The Prodigy of Székesfehérvár

In the first part of this theme we followed the method that was born in Leiden, the historical-critical method of Scholten and Kuenen that read the Bible as the sediment of its own time and that summoned revelation before the tribunal of philology. We saw how that method broke free from theology and presented itself as a universal instrument, applicable to any text, any religion, any revelation, and we saw how in the hands of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje it was carried to Mecca and there forged into an instrument of colonial administration. The road from the study to the Resident’s office was, as it turned out, shorter than one might have supposed. But the method that Leiden unleashed upon the Bible was still awaiting a second man, a man who would apply it with the same meticulousness to the Islamic tradition and who would thereby furnish a weapon that would hold out longer than any colonial army. That man was born in a small Hungarian town, into a pious Jewish family, and unlike Snouck he did not begin his dealings with Islam at a distance. He began with reverence.

His name was Ignác Goldziher, and he is the most difficult figure in this entire theme, precisely because he shows the mirror at its most honest and that mirror nonetheless goes on distorting. Where Snouck deceived, Goldziher came openly and under his own name. Where Snouck staged a false conversion in order to penetrate Mecca, Goldziher genuinely loved the Islamic scholarly tradition all his life and refused every service to an empire. And it was precisely this man who, with his principal work, supplied the scholarly edifice that would discredit the hadith literature in Western eyes. Before we can understand that work, and before we can weigh it fairly, we must come to know the boy who wrote it, and the world that formed him. We must come to love him before the critique arrives, for otherwise the critique becomes a caricature, and the caricature is precisely what this theme wishes to avoid.

The Ausgleich and the Jews of Hungary

On 22 June 1850, in Székesfehérvár, an old coronation city southwest of Budapest, a boy was born who at his circumcision received the Hebrew name Yitzhaq Yehuda, Isaac Judah, and whom the world would come to know as Ignác Goldziher. Székesfehérvár was a city with a long memory, for within its walls the kings of Hungary had for centuries been crowned and buried, and the old vaults still breathed the dignity of a past that the nineteenth-century provincial town had itself long since outgrown. In such a city, between the memory of the coronations and the sober reality of market and commerce, there lived a Jewish community that led a life of its own, bound to the synagogue, the houses of study and the laws of a tradition it had preserved from generation to generation. His father was a merchant who had settled in the town in 1842, a man of modest means who ran his household according to the strict orthodox tradition in which his son too was raised. It was a household in which prayer, the study of the sacred texts and reverence for the learned tradition formed the self-evident ordering of existence, and it is not without significance that the later dissector of another religious tradition was himself formed within a tradition that treated its transmission as a living authority, not as a historical residue.

The world in which Goldziher grew up was a world in motion, for in the middle of the nineteenth century Hungarian Jewry stood on the threshold of an emancipation that would change its place in society forever. In 1867 Austria and Hungary concluded the Compromise, the Ausgleich, which reformed the Habsburg monarchy into a dual monarchy and granted Hungary a great measure of internal autonomy. In that same year the Hungarian parliament granted the Jews civil and political equality, so that a generation that had grown up in the seclusion of the community suddenly saw the universities, the free professions and public life thrown open to it. For a gifted Jewish boy this meant that the road to scholarship was for the first time passable, though it remained, as we shall yet see, strewn with obstacles that the legal decree could not remove.

The promise of emancipation was, however, ambiguous, and this is a fact one must keep in view from the outset, for the equality granted on paper was in the reality of the university and the state office redeemed only sparingly. The talented young Jew was permitted to study, to take his doctorate, to lecture, but the chair, the full professorship that joined income to standing, long remained beyond his reach, not because any law forbade it but because an unwritten distrust prevented it. Emancipation opened the antechamber and kept the inner hall closed, and Goldziher would experience this in his own person in a manner that becomes fully visible only in the third article of this series. For now it suffices to know that the world which promised him scholarship at the same time made him feel that he was its guest and not its heir, and that awareness would color his whole life.

Those same years saw Hungarian Jewry split along the fault line between orthodoxy and reform, for at the congress of 1868 and 1869 the ways of the traditional and the modern-reform, the Neolog, communities parted. Goldziher was raised in the orthodox piety of his father’s house, and yet his later life would unfold within the circle of the Neolog community of Pest, a tension between origin and destination that would never wholly release him. He was a child of emancipation and at the same time an heir to the old piety, and that double inheritance explains much of the inner dividedness that his diary would later reveal. He belonged nowhere completely, and perhaps that is the reason he remained all his life so keenly aware of what it means to stand somewhere in between.

There is in this biographical circumstance something that casts light forward onto the later work. A man who has experienced in his own person that the dominant culture preaches its universality but opens its gates selectively develops a sharp eye for the concealed interests behind a learned system. Goldziher would train that eye with merciless precision upon the Islamic tradition and point out in it the traces of political and social interests that had disguised themselves as pious tradition. That he seldom turned the same eye upon his own method, that he saw the interests behind Western philology less sharply than the interests behind the Islamic hadith, is the blind spot this theme will patiently lay bare. But the forming of that gaze began here, in the ambiguous promise of an emancipation that gave with one hand what it withheld with the other.

A Child Who Writes About the Liturgy

Goldziher’s precocity borders on the incredible, and it is not the sort of anecdote that an admirer has invented, for the traces of it are printed and preserved. In 1862, when he was twelve years old, his first little book appeared, a study titled Sihat Yitzhaq, in which the child devoted a critical examination to Jewish liturgical poetry, the piyut, the art form in which the synagogal prayers had found their language and their rhythm. That a twelve-year-old should publish a treatise is remarkable, but that a twelve-year-old should publish a treatise that critically weighs the form and history of prayer poetry betrays a mind that from the beginning not only received but also ordered, not only read but also judged. The child who analyzed the piyut was already doing in miniature what the man would later do on a great scale. He took a living religious tradition and laid it on the scholar’s dissecting table.

To understand the nature of this precocity one must know something of the school in which it came to flower, for the orthodox Jewish upbringing of the nineteenth century was a school of the text of which few existed. From an early age the child learned the sacred books not merely to read but to know by heart, the Torah and the commentaries, the law and the discussion of it, in an unbroken chain of transmission handed down from teacher to pupil since time immemorial. It was a culture in which memory, the exactness of transmission and reverence for the chain of the transmitters were the highest virtues, and it is one of the quiet ironies of this story that Goldziher was raised within precisely such a chain of pious transmission, an isnad in its own right, and that he would later treat the Islamic chain of transmission as a collection of later fabrications. He who receives his own tradition as a living authority, and dissects the other as a historical residue, applies two measures, and the germ of that double measure already lay in the contrast between how he inhabited his own sources and how he would study the foreign ones.

At his bar mitzvah, the moment at which the Jewish boy comes of religious age, he delivered from the pulpit of the synagogue a sermon that lasted a full hour. One must picture that scene without romanticizing it, for it was no prodigy’s performance but the fruit of an upbringing in which the word, the argument and the learned exposition enjoyed the highest honor. The congregation that listened to the boy heard not merely a fluent speaker; it heard a mind that mastered the sources and that handled them with an ease that put grown men to shame. It is tempting to recognize in this youth the later scholar already, and that temptation is not wholly unjustified, but one must be careful, for the boy who wrote about the prayer of his own tradition wrote from within the tradition, from the inside, with the matter-of-factness of one who is at home in it. What happened later, when that same mind turned upon a tradition that was not his own, is precisely the question this theme poses.

Vámbéry and the First Oriental Formation

As a teenager Goldziher came into contact with one of the most curious figures of Hungarian learned life, Ármin Vámbéry, the traveler and orientalist who had grown up as a poor Jewish boy and who with an almost superhuman force of will had made the languages of the East his own. Vámbéry had traveled through Central Asia as a supposed dervish, through regions where an unmasked European’s life was far from safe, and he had survived those journeys through a disguise that pointed ahead to the deception Snouck would later practice in Mecca, though Vámbéry’s motive lay in adventure and scholarship rather than in colonial politics. Under his guidance the young Goldziher took his first steps in the Oriental languages, and it is thanks to Vámbéry that the gifted pupil felt himself drawn to Arabic, Persian and Turkish at a time when that study scarcely existed in Hungary.

It is worth pausing for a moment over the disguise by which Vámbéry had won his fame, for it casts a light forward onto the central opposition of this theme. Vámbéry had passed himself off as a pious mendicant monk, a dervish on pilgrimage, and so had gained access to regions and companies that would have excluded or killed an openly declared European. That same ruse, the scholar who disguises himself as a believer in order to penetrate where the unbeliever is not welcome, would a generation later be made by Snouck in Mecca into an instrument of colonial knowledge, as we saw in the first part of this theme. Goldziher thus knew at close quarters the model of disguised access, and it is all the more telling that he never followed it. When he himself traveled to the East, he traveled as himself, under his own name, as the Jewish scholar he was, and it is precisely that honesty that makes his case so much harder to fathom than that of the deceiver. The deceiver falsifies the access. Goldziher obtained the access honestly and falsified nothing, and yet his gaze remained a gaze from outside.

The relationship between the master and the pupil was more complicated than a simple story of formation would suggest, for between Vámbéry and Goldziher there grew in later years an estrangement that at times took on the sharpness of rivalry. The two men were too much each other’s equals, and their shared position as Jewish scholars within a society that praised their talents and distrusted their origin made the comparison between them inevitable and painful. It would be wrong to portray Vámbéry as the warm mentor who selflessly cherished the young mind, for the reality was cooler and more human. What is certain is that through him Goldziher received the first keys to the East, and that he then used those keys with a thoroughness his master had never possessed. Vámbéry was the traveler, the improvising prodigy of languages. Goldziher would become the philologist, the man of the text and of textual criticism.

In this distinction lies more than a difference of temperament, for it marks two ways in which Europe could appropriate the East. There was the way of the traveler, who enters the land, sees the faces, hears the voices and returns with stories, and there was the way of the philologist, who takes the texts apart in the silence of the study and reduces the living tradition to a series of datable documents. The traveler runs the risk of losing himself in the picturesque and the superficial. The philologist runs the deeper risk that he dissects the text so thoroughly that he drives the life out of it, that he so far reduces the tradition to an object that he forgets it is, for millions of people, a living voice. Goldziher would walk both ways, for he was the rare scholar who both traveled and dissected, and that is what makes his testimony so precious and his conclusions so painful. He had seen the life and yet chose the dissecting.

Leipzig and the Philological School

The decisive formation of Goldziher took place not in Budapest but in Germany, for there, in the middle of the nineteenth century, lay the workshops in which modern orientalism was forged. With the support of József Eötvös, the Hungarian minister of worship and education who took the gifted young man under his protection, Goldziher was able to study at the universities of Budapest, Berlin and Leipzig, and it was in Leipzig that he found his true master in the person of Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer. Fleischer was the great Arabist of his generation, a pupil of the French orientalist Silvestre de Sacy, and he stood at the head of a school that applied the classical philological training, the patient dissection of the text down to the last syllable, to Arabic letters. Under him Goldziher learned what it means to read a text with a meticulousness that leaves nothing unweighed, and that training would become the foundation of everything he later wrote.

The German university of the mid-nineteenth century was the cradle of a conception of scholarship that regarded itself as the crown of European civilization, the Wissenschaft, the systematic, methodical and source-grounded knowledge that turned everything it touched into an object of research. For Oriental studies this meant that the texts of the Islamic world, the Qur’an, the hadith, the legal literature and the poetry, were treated with the same instruments that had been tested on the classical Greek and Latin letters, and that the sacred text was approached as one manuscript among the manuscripts, to be dated, dissected and laid bare in its history of formation. Fleischer stood in the line of Silvestre de Sacy, the great French orientalist who had raised Arabic philology to a rigorous science, and he passed that rigor on to a generation of pupils who would populate the studies of all Europe. Goldziher absorbed that training with the thirst of one born to dissect, and he combined it with a knowledge of languages and a familiarity with the sources that astonished even his German masters.

In 1870 Goldziher took his doctorate at Leipzig with a dissertation that did not concern Islam but the medieval Jewish biblical exegetes and lexicographers who had written in Arabic, the scholars of the Judeo-Arabic heritage of Spain and the Near East who had studied their sacred texts with the instruments of Arabic linguistics. It is a detail one easily overlooks and that nonetheless says everything, for the young Goldziher began his scholarly life at the intersection of three traditions. He was an orthodox-raised Jew, he was schooled in the Arabic philology of the German university, and he studied the way in which medieval Jews had read their own Scripture with Arabic eyes. He who stands at such an intersection inevitably develops the capacity to inhabit a religious tradition from within and at the same time to view it from without, and that double capacity would become his greatest gift and at the same time the root of the distortion this theme wishes to lay bare.

Religion as a Growing Organism

There is to Goldziher’s formation still another dimension one must not skip over, because it contains the key to everything he would later write about Islam. In the reform-minded Jewish thought of his time, and in the broader science of religion of the nineteenth century in which he was schooled, there lived the conviction that religion is not an unchangeable magnitude fallen from heaven but a living organism that grows, develops and adapts itself to the changing circumstances of the community that bears it. What at a given moment is presented as timeless truth is, in this view, the precipitate of a historical process, the fruit of generations that have deposited their own needs, their own struggles and their own aspirations in the handed-down forms. For the reform-minded Jew this was a liberating thought, for it justified the adaptation of the tradition to the modern age, but in the hands of the scholar it became an analytical instrument of great sharpness and great reach.

He who regards religion thus reads every sacred text and every pious tradition as a testimony not in the first place of the truth it proclaims but of the community that brought it forth. The tradition becomes a mirror of its time, an imprint of the interests, the party strife and the ideals of piety of the generations that formed and passed it on. One need only connect this view with the philological schooling of Leipzig, and one has before one, in embryo, the program of Goldziher’s principal work, for that work would read the hadith in exactly this way, as a mirror of the later community rather than a document about the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions ﵃. The young scholar who took his doctorate in 1870 already carried this program within him, still unwritten, still unproven, but present as the self-evident manner in which he had learned to look at religion. It is important to see this already now, so that the critique this theme will later mount comes not as a surprise but as the unfolding of something that was present from the beginning.

After his doctorate Goldziher returned to Budapest, where in 1872 he was appointed as a Privatdozent, a position that gave him the right to lecture but that provided him, as we shall see in a later article, with no income. He was twenty-three years old, he was already reckoned one of the most promising Oriental scholars of his generation, and the world seemed to lie open before him. That the door to the chair would remain closed to him until he was fifty-five, no one could then have suspected. For this moment he was the young scholar at the beginning of his career, and fate offered him an opportunity that would mark his whole life. The Hungarian government enabled him to make the journey to the East for which he had longed.

The Method as Inheritance

To understand what happened in Goldziher when he traveled to the East and later when he wrote his principal work, we must return once more to the Leiden School of the first part of this theme, for the method that Kuenen had applied to the Old Testament and that Nöldeke had unleashed upon the Qur’an was the same method that would make Goldziher the masterly dissector of the Islamic tradition. Kuenen had treated the Bible as a library rather than a book, as a sediment of centuries in which the scholar could lay bare the layers and give each layer back its place in time. Nöldeke had arranged the Qur’an into periods and read the revelation as a precipitate of the historical circumstances in which it had arisen. What was still lacking was a scholar who would apply the same treatment to the hadith, to the immense tradition of the words and deeds of the Prophet ﷺ that forms the second foundation of Islamic law and Islamic faith, and that scholar would be Goldziher.

The distinction between the hadith and the Qur’an is for the Muslim of fundamental importance, and it is useful to mention it here briefly, because it determines the stakes of Goldziher’s later work. The Qur’an is for the believer the direct, unaltered Word of Allah ﷻ, revealed word for word to the Prophet ﷺ and transmitted with an unequaled care. The hadith, by contrast, is the tradition of what the Prophet ﷺ said, did and tacitly approved, passed on by the Companions ﵃ and the generations after them, and ordered by the great collectors of the third century of the hijra. Around this tradition the Muslim scholars developed a science of unheard-of refinement, the criticism of the isnad and the assessment of the transmitters, with which they separated the genuine from the false with a rigor that had no equal in the premodern world. It was precisely this edifice that Goldziher would call into question, and it is the reason his work touched the Islamic scholarly tradition more deeply than any attack of Nöldeke’s upon the Qur’an, for it aimed at the foundation on which the law, the piety and the daily life of the Muslim rest.

The triad that founded modern Western Islamic scholarship, as has often since been said, consisted of three names, Theodor Nöldeke, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje and Ignác Goldziher, and together they represent the three shapes of one and the same undertaking. Nöldeke took the Qur’an, Snouck took the living faith of the Muslims in its colonial reality, and Goldziher took the tradition. They shared a method and a presupposition, for all three read the Islamic sources as historical documents that had to answer for themselves before the tribunal of Western philology, and they shared the assumption that the believer who knew his own tradition from within was by that very faith disqualified from speaking reliably about it. Knowledge required distance, so ran the presupposition, and distance was precisely what the believer could not muster.

One must not underestimate the force of this presupposition, for it is not foolish and not merely ill-willed, and that is exactly why it is so tenacious. There is a truth in the thought that distance makes possible a form of knowledge that escapes the one involved, that the outsider sometimes sees what the initiate overlooks because it has become too familiar to him. The physician knows the body in a way the patient does not. But the presupposition becomes distorting the moment it forgets its own limit, the moment it supposes that the gaze from outside yields not merely a supplementary but a superior knowledge, that the believer through his faith not merely misses something but essentially knows less than the scholar who dissects his text without believing it. At that point the modest truth turns into a presumption, and the orientalism of the nineteenth century seldom noticed that turn because it took its own position for the neutral position. Goldziher, the most acute of them all, would unmask the presumption in countless places in the Islamic tradition and scarcely recognize it in his own method, and that is not a sign of bad faith but of the power a method exercises over its practitioner.

And yet there was in Goldziher something the others lacked, and that makes him the tragic figure of this theme. He truly loved the world he studied. He would enter the East not with the cold gaze of the dissector but with the beating reverence of a man who felt at home among the devout, and he would on a Friday in Cairo undergo an experience that would touch him to the very depth of his being. It is this riddle that carries the whole portrait of Goldziher, and it is the reason this theme draws him with more warmth than it drew Snouck, for his case proves something that the case of the deceiver cannot prove. Snouck shows that bad faith distorts, and that is a banal truth that surprises no one. Goldziher shows that honesty too distorts, that even sincere love, when it may read revelation solely as the making of its own time, in the end denies the believer the same thing that the deception denies him, namely the possibility that the tradition carries a truth that transcends its time. The false mirror is thus not in the first place a matter of character but of method, and it is precisely the best characters, the most honest and the most loving, who show this most sharply. That is the thesis this whole period will put to the test, and it begins with the boy of Székesfehérvár who dissected the piyut before he could properly write, and who had drunk in reverence for the tradition with his mother’s milk.

That precisely out of this love, and not out of coldness or enmity, the discrediting of the hadith would arise, is the riddle that the next article begins to unfold. We travel with him to the East, to Damascus and to the mosque of al-Azhar, and we shall see how the most honest gaze the West ever cast upon Islam nonetheless remained a gaze into a mirror. We shall see him kneel among the devout, his forehead against the floor of the mosque, more devout than he had ever been in his life, and we shall carry with us the question that this scene inevitably raises, namely how a man can come so close to the threshold and yet chooses to remain on the other side.

Sources

• Raphael Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary: A Translation and Psychological Portrait, Wayne State University Press (1987)
• Róbert Simon, Ignác Goldziher: His Life and Scholarship as Reflected in his Works and Correspondence, Brill / Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1986)
• Ignác Goldziher, Tagebuch, ed. Alexander Scheiber, Brill (1978)
• Lawrence I. Conrad, “The Near East Study Tour Diary of Ignaz Goldziher”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1990)
• P. Sj. van Koningsveld (ed.), Scholarship and Friendship in Early Islamwissenschaft: The Letters of C. Snouck Hurgronje to I. Goldziher, Leiden (1985)
• Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books (1978)