right to be consulted. Its primary responsibility was to get members to contribute samples of their work. Jost was exceedingly displeased by the exclusion of the Verein from managerial authority and at a meeting on April 20, 1820, aired his views at length. The purpose of the journal was to be a mouthpiece of the society and therefore it was improper for the Verein to forgo all supervision of the editors. Instead of a loose relationship between the Verein and the journal, Jost demanded a detailed set of bylaws and even a written contract with the editors that would spell out how future conflicts would be resolved. By way of a peroration, Jost cautioned that “it would be far better to proceed slowly and deliberately than to harm the project with rash decisions.”82 With Gans in disagreement, Jost’s proposal failed to garner support. And by May 14, he had withdrawn from the Verein.83
Some two years later in a discursive letter to Ehrenberg, Jost depicted the gulf that estranged him from his peers and friends:
[The Verein] is an outpouring of unabashed self-importance of the dumbest nonsense [Dünkels] of a few young people, who arrogantly imagine to be able to change a whole nation which they barely know. The results match the underlying premises, witness the boastful, laughable statutes, the childish criticism of everything that exists and the unreadable journal. What comes along to do some good must proceed modestly and young men who share the same goal must pave for themselves a calm road…. Moreover, the Verein, as yet unapproved by the authorities, operates illegally. I have nothing against an association of Jewish intellectuals [committed] to educating their errant brothers, but they must first give evidence that they themselves are educated…. That is why I hold myself aloof from a cause which I helped initiate with great excitement.84
But this self-revelatory epistle from August 1822 illuminates a much larger landscape. The dark horizon facing Prussian Jewry filled Jost with foreboding and resignation. Jews who attended a university had no alternative but to convert. If we don’t push Jews, Jost declaimed, to learn to work with their hands, a whole generation will go over to Christianity. And rightly so, for what binds them to their religion but childhood memories? What is more, Jost continued, the state cannot extend equality to Jews as long as they refuse to marry Germans. A state consists of a single national entity that must be a unified whole. How can the state tolerate a minority that believes it possesses the truth and will not socialize? Can such a minority ever show true patriotism? We are worse off than our persecuted ancestors, he contended, because we no longer find consolation in our faith. What can possibly compensate young intellectuals who wander around unemployed and hungry in order to preserve the name Jew? Faith is a bugaboo that vanishes as soon as it is derided. Jost was quick to assure Ehrenberg that he was no friend of desertion, but who can swim against the rapids of our day? Each person lives but once.85
Despite Jost’s abrupt departure, the first issue of the Zeitschrift came out in March 1822, with two more numbers thereafter in 1823, in all a single quarto volume of 539 pages.86 At its meeting on August 11, 1822, the Verein decided to pay both Zunz, its editor, and contributing essayists for their services.87 The field of Jewish studies in Germany would ever after bear the name of that beleaguered undertaking.88 Collectively, its authors, especially Gans and Zunz, who each wrote three of its pieces, respectively, showed with conceptual power and stunning detail the potential for critical scholarship to reshape the understanding of Judaism. Whether dealing with its external or internal history, their essays are secular in tone, inductive in method, and generally nonpartisan.
Methodologically, they move in different directions. In his exploration of the earliest traces of Jews in northern Europe and Slavic lands joined by the German language, Gans illustrated the inescapable need to consult non-Jewish sources to do Jewish history. The essay focuses in particular on Jews in England before 1066, for which Gans listed more than a dozen primary and secondary English sources indispensable for the subject.89 Nor can a reliable internal history of any Jewish settlement be done prior to knowing something of its external history.90
The same methodological message reverberated in Gans’s study of Jewish legal status in the Roman Empire and medieval Christian Europe, which Jost was quick to praise in his own history.91 The essay relied entirely on Greek and Roman sources. Laws, however, functioned differently in different periods. In pagan Rome, polytheism was tolerant and not obsessed with truth and hence the law protected Jews. Intergroup tensions erupted in the social arena from Jewish allegiance to Jerusalem and pagan ignorance of Judaism. With Christianity in possession of the truth, deviation often ran afoul of public opinion. It was actually church theology that tempered Christian animus with its reverence for the Old Testament and its expectation of an eventual conversion at the end of days. The self-contradictory nature of Christian policy toward the Jews down to his own day triggered an outburst of present-mindedness that brought down the wrath of the censor on the passage: “How long will this destructive half-measure still last? Has history not amply taught that between two options, the only choice is either to embrace the principle of salvation through a single church, in consequence of which Jews should be banished from the earth and the resulting chasm filled with their lifeless bones, or to forget about the Jews in matters of law and then fill the chasm with their reborn spirits? Only that which lies in the middle is evil.”92
Beyond the utilization of non-Jewish sources, Gans argued tellingly for the employment of comparative research. The body of terms, institutions, ideas, ritual, and purportedly historical events found throughout rabbinic literature needed to be brought out of its isolation. Many of these items bore a resemblance to items in cultures with which Jews interfaced, and similarity implied the possibility of influence. Gans had already set out in this direction in his essay on Jewish legal status in the Roman Empire, when he tried to align the titles of Jewish officials mentioned in the Roman codes with the titles of Jewish officials in rabbinic literature. His majestic essay on the principles of inheritance law in the Bible and Talmud also firmly planted its terminology and practices within the Roman world. The comparative approach led to large conclusions. While Gans regarded the Hebrew Bible as the highest expression of the Oriental world, he contended that the Talmud was a product of the Westernization of Judaism. Continuity lay in the fact that the Talmud acted as the expositor of Mosaic law, but in so doing the Talmud was open to the influence of the societies through which it passed. And Gans offered a bevy of examples of rabbinic terms relating to marriage that resemble Roman practice and terminology. As for talmudic inheritance law, he credited it with taking the disparate fragments and allusions of biblical practice and forging them into a well-ordered, inflected legal system, indeed one that compared favorably with that of Roman law.93
If then a keen eye for relevant non-Jewish sources and plausible instances of comparative material greatly sharpened the perspective on the Jewish past, Zunz’s methodological breakthrough in the handling of conventional Jewish sources was no less critical in the contextualization of historical phenomena. This was the dramatic achievement of his biographical essay on Rashi, the swan song of the scholarly seminar and the Verein itself. Texts long sanctified by tradition could be induced to yield unimagined information when subjected to new questions. Zunz’s goal was to strip Rashi, the classic eleventh-century commentator on the Bible and Talmud, of the nimbus of saga and mythology. Veneration had buried the Rashi of history. There was only one way to do a critical biography, and that was to read the works of Rashi themselves. By an exhaustive reading of all he had written and a rigorous application of philological analysis, Zunz was able to assemble the profile of a man of his age (d. 1105), who did not know Arabic or Persian or Latin, who had never met Maimonides, and who in fact was unfamiliar with the exegetical creativity of Spanish Jewry. Moreover, his command of French was far greater than German. Zunz was also able to identify the works that Rashi actually wrote and the works of others that he knew and used. Some eighty such works made up his own library. Overall, Zunz’s biography was a remarkable display of erudition, acumen, and discipline. With new tools and perspectives, Zunz was destined to mine and extract from the classical corpus of Jewish literature untold new information and significance.94
The importance of the Rashi essay also derived from the challenge it threw up
