alongside a German translation and a few highly instructive notes. As indicated on the title page, the chrestomathy was intended “for theologians and historians, as well as for use in Jewish institutions of higher learning,” and was a tribute to Veit’s commitment to serious Jewish education.85
Its editor was Joseph Zedner, born in Glogau in 1804, and a member of a small cohort of younger scholars inspired by Zunz to enter the parlous field of Jewish scholarship. At the time Zedner served as a resident teacher of the children in the household of Adolf Asher, who had published Zunz’s Gottesdienstliche Vorträge in 1832, and in whose book trade he also worked. Zedner had excelled as a student of Talmud in the Posen yeshiva of Akiva Eger, the dominant Orthodox sage of his generation. Self-effacing to a fault, Zedner (or maybe Veit) may have thought that putting his unknown name on the title page of his anthology might actually impede its sale. By the 1840s Asher had become the main European agent for the acquisition of Hebrew books by the British Museum, and it was his close ties to its dynamic librarian Anthony Panizzi that enabled him to secure an appointment for Zedner in 1846 in its division of printed books.86 Failing health would eventually force Zedner to retire in 1869 after presiding over the growth of its Hebraica collection from six hundred volumes to eleven thousand and finishing in 1867 an 891-page printed catalogue. A fixture inside this emporium of Jewish knowledge, Zedner would prove to be of inestimable value to Zunz and his protégé Moritz Steinschneider in their painstaking research.87
Because Zedner tutored not only the children of Asher but Asher himself, the scholarly world was soon to learn who had been behind the luminous anthology. In 1840–41 Asher produced a handsome two-volume English translation of the medieval Hebrew travelogue of Benjamin of Tudela (in Navarre).88 A merchant with a keen eye and diligent hand, Benjamin recorded his travels through the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds from approximately 1160 to 1173, creating a treasure trove of specific communal, economic, and geographic information. Asher’s English translation was based on an accompanying Hebrew text, carefully punctuated, that was itself a composite of the first two printed editions of Constantinople in 1543 and Ferrara in 1556.89 At the end of his preface to volume 2, Asher graciously acknowledged “the valuable assistance of Mr. Zedner, the editor of the Auswahl historischer Stücke without which I should not have been able to attain even that relative degree of perfection to which I humbly pretend.”90
The work was grand in conception and a model of collaboration. To contextualize Benjamin’s travels in the Baghdad Caliphate, Asher recruited Fürchtegott Lebrecht, who had studied with the Hatam Sofer in Pressburg and Wilhelm Gesenius in Halle and was a colleague of Zunz at the newly opened teachers’ seminary in Berlin, to write an extended history of the regime with special attention to its state in the period of Benjamin’s visit. In 1864 Lebrecht would be the first German scholar to call for a critical edition of the Babylonian Talmud in a small book that he warmly dedicated to Zunz on his seventieth birthday.91
Asher’s other major collaborator was Zunz, who assisted him significantly in three ways. First, he provided him with numerous learned notes to his translation, identifying more fully the many individuals mentioned by Benjamin, especially in Provence and Italy. To his credit, though, most of the notes on the contents of the text were written by Asher himself. Second, Zunz composed a long essay on the literature of a geographic nature authored by Jews that consisted of 160 works in eight subject categories from the Bible to his contemporary Salomon Munk in Paris. Third, Zunz balanced that sweep with an essay focused entirely on the topography of the land of Israel as preserved in Kaftor va-Ferah by Estori ha-Parhi in 1322.92
Again the assemblage of facts was intended to lift the miasma of ignorance among Christian scholars and savants. A sense of truth and justice drove Zunz’s relentless excavations of the remnants of Jewish creativity. Let three examples illustrate their plenitude. The overall achievement of Asher’s project was to establish the veracity of Benjamin’s Itinerary, which Jost had vigorously contested in 1826, a stance he reiterated in 1832. At worst, he suspected The Itinerary to be a fabrication of a trip never taken; at best, a compilation thrown together after the fact.93 Thus Asher took aim at Jost early on for accusing Benjamin of omitting the name of the pope at the time he visited Rome: “But as there exists no edition of these travels, in which that name is not clearly stated, we confess our distrust of the Doctor’s judgement of our author, and assert that the conclusions of an historian who is guilty of such mistakes—we refrain from saying misquotations—ought not to be taken bona fide.”94
Later Asher took the offensive again, joined in yet another note by Salomo Juda Löb Rapoport, whose promised collaboration never really materialized, most likely because of his move in 1840 from Tarnopol to Prague to assume the post of its chief rabbinic judge.95 The collective hostility betrayed a distinct consensus that Jost had grievously erred in embarking on his historical narrative (and critical notes) long before the necessary excavations had been done.
To drive home the point still further, Zunz brought to light two manuscripts of seminal importance: the diary of David Reuveni, the fearless adventurer who roused messianic fervor among the Conversos of Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century, and the work of Estori ha-Parhi on the sites, vegetation, and laws of the land of Israel.96 Zunz’s trustworthy friend Michael in Hamburg had a copy of the Reuveni diary in his collection and shared its contents freely with him. Zunz reported that “the manuscript contains 190 leaves in octavo and deserves to be printed. In the account David speaks in the first person.”97 Without embellishment, Zunz summarized Reuveni’s dramatic narrative in four riveting pages. In comparison, twelve years earlier Jost could not muster more than one paragraph, wrapped in doubt, that added nothing to what Gans had recounted in 1592, without his existential engagement.98
While Zunz’s exposure of the scholarly world to the diary of Reuveni would not yield a publication of the complete manuscript until the last decade of the nineteenth century,99 his extensive presentation of Estori ha-Parhi’s work bore immediate fruit. A native of Provence, ha-Parhi fell victim to the French expulsion of 1306 and cast about, translating in Barcelona some medical texts into Hebrew, before reaching Israel in 1313. During the next seven years he traveled the country amassing a host of geographic, historical, archaeological, and numismatic details. Uppermost in his research was a messianic undertone: the preparation of a digest of all halakhic matters pertaining to living in the land of Israel should a national restoration be in the offing. Since its first printing in 1549, Kaftor va-Ferah (Almond Blossoms, a play on ha-Parhi’s name) had not garnered sufficient interest for a second printing until 1852 in Berlin by Hirsch Endelmann, who in his short list of authors who over the centuries had made mention of ha-Parhi fully translated Zunz’s biographical sketch into Hebrew. And that Asher’s name was listed on the title page as the book’s distributor surely confirms the causal connection.100 Nevertheless, when the seventh volume of Heinrich Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden came out in 1863, he gave ha-Parhi short shrift. Though he found Kaftor va-Ferah to be a multifaceted, interesting work, he did not deign to give Zunz or Edelmann any credit.101
The target of Zunz’s contention of Kaftor va-Ferah as a vital source of information on the geography of Palestine was Karl von Raumer, a professor of natural history at Erlangen, whose 1835 book on the subject had already gone into a second edition by 1838. Not only was Raumer oblivious to the importance of Jewish sources for the topography of Palestine, he sailed over in silence “1100 years of Jewish antiquity from Josephus to Benjamin of Tudela.” Moreover, “his whole work does not contain one single quotation from the Talmud,” and when cited, it is from a secondary source.102 To highlight Raumer’s benightedness, Zunz compared him to the Dutch Orientalist Adrian Reland, who had visited the land in 1695 and “devoted an equal degree of attention to the Talmud and the fathers of the church” in his erudite study of Palestine of 1714, which Zunz regarded as the pinnacle of seventeenth-century scholarship on Judaism. During the intervening century, ignorance coupled with ill will to exclude Jewish scholarship from the academic discourse: “When in the
