Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch

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СКАЧАТЬ equality and social integration. As Zunz recounted to Ehrenberg in a letter, the initiative was not his. He had been commissioned to salvage the remnants of an earlier effort. After studying the material, he dictated the final coherent and cogent text in just two days, for which, he bitterly noted, he received neither acknowledgment nor compensation: “Büschenthal [Zunz’s friend and the original author, who had died] has the money, Hellwitz the fame, the workers their pay, the Jews a word in their behalf and I, the prime mover, need to go to the publisher and buy my own thoughts for six groschen.”⁴⁸

      The Verein created four lines of activity to wage its two-front war, two on the external front and two on the internal. The educational arm and the correspondence archive were deployed to counter Christian disdain and government suspicion, while the scholarly institute and journal were mounted to earn respect from Christian academics, engender pride among Jews, and identify what was eternal in Judaism. Put differently, the embrace of German culture would facilitate assimilation and the application of critical scholarship would cultivate a sense of continued apartness, if only inwardly. The cultural agenda would be hands on, the academic theoretical. The advocacy of religious reform, however, was not in the cards, because the government bristled when it misread Cultur as Cultus.⁴⁹

      In November 1821, Gans appointed Zunz to replace the disgruntled and ineffective Joel Abraham List, the society’s first president and one of its older members, as the head of the educational institute,⁵⁰ and in one week’s time Zunz had drafted a statute of thirty-one planks. Its opening paragraph announced the society’s intent to establish “a free school for those coreligionists who are devoted to science and art, but unable to attend a school or gymnasium, with the hope to awaken an appreciation for the world of science among suitable coreligionists.” The instruction would be offered without tuition, but only to Jewish boys thirteen or older who had a clear interest in pursuing a career in scholarship, business, education, preaching or the rabbinate, music, painting, or architecture and construction. The faculty would consist of Verein members who were obligated to teach at least three hours a week without pay.⁵¹

      The next month (December 1821), Gans reported to Zunz that during the past semester he had been teaching ancient history and Latin four hours a week. His most promising student in both was a young man recently arrived from Glogau on the Oder by the name of (Salomon) Munk, fairly fluent in reading Latin prose and poetry, though without any appreciation for the beauty of good poetry.⁵² Munk one day would be heralded as the discoverer and editor of the Arabic original of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed and as professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France. In his next report to Zunz in April 1822, Gans spoke of teaching Greek as well. Of his nine students, Munk still stood out: “Munk grasps quickly, though could be more productive. He is learning a lot and conducts himself well. To be noted, however, he is excessively attached to rabbinic Judaism [Rabbinismus] out of sheer perversity.”⁵³

      By the end of October 1822, Julius Rubo and Moses Moser replaced Zunz, probably at his request.⁵⁴ Nevertheless, growth remained precariously slow. While in April 1822, Gans could report in his presidential address that a total of twelve students had been taught by nine instructors, in his next address a year later, he spoke of fourteen students and twelve teachers and hinted at a possible merger of the society’s program with that of the long-standing Free School in Berlin.⁵⁵ Behind the comment was an impassioned plea by Zunz in the winter of 1823 to the elders of the Berlin Jewish community to promote such a merger by assuming financial responsibility for the far stronger school that would result. Led by Lazarus Bendavid (a member of the Verein) without remuneration, the forty-five-year-old Free School lived from hand to mouth. According to Zunz, of its fifty-six students, only six paid. As for the society’s school, it had instructed twenty-two students out of an applicant pool of forty. Were the community willing to fund the merger, Zunz went on, the members of the Verein would gladly commit to teaching without pay. The emergent Free School would be of such high quality that paying students would soon appear. Above all, it would bring credit to the Jewish community of Berlin and ensure its future, for “the prosperity or decline of schools and synagogues are decisive in determining our progress and sanctity or our retreat and ruin.”⁵⁶

      Not only was this appeal infused with common sense, but also filled with intense conviction, a foreshadowing of Zunz’s lifelong dedication to the priority of Jewish education. But a communal board, which in October 1821 had refused to allow the society’s course offerings even to be announced at its synagogue services because the society’s existence had not yet been approved by the government, was unlikely to consider favorably a request fraught with expense.⁵⁷ By the start of 1824, it no longer mattered; the Verein had gone out of business.⁵⁸

      The second arm of the Verein to focus on the world outside was its correspondence archive. According to Moser, who as its temporary head delivered a preliminary report to the membership on its mission in March 1822, it was the last of the Verein’s four arms to be launched.⁵⁹ Moser had come to Berlin in 1814 and worked in the banking firm of David Friedländer’s son Moses.⁶⁰ Heine later would laud his understated and compassionate dedication to laboring for the good incognito, and it was most likely Moser who drafted the twenty-four paragraphs of the archive’s statutes.⁶¹ While yet another instance of the society’s reach exceeding its grasp, the document underscored the importance of comprehensive information on the Jewish world in the fight for emancipation and against defamation.⁶²

      The objective of the archive was to create an ever-expanding network of correspondents inside and outside Germany to generate information that would eventually enrich the deliberations of the scholarly institute and the publications of the journal. The guidelines stipulated the scope of the information sought: on recent events regarding Judaism and the involvement of noteworthy individuals; on new writings related to Judaism and their authors; on little known or utterly lost works about Judaism, whether by Jews or non-Jews; on the past or present moral, religious, political, and economic condition of Jews at all social levels and in all regions of the body politic; on advances in culture and ethics registered by Jews collectively; and finally on contributions made individually by Jews in the arts and sciences or civic and national life. Verein members were obligated to participate actively by securing correspondents outside Berlin or by sending in reports themselves on anything newsworthy as quickly as possible.⁶³

      A few examples of the archive in action will readily suggest its ambitious expanse. The earliest submissions came from Hellwitz, a recent member of the Verein, in the form of copies of a complaint to the Prussian chancellor from the Jewish community (israelitische Corporation) in Westphalia dated May 1821 and his official response of December 9, 1821, and a subsequent report from February 26, 1822, on the state of Westphalian Jewry, probably written by Hellwitz himself.⁶⁴ The inventory list also shows an excerpt from an unpublished chronicle on the history of the Jews in Teplitz and another from a newspaper in Warsaw dated February 18, 1822, that printed the edict of Czar Alexander I, ordering the immediate disbanding of the traditional local Jewish communal structure (the Kahal) throughout Poland.⁶⁵ In charge of both the archive and journal, Zunz published the edict in the third and final number of his Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Journal for the Academic Study of Judaism) (ZWJ) along with Gans’s full-throated approval, given first in one of the many sessions of the scholarly institute (wissenschaftliches Institut).⁶⁶

      Gans took the occasion to reiterate the society’s rebellion against the rabbinic and moneyed leadership of the traditional Jewish community. Both were oppressive relics from its medieval past, no less than serfdom, the duel, and the fourfold faculty structure of the university. In Poland, Gans contended, the rabbinate had stagnated, turned inward, and sunk into scholasticism. It also forged a fateful alliance with the wealthy, which, akin to the medieval alliance of churchmen and nobles, dominated the governance of the Jewish community. Whereas the rabbinate had been under assault now for decades, Gans was especially stirred by the czar’s attack against the power of the wealthy: “Far more ruinous and enervating than the most stupid and crude rabbinism is the СКАЧАТЬ