Tag: orientalism

The bindings of Isaac: Goldziher’s library in Jerusalem

On By Martin Kramer

This past Sukkot holiday marked an important anniversary for the National Library of Israel and the study of Islam in Israel. A century ago, the Hebrew University opened a prized acquisition to the Jerusalem public: the 6,000-volume private library of Ignaz (Isaac Jehuda) Goldziher, the Jewish-Hungarian scholar of Islam. The books had been transported from Budapest, after lengthy negotiations and at some cost. Chaim Weizmann welcomed their arrival, addressing an enthusiastic crowd of Jews, Christians, and Muslims outside the library. Jerusalem’s British governor and Arab mayor also attended.

The accession of Goldziher’s library marked a triumph for the Hebrew University. Several generations of students and scholars would rely on the collection to maintain their competitiveness with the highest research standards. This centennial offers an opportunity to remember Goldziher and reflect on the journey and impact of his books.

Making of a master

“The Great Goldziher,” as admirers called him even during his lifetime, laid many of the modern foundations for scholarly Islamic studies. Born in the Hungarian town of Székesfehérvár to the son of a leather merchant, he received rigorous schooling in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud from an early age. He completed his philological studies in Leipzig in 1870, and then traveled further through Europe and the East. He even studied at Cairo’s famed Islamic university, Al-Azhar.

Ignaz Goldziher in 1892. Wikimedia Commons.

Goldziher’s Jewish faith precluded a professorship at the University of Budapest, and from 1876 he earned a living as secretary to one of the Jewish communities in the city. Only in 1905, at the age of 55, was he finally appointed to a salaried chair at the university. This meant that Goldziher had to pursue his studies on Islam after hours, following long days spent on menial tasks that he detested. His interests ranged widely, from the development of Muslim sects to Arabic poetry. But his most renowned contribution was his study of Islam’s oral tradition, the hadith, which he viewed not as a record of the Prophet Muhammad’s deeds and sayings, but as a window into the first centuries of Islam.

In the 1890s, as Goldziher’s reputation grew, foreign universities such as Heidelberg and Cambridge attempted to recruit him. But he refused to leave Hungary for personal and patriotic reasons. Nor did he consider relocating to Palestine. Goldziher, while an observant Jew, was not a Zionist. In 1920, his old schoolmate, the Zionist leader Max Nordau, encouraged him to join the planned university in Jerusalem—the future Hebrew University. Hungary had just fallen under the rule of Admiral Horthy, whose regime enacted sweeping antisemitic policies, including strict quotas on Jews in higher education. Goldziher declined Nordau’s proposal: “Parting with the [Hungarian] fatherland, especially at this time, would demand a heavy sacrifice from a patriotic point of view. This is also why I resisted moving to German or English universities in my younger years.”

Alongside his research and writing, Goldziher assembled an astonishing private library. Budapest lacked great collections of books and manuscripts from the Muslim East, so Goldziher had to acquire them himself. Foreign visitors to his home were awestruck by the scope of his collection. A young Hungarian rabbinical student, Leopold Grünwald (Greenwald), recalled visiting Goldziher’s home in 1910 and the emotional effect of seeing his library.

The room was his study, a large room filled with several thousand books and hundreds of manuscripts that did not appear to be arranged in any systematic way. Some forty books, for example, large and small, rested on a stool. It was as though a whirlwind had transported me to a Jewish ghetto of several hundred years ago, where the Jew was isolated from the entire world and enjoyed no pleasures except for the four ells of halakhah. Only among his books was he at ease; there alone he found peace. Even the air there was clear of physical desires and pleasures. All was spiritual. I thought to myself, would that I could remain in this ethereal state for as long as I live! Would that I could reject all the vain pleasures and find joy and comfort among books alone!

Ignaz Goldziher’s Budapest study, Goldziher family photo album, F72.94, Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives.

Floor to ceiling

Goldziher died in November 1921. Lore has it that he wished for his library to go to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, but there is no record that he made any specific provisions for it. His widow and son, pressed for cash, sought buyers, with serious offers coming from as far away as Japan.

However, the most persistent offers came from Jerusalem, where the newly established Hebrew University was eager to expand its library collections to an international standard. The detailed history of the Zionist Executive’s acquisition of Goldziher’s library has been expertly recounted by Samuel Thrope, curator of the Islam and Middle East Collection at the National Library (here and here). It’s a tale of negotiation, bureaucracy, and competing claims for credit, to which I have nothing to add.

Instead, I’ll share the vivid account of Israel Cohen, the British Zionist official and journalist who traveled to Budapest to finalize the deal and arrange for the library’s shipment to Palestine. In August 1923, he visited the library in situ, at Goldziher’s home at 4 Holló Street. Cohen described the street as “a long, dreary, narrow thoroughfare, flanked on either side by tall somber buildings, in which the two most homely features are a modest little bethel and a frowsy kosher restaurant.” Remote from “the majesty of the Danube,” Holló Street was “a haunt of unrelieved desolation, where nobody could be expected to dwell by choice; but as the Jewish Community owns Number 4, this has always formed the residence of some of its officials,” of whom Goldziher had been one.

Cohen wondered “what was it that fettered [Goldziher] to this somber dwelling,” when he had received all manner of “luring invitations” and “tempting material prizes” from around the world.

When I first went to visit his home in August 1923, and, later ascending a dim, circular flight of stone steps, found myself on the railed gallery that led to the door, and from which I looked down upon the dirty hand-carts and the rubbish-heaps in the courtyard below and at the lofty, grimy wall opposite, which seemed to shut out the light from heaven, I could not help wondering. For forty-two years, I reflected, this world-renowned savant, from early manhood until his death at the age of seventy-two, was content to tread up and down that dim, stone staircase, pace along the narrow, stone gallery that ran round three sides of the building—the fourth being bounded by the gloomy wall—and live in the humble flat that was entered by a door with chequered and bar-protected window-panes. No more drab and depressing surroundings could be conceived—and to be doomed to such neighborhood for forty-two years! ‘Such is the Torah, and such its reward!’

But when I was admitted by the gentle, gray-haired widow, and taken to the room where he had worked, the riddle was solved. For in this room was the wonderful library covering the walls from floor to ceiling and overflowing on to extra shelves, which he had thoughtfully and laboriously gathered together from all the regions of the Near East, and wherein he quarried night and day in quest of new truths. It was his passionate attachment to this library, in and for which alone he lived, that made all the glittering offers from other cities, with their promise of superior ease and comfort, appear but phantasms, and its removal seemed to him unthinkable. Here were arranged the well-thumbed tomes in all the Semitic tongues, which he had either bought or which had been presented to him by their authors or by the erudite societies that published them. The works given by their own writers all contained an inscription of homage and often of gratitude, and not a single Orientalist but considered it a duty and honor to send him a first copy. Many of the books were rare, and those that came from Moslem scholars were probably the only copies on the Continent. And Goldziher enriched most of them with his own notes and glosses, written on the fly-leaves and the margin, or on slips of paper, which form a mine of suggestions for those who will delve into them.

Since Cohen never met Goldziher, he couldn’t possibly have known the scholar’s reasons for staying in Budapest. Still, Goldziher could not have achieved much without his massive library of rare, hand-picked books, and the daunting task of moving them likely reinforced his reluctance to leave. For what it’s worth, Abraham Shapira Yahuda, Goldziher’s mentee and a Zionist, claimed that he had urged Goldziher “to come to the Land of Israel and dedicate the last years of his life to raising a new generation of scholars.” Yahuda regretted that Goldziher “never went to the Land of Israel, partly because he didn’t believe he could bring his books with him.”

For Goldziher’s widow, Laura, parting with her husband’s books was no small thing. Cohen gave this poignant account:

The twenty-two cases were ranged in the library and the adjoining rooms in two rows, between which the frail widow slowly passed, touching each case in turn, as though to retain contact until the last possible moment with the possessions of her husband. They must have seemed to her like coffins, as they were borne out of the dwelling, nor was the sorrow that followed them any less profound than that which accompanies many a real bier. At last they had all been taken away, and she gave a wistful look at the library—bare and desolate. ‘Ichabod—the glory is departed,’ she said, ‘and there is nothing more for me to live for.’

‘The glory is gone from here,’ I replied, ‘to the Holy Land, where it will become more glorious still, and where it will confer an untold blessing by bringing Jews and Arabs together in the peaceful pursuit of scholarship, and thus pave the way to a friendly understanding between the two peoples.’

The following day the Goldziher library was transported to Trieste, whence it was shipped to Palestine.

Books at war

In reports in the Hebrew press about Goldziher’s library, Cohen’s hopeful idea that it might bring Jews and Arabs together appeared frequently. Yahuda was the main promoter of this notion:

Imagine a library where a delightful and wonderful treasure from the finest Arabic literature and key Islamic texts is found. This place could become a center for Arab and Jewish scholars alike, where they would come together as brothers in wisdom and friends in the pursuit of knowledge. The spirit of enlightenment would dwell upon them and inspire our neighbors, who are close to us in both kinship and thought, with the same spirit of tolerance, broad-mindedness, and generosity of soul that once distinguished the Arabs in ancient times.

The poet and writer Kadish Silman attended the opening in Jerusalem, and struck exactly this note:

Besides Jewish scholars and teachers, dozens of English and Arab locals with an interest in scholarship came to the opening. All the editors of Jerusalem’s Arab newspapers were there, as well as the Mufti, the Qadi, and others…. Dr. [Nissim] Malul translated [Weizmann’s speech] into Arabic. The speech made a strong impression. A feeling of unity—and possibly even friendship—was achieved. Afterward, in the library, all the guests from various backgrounds mingled, and Dr. Weizmann gave explanations to everyone. He parted from the Arabs and the English with handshakes and warm wishes. Since we started our local political efforts, never has there been a moment of unity as strong as this one.

Close to the rented Arab house that served as a temporary home for Goldziher’s library, across a rocky expanse, stood a mosque’s minaret. Goldziher’s library had traveled far from Holló Street to fulfill its mission of peace.

The rented “Goldziher House” in Jerusalem, album of photographs of the National and University Library, ca. 1927-1944, catalog no. ARC. 4* 793 06 01, National Library Archives.

Alas, no number of books could have achieved that. In the years that followed, Jews and Arabs collided. Efforts to appoint an Arab to the faculty never bore fruit. In 1936, during the “Arab Revolt,” Lewis (Levi) Billig, the first lecturer in Arabic literature at the Hebrew University, was shot dead at his desk by an Arab assailant. “The manuscript he was preparing,” reported the Palestine Post, “a Concordance of Ancient Arabic Literature, and a large Arabic tome on which he was working, were spattered with blood.” The murder stunned the faculty.

In 1945, the librarian who had organized Goldziher’s collection faced hostility from Arab book dealers in the Old City: “Something like this has not happened to me even in the worst of times.” Then came the 1948 war, when the library salvaged (critics have claimed, looted) as many as 9,000 Arabic volumes from homes abandoned by Palestinian Arabs who fled the fighting. “The number of books brought to the library in this way,” wrote the university’s keeper of Oriental books, “exceeds the number of Arabic books we have gathered over the entire history of the institution.”

Ideas shape history, but the physical books and libraries that contain them have always been subject to its tides.

Spirit and method

The Goldziher collection didn’t change the course of Jewish-Arab relations. But it reached Jerusalem at the right moment, as Israel prepared to establish itself in the face of Arab opposition. By the time Israel gained independence, the Israeli school of Islamic studies was well-established, largely led by scholars who, like Goldziher’s books, had migrated from Central Europe to Jerusalem.

As one such scholar, Martin Plessner, remarked, “Goldziher’s library is one of the most valuable assets of the Hebrew University. His spirit lives among us from the earliest steps of our research into Islam.” But it wasn’t just his spirit that influenced them—it was also his method. “Goldziher used to write many notes in his books,” wrote S.D. Goitein, “especially on the blank pages at the beginning and end of the books. Anyone wishing to see his handwriting and get a glimpse of the working methods of a great scholar need only request an Oriental book printed before 1914 from the library, and they will almost certainly find what they are looking for.” Goldziher’s example, reinforced by the physical presence of his books, set exacting standards for interpreting Islam and Arabic within Israel’s universities, but also far beyond them.

Goldziher’s books are now dispersed throughout the broader library collection. Over the last century, their influence likewise has spread in ways that can no longer be traced—trails left from the big bang that occurred in a drab Budapest walk-up.

Excerpt from Al-Ghurar wa al-Durar fi al-Muhadarat by Sayyid Murtada (413 AH / 1023 CE). Manuscript copied by Muhammad Ahmad Al-Khuja (Cairo, 1310 AH / 1892 CE), with corrections by Ignaz Goldziher. National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Ms. Ar. 2.

Enough Said

On By Martin Kramer

Review by Martin Kramer of Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2006). The review appeared in Commentary, March 2007. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

THE British historian Robert Irwin is the sort of scholar who, in times past, would have been proud to call himself an Orientalist.

The traditional Orientalist was someone who mastered difficult languages like Arabic and Persian and then spent years bent over manuscripts in heroic efforts of decipherment and interpretation. In Dangerous Knowledge, Irwin relates that the 19th-century English Arabist Edward William Lane, compiler of the great Arabic-English Lexicon, “used to complain that he had become so used to the cursive calligraphy of his Arabic manuscripts that he found Western print a great strain on his eyes.” Orientalism in its heyday was a branch of knowledge as demanding and rigorous as its near cousin, Egyptology. The first International Congress of Orientalists met in 1873; its name was not changed until a full century later.

But there are no self-declared Orientalists today. The reason is that the late Edward Said turned the word into a pejorative. In his 1978 book Orientalism, the Palestinian-born Said, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, claimed that an endemic Western prejudice against the East had congealed into a modern ideology of racist supremacy—a kind of anti-Semitism directed against Arabs and Muslims. Throughout Europe’s history, announced Said, “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”

In a semantic sleight of hand, Said appropriated the term “Orientalism” as a label for the ideological prejudice he described, thereby neatly implicating the scholars who called themselves Orientalists. At best, charged Said, the work of these scholars was biased so as to confirm the inferiority of Islam. At worst, Orientalists had directly served European empires, showing proconsuls how best to conquer and control Muslims. To substantiate his indictment, Said cherry-picked evidence, ignored whatever contradicted his thesis, and filled the gaps with conspiracy theories.

Said’s Orientalism, Irwin writes, “seems to me to be a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misrepresentations.” Dangerous Knowledge is its refutation. An Arabist by training, Irwin artfully weaves together brief profiles of great Orientalist scholars, generously spiced with telling anecdotes. From his narrative, Said’s straw men emerge as complex individuals touched by genius, ambition—and no little sympathy for the subjects of their study.

SOME of the Orientalist pioneers were quintessential insiders. Thus, Silvestre de Sacy founded the great 19th-century school of Arabic studies in Paris; Bonaparte made him a baron, and he became a peer of France under the monarchy. Carl Heinrich Becker, who brought sociology into Islamic studies, served as a cabinet minister in the Weimar government. But it was marginal men who made the most astonishing advances. Ignaz Goldziher, a Hungarian Jew, revolutionized Islamic studies a century ago by applying the methods of higher criticism to the Muslim oral tradition. Slaving away as the secretary of the reformist Neolog Jewish community in Budapest, Goldziher made his breakthroughs at the end of long workdays.

Some great scholars were quite mad. In the 16th century, Guillaume Postel, a prodigy who occupied the first chair of Arabic at the Collège de France, produced Europe’s first grammar of classical Arabic. Irwin describes him as “a complete lunatic”—an enthusiast of all things esoteric and Eastern who believed himself to be possessed by a female divinity. Four centuries later, Louis Massignon, another French great at the Collège, claimed to have experienced a visitation by God and plunged into the cult of a Sufi mystic. When lucid, Massignon commanded a vast knowledge of Islam and Arabic, but he held an unshakable belief in unseen forces, including Jewish plots of world domination.

Above all, many Orientalists became fervent advocates for Arab and Islamic political causes, long before notions like third-worldism and post-colonialism entered the political lexicon. Goldziher backed the Urabi revolt against foreign control of Egypt. The Cambridge Iranologist Edward Granville Browne became a one-man lobby for Persian liberty during Iran’s constitutional revolution in the early 20th century. Prince Leone Caetani, an Italian Islamicist, opposed his country’s occupation of Libya, for which he was denounced as a “Turk.” And Massignon may have been the first Frenchman to take up the Palestinian Arab cause.

Two truths emerge from a stroll through Irwin’s gallery. First, Orientalist scholars, far from mystifying Islam, freed Europe from medieval myths about it through their translations and studies of original Islamic texts. Second, most Orientalists, far from being agents of empire, were bookish dons and quirky eccentrics. When they did venture opinions on mundane matters, it was usually to criticize Western imperialism and defend something Islamic or Arab. In fact, it would be easy to write a contrary indictment of the Orientalists, showing them to be wooly-minded Islamophiles who suffered from what the late historian Elie Kedourie once called “the romantic belief that exquisite mosques and beautiful carpets are proof of political virtue.”

IN other words, Edward Said got it exactly wrong. Other scholars said as much in the years after his book came out; Irwin’s critique echoes those made by Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr, Bernard Lewis, and Maxime Rodinson. These doyens of Islamic and Arab studies came from radically different points on the political compass, but they all found the same flaws in Said’s presentation. Even Albert Hourani, the Middle East historian closest to Said personally, thought that Orientalism had gone “too far” and regretted that its most lasting effect was to turn “a perfectly respected discipline” into “a dirty word.”

Yet the criticisms did not stick; what stuck was the dirt thrown by Said. Not only did Orientalism sweep the general humanities, where ignorance of the history of Orientalism was (and is) widespread; not only did it help to create the faux-academic discipline now known as post-colonialism; but the book’s thesis also conquered the field of Middle Eastern studies itself, where scholars should have known better. No other discipline has ever surrendered so totally to an external critic.

As it happens, I witnessed a minute that perfectly compressed the results of this process. In 1998, to mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of Orientalism, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) invited Said to address a plenary panel at its annual conference. As Said ascended the dais, his admirers leaped to their feet in an enthusiastic ovation. Then, somewhat hesitantly at first, the rest of the audience stood and began to applaud. Fixed in my seat, I surveyed the ballroom, watching scholars whom I had heard privately damn Orientalism for its libel against their field now rising sheepishly and casting sideways glances to see who might behold their gesture of submission.

This may help us understand something in Irwin’s account that might otherwise leave a reader bewildered. Why should Said have singled out for attack a group of scholars who had done so much to increase understanding of Islam, and who had tirelessly explained Muslim views to a self-absorbed West? The answer: for the same reason that radicals usually attack the moderates on their own side. They know they can browbeat them into doing much more.

By exposing and exaggerating a few of the field’s insignificant lapses, Orientalism stunned Middle East academics into a paroxysm of shame. Exploiting those pangs of guilt, Said’s radical followers demanded concession upon concession from the Orientalist establishment: academic appointments and promotions, directorships of Middle East centers and departments, and control of publishing decisions, grants, and honors. Within a startling brief period of time, a small island of liberal sympathy for the Arab and Muslim “other” was transformed into a subsidized, thousand-man lobby for Arab, Islamic, and Palestinian causes.

THE revolution did not stop until Said was universally acclaimed as the savior of Middle Eastern studies and, in that ballroom where I sat in 1998, virtually the entire membership of MESA had been corralled into canonizing him. It did not stop until he was elected an honorary fellow of the association—that is, one of ten select scholars “who have made major contributions to Middle East studies.” (No similar majority could be mustered to accord the same honor to Bernard Lewis.) It would not stop until it achieved the abject abasement of the true heirs of the Orientalist tradition.

This is the missing final chapter of Dangerous Knowledge. The established scholars in Middle Eastern studies never did deliver the crushing blow to Orientalism that it deserved. With the exception of Bernard Lewis, no one went on the warpath against the book (although, according to Irwin, the anthropologist Ernest Gellner was working on a “book-long attack” on Orientalism when he died in 1995). Going up against Said involved too much professional risk. He himself was famous for avenging every perceived slight, and his fiercely loyal followers denounced even the mildest criticism of their hero as evidence of “latent Orientalism”—or, worse yet, Zionism.

Still, the power of Said and his legions did begin to wane somewhat after the attacks of 9/11. Said had systematically soft-pedaled the threat of radical Islam. In a pre-9/11 revised edition of Said’s Covering Islam, a book devoted to exposing the allegedly biased reporting of the Western press, he mocked “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies.” After the planes struck the towers, Said declined to answer his phone. Irwin writes that when, unrepentant, he finally responded, “he put the terrorists’ case for them, just as he had put the case for Saddam Hussein.” September 11 broke Said’s spell. “Does this mean I’m throwing my copy of Orientalism out the window?” quipped Richard Bulliet, a professor of Islamic history at Columbia, in the week following the attacks. “Maybe it does.”

Since Said’s death in 2003, more doubters have found the courage to speak out. Some of Columbia’s own students did so in 2005, when they took on a number of Said’s most extreme acolytes, whom he had helped to embed as instructors in the university’s department of Middle East studies. Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge is a challenge to that minority of scholars in the field who still preserve a spark of integrity and some vestige of pride in the tradition of learning that Said defamed. They won’t ever call themselves Orientalists again. But it is high time they denounced the Saidian cult for the fraud that it is, and began to unseat it. Irwin has told the truth; it is their responsibility to act on it.

Those other Orientalists

On By Martin Kramer

A few months back, art historian Kristian Davies sent me a copy of his new book The Orientalists: Western Artists in Arabia, the Sahara, Persia and India. This is more than a lavishly illustrated decoration for a coffee table. It’s a provocative dissent from the Saidian take on nineteenth-century Orientalist art. I’ll let Davies say it himself:

In the 1980s, the great age of deconstructionism, Orientalist paintings were thoroughly deconstructed and dismantled from every angle: the questionable authenticity of what the paintings depicted, the subliminal intentions of the artist, the genre’s ties to imperialism, the supposedly unavoidable corruption of an artist’s perception of the East before even traveling abroad, the way in which artists portrayed women, violence, commerce, the streets, poverty, and architecture, and what the Orient even was. Everything was implicated, every brushstroke, until as is often the final outcome of deconstructionism, one was left with the feeling that one should believe nothing and suspect everything.

“Fortunately,” Davies adds, “in the twenty-plus years since Said’s Orientalism was published, many of his theories have been sufficiently and successfully refuted.” And he goes on to quote Bernard Lewis, John MacKenzie, and myself–very gratifying.

Davies is plainly moved by these paintings. He describes the moment he succumbed to their allure: he turned a corner in the Musée d’Orsay, “and there I saw it: a painting of a camel procession coming directly at me.” It was Léon Belly’s Pilgrims Going to Mecca (1861) and Davies “felt a very potent sensation brewing.” (A detail from that painting is on the book jacket, and an entire chapter is devoted to analyzing it.) The Orientalists is potent, too, written in an accessible style for non-specialists, and the quality of the reproductions is outstanding. (For more, see this review.)

Of course, what keeps the interest in nineteenth-century Orientalist art in an upward trajectory is the fact that, pace Said, today’s “Orientals” are enamored of it. It’s a market that was pioneered by a London dealer in the 1980s, and today some of the most impressive collections are held by private enthusiasts in the Gulf countries. When Christie’s opened shop in Dubai earlier this year, it sent over some outstanding examples of the genre for a showing, in advance of a June auction in London. At that sale, John Frederick Lewis’s A Mid-day Meal, Cairo (1875), which had been shown in Dubai, fetched $4.5 million. It’s mind-boggling.

If you’re in New York City, make a point of seeing the very respectable collection of Orientalist art at the Dahesh Museum, which is now showing off its best pieces in a tenth-anniversary exhibition. (The one I personally most appreciate is Gustav Bauernfeind’s vast and dramatic 1888 depiction of Ottoman forced conscription in the port of Jaffa. Davies devotes a chapter to Bauernfeind as well, and includes two spendid details from this painting.) The best time to visit the Dahesh? The evening of Thursday, September 1: Kristian Davies will be lecturing in the auditorium.