Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch

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      Born in Battle

      It is well known that Leopold Zunz’s 1818 booklet Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur (On Rabbinic Literature) articulated the scope, methodology, and ethos of critical scholarship on postbiblical Jews and Judaism in a single stunning essay. Less appreciated is the combustible atmosphere in which it was set forth. The turn to history was an integral part of German Jewry’s campaign for admission into the German body politic, a campaign that tragically would never end because of Germany’s recurring unresolved ambivalence. In 1809 as Prussian efforts at reform took up the anomalous status of its 124,000 Jews in the wake of its humiliation by Napoleon, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Prussia’s brilliant young bureaucrat newly appointed as head of the reorganized Department of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Education, from which he would create the University of Berlin in 1810 and reform secondary education throughout Prussia, authored an internal memorandum advocating unequivocally full emancipation in a single ordinance. He closed on a cautionary note that would prove to be prescient: “In a new law, the government expresses the opinion, which it currently holds about the Jews and the possibility of their civil improvement, and this opinion is of supreme importance in determining the general attitude of the country. Thus a new piece of legislation regarding the Jews that is not wise may perhaps terminate many physical faults, but runs the risk of possibly promoting even greater moral ones than those that marked its present circumstances, by misleading public opinion and reinforcing old prejudices.”¹

      Zunz had arrived at the University of Berlin in 1815, but five years after its auspicious founding and just three years after the incomplete emancipation of Prussian Jewry, spearheaded by its liberal prime minister, Karl August von Hardenberg. Since his own emancipation from the antiquated curriculum of the Samson Free School in Wolfenbüttel (a city rendered famous by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who had served for a decade as the head of its important ducal library) by Samuel Meyer Ehrenberg in 1807, Zunz had speedily consumed a vast body of secular knowledge. By April 1809, he was the first Jewish student admitted to the gymnasium in Wolfenbüttel and two and a half years later awarded his Abitur (diploma). From 1813 to 1815, he taught in the now fully revamped Samson School a range of subjects that displayed the reach of his intellectual competence: German, Latin, Greek, French, Hebrew, arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, and Hebrew cursive script.² In a report on the school’s graduates from July 1817, Ehrenberg traced the enormity of Zunz’s psychological as well as intellectual transformation: “Leopold Zunz—an outstanding mind in all fields of knowledge, or what is more, a genius. Above all, he excels in Hebrew and mathematics. Until 1807, he was unruly, wild and disorderly; in temperament, largely a mix of cheerfulness and peevishness. But through self-control, he grew since then to become respectable in appearance and well mannered. Somewhat later, some even came to regard him as quite phlegmatic.”³

      Zunz had come into the world on August 10, 1794, in Detmold, in the tiny earldom of Lippe, “lifeless and in the company of a twin sister,” who died the same day.⁴ Because of his father’s ill health, the family soon moved to Hamburg, where the father died in 1802, at which point Leopold was sent to vegetate in the Samson Free School. His mother, who died at age thirty-six in 1809, never saw her son again.⁵ Years later Zunz recalled his forlorn state until redemption appeared in April 1807 in the person of Ehrenberg, who became his surrogate father: “We literally went in a single day from the Middle Ages to a new day, and likewise from a state of Jewish slavery to civil freedom. Just consider everything that I lacked at that time: parents, love, instruction and the implements of learning. Only in math and Hebrew grammar was I ahead of the rest. The latter I had already studied as a child with my blessed father. But of the world and what fills it, of the subjects that thirteen-year-old boys today go through in three or four classes, of people and a social life, I knew nothing.”⁶

      It would be Ehrenberg who would provide the guidance, stability, and affection the abandoned adolescent desperately needed. When Zunz left Woffenbüttel for Berlin on September 26, 1815, Ehrenberg accompanied him as far as Braunschweig. Two days earlier in a letter to Isaak Markus Jost, his other cherished student, who was already in Berlin, Ehrenberg had given voice to his melancholy: “Just two more days and our Zunz will be leaving Wolfenbüttel behind. You know that I won’t be the worse off. Not only will he be replaced [i.e., as a teacher], but I will actually gain by the trade. Nevertheless, his departure touches me deeply. You know what he was when I came here. He was not yet thirteen. I confirmed him and he grew up under my care. And if I can’t claim any further service to him other than having loved him like a child, that is reason enough why I follow him with tears in my eyes.”⁷ When Jost showed that passage to Zunz, he copied Ehrenberg’s avowal of parental love into his diary, and years later after Ehrenberg’s death in 1853, added to the entry: “I too see him 40 years later with tears in my eyes. To part is our fate [Geschäft] on earth.”⁸

      Figure 1. Portrait of Samuel Mayer Ehrenberg from 1820, some thirteen years after he became Inspektor of the Samson Schule, by Johann W. Schroeder. Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York.

      Figure 2. Undated and unattributed portrait of Isaak Markus Jost at age fifty-three. The inscription reads: “Our grandchildren will learn much that our time labored to produce and take it for granted.” Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York.

      But Ehrenberg’s sadness was aggravated by worry. He confided in Jost, with whom Zunz would be rooming at the outset, that he would be coming to Berlin inexperienced, naïve, indisposed to accept advice, and unfazed by his pending departure. In fact, he would have preferred slipping out in the middle of the night to avoid the discomfort of saying good-bye. Those who loved him found his stolid and laconic exterior painful. When Ehrenberg’s wife outfitted him with some clothes for his sojourn, he showed no trace of gratitude. Yet Ehrenberg knew that beneath the surface silence roiled a wellspring of strong emotions prone to sudden eruptions. Jost would have his hands full in keeping Zunz’s fragile temperament from harming him.⁹ By mid-November Zunz had found employment as a tutor in the home of Saisette Herz, where he would stay until March 1818.¹⁰

      What confronted Zunz at the University of Berlin with its unprecedented combination of teaching and research, however, was a cauldron of German nationalism triggered by Napoleon’s final ignominious defeat and fueled by a virulent repudiation of French culture and institutions. The rational, universal, and secular discourse of the French Enlightenment quickly gave way to a resurgent embrace of Christianity, the Middle Ages, and the individuality of German law and literature. Among the casualties of this reactionary onslaught, because seen as a French import, was the emancipation of the Jews. The failure of the Congress of Vienna, convened among other reasons to unequivocally protect the equality of Jews extended by Napoleon in those German states under his dominion, further exacerbated the debate over terminating Jewish disabilities. Even in Prussia, where the emancipation СКАЧАТЬ