German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship

by Suzanne L. Marchand

• ISBN13: 9780521169073
• ISBN10: 0521169070
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-08-09
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Nineteenth-century studies of the Orient changed European ideas and cultural institutions in more ways than we usually recognize. "Orientalism" certainly contributed to European empire-building, but it also helped to destroy a narrow Christian-classical canon. This carefully researched book provides the first synthetic and contextualized study of German Orientalistik, a subject of special interest because German scholars were the pace-setters in oriental studies between about 1830 and 1930, despite entering the colonial race late and exiting it early. The book suggests that we must take seriously German orientalism's origins in Renaissance philology and early modern biblical exegesis and appreciate its modern development in the context of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debates about religion and the Bible, classical schooling, and Germanic origins. In ranging across the subdisciplines of Orientalistik, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire introduces readers to a host of iconoclastic characters and forgotten debates, seeking to demonstrate both the richness of this intriguing field and its indebtedness to the cultural world in which it evolved.

Author Biography

Suzanne L. Marchand completed her BA in history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1984 and her PhD at the University of Chicago in 1992. She then served as assistant and associate professor at Princeton University (1992-9), before moving to Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, where she is now professor of European intellectual history. She is the author of Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (1996), as well as numerous articles on the history of art, archaeology, anthropology, classical studies, and the humanities generally.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction	p. xvii
Orientalism and the Longue Durée	p. 1
Individuals, Institutions, Iconoclasms	p. 6
The Discrete Charm of Chronology	p. 11
Orientalism and the Enlightenment	p. 15
Oriental Civilizations in the Enlightenment	p. 21
The Peculiarities of German Orientalism	p. 28
Herder and Michaelis: The Fate of the Enlightened Old Testament	p. 38
Orientalists in a Philhellenic Age	p. 53
Friedrich Schlegel: Renaissance and Revelation	p. 58
Orientalism and Classicism in the Wake of the Creuzer Streit	p. 66
To Be a German Orientalist, 1820-1870	p. 72
The Long Road to Wissenschaftlichkeit	p. 74
Classics-Envy and Its Intellectual Consequences	p. 78
The Glass Half Empty: Orientalism as a Career	p. 84
On Patrons and the Public	p. 95
The Lonely Orientalists	p. 102
Biedermeier Bible Criticism or How to Study Jews - and Greeks	p. 105
The (Even Longer) Road to "Scientific" Judaism	p. 113
The Lonely Arabists	p. 118
The Indo-Europeanists	p. 123
Positivism and the Origins of the Aryan-Semitic Divide	p. 124
Fetishizing the Vedas	p. 131
Buddha and the Young Hegelian	p. 134
Poetic Wisdom's Last Proponent: Friedrich Rückert	p. 138
Carl Ritter: Oriental Geography in Western Libraries	p. 141
Germans Abroad: Neither Conquerors Nor Friends	p. 143
Ferdinand Von Richthofen: An East Asian Encounter	p. 153
The Second Oriental Renaissance	p. 157
Orientalism as a Career, 1871-1900	p. 162
Three Against the Churches: Paul de Lagarde, Theodor Nöldeke, and Julius Wellhausen	p. 167
Paul de Lagarde: The Orientalism of the Future and the Positivism of the Present	p. 168
Theodor Nöldeke: Liberal Semitist	p. 174
Julius Wellhausen: Hebraism and Realism	p. 178
An Islamic Renaissance?	p. 186
New Power, New Sources: The Flourishing of Indology in the Era of the Raj	p. 190
Beyond the Bible? Assyriology and Egyptology in the High Liberal Age	p. 194
Assyriology's Escape from Infancy	p. 196
Egyptology for Realists: Adolf Erman	p. 203
Eduard Meyer: Universal Historian in a Specialized Age	p. 206
The Furor Orientalis	p. 212
To Be a (Furious) Orientalist	p. 216
Return to Diffusionism, or the Problem of Universalism in a Philological Culture	p. 227
Panbabylonism: An Assyiological Revolt and Its Cultural Consequences	p. 236
Babel und die Bibel Revisited	p. 244
After the "Affair"	p. 249
Toward an Oriental Christianity	p. 252
Liberal Theology in Crisis	p. 256
The Religious-Historical School	p. 259
The Oriental Origins of New Testament Christianity	p. 267
Buddha versus Jesus; or, Fin de Siècle Christians and the Problem of Parallels	p. 270
Persia and Hellenistic Judaism	p. 279
Orientalizing Saint Paul	p. 284
The Passions and the Races	p. 292
On Aryans and Semites	p. 295
Paul Deussen, Schopenhauerian Christian	p. 300
Popularizing the Aryan Indian: Leopold von Schroeder and Houston Stewart Chamberlian	p. 311
Semitistik in the Post-liberal Period	p. 321
Ignaz Goldziher: Man between Two Laws	p. 323
Orientalism in the Age of Imperialism	p. 333
The Culture of German Imperialism	p. 335
German Orientalists and the Actuality of Empire	p. 339
Colonialism and Its Orientalist Institutions	p. 348
Martin Hartmann, Enlightened Arabist	p. 356
Carl Becker: Colonialism and Kulturgeschichte	p. 361
East Asia's Place in the Sun	p. 367
Otto Franke: Orientalism in the Age of "Indirect" Colonialism	p. 377
Erwin Baelz: The Orientalism the Kaiserreich Could Not Use	p. 383
Interpreting Oriental Art	p. 387
Oriental Art and the Ethnographic Museum	p. 393
Oriental Carpets and Austrian Art Historians	p. 398
Josef Strzygowski: The Art-Historical Furor Orientalis	p. 403
Exhibiting the Orient in Munich and Berlin	p. 410
The Turfan Expeditions and the Intellectual Consequences of the Central Asian Antiquities Race	p. 416
Orientalists and "Others"	p. 427
Orientalists and Others, 1900-1918	p. 429
The Orientalists and the Great War	p. 436
Declaring Jihad	p. 438
Utility, at Last	p. 446
Losing the Eastern Propaganda War: Turks, Armenians, and Jews	p. 454
Richard Wilhelm, German Mandarin	p. 463
Epilogue	p. 474
Orientalism's Indian Summer: Weimar Scholarship and Its Discontents	p. 476
Orientalism and Nazism	p. 487
Why German Orientalists Laid the Foundation for Multicultural Thinking, but Could Not Develop It	p. 495
Select Bibliography	p. 499
Index	p. 513
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.