Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch

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      The translation of Hebrew texts was but one way of contending with the oblivion to which postbiblical Jewish history and literature had been consigned by German scholarship. Another was securing Jewish coverage in Germany’s most widely read book—the Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon. Brought by Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus to Leipzig from Amsterdam in the second decade of the nineteenth century, this multivolume encyclopedia was designed to appeal to a popular market hungering for knowledge and culture.¹⁰⁴ The title conveyed the purpose of the repository: its contents were meant to make for good conversation.¹⁰⁵ During the ensuing decade, the encyclopedia sold some 60,000 sets of six separate editions, at a time when German books rarely sold more than 750 copies.¹⁰⁶ By the eighth edition (1833–37), Zunz had hitched his wagon to the Brockhaus meteor, now run by Friedrich Arnold’s two sons.¹⁰⁷ As late as the tenth edition of 1851–55, Zunz remained the sole Jewish scholarly contributor, among the hundreds listed, except for Moritz Veit.¹⁰⁸ Thus it is safe to say that Zunz authored or revised the multiple Jewish entries that began to appear, ranging from Aaron and Abraham to Saadia, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Benjamin of Tudela, Maimonides, and Mendelssohn. Nor did he shortchange Jewish ritual, with entries on circumcision, marriage, the Sabbath, and Day of Atonement, or Jewish institutions like the Sanhedrin, the rabbinate, and the synagogue or Jewish literary corpora like the Torah, the Talmud, and the Targumim (Aramaic translations of Scripture). Even the Samaritans, Essenes, and Sabbatians merited their own brief entries, as did a small clutch of his own scholarly contemporaries in central Europe.

      In the longer entries on the Hebrews, Hebrew language and literature, Jews, Judaism, Jewish literature, and Jewish education, Zunz amply displayed his erudition and conciseness, specificity and synthesis, respect for the past and sensitivity to the present. The entry on the Hebrews ordered the history of the Israelites from Abraham to the destruction of the First Temple according to the chronology Zunz had worked out for the Veit Bible.¹⁰⁹ In the related entry on their language and literature, Zunz unabashedly intoned the world significance of their legacy: “The extraordinary influence which the religious knowledge of the Hebrews exercised on the nations of Christianity and Islam lent their national literature a universal significance. Furthermore, insofar as its antiquity and trustworthiness, its religious content and poetic power, this literature supersedes that of any other pre-Christian nation, and thus constitutes for the history of mankind and its spiritual development noteworthy monuments and reliable sources.”¹¹⁰ More specifically, Zunz granted credence to some of the conclusions of biblical criticism. Deuteronomy, for example, in its present form took shape shortly before the final years of the Kingdom of Judah. Other books of the Pentateuch also betrayed the signs of an authorship later than Moses, though their historicity and spiritual integrity remained intact. At the same time Zunz acknowledged that the events prior to Samuel and David bore a mythic sheen.¹¹¹

      The entry on the Jews is a similarly compressed history in which Zunz declared outright “that the Jews were the direct postexilic descendants of the earlier Israelites or Hebrews.”¹¹² When writing on Judaism, Zunz conceded that with the canonization of the Tanakh in the second century BCE “a noticeable difference from the ancient Hebrew religion [Hebraismus] became evident in the evolution of its concepts and praxis.”¹¹³ In the Middle Ages, Jews fared far worse under the Christians than under the Muslims and Zunz did not hesitate to spell out the bitter particulars.¹¹⁴ He also averred the extent to which Islam was indebted to Judaism.¹¹⁵ Since the sixteenth century, the lot of Jews in the German states had been especially fraught, which prompted Zunz to exclaim: “The only way to integrate the Jewish population into the organism of the Christian state without harm is by emancipation and inner development, and not by disabilities and conversionary institutes, to which some are again taking recourse.”¹¹⁶