nature and abundant meaning of midrash, he was increasingly captivated by the ascetic and mystical intensity of his teacher, who despised all outward show and material desire.73 During his tenure at the helm of the Berlin community, Veit quickly emerged as a compelling force for Jewish education, communal reorganization, Jewish scholarship, and a modern yet traditional rabbinate.
Not only did Veit initiate the new Bible translation edited by Zunz, but his firm published three separate editions by 1855.74 To be sure, Zunz translated only the final two books of Chronicles, but his editorial work and reputation made the Zunz Bible, as it became known, the most often printed and widely appreciated of all the many German-Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible produced between 1783 and 1937. As late as 1934, Harry Torczyner, the editor of the last of these translations noteworthily sponsored by the Jewish community of Berlin and a distinguished scholar of Semitics, saw fit in his introduction to invoke the achievement of Zunz as still an inspiring milestone: “In our desire [to be as faithful to the Hebrew text as possible] we feel a special kinship to the Bible translation put out by Leopold Zunz a century ago. Despite what in content and form might be improved upon today, its unpretentious character still constitutes for our Bible an invaluable signpost.”75
As an added bonus, Zunz’s meticulously worked out chronological appendix imbued the lives and events recounted in Scripture with a semblance of historical veracity. Spread over fourteen pages, the table tabulated its data in two parallel columns according to the Jewish (anno mundi) and Christian (anno domini) calendars from creation to 330 BCE, when Alexander of Macedonia humbled the Persian Empire. In a third parallel column, Zunz succinctly mentioned the significance of each date. For example, in the signage for the year 330 BCE, Zunz enclosed in parentheses “duration 208 years,” signaling his rejection of the erroneous rabbinic calculation of only thirty-four years for the time in which Jews had allegedly lived under Persian rule.76
The discrepancy was at the heart of the Renaissance debate between Azariah de’ Rossi in Italy and David Gans in Prague at the short-lived dawn of critical scholarship in the Jewish world. In his pathbreaking effort to reconcile the indigenous sources of Jewish tradition with the avalanche of outside sources brought forth by the Renaissance, de’ Rossi in his Me’or Enayim (The Light of the Eyes) in 1573, among other things, vigorously disputed the validity of the Jewish creation calendar, with its most indefensible link being the reduction of Persian rule from Cyrus to Alexander to but thirty-four years.77 Notwithstanding, in 1592 David Gans, no less conversant with the legacy of the Renaissance, published his chronicle Zemah David (The Sprout of David) in which he reaffirmed the standing of dogmatic history and rejected any intermingling of Jewish and general history. Since the sources of Jewish history were revealed texts, they were far more reliable than the secular sources of general history.78 In consequence, Gans’s chronicle is binary, sacred and secular: in the first part on the basis of the creation calendar, he recounted year by year a truncated version of Jewish history, drawing only on Hebrew and Aramaic texts, while in the second he constructed an entertaining narrative of general history, culminating in the history of Bohemia. Often the availability of non-Hebraic sources permitted Gans to supplement his sparse account of Jewish turning points such as the Maccabean revolt, the translation of the Septuagint, and the uprisings against Rome in part 2. The strategy of separate and unequal allowed Gans to salvage the inviolability of the thirty-four-year calculation for the Persian period.79 On the other hand, it must be recognized that the ample attention paid to secular history potentially diminished the insularity of dogmatic history.
It is not surprising that Zunz would side firmly with de’ Rossi on this issue and many others. Indeed, just three years after the publication of the Veit Bible, Zunz published an encyclopedic Hebrew essay in Kerem Chemed on de’ Rossi’s tome and times, though not a deep analysis of its contents. Zunz’s canvas teemed with details on the literary history of Italian Jewry, which he justified with his operative principle that the mastery of the microcosm should precede any pronouncements about the macrocosm. He hailed de’ Rossi as a modern who understood that scholarship alone could distinguish between what is true and false.80 And he disseminated his research in a Hebrew journal, which ironically came out in Prague where Gans had lived, in order to win a beachhead in eastern Europe for the cause of critical scholarship.
Yet Zunz was not without a sentimental attachment to Gans. Zemah David had given Zunz his first taste of history, when he stumbled upon it in the Samson Free School in the forlorn days before the arrival of Ehrenberg.81 How are we to explain that Zunz began his biblical calendar with Adam and Eve and their sons Cain and Abel and that his first recorded date was the birth of their later son Seth in the year 130 after creation? Gans opened his chronicle with the identical date; in fact, Zunz followed his chronology without deviation down to the death of Joseph in 2309 BCE, or more than two-thirds of the time span he would cover.82 That overlap is a significant nod to Gans. Not wishing to leave a chronological vacuum for the popular audience for which the Veit Bible was intended, Zunz set aside his critical stance and took refuge in the company of an old friend.
He may also have learned from Gans the more vital lesson of context. If history is an endless game of chess, dates make up its chessboard. The beginning of historical knowledge is the accurate dating of its pieces. Among Zunz’s papers is an astonishing forty-page document consisting of a handwritten chronicle composed by him that enumerates in order the years from 529 to 1820 with the sporadic omission of some. Alongside each year, Zunz recorded a noteworthy historical datum or several, the overwhelming number of which came from general history. For example, for 1436 Zunz noted “first printing press,” for 1492 “the discovery of America” and “Jews expelled from Spain,” for 1517 “Luther’s Reformation,” for 1776 “abolition of torture in Austria,” and “Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith),” for 1806 “abolition of slavery in Great Britain,” for 1812 “the Jews of Prussia gain citizenship,” and for 1815 “a German worship service for Jews in Berlin.” Toward the latter half of the eighteenth century, the data become more numerous. The clean state of the document (with an occasional insertion) suggests that it may point to a project Zunz undertook during his university years.83 The amount of information packed into the chronicle bespeaks a zeal to master the landscape of general history, while the chronological grid underlines the supreme importance of dating, two pursuits that would distinguish his future career as a Jewish historian. But they were also values that already found expression in the secular part of Gans’s 1592 chronicle and which might have left an indelible imprint on the fertile mind of a callow adolescent.
Zunz’s deepening relationship with Veit prompted him to submit to Veit in the year the Bible translation came out a proposal to publish a chrestomathy of rabbinic passages to be selected, translated, and annotated by him. The idea may have recommended itself to Zunz as a plausible follow-up to his overview of midrashic literature of 1832 (Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, on which more anon), which related largely to the externals of the corpus, or perhaps as a correction of the one-sided treatment inflicted on rabbinic literature by Jost. The format of an anthology was a common vehicle of European scholarship to introduce ancient languages and literature to uninformed scholars and educated laity alike. After due consideration, however, Veit turned it down. In a letter of November 27, 1838, Veit acknowledged that there was an audience for such a work and that Zunz’s editorship would probably enlarge it somewhat. Yet it was still too small to cover the costs, let alone reward Zunz with a reasonable return for his effort. Instead, Veit urged him to compose a historical sketch of Jewish literature on the basis of his biographical entries in the Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon (discussed later), which might then be followed up with his rabbinic chrestomathy.84
The exchange did not remain barren, for in 1840 Veit did publish an exquisite anthology of Hebrew writings from the Mishna to the nineteenth century. Though published anonymously under the title Auswahl historischer Stücke aus hebräischen Schriftstellern (A Selection of Historical Pieces by Hebrew Writers), the work betrayed the hand of a careful and competent editor. Its thirty-five selections provided a vivid sense of continuity, creativity,
