Rarely has so much novelty been packed into so little space. Yet Zunz never lost sight of the whole. Above the multiplicity of fields and myriad of details hovered the canopy of philosophy, which imbued the dissonance below with order, coherence, and meaning. The particularity of Jewish philosophy was in turn not only the quintessence of Jewish wisdom through the ages, but also an integral component of the collective wisdom of humanity: “And as such, every historical datum, diligently uncovered, incisively deciphered, philosophically utilized and tastefully and appropriately positioned, is a contribution to the knowledge of humanity, which alone is the most worthy final goal of all research.”47
By withholding his initial impulsive retort to Rühs’s diatribe, Zunz set the stage for one of lasting consequence. An authentic study of the totality of the Jewish experience promised to indict Rühs as the deluded spinner of a dangerous phantasmagoria. By soaring above the battlefield, Zunz made his case without compromising the integrity of his enterprise. He neither rushed to premature conclusions nor indulged in direct refutation of instances of wild defamation. Rather, he had come in the spirit of Cicero, whom he quoted in signing off on his forward: “I believe the highest virtue to be the reconciliation of the minds of men.”48 Though the turn to history would eventually advance an incomplete form of equality for Jews and attain a conflicted acceptance by Germans, the failure of the field of Jewish studies to gain as much as a toehold in German universities prior to 1933 signified just how fragile was the state of emancipation as late as the Weimar Republic.49
In addition to Rühs, whose course he failed to complete, Zunz studied in his first semester with Friedrich August Wolf, the preeminent Greco-Roman scholar of his day in Germany, and his protégé, August Boeckh.50 Both men were instrumental in educating the teachers who were to embed the intensive study of Greek and Latin into the core of Prussia’s reformed gymnasium curriculum. From 1809 to 1865, Boeckh gave his renowned lecture course on his encyclopedic conception of philology some twenty-six times to a total of 1,696 students, one of whom was Leopold Zunz.51 As noted in his diary, Zunz reacted favorably to their instruction: “Boeckh instructs me, but Wolf attracts me,” and he would go on to take at least three more courses with each.52 In other words, while Zunz composed his second rejoinder to Rühs, he was immersed in the language, history, and culture of the two nations that contemporary intellectuals idealized as the epitome of civilization and the building blocks of German character.
The lure of this cult of neohumanism both influenced and confounded Zunz. Despite the absence of the word “encyclopedia” with its systematizing thrust from the title of his booklet, there can be no doubt that he borrowed the format and intent of the genre from his professors.53 The centrality of philology and primacy of literature in the discourse, along with its secular tone, came from them as well. Boeckh may also have been the source for the lofty synthetic role of integrating the findings of the disparate subfields that Zunz assigned to philosophy.54 Still, it is a tribute to his scholarly maturity and independence of mind that on the micro-level of language, terminology, and ordering of material Zunz was far less beholden to his mentors. In reworking their model, Zunz’s originality shines through.55
Overall, however, there was no room for the study of the Jews of antiquity in the vaunted field of Altertumswissenschaft propagated by Wolf and Boeckh.56 Greeks and Romans alone constituted the nations of antiquity worthy of the designation “cultured.” They alone rose above the constraints of nature to a level of freedom, intellect, and cultural life that became the seedbed for the ideas, practices, and institutions that germinated into Christianity and the modern world. In comparison, the other nations of antiquity deserved still to be regarded as barbarians.57 Only in the study of the earliest stages of Greek mythology did it seem warranted to cast a fleeting glance at the primitive mythology of the ancient Hebrews.58
The constricted and crowded horizon forced Zunz to ignore one of Rühs’s most telling pieces of evidence for the immutable character of the Jews, unaffected by external circumstances: “Long before Christianity and their dispersion, they manifest a speculative spirit, which seeks the greatest possible gain with the least exertion. They have been storekeepers and middlemen since the founding of Alexandria, where they already had their own streets.”59 Whereupon Rühs related at great length and with evident relish the escapades of one Joseph, the nephew of Onias the high priest in Jerusalem, and thereafter Joseph’s son Hyrcanus during the century of Ptolemaic rule over Palestine following the conquests of Alexander the Great. Taken from Josephus, the narrative recounted the daring and cunning by which Joseph secured and retained the right to collect the king’s taxes in all of Coele-Syria for twenty-two years, during which time he amassed a fortune and lifted his coreligionists out of poverty.60 Rühs exulted in conclusion: “This story reads as if fabricated by the enemies of the Jews. It matches to a tee the events of several wealthy families in our day, and yet it is ancient. The Jewish historian Josephus tells it to the world as proof of the endowment, skill and wit of his people, happily placing a few Jews like Joseph and Hyrcanus next to the heroes of Greece and Rome.”61
The provocation, though, did not induce Zunz to extend his encyclopedic survey into the Greco-Roman period. The terrain of the medieval Jewish world was less well known, more fluid, and perhaps even more relevant for his day. Moreover, many of the Jewish sources of the earlier period were in Greek and would have jeopardized the compact Hebrew framework that defined his periodization. It is also not improbable that he regarded a field monopolized by the Greeks and Romans as more hermetically sealed than one dominated by Christianity and Islam.
Yet the exclusion from the neohumanistic conception of antiquity did not dampen Zunz’s admiration of Greek culture. Under the aegis of Wolf and Boeckh, he too came to venerate it as the summit of human achievement. In 1841 toward the end of a massive pioneering survey of Jewish contributions to the general field of geographic literature from the Hebrew Bible to his own century, he suddenly waxed eloquent on the impact of the Greek legacy on Jewish history: “By virtue of this journey through the ages [i.e., his survey], we have seen science arise among Jews, when freedom and culture infuse their settlements[,] and sink once again, when they are gone. Three times did the Hellenic spirit, which brings nations to maturity, intersect with the Jews.”62 And each time—first unmediated in the Greco-Roman world, then mediated through Islam, and finally directly again in the Renaissance—the critical thought of that ancient civilization revitalized the forces of Jewish creativity.63 Zunz, indeed, made the confrontation with classical learning the benchmark of his periodization of Jewish history, and from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, according to him, a critical mind-set had again begun to fructify Jewish thought. Thus Zunz as an independent scholar managed to smuggle in through the back door what he had not dared to venture as a student through the front door. What he omitted from his 1818 manifesto he embedded in his later trajectory of Jewish history, making the study of the Jews in antiquity eventually an indispensable part of the emerging and expanding field of Judaica.
CHAPTER 2
A Messianic