no work for you on the horizon in Berlin.25
Zunz did not rush to answer and by the time he did on May 1, 1836, his spirits had rebounded. Adelheid would be back in Berlin by June (where serendipitously the first to greet her would be Gans)26 with Leopold to follow in August. His successor, Zunz reported, would be Michael Sachs, who would occupy the post until 1844, before coming to Berlin as its associate rabbi and preacher. The heart of the letter, though, gave vent to his disenchantment with the caliber of Jewish lay leadership: “As for me, I am cured of all rabbinic work, etc. While I would be pleased to see men of noble disposition and solid education at the head of Jewish religious life, the [current] Jewish aristocracy [kezinim—the high and mighty] is a crude rabble bereft of ideas and power. Indeed, I have put these moneybags [Geldseelen] entirely out of mind, and recognize only those who combine scholarship and religion as the aristocracy from which holiness can emanate. Neither Maimonides nor Mendelssohn were kezinim.”27
Again Ehrenberg counseled moderation. In Zunz’s heated critique of the high and mighty, he sensed a disturbing undertone of misanthropy. They alone are not entirely to blame for the sorry state of affairs. The rabbis who need to work with them share some responsibility: “Just as I cannot tolerate rabbis who unduly curry favor with them [the kezinim] or bow and grovel before them, suffering gladly whatever they might do, I cannot tolerate rabbis who do not respect them and, so to speak, throw out the baby with the bath water. They [the kezinim] are a necessary evil on earth that we must suffer and endure, as God does. Only those who bear evil patiently can find therein a measure of comfort.”28
The Prague trauma reconciled Zunz to Berlin, where he would live ever after. Realizing his error, Zunz chose to return without a job in hand or the prospect of one, to the astonishment of his friends, but not before taking a cure at the spa in Franzenbad on the way back to calm his frayed nerves, a pleasant expense in which he otherwise never indulged.29 This time, however, small assignments began to come his way from men of means who sensed the added value that Zunz brought to Berlin. Even before he arrived back, David Jacob Riess, a wealthy jewelry merchant, a former member of the short-lived Verein, and an elder of the Gemeinde board, contracted him in July 1836 to visit him weekly for 300 talers a year.30 The following month the board of the community commissioned Zunz to compose a brief rebutting the Prussian decree of 1828 forbidding Jews to take Christian forenames. In just over two months, Zunz submitted a masterpiece of erudition showing the historical travesty of the government’s action. Under the title Namen der Juden, it appeared in December 1836 and earned Zunz an honorarium of 100 talers. By March 1841 the government softened its original ordinance by restricting it to forenames intimately associated with the Christian faith (on the tract itself, more anon).31
Most auspicious for Zunz was the election of Moritz Veit in 1839 as head of the governing body of the organized Jewish community.32 A publisher by profession and admirer and close friend of Sachs, Veit understood and appreciated Zunz fully. While Zunz’s masterpiece on midrash (to which we shall return) had inspired him to undertake the study of the underlying rabbinic texts with a learned tutor, Veit had prevailed on Zunz and a cohort of three others in 1836 to do a new translation of the Hebrew Bible into German. With Zunz as editor, Sachs and Heymann Arnheim did the lion’s share of the translating. From the outset, Veit was fully engaged to ensure that the final product would be popular as well as critical. In 1838 his company published it in a single compact volume.33
Like Zunz, Veit was dismayed at the derelict condition of Jewish education in Berlin and quickly conceptualized a bold and comprehensive reorganization at the pinnacle of which would sit a modern teachers’ seminary with a national mission. Zunz’s name as director came to mind immediately with the subject being broached as early as July 1837.34 Nevertheless, several years elapsed before the city school board approved his appointment and permitted the dismantling of the outdated but long-standing yeshiva (jüdisches Seminar—Talmud Tora zu Berlin), which dispensed primarily instruction in Talmud to poor adolescents from Posen.35 During that interminable delay, Zunz had occasion to unburden himself to his former professor of Bible, Wilhelm de Wette. At the time Zunz made his preliminary excursion to Prague, de Wette had visited Berlin from Basel, where he had taken refuge in the university after being forced out of Berlin for his political and academic liberalism. Since de Wette’s departure in 1819 the two had had no contact, yet Zunz nurtured a sense of kinship with a fellow victim of Prussian autocracy to whom he was also intellectually indebted. The letter enabled Zunz to depict for de Wette his current predicament without asking of him anything more than a sympathetic ear:
If I take the liberty of writing to you, my esteemed teacher, I do so on the presumption that my name will at least remind you of the young student who in 1816–19 had the good fortune to hear your lectures and benefit from conversation with you. I missed seeing you again during your trip in 1835 to north Germany, of which I heard while in Prague, and by my return at the end of May, you had left. Still I had the satisfaction of hearing from you through a few friends with whom you had spoken. Though our external relationship was ephemeral, the internal one was everlasting. For I thank you for the introduction [Einsicht] to biblical criticism and along with F. A. Wolf what I in fact possess of a critical perspective. If I have not fully perfected myself in Wissenschaft des Judentums, which is the content of my life, it is the adversities with which a Jewish scholar has to contend that are responsible. He needs to do so much just to survive, rarely has the funds to travel and lacks an audience to animate him. How great is the need to create a chair for Jewish literature at our universities. Ignorance, prejudice and injustice prevail in everything that pertains to the social and historical factors regarding Jews. Neither scholarship nor the general welfare nor harmony nor morality benefit when Jewish students are taught with such disdain and condescension, devoid of all love. Thus were the Roman plebians, the first Christians, the oppressed Swiss and others abused, and yet they triumphed. Likewise the fate of the Jews moves along a steady ascent, even though I won’t live to see it here in Germany.36
De Wette, who cited Zunz’s findings on the authorship and scope of the biblical books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles in his own work,37 must have answered this poignant sample of Zunz’s epistolary elegance and fearless candor, though the evidence is lacking. The letter also shows the comfort Zunz must have garnered in linking his own fate to a cause greater than his own.
Some six months later in a brief drafted by Zunz and submitted to the city school board to accelerate its compliance, whose cogency and concision pleased Veit no end,38 he described the widespread erosion in the study of Talmud and made the case for professionalizing the training of Jewish educators:
The study of Talmud has long ceased to be in Italy, France, England, Germany and to a great extent in Poland the staple of their schools, especially the public ones [des Volkes]. Only prospective rabbis and learned men and an occasional pietist immerse themselves in Talmud. For all the others it is remote. Even those who studied it as young boys abandon it. Talmudic texts have no market. Jewish educators in Germany find jobs not because of talmudic expertise but because of solid knowledge and appropriate education. The raw Talmudist goes hungry. In truth, it is these factors which have pushed Talmud Torahs onto the track of seminaries, and the one in Berlin suffers its deplorable existence because it is unaware of what is taking place.39
At last on January 4, 1840, the city school board approved Zunz’s curriculum for the seminary with instruction due to begin on April 27. Zunz’s annual salary was set at 500 talers plus another 120 for housing.40 At the celebratory opening on November 18, Zunz delivered the keynote address and as he so often did at these public events, he rose above the moment to limn the big picture in a few choice words. The essential purpose of a modern teachers’ seminary was to sustain Jewish unity and survival by strengthening an inchoate sense of belonging to an ancient dispersed people: “How can this sense acquire a language if it does not imbue our consciousness, our property [Besitz], our love. That we are an Israelite collective [Gesammtheit], wish to be and must be, that everyone
