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Leopold Zunz
LEOPOLD ZUNZ
CREATIVITY IN ADVERSITY
ISMAR SCHORSCH
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS
Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania
Series Editor: Steven Weitzman
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4853-1
Frontispiece. Portrait of Leopold Zunz at age forty-nine from 1843 by Gustav Heidenreich. Courtesy of the National Library of Israel and Professor Haggai Ben Shammai, the Academic Director of the National Library of Israel.
For Gershon KekstWith esteem and affection
Was Du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es um es zu besitzen.
What has come to you from your elders by way of inheritance, take hold of it to make your own.
— Johann Wolfgang Goethe
The dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by the living.
—Joseph Conrad
Echte Wissenschaft ist taterzeugend.
Genuine scholarship is generative.
—Leopold Zunz
CONTENTS
Chapter 3. Into the Wilderness
Chapter 4. The Break with Reform
Chapter 5. A Clash of Scholarly Agendas
Chapter 7. Poetry and Persecution
PREFACE
In 1818 in a booklet of some fifty pages, Leopold Zunz announced his discovery of an unknown and uninhabited continent which modern Jews were soon destined to apprehend.1 A few hardy contemporaries in other sectors of Europe had already caught sight of a crag or shoreline of that continent, but Zunz was surely the first to see and sense the full expanse of its vast and variegated contours. And like other great explorers, Zunz would return time and again to map its terrain and unearth its treasures. No less astonishing, Zunz sailed without benefit of a fleet or a well-funded expedition. His single-handed effort and radical achievement, which would henceforth make history the homeland of Jewish self-perception and public discourse, welled up from an acute sense of historical consciousness, an almost fanatical commitment to get the facts straight, and an extraordinary medley of talents and tools. Spanning nearly a century of bitter turmoil, Zunz’s life of triumph and suffering, passion and pathos, scholarly seclusion and political activism has long deserved a biography in the round.
Without the remarkable survival of Zunz’s papers, however, that desideratum would be beyond our reach. Zunz threw out practically nothing that bore his name or handwriting or in which he may have been involved. Though often brief and intermittent, his diary is extensive for some of his seminal decades, and his continental network of correspondents yields a trove of letters and often a précis of Zunz’s response that constitutes, as Zunz well knew, a skeleton history of the movement he inspired. At his death in 1886, his papers were transferred to the Zunz Foundation (Stiftung) in Berlin, which had been created in 1864 on the occasion of Zunz’s seventieth birthday to provide him and his soul mate, Adelheid, with a modest pension for their twilight years.2
One of the earliest scholars to avail himself of that precious repository was Solomon Schechter, who at the invitation of Claude G. Montefiore had left Germany for England in 1882 and five years later published
