Leopold Zunz - Ismar Schorsch Jewish Culture and Contexts

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two manuscripts of seminal importance: the diary of David Reuveni, the fearless adventurer who roused messianic fervor among the Conversos of Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century, and the work of Estori ha-Parhi on the sites, vegetation, and laws of the land of Israel.96 Zunz’s trustworthy friend Michael in Hamburg had a copy of the Reuveni diary in his collection and shared its contents freely with him. Zunz reported that “the manuscript contains 190 leaves in octavo and deserves to be printed. In the account David speaks in the first person.”97 Without embellishment, Zunz summarized Reuveni’s dramatic narrative in four riveting pages. In comparison, twelve years earlier Jost could not muster more than one paragraph, wrapped in doubt, that added nothing to what Gans had recounted in 1592, without his existential engagement.98

      While Zunz’s exposure of the scholarly world to the diary of Reuveni would not yield a publication of the complete manuscript until the last decade of the nineteenth century,99 his extensive presentation of Estori ha-Parhi’s work bore immediate fruit. A native of Provence, ha-Parhi fell victim to the French expulsion of 1306 and cast about, translating in Barcelona some medical texts into Hebrew, before reaching Israel in 1313. During the next seven years he traveled the country amassing a host of geographic, historical, archaeological, and numismatic details. Uppermost in his research was a messianic undertone: the preparation of a digest of all halakhic matters pertaining to living in the land of Israel should a national restoration be in the offing. Since its first printing in 1549, Kaftor va-Ferah (Almond Blossoms, a play on ha-Parhi’s name) had not garnered sufficient interest for a second printing until 1852 in Berlin by Hirsch Endelmann, who in his short list of authors who over the centuries had made mention of ha-Parhi fully translated Zunz’s biographical sketch into Hebrew. And that Asher’s name was listed on the title page as the book’s distributor surely confirms the causal connection.100 Nevertheless, when the seventh volume of Heinrich Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden came out in 1863, he gave ha-Parhi short shrift. Though he found Kaftor va-Ferah to be a multifaceted, interesting work, he did not deign to give Zunz or Edelmann any credit.101

      The target of Zunz’s contention of Kaftor va-Ferah as a vital source of information on the geography of Palestine was Karl von Raumer, a professor of natural history at Erlangen, whose 1835 book on the subject had already gone into a second edition by 1838. Not only was Raumer oblivious to the importance of Jewish sources for the topography of Palestine, he sailed over in silence “1100 years of Jewish antiquity from Josephus to Benjamin of Tudela.” Moreover, “his whole work does not contain one single quotation from the Talmud,” and when cited, it is from a secondary source.102 To highlight Raumer’s benightedness, Zunz compared him to the Dutch Orientalist Adrian Reland, who had visited the land in 1695 and “devoted an equal degree of attention to the Talmud and the fathers of the church” in his erudite study of Palestine of 1714, which Zunz regarded as the pinnacle of seventeenth-century scholarship on Judaism. During the intervening century, ignorance coupled with ill will to exclude Jewish scholarship from the academic discourse: “When in the course of time Jewish literature shared the neglect which the Jews have suffered for centuries, their national works were considered unworthy of being noticed, and the writers on biblical geography only quoted Reland in lieu of any Jewish sources, and the more they quoted, the less did they understand their subject.”103

      The translation of Hebrew texts was but one way of contending with the oblivion to which postbiblical Jewish history and literature had been consigned by German scholarship. Another was securing Jewish coverage in Germany’s most widely read book—the Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon. Brought by Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus to Leipzig from Amsterdam in the second decade of the nineteenth century, this multivolume encyclopedia was designed to appeal to a popular market hungering for knowledge and culture.104 The title conveyed the purpose of the repository: its contents were meant to make for good conversation.105 During the ensuing decade, the encyclopedia sold some 60,000 sets of six separate editions, at a time when German books rarely sold more than 750 copies.106 By the eighth edition (1833–37), Zunz had hitched his wagon to the Brockhaus meteor, now run by Friedrich Arnold’s two sons.107 As late as the tenth edition of 1851–55, Zunz remained the sole Jewish scholarly contributor, among the hundreds listed, except for Moritz Veit.108 Thus it is safe to say that Zunz authored or revised the multiple Jewish entries that began to appear, ranging from Aaron and Abraham to Saadia, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Benjamin of Tudela, Maimonides, and Mendelssohn. Nor did he shortchange Jewish ritual, with entries on circumcision, marriage, the Sabbath, and Day of Atonement, or Jewish institutions like the Sanhedrin, the rabbinate, and the synagogue or Jewish literary corpora like the Torah, the Talmud, and the Targumim (Aramaic translations of Scripture). Even the Samaritans, Essenes, and Sabbatians merited their own brief entries, as did a small clutch of his own scholarly contemporaries in central Europe.

      In the longer entries on the Hebrews, Hebrew language and literature, Jews, Judaism, Jewish literature, and Jewish education, Zunz amply displayed his erudition and conciseness, specificity and synthesis, respect for the past and sensitivity to the present. The entry on the Hebrews ordered the history of the Israelites from Abraham to the destruction of the First Temple according to the chronology Zunz had worked out for the Veit Bible.109 In the related entry on their language and literature, Zunz unabashedly intoned the world significance of their legacy: “The extraordinary influence which the religious knowledge of the Hebrews exercised on the nations of Christianity and Islam lent their national literature a universal significance. Furthermore, insofar as its antiquity and trustworthiness, its religious content and poetic power, this literature supersedes that of any other pre-Christian nation, and thus constitutes for the history of mankind and its spiritual development noteworthy monuments and reliable sources.”110 More specifically, Zunz granted credence to some of the conclusions of biblical criticism. Deuteronomy, for example, in its present form took shape shortly before the final years of the Kingdom of Judah. Other books of the Pentateuch also betrayed the signs of an authorship later than Moses, though their historicity and spiritual integrity remained intact. At the same time Zunz acknowledged that the events prior to Samuel and David bore a mythic sheen.111

      The entry on the Jews is a similarly compressed history in which Zunz declared outright “that the Jews were the direct postexilic descendants of the earlier Israelites or Hebrews.”112 When writing on Judaism, Zunz conceded that with the canonization of the Tanakh in the second century BCE “a noticeable difference from the ancient Hebrew religion [Hebraismus] became evident in the evolution of its concepts and praxis.”113 In the Middle Ages, Jews fared far worse under the Christians than under the Muslims and Zunz did not hesitate to spell out the bitter particulars.114 He also averred the extent to which Islam was indebted to Judaism.115 Since the sixteenth century, the lot of Jews in the German states had been especially fraught, which prompted Zunz to exclaim: “The only way to integrate the Jewish population into the organism of the Christian state without harm is by emancipation and inner development, and not by disabilities and conversionary institutes, to which some are again taking recourse.”116

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