Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity (Jewish Culture and Contexts)

342 Pages·2016·2.918 MB·English

by  Ismar Schorsch

Leopold Zunz

LEOPOLD ZUNZ
CREATIVITY IN ADVERSITY
ISMAR SCHORSCH
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS
Published in association with
the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies
of the University of Pennsylvania
Series Editor: Steven Weitzman
A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.
Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes
of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be
reproduced in any form by any means without
written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www . upenn . edu / pennpress
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4853-1
Frontispiece. Portrait of Leopold Zunz at age forty- nine from 1843
by Gustav Heidenreich. Courtesy of the National Library of Israel
and Professor Haggai Ben Shammai, the Academic Director of
the National Library of Israel.
For Gershon Kekst
With esteem and aff ection
Was Du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
erwirb es um es zu besitzen.
What has come to you from your elders by
way of inheritance, take hold of it to make
your own.
— Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Th e dead can live only with the exact
intensity and quality of the life imparted to
them by the living.
— Joseph Conrad
Echte Wissenschaft ist taterzeugend.
Genuine scholarship is generative.
— Leopold Zunz
contents
Preface ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Born in Battle 7
Chapter 2. A Messianic Moment 24
Chapter 3. Into the Wilderness 55
Chapter 4. Th e Break with Reform 92
Chapter 5. A Clash of Scholarly Agendas 131
Chapter 6. A Time of Upheaval 156
Chapter 7. Poetry and Persecution 182
Chapter 8. Days of Twilight 215
Epilogue 240
List of Abbreviations 247
Notes 251
Bibliography 307
Index 323
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preface
In 1818 in a booklet of some fi fty pages, Leopold Zunz announced his discov-
ery of an unknown and uninhabited continent which modern Jews were
soon destined to apprehend.1 A few hardy contemporaries in other sectors of
Eu rope had already caught sight of a crag or shoreline of that continent, but
Zunz was surely the fi rst to see and sense the full expanse of its vast and var-
iegated contours. And like other g reat explorers, Zunz would return time and
again to map its terrain and unearth its trea sures. No less astonishing, Zunz
sailed without benefi t of a fl eet or a well- funded expedition. His single- handed
eff ort and radical achievement, which would henceforth make history the
homeland of Jewish self- perception and public discourse, welled up from an
acute sense of historical consciousness, an almost fanatical commitment to get
the facts straight, and an extraordinary medley of talents and tools. Spanning
nearly a c entury of bitter turmoil, Zunz’s life of triumph and suff ering, pas-
sion and pathos, scholarly seclusion and po liti cal activism has long deserved
a biography in the round.
Without the remarkable survival of Zunz’s papers, however, that desid-
eratum would be beyond our reach. Zunz threw out practically nothing that
bore his name or handwriting or in which he may have been involved. Th ough
often brief and intermittent, his diary is extensive for some of his seminal de-
cades, and his continental network of correspondents yields a trove of letters
and often a précis of Zunz’s response that constitutes, as Zunz well knew, a
skeleton history of the movement he inspired. At his death in 1886, his pa-
pers were transferred to the Zunz Foundation (Stiftung) in Berlin, which
had been created in 1864 on the occasion of Zunz’s seventieth birthday to
provide him and his soul mate, Adelheid, with a modest pension for their
twilight years.2
One of the earliest scholars to avail himself of that precious repository
was Solomon Schechter, who at the invitation of Claude G. Montefi ore had
left Germany for Eng land in 1882 and fi ve years later published the fi rst