Scholem on Zunz: An Egregious Misreading

Abstract:By the beginning of the twentieth century the study of midrash was the largest subfield of Jewish studies. The achievement reflects the impact of Leopold Zunz who, in 1832, published a pioneering, comprehensive history of midrashic literature that inspired several generations of scholars to pursue the subject on multiple fronts. The purpose of this article is to construct the dialectic of this unfolding scholarship and its indebtedness to Zunz with a view to refuting Gershom Scholem's negative judgment of him as a scholar out to bury Judaism. The reality of the nineteenth century simply does not comport with that unwarranted, ideologically motivated condemnation which, given Scholem's stature, has enjoyed a far longer shelf life than it deserves.