ans, Moses Moser, and
Leopold Zunz conceived the idea of a society with the purpose of
bringing Jews into harmony with their age and environment, not by
forcing upon them views of alien growth, but by a rational training of
their inherited faculties. Whatever might serve to promote intelligence
and culture was to be nurtured: schools, seminaries, academies, were to
be erected, literary aspirations fostered, and all public-spirited
enterprises aided; on the other hand, the rising generation was to be
induced to devote itself to arts, trades, agriculture, and the applied
sciences; finally, the strong inclination to commerce on the part of
Jews was to be curbed, and the tone and conditions of Jewish society
radically changed--lofty goals for the attainment of which most limited
means were at the disposal of the projectors. The first fruits of the
society were the "Scientific Institute," and the "Journal for the
Science of Judaism," published in the spring of 1822, under the
editorship of Zunz. Only three numbers appeared, and they met with so
small a sale that the cost of printing was not realized. Means were
inadequate, the plans magnificent, the times above all not ripe for such
ideals. The "Scientific Institute" crumbled away, too, and in 1823, the
society was breathing its last. Zunz poured out the bitterness of his
disappointment in a letter written in the summer of 1824 to his Hamburg
friend Immanuel Wohlwill:

"I am so disheartened that I can nevermore believe in Jewish reform. A
stone must be thrown at this phantasm to make it vanish. Good Jews are
either Asiatics, or Christians (unconscious thereof), besides a small
minority consisting of myself and a few others, the possibility of
mentioning whom saves me from the imputation of conceit, though, truth
to say, the bitterness of irony cares precious little for the forms of
good society. Jews, and the Judaism which we wish to reconstruct, are a
prey to disunion, and the booty of vandals, fools, money-changers,
idiots, and _parnassim_.[86] Many a change of season will pass over this
generation, and leave it unchanged: internally ruptured; rushing into
the arms of Christianity, the religion of expediency; without stamina
and without principle; one section thrust aside by Europe, and
vegetating in filth with longing eyes directed towards the Messiah's ass
or other member of the long-eared fraternity; the other occupied with
fingering state securities and the pages of a