Leopold Zunz and the Invention of Jewish Culture
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SCHOLARSHIP OF LITERATURE AND LIFE: LEOPOLD ZUNZ AND THE INVENTION OF JEWISH CULTURE Irene Zwiep Around 1820, a group of Berlin students assembled to found Europe’s first Jewish historical society. The various stages in the society’s brief his- tory neatly mirror the turbulent intellectual Werdegang of its members. The studious, typically Humboldian Wissenschaftszirkel they established in 1816 was changed into the more political Verein zur Verbesserung des Zustandes der Juden im deutschen Bundesstaate in the wake of the HEP!HEP! pogroms of 1819, only to be relabelled the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden two years later, in November 1821. In January 1824, in a session attended by a mere three members, the society’s meet- ings were again suspended. Thus, within less than five years, its ambitious attempts at building an alternative, modern scholarly infrastructure had come to a halt. The new Institut für die Wissenschaft des Judentums that was to serve as the Verein’s headquarters never materialized. Its relentless- ly academic Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (1822/23) did not survive its first issue. And when trying to strengthen their position within German society, many of its supporters, including first president Eduard Gans (1797-1839) and the ever-ambivalent Heinrich Heine, seem to have preferred smooth conversion to Lutheranism to a prolonged ca- reer in Jewish activism.1 Yet if the Verein’s attempts at establishing a new, comprehensive in- frastructure remained without immediate success, its overall agenda had a lasting impact on modern Jewish discourse. In the early 1820s, Wis- senschaft des Judentums as a form of shared political activism had been doomed to fail; during the following decades, however, a whole genera- 1 For a short history of the Verein, see I. Schorsch, “Breakthrough into the Past. The Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 33 (1988): 3-28, and M. Graetz, “Renaissance des Judentums im 19. Jahrhundert. Der ‘Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden’, 1819-1824,”’ in M. Awerbuch and S. Jersch-Wen- zel, eds., Bild und Selbstbild der Juden Berlins zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1992), 211-227. On Gans, see esp. N. Waszek, ed., Eduard Gans (1797- 1839). Hegelianer – Jude – Europäer. Texte und Documente (Frankfurt a.M.: P. Lang, 1991). 166 irene zwiep tion of Wissenschaftler arose, who continued to put the historical scrutiny of Judaism at the service of joint emancipation, religious reform and, in- creasingly, private intellectual reorientation. By admitting Western codes and categories (most notably the apparatus of the German Altertumswis- senschaft and Idealismus) into Jewish thinking and applying them to the Jewish cultural heritage, they wrought a fundamental change in modern Jewish self-perception.2 In the hands of literary historian Leopold Zunz, social historian Isaac Marcus Jost and Reform rabbi Abraham Geiger, timeless Jewish tradition was transformed into time-bound national his- tory. Accumulative exegesis was traded for contextual research, hoary myth replaced by nineteenth-century fact and, perhaps the greatest achievement of all: the Jews now had the means to become the authors of their own history.3 No longer subject to Christian curiosity, they were now able to freely explore their past and, in doing so, to construct and articu- late their own essential Volkstümlichkeit. In their reliance on German historicism, the founders of the Wissen- schaft des Judentums are often said to have paved the way for the-much more diverse, though generally no less political-modern academic study of Judaism.4 As if to acknowledge this indebtedness, Jewish scholarship has produced a vast library of studies on the movement’s heroes and crit- ics, its journals and institutions, its adaptations in other national contexts, its scholarly models and monuments, its political implications and im- pact on Jewish identity. Yet despite this intense and wide-ranging interest, research into the Wissenschaft still has its blind spots. In this brief con- tribution, I wish to draw attention to one such hitherto neglected detail: the introduction, by the movement’s earliest exponents, of the concept of 2 For the Jewish appropriation of the tools of the contemporary Altertumswissen- schaft, see, e.g., G. Veltri, “Altertumswissenschaft und Wissenschaft des Judentums.Leo- Leo- pold Zunz und seine Lehrer F.A. Wolf und A. Böckh,” in R. Markner and G. Veltri, eds., Friedrich August Wolf. Studien, Dokumente, Biographie (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1999), 32- 47. On the Wissenschaft’s dependence on German Idealism and Hegelian dialectics, see R. Schäffler, “Die Wissenschaft des Judentums in ihrer Beziehung zur allgemeinen Geistesge- schichte im Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in J. Carlebach, ed., Wissenschaft des Juden- tums. Die Anfänge der Judaistik in Europa (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992), 113-131. 3 The process is best described in I. Schorsch,From Text to Context. The Turn to His- tory in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), 151-76 (chapters 8-9, “Wissenschaft and Values” and “The Ethos of Modern Scholarship”). 4 Cf. N.N. Glatzer, “The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Studies,” in A. Altmann, ed., Studies in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1964), 27-45, and, more recently, R. Livneh-Freudenthal, “Jewish Studies. The Paradigm and Initial Patrons,” in. M.F. Mach and Y. Jacobson, eds., Historiography and the Science of Judaism [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: University of Tel Aviv, 2005), 187-214..