Bist du mit Grafen nicht verwandt,
Und Börsenrittern unbekannt—
Du wirst—sei immerhin ein Kant—
Von Zeitungsschreibern nie genannt.
On another occasion, when writing to him, Zunz complains of the indifference manifested towards him and his works by the Jews, and with bitter irony he goes on to say that they would no doubt have established an annual fast-day in his memory had he been the Gedaliah of the Bible, a governor of a Jewish province, and murdered by an assassin's hand[[153-1]].
Zunz considered himself, and more especially in his declining years, a disappointed man; but if the extent of a man's happiness is to be measured by the amount of useful work he has done for the benefit of others, then Zunz deserves more to be envied than to be pitied. He has certainly not lived and laboured, as he himself fancied, in vain. He will always occupy a foremost place in the annals of Jewish history and scholarship, and will ever be honoured as the Nestor of Jewish science and literature.
Footnotes:
[140-1] A sketch of the “Life and Works” of Zunz by the writer of this article has appeared in German (in 1890) in Dr. Rahmer's Literaturblatt.