Leopold Zunz

Leopold Zunz (1794-1886) Scholar.

Born in Detmold, Germany, he was orphaned at an early age and raised at an institution for poor Jewish children in Wolfenbuettel where the major subject taught was Talmud. He studied Hebrew grammar secretly with a fellow-student, I.M. Jost who was to become a noted historian. His outstanding abilities brought him to the universities of Berlin and Halle, receiving his doctorate at the latter. He first worked as a lay preacher for Reform congregations and in 1819 was a cofounder of the Society for Jewish Culture and Science and in 1823 became editor of the outstanding journal of Jewish studies, Zeitschrift fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums. When a Reform temple was closed down by the authorities on the grounds that preaching in the vernacular was against Jewish tradition, Zunz wrote his classic Sermons of the Jews, which showed the antiquity of vernacular preaching. After a period as a rabbi in Prague, he was appointed in 1840 director of the Berlin Jewish Teachers' Seminary. He wrote many works in a wide variety of fields of Jewish scholarship including a history of Jewish names, a biography of Rashi and a survey of Jewish religious poetry which identified 6,000 poems and 1,000 poets.