The Good Orientalists in Westernness
The Good Orientalists in Westernness
An earlier, abridged version of one section in this chapter was published as “Deutscher Ori-
entalismus und Identitätspolitik: Das Beispiel Ignaz Goldziher.” In Der Orient: Imaginationen in
deutscher Sprache. Lena Salaymeh, Yosef Schwartz and Galili Shahar (eds.). Göttingen: Wallstein
Verlag; Tel Aviv: Minerva Institut für deutsche Geschichte Universität Tel Aviv, 2017, 140 – 157. An
abridged French version of one section was also published as “Goldziher dans le rôle du bon
orientaliste. Les méthodes de l’impérialisme intellectual.” In The Territories of Philosophy in
Modern Historiography. Catherine König-Pralong, Mario Meliadò and Zornitsa Radeva (eds.).
Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2019, 89 – 103. For their comments and feedback on this piece,
I thank Gil Anidjar, Daniel Boyarin, Lahcen Daaïf, Yaacob Dweck, Simon Goldhill, Emily Got-
treich, Rhiannon Graybill, Ira Lapidus, Assaf Likhovski, Maria Mavroudi, Ralf Michaels,
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Yosef Schwartz, Galili Shahar, and Yaacov Yadgar.
Noah De Lissovoy and Raúl Olmo Fregoso Bailón. Coloniality. In Keywords in radical philoso-
phy and education: common concepts for contemporary movements. Derek R. Ford (ed.). Leiden,
Boston: Brill Sense, 2019, 83 – 97.
María Marta Quintana. Colonialidad Del Ser, Delimitaciones Conceptuales. (Editorial Biblos
Lexicón, 2008). http://www.cecies.org/articulo.asp?id=226 (02.03. 2022).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110728422-007
106 Lena Salaymeh
Examples include John M. Efron. From Mitteleuropa to the Middle East: Orientalism through a
Jewish lens. Jewish Quarterly Review 94:3 (2004): 490 – 520; John M. Efron. German Jewry and the
allure of the Sephardic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015; Michel Espagne, Perrine
Simon-Nahum and Sophie Basch. Passeurs d‘Orient: les Juifs dans l‘orientalisme. Paris: Éditions
de l’éclat, 2013; Ottfried Fraisse. Ignác Goldzihers monotheistische Wissenschaft: zur Historisier-
ung des Islam. Gö ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014; Ottfried Fraisse. From Geiger to Gold-
ziher: historical method and its impact on shaping Islam. In Modern Jewish scholarship in Hun-
gary: “the science of Judaism” between East and West. Tamás Turán and Carsten Wilke (eds.).
Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016, 203 – 222; Susannah Heschel. German Jewish scholarship on Islam as
a tool for de-Orientalizing Judaism. New German Critique 39:3 (2012): 91– 107; Dietrich Jung. Is-
lamic studies and religious reform: Ignaz Goldziher – a crossroads of Judaism, Christianity and
Islam. Der Islam 90:1 (2013): 106 – 126; Martin Kramer. Introduction. In The Jewish discovery of
Islam: studies in honor of Bernard Lewis. Martin Kramer (ed.). Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center
for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, 1999, 1– 48.
Throughout this piece, I use the term “identity” as a shorthand to refer to belonging. On the
historical and conceptual complexities of Jewish identity, see, for example, Shaye J. D. Cohen.
The beginnings of Jewishness: boundaries, varieties, uncertainties. Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 2009; Shlomo Sand. The invention of the Jewish people. Yael Lotan (trans.). London:
Verso, 2009; Michael L. Satlow. Defining Judaism: accounting for “religions” in the study of re-
ligion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74:4 (2007): 1– 23; Daniel Boyarin. Judaism:
the genealogy of a modern notion. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2019. On the abuse of
identity categories in Islamic studies scholarship, see Chapter 3 in Lena Salaymeh. The begin-
nings of Islamic law: late antique Islamicate legal traditions. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2016.
For instance, Susannah Heschel observes, “The contrast between Jewish and Christian eval-
uations of Islam is striking.” Heschel, German Jewish scholarship, 105; Susannah Heschel, Orien-
talist Triangulations: Jewish Scholarship on Islam as a Response to Christian Europe. In The
Muslim Reception of European Orientalism: Reversing the Gaze. Susannah Heschel and Umar
Ryad (eds.). London: Routledge, 2019, 147– 167, 157.
108 Lena Salaymeh
aims to elucidate how methods, rather than the imagined identity of scholars,
shapes scholarship. This recent body of scholarship ignores the significance of
methods because it is authored primarily by scholars of European intellectual
history who lack the training in “Oriental studies” that is necessary for evaluat-
ing Orientalist scholarship. In addition, scholars of European intellectual history
are entirely unfamiliar with scholarship produced in the global South that criti-
cizes Orientalism in ways that defy the myths of German exceptionalism or Jew-
ish exceptionalism.¹¹ In order to identify if “German Jewish” Orientalism is a
form of coloniality, it is necessary to “go to the colony” by examining the impli-
cations of this scholarship for the study of primary sources. I will illustrate that,
despite any fine distinctions between these two subgroups of German Orientalist
scholars (“Christian” and “Jewish”), they both participated in and contributed to
coloniality by applying methods that were prevalent in their shared scholarly
communities.
I will use a case study on the scholarship of Ignaz Goldziher (1850 – 1921), a
Hungarian Jewish Orientalist who was trained in Germany and often wrote in
German, in order to demonstrate that, despite his “religious identity,” he applied
colonialist methods. Goldziher is an important case study because he is widely
considered to be representative of a “German Jewish” Orientalist tradition and
to have established the modern discipline of Islamic studies (Islamwissenschaft)
in the West.¹² Part I summarizes some of the recent scholarship that alleges the
uniqueness of “German Jewish” Orientalism, in general, and of Goldziher, in par-
Examples of this area of scholarship include Gil Anidjar. The Jew, the Arab: a history of the
enemy. Cultural memory in the present. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 192– 194, n.51;
Gil Anidjar. Semites: race, religion, literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008; Gil
Anidjar. Muslim Jews. Qui parle: critical humanities and social sciences 18:1 (Fall/Winter 2009):
1– 23; Ivan D. Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar. Orientalism and the Jews. Waltham, Massachusetts:
Brandeis University Press, 2005; Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. Orientalism, Jewish Studies, and Israeli
society: a few comments. Philological Encounters 2:3 – 4 (2017): 237– 269; Ruchama Johnston-
Bloom. Analogising Judaism and Islam: nineteenth- and twentieth-century German–Jewish
scholarship on Islam. Journal of Beliefs & Values 38:3 (2017): 267– 275.
110 Lena Salaymeh
Jung, Islamic studies and religious reform, 125 – 126; Efron, From Mitteleuropa to the Middle
East, 491.
Efron, German Jewry, 15.
Susannah Heschel. Abraham Geiger and the emergence of Jewish philoislamism. In “Im vol-
len Licht der Geschichte”: die Wissenschaft des Judentums und die Anfänge der kritischen Koran-
forschung. Dirk Hartwig, Walter Homolka, Michael J. Marx, and Angelika Neuwirth (eds.). Würz-
burg: Ergon, 2008, 65 – 86; Heschel, Orientalist Triangulations, 148.
Colonialism and the Jews. Ethan Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud Mandel (eds.). Modern Jew-
ish experience. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2017.
Jonathan Irvine Israel. Diasporas within a diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the world maritime
empires (1540 – 1740). Leiden: Brill, 2002; Albert Memmi. Portrait du colonisé: précédé du Portrait
The “good Orientalists” 111
the identity of the colonizer. More importantly, being a minority in Europe is not
the equivalent of being a subaltern in the global South.¹⁹
Second, when contemporary scholars presume that German Jewish oppres-
sion resulted in scholarship that is distinct from that of German Christian schol-
ars, they adopt a false causal assumption about the relationship between iden-
tity and scholarship. While there is always a relationship between a scholar’s
identity or circumstances and scholarship, there is no simple causal relationship
that can be imputed to all members of a particular group. Emphasizing identity-
based differences between German Christian and German Jewish scholars resem-
bles the racist project of defining the Aryan in opposition to the Semite. Marking
German Jews as outside the Orientalist discourse that dominated their intellectu-
al landscape mimics the nineteenth-century German rejection of Jews as incapa-
ble of being German and/or Aryan. The seemingly “positive” stereotype of Euro-
pean Jewish Orientalists as “natural translators” of the Islamic tradition is as
essentializing (and judeophobic) as a “negative” stereotype.²⁰
Third, many scholars falsely claim that since Jewish Orientalists identified
with Islam and were interested in productively exploring the relationships be-
tween Judaism and Islam, their scholarship did not manifest coloniality.²¹ By
way of example, Efron noted, “far from finding Islam strange and hostile, they
found it entirely familiar and symbiotically linked to Judaism.”²² Similarly, He-
schel alleged that “Islam’s function in nineteenth century German Jewish dis-
course was not part of an agenda of Orientalism; on the contrary, identifying Ju-
daism with Islam was the tool to de-Orientalize Judaism.”²³ Some scholars even
accept the notion that European Jews were “Oriental” (rather than stereotyped as
such by non-Jewish Europeans) and that the interest of European Jewish schol-
Efron, German Jewry; Bernard Lewis. The pro-Islamic Jews. Judaism: a journal of Jewish life &
thought 17:4 (1968): 391– 404.
Jung, Islamic studies and religious reform, 118; David Moshfegh. Ignaz Goldziher and the rise
of Islamwissenschaft as a “science of religion”. (PhD Dissertation, UC Berkeley, 2012), 189.
Céline Trautmann-Waller. Histoire culturelle, religions et modernité, ou: y a-t-il une “mé-
thode” Goldziher?. In Ignác Goldziher: un autre orientalisme? Céline Trautmann-Waller (ed.).
Paris: Geuthner, 2011, 115 – 138, 126.
Lena Salaymeh. “Comparing” Jewish and Islamic legal traditions: between disciplinarity and
critical historical jurisprudence. Critical Analysis of Law, New Historical Jurisprudence 2:1 (2015):
153– 172.
Boyarin proposed this idea to me during the conference What is western about the West? in
Erfurt (24– 26 October 2019).
Michael P. Rogin. Blackface, White noise: Jewish immigrants in the Hollywood melting pot. Ber-
keley: University of California Press, 2007.
The “good Orientalists” 113
Heschel emphasized that European Jewish scholars depicted Islam positively as compared to
European Christian scholars. Heschel, Orientalist Triangulations, 157.
Heschel, Orientalist Triangulations, 149.
Moshfegh, Ignaz Goldziher, 275; Heschel, Orientalist Triangulations, 157.
P. S. van Koningsveld. Scholarship and friendship in early Islamwissenschaft: the letters of C.
Snouk Hurgronje to I. Goldziher. Leiden: Rijkuniversiteit, 1985; Raphael Patai. Ignaz Goldziher and
his Oriental diary: a translation and psychological portrait. Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1987; Róbert Simon. Ignác Goldziher: his life and scholarship as reflected in his works and corre-
spondence. Budapest, Leiden: Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, E.J. Brill, 1986;
Peter Haber. Zwischen jüdischer Tradition und Wissenschaft: der ungarische Orientalist Ignac
Goldziher (1850 – 1921). Lebenswelten osteuropä ischer Juden, Bd. 10. Kö ln: Bö hlau, 2006;
Ignác Goldziher: un autre orientalisme? Céline Trautmann-Waller (ed.). Paris: Geuthner, 2011.
Efron, From Mitteleuropa to the Middle East, 513.
Nora Lafi. Goldziher vu d’Al-Azhar: ‘Abd al-Jalīl Shalabī et la critique de l’orientalisme Eu-
ropéen. In Ignác Goldziher: un autre orientalisme? Céline Trautmann-Waller (ed.). Paris: Geuth-
ner, 2011, 249 – 59.
Jung, Islamic studies and religious reform, 117 (“for the young Goldziher it was European cul-
ture which was inferior”); Efron, From Mitteleuropa to the Middle East, 519.
Savvas Pacha. Le droit Musulman expliqué: réponse à un article de M. Ignace Goldziher. Paris:
Marchal et Billard, 1896, 26. Patricia Crone mentions Goldziher’s inappropriate remark in Patri-
114 Lena Salaymeh
cia Crone. Roman, provincial and Islamic law: the origins of the Islamic patronate. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002, 102.
Suzanne L. Marchand. Ignác Goldziher et l’orientalisme au XIXe siècle en Europe centrale. In
Ignác Goldziher: un autre orientalisme? Céline Trautmann-Waller (ed.). Paris: Geuthner, 2011,
89 – 113, 89.
Trautmann-Waller, Ignác Goldziher: un autre orientalisme?.
Lawrence I. Conrad. Ignaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan: from Orientalist philology to the study
of Islam. In The Jewish discovery of Islam: studies in honor of Bernard Lewis. Martin Kramer (ed.).
Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, 1999,
137– 180; Sabine Mangold. Ignác Goldziher et Ernest Renan – vision du monde et innovation sci-
entifique. In Ignác Goldziher: un autre orientalisme? Céline Trautmann-Waller (ed.). Paris: Geuth-
ner, 2011, 73 – 88.
The “good Orientalists” 115
could disagree with Renan and still produce colonial scholarship. It is not mere
coincidence that most of the scholars who advocate for differentiating between
“German Christian” and “German Jewish” Orientalisms or who depict Goldziher
as a “good Orientalist” are not trained in a relevant field of “Oriental studies,”
such as Islamic studies. Consequently, they do not provide substantive evidence
for their claims about the distinctions between “German Jewish” Orientalism and
“German Christian” Orientalism or about Goldziher’s scholarship. In and of it-
self, this neglect of the substantive content of Orientalist scholarship constitutes
a form of coloniality. Why do scholars of European intellectual history who can-
not read Arabic presume that they can evaluate Goldziher’s scholarship in Islam-
ic studies? That is coloniality. While scholars of European intellectual history
may contextualize European Orientalism within broader European intellectual
trends, their expertise does not facilitate evaluating the coloniality of Oriental-
ism.⁴¹ By contrast, only scholars with deep knowledge of primary sources can de-
termine what aspects of nineteenth-century European Orientalism were colonial-
ity.
Tayyab Mahmud. Colonialism and modern constructions of race: a preliminary inquiry. Uni-
versity of Miami Law Review 53:4 (1999): 1219 – 46, 1227.
Ignaz Goldziher. Influence of Parsism on Islam. In The religion of the Iranian peoples. C. P.
Tiele (ed.). Bombay: “The Parsi” Publishing Company, 1912, 163 – 186, 163.
See Talal Maloush. Early ḥadīth literature and the theory of Ignaz Goldziher (PhD Disserta-
tion, University of Edinburgh, 2000). Goldziher asserted, “Muslim theologians created an ex-
tremely interesting scientific discipline – that of hadith criticism.” Ignaz Goldziher. Introduction
to Islamic theology and law. Andras Hamori and Ruth Hamori (trans.). Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1981, 39.
Goldziher, Introduction, 44.
Muʿtaz al-Khaṭīb. Raddu al-ḥadīth min jihat al-matn: dirāsah fī manāhij al-muḥaddithīn wa
al-uṣūlīyīn. Beirut: Arab Network for Research and Publishing, 2011.
Goldziher, Muslim studies, 2:141.
The “good Orientalists” 119
were unreliable. The use of source criticism in Islamic studies parallels colonial
destructions of indigenous archives. Orientalists did not recognize that the cor-
pus of tradition-reports is a historical archive because they viewed these sources
through the lens of colonial superiority.
Goldziher’s assertion that tradition-reports were historically unreliable is
considered one of his more significant contributions to Islamic studies. It has
had enduring, negative consequences for the field and it is a key demonstration
of the coloniality of his methods.⁶³ By alleging that tradition-reports merely re-
flected the socio-political and theological concerns of redactors and transmitters
who postdated the reported historical events, Goldziher colonized Islamic histor-
ical sources.⁶⁴ Like many of his scholarly contemporaries, he did not realize that
even historical sources that are contemporaneous to historical events reflect the
socio-political and theological concerns of authors and transmitters; thus, post-
dated sources cannot be presumed to be less historically reliable than contem-
poraneous ones. The claim that tradition-reports are ahistorical texts is not a
neutral or “scientific” assertion about what constitutes a valid or reliable histor-
ical source. Consequently, classifying late antique Islamic historical sources as
folklore is a form of colonial epistemicide.
Kramer, Introduction.
Goldziher, Muslim studies, 2:19 (“The ḥadīth will not serve as a document for the history of
the infancy of Islam, but rather as a reflection of the tendencies which appeared in the commu-
nity during the maturer stages of its development.”).
Salaymeh, The Beginnings of Islamic Law, Ch. 3.
Mahmud, Colonialism, 1220 (“colonialism is a relationship of domination and difference,
with race constituted as a primary marker of difference.”).
The “good Orientalists” 121
portrayed Arabs as “backward” and lacking civilization. In doing so, they relied
on a reductive caricature of Arabness, ignoring that Arabs could be Jews and
Christians, in addition to being hybrids (such as Arab Jewish-Christians or
Arab Muslim-Jews).⁶⁷ Second, based on a simultaneous denigration of Arabs
and recognition of Islam as a civilization, European Orientalists sought to iden-
tify Islam’s “origins” in a non-Arab civilization.⁶⁸ Accordingly, Orientalists con-
ceptualized Islam as having “borrowed” or been “influenced” by a preexisting
Aryan or Semitic civilization. The notion of “borrowing” is not an insult, but it
is based on false notions of inside/outside, authenticity (or purity), and cultural
ownership.
The European Orientalist project of identifying non-Arab “origins” of Islam is
a form of coloniality. European Jewish Orientalists were involved prominently in
scholarly searches for Islam’s “origins.”⁶⁹ As Heschel observed, some German
Orientalists sought to identify “Judaism’s influence in shaping Islamic belief, rit-
ual practice, and law.”⁷⁰ Put differently, some German Orientalists sought to
identify Judaism as the “original source” of Islam. Commenting in particular
on the work of Abraham Geiger, Heschel explained, “For Geiger, Islam was as-
sembled from the building blocks of Jewish ideas and religious practices.”⁷¹
Many Orientalist scholars failed to realize that many of the first Muslims were
Jews, such that the scholarly notion of cultural ownership is false. They also
did not recognize that multiple, regional traditions shared what scholars fre-
quently misidentified as “originating” in one particular pre-Islamic tradition.
Notably, Orientalist scholarship infrequently identified “borrowings” in aspects
of the Islamic tradition (including issues related to violence, women, and minor-
ities) that are criticized (or propagandized) in modern debates.⁷² Thus searching
for Islam’s “origins” in Judaism is a colonial method through and through.
Goldziher’s notion of “origins” was interwoven with his use of the method of
source criticism; in numerous writings marking Islam as not originally Arab,
Goldziher emphasized that “Whatever Islam produced on its own or borrowed
Mahmud observed that in colonial discourse, “Often categories of race, caste, tribe, nation,
language, and religion were conflated and even used interchangeably.” Mahmud, Colonialism,
1228.
Salaymeh, “Comparing” Jewish and Islamic legal traditions; Salaymeh, The Beginnings of Is-
lamic Law, Ch. 3.
Heschel, German Jewish scholarship, 93 (European Jewish scholars “created a significant
body of research on the origins of Islam, the biography of the prophet Muhammad, and Jewish
influences on the Qur’an as well as on the Hadith”).
Heschel, German Jewish scholarship, 94.
Heschel, German Jewish scholarship, 95.
Salaymeh, Legal traditions of the “Near East”.
122 Lena Salaymeh
from the outside was dressed up as hadith. In such alien form, borrowed matter
was assimilated until its origin was unrecognizable.”⁷³ Goldziher’s scholarship
contributed to “origins”-based coloniality by perpetuating implicit and explicit
assumptions of Arab “backwardness.”⁷⁴ He declared:
the religion [of Islam] has been unjustly held responsible for moral deficiencies, and intel-
lectual lacks which may have their origin in the disposition of the races. As a matter of fact,
Islam, disseminated among a people belonging to these races, has moderated rather than
caused their [Arab] crudeness. Besides, Islam is not an abstraction to be considered apart
from its historical periods of development, or from the geographical boundaries of its
spread, or from the ethnic character of its followers…⁷⁵
Goldziher also insisted, “The old Arabs had no science of genealogy – indeed
science had no part in their lives at all.”⁷⁶ He asserted that Muḥammad “pro-
claims no new ideas. He brought no new contribution to the thoughts concerning
the relation of man to the supernatural and infinite.”⁷⁷ Like many of his Orien-
talist contemporaries and like European colonizers, Goldziher viewed Arabs as
primitive and unoriginal, even while appreciating and admiring the Islamic tra-
dition.
Having depicted Arabs as incapable of establishing Islamic civilization,
Goldziher participated in the European Orientalist exercise of claiming Jewish,
Christian, or Persian “original” sources for certain aspects of Islamic civilization.
In general, he concurred with European Orientalist scholars who presumed that
Judaism and Christianity were “the sources of the information of the Qoran.”⁷⁸
Goldziher, Introduction, 40. Goldziher, Mohammed and Islam, 45 (“foreign elements have
been so assimilated that one has lost sight of their origin”); Ignaz Goldziher. Vorlesungen über
den Islam. Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1910, 43 (“wurde das Fremde,
das Erborgte bis zur Unkenntlichkeit seines Ursprungs für den Islam assimiliert”).
In addition to his work in Islamic studies, Goldziher’s methodological commitment to the
notion of borrowing is evident in his work on Hebrew mythology. See Ignaz Goldziher. Mythology
Among the Hebrews and Its Historical Development. J. Martineau (trans.). London: Literary Li-
censing, LLC, 2014; Ignaz Goldziher. Der Mythos bei den Hebräern und seine geschichtliche Ent-
wickelung. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1876. See also Moshfegh, Ignaz Goldziher.
Goldziher, Mohammed and Islam, 15 – 16; Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den Islam, 15.
Goldziher, Muslim studies, 1:177; Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien, 177 (“Eine Wissen-
schaft der Genealogie hatten die alten Araber nicht, wie bei ihnen die Wissenschaft überhaupt
keine Stelle hatte”).
Goldziher, Mohammed and Islam, 3; Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den Islam, 3 (“Sein [de l’i-
slam] Stifter, Muhammed, verkündet nicht neue Ideen. Den Gedanken über das Verhältnis des
Menschen zum Übersinnlichen und Unendlichen hat er keine neue Bereicherung gebracht”).
Goldziher, Influence of Parsism, 177 (citing Abraham Geiger); Ignaz Goldziher. Islamisme et
Parsisme. In Gesammelte Schriften. Hildesheim: Olms, 1970, 232– 260, 252.
The “good Orientalists” 123
He declared, “it is mostly the assimilation of foreign influences which mark the
most important moments of its [Islam’s] history.”⁷⁹ He alleged that Muḥammad
learned from his “original teachers, the Christian ruhbān (monks) and the Jewish
aḥbār (scholars of scripture).”⁸⁰ Presuming “foreign influence,” Goldziher assert-
ed, “It was the immediate and permanent contact with Sasanian culture which
gave to the Arabs…the first impulse which permitted the expansion of a deeper
intellectual life.”⁸¹ And if this were not enough, Goldziher further insisted, “there
would be no Arab historians if the first impulse had not been received by Arab
litterateurs from Persia, and that it was this impulse which led them to make re-
searches and preserve the historic memory of their own nation. The ante-Islam-
ian [pre-Islamic] Arabs were devoid of all sense of history.”⁸² He also appeared to
blame Persian society for some aspects of the Islamic tradition that he disliked.⁸³
The prevailing, colonial method of searching for Islam’s “origins” resounds in
Goldziher’s scholarship.
Many European Orientalists focused their notion of “origins” on Islamic law,
claiming that it was the product of non-Arab civilizations.⁸⁴ Goldziher’s scholar-
ship did not diverge from this prevalent assumption, as he identified Islamic
Goldziher, Mohammed and Islam, 2; Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den Islam, 3 (“so ist es zu-
meist die Assimilierung fremder Einflüsse, was die wichtigsten Momente seiner [de l’islam] Ge-
schichte kennzeichnet”). Goldziher, Influence of Parsism, 164 (“the foreign influences which had
a determining importance on the formation and development of Islam.”); Goldziher, Islamisme
et Parsisme, 233 (“nous devons […] diriger notre attention sur les influences étrangères qui eur-
ent une importance déterminante sur la formation et le développement de l’islamisme”).
Goldziher, Introduction, 10; Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den Islam, 9 (“die ruhbān (Mönche)
der Christen und die aḥbār (Schriftgelehrte) der Juden, eigentlich seine Lehrmeister”). Goldziher
also claimed that Zoroastrianism “did not fail to leave its mark on the receptive mind of the Arab
Prophet.” Goldziher, Introduction, 15; Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den Islam, 14 (“Auch das Par-
sentum […] ist nicht spurlos an dem empfänglichen Sinne des arabischen Propheten vorüberge-
gangen”).
Goldziher, Influence of Parsism, 165; Goldziher, Islamisme et Parsisme, 235.
Goldziher, Influence of Parsism, 165; Goldziher, Islamisme et Parsisme, 235.
Goldziher, Influence of Parsism, 168 (“The Moslem idea of theocracy was born in Persian at-
mosphere and in its application and practical effect, it breathed the spirit of Persian tradition.”);
Goldziher, Islamisme et Parsisme, 238 (“Vous voyez quelle influence profonde la conception sas-
sanide de l’État a exercée sur la royauté abbaside et comment elle en a fait valoir l’idée théocra-
tique. Vous voyez comment cette dernière est née dans l’atmosphère persane”). See also Ludmila
Hanisch. “Islamisme et Parsisme” après Goldziher: contributions des iranisants allemands. In
Ignác Goldziher: un autre orientalisme? Céline Trautmann-Waller (ed.). Paris: Geuthner, 2011,
139 – 147.
Wael B. Hallaq. The quest for origins or doctrine? Islamic legal studies as colonialist dis-
course. UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law 2:1 (2002– 2003): 1– 31.
124 Lena Salaymeh
law’s “origins” in Roman law.⁸⁵ In his entry on fiqh for the Encyclopaedia of
Islam, he asserted that fiqh is “like the jurisprudentia of the Romans”⁸⁶ and al-
leged “the thoroughgoing adoption of Roman law by the jurists of Islām.”⁸⁷ Gold-
ziher further assumed, “even many of the provisions of Roman Law that have
been adopted by Islām only found a place in Fiḳh through the intermediary of
the Jews.”⁸⁸ Likewise, he claimed, “The receptive character that marks the forma-
tion and development of Islām also found expression, naturally first of all in
matters of ritual…in borrowings from Jewish law.”⁸⁹ Goldziher’s numerous schol-
arly declarations about the Roman or Jewish “origins” of Islamic law were un-
substantiated and have been refuted by recent scholarship.⁹⁰
Rather than being a “scientific” approach, origins-oriented Orientalism rest-
ed on speculative observations and sloppy research. Orientalist scholars did not
provide sound evidence for their assumptions about the “origins” of Islam.⁹¹ In-
stead, European Orientalists connected the dots between idiosyncratic observa-
tions that they happened to know. For instance, Goldziher claimed that “The
number of the daily devotional repetitions, which have their germs in Judo-Chris-
tian influence, certainly goes back to a Persian origin…The five gahs of the Per-
sians, their five times of prayers, were borrowed…by the followers of the Prophet,
and henceforth the Moslem prayers were not three but five in a day.”⁹² Referring
to no more than circumstantial evidence of a prior Persian practice, he expended
Crone, Roman, provincial and Islamic law, 102– 106 (Appendix 2, “Goldziher on Roman and
Islamic law”).
Ignaz Goldziher. Fiḳh. In The Encyclopaedia of Islam: a dictionary of the geography, ethnog-
raphy and biography of the Muhammadan peoples. M. Th. Houtsma et al. (eds.). Leiden; London:
E.J. Brill; Luzac & Co., 1913, 101.
Goldziher, Fiḳh, 102; Goldziher, Introduction, 44 (“Islamic jurisprudence shows undeniable
traces of the influence of Roman law both in its methodology and in its particular stipula-
tions.”); Goldziher, Mohammed and Islam, 51 (“Even Islamic jurisprudence bears, for example,
in its methods as well as in its detailed enactments special undeniable traces of the influence of
Roman law”).
Goldziher, Fiḳh, 102.
Goldziher, Fiḳh, 102.
See Chapter 3 of Salaymeh, The Beginnings of Islamic Law. See also Hallaq, The quest for ori-
gins or doctrine?; Ze’ev Maghen. First blood: purity, edibility, and the independence of Islamic
jurisprudence. Der Islam 81:1 (2004): 49 – 95.
Goldziher did not analyze “borrowed origins” or their transformations with precision. I dis-
agree with those who do not specialize in Islamic studies and mistakenly claim that Goldziher’s
methods were rigorous. See, for example, Trautmann-Waller, Histoire culturelle, 132 (“Il analyse
de manière très précise comment des éléments d’une culture sont conservés tout en étant trans-
formés…”).
Goldziher, Influence of Parsism, 173; Goldziher, Islamisme et Parsisme, 246.
The “good Orientalists” 125
Islamic and fused with new ideas and practices in a process that may be likened
to a craft: the artwork of Islamic recycling; the recycled components parts of Is-
lamic artwork are not distinguishable.⁹⁸
By declaring Judaism a civilization that was an “origin” for Islam, German
Jewish scholars imitated the broader coloniality of Orientalist searches for Is-
lam’s “origins.” Goldziher shared the prevalent European Orientalist notion
that “Islam was subject to Jewish and Christian influences.”⁹⁹ Heschel argues,
“Goldziher intended such denials of Islamic originality not to disparage Islam
but to demonstrate its vitality – and also that of Judaism.”¹⁰⁰ Regardless of Gold-
ziher’s intentions, the scholarly search for Jewish origins cannot be disentangled
from a colonial search for “origins” and a colonial notion of authenticity or pu-
rity. Identifying Jewish origins of Islam was part of the European colonial and
Orientalist agenda. When German Jewish scholars assumed Jewish origins for
Islam, they effectively colonized Islam in order to liberate themselves from mar-
ginalization in Europe.¹⁰¹
I used the metaphor of recycled art to conceptualize the hybridity of legal traditions in Sal-
aymeh, The Beginnings of Islamic Law. See also Salaymeh, Legal traditions of the “Near East”.
Goldziher, Influence of Parsism, 164.
Heschel, German Jewish scholarship, 100.
Relatedly, Raz-Krakotzkin explains, “In a seemingly paradoxical way, the departure of the
Jews from Europe and the founding of a Jewish settlement in the East served as a basis for an
integration into the West and for the redefinition of the Jews as a European nation.” Raz-Kra-
kotzkin, Orientalism, Jewish Studies, 250.
Anidjar, Semites. By way of example, Friedrich Max Müller (d. 1900), one of the founders of
the modern discipline of comparative religion, applied philological methods to the study of re-
ligion. Salaymeh, “Comparing” Jewish and Islamic legal traditions.
David Chidester. Empire of religion: imperialism and comparative religion. Chicago, London:
University of Chicago Press, 2014. See also Tomoko Masuzawa. The invention of world religions,
or, How European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005.
The “good Orientalists” 127
tions of race and religion.¹⁰⁴ The Eurocentric and universalist notion of religion
implicitly compares and evaluates traditions in relation to Protestant Christian-
ity, judging other traditions to be inferior and in need of reform.¹⁰⁵ Like the
source-critical search for an “original text” (Urtext) and the comparative philolo-
gical search for an “original language” (Ursprache), scholars of comparative re-
ligion searched for an “original religion.” The notion of “original religion” is
based on certain aspects of Protestant Christianity; consequently, religious stud-
ies can delegitimize traditions that do not conform to Protestant Christianity or
to secularism.¹⁰⁶ Ruchama Johnston-Bloom observed that “in the work of many
German-Jewish Orientalists, we can identify a Protestant-inflected understanding
of religion” and an assumption “that superstition and tradition must be stripped
away from both religions [Judaism and Islam] to reveal the rational core of
each.”¹⁰⁷ Like the colonial archaeologists who disposed of layers of historical
materials in order to unearth biblical-era remains, Orientalists sought to dispose
of layers of the Islamic tradition in order to unearth their notion of “original
Islam.” The Orientalist method of uncovering or discovering an original religion
is a colonial method.
In line with contemporaneous scholarly trends, Goldziher searched for an
“original monotheism” in Islam, one stripped of historical layers. Jung stated
that Goldziher attempted “to discover the pure content of the monotheistic rev-
elation and to understand its ‘historical distortion’ in the development of Muslim
civilization.”¹⁰⁸ Goldziher wrote about the “original Islamic ideal”¹⁰⁹ as located
in a historical moment, claiming that “early Muslims…were close to the original
ideas of Islam.”¹¹⁰ Because he applied a Protestant Christian notion of religion,
Timothy Fitzgerald (ed.). Religion and the secular: historical and colonial formations. Lon-
don, Oakville, CT: Equinox Pub., 2007; Maurice Olender. The languages of paradise: race, reli-
gion, and philology in the nineteenth century [Les langues du paradis]. Arthur Goldhammer
(trans.). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Lena Salaymeh. Taxing citizens: socio-legal constructions of late antique Muslim identity.
Islamic Law and Society 23:4 (2016): 333 – 367; Lena Salaymeh. “Decolonial translation: destabi-
lizing coloniality in secular translations of Islamic law.” Journal of Islamic Ethics 5 (2021): 250 –
277.
Salaymeh, Taxing citizens.
Johnston-Bloom, Analogising Judaism and Islam, 268.
Jung explained, “Goldziher provides us with a paradigmatic example of… the foundation of
modern Islamic studies and religious reform.” Jung, Islamic studies and religious reform, 107. This
notion of reform corresponded to the European colonial understanding of modernizing or ration-
alizing “religion.”
Goldziher, Introduction, 120.
Goldziher, Introduction, 80.
128 Lena Salaymeh
Conclusion
For contemporary scholars in Islamic studies, discussing Goldziher’s scholarship
may seem unnecessary. Long superseded, his work is not as canonical as it once
was. And yet, criticism of Orientalism remains germane to Islamicists because
the prevailing scholarly methods and approaches in the field continue to be
forms of coloniality. In recent years, several scholars of Islam have attempted
to “explain” the Islamic tradition. Addressing Western audiences, these attempts
seek to define a historical tradition (Islam) using modern terms and concepts
On the conceptual messiness of using “secularism” and “religion” in Islamic studies, see
Salaymeh, Decolonial translation.
The “good Orientalists” 131
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