Etwas Uber Die Judische Historik

Modern Jewish historiography -the study of Jewish sources, by Jews, according to shared methods of research and interpretation was launched in the last century by an uncommonly learned twenty-three-year-old German Jew called Leopold Zunz. Of course he was not the first to submit Jewish texts to the godless rigors of historical criticism. In sixteenth-century Italy Azariah de Rossi had skillfully applied the scholarly procedures of Biondi and the rhetorical sensitivities of the ancients to Scripture, and with unsettling results. Azariah was by all accounts a man of faith, however, albeit one devoted at once to tradition and truth a pious savant inviting trouble and he had confined his explorations in the Bible largely to its chronological passages. Zunz, a child of his own century, was more ambitious. He insisted that all of Judaism's works be consigned to the historian. He submitted a detailed and systematic plan for the totality of Jewish historical research for Wissenschaft des Judentums, as it came to be known. And he proposed, finally, that the Jew of his age adopt the historical attitude not merely as an instrument of study but as a view of life. All this young Zunz packed into an epoch-making manifesto entitled Etwas Uber die rabbinische Literatur, which appeared in Berlin in May, 1818.1 Zunz's essay is short but dense, by turns stolid and shrill, at once an erudite prolegomenon and a popular pamphlet. Its impact upon the intellectual world of nineteenth-century Jewry was considerable; it inaugurated one of the richest and most characteristic enterprises of that world, the distillation of a theory of Judaism out of the scrupulous and doctrinally unprejudiced examination of its past. The Jewish historian envisaged by Zunz was to be a new source of cultural authority, a rival of the rabbi and the philosopher. And such became the often thankless role of Zunz's students and heirs, of Zechariah Frankel, Heinrich Graetz, Simon Dubnow, Gershom Scholem, Yitzhak Baer, Jacob Shatzky and of the master himself. But these larger implications of Zunz's ideal the far-reaching implications of Jewish historiography for Jewish identity are best approached through the polymathic thicket of his program

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Historiography · Judaism · Theology · German legal, social, and political studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Philosophy · Religion, Theology, History, Judaism, Christianity

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