Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity (Jewish Culture and Contexts) PDF
Preview Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity (Jewish Culture and Contexts)
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 This page intentionally left blank 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
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