-wind scattering like chaff whatever is old and rotten. In your
struggle for a free country, you will have as allies the army of mighty
minds that have suffered for right and liberty in the past. Now you are
split up into tribes and clans, held together only by the bond of
language and a classic literature. You will grow into a great nation, if
but all brother-tribes will join us. Then Germany, strongly secure in
the heart of Europe, will be able to put an end to the quailing before
attacks from the East or the West, and cry a halt to war. The empire,
some one has said, means peace. Verily, with Prussia at its head, the
German empire means peace."

Such utterances are characteristic of Zunz, the politician. His best
energies and efforts, however, were devoted to his researches. Science,
he believed, would bring about amelioration of political conditions;
science, he hoped, would preserve Judaism from the storms and calamities
of his generation, for the fulfilment of its historical mission.
Possessed by this idea, he wrote _Die Gottesdienstlichen Vortraege der
Juden_ ("Jewish Homiletics," 1832), the basis of the future science of
Judaism, the first clearing in the primeval forest of rabbinical
writings, through which the pioneer led his followers with steady step
and hand, as though walking on well trodden ground. Heinrich Heine, who
appreciated Zunz at his full worth, justly reckoned this book "among the
noteworthy productions of the higher criticism," and another reviewer
with equal justice ranks it on a level with the great works of Boeckh,
Diez, Grimm, and others of that period, the golden age of philological
research in Germany.

Like almost all that Zunz wrote, _Die Gottesdienstlichen Vortraege der
Juden_ was the result of a polemic need. By nature Zunz was a
controversialist. Like a sentinel upon the battlements, he kept a sharp
lookout upon the land. Let the Jews be threatened with injustice by
ruler, statesman, or scholar, and straightway he attacked the enemy with
the weapons of satire and science. One can fancy that the cabinet order
prohibiting German sermons in the synagogue, and so stifling the
ambition of his youth, awakened the resolve to trace the development of
the sermon among Jews, and show that thousands of years ago the
well-spring of religious instruction bubbled up in Judah's halls of
prayer, and has never since failed, its wealth of waters overflowing
into the popular Midrash, the repository of