Ismar Schorsch builds on his august contributions with this biography of Leopold Zunz (1794–1886), a match made in scholarly heaven. Schorsch's qualifications to undertake this biography are unimpeachable. With such a copious amount of material presented, one could read only the quoted sources and emerge with a clear picture of Zunz's world. Sketches of Zunz by some formidable scholars have preceded this study: Solomon Schechter, Michael Meyer, and Nahum Glatzer. Schorsch himself has dealt with Zunz before on many occasions. Until now, however, nobody has amassed all the sources, published and archival, to construct an edifice like this. We have before us the definitive Zunz biography; another one is unlikely.

Schorsch takes some strong stands: Zunz's commitment to a scholarly approach to his material knew no bounds. His politics were consistently progressive. His willingness to clash in the small republic of letters with colleagues such as Abraham Geiger or Heinrich Graetz reflected a combative nature. His advocacy of circumcision, tefillin, kashrut, and Sabbath observance did not equate to a blanket opposition to religious reform. His fight against numerous Christian scholarly misrepresentations of Judaica was unrelenting. On every point of scholarship, and there are many, Schorsch displays mastery not only of Zunz's perspective, but also that of his collaborators and, more often, opponents. The cast of characters in this book is dauntingly large. With sincere respect for Schorsch's achievement, this is not a thesis-driven book. Scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums and German Jewry will benefit greatly from this volume; the general reader may get lost in the thickets.

Schorsch evokes Zunz's truly miserable childhood. Given up for adoption after the premature death of his father, only Samuel Ehrenberg's intervention on behalf of the thirteen-year-old Zunz allowed him to attain a decent public-school education and step into the German university. Zunz's “fraternity” was the famed Society for the Culture and Critical Study of the Jews, founded in 1819, which exerted a lifelong influence. Years later, he and his wife Adelheid would visit the dying Heinrich Heine, and while he and Eduard Gans disagreed on many matters, Zunz did not consider Gans's apostasy as a betrayal; Zunz himself considered and rejected this dicey escape route. By the time Zunz left the university, he was a master of contemporary scholarship. Like most of the founders of Wissenschaft des Judentums, Zunz believed a university professorial chair in Judaism was a desideratum—and that he should occupy it. His early efforts—the extraordinary Etwas über rabbinische Literatur (1818) and the less programmatic, but methodologically exciting “Rashi” essay (1822)—ought to have insured this result, but Germany remained, for the rest of Zunz's lifetime, resistant to the idea of university-level Jewish scholarship. Why did Zunz begin with rabbinic rather than biblical material? The answer seems deceptively simple: the Protestant academy had already taken up the Bible as a subject of inquiry.

Chapter 4 deals with Zunz's break with radical religious reform. The following citation gives a sense of Zunz's openness to Fränkel-style innovations:

Chapter 5 assesses On History and Literature (1845), which Schorsch deems a scholarly masterpiece. Zunz was not immune to the Sephardic mystique, but he took Ashkenazic culture seriously, categorized Ashkenazic literature, and spoke up for its creativity. While the use of Hebrew language alone did not immediately qualify for Zunz as being within the purview of Jewish literature, his view was more expansive than Geiger's. Zunz thought gravestones, calendars, and other material objects were well worth studying. Issues of periodization and taxonomy, as for Geiger and Graetz, seemed unquestionably important for Zunz as he navigated his way through the eras and genres of medieval Jewish literature. Despite his appreciation of this literature of suffering, and despite his rather uncharitable treatment of Christian scholars such as Franz Delitzsch, who shared his admiration for Jewish piety, Zunz contributed to what would be dubbed the lachrymose conception of Jewish history. George Eliot would both translate and elevate Zunz's verdict in a pivotal chapter in her late novel Daniel Deronda, which became an immediate classic in the annals of philosemitism and Christian proto-Zionism, but Zunz was less overwhelmed than his young admirer, the noted scholar David Kaufmann.

After a chapter on Zunz's political involvements, Schorsch turns to Zunz's later life. It was not an easy one. Zunz's income dried up as the Berlin Gemeinde found other “funding priorities,” and unlike S. D. Luzzato, with whom he was in close correspondence, Zunz had no rabbinic seminary or independent source of wealth. His friend and patron passed away, and Adelheid suffered for months before dying. Professionally, Zunz faced resistance to his later biblical scholarship from Christian academics such as Heinrich Ewald and Paul de Lagarde. Regarding Ewald's knowledge of Jewish literature, Zunz opined, “German scholars even when they are professors of Hebrew know less about Jewish literature than that of Mongolia.” Geiger and Graetz achieved greater popularity with their works, but the founding generation was made of strong timber and Zunz persevered, penning his third in a trio of critical works on Jewish liturgy (Literaturgeschichte). When Zunz died at age eighty, his legacy was indisputable. The quip attributed to Buber that only Scholem created a whole field needs rethinking in light of Schorsch's stellar portrait of Zunz.