a peculiar
couple stride briskly towards the _Thiergarten_ in the early afternoon.
The loungers at Spargnapani's _cafe_ regularly interrupted their endless
newspaper reading to crane their necks and say to one another, "There go
Dr. Zunz and his wife."

In his obituary notice of the poet Mosenthal, Franz Dingelstedt
roguishly says: "He was of poor, albeit Jewish parentage." The same
applies to Zunz, only the saying would be truer, if not so witty, in
this form: "He was of Jewish, hence of poor, parentage." Among German
Jews throughout the middle ages and up to the first half of this
century, poverty was the rule, a comfortable competency a rare
exception, wealth an unheard of condition. But Jewish poverty was
relieved of sordidness by a precious gift of the old rabbis, who said:
"Have a tender care of the children of the poor; from them goeth forth
the Law"; an admonition and a prediction destined to be illustrated in
the case of Zunz. Very early he lost his mother, and the year 1805 finds
him bereft of both parents, under the shelter and in the loving care of
an institution founded by a pious Jew in Wolfenbuettel. Here he was
taught the best within the reach of German Jews of the day, the _alpha_
and _omega_ of whose knowledge and teaching were comprised in the
Talmud. The Wolfenbuettel school may be called progressive, inasmuch as a
teacher, watchmaker by trade and novel-writer by vocation, was engaged
to give instruction four times a week in the three R's. We may be sure
that those four lessons were not given with unvarying regularity.

In his scholastic home, Leopold Zunz met Isaac Marcus Jost, a waif like
himself, later the first Jewish historian, to whom we owe interesting
details of Zunz's early life. In his memoirs[85] he tells the following:
"Zunz had been entered as a pupil before I arrived. Even in those early
days there were evidences of the acumen of the future critic. He was
dominated by the spirit of contradiction. On the sly we studied grammar,
his cleverness helping me over many a stumbling-block. He was very
witty, and wrote a lengthy Hebrew satire on our tyrants, from which we
derived not a little amusement as each part was finished. Unfortunately,
the misdemeanor was detected, and the _corpus delicti_ consigned to the
flames, but the sobriquet _chotsuf_ (impudent fellow) clung to the
writer."

It is only just to admit that in this _Beth ha-Midrash_ Zunz laid the
foundation of the profound, compreh