Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch

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СКАЧАТЬ benefit offset what in the wrong hands might be turned into a Jewish liability. Irrespective of these early weighty endorsements, unremitting assaults on the Talmud to come would forge a consensus among German Jews not to provide still further grist for the toxic mill of anti-Semites by translating the Talmud in full.⁵⁶

      While other of Zunz’s occasional pieces were to be written at the behest of communal leadership, there is no evidence that his refutation of Chiarini was officially solicited. The duplicity, intent, and backers of the tract spurred Zunz to action. Gabriel Riesser, a young Hamburg lawyer, had just burst onto the German scene with a rousing plea for equal rights for Jews. Upon reading it, Zunz shared his appreciation with his Hamburg friend Isler: “I am pleased by Dr. Riesser’s book as I am with every new tract written with sincerity.” Zunz’s tract belonged to the same genre, though in his letter to Isler his mood quickly turned sour and acerbic: “It is a veritable misfortune to write for Jews. Rich Jews take no note of it. Learned [i.e., traditional] Jews can’t read it and Jewish idiots review it.”⁵⁷

      In Riesser Zunz found a fellow warrior, who like himself spurned the baptismal font to advance his career. In his opening salvo, Riesser indicted the tortuous system of disabilities by which German governments coerced young Jews to convert. Resorting to strength in numbers, Riesser called on Jews to form local clubs across Germany to lobby their governments and to avow personally not to baptize their children.⁵⁸ In his next letter to Isler on April 28, 1831, Zunz applauded the strategy and sought more specific information on the club Riesser had formed in Hamburg. In a postscript, Adelheid chided Isler for taking her to be a dunce in that he had depicted Riesser so pedantically for her: “Yet it was all right and I thank you for it, since … 1000 voices have already sung his praises to me. Zunz and I read his book together and enjoyed greatly the incisiveness of his language and the truth it bore. I would like to get to know him better.”⁵⁹

      By July Isler could report little progress. In Hamburg Riesser alone was engaged, but on too many fronts. His hasty diversion to battle with a liberal theologian from Heidelberg, who continued to declaim the non-German national character of the Jews, had delayed the club to move beyond talking, as did the appearance of Riesser’s announced paper Der Jude.⁶⁰ In his animated response, Zunz condemned the medieval bigotry of Hanseatic cities like Hamburg. Their autonomy was the source of their illiberalism: “Only the large, uplifting life of a state can promote freedom.” Zunz did not make light of conversation. It would arouse others and eventually lead to action. However, Reisser should not squander his time by answering every “barking dog.” Above all, Zunz was excited by the prospect of Reisser’s paper and layed out at great length the steps it would take to succeed, obviously drawing on his own experience in journalism. Zunz even promised to write for Riesser as soon as he could make time: “Still I must caution that an enterprise like this demands patience, endurance, vision, help, money and luck.”⁶¹

      When Riesser spent time in Berlin in 1832, he and Zunz drew closer. Riesser visited often and Zunz bemoaned his departure as he wrote Isler: “For Berlin, I was often together with Riesser, often in our home. Now that he is leaving, the old emptiness returns. Those here become ever more estranged from me. My friends from the days of the Verein, if still alive, have either left Berlin or Judaism. I have no one here to work with me on my agenda. I am eager to see how long this can go on.”⁶² Thus the two men had bonded politically, ethically, and strategically, despite deep religious differences.⁶³ Isler’s quick and laudatory review of Zunz’s Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden just after it came out in Riesser’s paper exhibited for all to see the concord and collaboration among the three men. In light of the medieval creativity that Zunz had unfurled, Isler hoped that the fixated focus on the Talmud by the opponents of equal rights for Jews would finally be dislodged.⁶⁴

      For Zunz a defense of Judaism was always an occasion to advance the frontiers of Jewish scholarship. His lofty sense of calling would not allow a momentary need to compromise his long-term objective. His aforementioned monograph on Jewish names attests his consistent quest for balance. As early as July 1834, his diary shows an entry that indicates that he was at work on the subject, as do his frequent requests for names of Jewish men and women in medieval France and Germany of Heimann Michael in Hamburg, who placed his friendship, private collection of Hebraica, and deep Jewish learning at Zunz’s disposal.⁶⁵ When the elders of the community officially invited Zunz on August 5, 1836, to submit a brief contesting the constraints imposed on Jewish parents in naming their children, they relied on their knowledge of his prior interest. Zunz’s swift compliance would surely have been unlikely without his accumulated store of data.⁶⁶

      A keen eye for social history drives the sweep and specificity of Zunz’s tract. Names encoded the places in which Jews lived and the influence of their surroundings. Organized chronologically and geographically, the essay was the study of a barometer of assimilation over two millennia. In the welter of data, Zunz detected recurring patterns and relationships. Jews never restricted themselves to biblical names nor were their choices ever curbed by law. Wherever they lived, they availed themselves of names current in the local language, though often when in transition combining them with older biblical names. “For language, like sunlight,” he argued, “is a common good, unsuited for distinctions of castes and sects.”⁶⁷ Zunz was no less attentive to the names of women in different periods. While they did not need liturgical names, it became the custom in the Middle Ages to give male children theirs at circumcision.⁶⁸ For both, however, irrespective of time and place, he strove to understand the linguistic factors at play in name formation, at the end of which he unequivocally asserted that there is no Christian language nor, for that matter, a Muslim, monotheistic, or Lutheran one: “Names then belong always to a people and a language, never to a church or a dogma or to a political or religious point of view. In short, there are no Christian names.”⁶⁹

      It did not take long for a few men of discernment to recognize that Zunz had authored a work of lasting value. A few days after publication, Prussia’s renowned explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt complimented Zunz with an accolade drawn from his own endeavors: “Never has this subject, so intimately tied to the fate of this ancient tribe, been treated with such thoroughness and historical contextualization. In heaven’s vault the names of the stars teach us which nation in Spain pioneered the study of astronomy. The geographical names in North America attest the origins of the settlers. In the forenames of the Hebrews we can read the wanderings of this hounded people.”⁷⁰ One week later Veit thanked Zunz less poetically, but with equal fervor:

      [Your book] refreshes like every ripe fruit of intellect and erudition. You have shown again that the most penetrating study of details does not suppress the unimpeded view of the whole, the warm feeling and historical sympathy for the circumstances and dispositions of the past and present, but rather grounds and strengthens them. In truth, it is high time that in this field of literature, those men come forward as leaders who in their intellectual training can actually be regarded as exemplary authorities. Neither shallow glibness nor gross pedantry can gain the kind of success for which you aimed and achieved…. The tone and temper in which you have written has given Jews an enormous amount of satisfaction. In the pamphlets of revenge [nekomoh-Büchelchen] of our nation your book must forever remain marked in red. Amen.⁷¹

      These and other voices of appreciation must have momentarily assured Zunz that he had not labored in vain.

      What set Veit apart from his lay peers is that he was deeply engaged with Judaism and its sacred texts. He admired the ability of Sachs to mediate the wisdom, beauty, and power of midrash through the eloquence and conviction of his sermons. He scolded Sachs, who always spoke freely and often spontaneously, for not taking the trouble to write down the best of his often inspiring sermons on Saturday evening after the conclusion of the Sabbath.⁷² Veit was eager to publish such a collection to extend Sachs’s influence beyond Prague. In 1837 Veit committed himself to studying midrashic texts for four hours a week in the original with Salomon Plessner, a traditional scholar whose piety matched his learning. While СКАЧАТЬ