and would soon culminate in curbing the government’s liberal thrust.11 Thus Zunz arrived in Berlin at the onset of yet another bruising round of the Jewish question, the third since Christian Wilhelm von Dohm’s influential book of 1781, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the Civil Improvement of the Jews), though this time the field of battle would be the university itself.12 In the spring of his second year at the university, Zunz could report with certitude that the place was awash with animus toward Jews: “What Jews call Risches [the Judeo-German term for Jew-hatred] is here in many forms. De Wette is a Rosche [a Jew-hater] for philosophical reasons, Savigny for reasons of state, Buttmann out of erudition, Jahn out of Germanomania, Rühs out of Christian piety [Orthodoxie], Rudolphi out of Risches, etc.”13
Among the courses that Zunz took during the winter semester of 1815–16 was one by Friedrich Rühs in ancient history. A medievalist and student of Nordic myths, Rühs had taught at Greifswald and Göttingen before coming to Berlin in 1810. In his diary, Zunz confided that he would not continue to study with Rühs “because he writes against the Jews.” Zunz is clearly referencing here Rühs’s polemical tract Über die Ansprüche der Juden an das deutsche Bürgerrecht (On the Demands by Jews for German Citizenship), which came out in 1815 as a journal essay and in 1816 in an expanded form as a separate sixty-two-page booklet for greater dissemination.14 From the start Rühs insisted “that only a very careful study of Jewish history, prompted by my work as a medievalist, has uncovered just how groundless and perverted is the prevailing view.”15 The brunt of the evidence marshaled by him was intended to show that the objectionable character traits of the Jews were not the result of external factors such as hostility or oppression, but ones internal to the nature of their religion. Their exploitative commercial profile remained unchanged no matter where they live, be it in the Greco-Roman world, medieval Spain, or early modern Poland. It is on religious grounds that they regard work as a divine punishment, find farming contemptible, and gravitate to pursuits in which they can accumulate wealth quickly. A survey of the codes of medieval German law, in fact, shows Jews to have been generally treated equally and humanely. They enjoyed the protection of the emperor and pogroms definitely contravened the law. In sum, the Jews are a distinct nationality with the rabbis as their despotic political leaders, Jewish law as their constitution, and an insufferable sense of chosenness.16
Since for Rühs nationhood was not a mechanical construct but rather an organic and homogeneous entity and since Christianity was an inseparable component of German identity, he was willing to grant Jews no more than the status of tolerated subjects, for which they would have to pay a special tax and wear clothing marked with a visible Jewish insignia. Moreover, the state should not tolerate any increase in their number through immigration and do all in its power to facilitate their conversion to Christianity. Assimilated Jews were equally unacceptable because they “constitute an in-between thing [Mittelding] between Jews and Christians,” and flaunt a kind of natural religion that is completely untenable. No state would recognize it nor grant it more than a wholly unobtrusive toleration.17
With this fusillade, Rühs aimed to undermine the basic premise of Dohm’s liberal tract: that history accounts for the character deformation of contemporary Jews and not any innate depravity: “History everywhere proves that political or religious devotion and fanaticism are only sustained by persecution and that indifference, toleration and inattentiveness are the surest means for their demise.”18 Dohm’s Enlightenment message then was that environment forged ethos. As long as Jews were shackled by Christian contempt, they would remain repulsive. Assimilation can only follow emancipation. In his more liberal days, even Rühs believed in that argument, but a deeper study of Jewish history, he claimed, brought him now to viscerally dispute its validity.19
Like Rühs’s booklet, its unabashed endorsement by Jakob Friedrich Fries in a journal review was quickly published as a separate pamphlet. At the time, he was a professor of philosophy, an authority on contemporary German thought, a mathematician, and a political liberal. Yet in vitriol, he outdid Rühs. He denounced Judaism (what he called Judenschaft to emphasize its political character) as a plague left over from an earlier primitive age. To ameliorate the legal status of the Jews requires the extermination (ausrotten) of Judaism. It alone accounts for their social insularity, economic harm, and moral degeneracy, and they must be expelled as they once were from Spain. Though Fries rejected the idea that Germany was a Christian state (a vestige of his erstwhile liberalism), Jews qua Jews were still unsuited and disqualified from gaining citizenship, for they constituted a state within a state.20
Back in Berlin, Zunz did more than drop the course taught by Rühs. Bestirred by anger, he took up his quill to do battle. Others did as well. The dismay and fear voiced in the opening lines of a rebuttal of Rühs by a Jewish law student at Heidelberg named Sigmund Wilhelm Zimmern surely expressed a collective angst that vitriol could easily give rise to violence: “Our time is alive with a general ferment that roils the masses. One anxiously waits to see how it will play out. And the Jews are hardly overlooked. Espousing the interests of humanity on their lips and the individual in their hearts, people, misguided by their baser instincts, attack a poor and defenseless confession in order to bury its future. Important men and public teachers lend their names to publications that throw burning, inflammable material into the midst of the masses. And though they are without effect on calm thinkers, they do agitate the mob.”21 Zunz, for his part, needed two distinct drafts to harness his ire. Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur was his second attempt. By March 1816, as recorded in his diary, he had finished his first, but unsatisfied, returned to the drawing board. However, he never tore up that draft, and its survival among his papers enables us to grasp his state of mind and the radical nature of his subsequent shift.22
Clearly daunted by the prospect of taking on his professor in public, Zunz adopted the ironic pose of a fawning acolyte, addressing himself “to the wise counselor of the wise ruler of Germany”: “Where shall I find the words to properly describe my enchantment with your refutation of Jewish demands? Only future generations more enlightened than we dull-witted contemporaries will give you due credit by immortalizing you in their chronicles. How sad that Lessing and Mendelsohn [sic] did not live to experience their defeat!”23 Zunz’s surface intent was merely to explicate and amplify Rühs’s evidence and arguments. To underscore his dependence, he deftly wove words and phrases from Rühs’s text into his own and flagged them for the reader by underlining and page citation. But in that sheath, Zunz tucked his rapier wit. In a blend of overheated praise and understated sarcasm, he sought to disarm Rühs through ridicule. A good sample conveys the tone and tactic:
I [i.e., Zunz] have long been among the patriots who admire the Middle Ages. But therein you have outdone whatever I dared to put forth and I thank you publicly. It’s bad enough that people have decried this millennium as a time of barbarity and darkness, and imputed to the Christian religion and its servants acts of unspeakable cruelty. And, unfortunately, such superficial views are unavoidable as long as people have not studied Eisenmenger, Selig’s Juden, Rohrer’s Reisebeschreibung [Travels] and above all your godly documents. Where may one find more splendid laws than in Würzburg which in the fifteenth century allowed Jews to take with them 50 per cent [of their money]? Or in Switzerland where they could lend on stolen goods? Where more fairness than in Augsburg in 1440 where the expelled Jews could take along their belongings and sell their houses within two years? Where greater justice than in Spain, whose rulers permitted Jewish financiers all manner of extortion, and then stole their treasures wholesale? Where can one find less resolute tolerance and more laudatory zeal for the sacred and divine than in this land? Whenever did more Jewish blood flow, whenever did this beleaguered people wander about as much, and the forcefully articulated difference between them and Christians—when was it ever more vigorously declaimed than in the Middle Ages?24
By the end of this passage, Zunz had lost control of his artifice. The sudden gravity of his voice was nothing if not a direct challenge to Rühs’s sunny view of the Middle Ages. The gruesome fate of Jews in Spain and, for that matter,
