[3] The year following his birth his family moved to Hamburg, where, as a young boy, he began learning Hebrew grammar, the Pentateuch, and the Talmud.

[4] A turning point in Zunz's development came in 1807, when Samuel Meyer Ehrenberg [de], a reform-minded educator, took over the directorship of the Samson School.

Together with other young men, among them the poet Heinrich Heine, Zunz founded the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (The Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews) alongside Joel Abraham List, Isaac Marcus Jost, and Eduard Gans in Berlin in 1819.

Zunz "took no large share in Jewish reform", but never lost faith in the regenerating power of "science" as applied to the traditions and literary legacies of the ages.

Further, Isidore Singer and Emil Hirsch have stated that "the point of (Geiger's) protest against Reform was directed against Samuel Holdheim and the position maintained by this leader as an autonomous rabbi."

[5] The violent outcry raised against the Talmud by some of the principal spirits of the Reform party was repugnant to Zunz's historic sense.

Although Zunz kept to the Jewish ritual practises, he understood them as symbols (see among others his meditation on tefillin, reprinted in "Gesammelte Schriften," ii.

Zunz wrote in 1855: "If there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the nations; if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they are borne ennoble, the Jews can challenge the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies—what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?

Even at this early stage of his academic career, Zunz mapped out his concept of the Wissenschaft des Judentums which he intended to serve as a medium for presenting, preserving, and transmitting the corpus of Jewish literary works.

It was from this book that George Eliot translated the following opening of a chapter of Daniel Deronda: "If there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the nations...".