Goldziher ever remained a philogogist in the wider sense of the word. Language was for him first and foremost a key with which to unlock the secrets of literary texts and to gain access to the culture which produced them. His studies were always centred
77 See the accounts by Simon, Letters 77-87 and Conrad, Tgnaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan', in particular 142-150.
78 Mythology Among the Hebrews and its Historical Development, translated ... with addi-tions by the author, by Russell Martineau, London 1877. Max Müller was instrumental in the appearance of this publication, which was revised by Goldziher, supplied with an index and an appendix of two essays by Steinthal. Vorlesungen über den Islam (Heidelberg 1910) was the only other of Goldziher's monographs to be translated in toto during his lifetime (into Hungarian, Russian, English and French = Heller nos. 323, 325, 363, 372 respectively); today, of course, his most significant work is available in languages other than German and Hungarian, including Arabic and Hebrew renderings of the Vorlesungen, as well as a new translation thereof into English (Princeton 1981).
79 See e.g. F. Hommel, Die Namen der Säugetiere bei den südsemitischen Völkern, Leipzig 1879, 4 n. 6, and in more detail idem, Die semitischen Völker und Sprachen I, Leipzig 1883, 64-65. The favourable notice accorded the book by Steinthal in ZJVP 9 (1877), 272-303 was exceptional. Pace Conrad, Tgnaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan' 148. 1 have not noticed that the book had a particularly favourable reception in England (despite Tagebuch 87).
80 Tagebuch 88-89.
81 Conrad, Tgnaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan' 174 n. 85 seems to overstate the continuing importance of Der Mythos. Goldziher's later survey articles on Hebrew myth etc., e.g.
Heller nos. 72, 75, 86, 87, 195, are significantly not in the vehicle of his international scholarship, viz. German, but in Hungarian.
THE LANGUAGE STUDIES OF IGNAZ GOLDZIHER
firmly in the texts themselves, the literary traditions in which they arose and to which they led. This characteristic is already very well developed in Sichat-Jiczchak, the essay on Hebrew prayer published when he was twelve years of age. In this work he uses a large number of mediaeval sources in order to illustrate the history and practice of the Hebrew liturgy. The language of that liturgy is of much less interest to him, but when matters of Hebrew language arise in the course of the argument, Goldziher, with remarkably sure touch, gives them the philological attention they require. Thus, on p. 8 he shows how the foreign root "poet" has been integrated into the Hebrew language according to the noun patterns (qattäl), ICD (qatlän) and DVD (qittül). This morphological explanation of the words themselves is followed on pp. 9-11 by a criticism of the Hebrew language of the paytanim, already in 1862 based in characteristic Goldziher fashion on a generous selection of quotations from the sources.
Goldziher delighted in exploiting the possibilities afforded by a rich and varied tradition of literature. For this reason, one assumes, he never showed much interest, for example, in Semitic epigraphy, a field in which much of the material is by its very nature fragmentary and which could never have given him much intellectual satisfaction. It was for the same reason that he collected Arabic vocabulary from the huge number of Arabic texts which he read, but seems not to have recorded grammatical phenomena on the same scale; the lexicon of a language is important to the historian of culture and ideas in a way that morphology and syntax are not.
Goldziher followed the practice of other 19th century Arabists, e.g. Th. Nöldeke, and was accustomed to note new words and interesting vocabulary in the margins of Freytag's Lexicon Arabico-Latinum. After Goldziher's death in 1921 his copy of Freytag's Lexicon had a chequered history. For many years it was considered lost; it was unavailable to the editors of the Wörterbuch der klassischen arabischen Sprache. Goldziher's annotated copy of the four volumes of the Lexicon, however, has recently come to light in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.82
[The book did not reach Jerusalem in 1924 together with the bulk of the library, but was retained by Goldziher's widow (d. 1925) and son Károly Goldziher (d. 1955), together with interleaved copies of his own works containing profuse additions, notes and corrections for eventual revised editions. In March 1944, or shortly thereafter, with the German occupation of Hungary, the confinement of the Jews to the ghetto8' and the impending approach of the battle front, Károly Goldziher delivered it to J. Somogyi, in whose custody it survived the military operations, unlike the rest of the books and documents, which were destroyed during the siege of Budapest. In all probability Károly did not present Goldziher's Freytag as a gift, but
82 Könyvlcltár 5761/1986 sz. Shelfmark 743.391.
83 [Together with a n u m b e r of outstanding Jewish scholars Károly enjoyed the protection of the Regent, i.e. he did not have to move into the ghetto; see K. Frojimovics, G.
Komoróczy, V. Pusztai & A. Strbik, Jewish Budapest. Monuments. Rites, History, Budapest 1999, 403. 1. O.].
S I M O N HOPKINS
only for safe keeping; he appears to have reclaimed it after the end of the war.
Somogyi's wording is not fully clear when he states in 1951 that "Fortunately, however, there has remained safe and intact, in the library of the present writer, his hand-copy of Freytag's Lexicon arabico-latinum" M This seems to mean not that the book had become Somogyi's legal property, but that it survived the war among the books of his own library - in fact, he walled it up in the wine-cellar of the family home.8 5 It can be assumed that Károly, having regained his father's copy of Freytag, subsequently donated it to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to be kept with the rest of the Goldziher Nachlass. In any case it was already there in the 1950s.
According to the late Professor Károly Czeglédy (19 13-1996 )85a the editors of WKAS approached the Academy about Goldziher's copy of Freytag in the 1950s but the negotiations fell through. I. O.].
To Somogyi belongs the credit of having thus ensured the survival of Goldziher's copy of Freytag. He is also, as far as I know, the only scholar to have made use of Goldziher's lexical marginalia: he published from this source some of Goldziher's additions to the letter alif in Acta Orientalia Hung. 4 (1954), 320-321 by way of an appendix to his review of Nöldeke's Belegwörterbuch.
The marginal annotations (which are mostly in German, with only a few in Hungarian) to his copy of Freytag by no means represent the whole of Goldziher's lexical collections; many additional observations were included in his published works, sometimes in detail in the text of his books and articles, sometimes added casually in the footnotes. As examples one may mention here his remarks on the usage of the word LSJ^ jn ZDMG 53 (1899), 650-652 = GS IV 229-231, on the root ' - « " t o reap heavenly reward" in REJ 38 (1899), 271-272 = GS IV 171-172, on the magical term SJ* in ZATW 20 (1900), 37 or cuj^k. jn the Nöldeke Festschrift I 320
n-3 = GS V 49.
The frequency and ease with which Goldziher was able to produce examples of key words imply that he kept ordered lexical files on topics that interested him. A few references to such files occur in his correspondence with Hartmann, e.g. in a letter of 1897, in which Goldziher mentions that he had compiled from his own
84 Muslim World 41 (1951), 203 n. 3.
85 Muslim World 51 (1961), 12.
88a On him see I. O r m o s , 'Biographical Notice' in: Studies in Honour of Károly Czeglédy on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, The Arabist 8 (1994), xiii-xv; Id., 'In memóriám Czeglédy Károly' Keletkutatás (1996 - 2002), 301-305.
8 6 This is perhaps the place to mention a similar publication in the field of Hebrew.
Goldziher's annotations to the first part of the letter aleph of Levy's Neuhebräisches und chaldäisches Wörterbuch über die Talmudim und Midraschim, 4 vols. (Leipzig
1876-1889) were published by I. Elbogen, 'Bemerkungen Ignaz Goldzihers zu Levys Neuhebräischem Wörterbuch', MGWJ 78 (1934), 34-41. These Bemerkungen have been reissued at the end of the reprint of L e v y ' s dictionary, newly titled Wörterbuch über die
Talmudim und Midraschim, Darmstadt 1963, IV, 749-756.
THE LANGUAGE STUDIES OF IGNAZ GOLDZIHER
reading "ein arabisches Schimpfiexicon", a collection which might, he says, have been included in a further instalment of Abhandlungen zur arabischen Philologie; he also mentions the completion of a substantial "Folklore" study, the object of which was to elucidate certain obscure usages in old Arabic literature, and "mein strafrechtliches Bündel".8 In reply to an enquiry by Hartmann about the term j ^ j , Goldziher states "... habe ich sowohl meine Stellen zu j j sowie den Art. in LA angesehen", as a result of which inspection he rejects the meaning "Lebensgenuss"
which Hartmann had proposed.88 Goldziher's lexical collections are of such scope and quality that a glossary compiled from his publications, the four volumes of his Freytag and his unpublished writings would constitute a highly valuable contribution to Arabic lexicography, more particularly since theology and jurisprudence are areas not well covered in the existing Arabic dictionaries.8'1
Goldziher's philology was in general of the "higher" rather than the "lower"
variety. Accordingly, his Abhandlungen zur arabischen Philologie, i vols. (Leiden 1896-1898) is not a contribution to Arabic grammar similar in content to a more recent work of comparable title, H. Fleisch's Traité de philologie arabe, 2 vols.
(Beyrouth 1961-1979), but is first and foremost an investigation into the origin and growth of hi/a' poetry in Arabic, followed in the second volume by an edition of Abü Hätim al-Sijistäni's Kitäb al-mu'ammarín, preceded by a remarkable introduction (pp. ix-xcii) on the theme of longevity in Arabic and other literatures.'"' Goldziher was much less interested in the functioning of grammatical mechanisms and in comparative Semitic grammar than some of his great contemporaries, e.g. Fleischer, Nöldeke, Praetorius or Barth.
This is not, however, to say that he took no interest at all in philology in the narrower sense. On the contrary, he most certainly did. It is true that - excepting the aforementioned revision of the Hebrew grammar of Ballagi - he did not produce a formal description of any Semitic language or publish any strictly grammatical work, but from his early youth he was very well read indeed in this area and he continued throughout his life to enjoy the study of technical linguistic literature. For example, he was an enthusiastic reader of Abü Zayd's Kitäb al-nawädir, whose value for the study of old Arabic dialects he emphasized and from which he made copious extracts;'" the critical collection of dialectal features from the old philological literature he considered an important task." He doubtless had tongue in cheek when he disclaimed any linguistic expertise for himself "da ich in linguistischen Fragen
8' Hanisch, Briefwechsel 78, 306, 325 respectively.
88 Hanisch, Briefwechsel 342.
8'' See M. U l l m a n n ' s foreword to the first volume of the WKAS, Wiesbaden 1970, xiv n. 12.
'"' It is indicative of the gap between the two types of "philologie" involved that Goldziher's name does not appear at all in Fleisch's "Index des auteurs cités".
'" Hanisch, Briefwechsel 23, 30-31.
L'2 Hanisch, Briefwechsel 114.
S I M O N HOPKINS
i m m e r nur Schüler sein kann", or "Ich bin sehr wenig kompetent in sprachvergleichenden Fragen mitzureden".1,1
W e should recall here his close association with two of the greatest works ever published in the field of Semitic linguistics. Nöldeke's Beiträge zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft (Strassburg 1904) bears the inscription to "Ignaz Goldziher als Zeichen der Hochachtung und Freundschaft gewidmet"'4, a dedication which was to its recipient a source of enormous pride and gratification.95 Of the same author's Neue Beiträge zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft (Strassburg 1910) Goldziher writes to Nöldeke, even before having finished the chapter on biradical substantives, that he had scarcely ever revelled ("geschwelgt") in enjoyment of a scholarly book to such an extent before.9 6 The mutual admiration of the two great scholars ran deep and was of long standing.9 7 Goldziher was Nöldeke's preferred successor to the Strassburg chair in 1 9069 8 and it was Goldziher's unique combination of sovereign c o m m a n d of linguistic detail ("lower" philology) and prodigious familiarity with the cultural milieu of Islamic texts ("higher" philology) that led Nöldeke to recognise in him an "echter Philolog",9 9 fired by the spark of genius.1""