Leopold Zunz on the Hebrew Bible

Leopold Zunz brought his scholarly career to a close in the early 1870s with an unapologetic, wide-ranging excursion into the minefield of higher biblical criticism entitled “Bibelkritisches.” By steadfastly ignoring this final testament, the scholarship on Zunz promoted the erroneous perception that Zunz was not a biblical scholar. It is the contention of this essay that contextualizing “Bibelkritisches” properly yields two important revisions: First, that the study of the Hebrew Bible runs as a leitmotif throughout Zunz’s oeuvre and second, that he alone among his cohort of Jewish scholars dared to consider without constraints the full weight of Protestant biblical scholarship. In sum, Zunz proved to be as much of a pioneer in biblical studies at the end of his life as he had been in the turn to history at the beginning.