organized expression of student agitation for national unification across Germany, did not accept Jews as members,34 and in its celebration at the Wartburg Castle in October 1817 of the tercentenary of Luther’s Reformation and the more recent battle of Leipzig, among the books its members burned was Saul Ascher’s 1815 denunciation of their chauvinism, Die Germanomanie.35 The murder of a reactionary playwright in Mannheim on March 23, 1819, by a radicalized university student gave Austria’s chancellor Metternich a chance to extract from the diet of the German Confederation in Frankfurt a web of repressive measures and principles.36 And in the late summer of 1819, rhetoric erupted into violence against Jews and their property as riots leapfrogged across towns in southern and western Germany, though not in Prussia, where the promise of 1812 was undercut administratively.37 Thus when the Prussian government ordered all Christian children attending Jewish private schools to leave by September 15, 1819, Jost, one of the founders of the Verein, was forced to close his school by the start of the new year. The loss of income suddenly made him dependent on the goodwill of friends, such as Israel Jacobson, his former benefactor, who had helped him financially to open the school and now gave him the tidy gift of 800 Reichstaler. Jost proudly told Ehrenberg that he accepted only what he actually needed.38
A second factor served to increase the urgency to find refuge among one’s own. Internally, the erosion of faith among many Jews was weakening their resolve to withstand the adversity from without. Jost’s own estrangement from traditional Judaism exemplified the state of mind. In a long epistle to Ehrenberg from July 1820, Jost described in detail the expensive effort of an English missionary society founded in 1810 and operating in Berlin to convert Jews through suasion. He lauded it but doubted its efficacy because the society was perversely focused on converting religious rather than irreligious Jews. Moreover, Jost abhorred a Christianity dominated by clergy no less than a Judaism subservient to rabbis: “I am far from admiring clerical Christianity [Pfaffenchristenthum], although I can’t deny approving of the Christianity of the New Testament because it is a pure and purged Judaism, and our Judaism only a debased Christianity. But these poor Englishmen are as impoverished in learning as loaded with money. They are theologically naïve enough to convince themselves that observant Jews are more likely to convert than free thinkers, and thus they take aim at bearded rabbis …, starting a religious fight that alienates free thinkers, who till then had admired Christianity.”39
The hostility toward rabbinic Judaism, with its elaborate legalistic superstructure, was indeed a staple of the Verein and though long gone from its ranks, Jost unfurled it in a highly personal diatribe in the third volume of his history in the context of rejecting the talmudic claim that the whole corpus of dietary laws requiring the separation of meat and milk derived from a single biblical verse:
This misunderstanding is all the more noteworthy since Moses himself relates that Abraham set before the angels (who visited him after his circumcision) meat and cream, making it clear that in doing so Abraham gave no offense to God. Yet the rabbis assert that Abraham already observed the most minute of rabbinic injunctions. Indeed, the statement doesn’t even deserve to be rebutted. Yet one sees that not only have millions been blinded by such views and burdened with innumerable laws, but also rendered anxious by the myriad related details. How many noble works could have been produced in the time stolen by their study or the sacrifices made by their observance. To be sure, it is not advisable to lightheartedly sever the fetters of a religion once adopted, but the time has come that seminars be given on the basis of Scripture that erect an authentic building in which the Mosaist [Jost’s neologism] can abide by the principles of his synagogue with dignity. Whoever may be offended by this wish, should teach me something better, show me the infallibility of human statements and I will gladly retract it. But who after a deep examination of the spirit of Rabbinism can suppress the anguish that seizes the heart, when seeing the thousands and millions blinded by these terrible errors, confined in the pursuits and bedeviled by obsessive anxiety in the face of such phony piety on every side. One can read traces of spiritual bondage in their faces, which block the entrance of more salutary knowledge. Moses never intended this to be the outcome of God’s law!!40
The consternation of this outburst connotes the existential crisis that drove the founders of the society into their rescue operation. Besieged from without and bereft from within, they fought on two fronts with little more than their wits and their will.
The inspiration and energy for the organization came from Gans and Zunz. Gans, who had two years earlier tangled with Rühs himself over the reputation of his father, a failed banker,41 became its president on March 11, 1821, and articulated its Hegelian ideology with eloquent power. Zunz provided the administrative heft. As he wrote to Ehrenberg on January 15, 1822, he was currently the Verein’s vice president, editor of its scholarly journal, about to appear, and chair of its network of correspondents as well as head of its scientific and educational institutes. He also sent him a copy of the Verein’s newly printed statutes, which after protracted consultations with the government and several revisions, the government said required no official approval.42 Since every one of its four lines of activities was also the object of a separate set of bylaws, it is readily apparent that while for the first two years of its existence the society was absorbed with organizing itself, the deliberations explored many a question essential to a minority in transit from the margins of a Christian body politic to its heartland.43 Napoleon had compelled French Jewry to resolve such questions in 1806 when he convened an Assembly of Notables in Paris followed by a Sanhedrin in 1807, whereas the refusal of the Prussian government either to finish emancipating its Jewry or reorganizing its communal structure sowed the seeds for decades of bitter internal strife.
In an effort to persuade the government to extend its approbation to the work of the Verein, Gans embedded his plea of April 1820 in an elaborate historical argument. To prove that Judaism was no impediment to Jews adopting the language, livelihood, and culture of their host societies, Gans summoned the history of Sephardic Jewry, with special emphasis on the assimilated descendants in modern France, England, and Holland. In contrast, such opportunity was not afforded Ashkenazic Jewry in medieval Christian Europe. With the Renaissance the gulf between Jew and Christian deepened even further, in part because the study of the multivolume Talmud, now readily available in print, came to monopolize the intellectual life of Polish Jewry. And yet since Mendelssohn, German Jews had given ample evidence of their ability to remake themselves, only to face now mounting public impatience and government ambivalence, which threatened to upend the process. Gans presented the society as totally committed “to eradicating all articles of faith and morality, manner of living and thinking which set Jews apart in civil society by a broad and useful spiritual makeover.”44 Gans offered to collaborate with the authorities toward an eventual fusion of Germans and Jews. While the government should lower the legal barriers, the society would work internally to counter Jewish resistance to assimilation.45 The Verein regarded itself as a vital force for regeneration.
In an emancipation tract authored by Zunz in the fall of 1818 for Levi Lazarus Hellwitz, a Westphalian advocate of modernization whose name it bore, Zunz also argued historically that Jews deserve citizenship and can be rejuvenated. Christian contempt had led to their degradation in exile. The miserable fate of the Greeks under the Turks, the Moors under the Christians, and the Christians in Egypt proves indisputably that oppression always corrodes character. Conversely, freedom and education transformed the lowly settlers of North America into a blessed nation. German Jews are no longer a mirror image of their still benighted Polish brethren. Reflective of the distance traveled is the fact that there are (at the time) some forty important German writers who are Jewish.46 Along with full emancipation, Zunz called for a cleansing of the public discourse on Jews and state assistance in the reformation of an insular rabbinate and a dilapidated school system. Most unexpected was his invocation of a French-type Sanhedrin under government auspices that would restructure Jewish life at the local and national levels and issue a new code of Jewish law in which only the Bible would be sacrosanct.47
Overall, this sophisticated but unrealistic roadmap delineated what was to be expected of Jews, Christians,
