German scholarly engagement with the areas designated as “Orient” covers a long time span and encompasses various disciplines in which a repertoire of “Oriental knowledge” was used. These disciplines include Philology, History, Anthropology/Ethnology, Religion, and Sociology among others. Most contemporary studies on the history of German Orientalism focus on one or the other of these disciplines, or on particular geographical/cultural spaces. Among the relatively fewer studies that provide interdisciplinary overviews, mention must be made of Suzanne Marchand’s landmark study on German Orientalism (2009) which focusses mainly on scholars and their knowledge production. Another notable contribution is the volume edited by Burkhard Schnepel, Gunnar Brands and Hanne Schönig (2011) which engages directly with Edward Said’s discourse on Orientalism by examining cultural rather than institutional aspects of German and Western Orientalist thoughts and practices.1
The book under review is a welcome addition to this relatively recent genre of examining the history of Oriental Studies from an integrated perspective comprising various disciplines. As the editors of the book write in the introduction, the anthology is written from the conviction that the complex dimensions and ranges of theoretical, methodological, socio-political and cultural-critical aspects of German scholarly engagement with the Orient need to be compared and integrated (p. 12). Another central concern of the book is to review and critique Edward Said`s theory of Orientalism. Unlike the aforementioned volume edited by Schnepel et al, this book deals primarily with the institutional history of German Orientalism.
In his seminal book on Orientalism, Said claimed that due to an absence of “national interest” in the areas traditionally defined as the Orient, the “German Orient” was primarily a “scholarly Orient” comprising “a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient”.2 The editors of this anthology agree with this view to an extent, claiming that due to the late and short span of German colonialism, German Orientalism cannot be defined as a part of an imperialistic project, unlike its French and British counterparts. Not directly entering into the subject of “intellectual authority,” the editors claim that the German view of the Orient was conditioned by factors such as interest in the Old Testament, research methods in history and philology, an “oriental sensibility” of classical German philosophy as well as German Romanticism (p. 12).
The collection presents a rich pastiche of essays by scholars affiliated to Italian, German, Spanish and American universities. The essays are arranged chronologically, offering a longue duree perspective from the early 19th century to 1945. Most of the essays focus on a specific person or persons and their intellectual involvement with the “Orient,” the latter denoting in various cases Egypt, Near East, India and Africa. For the reader however, a more thematic rather than scholar-oriented division into sections would have been more helpful. Also, clearly mentioning the birth and death years of the scholars in question would have assisted non-specialist readers.
Most of the essays in the volume deal with academics specializing in “Arabic/Semitic Orient”. The first and the last articles by Claudio de Stefani focus on two Orientalists whose works seemed to mark the beginning and the end of a particular tradition of Arabic studies in Germany: Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (1801–1888) and Gottfried Bergsträsser (1886–1933). Aly Elrefaci’s essay on the biblical scholar and Orientalist Julius Wellenhausen discusses his methods of studying the history of Islam and Judaism. While they are valuable for scholars interested in the history of Arabic/Islamic Studies, these three articles do not venture out of the narrow disciplinary focus to examine broader historical contexts. The evolution of German Orientalism, as Said had claimed, was influenced by British and French Orientalist discourses which developed within an imperial framework. Said had written in detail about the role of the French Orientalist Silvestre De Sacy in fashioning the representation of the Orient in certain ways. Sacy’s role in training German Orientalists has been discussed by Stefani, without investigating the possible impact of his Orientalist visions on these scholars.
Bernhard Maier’s essay on Theodor Nöldeke, a scholar of Arabic and Semitic Studies, discusses, on the basis of Nöldeke’s personal letters, his reactions to contemporary political issues. The article brings to light the Orientalist`s protestant conservative, anti-democratic worldview which remained anchored in contemporary racial and religious prejudices. Giovanni Morrone’s article on the contributions of Carl Heinrich Becker to the study of Islam provides a differentiated account of Becker’s deployment of his scholarship to assist German Empire’s colonial pursuits as well as his epigenetic view of the development of Islam. These essays also avoid confronting Said’s contention that both these scholars exhibited a derogatory attitude towards Islam.
Among the essays that speak directly to Said’s discourse, the one by Sabine Mangold-Will examines the works of the Jewish scholars Immanuel Wolf and Abraham Geiger. Mangold-Will asserts that for these two scholars the study of Islam was not an expression of “alternative,” i.e. less hegemonic Orientalism as is often claimed, but an instrument to establish Judaism as an integral part of an European Wissenschaft. Another provocative essay by David Moshfegh on Ignaz Goldziher, the Hungarian scholar of Islam, claims that Goldziher attempted to transform Islamwissenschaft into a branch of the Science of Religion, which was supposedly a post-philological, post-racial alternative to the Semitic/Aryan binary. Mosfegh also maintains that Orientalism was neither racism nor humanism but the result of an encounter between diverse religions and cultures, thereby challenging one of Said’s fundamental assertions.
In a departure from the Semitic/Arabic Orient, another essay by Giovanni Morrone reviews aspects of the ethnologist Leo Frobenius’ engagement with Africa as part of his theory of cultural morphology. Frobenius criticised the scholars engaged in studying Islamic cultures for their disparaging views of Africa, which Morrone interprets as a critique of Eurocentrism. Though Morrone mentions the racist stereotypes that Frobenius employed regarding Africans, he does not probe the allegations of racist colonialist thinking that some scholars have attributed to Frobenius.3
An important deviation from individual centric essays is Douglas McGetchin`s overview of the role of German Indology within European Orientalism and world politics from 1880–1945. McGetchin lucidly traces the debates about the relationship between the academic study of (primarily) ancient India, imperialism and Nazism. He points to the ways in which some German Indologists supported the European imperial project through their scholarly works and their approval of British colonialism in India. One lacuna in this essay, however, is the lack of engagement with Sheldon Pollock’s ground-breaking essay on Indology in Nazi Germany, though it is mentioned in the bibliography. Also, McGetchin’s portrayal of Max Müller as an other-worldly and objective scholar is debatable, since Müller used his scholarship to legitimise British rule in India and to popularise the glorification of Aryans, thus emerging as a leading imperial theorist.4
Another set of essays examine the view of the “Orient” – Islamic or otherwise – on thinkers whose primary concerns lay elsewhere. In his article on the position of Orient in Hegel’s philosophy of history, Stefan Jordan claims that Hegel’s distinctive contribution was to stress on the “historicity of the Orient” and integrating it into an universal historical perspective, which can be discerned through his use of concepts like state, Geist (spirit) and individuality (p. 80). Jordan however, does not take into account an integral part of Hegel’s “historicising” the Orient: his view of India and China as static societies, which purportedly belonged to the preamble of history rather than to history proper.5
In his article, Fabio Ciraci traces the different influences and texts shaping Arthur Schopenhauer`s metaphysic of Will, in which the philosopher tried to fuse “old Indian wisdom” of Brahma, Maya and Nirvana with the philosophy of Kant and Platon. An examination of the allegation by some contemporary scholars that Schopenhauer’s interest in the Upanishads masked his anti-Semitism would have been pertinent here.6
Domenico Conte analyses the concept of “Magic culture” which supposedly prevailed between Tigris and Nile, Black sea and Arabia from the time of Augustus to about 1000 CE, as Oswald Spengler claimed in Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Conte concludes that Spengler’s actual concern was to rediscover Christianity in a more pure, “magical” form. Santi Di Bella focusses on the rejection of the concept of the so-called “Oriental Renaissance” in the thoughts of the historians Leopold von Ranke and Jakob Burckhardt. However, in their uncritical renditions of these scholars’ perspectives, these two articles appear to reinforce rather than contradict Said’s views. Said claimed that Ranke and Buckhardt generalized and negatively stereotyped the Islamic Orient and such “intellectual operations” were developed further by Spengler, “whose view of a Magian personality was typified by a Muslim Oriental”.7
Giampiero Moretti’s article on the multi-faceted Swiss thinker Johann Jakob Bachofen and the Orient conveys the latter’s overwhelmingly Romantic interest in the Orient, which he visualised as a “feminine” entity (p. 152). Moretti does not engage with the fact that this notion corresponds to Said’s classic thesis that certain 19th century European thinkers feminised and “othered” the Orient. More interesting for scholars of intellectual history is Moretti’s discussion of Bachofen’s view that paganism and Christianity, materialism and spiritualism could supposedly co-exist in a “genuine romantic paradigm” (p. 154).
Giancarlo Magnano San Lio examines the presence of the Orient within Wilhelm Dilthey’s intellectual oeuvre. On the basis of reviews that the polymath philosopher wrote of scholarly works relating to the “East,” San Lio establishes that Dilthey’s aim was to develop a multidisciplinary perspective and ultimately, to question the assumed hierarchy of human races. Through this example, this article contradicts Said’s “ultimately essentialist claims,” to quote Suzanne Marchand’s words in the preface of the book (p. 9).
Various aspects of the Orient figured prominently in the thoughts of the more sociologically oriented thinkers, Karl Marx and Max Weber. The “Asiatic mode of production” in Marx’s writings is the subject of Giovanni Sgro’s article. In the 1850s, Marx had credited British colonialism as an instrument of modernisation of the Indian village system, prompting Said’s accusation that Marx’s analysis was premised on Orientalism. Sgro posits that in the 1880s, Marx’s thinking on the “Asiatic mode of production” underwent a radical change, as Marx saw in the Russian economic and social system a possible alternative to capitalist modernisation and industrialization. Sgro’s article thus adapts the frame of reference provided by scholars like Kevin Anderson.8
Edoardo Massimilla adds to the scholarship on Max Weber’s use of the concept of Pariavolk (pariahs) or casteless “untouchables” in Indian society in relation to the Jews in his text, Religiöse Gemeinschaften. Massimilla looks at the different “sources” that influenced Weber’s use of the term, e.g. Nietzsche’s use of the term Chandala in Der Antichrist. Massimilla also elaborates on Weber’s claims that Jews and pariahs had visions of redemption which were both similar and dissimilar.
The major contribution of this volume is to offer some fascinating insights into the intellectual transfers and knowledge circulations that occurred between Germany and parts of the non-western world from the early 19th to mid-20th century. Such transmissions were instrumental in facilitating the use of multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural methodologies and perspectives which have become indispensable for the globalized academia of today. This anthology also adds significantly to the history of institutionalization of knowledge of the “Orient” in German academic spaces. However, as this review has tried to establish, despite its declared intention to critique aspects of Said’s discourse, most articles have not sufficiently explored the wider imperialist and Eurocentric contexts in which German orientalist scholarship operated, as Said had alleged.
An aspect that neither Said nor this volume has touched upon is the connection between Orientalism and nation-building in Germany. The search for an identity usually requires an antithesis or an “other” in relation to which an individual, a group or a national image can be constructed. In the early 19th century, the search for a German identity was linked to Lutheran ideals and Catholic Rome symbolized the ‘other’ to a Germanic self. In course of the 19th century, as Rome was progressively replaced by the Semite as the “anti-nation,” the “Orient” became the locus in which German nationalism could find an usable past in the form of an “Aryan civilization” as well as its antithesis, the Semitic, particularly the Hebraic people. The Orient became “the site upon which and through which German national and imperial visions were articulated and acted upon”.9
Notes:
1 Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race and Empire, New York 2009; Burkhard Schnepel, Gunnar Brands, Hanne Schönig (Eds), Orient-Orientalistik-Orientalismus. Geschichte und Aktualität einer Debatte, Bielefeld 2011.
2 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York 2003 (first edition 1978), p. 19.
3 Suzanne Marchand, Leo Frobenius and the Revolt against the West, in: Journal of Contemporary History 32(2) (1997), pp. 153–170, here pp. 162–163.
4 Baijayanti Roy, Friedrich Max Müller and the Emergence of Identity Politics in India and Germany, in: Publications of the English Goethe Society 85 (1–2) 2016, pp. 217–228.
5 Teschale Tibebu, Hegel and the Third World. The Making of Eurocentrism in World History, Syracuse 2011.
6 Dorothy L. Figueira, Exotic: A Decadent Quest, New York 1994, p. 138.
7 Said, Orientalism, p. 208.
8 Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins. On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Chicago 2010.
9 Jennifer Jenkin, German Orientalism. An Introduction, in: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24(2) 2004, pp. 97–100, here p. 98.