only hope that the ingenuity with which a wise prince has stanched here a barely noticed source of cultural deprivation might prompt some imitation in our German Fatherland, namely a closer look at the governance of the Jewish community.”67
The confidence with which Gans had addressed his fellow rebels on the first anniversary of the founding of the Verein on November 21, 1820, was long gone by the end of 1823. Then, he had believed that a cluster of intellectuals driven by a sense of calling could pull off unaided the hardest revolution of all: “The overturning and remaking of consciousness. In this no power or intrusion from without is of value. A psychic evil needs a psychic healing. You will effect it.”68 By 1823 the Prussian government had not only quashed all refashioning of Jewish worship, but also reversed itself on appointing Jews to university faculties.69
The interconnectedness of the society’s activities is also manifested in its courtship of Mordecai Manuel Noah, the most prominent American Jew of his day. Word of his 1819 project to found a settlement on Grand Island near Buffalo, New York, for Jews persecuted in Europe stirred messianic embers, reinforced by news of a similar undertaking in the Upper Mississippi and Missouri Territory by William Davis Robinson, an enterprising Christian merchant.70 In two successive meetings on December 29, 1821, and January 5, the Verein heatedly discussed endorsing Noah’s project and encouraging Jews to emigrate. Immanuel Wolf (later Wohlwill) spoke for the majority when he declaimed: “Over there is a land of freedom and tolerance, where even Jews will not be treated as strangers. Over there one can begin a new, resourceful life which will serve to promote the rebirth of the Jews.”71 But Gans and Zunz, who had an uncle living in New York,72 prevailed in convincing those in attendance that advocating emigration exceeded the purview of the society’s statutes and might readily displease the government. They proposed no more than turning the matter over to the archive and inviting Noah to become an associate member and correspondent of the Verein. And on January 1, 1822, between the two meetings, a letter in stilted English signed by Gans, Zunz, Moser, and one Leo-Wolf, a physician and corresponding member from Hamburg, went out to Noah.73 The value of the letter lies in its hunger for information about Jews in America—“their progress in business and knowledge, and the rights allowed them in general, and by each state”—which when disseminated would dispose at least some “to leave a country where they have nothing to look for but endless slavery and oppression.”74
Heine, who had come to Berlin in the summer of 1821 and joined the society at Gans’s behest, defiantly counseled the students he taught in its educational program to leave Germany for England and America: “In those countries, it would not occur to anyone to ask, what do you believe or don’t believe? Everyone can seek bliss in his own fashion.”75
Finally, the reports and documents accumulating in the Verein’s archive would become the fragments for an eventual collage of Judaism and its innumerable components. Bearing the technical name Statistik, such a composite had nothing to do with numbers, but rather with a snapshot of a present moment sociologically viewed as comprehensively as possible. If history faced the past, Statistik focused on a slice of time in the present, with documentary evidence being the building blocks of both. In the last of his three essays published in the ZWJ, Zunz validated the long term mission of the archive by co-opting the eighteenth-century German concept of Statistik into the embryonic field of Jewish studies. Bereft of a galvanizing state, Judaism would serve as the fulcrum that gave coherence to the totality of the Jewish experience. Ultimately, Jewish history consisted of a myriad of “statistically” studied moments; it would take scholars some eighty years to approach the sweep of Zunz’s vision of historical sociology.76
Zunz had first lectured on the nature of a Jewish form of Statistik in the Verein’s scholarly seminar, as had Wolf on his conception of what constitutes the field of Jewish studies. Both lectures subsequently appeared in the society’s journal, ten of whose sixteen essays had first been rolled out in the seminar. The overlap was intended, for the seminar’s bylaws drafted by Zunz (with thirty-five separate articles) stressed that Judaism was to be subjected to critical scholarship in a free and objective spirit. The seminar was to meet frequently and each member was obliged to regularly share his research. Even associate members living outside Berlin were expected to submit at least one paper every six months. The gravitas of its agenda inevitably constricted its membership. Of the twenty-five papers given over the course of forty-five sessions during the lifetime of the Verein, sixteen came from the seminar’s three founders—Moser, Gans, and Zunz.77 Thus the seminar served as the laboratory for testing and collaborating on research, which would eventually be distilled for publication in the journal. The intimate connection requires that these two arms of the Verein’s activities be treated together, though each had its own elaborate set of statutes.
If the school and archive were oriented toward the external state of the Jewish condition, the seminar and journal concentrated on its internal state. Not only did the high-minded rhetoric of the society concede at least partial Jewish responsibility for the deplorable condition of German Jewry, but it also granted the legitimacy of the government’s demand for the social homogeneity of all its citizens. Accordingly, the Verein espoused an agenda of total assimilation that would drastically shrink the scope of Judaism, eliminate all external differences, produce a radically altered rabbinic leadership, and return Judaism to its Mosaic foundation. In an age saturated with Hegelian idealism that believed ideas to be the engine of human events, the society invested in identifying and formulating the essential idea of Judaism as the centripetal force that would offset the centrifugal stress of total assimilation. Jewish singularity and influence historically were always to be found in the realm of ideas and values and not in the annals of statecraft or military prowess. Though Zalman Shazar (then Rubaschoff) when he republished Gans’s three presidential addresses in 1918–19 called them “the first fruits of dejudaization,” he knew full well that neither Gans nor the Verein advocated religious conversion. Political accommodation yes, but not religious betrayal. The society was acutely aware of the differences between the demands of the state and those of the church. Nor was it oblivious to the suffering of Jews at the hand of the church in the Middle Ages. But the Verein was desperate for Jews to reenter history after nearly two millennia on the sidelines. The mantra of the age was reconciliation and toward that end the Verein demanded the completion of the emancipation process, which would bestow the freedom Jews needed to regenerate themselves.78
The Verein’s preferred weapon of combat was critical scholarship, an empirical and rational science of universal import. Research would muster the data to convince the authorities of the contributions of Judaism to humanity and the right of Jews to find their place in the present political configuration. Internally, it would craft a narrative over time that would steel the resolve of Jews to remain distinct, if not apart, or in Gans’s resonant metaphor “as a current … in the ocean.”79 Aimed at two audiences then, scholarship would simultaneously be a source of truth and pride.
With the nomenclature Wissenschaft des Judenthums as opposed to Wissenschaft der Juden, Zunz avoided the atomization implicit in the use of the plural Juden. Jews were now defined as individuals who played out their lives on a chessboard called Judaism, even as the expansive scope of that board recast it as a cultural rather than a theological grid. Clearly echoing Zunz’s Etwas, Wolf declared in the opening essay of the journal: “If we are to talk of a science of Judaism, then it is self-evident that the word ‘Judaism’ is here being taken in its comprehensive sense—as the essence of all the circumstances, characteristics and achievements of the Jews in relation to religion, philosophy, law, literature in general, civil life and all the affairs of man—and not in that more limited sense in which it is only the religion of the Jews.”80 Yet, ironically, what kept those divergent strands together for Wolf was Judaism’s unique God idea, which fructified even its most secular extensions.81
The sense of urgency that drove Gans, Moser, and Zunz to bring the Verein’s journal to life quickly was not shared by Jost. By resolution the society had decided to elect two editors and give them full autonomy.
