our belief in a single, all-encompassing God is not a function of revelation, but knowledge acquired and amassed through human effort. And this Kantian aversion to heteronomy was accentuated in a Passover sermon that expatiated on the nature of freedom. To shun license, freedom must be restricted by law, but only that law which we legislate for ourselves. Implicitly, a law imposed from without lacks moral worth: “The higher freedom, however, will not be conquered through a God-sent savior. It is not a consequence of the criminal court with which God threatens the unjust…. In yourselves, my friends, in yourselves do people become free! Free your will, your word and deed—and then you will be free, even in the clothing of a slave, and you will speak up to monarchs more sharply than monarchs will speak down to you.”135
In sum, Zunz was an early master of two new fields, homiletics and scholarship, the pulpit and the lectern, the only one of his generation equally at home in both, even as they rapidly evolved and diverged. With the closing down of the Beer Temple by the government in 1823, the expiration of the Verein in 1824 and the darkening employment horizon, Zunz’s enormous talent, unharnessed and unfocused, cast about for another haven.
CHAPTER 3
Into the Wilderness
Among Zunz’s papers there is an intriguing list of nineteen pages of Hebrew works compiled by him in December 1823. On its title page he identified it as “a list of Hebrew works read and extensively excerpted by me, some of which I also used and cited in my published writings.” Page 2 consists of some 25 manuscript titles, while pages 3 through 19 list alphabetically another 465 titles of works in print, though often not readily accessible. If five years earlier in Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur Zunz had unveiled a stunning vision of the expanse of medieval Jewish literature for the German academic world, the list of what he had carefully studied by the end of 1823 gives resounding testimony to his resolve to immerse himself in as many of its particulars as possible. Zunz appears to have read whatever came to hand to gain command of the field’s contours, borders, and linguistic features. The dating of the list served notice that Zunz was determined to salvage the tool kit of critical scholarship from the wreckage of the Verein. Haunted by the ephemeral state of his primary sources, Zunz would tirelessly continue to buy manuscripts and rare Hebraica, despite his impecunious circumstances.1
From a financial standpoint, the next two decades would plague him with bouts of acute insecurity. As of January 1, 1824, Zunz worked at the Haude- und Spenersche Zeitung, the most prestigious of Berlin’s three daily papers, as its political editor.2 Given the government’s heavy-handed censorship in the wake of the Karlsbad Decrees of 1819, which advanced the restoration of absolutism throughout the Germanic Confederation after the defeat of Napoleon, the job amounted to little more than briefly chronicling political happenings abroad on the basis of anodyne passages selected and translated from the local press. Toward that end, Zunz would peruse daily two Italian, two English, three French, and eleven German newspapers, coming in at 7:30 in the morning and returning home often not earlier than 1:30 in the afternoon, or a total of thirty-seven to thirty-eight hours a week. By March 15, 1827, Zunz finally secured a written contract that fixed his salary at the annual rate of 900 Reichstaler, while obligating him to appear at work from 8 A.M. to 1 P.M. each day the paper was published. Though its publishers, Johann Karl Spener until 1826 and Samuel Heinrich Spiker thereafter, were both favorably inclined to England and France, much to Zunz’s liking, when the paper turned against the Polish uprising in 1831, Zunz resigned at the end of the year, partly because Jews were in the ranks of the rebels against the harsh czarist regime.3
The tedium of the job may have been numbing, but it indisputably equipped Zunz with an exceptional fund of political knowledge and a keen understanding of the political arena. In the years to come he would repeatedly draw on that wellspring in his efforts on behalf of the emancipation of Prussian Jewry and his deep public involvement in the revolutions of 1848, an agenda fully shared with his wife. Thus when Adelheid wrote Leopold from Hamburg in 1827 about her dismay at the news of the sudden death of George Canning, England’s short-lived liberal Tory prime minister, he responded with a pained outburst: “On my way home I learned of Canning’s death, which utterly shattered me. Few of the people who sit on thrones or nearby have touched me as deeply as this man, and now fate has snatched him away in mid-life, amid a thousand plans and looming wars, while thousands of knaves, monks and rotten judges stuff their fat bellies.”4 Zunz was destined to become not only the most politically engaged of all German Jewish Wissenschaft scholars but also the most radical in his political views.5
Beyond tedium, the job also sharply curtailed the amount of time and energy available to Zunz for scholarship. Years later he would estimate that over the eight years of his employment, he went through a total of sixty-six thousand individual papers.6 As a part-time scholar, Zunz’s focus wavered. In 1825 in the spirit of Wolf and Boeckh, he sketched the outline of an encyclopedic survey of the nascent field of Jewish critical scholarship, divided into four divisions encompassing eighty-six rubrics. Thirty years later he opined that twenty-one of them he actually researched and brought to print himself. Though the project came to naught, he entertained it as late as March 1829, when Heine took him to see a publisher. More lasting, the rubrics lent his research a roadmap that guided his omnivorous consumption of primary sources and provided files to order his findings. One of those rubrics was entitled “anything pertaining to religious services” (zum Gottesdienst Gehöriges) and by August 1829 Zunz had finally decided to write a book on the sermon in the synagogue. Dismissively, he confided in his diary that “one doesn’t get very far with such decisions, though farther than the Bourbons with Polignac” (a sardonic reference to the abbreviated tenure of Jules de Polignac, the prime minister just prior to the July revolution of 1830 of Charles X, the last of the Bourbon house to rule in France).7
By September 1825 Zunz was also back in the employ of the board of the Berlin Jewish community, when he agreed to serve as the director of its newly founded, officially sanctioned Jewish communal public school for an annual salary of 360 talers. By November 1826 after ten months of operation, the school could show an enrollment of sixty-nine students in two upper classes and one preparatory class for children ages five to eight or nine. The curriculum for the upper classes included a total of thirty-four and thirty-two class hours per week with six and seven of them respectively devoted to the study of Judaism and Hebrew. The remaining hours were distributed over nine secular subjects designed to ready the youngsters for business, farming, the crafts, or advanced study. Zunz authored not only the curriculum but also a set of fourteen stern rules governing student behavior in class and toward each other.8 Thus by 1826 Zunz had secured the kind of community sponsorship for Jewish education that he had failed to achieve in the name of the Verein back in 1823.
But parsimonious funding by the community frustrated Zunz’s short tenure. Despite the construction of a new facility for the boys’ school, the girls’ school never came to fruition. Moreover, the community continued to subvent the Talmud Torah of the Orthodox sector, thereby denying the new boys’ school a potential pool of sorely needed applicants. A severe shortage of staff also forced Zunz to spend his afternoons at the school teaching in the classroom rather than doing administration. When at last in 1829 a merger of the two schools seemed within reach, Orthodox pressure kept the directorship out of Zunz’s hands, whereupon he resigned in September.9
What had motivated Zunz to endure this exasperation was not only the need for additional income. A few years earlier when applying to be head of the community school in Königsberg, he had already enunciated forcefully a conception of Jewish education attuned to a radically new age in which the loyalty of the next generation would be an act of personal volition:
Religion, as it ought to be taught, is the foundation of all education—of all ennobling thought and behavior—the mother of all magnanimity of spirit and the guide beyond the grave. Till now among Jews religion
