We are assembled for the solemn duty
of paying a tribute to the memory of him whose name
graces our lodge. A twofold interest attaches
us to Leopold Zunz, appealing, as he does, to our
local pride, and, beyond and above that, to our Jewish
feelings. Leopold Zunz was part of the Berlin
of the past, every trace of which is vanishing with
startling rapidity. Men, houses, streets are
disappearing, and soon naught but a memory will remain
of old Berlin, not, to be sure, a City Beautiful, yet
filled for him that knew it with charming associations.
A precious remnant of this dear old Berlin was buried
forever, when, on one misty day of the spring of 1886,
we consigned to their last resting place the mortal
remains of Leopold Zunz. Memorial addresses are
apt to abound in such expressions as “immortal,”
“imperishable,” and in flowery tributes.
This one shall not indulge in them, although to no
one could they more fittingly be applied than to Leopold
Zunz, a pioneer in the labyrinth of science, and the
architect of many a stately palace adorning the path
but lately discovered by himself. Surely, such
an one deserves the cordial recognition and enduring
gratitude of posterity.
Despite the fact that Zunz was born
at Detmold (August 10, 1794), he was an integral part
of old Berlin a Berlin citizen, not by birth,
but by vocation, so to speak. His being was intertwined
with its life by a thousand tendrils of intellectual
sympathy. The city, in turn, or, to be topographically
precise, the district between Mauerstrasse and
Rosenstrasse knew and loved him as one of its
public characters. Time was when his witticisms
leapt from mouth to mouth in the circuit between the
Varnhagen salon and the synagogue in the Heidereutergasse,
everywhere finding appreciative listeners. An
observer stationed Unter den Linden daily for
more than thirty years might have seen a peculiar
couple stride briskly towards the Thiergarten
in the early afternoon. The loungers at Spargnapani’s
cafe regularly interrupted their endless newspaper
reading to crane their necks and say to one another,
“There go Dr. Zunz and his wife.”
In his obituary notice of the poet
Mosenthal, Franz Dingelstedt roguishly says:
“He was of poor, albeit Jewish parentage.”
The same applies to Zunz, only the saying would be
truer, if not so witty, in this form: “He
was of Jewish, hence of poor, parentage.”
Among German Jews throughout the middle ages and up
to the first half of this century, poverty was the
rule, a comfortable competency a rare exception, wealth
an unheard of condition. But Jewish poverty was
relieved of sordidness by a precious gift of the old
rabbis, who said: “Have a tender care
of the children of the poor; from them goeth forth
the Law”; an admonition and a prediction destined
to be illustrated in the case of Zunz. Very early
he lost his mother, and the year 1805 finds him bereft
of both parents, under the shelter and in the loving
care of an institution founded by a pious Jew in Wolfenbuettel.
Here he was taught the best within the reach of German
Jews of the day, the alpha and omega
of whose knowledge and teaching were comprised in the
Talmud. The Wolfenbuettel school may be called
progressive, inasmuch as a teacher, watchmaker by
trade and novel-writer by vocation, was engaged to
give instruction four times a week in the three R’s.
We may be sure that those four lessons were not given
with unvarying regularity.
In his scholastic home, Leopold Zunz
met Isaac Marcus Jost, a waif like himself, later
the first Jewish historian, to whom we owe interesting
details of Zunz’s early life. In his memoirs
he tells the following: “Zunz had been
entered as a pupil before I arrived. Even in those
early days there were evidences of the acumen of the
future critic. He was dominated by the spirit
of contradiction. On the sly we studied grammar,
his cleverness helping me over many a stumbling-block.
He was very witty, and wrote a lengthy Hebrew satire
on our tyrants, from which we derived not a little
amusement as each part was finished. Unfortunately,
the misdemeanor was detected, and the corpus delicti
consigned to the flames, but the sobriquet chotsuf
(impudent fellow) clung to the writer.”
It is only just to admit that in this
Beth ha-Midrash Zunz laid the foundation of
the profound, comprehensive scholarship on Talmudic
subjects, the groundwork of his future achievements
as a critic. The circumstance that both these
embryo historians had to draw their first information
about history from the Jewish German paraphrase of
“Yosippon,” an historical compilation,
is counterbalanced by careful instruction in Rabbinical
literature, whose labyrinthine ways soon became paths
of light to them.
A new day broke, and in its sunlight
the condition of affairs changed. In 1808 the
Beth ha-Midrash was suddenly transformed into
the “Samsonschool,” still in useful operation.
It became a primary school, conducted on approved
pedagogic principles, and Zunz and Jost were among
the first registered under the new, as they had been
under the old, administration. Though the one
was thirteen, and the other fourteen years old, they
had to begin with the very rudiments of reading and
writing. Campe’s juvenile books were the
first they read. A year later finds them engaged
in secretly studying Greek, Latin, and mathematics
during the long winter evenings, by the light of bits
of candles made by themselves of drippings from the
great wax tapers in the synagogue. After another
six months, Zunz was admitted to the first class of
the Wolfenbuettel, and Jost to that of the Brunswick,
gymnasium. It characterizes the men to
say that Zunz was the first, and Jost the third, Jew
in Germany to enter a gymnasium. Now progress
was rapid. The classes of the gymnasium
were passed through with astounding ease, and in 1811,
with a minimum of luggage, but a very considerable
mental equipment, Zunz arrived in Berlin, never to
leave it except for short periods. He entered
upon a course in philology at the newly founded university,
and after three years of study, he was in the unenviable
position to be able to tell himself that he had attained
to nothing.
For, to what could a cultured Jew
attain in those days, unless he became a lawyer or
a physician? The Hardenberg edict had opened academical
careers to Jews, but when Zunz finished his studies,
that provision was completely forgotten. So he
became a preacher. A rich Jew, Jacob Herz Beer,
the father of two highly gifted sons, Giacomo and Michael
Beer, had established a private synagogue in his house,
and here officiated Edward Kley, C. Guensburg, J.
L. Auerbach, and, from 1820 to 1822, Leopold Zunz.
It is not known why he resigned his position, but to
infer that he had been forced to embrace the vocation
of a preacher by the stress of circumstances is unjust.
At that juncture he probably would have chosen it,
if he had been offered the rectorship of the Berlin
university; for, he was animated by somewhat of the
spirit that urged the prophets of old to proclaim
and fulfil their mission in the midst of storms and
in despite of threatening dangers.
Zunz’s sermons delivered from
1820 to 1822 in the first German reform temple are
truly instinct with the prophetic spirit. The
breath of a mighty enthusiasm rises from the yellowed
pages. Every word testifies that they were indited
by a writer of puissant individuality, disengaged
from the shackles of conventional homiletics, and boldly
striking out on untrodden paths. In the Jewish
Berlin of the day, a rationalistic, half-cultured
generation, swaying irresolutely between Mendelssohn
and Schleiermacher, these new notes awoke sympathetic
echoes. But scarcely had the music of his voice
become familiar, when it was hushed. In 1823,
a royal cabinet order prohibited the holding of the
Jewish service in German, as well as every other innovation
in the ritual, and so German sermons ceased in the
synagogue. Zunz, who had spoken like Moses, now
held his peace like Aaron, in modesty and humility,
yielding to the inevitable without rancor or repining,
always loyal to the exalted ideal which inspired him
under the most depressing circumstances. He dedicated
his sermons, delivered at a time of religious enthusiasm,
to “youth at the crossroads,” whom he
had in mind throughout, in the hope that they might
“be found worthy to lead back to the Lord hearts,
which, through deception or by reason of stubbornness,
have fallen away from Him.”
The rescue of the young was his ideal.
At the very beginning of his career he recognized
that the old were beyond redemption, and that, if
response and confidence were to be won from the young,
the expounding of the new Judaism was work, not for
the pulpit, but for the professor’s chair.
“Devotional exercises and balmy lotions for the
soul” could not heal their wounds. It was
imperative to bring their latent strength into play.
Knowing this to be his pedagogic principle, we shall
not go far wrong, if we suppose that in the organization
of the “Society for Jewish Culture and Science”
the initial step was taken by Leopold Zunz. In
1819 when the mobs of Wuerzburg, Hamburg, and Frankfort-on-the-Main
revived the “Hep, hep!” cry, three young
men, Edward Gans, Moses Moser, and Leopold Zunz conceived
the idea of a society with the purpose of bringing
Jews into harmony with their age and environment, not
by forcing upon them views of alien growth, but by
a rational training of their inherited faculties.
Whatever might serve to promote intelligence and culture
was to be nurtured: schools, seminaries, academies,
were to be erected, literary aspirations fostered,
and all public-spirited enterprises aided; on the
other hand, the rising generation was to be induced
to devote itself to arts, trades, agriculture, and
the applied sciences; finally, the strong inclination
to commerce on the part of Jews was to be curbed,
and the tone and conditions of Jewish society radically
changed lofty goals for the attainment of
which most limited means were at the disposal of the
projectors. The first fruits of the society were
the “Scientific Institute,” and the “Journal
for the Science of Judaism,” published in the
spring of 1822, under the editorship of Zunz.
Only three numbers appeared, and they met with so
small a sale that the cost of printing was not realized.
Means were inadequate, the plans magnificent, the
times above all not ripe for such ideals. The
“Scientific Institute” crumbled away, too,
and in 1823, the society was breathing its last.
Zunz poured out the bitterness of his disappointment
in a letter written in the summer of 1824 to his Hamburg
friend Immanuel Wohlwill:
“I am so disheartened that I
can nevermore believe in Jewish reform. A stone
must be thrown at this phantasm to make it vanish.
Good Jews are either Asiatics, or Christians (unconscious
thereof), besides a small minority consisting of myself
and a few others, the possibility of mentioning whom
saves me from the imputation of conceit, though, truth
to say, the bitterness of irony cares precious little
for the forms of good society. Jews, and the
Judaism which we wish to reconstruct, are a prey to
disunion, and the booty of vandals, fools, money-changers,
idiots, and parnassim. Many a change of
season will pass over this generation, and leave it
unchanged: internally ruptured; rushing into
the arms of Christianity, the religion of expediency;
without stamina and without principle; one section
thrust aside by Europe, and vegetating in filth with
longing eyes directed towards the Messiah’s ass
or other member of the long-eared fraternity; the other
occupied with fingering state securities and the pages
of a cyclopaedia, and constantly oscillating between
wealth and bankruptcy, oppression and tolerance.
Their own science is dead among Jews, and the intellectual
concerns of European nations do not appeal to them,
because, faithless to themselves, they are strangers
to abstract truth and slaves of self-interest.
This abject wretchedness is stamped upon their penny-a-liners,
their preachers, councillors, constitutions, parnassim,
titles, meetings, institutions, subscriptions, their
literature, their book-trade, their representatives,
their happiness, and their misfortune. No heart,
no feeling! All a medley of prayers, banknotes,
and rachmones, with a few strains of enlightenment
and chilluk!
Now, my friend, after so revolting
a sketch of Judaism, you will hardly ask why the society
and the journal have vanished into thin air, and are
missed as little as the temple, the school, and the
rights of citizenship. The society might have
survived despite its splitting up into sections.
That was merely a mistake in management. The truth
is that it never had existence. Five or six enthusiasts
met together, and like Moses ventured to believe that
their spirit would communicate itself to others.
That was self-deception. The only imperishable
possession rescued from this deluge is the science
of Judaism. It lives even though not a finger
has been raised in its service since hundreds of years.
I confess that, barring submission to the judgment
of God, I find solace only in the cultivation of the
science of Judaism.
As for myself, those rough experiences
of mine shall assuredly not persuade me into a course
of action inconsistent with my highest aspirations.
I did what I held my duty. I ceased to preach,
not in order to fall away from my own words, but because
I realized that I was preaching in the wilderness.
Sapienti sat.... After all that I have
said, you will readily understand that I cannot favor
an unduly ostentatious mode of dissolution. Such
a course would be prompted by the vanity of the puffed-out
frog in the fable, and affect the Jews ... as little
as all that has gone before. There is nothing
for the members to do but to remain unshaken, and
radiate their influence in their limited circles,
leaving all else to God.”
The man who wrote these words, it
is hard to realize, had not yet passed his thirtieth
year, but his aim in life was perfectly defined.
He knew the path leading to his goal, and most
important circumstance never deviated from
it until he attained it. His activity throughout
life shows no inconsistency with his plans. It
is his strength of character, rarest of attributes
in a time of universal defection from the Jewish standard,
that calls for admiration, accorded by none so readily
as by his companions in arms. Casting up his
own spiritual accounts, Heinrich Heine in the latter
part of his life wrote of his friend Zunz: “In
the instability of a transition period he was characterized
by incorruptible constancy, remaining true, despite
his acumen, his scepticism, and his scholarship, to
self-imposed promises, to the exalted hobby of his
soul. A man of thought and action, he created
and worked when others hesitated, and sank discouraged,”
or, what Heine prudently omitted to say, deserted
the flag, and stealthily slunk out of the life of
the oppressed.
In Zunz, strength of character was
associated with a mature, richly stored mind.
He was a man of talent, of character, and of science,
and this rare union of traits is his distinction.
At a time when the majority of his co-religionists
could not grasp the plain, elementary meaning of the
phrase, “the science of Judaism,” he made
it the loadstar of his life.
Sad though it be, I fear that it is
true that there are those of this generation who,
after the lapse of years, are prompted to repeat the
question put by Zunz’s contemporaries, “What
is the science of Judaism?” Zunz gave a comprehensive
answer in a short essay, “On Rabbinical Literature,”
published by Mauer in 1818: “When the shadows
of barbarism were gradually lifting from the mist-shrouded
earth, and light universally diffused could not fail
to strike the Jews scattered everywhere, a remnant
of old Hebrew learning attached itself to new, foreign
elements of culture, and in the course of centuries
enlightened minds elaborated the heterogeneous ingredients
into the literature called rabbinical.”
To this rabbinical, or, to use the more fitting name
proposed by himself, this neo-Hebraic, Jewish literature
and science, Zunz devoted his love, his work, his
life. Since centuries this field of knowledge
had been a trackless, uncultivated waste. He who
would pass across, had need to be a pathfinder, robust
and energetic, able to concentrate his mind upon a
single aim, undisturbed by distracting influences.
Such was Leopold Zunz, who sketched in bold, but admirably
precise outlines the extent of Jewish science, marking
the boundaries of its several departments, estimating
its resources, and laying out the work and aims of
the future. The words of the prophet must have
appealed to him with peculiar force: “I
remember unto thee the kindness of thy youth, the
love of thy espousals, thy going after me in the wilderness,
through a land that is not sown.”
Again, when there was question of
cultivating the desert soil, and seeking for life
under the rubbish, Zunz was the first to present himself
as a laborer. The only fruit of the Society for
Jewish Culture and Science, during the three years
of its existence, was the “Journal for the Science
of Judaism,” and its publication was due exclusively
to Zunz’s perseverance. Though only three
numbers appeared, a positive addition to our literature
was made through them in Zunz’s biographical
essay on Rashi, the old master expounder of the Bible
and the Talmud. By its arrangement of material,
by its criticism and grouping of facts, and not a
little by its brilliant style, this essay became the
model for all future work on kindred subjects.
When the society dissolved, and Zunz was left to enjoy
undesired leisure, he continued to work on the lines
laid down therein. Besides, Zunz was a political
journalist, for many years political editor of “Spener’s
Journal,” and a contributor to the Gesellschafter,
the Iris, Die Freimuetigen, and other
publications of a literary character. From 1825
to 1829, he was a director of the newly founded Jewish
congregational school; for one year he occupied the
position of preacher at Prague; and from 1839 to 1849,
the year of its final closing, he acted as trustee
of the Jewish teachers’ seminary in Berlin.
Thereafter he had no official position.
As a politician he was a pronounced
democrat. Reading his political addresses to-day,
after a lapse of half a century, we find in them the
clearness and sagacity that distinguish the scientific
productions of the investigator. Here is an extract
from his words of consolation addressed to the families
of the heroes of the March revolution of 1848:
“They who walked our streets
unnoticed, who meditated in their quiet studies, toiled
in their workshops, cast up accounts in offices, sold
wares in the shops, were suddenly transformed into
valiant fighters, and we discovered them at the moment
when like meteors they vanished. When they grew
lustrous, they disappeared from our sight, and when
they became our deliverers, we lost the opportunity
of thanking them. Death has made them great and
precious to us. Departing they poured unmeasured
wealth upon us all, who were so poor. Our heads,
parched like a summer sky, produced no fruitful rain
of magnanimous thoughts. The hearts in our bosoms,
turned into stone, were bereft of human sympathies.
Vanity and illusions were our idols; lies and deception
poisoned our lives; lust and avarice dictated our
actions; a hell of immorality and misery, corroding
every institution, heated the atmosphere to suffocation,
until black clouds gathered, a storm of the nations
raged about us, and purifying streaks of lightning
darted down upon the barricades and into the streets.
Through the storm-wind, I saw chariots of fire and
horses of fire bearing to heaven the men of God who
fell fighting for right and liberty. I hear the
voice of God, O ye that weep, knighting your dear
ones. The freedom of the press is their patent
of nobility, our hearts, their monuments. Every
one of us, every German, is a mourner, and you, survivors,
are no longer abandoned.”
In an election address of February
1849, Zunz says: “The first step towards
liberty is to miss liberty, the second, to seek it,
the third, to find it. Of course, many years
may pass between the seeking and the finding.”
And further on: “As an elector, I should
give my vote for representatives only to men of principle
and immaculate reputation, who neither hesitate nor
yield; who cannot be made to say cold is warm, and
warm is cold; who disdain legal subtleties, diplomatic
intrigues, lies of whatever kind, even when they redound
to the advantage of the party. Such are worthy
of the confidence of the people, because conscience
is their monitor. They may err, for to err is
human, but they will never deceive.”
Twelve years later, on a similar occasion,
he uttered the following prophetic words: “A
genuinely free form of government makes a people free
and upright, and its representatives are bound to be
champions of liberty and progress. If Prussia,
unfurling the banner of liberty and progress, will
undertake to provide us with such a constitution, our
self-confidence, energy, and trustfulness will return.
Progress will be the fundamental principle of our
lives, and out of our united efforts to advance it
will grow a firm, indissoluble union. Now, then,
Germans! Be resolved, all of you, to attain the
same goal, and your will shall be a storm-wind scattering
like chaff whatever is old and rotten. In your
struggle for a free country, you will have as allies
the army of mighty minds that have suffered for right
and liberty in the past. Now you are split up
into tribes and clans, held together only by the bond
of language and a classic literature. You will
grow into a great nation, if but all brother-tribes
will join us. Then Germany, strongly secure in
the heart of Europe, will be able to put an end to
the quailing before attacks from the East or the West,
and cry a halt to war. The empire, some one has
said, means peace. Verily, with Prussia at its
head, the German empire means peace.”
Such utterances are characteristic
of Zunz, the politician. His best energies and
efforts, however, were devoted to his researches.
Science, he believed, would bring about amelioration
of political conditions; science, he hoped, would
preserve Judaism from the storms and calamities of
his generation, for the fulfilment of its historical
mission. Possessed by this idea, he wrote Die
Gottesdienstlichen Vortraege der Juden ("Jewish
Homiletics,” 1832), the basis of the future science
of Judaism, the first clearing in the primeval forest
of rabbinical writings, through which the pioneer
led his followers with steady step and hand, as though
walking on well trodden ground. Heinrich Heine,
who appreciated Zunz at his full worth, justly reckoned
this book “among the noteworthy productions
of the higher criticism,” and another reviewer
with equal justice ranks it on a level with the great
works of Boeckh, Diez, Grimm, and others of that period,
the golden age of philological research in Germany.
Like almost all that Zunz wrote, Die
Gottesdienstlichen Vortraege der Juden was the
result of a polemic need. By nature Zunz was a
controversialist. Like a sentinel upon the battlements,
he kept a sharp lookout upon the land. Let the
Jews be threatened with injustice by ruler, statesman,
or scholar, and straightway he attacked the enemy with
the weapons of satire and science. One can fancy
that the cabinet order prohibiting German sermons
in the synagogue, and so stifling the ambition of
his youth, awakened the resolve to trace the development
of the sermon among Jews, and show that thousands
of years ago the well-spring of religious instruction
bubbled up in Judah’s halls of prayer, and has
never since failed, its wealth of waters overflowing
into the popular Midrash, the repository of little
known, unappreciated treasures of knowledge and experience,
accumulated in the course of many centuries.
In the preface to this book, Zunz,
the democrat, says that for his brethren in faith
he demands of the European powers, “not rights
and liberties, but right and liberty. Deep shame
should mantle the cheek of him who, by means of a
patent of nobility conferred by favoritism, is willing
to rise above his co-religionists, while the
law of the land brands him by assigning him a place
among the lowest of his co-citizens. Only
in the rights common to all citizens can we find satisfaction;
only in unquestioned equality, the end of our pain.
Liberty unshackling the hand to fetter the tongue;
tolerance delighting not in our progress, but in our
decay; citizenship promising protection without honor,
imposing burdens without holding out prospects of
advancement; they all, in my opinion, are lacking in
love and justice, and such baneful elements in the
body politic must needs engender pestiferous diseases,
affecting the whole and its every part.”
Zunz sees a connection between the
civil disabilities of the Jews and their neglect of
Jewish science and literature. Untrammelled,
instructive speech he accounts the surest weapon.
Hence the homilies of the Jews appear to him to be
worthy, and to stand in need, of historical investigation,
and the results of his research into their origin,
development, and uses, from the time of Ezra to the
present day, are laid down in this epoch-making work.
The law forbidding the bearing of
German names by Jews provoked Zunz’s famous
and influential little book, “The Names of the
Jews,” like most of his later writings polemic
in origin, in which respect they remind one of Lessing’s
works.
In the ardor of youth Zunz had borne
the banner of reform; in middle age he became convinced
that the young generation of iconoclasts had rushed
far beyond the ideal goal of the reform movement cherished
in his visions. As he had upheld the age and
sacred uses of the German sermon against the assaults
of the orthodox; so for the benefit and instruction
of radical reformers, he expounded the value and importance
of the Hebrew liturgy in profound works, which appeared
during a period of ten years, crystallizing the results
of a half-century’s severe application.
They rounded off the symmetry of his spiritual activity.
For, when Midrashic inspiration ceased to flow, the
piut synagogue poetry established
itself, and the transformation from the one into the
other was the active principle of neo-Hebraic literature
for more than a thousand years. Zunz’s
vivifying sympathies knit the old and the new into
a wondrously firm historical thread. Nowhere have
the harmony and continuity of Jewish literary development
found such adequate expression as in his Synagogale
Poesie des Mittelalters ("Synagogue Poetry of
the Middle Ages,” 1855), Ritus des synagogalen
Gottesdienstes ("The Ritual of the Synagogue,”
1859), and Litteraturgeschichte der synagogalen
Poesie ("History of Synagogue Poetry,” 1864),
the capstone of his literary endeavors.
In his opinion, the only safeguard
against error lies in the pursuit of science, not,
indeed, dryasdust science, but science in close touch
with the exuberance of life regulated by high-minded
principles, and transfigured by ideal hopes.
Sermons and prayers in harmonious relation, he believed,
will “enable some future generation to enjoy
the fruits of a progressive, rational policy, and
it is meet that science and poetry should be permeated
with ideas serving the furtherance of such policy.
Education is charged with the task of moulding enlightened
minds to think the thoughts that prepare for right-doing,
and warm, enthusiastic hearts to execute commendable
deeds. For, after all is said and done, the well-being
of the community can only grow out of the intelligence
and the moral life of each member. Every individual
that strives to apprehend the harmony of human and
divine elements attains to membership in the divine
covenant. The divine is the aim of all our thoughts,
actions, sentiments, and hopes. It invests our
lives with dignity, and supplies a moral basis for
our relations to one another. Well, then, let
us hope for redemption for the universal
recognition of a form of government under which the
rights of man are respected. Then free citizens
will welcome Jews as brethren, and Israel’s prayers
will be offered up by mankind.”
These are samples of the thoughts
underlying Zunz’s great works, as well as his
numerous smaller, though not less important, productions:
biographical and critical essays, legal opinions, sketches
in the history of literature, reviews, scientific
inquiries, polemical and literary fragments, collected
in his work Zur Geschichte und Litteratur ("Contributions
to History and Literature,” 1873), and in three
volumes of collected writings. Since the publication
of his “History of Synagogue Poetry,”
Zunz wrote only on rare occasions. His last work
but one was Deutsche Briefe (1872) on German
language and German intellect, and his last, an incisive
and liberal contribution to Bible criticism (Studie
zur Bibelkritik, 1874), published in the Zeitschrift
der deutschen morgenlaendischen Gesellschaft in
Leipsic. From that time on, when the death of
his beloved wife, Adelheid Zunz, a most faithful helpmate,
friend, counsellor, and support, occurred, he was
silent.
Zunz had passed his seventieth year
when his “History of Synagogue Poetry”
appeared. He could permit himself to indulge in
well-earned rest, and from the vantage-ground of age
inspect the bustling activity of a new generation
of friends and disciples on the once neglected field
of Jewish science.
Often as the cause of religion and
civil liberty received a check at one place or another,
during those long years when he stood aside from the
turmoil of life, a mere looker-on, he did not despair;
he continued to hope undaunted. Under his picture
he wrote sententiously: “Thought is strong
enough to vanquish arrogance and injustice without
recourse to arrogance and injustice.”
Zunz’s life and work are of
incalculable importance to the present age and to
future generations. With eagle vision he surveyed
the whole domain of Jewish learning, and traced the
lines of its development. Constructive as well
as critical, he raised widely scattered fragments
to the rank of a literature which may well claim a
place beside the literatures of the nations.
Endowed with rare strength of character, he remained
unflinchingly loyal to his ancestral faith, “the
exalted hobby of his soul” a model
for three generations. Jewish literature owes
to him a scientific style. He wrote epigrammatic,
incisive, perspicuous German, stimulating and suggestive,
such as Lessing used. The reform movement he
supported as a legitimate development of Judaism on
historical lines. On the other hand, he fostered
loyalty to Judaism by lucidly presenting to young
Israel the value of his faith, his intellectual heritage,
and his treasures of poetry. Zunz, then, is the
originator of a momentous phase in our development,
producing among its adherents as among outsiders a
complete revolution in the appreciation of Judaism,
its religious and intellectual aspects. Together
with self-knowledge he taught his brethren self-respect.
He was, in short, a clear thinker and acute critic;
a German, deeply attached to his beloved country,
and fully convinced of the supremacy of German mind;
at the same time, an ardent believer in Judaism, imbued
with some of the spirit of the prophets, somewhat
of the strength of Jewish heroes and martyrs, who
sacrificed life for their conviction, and with dying
lips made the ancient confession: “Hear,
O Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is one!”
His name is an abiding possession
for our nation; it will not perish from our memory.
“Good night, my prince! O that angel choirs
might lull thy slumbers!”