of this knowledge, institutions of the spirit to preserve the holy fire, which turn single embers of coal into a common glow and the hard metal of the heart into a flowing stream.”41 After an excruciating decade of insecurity and humiliation, Zunz had finally reached a safe haven that could nourish his soul as well as his body.
* * *
Zunz’s vast store of knowledge, razor-sharp mind, and trenchant prose made him the spokesman of choice for Judaism in times of crisis and celebration. The role generated many a memorable occasional paper. An early instance was his address at the commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Moses Mendelssohn on September 10, 1829, at which 120 Berlin notables gathered at the Society of Friends, a religiously liberal fraternal organization founded in 1792, to be edified by the words of Jost, Moser, and Zunz. With a locus outside the synagogue on a day other than Mendelssohn’s Yahrzeit (the customary day of religious commemoration), the event bespoke a nascent rite of German Jewry’s emerging civil religion. Similar commemorations took place in five other cities across Germany, culminating in the formation in each one of them of a local Mendelssohn organization to advance the integration of its youth.42
For his part, Zunz accentuated the undiminished influence of Mendelssohn’s singular career. His character, indifference to fame, embrace of a simple life, calm in the face of adversity, loyalty to his people, and reconciliation of faith and reason were virtues that continue to elicit admiration. Abreast others, he stood at the dawn of German literature, extracting wisdom from heaven and implanting it in the hearts of many of his countrymen. As expected, Zunz celebrated Mendelssohn’s translation of the Torah with its run of 750 copies and subsequent reprints, which eventually effected “the banishment of eastern barbarism,” by which Zunz meant the eradication of Yiddish (Judendeutsch) and an end to the subordination of German synagogues and schools to the deficient and uncouth products of Polish yeshivot. It was German, Zunz proudly declared, that now reverberated in the public and private lives of German Jews. And yet in a semblance of noteworthy balance, Zunz also emphasized the literary quality of Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings, whose clarity of thought, deep knowledge, and uncluttered language matched his German, making him the most important Hebraist of his century. In both languages Mendelssohn taught without presumption and loved without wounding, and even when content became dated, the beauty of expression and nobility of thought remained. Though Mendelssohn was a man of his time, Zunz elevated him with his tribute to a cultural icon.43
The gravity of an attack against Judaism a year later drew from Zunz a quick and forceful response. In 1830 Luigi Chiarini, an Italian-born and educated priest and professor of Oriental and Semitic languages at the University of Warsaw, published a two-volume diatribe against the Talmud in French called Théorie du Judaïsme. Chiarini was a key member of a Christian committee founded in Warsaw in 1825 to overcome Jewish resistance to assimilation, for which purpose it immediately set up a rabbinical school with a five-year program to train teachers and rabbis for the religious institutions of the Jewish community. According to Zunz, in 1828 Warsaw’s Jewish population of 30,446 supported 215 Talmud-Schulen (yeshivot) with an enrollment of 2,482 young men, four elementary schools with another 298 boys, and a single girls’ school of 60–80 pupils. The intent of this Old Testament Believers’ Committee was to wean the young from a Judaism defined by the Talmud, and toward that end it commissioned Chiarini to translate the Babylonian Talmud into French. In 1829 the Russian government endorsed the effort with a subvention of 1,200 talers.44 Chiarini’s nearly eight-hundred-page Théorie du Judaïsme was to serve as the translation’s introduction, though in fact by laying out the road map for reforming Judaism all over Europe, it rendered the translation redundant.45
Zunz recognized the work’s implicit threat to move the Talmud back again to center stage in the unending debate over emancipation. The want of acculturation among Jews politically, economically, and culturally derived solely from their religion, which rested squarely on the Talmud. The need for its translation, Chiarini argued, was that without it Christians would never fully grasp the warped and deformed nature of Judaism. Despite Eisenmenger’s achievement, it remained unrevealed.46 In brief, Chiarini contended in great detail that talmudic Judaism was a radical departure from the pristine religion of the ancient Israelites that could be reversed only by a relevant Mosaism. Yet for Zunz to take him on was a delicate matter, because, as we have seen, the Talmud discomforted him also, especially in its contemporary iteration.
Rather than refute the plethora of Chiarini’s claims, Zunz zeroed in on the reliability of his underlying evidence. With cold precision, he uncovered that of the one hundred passages from the Talmud and rabbinic literature cited by Chiarini, some eighty of them were lifted directly from Eisenmenger with the rest taken from still other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century secondary sources. Hence, either the Talmud was already sufficiently revealed by the Christian humanists or Chiarini lacked the competence to do it.47
But then Zunz felt compelled to declare what the Talmud actually was not dogmatically but historically: “The Talmud is not the source but only a monument of Judaism, which, to be sure, as the oldest is recognized and revered, though many components of Judaism (customs, institutions and ideas) were modified by the rabbis without detracting from its veneration. Thus in the Talmud—as in the Pentateuch and the Mishna—two contradictory things come together: authority and nonauthority. A further development and modification of Judaism is evident from Jewish sources since the 7th century, from Jewish praxis and from the nature of Jews in different countries.”48 Zunz appended as well a list of six features of the talmudic dialectic that made it clear that not everything to be found therein was meant to be binding.49 In short, a historical perspective effected a momentous shift away from a normative text to a testament teeming with remnants of Jewish life in antiquity. Monuments are not sources of authority, but generators of reverence rooted in memory. Without fanfare, Zunz had historicized the Talmud by transmuting it from a repository of eternal verities and injunctions into a legacy of human wisdom and experience. The later development of Judaism no less than the talmudic text itself contravened the imputed absolute authority of the Talmud.50
As for a translation of the Talmud, a question that would roil German Jewry for the rest of the century, Zunz was not averse to the idea.51 The enterprise had to be free of extraneous tendencies and produce a faithful and comprehensible rendition. Though attuned to possible misuse by Germans unfriendly to Jews, Zunz displayed as yet no anxiety about losing control of a literature utterly foreign to Western sensibilities.52
Zunz published his learned tract with the publishing house of the Berlin paper at which he worked, the reason most likely for its quick appearance. At the time, Jost’s response to Chiarini was still in press. The interval allowed him in the foreword to express his embarrassment. Neither had been aware of the other’s intention. Clearly, living in the same city was not enough to restore a friendship that had frayed (on which more anon). Jost praised Zunz’s effort guardedly as “very compressed but still rich in content.”53 To be sure, they covered much the same ground, though Jost may have wanted to distance himself from Chiarini because he overtly held the first six volumes of Jost’s Geschichte der Israeliten in high regard. In a cryptic comment in his own essay, Zunz highlighted the problematic nature of the linkage: “Indeed the author [Chiarini] seems to know of Judaism, whose theory he propounds, only from hostile [fremden] reports, especially those by a nineteenth-century scholar full of unbelievable animosity toward all of rabbinic literature.”54 The allusion certainly accords with the tenor and substance of Jost’s early volumes (see above) and delivers a harsh, if veiled rebuke. Without admitting guilt, Jost had to clear his name.
Like Zunz, Jost harbored no reservations about a full translation of the Talmud. Provided it abided by scholarly standards, it could enrich the study of a broad swath of the ancient world by “yielding interesting disclosures about the intellectual character, the knowledge base and political and religious details of Jews as well as of the Persian empire in the early Christian centuries, strengthening our linguistic competence and finding as yet undetected
