The Secretary of the Congregation

In the previous article we followed Ignác Goldziher on his Oriental Journey, to Damascus and to the mosque of al-Azhar, and we saw how the young scholar who was the first European non-Muslim to be admitted to the lessons of the sheikhs knelt, on an exalted Friday in Cairo, amid the praying multitude and was more devout than ever before in his life. We saw the love that carried the whole journey, and we saw the tragic question it left open, for the very man who had let his heart be touched by Islam would return to practise the science that held the Islamic tradition at arm’s length. We left him on the threshold of his return to Budapest, with the exalted Friday behind him and the closed door before him. This article is about that closed door, and it is the darkest and the most human chapter of this whole portrait, for it shows us the most gifted Islamic scholar of Europe not on the professor’s rostrum but behind the desk of a congregational secretary, for thirty years, while his great work took shape in the hours of the night.

There is a reason to dwell on these years that reaches further than pity for a misjudged scholar, for the humiliation Goldziher underwent contains an insight that touches the very heart of this theme. We saw in the first part of this series how the false mirror of Orientalism was interwoven with power, with colonial administration and with the self-assurance of a Europe that believed it was entitled to order the world. One might infer from this that the distortion is a privilege of the powerful, a fault of those who look down upon the colonised from above. The case of Goldziher contradicts that reassuring thought. Here we have a man who was himself shut out, who knew in his own flesh what it is to be tolerated by the ruling culture and not admitted, and yet his gaze upon Islam remained the gaze of the outsider who judges. The distortion therefore lies not in power alone but deeper, in the method itself, and it is precisely the excluded man who proves it, for even he who had nothing to rule kept the revelation at a distance.

The Closed Door

When Goldziher returned from his Oriental Journey in 1874, he was twenty-four years old and already counted as one of the most promising Oriental scholars of his generation. He possessed a command of the Arabic language and the Islamic sciences that far surpassed that of his European contemporaries, he had come to know the living scholarly tradition of Damascus and Cairo from within, and since 1872 he had been attached to the university of Budapest as a privatdozent. Everything seemed to destine him for a brilliant academic career, and his patron József Eötvös, the Hungarian minister of religion and education who had recognised his talent and made his study journey possible, had held out to him the prospect of a chair in Semitic philology. The road to the rostrum seemed to lie open for the gifted young man.

But the road did not lie open, and the prospect deceived. Eötvös had already died in 1871, before Goldziher even returned from his journey, and with his patron the young scholar lost the powerful hand that could have opened the door for him. The promise of the chair remained a promise, and the years passed without its being kept. The reason lay not in any lack of merit, for his merit was beyond question, but in something that no law forbade any longer and that yet remained everywhere at work. Goldziher was a Jew, and the Hungary of the late nineteenth century, which had granted its Jews civil equality in 1867, was still far from ready to concede to a Jew the full chair and the standing that went with it. Emancipation had opened the antechamber and kept the inner hall closed, precisely as we foresaw in the first article of this series, and Goldziher stood in the antechamber.

The exclusion that struck Goldziher was no Hungarian failing alone, for the antisemitism that withheld the chair from him was a phenomenon that pervaded the scholarly world of all of Central and Western Europe, and Goldziher felt its chill from institutions beyond his fatherland as well. It is a painful fact that the scientific world which prided itself on its enlightenment and its universality was in practice riddled with prejudices it disavowed in its own self-image, and the gifted Jewish scholar ran again and again into the invisible wall that separated the professed equality from the real one. We shall take care not to ascribe this exclusion to particular persons, for it was a structure and not a conspiracy, and the friendships that Goldziher maintained across the borders, among them the forty-year friendship with Snouck that a later article will treat, prove that there was no want of personal goodwill. What was wanting was something deeper, the willingness of the institutions to grant the Jew the place his talent deserved, and against that deeper reluctance even the most sincere personal esteem could not prevail.

The position of privatdozent, which he held, was a position without income. It conferred the right to teach and bore the standing of the scholar, but it brought no salary, for the privatdozent was expected to live on his own means or from the contributions of his students, and of both Goldziher had not enough to build a livelihood. A man of wealth could have afforded this position as an honourable pastime while awaiting the chair, but Goldziher was the son of a merchant of modest means, and he had no fortune that allowed him the luxury of unpaid waiting. He stood therefore before the pressing necessity of providing for his own upkeep, and the science he loved could not furnish him that upkeep. He had to seek his bread elsewhere.

Slave of the Congregation

The solution that presented itself was at once a rescue and a humiliation, for in 1876 Goldziher accepted the office of secretary of the Neolog Jewish congregation of Pest, the modern-reformed congregation to which, despite his orthodox origins, he had come to belong. It was a post that furnished him an income and enabled him to remain in Budapest and to continue his scholarly labour, but it was administrative work, office work, the management of the affairs of the congregation, and it had nothing to do with the Islamic scholarship that was his true calling. The most gifted expert on Islam that Europe possessed in those years spent his days governing a community of faith, and he experienced it as a millstone around his neck.

How deeply the humiliation struck him we know from his own words, for Goldziher kept a diary that was published only long after his death, in 1978, by Alexander Scheiber, and that laid bare the bitter inner side of his life which he had kept hidden throughout his life behind a dignified exterior. Of the time in which he took the secretariat upon himself, he set down in that diary, looking back, a sentence that leaves nothing to be desired in clarity. It is now settled, he wrote, that I shall be a slave. One must let those words stand in their hard honesty, for they show us what the outer world was not permitted to see. The man who in his writings radiated the calm mastery of the scholar, who published his books and built his honour as a man of science, felt himself in the reality of his daily existence an enslaved man, a prisoner of an office that had been forced upon him by a world that praised his talent and refused him his place at the university.

One must guard against the misunderstanding that Goldziher would have discharged his office with mere reluctance and without devotion, for the reality was more intricate and more human than the bitter diary note at first sight suggests. The congregation he served was the Neolog, the modern-reformed congregation of Pest, and though Goldziher had been raised in the strict orthodoxy of his father’s house, he had joined this reform-minded current that wished to bring Judaism into accord with the demands of the modern age without stripping it of its essence. In that striving Goldziher recognised something of himself, for he too sought a form of faith that could reconcile fidelity to tradition with the honesty of science, and it is not without significance that the man who treated the Islamic tradition as a historical phenomenon adhered, in his own community of faith, to the reform that likewise wished to adapt the Jewish tradition to the age.

His service to the congregation was therefore not that of a listless official who grudgingly discharges his duty. From 1886 Goldziher stood at the head of the organisation of religious teachers of Pest, and he concerned himself with earnestness and devotion with the religious instruction and the training of the teachers who were to instruct the youth of the congregation in the faith. He took this task seriously, he brought to it his learning and his care for the formation of the young generation, and one would do him an injustice by depicting him as a man who only suffered under an office that meant nothing to him. He suffered under the time it robbed from him, but he fulfilled it with a conscientiousness that marks his character. The tragedy lies not in a lack of devotion but precisely in its abundance, for Goldziher gave himself with all his earnestness to a work that stood in the way of his true calling, and that is a heavier fate than indifference would ever have been.

It is important to understand the nature of this slavery rightly, for it was not that of poverty or hunger. Goldziher suffered no material want, and the secretariat furnished him a decent existence. The slavery he felt was that of time and calling, for every morning he had to devote to the affairs of the congregation was a morning he could not give to his science, and every duty the office laid upon him was a duty that kept him from the work for which he had been born. For a man who regarded science as the aim of his life, no crueller prison was conceivable than an existence that gave him the bread and took the time. He was free of want and unfree in everything that truly belonged to him.

Nightwork, the Scholar After Closing Time

How did a man under these circumstances write the work that would make him immortal. The answer is as simple as it is sobering. He wrote it in the hours that remained to him once the affairs of the congregation were done, in the evenings and the nights, in the margins of a life that by day belonged to another. The great studies on which his fame rests, and above all the two-volume masterwork that he would publish at the end of the eighties and that forms the subject of a following article, came into being not in the sheltered calm of a chair but in the stolen hours of an overburdened man. The science that the universities of Europe would not entrust to Goldziher, he practised as it were clandestinely, after closing time, with the perseverance of one who does not let his calling be smothered by circumstance.

One must keep before one’s eyes the scope of what came into being in these stolen hours in order to be able to weigh the achievement. They were not the small contributions of an amateur who diverted himself with science in his free time, but the fundamental studies on which the modern Western knowledge of Islam is in large part built. In the years of the secretariat there ripened the labour that would issue in the two-volume masterwork of 1889 and 1890, the study that made the hadith literature an object of historical criticism and that would forever bind the name of Goldziher to the Western approach to the Islamic tradition. That a work of this reach and this influence was written not in the shelter of a chair but in the margins of an overburdened existence is a fact that the history of scholarship knows but rarely, and it compels an admiration wholly independent of the judgement upon the content of that work. One can reject the theses of Goldziher, as this theme will refute them with force in a later article, and at the same time hold in awe the strength of will with which they came into being.

There lies in this fact a greatness that one must not let be buried beneath the pity, for it testifies to a devotion to knowledge that deserves all admiration. A less driven man would have given up his scholarly ambitions under the burden of the secretariat and resigned himself to an existence of administration and community service. Goldziher did not give up. For thirty years he kept two lives standing at once, the public life of the congregational secretary and the hidden life of the scholar, and in that hidden life he brought forth an oeuvre that would determine the course of Western Islamic scholarship. It is an achievement all the more remarkable because it came into being under circumstances that would have brought most scholars to a standstill, and it shows us the iron will that lay concealed behind the calm learning of his pages.

And yet this admiration must not blind us to the tragedy, for the toll that this double life exacted from him was high. The diary that appeared after his death reveals a man who went bowed beneath the burden of his existence, who was embittered over the misjudgement he underwent and who never truly worked through the humiliation of his position. The dignified exterior that he showed to the world was a mask over an inner life ravaged by rancour and grief, and it is one of the most moving aspects of his life that he knew how to hide this pain so well that his contemporaries scarcely had any inkling of it. Only the diary, which waited more than half a century for its disclosure, showed what it had cost the scholar to remain a scholar in a world that withheld from him the place that was his due.

The Diary That Waited

That we know this inner side of Goldziher’s life we owe to a document that he himself did not intend for the public and that saw the light only more than half a century after his death. His diary, the Tagebuch, was a personal writing in which he set down the feelings he withheld from the outer world, the bitterness over the misjudgement, the rancour over the humiliation, and also the joys and the wounds of a complicated inner life. It remained long unpublished after his death in 1921, and it was Alexander Scheiber who issued it in 1978 and thereby revealed a figure of Goldziher whom his contemporaries had not known. Whoever had met Goldziher during his life knew the dignified, composed scholar who hid his suffering behind a smooth surface. Whoever reads the diary meets the wounded man behind it.

It is a curious circumstance that the most intimate testimony concerning the man who cast doubt upon the reliability of the tradition had itself to wait half a century for its own transmission, and that it came to us only through the care of a later scholar who preserved and published it. One might almost read in it a lesson about the nature of tradition itself, for Goldziher’s own words too reached posterity only because a chain of preservers passed them down faithfully, and we trust in the reliability of that transmission when we cite his diary notes as the true testimony of his heart. The tradition he distrusted in others is the tradition through which we know him. But this reflection anticipates the article devoted to his masterwork, and we return to the years of his enslaved existence.

The Offers He Declined

The misjudgement that Goldziher underwent in his own land stands in a light all the more grievous when one considers that abroad he was indeed offered the honour that Hungary refused him. The fame of the scholar reached far across the borders, and the great universities of Europe knew very well who the man was who earned his bread in Budapest as a congregational secretary. More than once a chair abroad was offered to him, a position that would have freed him at a stroke from the slavery of the secretariat and furnished him the standing and the income that his merit justified, and more than once Goldziher declined the offer.

In 1893 a chair at the university of Heidelberg was offered to him, and the year after, in 1894, the university of Cambridge called him to occupy the chair that had fallen vacant through the death of William Robertson Smith, the renowned historian of religion and Semitist. They were offers of the first rank, from institutions that belonged among the most authoritative of Europe, and they would have put an end to everything that embittered Goldziher in Budapest. He refused them both, and he remained in Hungary. He remained in the land that refused him the chair and granted him the secretariat, he remained with his congregation and his native city, and his whole life he would leave Hungary only for short spells to attend academic gatherings, the congresses of Orientalists that we encountered in the first part of this theme.

The Cambridge chair deserves a moment of attention, for it links Goldziher with one of the figures who had shaped the study of religion in the English-speaking world. William Robertson Smith had been a Scottish scholar who had applied the historical-critical method to the Old Testament and to the early religion of the Semitic peoples, and who had for that been persecuted by the church of his fatherland before Cambridge offered him a refuge. When he died in 1894, his chair fell vacant, and the university turned to Goldziher as the man best able to fill it. That one of the most prestigious chairs of the English-speaking world was offered to the Budapest congregational secretary measures the distance between the fame he enjoyed abroad and the misjudgement he underwent at home, and it makes his refusal all the more enigmatic. He had seen the door to freedom and honour standing wide open, and he had closed it himself.

Why a man declined the deliverance that was offered him and chose the prison that enslaved him is a question that reaches into the very heart of Goldziher’s character. The answer lies partly in his Hungarian patriotism, for he was a patriot who had bound his fate to that of his country and who could not bring himself to abandon his fatherland and his community, however bitterly that fatherland treated him. It lies partly in his attachment to the Jewish community of Pest, which needed him as secretary and which, despite everything, offered him a home. And it lies perhaps also in a pride that refused to flee from the misjudgement, that would not grant the land that wronged him the satisfaction of having driven him out. Whatever the precise proportion of these motives, the fact remains that Goldziher denied himself the deliverance that others offered him, and that he in part chose to go on bearing the burden he carried. The slavery had been imposed upon him by the world. That he did not flee it when the chance offered itself was his own choice, and it makes the tragedy more human and no less heavy.

Freedom, Once

The redemption came only late, and it came with a bitterness that even the joy could not wholly dispel. In 1905, when Goldziher was fifty-five years old and had borne the secretariat for thirty years, the full chair in Semitic philology at the university of Budapest was at last conferred upon him and he became the head of the department that had been promised to him a generation earlier. A year before, the university of Cambridge had already made him an honorary doctor, one of the many foreign honours that poured down over his late years, but it was only this chair in his own city that gave him back the freedom of which he had so long been deprived. He could now lay down the secretariat, he could devote his days to science, and the prison of thirty years fell at last from him.

One may ask what it means for a man to receive at fifty-five at last what had been promised to him at twenty-five, and the answer is not joy alone. The chair that was conferred upon him in 1905 was no beginning but a late redress, and the years he had wished to devote to science and that the secretariat had swallowed did not come back. A young scholar who receives his chair stands at the foot of a life that stretches out before him. Goldziher stood at the foot of his old age, with the greater part of his working life behind him, and the freedom he at last obtained was the freedom of a man who received it too late still to enjoy it to the full. It is this undertone of too late, of a justice that came only when it had already lost its full worth, that marks his late years and that lends even his triumphs a shadow.

On the day that he took leave of the office that had so long enslaved him, Goldziher reached for his diary, and there, on the first of July of that year, he wrote the words that form the counterpart of the bitter note with which everything had begun. From today, he wrote, I am a free man, and he added that he was rid of the filthiest bond that had ever crippled the life of a scholar. Let one read these two diary notes beside each other, the first from 1876 and the second from 1905, and one has in two sentences the history of thirty years. It is now settled that I shall be a slave. From today I am a free man. Between those two sentences lay a human life, the best years of a scholar, consumed in the service of an office that had been forced upon him by a world that granted him no better place.

The pen that wrote these words must have weighed heavier in the hand of the fifty-five-year-old than joy alone would suggest, for the freedom he at last regained was the freedom of a man whose best years had been robbed. There is in the brevity of that second note something that lets the decades of pent-up bitterness show through, a relief that does not exult but breathes, the breathing of one who may at last lay down a burden he has carried too long and only then feels how heavy it had been all that time. The scholar who wrote this was no longer a young man who had still to conquer the world but a man advanced in years who looked back on what it had cost him to remain a scholar, and the freedom therefore tasted to him not as a triumph but as a late and incomplete righting of a long-drawn-out wrong.

The Excluded Man Who Was Included

Now that we have surveyed these dark years, we return to the insight with which this article began, for the case of Goldziher confronts us with a question that breaks through the easy understanding of Orientalism. We are inclined to connect the distortion of the Western gaze upon Islam with power, with the self-assurance of the ruler who judges the subject from above, and that connection is, in the case of Snouck and colonial science, entirely justified. But Goldziher was no ruler. He was himself an excluded man, a man who was tolerated by the ruling culture of Europe and not admitted, who knew the humiliation of misjudgement in his own flesh, and who all his life remained on the side of the colonised and the oppressed. If the distortion had been solely a matter of power, then this man of all men should have been spared it.

And yet he was not, for Goldziher too, the excluded man, held the Islamic revelation at a distance and treated the living tradition as a historical residue. The man who on the exalted Friday in Cairo had knelt among the devout and who had called Islam the only religion that could satisfy the philosophical mind was the same man who would write the work that debased the hadith in the eyes of the West. His exclusion did not free him from the distortion, and that is precisely the proof toward which this theme has been driving. The false mirror is not an instrument that only the powerful wield. It is the method itself, the way of looking that will read the revelation exclusively as the fabrication of its own time, and that way of looking distorts in the hands of the ruler and in the hands of the oppressed alike. Whoever looks through the method sees always the time and never the revelation, indifferent whether he looks from above or from below.

There lies in this insight also a curious reconciliation, and it is well to name it at the close of this human article. The world that excluded Goldziher was the civilised, enlightened, scientific world of Christian Europe, and the world that included him, that admitted him as the first non-Muslim to its holiest lessons and that treated him with a hospitality he found nowhere else, was the Islamic world he studied. The excluded man was included by precisely the tradition he held at a distance, and one cannot escape the impression that there lived in his heart an awareness of this paradox, an awareness that was the source both of his lifelong love for Islam and of the longing that never ripened into surrender. He had tasted the hospitality and the door had opened for him, and yet he chose the study over the threshold.

We have followed Goldziher through his darkest years, from the closed door of 1876 to the late freedom of 1905, and we have seen the man who lay concealed behind the scholar, with his bitterness, his perseverance and his unresolved longing. We have built the sympathy that honesty requires, for without it the next article would become an indictment instead of a weighing. In that next article we enter the study where the great work came into being, and we take up the masterwork that Goldziher wrote in the stolen hours of his enslaved years, the work that debased the hadith literature for the West and that raises the heaviest question of this whole theme. We shall approach it with the warmth we have gathered here, and with the severity that truth demands, for only he who has loved the man may honestly weigh his work.

Sources

• Ignác Goldziher, Tagebuch, ed. Alexander Scheiber, Brill (1978)
• Róbert Simon, Ignác Goldziher: His Life and Scholarship as Reflected in his Works and Correspondence, Brill / Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1986)
• Raphael Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary: A Translation and Psychological Portrait, Wayne State University Press (1987)
• Memorial Website Ignaz Goldziher, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (goldziheren.mtak.hu)
• 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)