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Islamic Studies and Religious Reform. Ignaz Goldziher – A Crossroads of

Judaism, Christianity and Islam

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DOI: 10.1515/islam-2013-0005

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106 Dietrich Jung DOI 10.1515/islam-2013-0005 Der Islam 2013; 90(1): 106–126

Dietrich Jung
Islamic Studies and Religious Reform.
Ignaz Goldziher – A Crossroads of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam1
Abstracts: In light of the dichotomous representation of the relationship between
Islam and the West, the life and work of Ignaz Goldziher appears to be an utter
anachronism. By applying the methodologies of Protestant biblical criticism to
the study of Islamic traditions, the Hungarian scholar of Islam and secretary of
the liberal Jewish community in Budapest became a crossroads of Judaism, Chris-
tianity and Islam. Personally driven by a Jewish reform agenda, he became a
founding father of modern studies on Islam. The article analyzes the complex his-
torical and political context in which Goldziher developed the field of Islamic
studies. In order to understand the origin of modern images of Islam, the article
suggests putting the rise of the discipline of Islamic studies into the context of
nineteenth century movements of religious reform.

Keywords: Goldziher, Islamic studies, religious reform, biblical criticism, Muslim

intellectuals

Dietrich Jung: Odense, University of Southern Denmark, jung@sdu.dk

Since the publication of Edward Said’s seminal book Orientalism in 1978, the
formation of Islamic studies and its representations of Islam have predominantly
been discussed in the context of European colonialism. There is hardly any doubt
that the emergence of Islamic studies as a distinct academic discipline took place
within the coordinates of the asymmetric power relations of colonialism, which
certainly left their traces in the construction of Western representations of Islam.

1 I would like to thank Götz Nordbruch, Umar Ryad and the other participants of the workshop
“Re-mapping divides and interactions: The Fusion of horizons in Middle Eastern-European intellec-
tual encounters” that took place in May 2010 at the University of Southern Denmark. The dis-
cussion at the workshop helped enormously to further develop my research for this article. I am
also grateful for the insightful comments of Catherine Schwerin and the two anonymous re-
viewers of Der Islam. Last but not least, I thank the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at
the University of Victoria, Canada, where I wrote the final version of this article.

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 Islamic Studies and Religious Reform 107

Yet the preoccupation with imperialist politics also reduced the complexities that
characterized the emergence of Islamic studies. In taking up the life and work of
Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), this article aims to present a different perspective.2
More specifically, I will suggest that an adequate understanding of the origins of
modern Islamic studies must complement Said’s perspective with an analysis of
the nineteenth century quest for religious reform. Ignaz Goldziher provides us
with a paradigmatic example of precisely this relationship between the foun-
dation of modern Islamic studies and religious reform. Moreover, Goldziher rep-
resents a prime example of the role of Jewish scholars in the foundational phase
of Islamic studies and their attempts to reconfigure the relationship among the
three monotheistic religions in light of European Christian hegemony.3
In discovering Islam as an independent field of academic research, Gold-
ziher’s pioneering work marks a turning point in the disciplinary development of
Oriental studies.4 Goldziher was a nodal point in linking nineteenth-century
Orientalism with the disciplines of comparative religion, Protestant theology and
modern Islamic studies. Applying the methods of historicist criticism to Islamic
traditions, Goldziher changed our understanding of Islamic history and laid the
foundations for the formation of Islamic studies as a modern academic discipline.
In doing so, Goldziher was a scholar of international stature. The Hungarian Jew
was a member of the Royal Asiatic Society in London, the Societé asiatique in
Paris, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft in Berlin and the Finno-Ugar-
ian Society in Helsingfors. In 1889, King Oscar II of Sweden awarded him with a
gold medal for his scholarly work at the Orientalist congress in Stockholm. Gold-
ziher held honorary memberships of the Academies of Science of Amsterdam,
Bavaria, Denmark and Prussia, and he was offered prestigious university chairs at
such universities as Cambridge, Heidelberg, Königsberg, Prague and Strasbourg,

2 It should be mentioned that Ignaz Goldziher plays only a very marginal role in Orientalism.
Said refers to him only three times in a rather superficial way, see: Edward W. Said, Orientalism,
New York, 1978, 18; 105; 209. However, to make it clear, this article does not attempt to discuss the
life and work of Goldziher in light of the ongoing “Said controversy”. For the position of this
author in this controversy, see Chapter 2, in: Dietrich Jung: Orientalists, Islamists and the Global
Public Sphere. A Historical Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam, Sheffield, 2011.
3 Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, Chicago, 1998, 20–21.
4 Carl-Heinrich Becker, “Ignaz Goldziher”, Islamstudien. Vom Werden und Wesen der isla-
mischen Welt, Band II, Hildesheim, 1967; Ulrich Haarman,: “Die islamische Moderne bei den
deutschen Orientalisten”, Araber und Deutsche. Begegnungen in einem Jahrtausend, Friedrich H.
Kochwasser and Hans R. Roemer (ed.), Tübingen und Basel, 1974; Richard Hartmann “Ignaz
Goldziher”, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 76, 1922, 285–290; Jacques
Waardenburg, L’islam dans le miroir de l’occident. Comment quelques orientalistes occidentaux
se son penchés sur l’Islam et se sont formé une image de cette religion, Paris, 1962.

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108 Dietrich Jung

as well as a professorship at the then newly opened Egyptian University (later

Cairo University) in 1905.5 Moreover, the discursive and social threads which con-
nect Goldziher with the life and work of such eminent Muslim figures as Jamal al-
Din al-Afghani (1838–1897), Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) or Muhammad Kurd
Ali (1876–1953) put the conventional wisdom about the dichotomist relationship
between Islam and the West into question.6 How are we to understand Gold-
ziher’s scholarship and the image of Islam that he bequeathed to the field of Is-
lamic studies and beyond? In which ways can a closer look at Goldziher inform
our understanding of the historical development of the discipline of Islamic
studies?
It is my contention that we find answers to these questions in the specific in-
terplay of various forms of nineteenth-century academic reasoning, quests for re-
ligious reform and the particular political situation of the Hungarian Jewry. These
three dimensions conditioned the life of Goldziher and ultimately his approach to
understanding Islam. In the following, I unfold this argument in five steps. I begin
with an examination of the scholarly and political contexts in which Goldziher’s
career developed. Even the works of the most original scholars closely reflect the
historical and structural conditions of their times. Therefore, the first section
shows in which ways Goldziher’s work was embedded in the academic worldview
of the late nineteenth century. He was instrumental in transferring the historicist
and hermeneutical methods of biblical criticism to Islamic studies and analyzed
Islam with reference to the axiomatic conceptual knowledge about modern
religion provided by liberal Protestant theology, as well as the rising fields of the
social sciences and humanities. In doing so, Goldziher represents a crucial inno-
vator in the field of Islamic studies, paving the methodological path on which
Western studies of Islam largely moved in the twentieth century. The second sec-
tion focuses on the context of Hungarian politics. Goldziher’s interest in religion
and Islam is closely linked to his position as both a sincere Jewish believer and a
Hungarian nationalist who advocated religious reform as a means for the national
integration of the Hungarian Jewry. Throughout his career, Goldziher combined
religious studies with a specific agenda for religious reform. His scholarly devo-

5 Donald Malcolm Reid, “Cairo University and the Orientalists”, International Journal of Middle
East Studies 19, 1987, 51–76. Goldziher rejected all these offers and remained in Hungary.
6 Ignaz Goldziher met Afghani on his study trip in Cairo and visited him later in his exile in Paris.
Goldziher apparently was not directly in touch with Abduh, a disciple of Afghani, however, with
some of his students. In addition, Goldziher read the journal al-Manar in which Abduh’s reform
ideas were published by Rashid Rida (1865–1935). Muhammad Kurd Ali, with whom Goldziher
met in Damascus, was a disciple of Tahir al-Jazari. Kurd Ali was a journalist and later Minister of
Education in mandatory Syria. He visited Goldziher in Budapest in February 1914.

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 Islamic Studies and Religious Reform 109

tion to Islamic studies was intimately connected to his engagement and failure
within the broader European movement of Jewish religious reform. The third sec-
tion moves to the micro-level and discusses the individual background of Ignaz
Goldziher’s engagement in Orientalist scholarship. This part deals with the ques-
tion of why Goldziher diverted his search for religious reform into the field of
Islamic studies. Then, I will take a critical look at Goldziher’s imaging of Islam in
light of the findings which the analysis of his life and work has revealed. I con-
clude by pulling together the different academic, historical and individual
threads that make the life and work of Ignaz Goldziher a peculiar crossroads of Ju-
daism, Christianity and Islam.

Biblical Criticism and Jewish Reform:

The Scholarly Context of Goldziher’s Work
In the early years of his academic career, Judaism was still an essential part of
Goldziher’s scholarly concerns. His first book, Der Mythos bei den Hebräern
(Mythology among the Hebrews and Its Historical Development), tells us a lot
about the intellectual influences that molded his scholarly approach. Published
in 1876, Der Mythos was an explicit critique of Ernest Renan’s (1823–1892) thesis of
the “myth-less Semitic mind” in Système comparé et histoire générale des langues
sémitiques (Renan 1855).7 In this thesis, Renan repeated the then very popular
“Indo-European hypothesis,” which bestowed the polytheistic culture of Aryan
peoples with a progressive character, whilst declaring the monotheistic Semites
to be immobile in time and space.8 In his critique, Goldziher took Max Müller’s
(1823–1900) comparative theory on mythology and religion as his point of depar-
ture. He constructed an evolutionary history of religion in which myths play a
necessary role as a distinct period of human development. According to this evol-
utionary theory, the history of religion is characterized by subsequent steps to-
ward pure monotheism. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are integral parts of this
process of religious evolution, and consequently all three went through a mytho-
logical past. In Goldziher’s eyes, Renan is therefore completely mistaken in his
assertion that the Hebraic world is devoid of myths.9

7 Ernest Renan, Système comparé et histoire générale des langues sémitiques, Paris, 1855.
8 Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise. Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth
Century, Cambridge, Mass., 1992, 12.
9 Ignaz Goldziher, Der Mythos bei den Hebräern und seine geschichtliche Entwicklung, Leipzig,
1876, VIII-XXVII.

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110 Dietrich Jung

With regard to his theoretical and methodological sources, Goldziher refers

in his diary to a number of leading critical Protestant theologians such as Abra-
ham Kuenen (1828–1891) and Heinrich Ewald (1803–1875). Although he read
Ewald’s Geschichte des Volkes Israel in the university library in Budapest,10 it was
his friend Moritz Kleinmann who first made him familiar with the critical biblical
studies of Graf, Kuenen and Vatke during their stay in Leipzig.11 In particular the
Grafian thesis on the Pentateuch seems to have made a remarkable impact on the
young Goldziher. Employing source-critical methods, this thesis focused on the
historicity of the Pentateuch’s documents and authors, claiming that their origins
were clearly separated by time, style and religious outlook. According to the the-
sis, several redactors gradually combined these documents later, projecting their
perspective into them in an anachronistic way.12 Together with the German theo-
logian and Arabist Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), the Dutch scholar Abraham
Kuenen was a leading proponent of this thesis, and the work of the Leiden Profes-
sor was definitive in abolishing the view “that Israel’s sacred books were the
product of divine revelation”.13
In 1904, almost thirty years after the publication of the Mythos, Goldziher
again stressed the importance of the Grafian thesis for his own work. In a letter to
Theodor Nöldeke, he described the methods of biblical criticism as an integral
part of his thought that had molded his philological consciousness.14 Apparently,
the critical reading of the Pentateuch by Kuenen and Wellhausen provided a
model for Goldziher’s hermeneutical critique of Islamic traditions. Although fas-
cinated by his Arabic teacher Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (1801–1888), who at
Leipzig University in Germany continued the strictly philological approach to
Arabic and Islamic studies that he once learnt from Silvestre de-Sacy (1758–1838),15

10 Ignaz Goldziher, Tagebuch, Alexander Schreiber (ed.), Leiden, 1978, 27.

11 Ibid., 43.
12 Ernest Nicholson, The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century. The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen,
Oxford, 1998, 29.
13 Simon John de Vries, Bible and Theology in the Netherlands: Dutch Old Testament Criticism
under Modern and Conservative Auspices, 1850 to World War I, Wageningen, 1968, 10.
14 Robert Simon, Ignác Goldziher. His Life and Scholarship as Reflected in His Works and Corre-
spondence, Leiden, 1986, 266.
15 After studying theology at Leipzig University, Fleischer spent the years from 1824 to 1828 in
Paris, where he studied Arabic under Silvestre de Sacy. His appointment to the Chair of Semitic
Languages at Leipzig University (1835) marked the eventual break-through of the scientific philo-
logical approach to Oriental Studies in Germany. He was the founding father of scientific Arabic
philology in Germany and one of the most popular Arabic teachers in Europe. See: Carl Brockel-
mann, “Die morgenländischen Studien in Deutschland”, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländi-
schen Gesellschaft, 76 (1), 1922, 3.

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 Islamic Studies and Religious Reform 111

Goldziher did not follow him in this focus on linguistics. For Goldziher, perfection
in philology was nothing more than the necessary means to write the cultural his-
tory of Islam. Rather than Fleischer or Sacy, it was the Austrian Orientalist Alfred
von Kremer (1828–1889) who inspired Goldziher’s work. In Kremer’s Geschichte
der herrschenden Ideen des Islam (1868) Goldziher found the direction for his
own research, analyzing Islamic history from a universalist perspective as a con-
tingent historical development of ideas.16 Most profoundly, however, was the
influence that the Jewish reformer Abraham Geiger (1810–74) exerted on him.
Through his work, Goldziher began to understand the approach of Germany’s
liberal Protestants, in particular the radical biblical criticism of the “Tübingen
School”.17
Growing up in a rather traditional and fully observant Jewish family, Abra-
ham Geiger became a central figure in the second generation of the Jewish En-
lightenment, the Haskala reform movement. In contrast to Protestant Christian-
ity, which had undergone theological revision, Judaism was, in Geiger’s view, in a
state of utter stagnation. The application of the same critical method to the sacred
texts of Judaism became for him an “essential prerequisite for religious reform”.
Following an apologetic path, Geiger attempted, through the critical reading of
the Bible, to reconcile modern knowledge with divine revelation. The historical
analysis of the holy scriptures of Judaism would be able to reveal their universal
message to humanity and their compatibility with the challenges of modern life.
With his reform agenda, Geiger was simultaneously challenging the Jewish
Orthodoxy and defending his faith against Christian theologians who perceived
Judaism as an obstacle to modernity.18 Moreover, Geiger adopted the methods of
Christian Protestant theology in order to put Christianity into question.19 In defin-
ing Jesus as a central figure in Judaism, Geiger told the “story of Christian origins
from a Jewish perspective”, an act of Jewish empowerment not well received by
Germany’s Protestant theological establishment.20
Ignaz Goldziher described the encounter with Abraham Geiger’s writings as a
revelation.21 Through Geiger’s work and his reception of critical Protestant think-
ing, Goldziher became closely acquainted with the all-penetrating ideas of his-
toricism, cultural evolutionism, religious rationalism and social differentiation.

16 Simon, 31–33.
17 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 39.
18 Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism, Oxford,
1988, 203.
19 Heschel, 65.
20 Ibid., 4.
21 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 33; 123.

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112 Dietrich Jung

He made these core ideas of nineteenth-century intellectual life the foundations

on which his Islamic studies rested. Later in his interpretations of Islamic tradi-
tions, Goldziher was closely following Geiger’s approach to understanding the
inner striving of a historical period through a historical critical reading of holy
texts.22 Moreover, Geiger’s Jewish reform agenda delivered the framework for
Goldziher’s life-long search for a third way in making possible the national inte-
gration of the Hungarian Jewry between the outer poles of orthodox rejection and
secularizing assimilation. In his frequently uttered disgust for religious ortho-
doxies, we can detect the severe and polemic criticism with which Geiger covered
varieties of Jewish and Christian orthodoxies throughout his life.23 The specific
situation of the Jewish community in Hungary, however, eventually led to the fail-
ure of Goldziher’s reformist aspirations.

Hungarian Nationalism and Jewish Reform:

The Political Context of Goldziher’s Work
The German developments served in general as a model for the Jewish reform
movement in Hungary. The influence of reform-minded German rabbis predomi-
nantly spread via private contacts, the exchange of letters, and the distribution of
German Jewish newspapers. German publications found an extensive readership
among educated Hungarian Jews who were not separated from the German Jewry
by linguistic borders.24 In sharp contrast to Germany, however, the reform move-
ment in Hungary found itself in a dilemma regarding cultural and national inte-
gration. The Hungarian Jews formed a peculiar mixture of Western and Eastern
European Jews. This heterogeneous group was the result of several waves of im-
migration from Hungary’s neighbouring countries in the West and Galicia that
took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and brought together the
Western reform culture of the Haskala with the orthodox culture of the Eastern
European shtetl. At the beginning of the twentieth century, approximately
900,000 Jews lived in Hungary, of which 65,000 settled in Budapest. Since 1867
the Jewish community had had full political and legal rights, with religious equal-
ity being granted in 1896. The period from 1867 to the First World War saw a rather

22 Heschel, 81.
23 Ibid., 32.
24 Walter Pietsch, Zwischen Reform und Orthodoxie. Der Eintritt des ungarischen Judentums in
die moderne Welt, Berlin, 1999, 55.

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 Islamic Studies and Religious Reform 113

late but – at first glance – comparatively harmonious integration of Jews into

Hungarian society on its way to national independence.25
On closer inspection, however, the Hungarian Jewry experienced very diffi-
cult times during the formation of the modern Hungarian state and found itself
deeply split into Reformist, Neo-Orthodox and Orthodox branches. The support
of the Jewish reform movement for Hungarian independence during the bour-
geois revolutions of 1848/49 antagonized the urban German population of the
country, which advocated the union with Austria. While clearly based on the Ger-
man culture of Jewish reform, the movement had to increasingly distance itself
from the German language and nation. The idea of religious reform therefore be-
came closely interconnected with national integration.26 The increasing associ-
ation of religious reform with Hungarian nationalism deepened the existing rift
between reformist and Orthodox Jews. The Orthodox Jews rejected not only relig-
ious reform but also Jewish assimilation into the Hungarian nation, and they con-
sequently observed the revolutionary events of 1848/49 from a distance. The re-
formist idea of turning the Hungarian Jewry into a mere religious confession
alongside the Christian Churches was alien to them. On the occasion of the Hun-
garian Jewish Congress of 1868–1869, this rift in Hungarian Jewry ended in an in-
stitutional divide between the Orthodox and reformist camps, who established
two separate national Jewish organizations.27
After having achieved legal equality in 1867, the liberal Jewish reform move-
ment wanted to establish a nationwide Jewish organization that, similar to the
Christian churches, should represent the Jews at state level. Moreover, they at-
tempted to found a modern academic training seminar for rabbis. For this pur-
pose, the then minister of culture Baron Jozsef Eötvös, a representative of Hun-
gary’s aristocracy who strongly advocated Jewish assimilation, convoked the
Hungarian Jewish Congress in Budapest. However, the ultra Orthodox wing vehe-
mently opposed the ideas of Jewish re-organization, in particular the attempt of
the modernists to replace the traditional Talmud schools by an academic seminar
for the education of Jewish rabbis. Thus, they left the congress in protest and the
whole event ended in a Pyrrhic victory for the reformist camp. They were only
able to establish the seminary at the expense of organizational unity. From now

25 Peter Haber, “Ungarische Assimilationsstrategien”, Jüdische Identität und Nation, Fallbei-

spiele aus Mitteleuropa, ed. by Peter Haber, Erik Petry and Daniel Wildmann. Cologne, Weimar,
and Vienna, 2006
26 Pietsch, 61.
27 Jacob Katz, A House Divided. Orthodoxy and Schism in Nineteenth-Century Central European
Jewry, Hanover and London, 1998, 1.

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114 Dietrich Jung

on, the Hungarian Jewry was fully split into fiercely opposing camps.28 Conse-
quently the reformist forces, known under the name of the Neolog movement,
had to move even closer toward the Hungarian nationalists and advocate com-
plete assimilation into the Hungarian nation.
The Hungarian Jewish Congress coincided with Goldziher’s study tour to Ger-
many, which was financed by a grant the then eighteen-year-old student had
received directly from Baron Eötvös. Goldziher does not mention the Congress
in his diary, but he refers to an episode in his hometown Székesfehérvár (Stuhl-
weissenburg) which at the local level anticipated the formal split of Hungarian
Judaism. The Jewish community in Székesfehérvár was founded in 1840, immedi-
ately after Jews had received official permission to settle in the cities. Immigration
to the city turned Székesfehérvár into a commercial center and a place of rapid
modernization. The local rabbi, Meir Zisper, was appointed in 1844 and repre-
sented one of the few rabbis who were acquainted with the Haskala and sup-
ported moderate ideas of Jewish reform. In 1853, his inadequate dealing with a di-
vorce caused a severe dispute with his rival and opponent, Gottlieb Fischer, who
accused Zisper of holding a heretical stance. Due to Zisper’s rather unorthodox
ideas, Fischer declared him to be unqualified to serve as an authority in Rabbini-
cal law. The controversy continued, until Meir Zisper resigned from his post three
years later and became rabbi of a nearby town whose community supported his
reformist stance. In Székesfehérvár, however, a majority of the Jewish community
upheld Zisper’s views after his departure and remained in opposition to the con-
servative minority that had caused Zisper’s resignation. As a consequence, the or-
thodox minority filed a petition to the government and asked for permission to set
up their own congregation, the first instance of “a separatist Orthodox ideology”
in Hungary.29
In his diary, Goldziher positioned himself between the two quarreling sides.
In his opinion, the split was eventually caused by Joseph Guggenheimer. He was
appointed as the new rabbi in 1859 and the son-in-law of the leader of Germany’s
neo-Orthodox stream Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.30 Goldziher tells us that his
father strongly supported Meir Zisper’s reformist camp and remained a close
friend of the former rabbi. The brother of Meir Zisper, Marcus Zisper, gave Gold-
ziher his first lessons in the Talmud. In 1859, Moses Wolf Freudenberg followed

28 Pietsch, 14–15.
29 Katz, 52–55.
30 Hirsch was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Frankfurt a.M. and Germany’s leading pro-
ponent of a neo-Orthodox theology that attempted to protect traditional Judaism in reconciling
Orthodoxy with modern bourgeois life. Shulamit Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland 1780–1918,
München, 2000, 30.

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 Islamic Studies and Religious Reform 115

him as Goldziher’s private teacher. Specialized in the Bible and Hebrew grammar,
Freudenberg apparently combined a rationalist method with rather Orthodox be-
liefs. According to Goldziher’s notes, the four years of Freudenberg’s teaching
were decisive for the development of his own worldview. Although he later per-
ceived Freudenberg’s ethical principles as an inhibition to his career, Goldziher
promised to remain grateful to his old teacher and to convey his principles to his
own children. In the quarrel around Zisper, Freudenberg supported the conser-
vative minority, yet at the same time he continued his close friendship with Gold-
ziher’s father without any strain. The young Goldziher, however, learnt from Freu-
denberg to perceive both the conservative and the reformist camps with disdain.31
To a certain extent, this episode in his youth marks the point of departure for
Goldziher’s life-long search for a form of religious reform between the poles of as-
similation and orthodoxy. Being a staunch Hungarian nationalist, he strongly op-
posed the maintenance of the “ghetto mentality” propagated by the Orthodox
Jewry. Unconditional assimilation into Hungarian culture as promoted by the
reformists, however, was in contradiction to his deep religious feelings. In the
peculiar context of the Hungarian Jewry, Goldziher placed himself between all
chairs. He was a Jewish apologist who tried to reconcile the demands of modern
national integration with the maintenance of a specific Jewish religious identity.
In this attempt, modern scholarship was a means to reform Judaism in a direction
that allowed it to develop into the religious ethic of a Hungarian bourgeois
citizen. Yet, while the Jewish orthodoxy strongly objected his reform ideas and
declared him a heretic, the liberal camp followed the path of complete assimi-
lation and disgusted him by their disregard for religious ethics.32 In antagonizing
both camps of the Hungarian Jewry, Goldziher gave up his engagement in the
field of Jewish studies. The outspoken critical reception of his Mythos among
Hungarian Jews and the weak response to his series of lectures on The Essence
and Evolution of Judaism in 1887–88 made him aware of the difficulties of combin-
ing his religious reform aspirations with an academic career in the field of Jewish
studies. In his diary, Goldziher later described the scholars of modern Jewish
studies as “street urchins, sales agents, moneybags and liars” completely devoid
of any idealism. For Goldziher, the reconciliation of faith and modern scholarship
by critically examining the holy scripts of Judaism had failed. Being deeply com-
mitted to the study of religion, Goldziher now turned completely toward Islam,
driven by his search for the essence of pure ethical religion.33

31 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 19–23.

32 Simon, 144–45.
33 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 110 and 167.

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116 Dietrich Jung

Modern Science and Religious Reform:

The Motivation of Goldziher to Study Islam
Turning to the individual level, there is mutual agreement among Goldziher’s bi-
ographers that he was a deeply religious man. His father was a liberal Jewish
tradesman with a high appreciation of knowledge, humanist bourgeois values
and Jewish traditions, who tutored his son intensively in Hebrew. Ignaz Goldziher
had already begun to read the Bible at the age of five, and during his youth he fol-
lowed a daily routine of studying that left him a night rest from only midnight to
five in the morning.34 In 1862, the twelve-year-old Goldziher published his first
book on the origin and history of prayers in Judaism in which he criticized the
“exaggerations of Orthodoxy”.35 Due to economic problems, the family moved to
Pest in 1865. There, Ignaz Goldziher enrolled at university and attended courses
in philosophy, linguistics, and classical and Oriental philology.36 Later he studied
in Berlin, Leipzig, Leiden and Vienna, before he embarked on a trip to the Middle
East in September 1873. This journey brought him to Istanbul, Beirut, Damascus,
Jerusalem and Cairo, from where he returned to Budapest in April 1874. Goldziher
viewed these months as the happiest period of his life and in his diary, he called it
his “Muhammadian year” full of “honor, glory and light”.37
However, this Muhammadian year did not start as gloriously as the forty-
year-old Goldziher described it in retrospect. This is at least the impression one
gets when reading his “Oriental Diary”. While staying in Istanbul under quaran-
tine, Goldziher began to write a travel diary in which he tells us about his mood
and objectives, as well as his personal encounters with Muslim life and Islamic
scholarship. The diary has no addressee and was most probably motivated by the
loneliness and homesickness he felt during the first phase of his journey.38 Right
at the beginning, Goldziher laments the torturous conditions of the quarantine
and the despair he feels for having left his “loved ones” at home.39 Moreover, the
first pages of the diary contain sequences of nationalist Hungarian sentiments

34 Raphael Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary. A Translation and Psychological Pro-
trait. Detroit, 1987, 15.
35 Peter Haber, “Bruchstellen einer ungarisch-jüdischen Symbiose: Ignaz Goldziher”, Heraus-
forderung Osteuropa. Die Offenlegung stereotyper Bilder, ed. by Thede Kahl, Elisabeth Vyslonzil
and Alois Wondan, Vienna, 2004, 76.
36 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 24-25.
37 Ibid, 50.
38 Lawrence I. Conrad: “The Near East Study Tour Diary of Ignaz Goldziher”, Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society, Vol 122 (New Series) Issue 01, 1990, 105–126.
39 Patai: Ignaz Goldziher, 91.

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 Islamic Studies and Religious Reform 117

and chauvinist attitudes toward southeast European peoples and the Turks. On
the day of his release from quarantine, Goldziher describes Istanbul as a depress-
ing, corrupt and “bakshish hunting” site and compares the Turks’ obsession with
commerce with the “disgusting petty chaffer”, the stereotypical image of the
prize-haggling Jewish trader in Europe.40 In general, Goldziher has a tendency to
describe the Christians and Jews he met in Istanbul, Beirut, Damascus and Jeru-
salem in rather stereotypical and denigrating terms. In Damascus, for instance,
he is disgusted by the “galuth [exile] physiognomies” of the local Jewish popu-
lation, and he describes the Orthodox Christians and Jews with their ritual prac-
tices as “religious rabble”.41
In sharp contrast to these pejorative descriptions, the Muslim Arabs we meet
in Goldziher’s notes are almost exclusively pictured as cultivated and rationally
minded friends. With them, Goldziher engages in sophisticated linguistic debates
and discusses Islamic traditions, receiving confirmation of his excellence in
Arabic. With regard to Islam, the familiar dichotomy between the East and the
West appears in the Oriental Diary almost up-side down: for the young Goldziher
it was European culture which was inferior to the religiously and philosophically
learnt culture of Islam. In his later diary Goldziher wrote that it was the purpose of
this journey to become familiar with the Islamic sciences and to become himself a
part of the “Muhammadian republic of knowledge”.42 In Damascus he spent his
afternoons in a bookshop close to the Ummayyad Mosque, discussing Arab litera-
ture with whoever stopped by. In Cairo, he immersed himself in Islamic scholar-
ship at the al-Azhar and once even participated in Islamic prayer at a mosque.
Goldziher met the Pan-Islamist agitator and Islamic reformer Jamal al-Din al-Af-
ghani and his group of students in a coffee shop in Abedin, where he regularly
joined their circle discussing subjects which he later described as being of a “free-
thinking and heretical” nature.43 Apparently, Goldziher found in the Muslim re-
formist group brothers in mind, advocating a similar reconciliation of faith and
modern culture.
In the biography of the Jewish-Hungarian scholar of Islam we can detect an
agenda which reminds us of the core concerns of the Islamic reform movements
in the Middle East and India. The classical Salafiyya around Jamal al-Din al-Af-
ghani, Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida, as well as the Aligarh movement of
the Indian reformer Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), propagated religious reform

40 Ibid, 96–97.
41 Ibid. 127.
42 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 56.
43 Ibid, 68.

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118 Dietrich Jung

as a means of political emancipation. For them, transforming Islam into a modern

religion was an integral part of their struggle for political independence from co-
lonial rule. Thereby, these Muslim reformers interpreted Islamic history similar to
their Western contemporaries in terms of stagnation and decline. Likewise, Gold-
ziher aimed at paving the way toward national integration of the Hungarian Jewry
by means of religious reform. He saw the Orthodox representatives of Hungarian
Judaism as being in a similar state of stagnation as was the traditionalist Islamic
establishment in the eyes of Afghani, Abduh or Rida. Apparently, Muslim and
European intellectuals were not as divided by a clear dichotomy of worldviews as
the master narrative about Islam and West suggests. During his stay in Egypt,
Goldziher’s direction of thought turned entirely toward Islam and he emphati-
cally called Islam his monotheism.44 From a scholarly perspective, his “Muham-
madian Year” was an exercise in participant observation, or in Goldziher’s own
words: “I wanted to observe the people, their ideas and institutions, not chase
after yellowed papers”.45 It was the then contemporary struggle between modern
Islamic reformers and the ulama, not the classical texts of Orientalist philology,
which captured the scholarly attention of Goldziher during his study tour. In re-
ligious terms, however, Islam provided him the standard of rationality to which
he wanted to raise Judaism.
The young Goldziher approached Islam in a peculiar fusion of emotional ro-
manticism with scholarly curiosity based on the rationalist belief in the methods
of modern science. Putting his veneration of pristine Arab-Islamic culture to-
gether with his disdain for the orthodox appearances of Eastern Christianity and
Judaism, as well as with his frequent attacks on the European style of moderniz-
ation that he observed in Beirut and Cairo, his dairies tell us something about his
disenchantment with modern Europe in general and the specific situation of the
Hungarian Jewry in particular. During his Oriental study tour, the young Gold-
ziher projected onto the Orient the kind of authenticity he considered to be lost in
Europe. In Islam, he was looking for the purity and unspoiled spirituality which
he missed in the Judaism of both Hungary’s Orthodoxy and its Jewish reform
movement.46 While Ignaz Goldziher “went native” in Egypt, he still believed in
his mission to reconcile rational scholarship, Hungarian nationalism and the
ethical piety of the modern Jewish believer. The eventual complete failure of this

44 Ibid, 71.
45 Goldziher received the grant for his study tour partly in order to collect handwritten Arabic
manuscripts. Ibid, 57.
46 Peter Haber, Zwischen jüdischer Tradition und Wissenschaft. Der ungarische Orientalist Ignác
Goldziher (1850–1921), Köln, 2006, 136.

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 Islamic Studies and Religious Reform 119

“eccentric experiment”,47 however, already became apparent upon his return to

Hungary.
Ignaz Goldziher was called back because of the deteriorating health of his
father, who died shortly after his arrival in Budapest. The university chair in Se-
mitic philology, which supposedly had been promised to Goldziher by Eötvös and
his successor Trefort, had gone to Péter Hatala, a Catholic theologian. In publicly
criticizing the infallibility of the pope, Hatala has raised a scandal and had to be
transferred from theology to the faculty of arts. The Hungarian minister of edu-
cation Ágoston Trefort, tried to comfort Goldziher in a personal conversation and
promised him a future career in Hungarian academia. This promise, however,
took thirty years to come true. It was not until 1905 that the then 54-year-old Gold-
ziher succeeded Hatala to the chair in Semitic languages. For three decades, how-
ever, Europe’s leading scholar of Islam earned his daily bread as the secretary of
the Neolog Jewish community of Pest.48 In these decades, Ignaz Goldziher lived
two lives. On the one hand, he was the deeply frustrated secretary of the Jewish
community who hated his job and the people surrounding him. He experienced
his daily work as a deeply humiliating form of slavery, as a constant ordeal. In
June 1892, he described his birthday as a day of mourning and his life as full of
grief, insult and misfortune.49 On the other hand, Goldziher became a world-fa-
mous scholar during this period, receiving a series of scholarly awards. Working
as a secretary during the day, the nights and vacations were reserved for scholarly
work which until today represents groundbreaking research on Islam.50
In his search for a third way between assimilation and orthodoxy for Hun-
gary’s Jewry, Ignaz Goldziher remained, despite his international success, a “mar-

47 Simon, 57.
48 Although Goldziher received his first salaried university position at the age of 55, he most
probably exaggerated in his diary the neglect of his scholarly work by Hungarian academia. Ed-
ward Ullendorff, for instance, pointed to the fact that Goldziher had become a private lecturer at
Budapest University in his early twenties already and a member of the Hungarian Academy at 26.
Moreover, he received an unpaid professorship at 45 and later became the dean of the faculty in
which his chair in Semitic languages was placed. Edward Ullendorff, “Book Review: Alexan-
der Schreiber (ed.): Ignaz Goldziher: Tagebuch”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African
Studies 42 (3), 1979, 553–555.
49 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 140.
50 It must be mentioned that Goldziher enjoyed very generous vacations and apparently did not
face any problems to attend academic conferences and congresses. For his visit to the Oriental
Congress in Stockholm (1889), for instance, he spent twenty days abroad (Goldziher, Tagebuch,
117). This would hardly have been possible if his employers not appreciated his academic
achievements.

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120 Dietrich Jung

ginal man” in Hungarian society.51 His biography demonstrates that Goldziher

was first and foremost a Jewish Hungarian nationalist and then a scholar of inter-
national reputation. Otherwise he would not have rejected the numerous foreign
university chairs which could have terminated his ordeal. On May 16, 1902, he
wrote in his diary that he perceived publishing in Hungarian as a duty ranking
higher than his success in international scholarship.52 Within the political context
of East-European state- and nation-building, Goldziher was struggling to recon-
cile his belief in rational modern scholarship with his Jewish faith, which he de-
scribed as the “pulse of his life”.53 On a personal level, for him religious reform
and political emancipation were inseparably joined together. However, in the
Hungarian context he failed in the attempt to merge his universalist agenda of re-
ligious reform with Hungarian nationalism. Instead, Goldziher diverted his
energy into the academic study of Islam. Guided by his search for “pure religion”,
his Islamic studies made him the founding father of a new scholarly discipline. In
what ways did these structural and biographical contexts leave traces in Gold-
ziher’s work on Islam?

Eclecticism and Adaptation:

Goldziher’s Representation of Islam
In his Vorlesungen über den Islam (Lectures on Islam) Goldziher defines Islam first
and foremost as the absolute submission to God. It is the experience of God’s om-
nipotence that characterizes Islam as a religion. Yet in Goldziher’s eyes this relig-
ious core does not explain the development of Islam as an ethical worldview and
a normative system. In his analysis, Islamic history did not unfold from its relig-
ious core alone, but rather it was characterized by the assimilation of new ideas
and the adjustment to specific historical and social circumstances. According to
Goldziher, Islam has been of a receptive character from its very beginning. The Is-
lamic revelation already represented for him an eclectic composition of religious
ideas, which is due to Muhammad’s contact with other religions, in particular
with Judaism and Christianity.54 From this perspective, Goldziher did not view
Islam as a trans-historical holistic system, but as an eclectic set of historically

51 Haber, Zwischen jüdischer Tradition, 10.

52 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 231.
53 Ibid, 33.
54 Ignaz Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den Islam, 1910, second revised edition, Heidelberg
[1925], 1–15.

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 Islamic Studies and Religious Reform 121

contingent religious beliefs developing over time. In this historical process, how-
ever, the spiritual message of Islam was gradually superseded by juridical points
of view.55 The pure religious core of the Islamic revelation, its ideal monotheism,
was submerged and the “quibbling religious jurists” became victorious over the
pious religious believer.56 How did Goldziher arrive at this position?
The German Orientalist and contemporary of Ignaz Goldziher, Richard Hart-
mann, declared Goldziher’s historical critical analysis of the Islamic traditions
around Muhammad, i.e. of the huge corpus of hadith literature, as “the crown” of
Goldziher’s work.57 In his Muhammedan Studies, Goldziher used the hadith litera-
ture as indirect sources for his interpretative reconstruction of the first two cen-
turies of Islamic history.58 He assumed that in these religious and profane stories
about the Prophet and his companions we meet the “ideal desires of the present”
projected back into the life of the Prophet.59 Thus, the historical critical analysis
of the hadith provides us with a testimony of the social, political and cultural de-
velopments of early Islam.60 In the second volume of the Muhammedan Studies
Goldziher developed a typology of the hadith according to the different purposes

55 Ibid, 70.
56 Ibid, 45.
57 Hartmann, “Ignaz Goldziher”. Hartmann’s position is confirmed by looking at the exchange
of letters between Ignaz Goldziher and Theodor Nöldeke (1836–1930), certainly one of the most
eminent Orientalists in Germany. The two scholars were in constant contact from 1881 to Gold-
ziher’s death in 1921. In the beginning, Nöldeke was rather skeptical regarding the full-fledged
critique of the traditions by Goldziher. In several letters he suggested that at least a good part of
them might be accurate expressions of the life and action of the Prophet. In August 1905, how-
ever, he admitted that Goldziher was an absolute pioneer in the field of hadith, the first who
really discovered their essence and meaning (Simon, 281).
58 Ignaz Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien, Zweiter Theil. Halle, 1890, 5. To a certain ex-
tent, Goldziher already applied this method in his first major book on Islamic jurisprudence: Die
Zahiriten. Ihr Lehrsystem und ihre Geschichte. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der muhammedanischen
Theologie, 1884, with a foreword by Joseph Desomogyi, Hildesheim, [1967]. The innovative char-
acter of his early works on Islam becomes apparent when looking at the hesitations he had to
publish the Muhammedan Studies. In his diary he describes the critical reception of Die Zahiriten
and how his friends put him under pressure to publish his studies. In his imagination he expected
to be ridiculed by the Orientalist establishment and it came as a great relief that he received con-
gratulations by such eminent scholars as Theodor Nöldeke and Alfred von Kremer immediately
after the publication of the first volume of the Muhammedan Studies (Goldziher, Tagebuch,
112–116).
59 “Muhammedanisches Recht in Theorie und Wirklichkeit”, in: Gesammelte Schriften, Band II
(1878–92), ed. by Joseph Desomogyi, Hildesheim [1967–1973], 365.
60 Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien, Zweiter Theil, 3–5; Ignaz Goldziher: “Kämpfe um die
Stellung des Hadith im Islam”, in: Gesammelte Schriften, Volume V (1870–77), ed. by Joseph
Desomogyi. Hildesheim [1967–1973].

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122 Dietrich Jung

these stories supposedly had served. In his analysis, every political and intellec-
tual stream of the early centuries of Islam found its expression in the form of the
hadith.61 Consequently, Goldziher declared the absolute majority of traditions to
be anachronistic projections of later concerns into the times of Muhammad: “Ha-
dith exists for everything”.62 In Goldziher’s work, religious traditions are not the
independent variable in Islamic history, but they were strongly influenced by so-
cial, economic and political developments.
Goldziher’s work was based largely on classical texts; however, he did not
find any trans-historical essence or deep structure of Islam in these texts. In his
critical, historicist approach Goldziher followed Abraham Geiger in utilizing clas-
sical texts as primary sources for the reconstruction of the religious and profane
history of early Islam. In his analysis of Islamic traditions, Goldziher found “relig-
ious tendencies” which reflected the social and political conflicts of the period of
their composition. This approach, the search for tendencies in the hadith litera-
ture, closely links Goldziher to Geiger, who took it from Ferdinand Christian
Bauer (1792–1860), the intellectual head of the Tübingen School.63 Goldziher’s
examination of Islamic traditions basically served two goals: to discover the pure
content of the monotheistic revelation and to understand its “historical distor-
tion” in the development of Muslim civilization. Based on his critical reading of
the traditions, Goldziher interpreted Islamic history as a deviation progressing
from its original religious message. Although this religious message was “purely
anti-dogmatic” and spiritual in its essence,64 it was historical developments that
drew the transcendental God of Islam into worldly affairs and compromised
Islam’s revealed ethical content. This becomes apparent in Medina. Here the “suf-
fering ascetic” is transformed into the “statesman and warrior”.65 From this point
in time, Islam subsequently attained the historical character of a “warrior re-
ligion” in which the search for power replaced the religious spirit of the revel-
ation. Whereas “really religious circles” such as those related to the philosopher
and theologian al-Ghazali (1058–1111) always remained anti-dogmatic,66 the dog-
matic mainstream was epitomized in the emergence of fiqh, the field of Islamic
jurisprudence; in Goldziher’s judgment a fatal degeneration of religious life.

61 Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien, Zweiter Theil, 131.

62 In the German original: “Hadith gibt es ja für alles”. Ignaz Goldziher, “Katholische Tendenz
und Partikularismus im Islam”, in: Gesammelte Schriften, Volume V (1870–77), ed. by Joseph
Desomogyi, Hildesheim [1967–1973], 307.
63 Heschel, 118.
64 Goldziher, “Katholische Tendenz”, 287.
65 Goldziher, Vorlesungen, 27.
66 Goldziher, “Katholische Tendenz”, 302.

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 Islamic Studies and Religious Reform 123

This sketch of Goldziher’s work leaves us with a rather ambiguous image of

Islam. According to him, the Muslim religion was born into the very same divine
context as Judaism and Christianity. What found Goldziher’s strong criticism was
Islamic orthodoxy, in particular the canonic schools of law, which in his eyes had
submerged the spiritual content of Islam as a religion. He appears to have ex-
tended the criticism of Orthodox Judaism and Christianity he held in his youth to
Islam. In so doing, Goldziher applied a concept of religion whose origin was in the
revision of Christianity by liberal Protestant theology. Thus the rationalization,
individualization and spiritualization of the Christian program implicitly became
the standard to measure the religious value of a particular cultural tradition.67 In
his critique of Orthodox Islam, Goldziher was again in mutual agreement with
such famous Islamic reformers as Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida. In his last
book, he refers extensively to their critical and “anti-clerical” articles about the
orthodox establishment of Islam in the journal al-Manar.68 Apparently, the Is-
lamic reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century applied con-
ceptual elements of the very same standards as Christian and Jewish reformers in
framing their ideas about Islamic modernity.69
From his historicist position, however, Goldziher did not perceive this ortho-
dox system of Islam as an unchanging and holistic entity. Moreover, in his inter-
pretation the historical appearances of Islam do not originate in its revealed reli-
gious core, but are the accidental results of, in principle, contingent historical
developments. This also applies to the fusion of religion and politics in Medina.
To be sure, in his more popular writings Goldziher also succumbed to the sugges-
tive power of the anachronistic language of political history writing so prevalent
in nineteenth-century Europe. Consequently Goldziher also frequently called Mu-
hammad both a prophet and a statesman, thereby echoing the popular picturing
of the Prophet by Julius Wellhausen with whom Goldziher was in close contact.70

67 Cf. Jan Rohls, Protestantische Theologie der Neuzeit I., Tübingen, 1997.
68 Ignaz Goldziher, Die Richtungen der Islamischen Koranauslegung. An der Universität Upsala
gehaltene Olaus-Petri-Vorlesungen, 1920, unchanged reprint, Leiden [1952], 326–40.
69 For a more detailed account of this argument, see Chapter Six in: Jung, Orientalists.
70 The German theologian and Arabist Julius Wellhausen was a prominent representative of
biblical criticism who eventually turned agnostic. In his article on Muhammad in the Encyclo-
pedia Britannica, Wellhausen presented Muhammad more as a politician than a prophet and de-
scribed the Koran as “Muhammad’s weakest performance”, see: Julius Wellhausen, “Moham-
medanism”, in: Encyclopedia Britannica 16 (9), 1883, 545–565. In a letter to Martin Hartmann
(November 1902), Goldziher described Wellhausen’s book Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz as a
splendid achievement that gave him fresh inspiration, see: Ludmila Hanisch (ed.), Machen Sie
doch unseren Islam nicht gar zu schlecht. Der Briefwechsel der Islamwissenschaftler Ignaz Gold-
ziher und Martin Hartmann 1894- 1914, Wiesbaden, 2000, 194.

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124 Dietrich Jung

Yet Goldziher perceived this association of religion and politics not as the in-
herent nature of Islam; rather he saw it as a very significant but revisable deter-
minant in the historical development of Islam.
In accordance with the Islamic reform movement, Goldziher interpreted the
historical path of Islam as a process of decline. To a certain extent, this narrative
was the reversed interpretation of the historical development of Christianity by
apologetic Protestant theologians. They turned Christian eschatology into a phil-
osophy of history, later scientifically reconstructed as a process of socio-cultural
rationalization. Consequently, modern culture could be interpreted as an evol-
utionary result of religious history with Protestant Christianity as its ultimate
stage. For Protestant apologists, modernity was in the end the universalization of
rationalized Christianity. From this perspective, orthodox and dogmatic mono-
theisms represented blind alleys of religious evolution, and Islamic history was
interpreted as a deviation from the path of religious rationalization. Yet Goldziher
did not see this course of history as irreversible. Therefore, Islam in his reading
was not incompatible with modern times. Only in the dogmatic interpretations of
Islamic orthodoxy did he see a major obstacle to change. As in Judaism and Chris-
tianity, Goldziher perceived in Islamic religious reform the key to social change in
the Muslim world. In the Islamic reform movements in India and the Middle East,
Goldziher discerned these forces of change at work. Adopting his critical method
of interpreting the Islamic traditions, these Muslim reformers could be able to
bring about the necessary transformation of the Muslim world.71

Conclusions: Islamic Studies and Religious Reform

What was the driving force behind Ignaz Goldziher’s scholarly work? His engage-
ment with Islamic studies seemingly was first and foremost driven by a deep con-
cern about the role of religion in the modern world. As a sincere believer he was
dedicated to reconciling faith with his passion for modern scholarship. As a Hun-
garian apologist of Judaism, however, he soon became disillusioned with the field

71 Ibid, 310. In a letter to the German Orientalist Martin Hartmann in 1898, Goldziher wrote that
he had the vision of a time in which the historical critique of the Koran and the traditions would
be taught at the Al-Azhar as biblical criticism was as part of the program at European theological
faculties (Hanisch, 115). In his later years, however, he apparently became as despairing of Islam
as he was previously of Judaism. According to Shelomo Dov Goitein, shortly before his death
Goldziher wrote that “the young Muslims of today have neither knowledge and understanding
of, nor real interest in their religion.” Shelomo Dov Goitein, “Review Article: Alexander
Schreiber, ed. Ignaz Goldziher Tagebuch”, in: Jewish Social Studies 41 (3/4), 1979, 323–327, 326.

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 Islamic Studies and Religious Reform 125

of Jewish studies. In the particular context of late nineteenth-century Hungary, he

was not able to synthesize his academic interests with his striving for Jewish
reform and his deep political concerns regarding the national integration of Hun-
gary’s Jewry. On a national level, the internationally celebrated Goldziher
became a marginal man often at odds with both the Jewish community and Hun-
garian academia. In this situation, Islamic studies provided him with a field of en-
gagement to which he could escape and search for both religious purity and ex-
cellence in academic work without coming directly into conflict with his own
faith and the Jewish community at home.
In his work Goldziher absorbed the then current theories of historical criti-
cism and comparative religion which largely had their origin in the revision of
Protestant theology. In this way, he laid the foundations for the development of
Islamic studies as a distinct discipline of modern scholarship. Goldziher’s repre-
sentation of Islam was predicated on a theory of the evolution of religions accord-
ing to which he perceived Islam as an integral part of the general development of
humanity. When applying for his scholarship in 1868, the young Goldziher ex-
plained to Baron Eötvös that he pursued Semitic studies as a means “to investi-
gate the institutions of humanity in their historical development in religious and
political life”.72 Although Goldziher saw the Muslim world of his time to a certain
extent in stagnation, he did not attribute this situation to any fundamental
inferiority of Islam to Western culture. As in Christianity and Judaism, Goldziher
saw in the Islamic religion an inherent potential to overcome the traditionalist
barriers of orthodox religion and to reconcile modern culture with religion. Here
the interests of the scholar of Islam and the religious apologist met: As in the case
of Judaism, Goldziher advocated religious reform as the right answer to the chal-
lenges of modernity, also with regard to Islam.
In putting its focus on the scholar Ignaz Goldziher, this article has suggested
viewing Western scholars of Islam and Islamic reformers as not necessarily being
on two sides of a clear cultural divide. Rather we should see them as distinct parts
of discursive interfaces in the context of a broad nineteenth century movement
for religious reform. This perspective does not refute the cultural hegemony and
imperial utilization of the stereotypical dichotomies to which Edward Said in his
Orientalism rightly refers. Moreover, there is no doubt that many Western scholars
on Islam shared the colonialist attitudes of their European contemporaries. How-
ever, the explanatory framework of colonialism does not neatly fit the role of Jew-
ish scholars in Islamic studies. Under the hegemony of Christianity, Jewish
scholars of Islam experienced a situation of “internal colonialization” and Gold-

72 Goldziher, Tagebuch, 34.

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 126 Dietrich Jung

ziher is a prime example of the close relationship between their scholarship and
their striving for religious and political emancipation. In addition, emphasizing
the colonial situation does not always do justice to the agency of Muslim intellec-
tuals and the factual cultural interfaces between European and Muslim thinkers.
In the context of Europe’s cultural hegemony, we nevertheless can observe in-
tense and complex interactions among Muslim and European intellectuals. The
evolution of Islamic studies must therefore also be seen in the context of these
social and discursive interactions, as the analysis of the life of Ignaz Goldziher
perfectly shows. The crucial framework for these interactions, however, was the
widespread apologetic desire for religious reform. During his formative years,
Goldziher met three of the leading representatives of religious reform, the Jewish
reformer Abraham Geiger, the Protestant theologian Abraham Kuenen, and the
Pan-Islamist agitator Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. In his work, Goldziher absorbed
the ideas presented by these three reformers, synthesized Islamic and Western
knowledge and made his Islamic studies a crossroads of Judaism, Christianity
and Islam.

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