e pioneers of modern Jewish historicism illustrate the extremes of Jewish assimilation in European society (Schorsch, 1977, pp. 109-128). Jost, as a student of Voltaire's rationalism, measured the past in terms of the present. The historiography of Jost judged, condemned, applauded, but did not display much sympathy for Jewish religion. By contrast, Zunz, the father of modern Jewish scholarship, applied the insights of Herder and revealed both cultural creativity and cultural growth among the Jews where Jost found primarily error and degeneration. Jost, in 1817 at the age of 24 years old, castigated the men responsible for the Day of Atonement Services held by a Jewish Reform congregation as being hypocritical and ignorant (Glatzer, 1977, pp. 129-138). By uncovering the nature of the Jewish past, however, Zunz, by contrast with Jost, believed that he could influence the shape of the Jewish present (pp. 129-138).
The scholarly writings of Leopold Zunz aided in the process of the transformation of nineteenth century Jewry because these writings provided emancipated Judaism with an unbroken continuity and a new sense of self (schorsch, 1992, pp. 33-43). Late in his life in 1872, Zunz published The Days of the Month of the Calendar Year: A Remembrance of Those Departed, a work that he had begun in 1840. In this work, Zunz recorded the days of the secular calendar references to approximately 800 individuals and to 70 medieval prosecutions in a synopsis of Jewish history. Zunz, thus, transformed the Gregorian calendar into an instrument of Jewish consciousness as he revealed the unfolding of Jewish history. The Days of the Month reached a large Jewish public, and was, thus, instrumental in shifting
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