Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch

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СКАЧАТЬ sclerotic and cowardly generation dies out and one born in freedom arises, which will fight for its own salvation, that is for human rights and knowledge, no good will emanate from the Jews themselves. I hope upon my return to Berlin to be active in behalf of the Jews.

      At this juncture in his letter, Zunz broke into a romantic mode. The presence of a soul mate imbued him with the confidence to endure the hardships attendant to his mission, even as it impelled him to be forthright: “Do not wonder, my devoted partner [Treueste], that in my letters I touch upon this topic so often. My whole life is a text to this unending subject, although the world has not always known or fathomed it. Here where I am both aroused to new action and feel a sense of satisfaction in conversing with you, I am touched with longing for you and the wish to be worthy of you, so that you might share in the earnestness of my views and strivings. It seems to me that the more fervently I work for the good of my brothers, the deeper I long for you. And even though I am inclined to laugh at this gush of emotion, I still feel that it did me some good.”¹²²

      Unfortunately, Zunz’s tenure as one of the two official preachers of the Beer Temple lasted no longer than one year. By September 12, 1822, he had submitted his resignation. But a few months earlier, the temple had been the site of his marriage to Adelheid.¹²³ As his relationship with the temple leadership deteriorated, charges and countercharges filled the air. A special committee of nine members to resolve the differences submitted its report on September 9. Of the four charges against Zunz, the committee found merit in only one, that Zunz had improperly departed from the synagogue at the moment services for Tisha be-Av were about to begin: “Granted that the divine [Gottesgelehrter] should heed his inner conviction, it is expected that he also take into account what the moment calls for.” Obviously at this point in his life, Zunz had discarded the observance of the twenty-five-hour summer fast commemorating the destruction of Jerusalem’s two temples.¹²⁴

      In contrast, the committee made short shrift of the charges brought by Zunz—that the leadership of the temple was responsible for its decline, that it had violated Zunz’s right as a preacher, and that after his jeremiad on the grave condition of the temple, the leadership encouraged its disaffected membership to call for his removal, without the courtesy of a hearing. The special committee, however, did not entirely exonerate the leadership. Much of the friction and misunderstanding so rife in this clash could have been avoided if the leadership had taken the time to draft a set of bylaws governing the operation of the temple, and its future welfare demanded that it do so immediately. As for Zunz, the committee instructed him henceforth to abide by the instruction of the temple’s official leadership.¹²⁵

      The outcome only exacerbated Zunz’s irascible disposition. After a letter of protest to the special committee on September 11, he submitted his resignation to the temple board the following day.¹²⁶ A few weeks before, Zunz had summarized for his friend Isak Noa Mannheimer, destined to replace him briefly in Berlin and then go on to an illustrious career in Vienna, his own abbreviated misadventure in Berlin:

      Since September 1821, I have not given a sermon in which I have not intermingled clear and vague references to the improvement of the Temple. I also personally brought to people’s attention inappropriate practices and opposed their misconstrued and unauthorized liturgical regulations, etc. I drafted for them statutes, suggested [in conjunction with Isaac Levin Auerbach (the other preacher and a founding member of the Verein)] changes in the prayers. Nothing helped. Thus on August 17, I gave a sermon on the downfall of the Temple, which did not spare the board and set forth irreligion, vanity, arrogance and love of money as the reasons for the downfall. In consequence, the board that I had not spared fell into a frenzy. They incited people [who had not been in the Temple at the time], intimidated my friends, worked over the faint-hearted and finally on Tuesday August 20 notified Temple members of a meeting on Sunday August 25 to decide on Dr. Zunz’s attack against the community and the board…. Thus has this wretched Temple confirmed what I said, that it lies in ruins.¹²⁷

      By November 22, 1822, Zunz had a contract in hand to publish a selection of his sermons by the 1823 Easter fair in Leipzig. For each quire he was promised one louis-d’or (five talers in gold).¹²⁸ The resulting volume of sixteen sermons gave Zunz the final word in his battle with the temple. More important, it modeled for a genre still in formation the highest religious and literary standards. The “new Jewish synagogue” embodied for Zunz the desperately needed synthesis of Eastern piety and Western culture, by bringing together salient ancient Hebrew prayers and ceremonies with choral singing and edifying German sermons. Nor were sermons in the vernacular anything new; they had already enriched the early synagogues in Italy, Spain, Germany, and Holland: “Only the organ, a few prayers, hymns and ritual modifications are new but also unessential.”¹²⁹ And it was in such a synagogue “that I found a place to proclaim God’s word. My sermons spoke candidly and without one-sided partisan contamination about what Jews are now in need of, particularly here. For virtue and truth are more important than fashion and glamour.”¹³⁰

      Zunz tried manfully to address both sides of the deep rift in Berlin Jewry. Only a fair and sensitive joining of the old and new synagogues could engender the harmony to overcome the ravages of the ages. So Zunz dedicated this volume not only to those who heard his sermons but also to a spectrum of those still attached to the old synagogue, to men and women hungry for God’s word, and to young people who had already abandoned God: “And above all I dedicate them to the attention of those few, who, after bringing about the downfall of this synagogue and disdaining the voice of truth and spurred on by evil intentions, brought me with their meanness and madness to the point of giving up my post as preacher, irrespective of income and vanity, so as not to violate my honor, my principles, my conscience and indeed the welfare of the whole. I shall seek other fields in which I will be able to employ my talents unhindered for the good of my coreligionists.”¹³¹

      It is abundantly clear that Zunz’s resignation was meant to forestall his dismissal. The presence (and influence?) of Gans on the special committee was not enough to quell the uproar and save his appointment. The breakup surely did not endear the society to the Gemeinde (the official Berlin Jewish community, which sponsored the synagogue) and must have dimmed still further any prospect of an alliance. The episode also made crystal clear how unsuited Zunz was for the emerging post of preacher, one of the few career options available to him. Zunz failed because he was too religious for his congregants. His sermons display not a shred of duplicity. Deep faith and absolute conviction in the truth of his words, regardless of his selective observance of Jewish practice, were what generated the force of his eloquence and the fluency of his delivery. To be sure, Zunz could be impatient and uncompromising, but in the end his lofty religious expectations of an essentially wavering congregation and not any character faults did him in.¹³² In the absence of written rules of governance, Zunz’s zeal blurred the implicit distinction of roles.

      Yet the image of Judaism to emerge from his sermons was decidedly biblical rather than rabbinic. Though always tied to the Torah portion of the week or the festival of the moment, the sermon was animated by the spirit of the prophets.¹³³ Its function now was no longer to instruct an observant congregation in the specifics of Jewish observance, but rather to convince one that consisted of many indifferent and estranged Jews that Judaism was a source of universal ethics and personal meaning. Its prophetic patrimony and apocalyptic tone, alas, often slipped into unrelenting rebuke. Still, on occasion, like the prophets of old, Zunz could light up a subject with a memorable simile. In a sermon on the beauty of harmony in the family, Zunz waxed poetic: “The love of family resembles the rays of the sun, which though they break down into seven colors, yet warm and light only when all seven are united as one. A house is bereft of true love if it is present in divided form, if there is love of parents but no love of children or either one goes unreciprocated.”¹³⁴

      In Zunz’s presentation and advocacy of Judaism, its essentially legal and exegetical nature is gone. Thus in his sermon commemorating Shavuot and the giving of the Ten Commandments, Zunz spoke only of the first, which serves as their theological preamble. Much of the sermon dwelt СКАЧАТЬ