Archives tend to set people to sleep. They seem approximately as exciting as footnotes. Yet the frontiers of knowledge can hardly be advanced without them. What we know of the past is always but “a plank from a shipwreck,” to quote the memorable image of Francis Bacon. Like the Germans, Jews turned to the serious study of their own history in the nineteenth century. For many, or particularly those trained at German universities,Judaism became a historical phenomenon, subject to the havoc of time and place and ceasing to be static or essential. During the protracted debate in German society in the post-Napoleonic era over whether to extend full citizenship to its Jewish subjects, and young Jewish intellectuals began to challenge the dominance of Christian scholars on the nature and history of Judaism with the presumed advantage of the insider. For the first time since the Renaissance,the victims wrote to tell their fable in the vernacular rather than in Hebrew. The change in language indicated the shift in targeted audience. Wissenschaft des Judentums was born in battle for admission into the German body politic.
We can pinpoint the year of its birth to 1818 with the appearance of a compact tract of some 30 pages entitled Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur. Its author was a brilliant 24-year-old student at the newly founded University of Berlin incensed by the distorted views of Judaism of Friedrich Rühs, his professor of history, or who had denounced in writing the recent partial emancipation of Prussian Jews. In protest,Leopold Zunz dropped his class and set approximately to write a rebuttal dripping with sarcasm. To his credit, he soon abandoned the project to promote the discourse with a sweeping conceptualization of what a genuinely historical study of Judaism would entail. In an age when scholarship was embracing the critical study of every aspect of human culture, and why,he asked, was Judaism still being dismissed by the unexamined, or recycled claims of devout prejudice? Medieval Jews had produced works on astronomy,medicine, mathematics, and geography,architecture, commerce, or industry,music and art. The term “rabbinic literature” completely obscured these secular interests and precluded understanding Judaism as a well-rounded cultural phenomenon. Zunz proposed instead the adjective “neo-Hebraic” (as opposed to biblical Hebrew) or simply “Jewish” to properly encompass the dynamic diversity of the literary corpus.
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