Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch

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СКАЧАТЬ among Jews was predominantly Hebrew, and it is the vast and variegated nature of this religious-cultural legacy that Zunz set out to sketch. The key to understanding a people was its literature.³⁵ Minimally, then, Etwas is a bibliography of a bracingly new conception of Jewish literary creativity.

      The conception did not include the Hebrew Bible, the fountainhead of the language, because it was already long ensconced in the university’s theological faculty.³⁶ Postbiblical Hebrew literature, beginning with the Mishnah, however, had not made the grade, for Protestant interest in Judaism ended once superseded by Christianity. By averting a head-on collision over the Bible, Zunz could stress the unappreciated secular nature of much of rabbinic literature, while implying that its study ought to be located in the now ascendant faculty of philosophy. Reluctantly, though, he retained the prevailing nomenclature for his subject (he would have preferred to call it new Hebrew or just Hebrew literature), but insisted that a multitude of its authors were not rabbis nor their works religious.³⁷

      The astonishing comprehensiveness of Zunz’s bibliography incontrovertibly reinforced his argument. From his threefold division into works of religion, language, and history, with their numerous subdivisions, emerged a religious civilization that was highly distinctive yet at home in the world.³⁸ Like his mentors at the university in Altertumswissenschaft (the study of the Greco-Roman world), Zunz did not shortchange the primacy of original sources in reaching for encyclopedic coverage. He uncovered a bevy of Hebrew (and some Arabic) manuscripts and rare books for many of his disciplinary categories simply by scrutinizing the dated, incomplete and faulty catalogues of extant collections. In truth, the specificity of his bibliography went far beyond reshuffling familiar sources.

      In the process, Zunz acutely and presciently anticipated topics for future research: a history of the synagogue grounded in the sources;³⁹ a comparison of talmudic law on culpability with its Roman counterpart;⁴⁰ a systematic study of the disputes between the schools of Hillel and Shammai;⁴¹ a study of the numerous sources of the Zohar (many of which he identified with precision) that give it the appearance of a medieval composite work;⁴² a compilation of Jewish ethics (including “many of the gold nuggets in the little read book of the Zohar”) to counter the one-sidedness of Eisenmenger;⁴³ a review of the abundant material scattered throughout the Talmud dealing with the disparate fields of natural science; and a history of the Hebrew language.⁴⁴ In reference to the last topic, Zunz called for preparatory work in the fields of grammar, lexicography, and etymology. Acidly, he opined that most rabbinists were not Orientalists and the latter know no Hebrew.⁴⁵ Zunz, like his mentors, extolled the predominance of philology: “For language is the first friend, who willingly leads us along the footpaths to scholarship and the last to whom we return longingly. She alone can tear away the past’s veil. She alone can prepare kindred spirits for the future. And that is why the scholar must endure her caprice. What centuries have created can only be enhanced by centuries.”⁴⁶

      Rarely has so much novelty been packed into so little space. Yet Zunz never lost sight of the whole. Above the multiplicity of fields and myriad of details hovered the canopy of philosophy, which imbued the dissonance below with order, coherence, and meaning. The particularity of Jewish philosophy was in turn not only the quintessence of Jewish wisdom through the ages, but also an integral component of the collective wisdom of humanity: “And as such, every historical datum, diligently uncovered, incisively deciphered, philosophically utilized and tastefully and appropriately positioned, is a contribution to the knowledge of humanity, which alone is the most worthy final goal of all research.”⁴⁷

      By withholding his initial impulsive retort to Rühs’s diatribe, Zunz set the stage for one of lasting consequence. An authentic study of the totality of the Jewish experience promised to indict Rühs as the deluded spinner of a dangerous phantasmagoria. By soaring above the battlefield, Zunz made his case without compromising the integrity of his enterprise. He neither rushed to premature conclusions nor indulged in direct refutation of instances of wild defamation. Rather, he had come in the spirit of Cicero, whom he quoted in signing off on his forward: “I believe the highest virtue to be the reconciliation of the minds of men.”⁴⁸ Though the turn to history would eventually advance an incomplete form of equality for Jews and attain a conflicted acceptance by Germans, the failure of the field of Jewish studies to gain as much as a toehold in German universities prior to 1933 signified just how fragile was the state of emancipation as late as the Weimar Republic.⁴⁹

      In addition to Rühs, whose course he failed to complete, Zunz studied in his first semester with Friedrich August Wolf, the preeminent Greco-Roman scholar of his day in Germany, and his protégé, August Boeckh.⁵⁰ Both men were instrumental in educating the teachers who were to embed the intensive study of Greek and Latin into the core of Prussia’s reformed gymnasium curriculum. From 1809 to 1865, Boeckh gave his renowned lecture course on his encyclopedic conception of philology some twenty-six times to a total of 1,696 students, one of whom was Leopold Zunz.⁵¹ As noted in his diary, Zunz reacted favorably to their instruction: “Boeckh instructs me, but Wolf attracts me,” and he would go on to take at least three more courses with each.⁵² In other words, while Zunz composed his second rejoinder to Rühs, he was immersed in the language, history, and culture of the two nations that contemporary intellectuals idealized as the epitome of civilization and the building blocks of German character.

      The lure of this cult of neohumanism both influenced and confounded Zunz. Despite the absence of the word “encyclopedia” with its systematizing thrust from the title of his booklet, there can be no doubt that he borrowed the format and intent of the genre from his professors.⁵³ The centrality of philology and primacy of literature in the discourse, along with its secular tone, came from them as well. Boeckh may also have been the source for the lofty synthetic role of integrating the findings of the disparate subfields that Zunz assigned to philosophy.⁵⁴ Still, it is a tribute to his scholarly maturity and independence of mind that on the micro-level of language, terminology, and ordering of material Zunz was far less beholden to his mentors. In reworking their model, Zunz’s originality shines through.⁵⁵

      Overall, however, there was no room for the study of the Jews of antiquity in the vaunted field of Altertumswissenschaft propagated by Wolf and Boeckh.⁵⁶ Greeks and Romans alone constituted the nations of antiquity worthy of the designation “cultured.” They alone rose above the constraints of nature to a level of freedom, intellect, and cultural life that became the seedbed for the ideas, practices, and institutions that germinated into Christianity and the modern world. In comparison, the other nations of antiquity deserved still to be regarded as barbarians.⁵⁷ Only in the study of the earliest stages of Greek mythology did it seem warranted to cast a fleeting glance at the primitive mythology of the ancient Hebrews.⁵⁸

      The constricted and crowded horizon forced Zunz to ignore one of Rühs’s most telling pieces of evidence for the immutable character of the Jews, unaffected by external circumstances: “Long before Christianity and their dispersion, they manifest a speculative spirit, which seeks the greatest possible gain with the least exertion. They have been storekeepers and middlemen since the founding of Alexandria, where they already had their own streets.”⁵⁹ Whereupon Rühs related at great length and with evident relish the escapades of one Joseph, the nephew of Onias the high priest in Jerusalem, and thereafter Joseph’s son Hyrcanus during the century of Ptolemaic rule over Palestine following the conquests of Alexander the Great. Taken from Josephus, the narrative recounted the daring and cunning by which Joseph secured and retained the right to collect the king’s taxes in all of Coele-Syria for twenty-two years, during which time he amassed a fortune and lifted his coreligionists out of poverty.⁶⁰ Rühs exulted in conclusion: “This story reads as if fabricated by the enemies of the Jews. It matches to a tee the events of several wealthy families in our day, and yet it is ancient. The Jewish historian Josephus tells it to the world as proof of the endowment, skill and wit of his people, happily placing a few Jews like Joseph and Hyrcanus next to the heroes of Greece and Rome.”⁶¹

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