Abstract
Reviewed by: Howard Lupovitch, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA
Leopold Zunz is a towering figure in modern Jewish History who is, at once, well-known and barely known. Most courses in Modern Jewish History include Zunz among the pantheon of nineteenth-century German Jewish scholars who founded and was one of the leading minds of the Wissenschaft des Judenthums [The Science of Judaism] school of academic Jewish scholarship. As such, he is aptly recognized as one of the founders of the field of Jewish Studies, who subjected the broadly, richly-textured experience of Jews since antiquity to rigorous historical and philological analysis.
Aside from paying lip service to his intellectual achievements, notably his seminal study of the long history of rabbinic homilies – the drash no less than the sermon – Zunz is also known as an activist who, along with his fellow Wissenschaft scholars, regarded their research, in part, as a way of demonstrating a compatibility between affiliation with Judaism and modern citizenship. Beyond these broad strokes, though, Zunz’s life and career become murkier and less familiar, even to many academic specialists. True, there are more than a few Jewish Studies scholars who will read the works of Wissenschaft scholarship, typically, as a way of becoming familiar with the nuances and pioneering scholarship in one’s particular field of expertise; and, in some cases, to ensure proficiency in the always useful German language by cutting one’s teeth reading Graetz or some other Wissenschaft scholar.
Herein lies the merit of Ismar Schorsch’s new biography of Zunz. Schorsch deftly takes his readers on a journey through Zunz’s scholarship, activism and apologia, but also shows how these endeavours complemented one another – the scholarship grounded and provided nuance for the activism and apologia; the latter provided purpose for the scholarship – without one biasing the other. Schorsch demonstrates how Zunz analysed and critiqued the texts of the past apart from the concerns of his nineteenth-century present; thus separating his research and scholarship from his public life; then Schorsch shows how Zunz qua activist drew on the fully formed conclusions of his research in order to bring them to bear on the debates regarding inyana de-yoma [the affairs of the day]. Indeed, one of the accomplishments of this book is Schorsch’s ability to reconstruct and systematize Zunz’s vast corpus of scholarly achievements while engaging with the larger question of the purpose of Wissenschaft then (and Jewish Studies now). Here Schorsch draws on the debate between Zunz and Zacharias Frankel on this subject: was purpose of the academic study of Judaism simply the pursuit of knowledge and critique of Jewish sources, or was it to apply this knowledge to the betterment of Jewish identity and community? (112).
Were this the book’s only contribution, readers could have come away satisfied. Schorsch, though, probes further by presenting the Wissenschaft School not as a static collection of scholars and scholarly works, but as a dynamic group of individuals deliberately looking for ways to expand the impact of this scholarship. For example, Schorsch recounts the efforts by Zunz and David Cassel to publish Real-Encyclopedia des Judenthums. After Isaac Marcus Jost declined to participate until other prominent scholars – notably Abraham Geiger, Ludwig Frankel, Samuel David Luzzatto and Shlomo Yehuda Rapoport – agreed to join the project, Zunz and Cassel forged ahead by soliciting contributions from a younger, second-generation of Wissenschaft scholars, such as Hirsch Fassel, Gideon Brecher, Moritz Abraham Levy, Bernhard Beer, Adolf Jellinek, Moritz Steinschneider and others (99–100). This not only brought the encyclopedia project to fruition, but launched the career of these and other younger scholars who would ultimately extend and expand the influence of Wissenschaft. This established Zunz as an important patron of the next generation of scholarship and, more broadly, the role of the Wissenschaft scholar to see beyond his own scholarly achievements and contributions to the broader trajectory of scholarship.
Finally, Schorsch shows his readers Zunz as a defender of Judaism. He shows how Zunz defended Jews against the blood libel accusation in 1840, and was especially critical of an unnamed Jewish scholar who did not or could not refute the claim that the blood libel was a mainstream idea in Judaism noted in the Talmud. He notes how, acting on behalf of Amshel Rothschild via the intervention of Gerhard Bleichsroder, Zunz defended the practices of ritual circumcision and praying with phylactories when these came under scrutiny in an increasingly de-sacralized European society. Schorsch’s Zunz is not only a scholar poring over musty texts in a study or archive, but an active part of a lengthy public debate over the image and status of Jews in pre-emancipation German society, thus placing Zunz alongside other defenders of Judaism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe such as Luzzatto and Moses Mendelssohn.
If there is anything missing from this biography, it is Zunz’s impact beyond Germany. Here Schorsch ensures that, after a half-century of re-examining the Germano-centric approach to the study of modern European Jewish history, we do not throw out the baby with the bathwater by ignoring the impact that Zunz and other Wissenschaft scholars had on academic scholarship elsewhere in Europe, and beyond in Russia, the State of Israel, and North America. Indeed, it is worth asking to what extent did his dual role of scholar and activist provide a template for Jewish scholar-activists elsewhere in Europe. There were examples that seem comparable, particularly in Hungary: did these men see Zunz as an archetype worth emulating? In the longer-term, how can Zunz’s scholarship-activism provide a guide for present-day academic scholars to engage in the heated political debates of the twenty-first century? In the end, though, these are minor quibbles that do not diminish from a seminal biography that brings into sharper focus the complex life and career of Leopold Zunz.