He was the founder and the most eminent member of the school of positive-historical Judaism, which advocates freedom of research while upholding the authority of traditional Jewish belief and practice.

However, after a long correspondence he declined, chiefly because the Prussian government, in accordance with its fixed policy, refused to officially recognize the office.

In this sense Frankel declared himself when the president of the Teplice congregation expressed the hope that the new rabbi would introduce reforms and do away with the "Missbräuche" (abuses).

In this respect, his denunciation of the action of the "Landesrabbiner" Joseph Hoffmann of Saxe-Meiningen, who permitted Jewish high-school boys to write on the Sabbath, is very significant ("Orient," iii.

A great impression was produced by his letter of 18 July 1845, published in a Frankfurt-am-Main journal, in which he announced his secession from the rabbinical conference then in session in that city.

But Frankel's conciliatory attitude was bound to create for him enemies on both liberal and orthodox sides, and such was the case with Abraham Geiger and Samson Raphael Hirsch, respectively.

When the fourth volume of Heinrich Graetz's history appeared, Hirsch impeached the orthodoxy of the new institution (1856), and his attacks became more systematic when Frankel in 1859 published his Hebrew introduction to the Mishnah.

The general Jewish public remained indifferent to the whole controversy, and Frankel's position was gradually strengthened by the number of graduates from the seminary who earned reputations as scholars and as representatives of conservative Judaism.

Frankel proved that no Jewish doctrine justified such an assumption, and owing to his work, a new regulation (13 February 1840) put the Jews on the same basis as Christians as regards testimony in court.

A political motive was involved in his study on legal procedure, "Der Gerichtliche Beweis nach Mosaisch-Talmudischem Rechte: Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis des Mosaisch-Talmudischen Criminal-und Civilrechts: Nebst einer Untersuchung über die Preussische Gesetzgebung Hinsichtlich des Zeugnisses der Juden" (Berlin, 1846).

It was due to Frankel's work, which was cited as an authority in the Prussian Diet, that the new law of 23 July 1847 referring to the Jews, abolished this discrimination.

It is one of the most valuable attempts at a systematized exposition of the history of early rabbinical literature and theology, and has largely inspired subsequent works of that kind, as those of Jacob Brüll and Isaac H. Weiss.

He afterward began a critical edition of the Jerusalem Talmud, with a commentary, but only three treatises had appeared, Berakot and Peah (Vienna, 1874) and Demai (Breslau, 1875), when his death intervened.

Though a son of the rationalistic era which produced two of its most intense partisans, Peter Beer and Herz Homberg in his native city, Frankel developed, partly through opposition to shallow rationalism and partly through the romantic environments of the ancient city of Prague, that love and sympathy for the past that made him the typical expounder of the historical school which was known as the "Breslau school."

In 2017, Nitzan Stein Kokin, who was German, became the first person to graduate from Zacharias Frankel College, which also made her the first Conservative rabbi to be ordained in Germany since before World War II.