A measurement is presented of the cross section for the electroweak production of a Z boson and a photon in association with two jets in proton-proton collisions at $ \sqrt{s} = $ 8 TeV. The Z bosons are identified through their decays to electron or muon pairs. The measurement is based on data collected with the CMS detector corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb$^{-1}$. The electroweak contribution has a significance of 3.0 standard deviations, and the measured fiducial cross section is 1.86$_{-0.75}^{+0.90}$ (stat)$_{-0.26}^{+0.34}$ (syst) $±$ 0.05 (lumi) fb, while the summed electroweak and quantum chromodynamic total cross section in the same region is observed to be 5.94$_{-1.35}^{+1.53}$ (stat)$_{-0.37}^{+0.43}$ (syst) $±$ 0.13 (lumi) fb. Both measurements are consistent with the leading-order standard model predictions. Limits on anomalous quartic gauge couplings are set based on the Z$γ$ mass distribution.