UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM
Judaism Organized
Concepts of Life and Organicity
in German-Jewish Scholarship
during the Nineteenth Century
Student Diederik Broeks
Student ID 10049444
Supervisor prof. dr. I.E. Zwiep
Second reader dr. A.K. Mohnkern
Word count 19456
MA-Thesis Hebrew and Jewish Studies
(Middle Eastern Studies)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ... 3
Introduction: Conceptions of life in Jewish scholarship ... 5
General introduction ... 5
Research question ... 6
Structure ... 8
Romantic Trends and Imagery in Judaism ... 8
On the phrase ‘Wissenschaft des Judentums’ ... 11
Notes on translation ... 12
Chapter 1: Cultivation and Harvest ... 14
1.1 Reproducing Judaism: Leopold Zunz ... 14
1.2 An Overgrown Garden: Immanuel Wolf ... 19
Chapter 2: Organism and Decomposition ... 24
2.1 The Amphibious Jew: Moritz Steinschneider ... 24
2.2 Life’s Decomposing Forces: Abraham Geiger ... 29
Chapter 3: Preservation and Rejuvenation ... 34
3.1 Sowing the Teaching: Zecharias Frankel and Wolf Landau ... 34
3.2 In the Valley of Bones: Heinrich Graetz... 37
Chapter 4: Life and Death ... 42
4.1 The Neglected Tree of Life: Samson Raphael Hirsch ... 42
4.2 The Afterlife of Concepts: Gershom Scholem... 44
Conclusion ... 49
Reviewing the findings ... 49
Connecting dots ... 50
A glance ahead ... 52
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ABSTRACT
This thesis explores how concepts of life, biology and organicity were adopted by 19th
century German-Jewish scholars, representatives of Wissenschaft des Judentums, and adapted to contemporary Jewish issues. The author suggests that these concepts, images or metaphors may have developed into a conceptual paradigm in German-Jewish dis-course, based on or incorporating conceptual trends in the contemporary German aca-demia and the wider European context. This paradigm centralized the image of ‘organic life’, which came to serve as a framework to articulate positions on various Jewish so-cial, political and religious issues.
Apart from considering the paradigm’s relationship with the contemporary German intellectual climate, the study also reflects on its roots in, or associations with, 18th cen-tury (Jewish) traditions and considers its survival into the 20th. The guiding hypothesis is that the paradigm particularly supported a conception of Judaism as a unity over the course of history (continuity), and in a modern context of perceived disintegration through acculturation or assimilation, conversion and, from a traditionalist perspective, religious reform. The objectives of the study are thus to a) sketch Jewish adoptions and adaptations of specific conceptual trends in the European context, in order to b) deter-mine to what extent these trends had a formative influence on ensuing Jewish debates and c) determine whether they might deserve more systematic study.
By order of appearance, the discussed scholars are: Leopold Zunz (chapter 1.1) and Immanuel Wolf (1.2), on concepts of reproductivity and cultivation; Moritz Stein-schneider (2.1), on the conception of the Jew as an amphibious organism, and Abraham Geiger (2.2), on conflict as an expression of life and the organic function of decompos-ing forces, juxtaposed with Richard Wagner’s view of the Jew as a parasite or decom-poser as such; Zecharias Frankel and Wolf Landau (3.1), on the process of fertilizing and regenerating the tradition from its own sources; Heinrich Graetz (3.2), with a focus on his imagery in reflection on dispersion, rejuvenation and resurrection of the Jewish people; Samson Raphael Hirsch (4.1), on contemporary scholarship as dissecting a liv-ing Judaism, and finally Gershom Scholem (4.2), on the scholarly tradition of
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INTRODUCTION:CONCEPTS OF LIFE IN JEWISH SCHOLARSHIP
General introduction
What struck me as I read Gershom Scholem’s “The Science of Judaism – Then and Now” for the first time a few years ago was the type of imagery Scholem employed in his evaluation of 19th century German-Jewish scholarship. To him, this Wissenschaft des
Judentums resembled a funeral ceremony for a Judaism declared dead prematurely by
its scholars: he accused them of approaching a living subject with an antiquarian mind-set. Scholem’s experience, however, was quite different from my own impression from the writings of prominent representatives, such as Leopold Zunz and Heinrich Graetz. What especially stood out were the clear similarities between Scholem’s criticism of his predecessors and their original criticism of contemporary rabbinic leadership. Both cri-tiques used metaphors of life, stagnation and death.
As it turned out, those similarities were the result of a conscious rhetoric. From the perspective of progressive scholars in the 19th century, a once healthy Judaism had withered over the preceding centuries. Within the confines of the ghetto, halachic prac-tice had ossified under increasingly rigid rabbinic leadership.1 Scholem, on the other hand, writing from a 20th century Zionist context, turned this rhetoric around and claimed that 19th century Jewish scholars, besides having been unsuccessful in their aim to ‘revive Judaism’, had in fact actively worked towards its ‘liquidation’. Scholem claimed that they had pursued a detached and elitist agenda, ignoring the living body of Judaism, and that their talk of revival had been empty.
The original plan for this thesis was to study the language of that polemic, with a focus on the concepts of ‘regeneration’ and ‘revival’ found among 19th century scholars and appropriated by Scholem. In fact, the latter’s critique can be read as a late contribu-tion to a polemic that had started already in the 19th century, when the first voices, most famously that of Samson Raphael Hirsch, criticized contemporary scholars for an al-leged lack of concern for ‘living Judaism’. However, I soon found out that (much of) this conceptual history has already been written by Asher Biemann, with special focus on the idea of Jewish renaissance in fin-de-siècle Jewish thought.2
1 Halacha; adj. halachic: the corpus of Jewish ritual developed to fulfill the religious commandments. 2 See: Asher D. Biemann, “Wissenschaft als Wiederaufstehung: Zur Polemik der toten Geschichte in der Wissenschaft des Judentums,” in Jüdische Existenz in der Moderne: Abraham Geiger und die
Wissen-schaft des Judentums, ed. Christian Wiese, Walter Homolka and Thomas Brechenmacher (Berlin, Boston:
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I consequently chose to shift my own focus. Firstly, by attempting a broader study of how concepts of ‘life’, ‘biology’ and ‘organicity’ found their way into the writings of 19th century Jewish scholars. Secondly, by looking back to the 18th century, to focus more on the roots of the conceptual language that thoroughly shaped debates on Jewish survival and revival, culminating in the conception of Zionism. Broadly speaking, we will examine how such concepts figured as means to (re)interpret Judaism, the Jewish people and/or Jewish history. They might be designated in different ways: I will mainly refer to them as ‘biological’ or ‘organicist’ concepts. I will explore how the concepts related to their wider intellectual context (as originating in the discourse of the German academy), and how they were adapted to Jewish debates on modern scholarship and religious reform.
Starting with a statement of the research question, along with some clarifying re-marks, I will briefly introduce my conception of the European and Jewish engagement with imagery of (organic) life. I will do so in order to formulate an hypothesis with re-gard to the functions these concepts or images may have served for 19th century Jewish
scholars. Afterwards I will provide an introductory overview of the history of the phrase ‘Wissenschaft des Judentums’, which provides us with a framework to introduce and briefly characterize the main figures discussed in this study.
Research question
As said, we will look into how a preoccupation with ‘life’ found its way into German-Jewish scholarship during its early development, and try to address the following ques-tion:
“How were concepts concerning life, biology and organicity adopted by German-Jewish scholars during the 19th century and adapted to contemporary Jewish issues?”
The biggest obstacle to formulating the question is in fact the proper designation for the concepts we wish to examine, which are admittedly rather elusive (partly explaining their adaptability and popularity to begin with). We are dealing with a range of words having to do with the conceptualization of ‘(organic) life’. I feel this collection might be characterized as a ‘conceptual paradigm’ of sorts, meaning a popular conceptual frame-work that was sufficiently general and flexible for each scholar to adapt it to their own book titled Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism (Stanford: Stan-ford University Press, 2009).
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concerns. We should remark that the difficulties of characterizing the paradigm are not limited to studies regarding the Jewish context, but are just as real and problematic in any study on the wider European intellectual climate: we are dealing with Jewish ‘in-flections’ of European phenomena.
To express the character of the paradigm, I landed on three concepts meant to repre-sent all others: “life, biology and organicity”. ‘Life’ is of course the central and over-arching concept, but too vague by itself. ‘Biology’ specifies those concepts with a diagnostic or taxonomic element, in other words: serving to interpret and categorize characteristics of (Jewish) life. ‘Organicity’ refers to those concepts expressing the na-ture of ‘(the) organism’, as popularly used in romantic scholarship for ‘living wholes’, rooting in a largely holistic view of reality. To give a first indication of the range of concepts covered, along with some of their negative counterparts, we will mention: ‘or-ganism’ and ‘organicity’, versus ‘decomposition’; ‘lively’, ‘vital’ and ‘reproductive’, versus ‘lethargic’ and ‘sterile’; ‘revitalization’, ‘rejuvenation’, ‘regeneration’; finally, of course, concepts concerning ‘disease’ and ‘death’. I hope this gives the reader a decent impression of what we are looking for.
In my phrasing of the research question I have left the historical window open on purpose. My main concern was that specifying a historical window might suggest an exhaustiveness that I cannot hope to offer: this is a preliminary study seeking firstly to examine trends. Furthermore, we want to look outside: firstly to the past, for possible continuities with thought in the 18th century, and secondly to the future, for very certain continuities with Jewish thought around the fin-de-ciècle, in particular that of Gershom Scholem and other Zionist publicists.
The selection of scholars to be discussed in this thesis was guided by a few consider-ations. Obviously, limits of space forced me to leave out many scholars. In general, my aim was to present a diversity of attitudes in order to highlight various different adapta-tions of the concepts in question. The first two choices were easy in light of their central importance to the development of Wissenschaft des Judentums: Leopold Zunz and Moritz Steinschneider. Moreover, the consideration of diversity led me to include three figures representing different religious orientations (and attitudes to scholarship): Abra-ham Geiger, Zecharias Frankel and Samson Raphael Hirsch. Because of our focus on concepts, some choices were guided mainly by the fact that an author wrote a seminal particularly relevant text: Immanuel Wolf, Wolf Landau and Heinrich Graetz. Finally, I included Gershom Scholem because his polemical writings made me aware of these
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conceptual trends to begin with, and because he consciously engaged with them from a 20th century Zionist perspective.
Structure
I have chosen to present the discussion in four chapters. All chapters consist of two sec-tions, each dedicated to a specific scholar. In chapter 1 we discuss Leopold Zunz (1.1) and Immanuel Wolf (1.2); in chapter 2 we turn to Moritz Steinschneider (2.1) and Abraham Geiger (2.2); chapter 3 treats Zecharias Frankel together with Wolf Landau as representing ‘the Breslauer school’ (3.1), and Heinrich Graetz (3.2); the final chapter 4 is a bit shorter than the others, reflecting on two critiques of contemporary scholarship, namely by Samson Raphael Hirsch (4.1) and Gershom Scholem (4.2).
The above order is mainly based on thematic similarities or associations, since most of the scholars lived and published over the same period. It is chronological only in the general sense that we start with Leopold Zunz and conclude with Gershom Scholem. The grouping of scholars into pairs was firstly a practical way to organize the whole, and although based on similarities in concepts, themes and perspectives, the reader should not read too much into it. Some concepts appear in all of their writings, but I had to make choices to manage the discussion. For example, Zunz and Wolf are not neces-sarily closer to one another than Zunz and Steinschneider, and what binds Hirsch and Scholem in this context is their shared critical attitude towards Wissenschaft.
Romantic Trends and Imagery in Judaism
In this study we will be using the words ‘concept’, ‘metaphor’ and ‘image’ or ‘imagery’ loosely and for the most part interchangeably, because our emphasis lies on the signifi-cance of form. Concepts, especially those used in science and philosophy, can be said to imagine their object in one way or another. For example, ‘the human’ may be imagined as a machine, as an impulsive natural organism or as a soul with freedom of will, each evoking a specific range of concepts that develop the image. Thus, each image has sig-nificant consequences for the possible directions of thinking and debating the subject. Even if we are intellectually aware enough that we may distance ourselves from our own concept(ion)s, redefine them or even develop new ones, we remain partly tied to the established concepts of a discourse as ‘centers of gravity’ that keep participants in a
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debate mutually intelligible. At the very least they determined our initial conceptions of complex or elusive subject matter, because they introduced us to it.
Jewish communities across the Diaspora and throughout history of course devel-oped or preserved their own traditions of concepts and images. Obviously, Jews have always had particularly rich traditions to draw on: most notably the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, along with the many stories that grew around them. The powerful charac-ters, places and events of the Biblical narrative have helped generations of Jews as well as Christians to grasp their pasts and presents. In other words, these traditions would serve as a first frame of reference for new contexts and events. The constant interaction of Jews with their surroundings (whether positive or negative) likely stimulated the re-trieval of specific images from the sources, or alternatively the introduction of concepts from ‘foreign’ cultural traditions in which Jews participated.
When we turn to the romantic scholarship3 current in German universities in the early 19th century, a period in which various of our Jewish scholars studied there, we encounter a more or less coherent collection of images making sense of the world as a
living historical whole. The way I have come to understand it, thinkers across Europe
gradually turned to the image of the organism to conceptualize ‘lively’ dynamics as opposed to the static forms of rationalist thought, which they deemed lacking. The con-cept of ‘growth’ provided a familiar image to express the continuity and gradual change of various traditions. Not merely the natural world, but also humanity and its history ended up being explained as living, organic processes.
To specify, the growing organism represented an organized unity that appeared to be not merely determined and mechanical but also to contain a mysterious, perhaps transcendent, spark: life, often appearing next to the popular concept of Geist.4 One might say that centralizing this idea of an organizing life force allowed for an ordered,
3 Romantic: I will use this word regularly, although it is admittedly imprecise. The truth is that despite its ambiguity it suffices in the context of this thesis as an historical designation for the scholarship dominant in the German language area from the last decade(s) of the 18th into the first of the 19th century, marked by an emphasis on the arts, philology, the historical development of just about anything (texts, law, na-tions, all interconnected of course), hermeneutics and elements from philosophical idealism. One publica-tion that shaped my perspective was: Joep Leerssen, “Notes towards a definipublica-tion of Romantic
Nationalism,” Romantik 2, no. 1 (2013), 9-35. Note that it specifically discusses ‘romantic nationalism’, but it reflects on the constituent terms and most importantly: on their vagueness. A publication more specifically about ‘romanticism in science’ that I consulted is: Yannis Hadzigeorgiou and Roland Schulz, “Romanticism and Romantic Science: Their Contribution to Science Education,” Science & Education 23, no. 10 (2014): 1963-2006.
4 An interesting article about the evolving meaning of the term ‘organism’ is: Tobias Cheung, “What is an ‘Organism’? On the Occurrence of a New Term and Its Conceptual Transformations 1680-1850,” History
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in many practical respects secularized, worldview that still reserved space for mystery and a link to the transcendent. It was perhaps in the same spirit that romantics hailed the poet as a new type of prophet, both deriving their genius or inspiration from a (divine) transcendent source. In other words, I would suggest that besides the concept of Geist, the image of the living organism functioned as a medium bridging theological and ra-tional conceptions of nature, humanity and history.
Moreover, the trend to view reality as organic and lively (lebendig), appears linked to a wider emergence of a fascination with the phenomenon of life. This preoccupation seems to have gained in prominence especially from the late 18th century onward. Apart
from the popularity of organicism among philologists, these times also saw the publica-tion of the first works of ‘biology’ as a budding scientific discipline.5 We should remark
that the interest in the mysteries of life and death extended beyond German borders, as we may tell for example from literary meditations on the nature of life and attempts to manipulate its power, for example through galvanism.6 Furthermore, already during the
18th century there existed traditions of ‘vitalism’ and ‘organicism’ in France, but these
lie beyond the focus of this study.7
In discussing the presence of organicist or biological trends in 19th century German-Jewish scholarship I hope to highlight some less emphasized aspects of the thought of its most famous representatives. My main focus is how scholars adapted popular image-ry to come to terms with their social and political issues, and how it thereby shaped en-suing debates. To formulate a general hypothesis: I suspect that the organic ‘model’ helped scholars conceive of Judaism as a living and continuous unity: on the one hand throughout history and on the other in a present of internal conflict, a perceived
5 For example, Grundzüge der Lehre von der Lebenskraft (1797) by T.G.A. Roose (1771-1803), which also happens to be a great example of a work that reflects a transition from philosophical or theological speculation to scientific examination. Another is Biologie; oder die Philosophie der lebenden Natur für
Naturforscher und Aerzte by G.R. Treviranus (1776-1837), published in volumes between 1802 and
1822. Lastly, there were the works by biologist/zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), an early advocate for a theory of organic evolution, such as his Philosophie zoologique (1809).
6 The most famous example of this is of course Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shel-ley, first published in 1818. Apart from engaging with the question what a human is and what it means to be one, Shelley’s work engages with Milton’s famous Paradise Lost. In a way, I feel this literary en-gagement reflects how the emerging ‘biological’ fascination with humanity was linked to a tradition of theological reflection on the place of human life within the larger scheme of things. As I was finishing this thesis I discovered an article that actually seeks to situate Frankenstein in the romantic period and analyze its engagement with contemporary scientific developments: John Robbins, “‘It Lives!’:
Franken-stein, Presumption, and the Staging of Romantic Science,” European Romantic Review 28, no. 2 (March
2017): 185-201.
7 For more on vitalism, especially in the French context, one might want to consult Science in Context 21, no. 4 (December 2008), which is dedicated to ‘medical vitalism in the Enlightenment’.
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crease in observance and increase in conversion. It may have provided a theoretical ba-sis for attempts at (re-)unifying a Jewry felt to be in danger of disintegration under the various pressures of European modernity.
On the phrase ‘Wissenschaft des Judentums’
I felt it important to dedicate part of this introduction to the development of the contro-versial phrase or designation at the center of it all: Wissenschaft des Judentums, mean-ing ‘science’ or ‘scholarship’ of ‘Judaism’ or ‘the Jewish people’. It is customary to refer to 19th century German-Jewish scholarship as ‘the’ Wissenschaft des Judentums,
but one should bear in mind that it never had the level of consistency such a designation might suggest. In fact, the phrase went through a series of appropriations by rivalling scholars, finally becoming a designation by which scholars in the early 20th century
re-ferred to the whole diversity of 19th century German-Jewish scholarship, in the context of evaluating its development and/or to contrast it to new styles of scholarship.
The phrase ‘Wissenschaft des Judentums’ was first used more or less consistently in the context of the short-lived Kulturverein (active ca. 1819-24).8 Leopold Zunz was a prominent member and explicitly regarded it as an academic discipline for the study of Jewish literature(s), which he hoped to introduce to the German universities – an ideal his pupil Steinschneider would firmly hold on to. As such, their definition was quite close to modern conceptions of ‘Jewish Studies’, although their orientation was mainly philological. This original perspective, however, did not prevent the adoption of the phrase by associates of the Jüdisch-Theologische Seminar of Breslau, which was found-ed in 1854. This institute came to be directfound-ed by Zecharias Frankel, generally thought of as the father of Conservative Judaism. Neither Zunz nor Steinschneider dared to entrust theologians with objective Jewish scholarship, resulting in diverging definitions of Wis-senschaft des Judentums in the early fifties.
Similar criticism came from the more radical reformer Abraham Geiger, who had originally hoped to direct and shape the theological seminary in accordance with his own liberal orientation. Only near the end of his life he saw his dream fulfilled, be it with the establishment of an entirely new institute: the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft
des Judentums in Berlin in 1872, which thus explicitly incorporated the phrase into its
8 Kulturverein: an abbreviated designation for a society of young German-Jewish intellectuals calling themselves the Verein für Cultur [sic] und Wissenschaft der Juden, active from roughly 1819 to 1824.
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name.9 A scholar such as Steinschneider, however, could not reconcile himself with the fact that despite its secular approach the Hochschule was still a separate, Jewish, insti-tute: to him it represented an unsatisfactory compromise.
Lastly, I should mention that near the end of the 19th and into the early 20th century
the phrase witnessed a surge in usage in the context of debates on the state and future of Jewish life and scholarship in Europe. This seems especially linked to significant events like World War I and the rise of antisemitism. One may find multiple ‘evaluative’ es-says from this period, in which German-Jewish intellectuals publicly looked back on the ambitions, direction, accomplishments and failures of Jewish scholarship until then, with an eye to its future.10 It is likely at this time that ‘Wissenschaft des Judentums’
achieved something close to its current use, as referring to the whole collection of 19th
century Jewish scholars themselves, rather than their project.
Needless to say, the original scholars hardly considered themselves a unified movement. One might say that they saw themselves at most as participants in the devel-opment and dissemination of ‘Jewish scholarship’, and that each ascribed a central sig-nificance to this enterprise. Apart from a shared ideal it is clear that they held strongly diverging views with regard to its theoretical underpinnings, approach, purpose or in what type of institute it should be housed. Over the course of this study we will come to discuss those different attitudes more closely.
Notes on translation
▪ I have translated all German and Hebrew passages to English, so all interpre-tative choices (and possible mistakes) are my own.
▪ Depending on the context, I have translated the word Wissenschaft a few times as ‘science’ but more regularly as ‘scholarship’. In the 19th century it was basically used for any systematic inquiry pursuing knowledge, whereas the word ‘science’ is nowadays associated mainly with the natural sciences and specific methods.
9 This institute produced well-known scholars such as Hanoch Albeck, Ismar Elbogen and Leo Baeck. 10 See for example: Martin Buber’s “Jüdische Wissenschaft” (1901); Osias Thon’s “Das Problem der jüdischen Wissenschaft” (1903); Ismar Elbogen’s “Neuorientierung unserer Wissenschaft” (1918) and “Ein Jahrhundert Wissenschaft des Judentums” (1922) or Rubashov/Shazar’s “Erstlinge der Entjudung” (1918). In fact Gershom Scholem’s “Reflections on the Science of Judaism” (1944) which we will discuss near the end of this paper, may be considered a late contribution to this ‘evaluative literature’.
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▪ Due to the encompassing meaning of the word Judentum,11 referring not just
to the Jewish religion but to the whole of Jewish life and worldly agency (analogous to concepts such as Deutschtum or Griechentum), I have taken some liberty with regard to its translation (‘Judaism’, ‘Jewry’, ‘the Jewish world’, etc.)
11 In the oft quoted words of Immanuel Wolf: “When speaking of a Wissenschaft des Judentums, it should be clear that the word Judentum is taken in its most encompassing meaning, as including all collective conditions, peculiarities and achievements of the Jews, in terms of religion, philosophy, history, laws, literature in general, civil life and all human affairs; not however in the more limited sense, in which it refers only to the religion of the Jews.” Immanuel Wolf, “Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Juden-thums,” Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums 1, no. 1 (1822): 1.
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CHAPTER 1:CULTIVATION AND HARVEST
1.1 Reproducing Judaism: Leopold Zunz
It is almost customary to start a discussion on the history of Jewish scholarship with the controversial essay published in 1818 by a young student named LEOPOLD ZUNZ, titled “Notes on the rabbinic literature.” The famous text advocated the development of rigor-ous historical scholarship on Jewish (also ‘rabbinic’, ‘new-Hebrew’) literature: a so-called Wissenschaft des Judentums. At the same time it outlined the extensive prelimi-nary works that would have to be compiled in preparation to more profound analyses. Its discussion will serve mainly to introduce the perspective and some conceptual fun-daments of the scholarly project. We will thus be focusing on Zunz’s evaluation of the state and direction of Jewish literary and scholarly life in his time, which led him to believe that the establishment of such a research agenda was an urgent matter.
Zunz’s passionate text was quite clearly guided by progressive values, prevalent among a new generation of the German-Jewish intellectual elite, heirs to the first gener-ations of maskilim.12 More or less separate from his progressive agenda, however, Zunz sought to convince his contemporaries of what he felt to be real and irreversible histori-cal trends that endangered the preservation of Jewish history as well as its future. Where previous Jewish progressives had focused mainly on political and educational issues, Zunz’s essay, which shows the strong influence of contemporary German scholarship, placed more emphasis on new academic ideals and introduced these into German-Jewish debates.
In the space of a mere three paragraphs at the start of his essay, Zunz sketches his view on the history of Jewish literature from the Bible to modernity. He describes a de-velopmental course with creative peaks, namely the Biblical and early rabbinic litera-tures, which were separated by periods of decline, namely the post-Biblical writings that preceded the rise of rabbinic discourse as well as the more recent ‘rabbinic’ literary pro-ductions in Zunz’s own time. The ‘periods of decline’ were characterized by a lack of originality, resulting in what Zunz calls “hardly successful exegeses” of previous liter-ary treasures.
12 Maskilim, sg. maskil: representatives of ‘Haskalah’, which is traditionally translated as ‘Jewish En-lightenment’. Although sharing many progressive ‘Enlightenment values’ (civil equality, religious re-form, science and dissemination of education) it can be argued that Haskalah was a more or less distinct phenomenon, incorporating a greater diversity of historical trends (notably from the 19th century) than just those strictly associated with Enlightenment. I will also be using the adjective ‘maskilic’.
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Zunz’s key suggestion is that an almost two-millennia long rabbinic cycle of Jewish literary life was finally coming to an end, and that the Jewish literary tradition would have to attach to a new one in order to be reborn. That was the way, Zunz argues, in which the rabbinic tradition had once been born itself: from the happy marriage of the Hebrew and Greek traditions.13 Indeed, Zunz asserts that the rise of early rabbinic litera-ture was stimulated by a foreign influence (“eine neue fremde Bildung”), namely Hel-lenism.14 The marriage of old and new, of ‘national’ and ‘foreign’, carried the potential for an historical revitalization of Jewish literature. In light of the significance ascribed to literature in contemporary thought, for Zunz and his fellows a literary rebirth represent-ed a renewrepresent-ed life in the modern European context, supporting both internal (represent-education- (education-al, didactic) and external (politic(education-al, social) emancipatory pursuits.
In light of the above, it is quite understandable why Zunz did not attempt to hide the fact that he had been inspired by contemporary German scholarship. In conclusion to a programmatic overview of the domains of Jewish literature to be studied, he makes this claim explicit. The ambition to develop a Wissenschaft, he points out, flowed from the original spirit that had once produced rabbinism, but had finally left it: “We have merely come to point out gaps, striving to reawaken a scholarship, that, although with a rather flawed approach, once flourished more than it does today...”15 [my italics]
Zunz goes on to express an idea common in maskilic writings, but articulated more ‘romantically’: “Wherever good will was present, often the classical training was lack-ing, while on the other side many scholars erred because they did not manage to attune themselves to the Hebrew mind and feel along with the author.”16 The dual criticism shows the young Zunz’s connection to earlier German-Jewish progressive thought: what had historically impeded Jewish development and tainted most previous scholarship on Judaism, were on the one hand ignorance, prejudice and lack of good-will on the Chris-tian side, and on the other a gradual decline in intellectual rigor among the rabbinic leadership (typically explained as a result of persecution).
13 Leopold Zunz, “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur (1818),” in Gesammelte Schriften von Dr. Zunz
Band 1 (Berlin: Louis Gerschel Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1875), 4.
14 Leopold Zunz, “Die jüdische Literatur (1845),” in Gesammelte Schriften von Dr. Zunz Band 1 (Berlin: Louis Gerschel Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1875), 43-45. Originally appeared as introduction to Zunz’s Zur
Geschichte und Literatur published in 1845.
15 Zunz, “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur,” 23. 16 Idem, 24-25.
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What would particularly anger Zunz’s more conservative readers – and would, as it turned out, continue to annoy later generations of Jewish ideologues – was what they interpreted as a claim that Judaism was dying:
Even what still belonged to [the rabbinic literature] in the last fifty years, did only borrow its language as an accessible scholarly vessel for ideas that must prepare a time when the rabbinic literature will have ceased living.
But exactly because in our time we see the Jews – to just focus on the German ones – em-brace the German language and culture with more seriousness and thus – perhaps often without meaning or suspecting to – are carrying the new-Hebrew literature to its grave, our scholarly discipline steps up and desires to account for that which has ended. [my italics]17
It should be clear that for Zunz the rhetoric of decay and the prophecy of death actually served as a premise to a more optimistic program of revitalization. His historical per-spective on Judaism presented the rabbinic tradition as an important yet temporary ex-pression of the Jewish spirit, so that the ‘death’ of that specific tradition was perfectly reconcilable with the survival of the Jewish whole.
As one might expect, those who felt more profoundly attached to the rabbinic tradi-tion as it was, most eloquently represented by SAMSON RAPHAEL HIRSCH (see page 43), were offended by Zunz’s almost casual claim that their tradition was near-dead. To them the rabbinic tradition was the only true form of Judaism, or at least made up an essential part of its body. Thus, they disagreed with both parts of Zunz’s argument: firstly, with the claim that rabbinism was becoming obsolete, and secondly with the idea that modern scholarship could do anything for Jews as Jews, even if science might ben-efit humanity as a whole. In fact, some of these critics would eventually adopt the rheto-ric of life and death themselves, but we will save that discussion for later.
As said, Zunz developed much of his conceptual perspective in the German acade-my. At this time the German academy found itself under the spell of romanticism, closely associated with an idealist philosophy that aspired to endow the rationalist tradi-tion with life. Popular thinkers such as Schelling and Hegel emphasized the ‘organicity’ and ‘liveliness’ of reality, opposing a deeper understanding of its living development to what they regarded as a static formalism of earlier thinkers. A glance through the pref-ace to Hegel’s famous Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) suffices to illustrate this style of thought, in particular where he discusses Kantian schematism and scientific
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formalism.18 In chapter V (part a. ‘Observation of Nature’) he states: “In the systems of form as such, the organism is interpreted from the abstract perspective of dead exist-ence; its moments, thus taken, belong to anatomy and the cadaver, not to knowledge and the living organism.”19 His view was that a true understanding constitutes more than an
exercise of externally observing and designating parts or stating laws.
While sharing Hegel’s perspective in the above regard, Schelling elaborated more on the image of life, placing it at the center of his idealism. Another characteristic of his writings is that they were more explicitly theological. For example, one emphatic anal-ogy in Schelling’s (later) philosophy was that the capacity for disease in fact reflects internal freedom, associating or equating disease with sin.20 He characterized the
preoc-cupation with one’s own interests as a move away from God’s unity – the only place where one may find immortality – in favor of an ultimately sterile particularity. Schel-ling explained localized diseases in parts of the body along the same lines: as reflecting the part’s abuse of its freedom in ignorance or defiance of the whole organism.21 One
might keep these images or metaphors in mind for the rest of our discussion on Jewish scholars and religious thinkers.
The details of the relations between philosophical idealism and romantic scholar-ship are a complex intellectual-historical question far beyond the scope of this study, so we will merely observe that the above philosophical concepts were prevalent throughout the contemporary German academy.22 In this context, one of romantic scholarship’s basic ideas was that literatures and the knowledge they represented grew organically throughout history in a living development, and that studying this development would yield insight into the present.23 Zunz and his peers ‘applied’ this perspective to Judaism
18 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes: Jubiläumsausgabe, ed. Georg Lasson (Leipzig: Verlag der Dürr’schen Buchhandlung, 1907), 33-35. On page 35 he states: “That colorlessness of the schema and its lifeless determinations and this absolute identity … is a … dead understanding … and a … superficial knowing.”
19 Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 184.
20 F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die
damit zusammenhangenden Gegenstande, ed. Thomas Buchheim (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2011),
18.
21 Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen, 38.
22 Siegfried Ucko characterizes the intellectual trends of the time (romanticism, ‘Hegelianism’ and their closely associated development), as a ‘fashion’, referring to the analysis by Metzger in his 1917
Gesell-schaft, Recht und Staat in der Ethik des deutschen Idealismus. See: Siegfried Ucko,
“Geistesgeschichtli-che Grundlagen der Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in
Deutschland 5 (1934): 1-34.
23 For further reading, one might have a look at the 1978 issue (Sonderband) of the Deutsche
in-18
and Jewish history, rediscovering the Jewish (literary) past as encompassing more than the rabbinic tradition. Moreover, and just as importantly, a view of the world as one developing organism offered them a framework to conceptualize Jewish emancipation: they hoped that by stimulating Jewish participation in this inclusive intellectual perspec-tive, its essential contributions to general history might finally be recognized.
It is unlikely that Zunz himself was influenced directly by the German idealists. Whatever he adopted more likely came from his professors in the university.24
Moreo-ver, he likely took inspiration from conversing with his friend Eduard Gans, a disciple of Hegel who had also been involved in the Kulturverein, and from the work of Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840).25 It was Zunz who, by request of Krochmal himself,
posthumously edited and published the latter’s “Guide for the Perplexed of Our Time” (1851, originally in Hebrew: moreh nevuḵei ha-zman). Krochmal’s philosophy was strongly influenced by the famous idealists (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) but wove them into a distinctly ‘Jewish’ philosophy of his own. Indeed his characterization of the peo-ple of Israel as eternal, undergoing periods of decline and renewal, might be discerned not just in the writings of Zunz, but also in those of other scholars such as HEINRICH GRAETZ, whom we will discuss later on.
One of the key concepts Zunz introduced was that of a Reproduktionskraft, that is, a ‘reproductive capacity’ manifesting in the creative chapters of Jewish history. As we will see, this concept would become important in the context of Jewish debates on the state and future of Jewry (and Jewish scholarship) in Europe. In light of Zunz’s empha-sis on the creative potential of a marriage between Jewish and non-Jewish traditions, one realizes that the concept might even have had a more concrete biological dimen-sion: most entities are sterile without a partner, so a marriage of traditions would be the natural basis for reproduction. This play with the imagery makes for a first subtle illus-tration of how the form of a concept may just imply more than is immediately apparent.
terdisziplinäres Symposium. Of particular interest to our subject is the contribution by Hans Querner on
organicism: “Ordnungsprinzipien und Ordnungsmethoden in der Naturgeschichte der Romantik”. 24 Such as Friedrich Carl von Savigny. See: Fritz Bamberger, “Zunz’s Conception of History: A Study of the Philosophic Elements in Early Science of Judaism,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish
Research 11 (1941): 3.
25 Steinschneider remarks that Hegelianism was “planted on new-Hebrew soil” through Krochmal’s work. See: Moritz Steinschneider, Die fremdsprachlichen Elemente im Neuhebräischen und ihre Benutzung für
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1.2 An Overgrown Garden: Immanuel Wolf
The Kulturverein published one three-issue volume of a ‘Journal for the Science of Ju-daism’.26 The introductory essay that opened the first issue was titled “Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judenthums,” and written by IMMANUEL WOLF. Together with Zunz’s 1818 text, it has become well-known as an early statement of the Kulturverein’s scholarly ideals. Where Zunz had provided a sketch of the historical perspective in order to present the envisioned program for the Wissenschaft, Wolf’s introductory essay dis-cusses the broader philosophical conception of Judaism that was to be the framework for future studies. Wolf’s thought may not appear particularly original or interesting in itself, but his text offers a representative articulation of the views guiding early 19th cen-tury Jewish scholarship.
Wolf states that Judaism27 is determined by a religious idea, condensed in the
tetra-grammaton, which in his view expresses “the lively unity of all being in eternity,”28 and thus ‘passed over everywhere into daily life’.29 More obviously than in Zunz, we can observe the influence of German idealism in his writings, in the sense that many of his statements are paraphrases or near-quotations from Hegel.30 Wolf repeats and elaborates on some of Zunz’s claims or suggestions with regard to internal and external cultural dynamics. For example, he states that Greek culture, as it was dying, had flung itself into the arms of Europe, an event that was only possible because Jews served as inter-preters/translators (Dollmetscher) of the Arabic scholarship in which the Greek legacy had been preserved until that time.31
In line with Zunz’s view, Wolf held that Jewish intellectual productivity had begun to fade as European modernity and science were taking off. For this Wolf’s essay gives us two familiar explanations: oppression from the outside on the one hand, and rabbinic withdrawal into the narrow confines of the Jewish tradition on the other, a move Wolf
26 Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1822/3.
27 As mentioned in the introduction (page 14), Judentum was used in a more encompassing sense as cov-ering ‘the whole of Jewish presence and agency in the world’.
28 Immanuel Wolf, “Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judenthums,” Zeitschrift für die
Wissen-schaft des Judenthums 1, no. 1 (1822): 3.
29 Wolf, “Über den Begriff,” 1.
30 To illustrate: “Thus we encounter [the Idea of Judaism] from its first revelation in a perpetual state of unrest, involved in a constant struggle. Rest and stasis are completely foreign to the domains of the Mind [des Geistigen], as the true elements of liveliness [Lebendigkeit]; rather, it is the nature of Mind [des Geistes], persisting in constant motion, to indefinitely develop itself.” See: Wolf, “über den Begriff,” 4. 31 Idem, 11-12. Note that this role of the Jews as ‘interpreters’ between Arabs and Europeans would be-come one of the central themes in the scholarship of MORITZ STEINSCHNEIDER, discussed below.
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calls a retreat into ‘scholastic’ reservedness or prejudice (Befangenheit).32 Indeed, Wolf leaves little question as to who his heroes were: in a footnote he declares that Descartes represented the end of scholasticism in the sciences and the birth of a new, independent discipline. Unsurprisingly, Wolf refers to Spinoza’s discussion of Descartes’ work.33
Taking a closer look at the way Wolf phrased his critique of modern rabbinism and his enthusiasm for rationalism gives us an idea of the way that early romantic imagery might attach to, or continue, that of ‘classical’ liberal philosophy. At the same time, his essay illustrates how a Jewish thinker involved traditional Jewish images to (rhetorical-ly) reinforce his point. When I refer to liberal imagery, I mean the imagination of hu-man well-being as based on a ‘freedom-from’, in order for people – and scholarship, for that matter – to realize their potential without impediment. The implied analogy might just be with the plant, which cannot grow in a confined space lacking light and air, for example due to ‘overgrowth’. In an allusion to the traditional concept of a syag
la-torah,34 Wolf claims that “the fence, which [the Jewish people] planted around the Law,
has expanded bit by bit to such an extent, growing into an impenetrable barricade, that it has restricted access to the inner shrine, that indeed it has buried this shrine within it-self.”35
Such plays with images of growth and overgrowth especially make sense in light of contemporary reflections on the concept of ‘culture’, which seems to have become in-creasingly popular in intellectual debates from the 18th century onward. Culture was understood primarily as the civilizing process associated with morals and practical re-finement, essential to a healthy and productive population. We find a brief but elucidat-ing reflection on its conceptual history in the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn’s 1784 essay on Enlightenment:
[Culture] appears more related to the practical. [...] The more a people has brought [arts, crafts and social customs] in line with the human purpose [Bestimmung], the more culture it is said to possess; just as a plot of land is ascribed more culture and cultivation, the more
32 Wolf, “Über den Begriff,” 12-13.
33 See for example the first part of Descartes’ Discours de la méthode (1637), the famous treatise in which he presents his rational method and first expresses his statement “je pense, donc je suis.” Wolf himself consulted Spinoza’s Principia philosophiae cartesianae (1663).
34 Syag la-torah: ‘a fence around the Torah’, an expression found in Mishnaic tractate Avot chapter 1. In the traditional sense it refers to extra measures that safeguard against transgression of an original precept. 35 Wolf, “Über den Begriff,” 15.
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it has been developed through human industriousness to bring forth products beneficial to humanity.36
Culture, from Mendelssohn’s perspective, is one of the two pillars by which a society’s development can be measured, the other being its intellectual level as reflected mainly by the quality of its philosophy and sciences. His judgment is that an excess of neither the former nor the latter is desirable: they reinforce each other as practice and theory, and ideally maintain a balance.
To be sure, Mendelssohn’s account reflects a relatively conservative appreciation of ‘Enlightenment’. The imagery, however, was also adopted by those less attached to (Jewish) tradition, such as Immanuel Wolf. The latter suggests rationality as the main cultivating force, stating that a liberal and scientific impulse has (finally) started to break through the weeds of a ceremonial practice turned mechanical and thoughtless by a thousand years of habit.37 In fact, Zunz himself was more reserved when it came to reform and uncompromising rationalism, especially later in life. His personal perspec-tive – like that of Mendelssohn – reflected the strong influence of Greek philosophy, in particular when it came to conceptions of morality and health.
To illustrate the above, one might have a look at a didactic speech that Zunz held in 1864, titled “Mental/Spiritual Health” (Die geistige Gesundheit), apparently for mem-bers of a society for young merchants. Seeing that it contains neither particularly origi-nal nor ‘Jewish’ content, it is not surprising that it has hardly received any scholarly attention. From the perspective of our topic, however, it contains some interesting ele-ments. As the title suggests, Zunz discusses the importance of health, which he explains as an organic harmony of body and mind that results in the greatest productivity. He furthermore stresses the close link between health and morality, an idea rooting in an-cient Greece and popular into the early 20th century. As he summarizes himself: “Al-ways strive to reach that fine goal, prosperity and kindness [...] Because living morally means being healthy.”38
To go a bit deeper, John Efron has argued that besides its “social, intellectual, edu-cational and political” pursuits, the thought of Haskalah had also involved rather
36 Moses Mendelssohn, “Über die Frage: was heißt aufklären?,” Berlinische Monatsschrift 4 (1784): 194. 37 Wolf, “Über den Begriff,” 16.
38 Leopold Zunz, “Die geistige Gesundheit,” in Gesammelte Schriften von Dr. Zunz Band 1 (Berlin: Louis Gerschel Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1875), 340.
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cal concerns, namely a desire to restore Jewish control over their bodies.39 According to Efron, one dominant idea among Jewish progressives was that Jews had ceded control over their bodies to a tradition whose obsolete customs had become detrimental to Jew-ish health. He suggests that, in a general sense, this idea rooted in the Enlightenment ideal of freedom from (religious) tyranny over body and mind, but that it moreover was a shared assumption in the contemporary debate on the supposed physical and moral ‘degeneracy’ afflicting the Jewish population.40
Efron particularly refers to Henri Grégoire’s “Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des Juifs” (1789), to illustrate the way physical concerns were part of an effort to ‘regenerate’ European Jewry, already in that century.41 The ultimate goal
was to make the Jews ‘happier and more useful’.42 Efron’s discussion suggests that the
concept of a Jewish ‘regeneration’, involving very practical, physical concerns, was already part of the Wissenschaft’s conceptual inheritance from 18th century maskilic
thinkers. This would suggest at least some links between the ideas of mental, moral and physical cultivation to regeneration, and to the ‘projection’ of such physical imagery on the whole of Jewry in 19th century scholarship.
Having suggested some conceptual continuities between early Wissenschaft and the thought of earlier Haskalah, let us highlight the 19th century’s innovations. The first thing to note is that, in line with the rising prominence of philology, the Wissenschaft put a new emphasis on Jewish literature as the main expression of Jewish life through-out history. Despite what some critics would come suggest,43 the new reverence for the Jewish literary inheritance did not – at least not intentionally – turn away from present Jewish concerns in favor of a detached antiquarianism. A fresh engagement with (the whole of) Jewish literature was presented as the only way to reawaken what may be seen as a lively dialectic within modern Jewry, which they claimed had become
39 John M. Efron, “Images of the Jewish Body: Three Medical Views from the Jewish Enlightenment,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicin 69, no. 3 (1995): 350.
40 Efron, “Images of the Jewish Body,” 351.
41 John M. Efron has written more extensively on the development of race science and the various ways in which Jews engaged in it from the 18th to the early 20th century in his book Defenders of the Race: Jewish
Doctors & Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994),
and his Medicine and the German Jews (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001) deals more specifically with the history of Jewish physicians in Germany from the Middle Ages to the era of the Weimar Republic. Especially the third chapter, “Haskalah and Healing,” is of interest to our topic: it may be read as elaborating his 1995 article.
42 Efron, “Images of the Jewish Body,” 352.
43 This criticism came primarily from early Zionist scholars, notably Gershom Scholem, in his highly polemical “mitoḵ hirhurim ‘al ḥoḵmat yisrael” (1944), who again drew on an earlier critique by Zionist ideologue Osias Thon (“Das Problem der jüdischen Wissenschaft,” 1903).
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gic under rabbinic guardianship. Wolf, clearly in the spirit of Hegelianism, stated that ‘the Jewish Idea’ from the moment of its emergence in history had been in a constant state of motion, of struggle, which is the source of life and progress. This idea would be centralized by ABRAHAM GEIGER, whom we will discuss later.
To summarize, the members of the Kulturverein imagined the history of literature to carry the secret of Jewish life within it, ready to be revived with the help of modern methods of research and ‘exegesis’.44 In their conception, ‘history’ was not limited to
descriptions of the past, but even more so had the task to retrieve and reactivate the past in the present. Like previous maskilim they believed Jewry to be in bad shape but alive, slumbering but ready to be revitalized – their innovation was to seek the answer not just in political emancipation and educational reforms, but also in scientific studies through which Jews might learn to know themselves better. As Zunz wrote:
Many a field is still to be cultivated, now lying covered in weeds, but promising a bountiful harvest under better care; many a harmful seed is still sown and robs its fitter neighbor of maturation and health; many a ripe harvest is still battered by the hail of fervor, of malice, of false wisdom; and many a fine fruit lies neglected on the soil, or is coldly trampled out of arrogance.45
Still, time taught that the uncompromising life of the pioneer in scholarship was not for everyone, especially due to the frustrating condition of partial emancipation. Eduard Gans converted to Christianity in 1825, and so did Heinrich Heine, who would after-wards become a famous German poet. The other members of the Kulturverein each went their own path. Leopold Zunz would hold on to the ideal of scholarship, but Im-manuel Wolf ended up choosing a career as a teacher. The latter moved to Hamburg in 1823 to teach at the Israelitische Freischule.46
44 Wolf, emphasizing external causes of decline, writes: “Judaism lies in front of us in double form, firstly contained in historical-literary documents, in a very extensive mass of literature; secondly, as a still living principle, acknowledged by millions of people spread across the whole world. Among the people, howev-er, the original, simple idea has, as it were, gradually passed over into a state of oxidation due to the oxy-gen of a hostile atmosphere.” See: Wolf, “Über den Begriff,” 15.
45 Zunz, “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur,” 29.
46 Arno Herzig, “Wohlwill, Immanuel,” Das Jüdische Hamburg: Ein historisches Nachschlagewerk, accessed June 18, 2018, http://www.dasjuedischehamburg.de/inhalt/wohlwill-immanuel-auch-wolf-immanuel.
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CHAPTER 2:ORGANISM AND DECOMPOSITION
2.1 The Amphibious Jew: Moritz Steinschneider
MORITZ STEINSCHNEIDER (1816-1907) is without a doubt one of the most productive figures in the history of Jewish Studies. His extensive bibliographical works on Jewish literature appear as loyal contributions to the execution of the plan originally drawn up by Zunz in 1818. After all, the latter had emphasized that the first step towards modern Jewish scholarship would consist in preliminary works (Vorarbeiten): mapping, prepar-ing and preservprepar-ing materials that future scholars might further analyze and synthesize.47 Although first and foremost a scholar and less consistently engaged in contemporary polemics, Steinschneider was by no means unaware of or indifferent to the issues of his time. He chose to concisely express his concerns, insights and not rarely sharp criti-cisms concerning contemporary religious, political, social and scholarly issues in his prefaces and footnotes.48
To understand Steinschneider’s nuanced engagement with the conceptual trends under discussion, we had best reflect a little on his individual perspective (and, in a sense, on his nature). Steinschneider believed that scientific and religious pursuits were naturally opposed and showed a clear personal preference to occupy himself with the former.49 This fact, coupled with his often cynical tone and critical attitude to virtually all theological tendencies, have led many to consider him an agnostic or even an atheist.
Although there may be truth to that assessment, one should also take consider that Steinschneider would have leaned towards a ‘negative theology’ anyway, in light of his obvious distaste for talk about what he considered ultimately incomprehensible. Even in the last years of his life he would still express a universalist view on a moral bond of all humanity, sharing equally in the transcendent (or divine) that must remain a mystery to all.50 In my view, what primarily frustrated him was what he perceived as willful igno-rance and the tendency to deform facts among idealists of any cause or orientation, in-cluding priests and rabbi’s.
It should be clear from the outset that Steinschneider is not an easy author to inter-pret, especially when it comes to his theoretical views. That does not mean, of course,
47 Zunz, “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur,” 6. Zunz mentions works such as editiones principes of manuscripts, proper translations, handbooks and biographies.
48 A prominent example is his preface to Die Arabische Literatur der Juden (1902).
49 Moritz Steinschneider, Die Arabische Literatur der Juden (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Kauffmann, 1902), IX. 50 Steinschneider, Die Arabische Literatur, X.
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that these are absent from his work. His scholarly aim to be as objective as possible, “neither apologetically nor polemically colored, neither nationally nor theologically shaped,” established firstly an order of priority.51 As a traditional objectivist and dedi-cated scholar Steinschneider seems to have felt that analysis of a shared reality should always precede judgment, to prevent reality from being molded to fit some traditional or chosen position. This consciousness caused him to refrain from ‘unnecessary’ specula-tion. Nevertheless, we find that he employs theoretical concepts, and how could he not? In light of his ‘minimalism’ we may perhaps even consider his concepts to have been chosen all the more consciously.
It comes as no surprise that, especially during the first half of his life, Steinschnei-der’s thought strongly resembled that of his mentor Zunz. His 1844 lecture on “foreign language elements in new-Hebrew” (published in 1845) provides an overview of the various ‘influences’ that Jews incorporated into their lingual tradition from Antiquity to Modernity. Steinschneider quite explicitly presents this text as a linguistically focused complement to the overviews already composed by Zunz.52 Indeed, one finds plenty of
similarities when reading this lecture alongside Zunz’s “Die jüdische Literatur” (the introduction to his Zur Geschichte und Literatur, also 1845).
The most important structural view shared by Zunz and Steinschneider, was a spe-cial emphasis on the historical interactions of Jews with different contexts and the re-sulting additions to or even transformations of their original tradition. Zunz himself focused primarily on the development of Jewish liturgies, for which the idea of ‘histori-cally interacting literatures’ served as a framework. Steinschneider on the other hand had a more pronounced linguistic orientation, which led him to focus on the languages spoken and written by Jews. He studied the active role of Jews in literary exchange throughout history, rather than strictly occupying himself with one theme or genre. He characterized language as “the most faithful mirror of history.”53
In the context of this thesis, the interesting thing about Steinschneider’s writings is that he made a more concrete attempt to determine the particular nature of (the) Jewish
organism.54 The basic underlying question had in fact plagued philosophers of all ages, but gained special attention in a time obsessed with historical change: how are unity and
51 Steinschneider, Die Arabische Literatur, VIII.
52 Moritz Steinschneider, Die fremdsprachlichen Elemente im Neuhebräischen und ihre Benutzung für die
Linguistik (Prague: Pascheles, 1845), 29.
53 Steinschneider, Die fremdsprachlichen Elemente, 29. 54 Organism: here in the sense of ‘manner of self-organization’.
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identity maintained in discontinuity and diversity? For a Jewish scholar the question had fundamental relevance in light of the fragmented and mixed state of a people in Diaspo-ra, and special urgency in a context of (partial) emancipation, an experienced increase in acculturation of German Jews, as well as conversions.55 An author like Wolf, as we saw before, chose to simply posit a shared ‘religious idea’ as the essence that somehow binds the whole together. That solution could not satisfy a more rigorous scholar like Steinschneider, so he came up with his own analysis.
One of the ideas introduced by Steinschneider was that Jews carried their homeland through the Diaspora in the form of their literature.56 At the same time, this literary
tra-dition was subject to constant change and development, with parts being reconstructed or newly added under the influence of new lingual and cultural contexts. The clearest examples are of course the Aramaic and Arabic works, both translations and novel liter-ary creations, that became incorporated into the Jewish tradition. Based on the above, Steinschneider suggests that the characteristic organism of the Jewish spirit might be best described as “historically determined reproductivity.”57
The concept of reproductivity (Reproduktivität) is of course linked to – possibly synonymous with – the Reproduktionskraft posited by Zunz, but perhaps it takes a slightly more careful stance in expressing a process rather than positing a capacity. Steinschneider suggests that what characterizes the Jewish people is its constant repro-duction of its ancient ideas in new forms, attaching the new to the old.58 He moreover states explicitly that this ‘moment of attachment’ is the only thing that makes up the Jewish people’s organic unity. Thus, we see that although ‘Jewish ideas’ do figure in his analysis, Steinschneider refrains from using them as an explanation, but highlights the
moments of adaptation as typically Jewish.
To characterize the particular Jewish ‘double life’ between the Hebrew tradition and the various vernaculars they spoke depending on the context, Steinschneider intro-duces the idea of the Jew as a lingual ‘amphibian’ (Sprachamphibie), naturally
55 In a passage quoted by Ucko, Moses Moser (1797-1838) articulated the issue perfectly: “The biggest of all maladies from which our people suffers, is that in the part of the nation that already released itself completely or partly from the old bonds […] so little unity reigns, its efforts often wandering about in the greatest diversity of directions and dispersing […] and the individual gets entangled in the most tragic conflict with itself and the outside world, because a center is missing, in which the forces torn from the old mass are unified once more…” (Cited in: Ucko, “Geistesgeschichtliche Grundlagen,” 13-14.) 56 Steinschneider, Die fremdsprachlichen Elemente, 5.
57 Idem, 7. 58 Ibidem.
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able in various lingual traditions at the same time.59 Other designations he used for the historical Jew were “a living, stuttering polyglot” or simply an “interpreter”
(Dol-metscher). What is so significant here is that instead of positing a metaphysical Jewish
essence – although he leaves the possibility of its existence open – Steinschneider comes up with what reads almost like a taxonomy of the Jew, explaining Jewish nature from its way of surviving ‘gaps’: between old and new, between particular and foreign, between Hebrew and vernacular. The reason that there were still Jews in 1844, Stein-schneider suggests, is that generation after generation managed to be flexible enough to cross such boundaries, preserving a continuous Jewishness. Although his words resem-ble those of his peers, his views turn out quite distinct.
It will be clear by now that I do not consider Steinschneider’s choice to describe the Jew in terms of a zoological class as random, but rather as a subtle engagement with a prevalent conceptual paradigm. It is rather interesting to contrast his Jewish ‘lingual amphibian’ to another account written around that time, namely by Richard Wagner in his “Judaism in Music.” Let us look at one particular passage:
As long as the musical art carried a truly organic force of life within it, up until the time of Mozart and Beethoven, no Jewish composer was to be found: it would be impossible for an
element completely foreign to this living organism to participate in the development of its life. Only at the moment that the inner death of a body becomes apparent, do the external
elements attain the power to take possession of it, but only to decompose it; afterwards the flesh of the body surely disintegrates in a teeming and lively mass of worms: who, however, would, upon viewing it, still consider the body itself as living? [my italics]60
There are two aspects of this passage that I would like to highlight. Firstly, and obvious-ly, the fact that the Jew is characterized as a parasite or decomposer. Secondly there is Wagner’s suggestion that there are strange elements that cannot become part of an or-ganism, somehow because of its original and distinct organic life force. The ‘pseudo-participation’ of such elements, on his view, could only be a sign of decay.
Steinschneider was perfectly aware of the negative trends in his time, and although at that time it cannot have been a direct response to Wagner, his ‘amphibious Jew’ of-fered a positive interpretation of the Jew in more or less biological terms. It moreover offered an answer to the difficult ‘Jewish’ question how a people without a land,
59 Steinschneider, Die fremdsprachlichen Elemente, 6. See also: Steinschneider, “Über die Volksliteratur der Juden,” 9.
60 Richard Wagner, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Leipzig: J.J. Weber, 1869), 31. (Expanded reprint of the original 1850 essay.)
