The First Scholars
Academe put up the most formidable barriers to Jewish participation — barriers that stood well into the nineteenth century. Before the emancipation of Europe’s Jews, learned Christians did not regard them as credible authorities in matters of faith — even the false faith of Islam. Such credibility was inseparable from an adherence to the true Christian faith, and information about Islam had to be embedded in an affirmation of Christianity’s truth and Islam’s falsehood. Even in the Enlightenment, Arabic studies remained a handmaiden of theology, and in most cases served as an adjunct to the Hebrew and biblical studies of Christian theologians. The theological connection formed an insurmountable barrier to the emergence of Jewish academic authorities on Islam in Europe.
Three developments combined to break down the barrier and afford Jews a role in the rapid expansion of the European scholarly exploration of Islam. The first was the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment: Jewish scholars began to take an interest in secular history, and the place of Jewish narratives within that history. The second development was the Jewish emancipation: Jews gradually won admission to secular academic institutions, as students and professors. The third development was Europe’s secularization: Europeans increasingly sought an understanding of Islam and the Muslims freed from Christian theological dogma.
In the nineteenth century, the scope of Jewish scholarship expanded. No longer limited to traditional study of the law, it came to embrace the origins and history of the Jews, and of the peoples with which they had interacted. The new “science” of Jewish studies, emphasizing history and philology, focused also upon the history of Jews under Islam. Many European Jewish scholars first acquired Arabic and Judeo-Arabic as a basic tool for the study of medieval Jewish philosophy and history. Jewish cultural history could not be researched and written without this tool, and while Jews learned Arabic alongside non-Jews in universities, they usually did so with the different intent of studying Jewish sources. Two of the pioneers in this field were Solomon Munk (1805-67) and Moritz Steinschneider (1816-1907).24
Only a minority applied these linguistic tools to the study of Islam, usually in the first instance to Jewish-Muslim relations and Jewish elements in Islam. The theme of Islam’s debt to Judaism would be a recurrent one in the Jewish study of Islam, precisely because Jewish scholarship, following Hegel, had settled upon monotheism as the great contribution of the Jews to world civilization. In 1833, Abraham Geiger (1810-74), a brilliant young rabbi from Frankfurt, published a book entitled Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?, analyzing the Prophet Muhammad’s adaptations from Judaism. (The original Latin thesis was written for a competition at the University of Bonn, where it took the prize.) Geiger’s adept handling of the sources and his careful analysis won him widespread praise among the handful of scholars then devoted to the academic study of Islam.
As Jacob Lassner points out in his study for this collection, Geiger overstated the case for Islam’s borrowing from Judaism. But the book has been rightly called the dawn of historical research on Islam, and Geiger’s approach to the relationship of Islam to other religions retained its validity for a century. No less important, it introduced a tone of respect into the study of Islam — so much so that Geiger came under some criticism from Christian colleagues, particularly for assuming the sincerity of the Muslim prophet. Muhammad, he wrote, “seems to have been a genuine enthusiast who was himself convinced of his divine mission.” His conclusion: "The harsh judgment generally passed upon him [by Europeans] is unjustifiable."25 This caused something of a stir, and in an otherwise favorable review of Geiger’s book, the French scholar Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838), founder of modern Arabic studies, felt compelled to insist that Muhammad was a "skilled imposter."26
Geiger, however, was not destined to become a historian of Islam. He applied his immense talents to building the intellectual foundations of Reform Judaism, applying the same source-critical techniques to Jewish origins. Nonetheless, Geiger remained a partisan of Islam, especially in comparing the experience of Jews under Islam and Christianity. In 1865, he contrasted Islam, which "always left itself favorable to the cultivation of science and philosophy, with a Christian Church that increasingly nourished a repugnance of science and reason."27 This was a clear voice of dissent in a Europe where Islam continued to be regarded as inimical to science and reason.
Only a handful of Jewish scholars, formed in the “science of Judaism,” went still further, and devoted themselves fully to Islamic studies. A German Jewish contemporary of Geiger’s was the first to do so. Gustav Weil (1808-89) was born in Sulzburg, Baden, to a rabbinical family. Like his forebears, he was to have been a rabbi, and he studied Talmud under his grandfather in Metz. But he abandoned this at the first opportunity, entering the University of Heidelberg at the age of twenty. There he studied philology and history, as well as Arabic. In 1830 he went to Paris to study under Silvestre de Sacy, and from there he accompanied the French forces which occupied Algeria, as a correspondent for an Augsburg newspaper. In 1831 he proceeded to Cairo, where he spent more than four years teaching French at the new Egyptian medical school established by Muhammad 'Ali Pasha (r. 1805-49) and run by the French physician Antoine Barthélémy Clot-Bey (1799-1867). In Egypt he perfected his Arabic and acquired Turkish and Persian. After some months in Istanbul, he returned to the University of Heidelberg, where he served as a librarian for almost twenty-five years. He was appointed a professor in 1861.
In 1843, Weil published a life of Muhammad entitled Mohammed der Prophet. Lewis describes this work as the first Western biography of Muhammad "that was free from prejudice and polemic, based on a profound yet critical knowledge of the Arabic sources, and informed by a sympathetic understanding of Muslim belief and piety. For the first time, he gave the European reader an opportunity to see Muhammad as the Muslims saw him, and thus to achieve a fuller appreciation of his place in human history."28 Weil achieved this through an exacting and exhausting use of manuscripts then available in Europe.
Although trained in philology, Weil came to regard himself as a historian of Islam, who took his inspiration from Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886). The Rankean influence was most notable in Weil’s five-volume *Geschichte der Chalifen *(1846-62). A contemporary French scholar described this work as "the first complete history of the caliphate, written according to the demands of European criticism and composed from the original sources… the authors are controlled by each other, the facts discussed and the authorities cited."29 Weil reproduced the narrative style of his Arabic sources, resulting in an account that was neither dramatic nor analytical — a critic once described it unkindly as ledern, dull. But Weil’s work nonetheless represented an advance in its dispassion and detachment.
Another Jewish scholar, Hartwig Derenbourg (1844-1908), achieved something similar in making possible a more sympathetic understanding of the Muslim view of the Crusades. The Paris-born Derenbourg, son of a specialist in Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew, studied Arabic in Leipzig. He then taught it in Paris, and in 1885 was appointed to the new chair of Islamic studies at the École des langues orientales. In 1880, while cataloguing Arabic manuscripts in the library of the Escorial, he discovered the autobiography of Usama ibn Munqidh, a twelfth-century writer and diplomat from Syria, who left a vivid and very human account of Muslim life at the time of the Crusades. Derenbourg published the text in 1886, and a French translation in 1889. Derenbourg also would be remembered for the direction he gave to one of his last students, Louis Massignon (1883-1962). In 1907, Massignon read Muslim mystical texts with Derenbourg, who encouraged him to take up the tenth-century mystic Hallaj as his thesis subject. Derenbourg died before the thesis was completed, and Massignon dedicated his thèse complémentaire, a lexicon of Muslim mysticism, to Derenbourg’s memory.30