Figure 3. The sample of Zunz’s clear but minuscule handwriting is the first page of his discarded satirical response to Friedrich Rühs dated March 31, 1816. Courtesy of the National Library of Israel.
Though briefer, the second major category of deficiencies due to external circumstances was no less harsh in its sweeping condemnation. Among Jews there was a lamentable absence of craftsmen or farmers and an exclusive concentration in petty trade. They tended to be work-shy, physically inactive, and indifferent to self-improvement. Their economic profile lacked class structure and their “indiscriminate grasping for bits of humor and information amounted to miseducation.” They evince “neither thorough nor concentrated study, are either retiring or fawning in their relationship to Christians and crude in their speech, demeanor, interaction and morality.”26
In short, Zunz’s strategy to expose Rühs obliquely through ridicule was inadequate to the task. While it proved itself of nominal value in casting some doubt on his reading of the past, when it came to the present, Zunz’s agreement with Rühs quashed his ironic pose. Stripped of sarcasm, his language became straightforward and blurred the distinction between the personae. More basic still, Zunz’s cleverness did little to undermine Rühs’s deeply flawed methodology.
Yet the real question is not what prompted Zunz to withhold his fire, but why he saw fit to try again. The year 1816 was a productive one for Rühs. He soon came out with a second coarse pamphlet which staunchly defended his conservative views against the condemnation of Johann Ludwig Ewald, a politically and theologically liberal pastor and professor of theology in Heidelberg. Rühs declaimed therein that Christianity was an inseparable component of the Prussian state, that human rights were not universal but derived from the nation rather than the state, and that Christians shared no blame for Jewish faults. Above all, for him the French emancipation of its Jews was an anathema.27
It was Rühs’s third publication of the year, however, that induced Zunz to make his momentous shift from ridicule to research. Rühs’s Handbuch der Geschichte des Mittelalters (A Handbook on the History of the Middle Ages) was a gargantuan work of some nine hundred pages, the culmination of years of labor, that for the first time systematically ordered the sources, salient facts, and broad outlines of medieval history in terms of chronology, political bodies, ethnic groups, and religions. Within that tome, Rühs devoted ten pages to the Jews in which he singled out Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s malevolent source book Entdecktes Judentum (Judaism Disclosed) as “a rich and unjustly decried collection” regarding “the teachings and opinions of the Jews.” No other entry in Rühs’s book was marked by the same degree of spite and condescension as his brief treatment of the Jews. The bigotry of his previous two tracts was succinctly recycled with tiresome disdain. But by embedding his bill of particulars this time in the context of what Rühs surely hoped would become a landmark of serious history, he had forced Zunz to spell out what actually constituted a critical approach to the study of Jewish history.28
By 1818, when Zunz published Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur, the anti-French reaction throughout central Europe was in full swing. It had already prevented the Congress of Vienna from protecting within the states of the German Confederation any act of emancipation enacted under the French occupation. In the free cities of Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, the authorities quickly set out to reverse the favorable status of their Jewish subjects, and in Prussia the government refused to extend its celebrated emancipation edict of 1812 to newly acquired provinces such as Posen. Amid this miasma, Zunz dared to challenge the guardians of the academic establishment to undertake a proper study of Jewish history. Taking the long view, he invoked the canons of critical scholarship over the blood-letting virulence of polemics. The perversion of public policy emanating from the professoriate might thereby be unmasked as an egregiously flawed employment of their respected expertise.29
A single reference to the Handbuch of Rühs in the final footnote of Etwas, in which Zunz gently chided him for his excessive generalizing and undue harshness, alludes to the role the volume played in getting Zunz to shift gears.30 The change in genre also prompted Zunz to switch pronouns from first-person singular to plural. The language of science is universal and therefore must be inclusive.31 Zunz contended that the exclusion of the study of rabbinic literature from the curriculum of the university contradicted the animating ethos of the institution itself: “How is it possible, one may ask, that at a time when a grand, encompassing glance spreads its bright rays over all the fields [Wissenschaften] and activities of humanity, in which the most remote corner of the earth is visited, the least known language studied and no body of material disdained in order to serve the amassing of wisdom—how is it possible that our field lies fallow? What prevents us from studying the totality of rabbinic literature, understanding it properly, explaining it felicitously, judging it correctly and perusing it at our leisure?”32 What is more, such an academic initiative would yield political benefits. One cannot legislate intelligently out of ignorance. Misguided steps by the government only end up lending further credence to archaic and outmoded customs and rituals that should be discarded: “Thus to decide on the basis of knowledge what is ancient yet useful, archaic and injurious or new and desirable, we must prudently take up the study of the Jews [des Volkes] and their history, both its political and moral aspects.”33
Aside from its political urgency, the moment was propitious because Hebrew as the language of Jewish literature was slipping into oblivion. Zunz, a master of Hebrew in all its layers, sensed that the Haskalah, the rearguard effort to enlighten Jews in Hebrew, was rapidly giving way to German: “Precisely because we see in our day that Jews—to speak only of German Jews—are earnestly embracing the German language and German education and thus—often even without wishing to or realizing it—bearing their new Hebrew literature to the grave, does scholarship arise to demand an accounting of what has been ended.”34 The transition, indeed, would close an era of more than a millennium and a half in which the language of literary discourse among Jews was predominantly Hebrew, and it is the vast and variegated nature of this religious-cultural legacy that Zunz set out to sketch. The key to understanding a people was its literature.35 Minimally, then, Etwas is a bibliography of a bracingly new conception of Jewish literary creativity.
The conception did not include the Hebrew Bible, the fountainhead of the language, because it was already long ensconced in the university’s theological faculty.36 Postbiblical Hebrew literature, beginning with the Mishnah, however, had not made the grade, for Protestant interest in Judaism ended once superseded by Christianity. By averting a head-on collision over the Bible, Zunz could stress the unappreciated secular nature of much of rabbinic literature, while implying that its study ought to be located in the now ascendant faculty of philosophy. Reluctantly, though, he retained the prevailing nomenclature for his subject (he would have preferred to call it new Hebrew or just Hebrew literature), but insisted that a multitude of its authors were not rabbis nor their works religious.37
The astonishing comprehensiveness of Zunz’s bibliography incontrovertibly reinforced his argument. From his threefold division into works of religion, language, and history, with their numerous subdivisions, emerged a religious civilization that was highly distinctive yet at home in the world.38 Like his mentors at the university in Altertumswissenschaft (the study of the Greco-Roman world), Zunz did not shortchange the primacy of original sources in reaching for encyclopedic coverage. He uncovered a bevy of Hebrew (and some Arabic) manuscripts and rare books for many of his disciplinary categories simply by scrutinizing the dated, incomplete and faulty catalogues of extant collections. In truth, the specificity of his bibliography went far beyond reshuffling familiar sources.
In the process, Zunz acutely and presciently anticipated topics for future research: a history of the synagogue grounded in the sources;39 a comparison of talmudic law on culpability with