Goldziher's scholarly career has been divided into three periods: (i) to 1876/8, (ii) 1876/8-1910, (iii) 1910-1921."" The first comprised the works of his youth in
9 3 Hanisch, Briefwechsel 107, 306.
94 F. Schwally's revision of the first volume of Nöldeke's Geschichte des Qorans (Leipzig 1909) was inscribed to Goldziher and Snouck Hurgronje.
95 Tagebuch 235 and cf. Snouck Ilurgronje's letters to Goldziher dated 11.9.1904, 18.4.1908 and 25.12.1910 in van Koningsveld, Letters 235, 271, 350.
96 Simon, Letters 344 (2.11.1910).
97 For Goldziher's admiration for Nöldeke "als Gelehrter und Humanist" see the letter (1902) in Hanisch, Briefwechsel 189.
98 Simon, Letters 283 (7.8.1905). Goldziher, Tagebuch 249 refers to another letter from Nöldeke on this subject dated 15.12.1905, and cf. Simon, ibid. 187 (4.12.1893), where Nöldeke already envisages this possibility.
99 Th. Nöldeke, ZA 26 (1912), v.
l n o Th. Nöldeke to Snouck Hurgronje 27.5.1909 and 7.12.1921, quoted by Hurgronje, ZDMG
85 (1931), 281. Hurgronje responded to Nöldeke on this subject on 13.6.1909 and 30.12.1921 (P. Sj. van Koningsveld, Orientalism and Islam. The Letters of C. Snouck Hurgronje to Th. Nöldeke, Leiden 1985, 146, 296) and he communicated to Goldziher the text of Nöldeke's first letter on 17.6.1909 (van Koningsveld, Letters 308, 312).
101 This somewhat artificial yet convenient periodization is that of Németh, Acta Orientalin Hung. 1 (1950), 10-11, adopted by J. Fiick, Die arabischen Studien in Europa, Leipzig
1955, 228, 229, 231. Goldziher himself might have divided his life differently. He regarded (Tagebuch 8off.) the year 1883 as a milestone in his career, marked by the
T H E L A N G U A G E STUDIES OF IGNAZ GOLDZIHER
Hungary and his German Wanderjahre, his first ventures into Arabic literary history, his oriental tour of 1873-4 to the Levant and Egypt, his aforementioned German book on Hebrew mythology (1876) and culminated in his Hungarian History of Grammar among the Arabs (1878), to which we shall return below §7. The oriental tour played a crucial role in familiarizing Goldziher at first hand with the spoken Arabic of the Middle East, the life of its inhabitants and the contents of its libraries (see below §6 end). His acquisitions in the bookshops of Damascus and Cairo"9 also put him in very good stead. He ever after cherished the memory of his visit to the Levant and Egypt, which he regarded as the happiest time of his life,1"' rivalled only by his participation in the Eighth International Congress of Orientalists in Stockholm in 1889.104 Goldziher's general philological activity during this period has been sketched above §2; his specifically Arabic studies will be mentioned in §6.
In the second period, from 1 8 7 6 / 8 - 1 9 1 0 , G o l d z i h e r turned more and more to the study of Islam, the field in which his name will always be remembered and revered.
Towards the beginning of this second period there appeared in French Le culte des saints chez les musulmans, RHR 2 (1880), 257-351 (and separately Paris 1880) = GS VI 62 and a large Hungarian work entitled Az iszlám (Budapest 1881), which is in some ways a forerunner1 (K' of his celebrated Muhammedanische Studien, 2 vols.
(Halle 1889-1890). In the interim he published Die Zdhiriten (Leipzig 1884). The Muhammedanische Studien were followed by further landmarks: his edition of Der Diwan des Garwal b. Aus al-Hutej'a (Leipzig 1893)1"7 = GS III 50,"ls a Hungarian treatise on Arabic historiography, A történetírás az arab irodalomban [Historiography in Arabic Literature] (Budapest 1895 [in fact 1896]),'"'' the two parts
completion of Die Zdhiriten (93) and participation in the Sixth International Congress o f Orientalists in Leiden (95-96); the death of Fleischer in 1888 was another landmark for him (116).
102 Oriental Diary 120, 125, 147, 151, 152; Tagebuch 58, 60, 66, 72-73 and cf. Heller no. 40
= Az arabok I 65, no. 40a, no. 43 = GS I 347, no. 45, no. 51 = GS I 351, no. 52. The acquisition of Arabic books for the Library of the Hungarian Academy was among the official purposes of Goldziher's trip.
103 Tagebuch 55, 58, 64, 73.
104 Tagebuch 117ff., 120, 177, 189 and cf. ibid. 258 on the death of King Oscar II.
1 Called by Németh, Acta Orientalia Hung. 1 (1950), 15-16 the "Fleischer-Periode".
106 A detailed synopsis of the six chapters of the work is given by Heller no. 85, pp. 30-35.
10 Reprinted from the ZDMG. The details in Heller no. 157 are incomplete; add ZDMG 47 (1893), 43-85, 163-201.
1118 The reprint in GS has been made from the instalments published in ZDMG and thus omits the dedication to Landberg and the addenda of the separate edition.
109 Synopsis in Heller no. 179. Of this Hungarian work Goldziher did not subsequently publish a revised version in German; the Hungarian text has been reprinted in O r m o s ' s Az arabok II 635-681 and an English translation provided by DeSomogyi, GS III 359-394.
SIMON H O P K I N S
of Abhandlungen zur arabischen Philologie (Leiden 1896-1899)"" and Le livre de Mohammed ihn Toumert, Mahdi des Almohades (Alger 1903). This period ended with the classic Vorlesungen über den Islam (1910).
The third period of Goldziher's career, the last decade of his life 1910-1921, saw the appearance of the Stellung der alten islamischen Orthodoxie zu den antiken
Wissenschaften (Berlin 1916) = GS V 357, Streitschrift des Gazait gegen die Bätinijja-Sekte (Leiden 1916) and was crowned by his final masterpiece Die Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung (Leiden 1920).
Goldziher's language interests characterise the first of these three periods rather than the second and third. From the second period onwards his adventures in the study of language and languages diminished somewhat, even though his works are rich in information of linguistic interest, especially where terminology and lexicon are concerned. A shift of emphasis takes place both in his published work and in his private reading; from now on it is the phenomenon of Islam and its "innere Geschichte"111 ritual, cult, polity, society that is the focus of his attention.1" This development - the beginnings of which are already evident from what Goldziher says e.g. about his time in Leiden in 1871,11'' from his 1873 Hungarian publication on nationality among the Arabs,"4 from the clear picture he had in Cairo in 1874 of his "zu erfüllendes Studienprogramm",114 and from the significant Islamic component of Der Mythos bei den Hebräern"h - gained so much in strength that in
" " A third part was considered (Tagebuch 232, 234; Hanisch, Briefwechsel 78, 162), containing, inter alia, an edition of N a j l r a m i ' s 'Aymän al-'arab fial-jähilivya (see below n. 138) and Goldziher's Schimpflexicon (see above n. 87), but did not appear.
111 Hanisch, Briefwechsel 203.
' " The transition is indicated (I think too sharply) by Conrad. 'Pilgrim from Pest'138-139, who finds the Goldziher of the oriental diary "forever worrying over fine points of g r a m m a r " and other minutiae of traditional philology, in contrast to the later scholar, whose work was concentrated upon the "exploration of Islam as a spiritual c o m m u n i t y and culture". Note too the subtitle " f r o m orientalist philology to the study of Islam" of C o n r a d ' s aforementioned essay 'Ignaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan' in The Jewish Discovery of Islam. Goldziher himself summarizes his Islamic interests in 1902 in his letter to Hartmann published by Hanisch, Briefwechsel 186.
113 Tagebuch 50. [Goldziher states in a letter dated 10.4.1895 to Baron von Rosen, with whom he had studied in Leipzig, that his interest in Judaeo-Arabic had remained firm, even though he had worked little in the field since he "had gone over into the Muslim camp in b o d y and soul already in Leipzig"; see the obituary by V. V. Barthold in Izvestiya Rossiyskoy Akademii Nauk, Leningrad, ser. VI, vol. XVI (1922), 149 = id. Socineniya IX, Moscow 1977, 719. I. O.].
114 Heller no. 3 0 (with synopsis) = Az arabok I 1. T h e link between this and the first v o l u m e of the later Muhammedanische Studien is stressed e.g. by Németh, Acta Orientalin Hung,
1 (1950), 15.
'1 Tagebuch 71.
T H E LANGUAGE STUDIES O F IGNAZ GOLDZIHER
1897 he even declined to revise some of his deceased friend W. Robertson Smith's articles for Cheyne's Encyclopaedia Biblica "da mich der Islam vollends beansprucht"."7 In 1900 he wrote to Hartmann that "mich nichts mehr in meiner Wissenschaft interessiert als die provinzielle & individuelle Ausprägung des Islam", and in 1906, having completed his edition of the Judaeo-Arabic Kitäb ma'áni al-nafs (below §5c), he declares his wish to devote the remainder of his life to Islam alone."8
It was not, however, Goldziher's scholarly temperament alone that was responsible for the shift of emphasis. The beginning of the second period of his career coincided with the start of his miserably unhappy full-time employment, from ist January
1876, as secretary to the Neolog Israelite congregation of Pest, from which wretched position he found release only in 1905 when he received the salaried university appointment which by rights and by expectation he should have had some thirty years before."9 The Hungarian Academy of Sciences elected Goldziher to its membership in 1870;"" the university, however, because of religious prejudice and petty factional squabbles, would not agree to grant him Habilitation.171 In his secretarial post leisure for study was no longer available to him as it had been in the past, and his reading had consequently to be restricted and channelled into the direction of his main priorities,122 those where he knew his major scholarly strength to lie. Thus we find him writing to Nöldeke in 1896 that he no longer has the leisure to read the large quantities of Persian which he once did,12 ' and in 1910, apropos of the Neue Beiträge zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft (the second chapter of which deals with loanwords into and out of Ethiopic). he states that force of circumstances had allowed him little opportunity to read Ethiopic since 1877.124 [It was the same with Mandaic. I.O.I.125 One may take the fate of Goldziher's Persian, Ethiopic and
116 Rightly pointed out by Conrad, Tgnaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan' 150.
117 Tagebuch 214-215; he did, however, undertake a f e w months later (ibid. 217 and cf.
Simon, Letters 266) to annotate Robertson Smith's Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia for its second edition (London 1903).
118 Hanisch, Briefwechsel 150-151.
119 Tagebuch 244-245; Simon, Letters 279.
12,1 Tagebuch 88, 93; for his further progress in this institution see ibid. 137-138, 243-244.
121 Tagebuch 45 and cf. 182. For the issues involved here see Simon, Letters 39ff., 49-52;
Conrad, 'Pilgrim from Pest' 125-127; Tgnaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan' 150 and 174 n. 86.
122 Tagebuch 92-93, 110.
123 Simon, Letters 213. In 1898, however, he found time to read Jaläl al-DTn al-Rúml (Hanisch, Briefwechsel 117).
124 Simon, Letters 344 referred to above n. 60. Goldziher had already mentioned the rustiness of his Ethiopic in a letter to Hartmann in 1894 (Hanisch, Briefwechsel 22).
125 [In an unpublished letter to Nöldeke dated 29.3.1916 Goldziher writes: "Aus dem Mandäischen bin ich seit langem hinausgekommen. 1876 habe ich Ihre Mand. Grammatik bald nach ihrem Erscheinen ernstlich studiert. Durch die bekannten, 30 Jahre währenden
SIMON HOPKINS
Mandaic studies as indicative of his general circumstances and suppose that his private reading in other languages too was curtailed for the same reason.'2 6 He did not, however, entirely lose contact with languages outside his principal field of interest; thus, in 1911 he taught Syriac at the University of Budapest and was eager to read the latest publication of Sachau on the Elephantine papyri.127