In 1894, on the centenary of the birth of Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, published its 12th annual report together with a supplement devoted to the great scholar whom the institution saw as its founder. Zunz had called for the revival of scholarship devoted to Jewish literature in a famous 1818 essay, "On Rabbinic Literature." The wealth of scholarly publications that appeared in the following decades testify to the reception of his call. Although most of Zunz's scholarly oeuvre was decidedly not popular and sometimes difficult to digest, Zunz's persona and life were represented in popular terms after his death. This 1894 publication by Maybaum (1844-1919), himself a great scholar of Jewish antiquity and late antiquity, gathered some of Zunz's personal correspondence from the years between 1818 and 1839, when Zunz struggled to secure a permanent position for himself as a rabbi or communal teacher. The correspondence consists mainly of his applications for candidacy and requests for assistance as well as a few rejections and negative appraisals sent by or about him. In Maybaum's words, "these failed attempts ... led him to the realization that his nature was suited only for work in complete independence" (p. 2). That is to say, they mark Zunz's turn to Wissenschaft (scholarship) alone and for its own sake.

The attached image is from Maybaum p. 11 and consists of Maybaum's reproduction of a chart that Zunz prepared in which he documented all the sermons he had given at the "German Synagogue in Berlin." The table lists the date of the sermon and the verse(s) that it discussed.