Leopold Zunz. Ismar Schorsch

In consequence, the board that I had not spared fell into a frenzy. They incited people [who had not been in the Temple at the time], intimidated my friends, worked over the faint-hearted and finally on Tuesday August 20 notified Temple members of a meeting on Sunday August 25 to decide on Dr. Zunz’s attack against the community and the board…. Thus has this wretched Temple confirmed what I said, that it lies in ruins.¹²⁷

      By November 22, 1822, Zunz had a contract in hand to publish a selection of his sermons by the 1823 Easter fair in Leipzig. For each quire he was promised one louis-d’or (five talers in gold).¹²⁸ The resulting volume of sixteen sermons gave Zunz the final word in his battle with the temple. More important, it modeled for a genre still in formation the highest religious and literary standards. The “new Jewish synagogue” embodied for Zunz the desperately needed synthesis of Eastern piety and Western culture, by bringing together salient ancient Hebrew prayers and ceremonies with choral singing and edifying German sermons. Nor were sermons in the vernacular anything new; they had already enriched the early synagogues in Italy, Spain, Germany, and Holland: “Only the organ, a few prayers, hymns and ritual modifications are new but also unessential.”¹²⁹ And it was in such a synagogue “that I found a place to proclaim God’s word. My sermons spoke candidly and without one-sided partisan contamination about what Jews are now in need of, particularly here. For virtue and truth are more important than fashion and glamour.”¹³⁰

      Zunz tried manfully to address both sides of the deep rift in Berlin Jewry. Only a fair and sensitive joining of the old and new synagogues could engender the harmony to overcome the ravages of the ages. So Zunz dedicated this volume not only to those who heard his sermons but also to a spectrum of those still attached to the old synagogue, to men and women hungry for God’s word, and to young people who had already abandoned God: “And above all I dedicate them to the attention of those few, who, after bringing about the downfall of this synagogue and disdaining the voice of truth and spurred on by evil intentions, brought me with their meanness and madness to the point of giving up my post as preacher, irrespective of income and vanity, so as not to violate my honor, my principles, my conscience and indeed the welfare of the whole. I shall seek other fields in which I will be able to employ my talents unhindered for the good of my coreligionists.”¹³¹

      It is abundantly clear that Zunz’s resignation was meant to forestall his dismissal. The presence (and influence?) of Gans on the special committee was not enough to quell the uproar and save his appointment. The breakup surely did not endear the society to the Gemeinde (the official Berlin Jewish community, which sponsored the synagogue) and must have dimmed still further any prospect of an alliance. The episode also made crystal clear how unsuited Zunz was for the emerging post of preacher, one of the few career options available to him. Zunz failed because he was too religious for his congregants. His sermons display not a shred of duplicity. Deep faith and absolute conviction in the truth of his words, regardless of his selective observance of Jewish practice, were what generated the force of his eloquence and the fluency of his delivery. To be sure, Zunz could be impatient and uncompromising, but in the end his lofty religious expectations of an essentially wavering congregation and not any character faults did him in.¹³² In the absence of written rules of governance, Zunz’s zeal blurred the implicit distinction of roles.

      Yet the image of Judaism to emerge from his sermons was decidedly biblical rather than rabbinic. Though always tied to the Torah portion of the week or the festival of the moment, the sermon was animated by the spirit of the prophets.¹³³ Its function now was no longer to instruct an observant congregation in the specifics of Jewish observance, but rather to convince one that consisted of many indifferent and estranged Jews that Judaism was a source of universal ethics and personal meaning. Its prophetic patrimony and apocalyptic tone, alas, often slipped into unrelenting rebuke. Still, on occasion, like the prophets of old, Zunz could light up a subject with a memorable simile. In a sermon on the beauty of harmony in the family, Zunz waxed poetic: “The love of family resembles the rays of the sun, which though they break down into seven colors, yet warm and light only when all seven are united as one. A house is bereft of true love if it is present in divided form, if there is love of parents but no love of children or either one goes unreciprocated.”¹³⁴

      In Zunz’s presentation and advocacy of Judaism, its essentially legal and exegetical nature is gone. Thus in his sermon commemorating Shavuot and the giving of the Ten Commandments, Zunz spoke only of the first, which serves as their theological preamble. Much of the sermon dwelt on the deleterious consequences of polytheism. Ultimately, our belief in a single, all-encompassing God is not a function of revelation, but knowledge acquired and amassed through human effort. And this Kantian aversion to heteronomy was accentuated in a Passover sermon that expatiated on the nature of freedom. To shun license, freedom must be restricted by law, but only that law which we legislate for ourselves. Implicitly, a law imposed from without lacks moral worth: “The higher freedom, however, will not be conquered through a God-sent savior. It is not a consequence of the criminal court with which God threatens the unjust…. In yourselves, my friends, in yourselves do people become free! Free your will, your word and deed—and then you will be free, even in the clothing of a slave, and you will speak up to monarchs more sharply than monarchs will speak down to you.”¹³⁵

      In sum, Zunz was an early master of two new fields, homiletics and scholarship, the pulpit and the lectern, the only one of his generation equally at home in both, even as they rapidly evolved and diverged. With the closing down of the Beer Temple by the government in 1823, the expiration of the Verein in 1824 and the darkening employment horizon, Zunz’s enormous talent, unharnessed and unfocused, cast about for another haven.

      CHAPTER 3

      Into the Wilderness

      Among Zunz’s papers there is an intriguing list of nineteen pages of Hebrew works compiled by him in December 1823. On its title page he identified it as “a list of Hebrew works read and extensively excerpted by me, some of which I also used and cited in my published writings.” Page 2 consists of some 25 manuscript titles, while pages 3 through 19 list alphabetically another 465 titles of works in print, though often not readily accessible. If five years earlier in Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur Zunz had unveiled a stunning vision of the expanse of medieval Jewish literature for the German academic world, the list of what he had carefully studied by the end of 1823 gives resounding testimony to his resolve to immerse himself in as many of its particulars as possible. Zunz appears to have read whatever came to hand to gain command of the field’s contours, borders, and linguistic features. The dating of the list served notice that Zunz was determined to salvage the tool kit of critical scholarship from the wreckage of the Verein. Haunted by the ephemeral state of his primary sources, Zunz would tirelessly continue to buy manuscripts and rare Hebraica, despite his impecunious circumstances.¹

      From a financial standpoint, the next two decades would plague him with bouts of acute insecurity. As of January 1, 1824, Zunz worked at the Haude- und Spenersche Zeitung, the most prestigious of Berlin’s three daily papers, as its political editor.² Given the government’s heavy-handed censorship in the wake of the Karlsbad Decrees of 1819, which advanced the restoration of absolutism throughout the Germanic Confederation after the defeat of Napoleon, the job amounted to little more than briefly chronicling political happenings abroad on the basis of anodyne passages selected and translated from the local press. Toward that end, Zunz would peruse daily two Italian, two English, three French, and eleven German newspapers, coming in at 7:30 in the morning and returning home often not earlier than 1:30 in the afternoon, or a total of thirty-seven to thirty-eight hours a week. By March 15, 1827, Zunz finally secured a written contract that fixed his salary at the annual rate of 900 Reichstaler, while obligating him to appear at work from 8 A.M. to 1 P.M. each day the paper was published. Though its publishers, Johann Karl Spener until 1826 and Samuel Heinrich Spiker thereafter, were both favorably inclined to England and France, much to Zunz’s liking, when the paper turned against the Polish uprising in 1831, Zunz resigned at the end of the year, partly because Jews were in the ranks of the rebels against the harsh czarist regime.³

      The