, he became zealous, imprudent and provocative. The public ignored him and I did not counter his slights, except to speak the truth, as I always do, and overlook the insults.²³

      Hence Zunz’s ruminations about converting were no secret and not out of line with the angst of his peers.²⁴ The conversion of Jost’s younger brother Simon, a student of law, in 1820 certainly did not escape Zunz’s attention.²⁵ Once over the decision, Zunz never reconsidered. Not only did he personify the virtue of fidelity in stormy weather, but he became the scathing critic of those who jumped ship. His diary abounds with sardonic comments about prominent converts,²⁶ while few merit mention in his unique Yahrzeit calendar (Die Monatstage des Kalenderjahres) of 1872 with its 722 names of Jews and Christians, men and women, whose known day of death allowed for memorialization.²⁷ For instance, Zunz conspicuously omitted the name of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, even as he made an exception of Eduard Gans, Hegel’s preeminent legal disciple, though only for his work for the Verein (the subject of this chapter). Noting his premature death on May 5, 1839, Zunz recalled: “Professor Gans … converted to Christianity on December 12, 1825 in Paris, but [his] most admirable years of development fell between 1818 and 1823, a period which Laube in his biography skipped over entirely.”²⁸

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      The Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (the Society for the Culture and Critical Study of the Jews) was founded in Berlin on November 7, 1819, by seven men who, except for Gans, were not native to Berlin and five of whom were under thirty. Zunz described the initiative to Ehrenberg a few months later as an effort to unite the best minds of German Jewry to promote culture and critical scholarship among their compatriots. In consequence, its active membership to the bitter end remained fairly homogeneous, socially marginal, decidedly bookish, and disastrously small in number.²⁹ Heinrich Heine joined for a short stint in August 1822 while in Berlin,³⁰ and when his immensely diligent and utterly sympathetic first biographer, Adolf Strodtmann, began his undertaking, Zunz prevailed upon him not to omit the story of the Verein: “Nearly all the advances [made by] Jews in the academic, political and civil arenas, as well as their initiatives in the reforms of their schools and synagogues have their roots in the activities of that association and its handful of members.”³¹ Zunz never discarded the papers of the Verein and placed them at the disposal of Strodtmann, who wove them into a colorful tapestry he called “Das junge Palästina,” analogous to his later chapter on “Das junge Deutschland.” Both told the story of idealistic youth in rebellion against the hidebound conservatism of entrenched elders in the entangled fields of religion and politics. As communicators, though, the former never matched the latter: “The Young Palestine, as we would like to call these heralds, who [were] way ahead of their time in anticipating the era’s new ideas, had not yet learned to package their liberal wisdom in a popular idiom, as did The Young Germany so effectively a decade later.”³²

      Still, by evocatively corroborating Zunz’s judgment, Strodtmann put the Verein on the historiographical map. Nor would the memory of its messianic fervor ever dim for Zunz. In 1839, he wrote his friend the Berlin publisher and communal leader Moritz Veit that “the Verein survived 39×40 days [Zunz often expressed his feelings in arithmetic terms], and those days in which Gans, Moser, Heine, Zunz and Rubo, ignoring their own welfare, devoted themselves wholly to the interests of their people [nationalen Interessen]—were they not more comely than our own day with its heartless self-centeredness?”³³

      By November 1819, the prospects for full emancipation in the states of the German Confederation were rapidly receding. Liberals and Conservatives had united in their suspicion of the Jews. The recently founded Burschenschaften, the organized expression of student agitation for national unification across Germany, did not accept Jews as members,³⁴ and in its celebration at the Wartburg Castle in October 1817 of the tercentenary of Luther’s Reformation and the more recent battle of Leipzig, among the books its members burned was Saul Ascher’s 1815 denunciation of their chauvinism, Die Germanomanie.³⁵ The murder of a reactionary playwright in Mannheim on March 23, 1819, by a radicalized university student gave Austria’s chancellor Metternich a chance to extract from the diet of the German Confederation in Frankfurt a web of repressive measures and principles.³⁶ And in the late summer of 1819, rhetoric erupted into violence against Jews and their property as riots leapfrogged across towns in southern and western Germany, though not in Prussia, where the promise of 1812 was undercut administratively.³⁷ Thus when the Prussian government ordered all Christian children attending Jewish private schools to leave by September 15, 1819, Jost, one of the founders of the Verein, was forced to close his school by the start of the new year. The loss of income suddenly made him dependent on the goodwill of friends, such as Israel Jacobson, his former benefactor, who had helped him financially to open the school and now gave him the tidy gift of 800 Reichstaler. Jost proudly told Ehrenberg that he accepted only what he actually needed.³⁸

      A second factor served to increase the urgency to find refuge among one’s own. Internally, the erosion of faith among many Jews was weakening their resolve to withstand the adversity from without. Jost’s own estrangement from traditional Judaism exemplified the state of mind. In a long epistle to Ehrenberg from July 1820, Jost described in detail the expensive effort of an English missionary society founded in 1810 and operating in Berlin to convert Jews through suasion. He lauded it but doubted its efficacy because the society was perversely focused on converting religious rather than irreligious Jews. Moreover, Jost abhorred a Christianity dominated by clergy no less than a Judaism subservient to rabbis: “I am far from admiring clerical Christianity [Pfaffenchristenthum], although I can’t deny approving of the Christianity of the New Testament because it is a pure and purged Judaism, and our Judaism only a debased Christianity. But these poor Englishmen are as impoverished in learning as loaded with money. They are theologically naïve enough to convince themselves that observant Jews are more likely to convert than free thinkers, and thus they take aim at bearded rabbis …, starting a religious fight that alienates free thinkers, who till then had admired Christianity.”³⁹

      The hostility toward rabbinic Judaism, with its elaborate legalistic superstructure, was indeed a staple of the Verein and though