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Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University
Te Idea of Semitic
Monotheism
Te Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth
G U Y G . S T R OUM S A
1
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For Tema and Mark Silk
Acknowledgements
Although most chapters of this book were written in Jerusalem, I have used
library facilities also in Oxford, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Berlin, and Paris. I
started working on it during my Oxford stint, as the frst Professor of the
Study of the Abrahamic Religions. My College, Lady Margaret Hall, is
located at the end of Norham Gardens, where Max Müller once lived. My
original puzzlement at the fact that the Chair had only been established in
2009, rather than in his days, a century-and-a-half earlier, lies at the root of
this book.
A generous Research Award from the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stifung,
in 2008, permitted the initial research on this project. My intensive
involvement with its topic started as I worked on the Jordan Lectures in
Comparative Religion, which I delivered in the spring of 2013 at the School
of Oriental and African Studies in London. I wish to thank Catherine
Hezser for her kind invitation. I did not guess at the time that it would take
me so long to transform these lectures into a book. My gratitude also goes
to Peter Mack for the Workshop on “Judaism and Islam in the Mind of
Europe” that he asked me to organize at the Warburg Institute, of which he
was then Director, on June 6, 2013. I am grateful to the Frankel Center for
Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for a Fellowship

in 2015, and to the John U. Nef Committee on Social Tought at the
University of Chicago for a Kohut Visiting Professorship in 2016. I was able
to pursue research on this book with the help of remarkable libraries in Ann
Arbor and Chicago. I wish to thank Luca Guliani, former Rector of the
Wissenschafskolleg zu Berlin, for having extended to me a Fellowship at
this remarkable institution in 2017. Te excellent conditions at the WiKo
did much to facilitate my research. Te lecture I gave at the reception
(jointly with Sarah Stroumsa) of the Leopold-Lucas Prize in Tübingen on
May 8, 2018 provided further incentive to publish my views on the topic
(Guy G. Stroumsa and Sarah Stroumsa, Eine dreifältige Schnur: über
Judentum, Christentum und Islam in Geschichte und Wissenschaf [Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 2020]). I wish to express my gratitude to the Evangelical
Teological Faculty at the University of Tübingen for this award.
viii Acknowledgements
I am beholden to Rajeev Bhargava (CSDS, Delhi), Corrine Bonnet

(Toulouse), Arthur Bradley (Lancaster), Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill
and Geofrey Lloyd (Cambridge), Charles Stang (CSWR, Harvard), and
Carsten Wilke (Central European University, then Budapest) for having
invited me to present parts of this work at a number of workshops and con-
ferences. Over the years, Dominique Bourel (CNRS, Jerusalem) read a
number of the chapters in their draf form and discussed their content with
me. In acts of true friendship, both Philippe Borgeaud (Geneva) and
Maurice Kriegel (EHESS, Paris) read the whole typescript; I am much
indebted to them for their important comments. Naphtali Meshel
(Jerusalem) and Perrine Simon-Nahum (CNRS, Paris) kindly agreed to
read various chapters. Teodor Dunkelgrün (Cambridge) and Robert Priest
(Royal Holloway, London) commented on Chapter six. My own refection
on Renan has benefted from almost daily conversations with François
Hartog (EHESS, Paris) in Chicago during the fall of 2016, when we were
both teaching in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Tought at the
University of Chicago. A French version of the frst half of Chapter four,
published in Asdiwal in 2018, was dedicated to the distinguished Parisian
Sanskritist Charles Malamoud, in recognition of his friendship and gener-
osity over the past fve decades. Jacques Le Brun, with whom I discussed
various aspects of this book, will not be able to read it: he became a victim
of Covid-19 in early spring 2020.
At Oxford University Press, I was lucky to have Tom Perridge as a
thoughtful and gracious editor. I am most grateful to the anonymous read-
ers, who called my attention to a number of serious problems in the original

typescript. Te reports they produced helped me to clarify and sharpen my
thought and to prune my text of many errors and typos. Once more, Sara
Tropper’s excellent editing saved me from many oddities and infelicities.
I am beholden to Marc Sherman, who compiled the indices with great care.
I wish to thank the Centre des monuments nationaux in Paris for allowing
me to use their photo of Renan’s study at the Collège de France, as reconsti-
tuted in Renan’s native home in Tréguier, for the dust jacket. My gratitude
goes to Margo Stroumsa-Uzan for suggesting this photo.
Troughout the years, Sarah Stroumsa has been my frst, last, and tough-
est reader. My debt to her is infnite.
I dedicate this book to Tema and Mark Silk, in gratitude for half a cen-
tury of constant friendship and intellectual exchange.
Jerusalem,
January 2021
Contents
Introduction: Te Study of Religion and the Spirit of Orientalism 1

1. Varieties of Monotheism and the Tree Rings 24
Te Emergence of a Concept 24
A Medieval Legacy 35
2. Te Enlightenment’s Paradigm Shif and the Tree Impostors 43
Philosophes Comparing Religions 43
Te Abrahamic Eclipse 56
3. Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars 63
A Romantic Tradition 64
Aryans and Semites 72
Wissenschaf des Judentums and Jewish Orientalism 76
4. Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis 85
Anquetil Duperron: Go East, Young Man 86
A New Epistemology 101
5. Semitic Monotheism: Renan on Judaism and Islam 111
Monotheism and Race 112
Te Jewish Miracle and Anti-Islamism 120
6. A Jesus of White Marble or a Jesus in the Flesh? 131

Jesus a Man? 131
Jesus a Jew? 138
7. Secular Scholarship in France: Catholics, Protestants, and Jews 147
Building Institutions 147
Crossing the Rhine 154
8. From the Quarrel of Monotheism to the Babel–Bibel
Controversy 167
Te Quarrel of Monotheism 167
Beyond the Hebrew God 177
x Contents
9. Semitic Religion and Sacrifcial Ritual 191

Max Müller and the Birth of “World Religions” 191
Julius Wellhausen on Hebrews and Arabs 201
William Robertson Smith: Te Sacrifcial Turn 207
10. Sacrifce Compared: Israel and India 219
Hubert and Mauss: Sacrifce in Context 221
Jewish Scholars and the Dreyfus Afair 226
Robert Hertz: Becoming the Expiatory Sacrifce 237
Oriental Religions 241
Conclusion: Comparing Monotheisms 245
Bibliography 253
Selected Name Index 289
General Index 293
Les feurs de l’histoire religieuse sont des feurs étranges.
[Te fowers of religious history are strange fowers’]
Ernest Renan, Nouvelles études d’histoire religieuse, Preface
Es gelingt dem Gelehrten erst mit Hülfe der Geschichte (aber
nicht von seiner persönlichen Erfahrung aus), es gegenüber den
Religionen zu einem ehrfurchtsvollen Ernste und zu einer
gewissen scheuen Rücksicht zu bringen . . .
[It is only with the help of the study of history (but not from personal
experience) that a scholar becomes able to treat religions with a rever-
ent seriousness and a certain shy regard . . . ]
Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 58
Car c’est inouï, la rage des gens d’une religion à étudier celle
des autres.
[It’s unbelievable, the craze that people of one religion bring to study
the religion of others.]
Marcel Proust, Le côté de Guermantes, Part II, Chapter Two
Wie unfassbar bescheiden sind die Menschen, die sich einer
einzigen Religion verschreiben! Ich habe sehr viele Religionen,
und die eine, die ihnen übergeordnet ist, bildet sich erst im
Laufe meines Lebens.

[How incomprehensibly modest are people who only subscribe to one
religion! I have a great many religions, and the one towering above
them all is constructing itself throughout my life.]
Elias Canetti, Die Provinz des Menschen,
Aufzeichnungen 1942–1972
. . . le chercheur, lorsqu’il entreprend d’explorer les rapports entre
l’esprit humain et les cultures, fabrique lui-même des mythes.
[. . . the very scholar who seeks to explore the relationship between the
human mind and human cultures, concocts myths.]
Charles Malamoud, “Histoire des religions et
comparatisme: la question indo-européenne” (1991)
Introduction
Te Study of Religion and the Spirit of Orientalism
Tis book is a sequel to A New Science: Te Discovery of Religion in an Age of

Reason, where I analyzed new intellectual approaches to religion in early
modernity, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.1 In the present
work, I study some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion during
the long nineteenth century. More precisely, I seek here to understand the
implications, in a secular age, which was also the formative period of the
new discipline, of a major paradigm shif. Te nineteenth century witnessed
the transformation of the taxonomy of religions. According to the tradi-
tional model, in place since late antiquity, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
were cognate religions, all stemming from the biblical patriarch Abraham’s
discovery of monotheism. Tis model was largely discarded during the
Enlightenment, and would be later replaced by a new one, according to
which Christianity, the religion of Europe, essentially belonged to a postu-
lated family of the Aryan, or Indo-European religions, while Judaism and
Islam were identifed as Semitic religions.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Ernest Renan coined the term “Semitic
monotheism” to describe the belief in one single God, supposedly emblem-
atic of the Semitic peoples, in contrast to the purportedly polytheistic sys-

tems of the Indo-European peoples. In doing so, Renan was creating a
potent scholarly myth that would be espoused for decades by European
scholars of religion, only to unravel towards the end of the century and fall
by the scholarly wayside. Te myth of Semitic monotheism is intricately
associated with important aspects of European religious, intellectual, and
social history, and should be understood within the broader framework
provided by growing secularization, colonialism, the fowering of the mis-
sionary movement, and the rise of the modern university. Trough the
prism of Semitic monotheism, I hope to shed light on some fundamental
aspects of the modern study of religion in Europe in the long nineteenth
1 Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: Te Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth. Guy G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press
(2021). © Guy G. Stroumsa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898685.003.0001
2 The Idea of Semitic Monotheism
century, from the sequels of the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth cen-
tury to the eve of the First World War. In this book, I propose to repurpose
this prism, deploying it to decipher how, in this period, traditional catego-
ries of religion were radically transformed and new taxonomies invented.
Tis transformational passage was even more profound than an apparently
simple shif from religious to scientifc categories would imply. Just as the old
thought patterns were based on ancient myths, so new myths were forged to
establish new patterns. Te nineteenth century, which Jürgen Osterhammel
has dubbed the “foundational century” (Gründungsjahrhundert),2 was
indeed the foundational period not only of our contemporary, globalized
world, but also of no small number of the scholarly disciplines taught in
modern universities. Among them is the academic study of religions, alter-
natively called “science of religion,” “history of religions,” or “comparative
religion.” I seek here to identify, in the study of religions, one such founda-
tional myth and to present and analyze some of its abiding consequences.
While all branches of knowledge have a history, important features of
these histories are ofen obscured from view. It remains a puzzling fact that
the history of science, as a discipline, focuses mainly on the natural sciences,
in which the past of the discipline matters less to the practicing scientist
than in the humanities, where the historical tradition of a discipline has a
powerful efect on both the problems tackled and the methods used. Te
history of Western scholarship, however, cannot be studied in isolation
from its broader societal context; it also forms part of European intellectual
and cultural history, and it is as such that it should be approached.3
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the “science of religion” stood
at the very forefront of knowledge. Its claims, which tended to be made in
the form of combative statements, had immense implications for society at
large. It is this broader, public signifcance of a discipline that today is ofen
assessed as arcane, which I hope to showcase in the following pages.4
2 See Jürgen Osterhammel, Te Transformation of the World: A Global History of the

Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014).
3 I concur here with Timothy Fitzgerald, Te Ideology of Religious Studies (New York,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), IX, who criticizes a “mystifying ideology” for attempt-
ing to reconstruct a decontextualized, ahistorical phenomenon and divorce it from questions
of power.
4 See, for instance, Mircea Eliade’s refection, dating from 1959:
Te adventurous and the bold, creative minds are no longer coming to philology, to
Orientalism, or to the history of religions as they were in 1870–1880; they are ori-
ented rather towards the physical sciences and mathematics . . . We attract only paltry
types who haven’t a virile enough soul to face a world in a state of crisis or risk their
career for a daring idea.
Introduction 3
In A New Science: Te Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason, I sought

to call attention to an early chapter in the formation of the modern study of
religion, to a time before the academic discipline was established. Taking
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as my focal point, before the birth
of scholarly institutions devoted to this study, I demonstrated how individ-
ual scholars frst set modern parameters for the non-theological study of
the religions of humankind, past and present. Te present work takes as its
point of departure the Enlightenment. In the nineteenth century, the study
of religion surfaced as a new discipline, complete with its own institutional
frameworks. Tis nascent research feld emerged at the nexus of several
existing disciplines, including philosophy and theology, linguistics and phi-
lology, Oriental studies and ethnology (or social anthropology, as it would
later be called). It could not have emerged without a prolonged, intense, and
complex interface between these disciplines. From its inception, the use of
comparative methods was integral to this “science of religion,” as it was at
the time in a number of disciplines. It can be said that the new mental map
of religion, as it materialized during the nineteenth century, amounted to
nothing less than a reconstruction of the idea of religion as it had been
known since early modernity.5
Oddly enough, the concept of “monotheism,” which one might have
assumed to have been around for quite some time, is an early modern
invention, attributed to the Cambridge Platonist Henry More and dating
from 1660. Moreover, for most of its lifespan, the concept seems to have
enjoyed a rather limited popularity. Judging from its written usage in both
English and other European languages, even as late as the early nineteenth
century the term was relatively rare. Te usage had already reached its peak,
however, by the fnal decade of that century, between 1890 and 1895.
Mircea Eliade, Journal II, 1957–1969 (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press,
1977), 47.
5 Among the studies on the history of the concept of religion, see in particular Ernst Feil’s
monumental Religio (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986–2012); the fourth and last
volume goes up to the early nineteenth century. See further Michel Despland, La religion en
occident: évolution des idées et du vécu (Montréal: Fides, 1979); Daniel Dubuisson, Te Western
Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2003) [French original: L’Occident et la religion: mythes, science et idéologie
(Paris: Complexe, 1998)]; and Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept
(New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press, 2013); cf. the earlier Eric J. Sharpe,
Comparative Religion: A History (London: Duckworth, 1975). See further Jonathan Z. Smith,
“A Twice-Told Tale: Te History of the History of Religions’ History,” in his Relating Religion:
Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2004), chapter 16,
362–374.
Te modern study of religion developed during the nineteenth century,

up to the establishment, in its last third, of the frst academic Chairs, jour-
nals and conferences exclusively devoted to the new discipline. At that time,
the religious systems of newly “discovered” peoples, throughout Asia, the
Americas, and Africa, as well as of those from Mediterranean and Near
Eastern antiquity, were the main objects of investigation. Tese systems
were now analyzed thanks to new philological tools and courtesy of newly
unearthed archaeological evidence. In this context, the understanding of
polytheistic (or, as in the case of Buddhism, non- theistic) systems,
approached for the frst time in a non-polemical fashion, sine ira et studio,
played a central role.
Medieval Christian societies, both in Byzantium and in the Latin West,
knew a single taxonomy of the world’s religions.6 For a full millennium,
roughly from the eighth to the eighteenth century, Christian thinkers had
divided the world among the religious families of Christianity, Judaism, and
Islam, side by side with all other religions of humankind, past and present,
usually considered under the single category of “heathenism.” As a rule, this
fourfold classifcation did not admit of what one may call the later “Triple
Alliance” between the monotheistic traditions. Polemics remained the usual
medium of communication between them. Christianity (or, more precisely,
its orthodox version) was the only true religion (or vera religio in Augustine’s
terms), while Judaism and Islam were considered to be false religions (falsae
religiones), one upstream and one downstream of Christianity, as it were.
From Epiphanius of Salamis, in the fourth century, for whom Judaism was
the frst heresy to John of Damascus in the eighth, who considered Islam to
be the last—and worst—one, patristic heresiologists could even present these
two religions as heresies of sorts.7 In diferent ways, Jews and Muslims were
considered inveterate enemies of the true faith. As monotheists, however,
they were recognized as profoundly akin to the Christians.
To be sure, the scholarly quadripartite classifcation of religions was at
times transformed in popular tradition into a tripartite one, in which
Muslims were simply presented as pagans, as in the famed Palästinalied of
6 On early Christian taxonomies of religions, see Francesco Massa, “Nommer et classer les
religions aux IIe–IVe siècles: la taxonomie ‘paganisme, judaïsme, christianisme,’ ”Revue de
l’Histoire des Religions 234 (2017), 689–715.
7 Te transformation of Judaism into a Christian heresy is, of course, less intuitive than the
Christian perception of earliest Islam as a heresy. But Epiphanius explicitly called Judaism a
heresy, while Justinian’s rulings can be said to treat the Jews as heretics. See Guy G. Stroumsa,
“Barbarians or Heretics?,” in his Te Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 175–188.
Introduction 5
Walther von der Vogelweide, the illustrious lyric poet of Middle High
German literature. Te text, written at the time of the Fifh Crusade
(1217–1221), refers to Christians, Jews, and pagans (“Kristen, juden und die
heiden,” 11) who all consider the Holy Land to belong to them. By “pagans,”
Muslims are obviously meant. But even such nomenclature, through its
exclusive focus on Jews, Christians, and Muslims, refects a “trinitarian”
perception of kinship between the three monotheistic religions. It goes
without saying that this kinship did not stop Christians from perceiving the
Jews as a generally tolerated but usually reviled (as children of the devil
[John 8: 44]) religious community, and the Muslims as simply enemies from
without.8
In modern times, Christian encounters with diferent societies and their
traditional cultures demanded that the aforementioned classifcation be
abandoned, as the category of “heathenism” no longer sufced to encom-
pass the great variety of religions in the world. Tis setting aside of the old
taxonomy weakened the centuries-old family relationship between the three
monotheistic religions. When William Jones, speaking in 1786 at the
recently founded Calcutta Asiatic Society, announced that he had discov-
ered similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, he was in fact launch-
ing a new classifcation of languages and peoples.9 Tis new ethnological
taxonomy would fast become the main paradigm, alongside the linguistic
one, for a number of disciplines in the nineteenth century. Semites and
Aryans now took the traditional place of the ofspring of Shem and Japheth,
two of Noah’s three sons.10 Te Semites were imagined through the model
of the Hebrews (and the Jews; from the 1880s on, the newly coined term
“anti-Semitism” never referred to the hatred of anyone but the Jews), while
the Greeks represented the model of the Aryans. Monotheism would now
be conceived as a characteristic of a postulated ancient Semitic religion,
8 Judaism and Islam did not always reciprocate the compliment paid to them by
Christianity, as Jewish and Muslim medieval thinkers rarely considered Christianity to be
monotheistic.
9 See Bruce Lincoln, “Isaac Newton and Oriental Jones on Myth, Ancient History, and the
Relative Prestige of Peoples,” History of Religions 42 (2002), 1–18. Lincoln demonstrates how
Jones transformed the old paradigm of Noachide humanity according to Newton, and how his
wish to reduce the historical privilege of the Hebrews, in particular over Indians and Iranians,
refected a resentment against Israel, with its horrifc ultimate consequences.
10 Troughout history, Ham, Noah’s third son, traditionally identifed with blackness, has
remained the incarnation of blacks and slaves. See Benjamin Braude, “Race, esclavage et
exégèse entre islam, judaïsme et christianisme,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 57 (2002),
93–125, as well as David M. Goldenberg, Te Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism,
Christianity and Islam (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005).
while polytheism would be linked to the Aryan religion. Tis new paradigm
gave the old taxonomy the coup de grâce. New categories had to be created,
and this was one of the major tasks of the fedgling “science of religion.” A
Europe whose identity was perceived as torn between the Semitic roots of
its religion and the Aryan nature of its languages and ethnicities saw the
emergence of a deep ambivalence to monotheism. Tis ambivalence echoed
and amplifed those trends in the radical Enlightenment that had grown
strongly critical of Christianity beyond the established churches, more
broadly of monotheism, and even of the very idea of religion.
Te new European discovery of isomorphisms between Sanskrit and
most European languages led to the identifcation of families of languages,
and also of families of religions, in particular the Aryan and the Semitic
religious families.11 Yet, deducing religion (and ethnicity) from linguistics
yields a fallacy, a fact vividly underscored towards the end of the nineteenth
century by Salomon Reinach in his seminal article “Le mirage oriental.”12
Important European intellectuals now started to identify European lan-
guages and peoples as belonging to the Indo-European (or Indo-Germanic)
or Aryan family. Loath to consider their own religion, Christianity, as
related in any signifcant way to Judaism and Islam, the main extant Semitic
religions, they preferred to see in it a religious expression of the Aryan race.
It is important to bear in mind, however, that pan-Aryanism hardly repre-
sented a leading trend in nineteenth-century European thought. Most intel-
lectuals in Europe placed little value on this kind of racialism. To trace back
the early nature of racialist thought patterns from their radical, murderous
consequences in the twentieth century would amount to teleological rea-

soning. Nevertheless, as the following chapters argue, the Aryan-Semite
taxonomy did play a formative role in the study of religion.13
11 Maurice Olender, Te Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the

Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992 [French original: Les
langues du paradis. Aryens et Sémites: un couple providentiel (Paris: Gallimard, Le Seuil,
1989)]). Olender discusses some of the fgures we shall encounter in the following chapters,
such as Ernest Renan, Max Müller, and Ignaz Goldziher, although the book itself does not
focus, as I do here, on the study of religion.
12 Salomon Reinach, “Le mirage oriental,” L’anthropologie 4 (1893), 539–579 and 699. See
Chapter 10 in this volume. For another use of this metaphor, see Louis Bertrand, “La réalité et
le Mirage oriental,” Revue des Deux Mondes 48: 5 (1908), 139–172. Bertrand later published a
novel entitled Le mirage oriental (Paris: Perrin, 1920).
13 See Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science
(Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2006), also on de Lagarde and Chamberlain;
cf. Chapter 8 in this volume.
Introduction 7
Christianity remained paradoxically peripheral to the development of

the new discipline. Indeed, while the traditional refection on religion had
been the object of theological and philosophical inquiry, the modern study
of religion grew mainly at the interface of philology, Oriental studies, and
ethnology. Te religion of biblical Israel remained within the purview of
Christian theology, while post-biblical and rabbinic Judaism were set aside,
refecting the Christian perception of the decadence that had overtaken the
Hebrews following the prophetic period, and certainly since Jesus.
Moreover, the historical study of Christianity and the critical, philological
approach to the Bible in our period continued to be the province of liberal
Protestant theologians; Catholics were still forbidden by ecclesiastical
authorities to deal with higher biblical criticism.
Te study of Islam, by contrast, stayed mainly in the hands of Arabic
scholars. Some of these scholars showed remarkable intellectual curiosity
and open-mindedness and made signifcant achievements in understanding
major documents of an alien civilization and religion. At the same time,
however, many among these scholars had for centuries displayed a dispar-
aging attitude towards Muhammad, dubbed a false prophet, and to his reli-
gion.14 Remarkably, then, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam found
themselves, to some extent, ofen outside the core of the new discipline.15
By and large, this important fact has not attracted the attention it deserves
in contemporary scholarship. In this book, I frst and foremost wish to
appreciate the consequences of this fact on the study of monotheism—and,
in particular, on the scholarly approaches to Judaism and Islam, two reli-
gions that now came to be perceived as distinctly alien to Christian Europe.

Unlike the abstract history of ideas, intellectual history seeks to under-
stand ideas within their full cultural, social, and political context. When
dealing with approaches to religion in the nineteenth century, accelerated
secularization, growing nationalism, and imperial colonialism provide the
immediate context. Te analysis of scholarly discourse on religion must
refect the new status of religion in societies that were undergoing intensive
14 On the ambivalence shown by early modern scholarship on Islam, see Stroumsa, A New
Science, chapter 6, 124–144 and notes. On perceptions of Islam in the Enlightenment, see
Alexander Bevilacqua, Te Republic of Arab Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018).
15 On the complex relationship between these religions from the perspective of a compara-
tive historian of religions, see Kurt Rudolph, “Juden – Christen – Muslime: Zum Verhältnis der
drei monotheistischen Religionen in religionswissenschaflicher Sicht,” chapter 11 in his
Geschichte und Probleme der Religionswissenschaf (Studies in the History of Religions, Vol.
LIII (Leiden, New York, Cologne: Brill, 1992), 279–300.
processes of secularization. On the one hand, with the industrial revolution

and the growth of cities, the working classes were learning to free them-
selves from ecclesiastical control and the churches were losing their tradi-
tional grip on Western European societies. On the other hand, powerful
thinkers, pursuing the radical Enlightenment onslaught on traditional
Christianity, were in search of new forms of spirituality. Concepts such as
Hegel’s “spirit of the age” or Comte’s “religion of the future” seduced many,
including, for example, the theologian David Friedrich Strauss in Germany
and the historian and intellectual Edgar Quinet in France. Te second half
of the century saw a signifcant decline in the number of churchgoers,
together with the growth of the historical and comparative study of
religion.16
Tis did not mean that religion was waning, as many feared, and many
others hoped. It meant, rather, that its status and function in society were
undergoing a profound transformation. Expressions of religion were
increasingly regressing from the public sphere to the private one. Of course,
the Christian dimension of European identities was in no way disappearing.
Rather, the semiotic range of Christianity shifed, moving from represent-
ing Europe’s core religious identity to representing its cultural memory. Tis
was perhaps clearest in the case of the Bible in Protestant countries, where it
became in the nineteenth century, in its vernacular translations, an essential
element of education and culture.17 Even though Christianity did not always
embody shared beliefs and practices, it certainly remained at the center of
historical consciousness and national identity. For Hegel, this was the trans-
formation, or Aufebung, of Christianity in the fully fedged Geist.18

In his seminal book A Secular Age (2007), the reception and intellectual
impact of which has been resounding, the Canadian philosopher Charles
Taylor aimed to analyze the conceptual transformations of religion in the
16 For an analytical description of the period, see Owen Chadwick, Te Secularization of the
European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). As
the present book deals with a number of countries, across a signifcant period, it will be impos-
sible to ofer an adequate discussion of the diferent conditions in each case.
17 See Jonathan Sheehan, Te Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); cf. Chapter 3 in this volume, note 8.
18 See, for instance, Jean- Claude Monod, La querelle de la sécularisation de Hegel à
Blumenberg (Paris: Vrin, 2002). On the relationship between philosophical and theological
perceptions of secularization, see Hans Blumenberg, Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974 [1966]). Blumenberg is reacting to the views expressed by Karl
Löwith, in his Meaning in History: On the Teological Implications of the Philosophy of History
(Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1949), according to whom modern European thought
amounts to a secularization of Christian ideas about salvation.
Introduction 9
modern age.19 Taylor, one must note, was not so much interested in studying
secular society in itself as in understanding the conditions under which reli-
gion in general, and Christianity in particular, remains possible in secular-
izing, modern societies. Secularity, he argued, can be understood in many
ways. For example, it can mean the separation of religion and public life.
Secularity can also indicate a decline, sometimes drastic, of religious belief
and practice. Tus, secularization points to a process rather than to a steady
state—a “secular age”—and always remains an unfnished business. Indeed,
our societies can by no means be considered as fully secularized, a global
fact we have learned the hard way to recognize in the past decades. In other
words, one could say that a secular age does not refer to a world from which
religion has disappeared, but rather to one in which religious and secular
ideas both circulate freely, in a complex, sometimes hidden, but always
present dialectic, each one in need of the other.
Secularization alone, however, cannot fully explain the transformation of
Christianity in European consciousness from representing Europe’s reli-
gious identity to encapsulating its cultural capital. An account of this trans-
formation requires a consideration of both the rapid growth of nationalism
and the expansion of colonial conquests in the age of imperialism. Such a
consideration, however, cannot be attempted here, as nationalism and colo-
nialism played out diversely in various countries, and at diferent times. In
the second half of the nineteenth century, the growing feelings of European
superiority versus Asian and African peoples and cultures would be
expressed in a new key, that of “scientifc racism.” Tis particular expression
of disparaging attitudes to foreign peoples and their cultures lef an imme-

diate, potent, and lasting impression on scholarly conceptions. A great deal
of research, including, for example, Martin Bernal’s work on Greek antiq-
uity, has shown how the categories forged in nineteenth-century scholar-
ship refected racist ideas.20
19 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press,
2007). For a similar attempt at identifying major religious transformations in human history,
see Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
(Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2011); cf. Guy G. Stroumsa, “Robert
Bellah on the Origins of Religion: A Critical Review,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 229
(2012), 467–477.
20 In Black Athena: Te Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. I: Te Fabrication of
Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), Bernal
insisted on the major role played by the intensifcation of racism and the central importance of
“ethnicity” as a principle of historical explanation. He demonstrated the crucial part they
played in the formation of new taxonomies opposing “Aryans” to “Semites.”
In one of the paradoxical consequences (and most insidious aspects) of

this transformation, Judaism and Islam, which had long belonged, together
with Christianity, to the family of the monotheistic religions (although they
were perceived, of course, as its parents pauvres), became increasingly seen
as inherently foreign to the spirit of Christianity and the nature of
Christendom. Tis constituted a major fracture in European identity, yet
another crisis of European consciousness, afer the crisis of the
Enlightenment, analyzed in such a masterful way by Paul Hazard.21 Te
depth of this fracture, as well as its efect on the status of Judaism and Islam
in the European mind, has yet to be fully assessed.22
Prior to the Enlightenment, the Near East, which was then generally
referred to as simply “the East,” was considered the seedbed of human reli-
gious origins. All religions had come from the Ancient Near East, from
Egypt to Babylonia, through the lands of the Bible.23 As Christianity was
perceived as the quintessential European religion, Judaism and Islam repre-
sented for the European mind the two surviving religions from the Ancient
Near East. Tis is true notwithstanding the continuing power of both deep
prejudices against the Jews, marginalized in the ghettos’ enclave societies,
and of persistent animosity (or at the very least contempt) towards, as well
as fear of, Muslim societies outside Europe, in particular the Ottoman
Empire. Now, however, Judaism and Islam started to be understood as
belonging to “the East of the West,” or as “the West of the (deep and true)
East,” as it were, that of India and China.
Judaism and Islam thus fell between Europe and India, between the two
poles of Indo-European cultural and religious creativity. To be sure, schol-

ars recognized the impressive geographical spread of Islam, and that both
Jews and Muslims believed in one God. Yet, all in all, racial prejudice against
the Jews (as distinct from traditional religious anti-Semitism), which had
been on the rise since the Enlightenment, and condescending attitudes
towards Islam and Islamic societies, entailed a strong devaluation of both
Judaism and Islam. At the same time, despite continuing suspicions towards
Asian religions such as Buddhism, some literati learned to express a
21 Paul Hazard, Te Crisis of the European Mind 1680–1715 (New York: New York Review of
Books, 2013 [French original: La crise de la conscience européenne, 1689–1715 (Paris: Fayard,
1961 [1935])]).
22 Markus Messling, Gebeugter Geist: Rassismus und Erkenntnis in der modernen
europäischen Philologie (Göttingen: Wallerstein, 2016).
23 See, for instance, Guy G. Stroumsa, “John Selden et les origines de l’orientalisme,” in
Quentin Epron, ed., John Selden: juriste européen, Annuaire de l’Institut Michel Villey 3
(2012), 1–11.
Introduction 11
preference for Indo-European religious systems and cultural traditions over

Semitic religions and cultures. European Christians thus contrived to liber-
ate themselves from the Jewish, Near-Eastern origins of their religion. Te
close relationship of Christianity with European culture, it was claimed, did
not abnegate its universal nature, and it was therefore Europe’s duty to pro-
mote Christianity throughout Asia and Africa, along the model of its earlier
conquests in the Americas.
Intellectual perceptions of Judaism and Islam, moreover, are directly
related to social attitudes toward Jews and Muslims in European societies—a
point which there is surely no need to belabor. In the early stages of Jewish
emancipation, a process that had started with the French Revolution, the
Jewish presence in Western European societies changed at a rapid pace.
Emancipation and reduced exclusion from society at large was accompa-
nied by new tensions. Te traditional forms of Christian anti-Semitism,
which had never quite disappeared, were reactivated in a new, racial key,
and fresh forms of prejudice were devised. It is a striking paradox, which
merits attention, that at the very time when they were starting to become
part of society at large, the Jews began to be experienced as more alien than
in the old days, when their liminal existence, on the fringes of Christian
society, was anchored as a permanent reminder of the abiding truth of
Christianity. Now, with the opening of the ghettos and the invitation to
integrate in the mainstream of society, the Jews came to be perceived as an
essentially Asian people; in that sense, they were ofen thought of as remain-
ing essentially marginal to Europe, not quite belonging to it.
At the same time, Islam was identifed as the religion of Europe’s imme-
diate neighbor, the Ottoman Empire, and that of colonized peoples from the
Maghreb to the Indian subcontinent and beyond. As such, Muslims were
ofen scorned by Europeans. Of course, signifcant Muslim communities
had long been present on European soil, mainly in the Balkans. In southern
European imagery, Muslims were ofen portrayed as peaceful traders. Yet,
more ofen than not, they remained marginalized in Western European per-
ception. In diferent ways, British, French, Belgian, and German imperial-
ism and colonialism, in Africa, the Near East, South and East Asia only
strengthened negative attitudes towards Islam and Muslims and reactivated
existing prejudices. Furthermore, as is well known, Orientalist trends in art
and literature in the nineteenth century accentuated such negative attitudes
towards Islam and Muslims.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the French historian and philosopher
Edgar Quinet introduced the phrase “la Renaissance orientale,” by which he
meant the new European scholarly interest in, and cultural sensitivity to,
the civilizations of Asia.24 Since Quinet’s days, European perceptions of the
Orient have been a highly loaded topic: witness the fate of Edward Said’s
Orientalism, which quickly became a cult classic.25 Tere is no need to
revisit here either the book’s important contributions or its various short-
comings.26 One of its features, however, has direct implications for the pres-
ent inquiry: it dismissed the colossal efort made by courageous scholars to
open new vistas to whole civilizations far beyond the borders of Europe.
Tese scholars appear to have had boundless intellectual curiosity.
Several fne monographs on aspects of nineteenth-century Orientalism
have revealed its rich and complex history, as well as the many links, both
obvious (starting with linguistic demands) and implicit, between
Orientalism and the study of religion.27 Some recent studies, moreover,
have brilliantly surveyed the world of modern Orientalism, showing its
embeddedness in intellectual and social history. Urs App’s remarkable work
on the intellectual origins of Orientalism, for example, ofers broad per-
spectives on its beginnings, from Voltaire to Volney.28 On her part, Suzanne
Marchand published an outstanding volume on Orientalism in nineteenth-
century Germany.29 App, however, concentrates on the cultures and reli-
gions of South and East Asia, and does not deal with Islam and Judaism,
whereas the core of Marchand’s book concerns developments that took
place during the Second German Reich, that is, afer 1871, leaving most of
those occurring elsewhere beyond the scope of her inquiry. From the
24 Edgar Quinet, Du génie des religions (Paris: Charpentier, 1842), 65–77: “De la renaissance
orientale”. A century later, the literary scholar Raymond Schwab would use the expression as
the title of his masterpiece, La Renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, 2014 [1950]) [N.B.: page
numbers are diferent from those in the 1950 original publication. English translation: Oriental
Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984)].
25 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978).
26 Cf. Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: Te Orientalists and their Enemies (London:
Penguin, 2006), 3–5. On the vitriolic polemics to which the book gave birth, see, for instance,
the exchange between Said and two distinguished Arabists and Islamic scholars, Oleg Grabar
and Bernard Lewis, in Te New York Review of Books (12 August 1982). Quite oddly, the
polemics continues unabated, more than forty years afer the publication of Orientalism. See,
for instance, Adam Shatz, “ ‘Orientalism,’ Ten and Now,” New York Review daily (May 20,
2019), www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/20/orientalism-then-and-now.
27 Tese studies will be repeatedly referred to in the chapters that follow.
28 Urs App, Te Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia, PA, Oxford: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2010).
29 Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and
Scholarship (Washington, Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University
Press, 2009).
Introduction 13
perspective of the present book, a crucial dimension of the study of religion

lies in its transnational character. More precisely, only by taking cultural
transfers into consideration (in particular, between Germany, France, and
Britain, as well as the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden) can one
explain the genesis and structure of this study. Hence, any research on one
specifc national or linguistic domain is bound to be limited.30
While the study of Islam and that of Judaism form part of the Orientalist
enterprise, they obviously also belong to the study of religion. Like
Orientalism, the latter expanded in the course of the nineteenth century,
eventually becoming a fully fedged scholarly discipline. How and when was
the modern, critical study of religion born? Among the branches of human-
istic scholarship, the study of religion seems to have particularly sufered
from a lack of refexivity concerning its own history.31 In the past genera-
tion, however, sophisticated accounts of the history of religion have done
much to remedy this sorry state of afairs, shedding new light on the history
of the modern study of religion. Tese books naturally focalize the second
half of the nineteenth century, the period when the frst university Chairs
and scholarly journals were established across Europe. In countries with a
predominantly Protestant culture, the study of religion became established
in theological faculties. Consequently, as Jonathan Z. Smith has shown
regarding the religions of late antiquity and the world of Early Christianity,
the study of religion long remained entwined with theological
conceptions.32
In his Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age, Hans Kippenberg
ofers an incisive analysis of major trends in the study of religion at the time
of its early development, read in their broader cultural context.33 In doing
30 Te theory of cultural transfers, developed, in particular, in France in the 1980s, at frst

focusing on philology and literary studies between France and Germany, but which has now
become much more broadly applied. See, for instance, Michel Espagne, Svetlana Gorshenina,
Frantz Grenet, Shahin Mustafayev and Claude Rapin, eds, Asie centrale: Transferts culturels le
long de la route de la soie (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2016), Introduction, 8–9. On Pierre Bourdieu’s
concept of intellectual feld as a system of relations between the agents of intellectual produc-
tion, see, for instance, Pierre Bourdieu, “Genèse et structure du champ religieux,” Revue
française de sociologie 12 (1971), 295–334.
31 Robert Orsi, “Te ‘So-Called History’ of the Study of Religion,” Method and Teory in the
Study of Religion 20 (2008), 134–138: “Te past of religious studies has been until recently
largely invisible . . .” (134).
32 Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the
Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
33 Hans G. Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age (Princeton, NJ,
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002). Te original version was published as Die
Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: Religionswissenschaf und Moderne (Munich: Beck, 1997).
so, he explicitly sets out to reintroduce the category of “history” into

religious studies. Although he starts more broadly, with various views of
religion among diferent Enlightenment thinkers, Kippenberg soon hones
in on the second half of the nineteenth and on the frst half of the twentieth
centuries. Unlike Marchand, he works as a historian of religion rather than
of Orientalism, and he deals at length not only with Germany, but also with
scholarship in other countries. Moreover, unlike App, his net is cast wide,
well beyond the study of the “Asian religions,” although his interest in the
study of Judaism and Islam remains rather limited—a refection, no doubt,
of mainstream research in the nineteenth century.
Tomoko Masuzawa’s Te Invention of World Religions is particularly per-
tinent to the present discussion.34 Like Kippenberg, Masuzawa mainly tack-
les the fnal decades of the century—the period in which the new discipline
fourished. She rightly notes that her inquiry exposes important aspects of
the new European self- consciousness and modern European identity.
Masuzawa’s focal point is the role played by the new category of “world reli-
gions” in the reinterpretation of religious phenomena and historical reli-
gions. For her, the nineteenth-century scholarly European discovery and
study of the religions of South and East Asia, principally Buddhism and
Hinduism, as well as Confucianism and Shintoism (all terms introduced by
European scholars), diverted attention from the religions born in the Near
East, frst and foremost Islam, but also Judaism.
We see a strikingly diferent approach in the work of Philippe Borgeaud,
whose Aux origines de l’histoire des religions inscribes itself defnitively in
the longue durée. Borgeaud follows the long and entangled thread from
comparative attempts in the refection about religion in antiquity, through
the approaches of paganism by the Church Fathers and the early modern
perceptions of Christian missionaries, to the establishment of university
Chairs devoted to the study of religion in the fnal third of the nineteenth
century.35 In this discursive tracking mode, Borgeaud demonstrates both
34 Tomoko Masuzawa, Te Invention of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism

Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, IL, London: University of Chicago
Press, 2005).
35 Philippe Borgeaud, Aux origines de l’histoire des religions (Paris: Seuil, 2004); cf. my
review in History of Religions 45 (2006), 257–259. See also Philippe Borgeaud, “Le problème du
comparatisme en histoire des religions,” in his Exercices d’histoire des religions: Comparaison,
rites, myths et émotions (Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 20; Leiden, Boston, MA:
Brill, 2008), 3–20. See further Philippe Borgeaud, La pensée européenne des religions (Paris: Le
Seuil, 2021). In this new volume, Borgeaud insists on the comparative nature (either explicit or
implicit) of the scholarly study of religion, which starts for him with the comparative study of
rituals and myths. He also highlights the fact that such a conception of the comparative method
Introduction 15
continuities and ruptures in the long history of human interest in the reli-
gions of other people.
Coming now to the current book, I aim to provide the reader with a crit-
ical genealogy of scholarly discourse. In order to do so, I seek to contextual-
ize this scholarly discourse, reading it within the broader framework of
social, cultural, and religious transformations during our period. In this
sense, my project is something other than traditional disciplinary history.
I am seeking here to unveil the unconscious of the discipline.36 By “uncon-
scious,” I refer to implicit, hidden principles that dictate research and the
development of the feld. It is no accident that such principles usually
remain unexpressed, in the feld of religion perhaps more than anywhere
else. If Freud was right in arguing that religion is particularly fraught with
repression (Verdrängung), the same may also be true of its study.
Taking as its main object the archaeology of the scholars’ conceptual
worlds (rather than the history of scholarship itself), the present inquiry
amounts to the study of an absence. Why is it, I ask, that nineteenth-century
religious scholarship neglected the comparative study of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam—a form of study that it had inherited from a long
tradition? It is true that nineteenth-century historicism sought to see phe-
nomena as rooted in their cultural and historical context, and to give each
nation its due, as Ranke noted. Still, in the fnal decades of the century,
comparative scholarship blossomed at the acme of British imperial power.
Te colonial enterprise fostered a comparative approach—with the avowed
view of claiming the supremacy of European culture over that of other civi-
lizations. Tis inquiry also stands at the confuence of diferent disciplines

in current bloom, especially the study of Islam (together with Arabic,
Turkic, and Iranian philology) and Jewish studies.37
Jewish scholars play a special role in our story. Tis role refects their
peculiar status and self-perception, as well as a unique aspect of the disci-
pline. Most European scholars of religion identifed, at least culturally, as
Christians—the Jewish scholars being the exception. Tese scholars sought
to achieve various goals, which were not always compatible with one
excludes the global comparison between religions, which remains always either polemical or
apologetical. I wish to thank Philippe Borgeaud for having shared his typescript with me prior
to publication.
36 Tis is to be distinguished from the point made by Philippe Borgeaud, Aux origines de
l’histoire des religions, 18, on religions representing the unconscious of civilizations.
37 See, for instance, Christian Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and
Protestant Teology in Wilhelmine Germany (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2005).
another. For example, some of them aimed to apply philological and

historical methods to Jewish texts and documents which they considered
overlooked or misunderstood by Christian scholars. Moreover, moved as
they were by both a sense of belonging to their own traditional Jewish cul-
ture and an intense desire to become full members of society at large, they
ofen perceived themselves as a bridge of sorts between the cultures and
languages of Asia and Europe—that is, as Orientals living in the West.
Te scholarly study of Judaism incorporated the multidisciplinary study
of post-biblical Judaism, Jewish history, and Jewish languages and litera-
tures. Tis feld, created more or less ab ovo by Jewish scholars in the nine-
teenth century, is known as as the Wissenschaf des Judentums. Te specifc
contribution of Jewish scholars to the study of religion, however, goes far
beyond the study of Judaism.38 Jewish scholars made major advancements
to the comparative study of Christianity and Judaism, as well as of Islam
and Judaism. Indeed, some particularly gifed Jewish scholars, from
Abraham Geiger to Ignaz Goldziher, transformed the European approach
to Islam. Moreover, as we shall see, Jewish scholars in various countries
made substantial contributions to the philological and historical study of
Iranian and Indian religions, as well as to the anthropological approach to
religion. One might say that it is as if their identity as belonging to a reli-
gious minority had revealed to them their vocation as cultural translators
and go-betweens. Te presence of Jewish scholars, together with the unique
relationship of Christian theology to the Hebrew Bible, shaped the singular
status of Judaism within the study of religions, where its ambivalence would
remain even more marked than that of Islam.

By broadening its anti-clericalism to a critical view of monotheism
which included Judaism and Islam alongside Christianity, the radical
Enlightenment had actually strengthened the commensurability between
the three monotheistic religions. At the same time, Enlightenment authors
started taking more seriously than ever before the great cultural traditions
of Asia, in particular those of India and China. It is during the Romantic
period and the rise of national movements that we witness the real break-up
of the integrative refection on the three monotheistic religions. Tis
38 For a lucid analysis of the signifcant role of French Jews in the study of religion as well as
in other humanistic disciplines, see Perrine Simon-Nahum, Les juifs et la modernité: L’héritage
du judaïsme et les Sciences de l’homme en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2018).
Simon-Nahum shows how French Jews play a role of their own in the study of religion, one
that is directly related to their religious identity and place in society. See Chapter 7 in
this volume.
Introduction 17
break-up was fnalized by the combined impact of a traditional scorn

towards Islam and a condescending attitude towards contemporary Muslim
societies.39 Alongside this aversion to Islam, the new racial anti-Semitism
burgeoned. At the time, the Jews of Europe were starting to leave the ghet-
tos and enter Western European societies—a radical shif in the centuries-
old pattern of relationship between Christians and Jews. Te latter soon dis-
covered, however, that this new economic integration was not enough to
earn them what Heine called an “entrance ticket” to European society—a
ticket which only baptism could truly purchase. Te Jews, as already noted,
were perceived as stemming from the Orient, and ofen enough still belong-
ing to it. It is worth mentioning that Jews tended to embrace these Oriental
roots with pride. Tis self-identifcation is refected in the Orientalizing
architecture of many nineteenth- century synagogues, a style meant to
allude to the mythical symbiosis, or convivencia, between Muslims, Jews,
and Christians in al-Andalus; that is, medieval Islamic Spain.40
Te scholarly study of Christianity (in particular early and late antique
Christianity), which was gradually disengaging itself from theology (with-
out ever fully succeeding in achieving this goal), represents a special case in
the emerging comparative and historical study of religions. As noted above,
the appearance, in the fnal three decades of the nineteenth century, of the
new concept of “world religions,” fnally broke up the traditional family
relationship of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At this point, Christianity
was classifed as a full-bodied universalist religion, while Islam was granted
this status only grudgingly, and Judaism was relegated to the category of
racially and ethnically determined religions.41

Signifcantly, the history of scholarship, and even more that of scholarly
perceptions and presuppositions, encompasses much more than a list of the
achievements of individual scholars; it also covers scholarly institutions, in
the framework of which free research and intellectual breakthroughs can
happen. Such institutions include universities, but also theological seminar-
ies, scientifc academies, scholarly journals, conference halls, and publish-
ing houses. In contrast to early modernity, when scholarship was largely the
39 A similar phenomenon can also be observed about religions and societies of black Africa,
as demonstrated by David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion
(Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 2014).
40 See, for instance, the discussion of this theme in John Efron, German Jewry and the Allure
of the Sefardic (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016). Tis embrace of the
Orient would be echoed in the Zionist urge to return to the East, to Palestine. At the turn of the
century, art in Jewish Palestine, too, would embrace the Orientalizing trend.
41 See Chapter 9 in this volume.
personal adventure of gifed and idiosyncratic individuals, from the

nineteenth century on, research has mainly been carried out within univer-
sity walls. It is, indeed, the dialectical interaction between individual think-
ing and institutionalized systems of knowledge that transforms disciplines.
Intellectual discourse and scholarly practices are best grasped when their
cultural, religious, and ideological background is incorporated into the
broader picture.
Since their birth in the seventeenth century, the modern humanistic dis-
ciplines, just like the natural sciences, have been fascinated by the act of
comparison. Importantly, the comparison between languages, cultures,
legal systems, scientifc traditions, mythologies, and societies has always
refected the efort to detect diferences as much as to seek similarities.
Tese modern disciplines were the ofspring of the puzzlement generated
by the new cultures and societies revealed by the great discoveries. Te
comparative element gathered momentum in the nineteenth century, start-
ing with linguistics, under the impact of Franz Bopp’s seminal studies on
the grammar of the Indo- European languages, and reached its zenith
towards the end of that century.42 Te comparative ethos would then
broaden to include other scholarly disciplines, such as those we now call the
social sciences.43
Comparison has lain at the heart of the study of religions since the eight
eenth century. Ever-present (yet never innocent, as astutely noted by Bruce
Lincoln and David Chidester44), comparison is a method fraught with
42 See further ibid.

43 See, for instance, Stefan Collini, “Te Clue to the Maze: Te Appeal of the Comparative
Method,” in his Tat Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 207–246, which discusses at length the
approach of the historian Sir Henry Maine, Max Müller’s colleague at Oxford, and his studies
of villages in India and Europe.
44 Bruce Lincoln and Christiano Grottanelli, “Teses on Comparison,” in Bruce Lincoln,
ed., Apples and Oranges: Explorations In, On, and With Comparison (Chicago, IL, London:
Chicago University Press, 2018), 25–33, esp. 25. See also, in the same volume, “Te Future of
History of Religions,” 14–24 (written together with Cristiano Grottanelli). David Chidester,
Empire of Religion: Chidester shows how British Imperialism in the second half of the nine-
teenth century used taxonomies of religions in order to support its colonial conquests in South
Africa. See the earlier book of David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative
Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville, London: University Press of Virginia, 1996). On
comparison in the study of ancient religions, see Claude Calame and Bruce Lincoln, eds,
Comparer en histoire des religions antiques (Liège: Presses universitaires de Liège, 2012). For the
wise remarks of a Western medievalist puzzled by what she sees in India, see Caroline Bynum,
“Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology; Or, Why Compare?” History of Religions 53 (2014),
341–368. For an attempt to negotiate a path between too much and too little comparison in the
study of religion, see Wendy Doniger, “Te Postcolonial and Postmodern Critique of
Comparison,” in her Te Implied Spider: Politics and Teology in Myth (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998), 64–71.
Introduction 19
itfalls. What do we do when we compare? Te answer depends, of course,

p
upon one’s goals, perspective, and culture. Social anthropologists, in partic-
ular, have refected on the question of comparison between societies, both
those broadly similar and those strikingly diferent from one another.45
Remarkably, the study of religion, as a discipline, has never really settled
on its own name. Te Germans speak of Religionswissenschaf, the French of
histoire des religions, while in Britain, one used to refer to “comparative reli-
gion,” in particular at its peak, in the decades leading up to the First World
War. Te term “comparative religion” refects the state of the art in the late
nineteenth century, during the Victorian age.46 Te fnal three decades of
the nineteenth century, which saw the birth of “comparative religion,” also
witnessed the emergence of “world religions.” Tese “big” religions in terms
of numbers of believers or practitioners were also deemed “great” and com-
parable, mutatis mutandis, to Christianity in their theological riches, geo-
graphical spread, historical span, and civilizational impact. Today, most
departments in English-speaking countries, avoiding any serious discussion
on method, use the rather insipid term “Religious Studies.” As cogently
argued by Oliver Freiberger, the comparative method, which he calls a
“second-order method,” is not only useful for the study of religion. It might
also be constitutive for religious studies if they want to assert themselves as
a fully fedged discipline.47
45 About comparison as experimental method, see Philippe Borgeaud, L’histoire des religions
(Gollion: Infolio, 2013), 182–185. For a rich volume of studies on comparatism by historians
and social anthropologists alike, see Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, Geofrey E. R. Lloyd, eds,
Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology
(Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 24; Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2018). For an
analysis of the diferent kinds of comparatism in anthropology, see in particular in that
volume, Philippe Descola, “Anthropological Comparatisms: Generalisation, Symmetrisation,
Bifurcation,” 402–417. In 2019–2020, Descola dedicated his last year of teaching at the Collège
de France to the question of comparatism in anthropology. In the footsteps of E. E. Evans-
Pritchard, he insists on the fact that comparison is the very essence of anthropology and seeks
to distinguish between diferent kinds of comparatism. In this context, it is signifcant that, like
the study of religion, modern anthropology dates from the last decades of the nineteenth cen-
tury. In his Marett Lecture (1950), Evans-Pritchard had already argued that anthropology
should be perceived as a kind of history, and that it properly belongs to the humanities. See
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “Social Anthropology: Past and Present,” in his Social Anthropology and
Other Essays (New York: Te Free Press, 1962), 139–154, esp. 152–154.
46 For a recent synoptic review, see Jörg Rüpke, “Comparative Religion—Past and Present,”
in Guy G. Stroumsa, ed., Comparative Studies in the Humanities (Jerusalem: Te Israel
Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2018), 153–172. See Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay, Te
Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia
Press, 2010).
47 See Oliver Freiberger, Considering Comparison: A Method for Religious Studies (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2019).
Contemporary historiography of the discipline tends to take as its main

object Protestant countries in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Philippe Borgeaud, for instance, puts his fnger on the pulse of secularization
in Protestant countries in the 1870s, while Hans Kippenberg follows the tradi-
tional emphasis on Protestant scholarship.48 Until the early twentieth century,
the Catholic hierarchy was still battling the critical methods in the study of
the Scriptures, and Catholic theological faculties mostly resisted the study of
religious phenomena and history in a modern, non-traditional way. Despite
daring attempts, such as those of the Dominicans of the École Biblique in
Jerusalem since the days of Marie-Joseph Lagrange, O.P., Catholic scholars
were prohibited from practicing higher criticism until Vatican II.49 As I
argued in A New Science, the main Catholic contribution to the study of reli-
gion lies not in philology, but in the long tradition of keen ethnological obser-
vations made by Catholic missionaries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
It was within Protestant theological faculties in Germany that the new
critical approach to the Scriptures was born, and that the progressive theo-
logical liberalization was most conspicuous, permitting the study of non-
Christian religions, past and present. Fresh scholarly biblical hermeneutics
eventually paved the way to the comparative study of religious texts from
both the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman Mediterranean—a trend
exemplifed by the Göttingen Religionsgeschichtliche Schule in the 1890s.50
Tese ancient texts were now understood as refecting the background, or
Sitz im Leben, of the religious ideas expressed in the books of the Old and
New Testaments.
Te common misperception that the nineteenth-century study of reli-

gion was essentially a Protestant afair, however, is multidetermined. Te
massive clef between Protestant and Catholic biblical scholarship also con-
tributed to this fallacy. Te following chapters, which present evidence for
48 See Borgeaud, L’histoire des religions, 134; Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in
the Modern Age. Tis is also true for those works calling attention to the high price paid by
those reading religious history through confessional glasses. On this issue, Jonathan Z. Smith
has shown in his seminal Drudgery Divine how much Protestant beliefs had impacted the
study of early Christianity in its Hellenistic background. Mutatis mutandis, a similar argument
could be made about ancient Israel and Near Eastern religions.
49 A later, but similarly interesting fgure among Catholic scholars, is that of Franz Joseph
Dölger. See Teodor Klauser, Franz Joseph Dölger 1879–1940: sein Leben und sein
Forschungsprogramm “Antike und Christentum” (Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum,
Ergänzungsband 7; Münster: Aschendorf, 1980).
50 On the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, see Gerd Lüdemann, ed., Die “Religionsgeschichtliche
Schule”: Facetten eines theologischen Umbruchs (Frankfurt, New York: Peter Lang, 1996). See
Chapter 8 in this volume.
Introduction 21
the major importance of the transmission of knowledge between diferent

European countries and the crucial signifcance for the science of religion of
ethnological studies, coming at the time mainly from Catholic missionaries,
seek to lay to rest this long-lived misapprehension. We now know that it is
as a complex combination of elements stemming from diferent cultural
and intellectual traditions that the modern study of religion emerged.51
Te chapters of this book spotlight salient features of the aforementioned
problems. It bears mention, however, that in no way do they present a full
narrative of the discipline in the period. Te book does not deal, for
instance, with the study of Hinduism or Buddhism, or of Greek, Roman, or
African religions, which cannot contribute much to the questions at hand.
Zoroastrianism, on its part, will be touched upon only obliquely. All these
important and fascinating topics have been the object of various studies,
some of them referred to above. Instead, the book proposes to follow some
major themes that have not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve.
Its ten chapters trace, in rough chronological order, a number of motifs
related to the idea of Semitic monotheism, its deep and immediate origins,
its formation, the developments it stimulated, and its fnal waning. Te
chronological order has to remain rough, as the story is an intricate one,
pivoting on multiple axes. Moreover, our interdisciplinary journey criss-
crosses political, linguistic, and cultural borders, in particular between
Germany, France, and England. We recall that Ernest Renan introduced the
term “Semitic monotheism,” and is largely responsible for its rapid propaga-
tion. Te frst four chapters, then, will lead the reader to Renan’s idea, while
the fnal four will showcase some of its efects. As indicated earlier, any his-
tory of the discipline must take into account not only the relevant German
scholarship, but also the core role played by French scholars. Jewish schol-
ars, too, are a polestar in this narrative. In particular, we will track those
who crossed the Rhine, moving from Germany to France in search of aca-
demic positions.
Chapter 1 refects on historical varieties of monotheism and on the medi-
eval tale of the three rings, each representing one of the three monotheistic
religions. In Chapter 2, we shall see how this tale was shattered by the para-
digm shif of the Enlightenment and replaced by the story of the three
impostors. Chapter 3 introduces the reader to the French renaissance of
Oriental studies at the end of the eighteenth century and the frst decades of
51 I reached a similar conclusion about the early modern study of religion, in the seven-
teenth century, in A New Science.
the nineteenth. In Chapter 4, we will track early Jewish scholars and their
role in the transmission of knowledge between France and Germany. Renan
will be the sole protagonist of Chapter 5, while he will share Chapter 6 with
the French Jewish scholar Joseph Salvador. In Chapter 7, we will follow the
development of new, secular approaches to the history of religions in Paris.
What I propose to call the “Quarrel of Monotheism,” the focal point of
Chapter 8, is by nature of European dimensions, although it starts from a
discussion of Renan’s vision of Semitic monotheism. Chapter 9 will deal
with the birth of the idea of “world religions,” and with scholarship on
Semitic religion, in particular that of Julius Wellhausen and William
Robertson Smith. Te latter, as is well known, considered sacrifce the core
ritual of ancient Semitic religion. Te comparative study of sacrifce, among
Emile Durkheim’s collaborators, is analyzed in the tenth and fnal chapter.
In the Conclusion, I refect on some twentieth-century trajectories and
the protracted birth of the idea of Abrahamic religions, a hundred years or
so afer the close of the period at the core of this book’s inquiry. In a sense,
the concept of Abrahamic religions plays today a role similar to that of
Semitic monotheism as studied here. Although the bulk of this book takes a
historical and descriptive approach, one cannot ignore the contemporary
implications of the story about to be told. In this context, I will argue for the
ethical value of the comparative approach to the study of religion. Learning
about others ofers a path to the recognition of cultural pluralism, through
the decentering of one’s own culture. More than any other scholarly method,
the comparative approach places the study of other worlds squarely within
the purview of humanistic behavior.

Trough the individual cases presented in these pages, I seek to signal
several specifc, signifcant, points. In the trajectory of modern scholarship
on religion, paradigm shifs in systems of knowledge brought about the
reconstruction of central cognitive structures. It is important to note that I
discuss specifc points, and I trace these points through a particular trajec-
tory. My aims here are decidedly selective and circumscribed; I leave to
others a comprehensive treatment of the phenomena at hand. What inter-
ests me most is the formation and restructuring of concepts and methods,
which modifes felds of study, sometimes profoundly transforming them.
Such felds are ultimately related to the construction of the self, in particular
when they deal directly with religious identities.
Te historical and comparative study of religions, a delicate and interdis-
ciplinary feld of scholarship, has had a considerable impact on both the
transmission of knowledge and the transformation of European identities.
What was true in the nineteenth century remains true today, as we witness,
Introduction 23
throughout Europe, and beyond, a burst of Islamophobia and an animated,

enduring, ofen strident and sometimes violent public discussion about the
ethnic, cultural, and religious implications of the massive immigration from
Muslim countries, coming together with a worrisome renewal, in various
garbs, of a Judaeophobia (a phenomenon traditionally called anti-Semitism)
we naively thought was on the wane.
For a number of reasons, the use of “Semite” and “Semitic” has continued
to be profoundly ambivalent, and to this day is ofen problematic. As a term,
“anti-Semitism” was given currency in the early 1880s, by the German jour-
nalist Wilhelm Marr, referring to the political movement opposed to the
integration of Jews into society.52 Although this misnomer has retained its
original connotations to this day, it is ofen argued that Arabs cannot be
accused of anti-Semitism in the sense of Judeophobia, since they too are
Semites. Tis is, of course, a very weak syllogism, as has been amply demon-
strated. Edward Said made another claim, more relevant to our present
inquiry, when he argued that the popular anti-Semitic animus was trans-
ferred from a Jewish to an Arab target, and that this transference was made
smoothly, since the fgure was essentially the same (i.e. the Arabs too are
Semites, and therefore the same word can be used against them). Tis too is
a specious argument, as shown by Bernard Lewis.53 Te word itself, anti-
Semitism, dates from the late nineteenth century, while according to Said,
Orientalist anti-Arab animus is a much earlier phenomenon. Moreover,
anti-Jewish animus never weakened, let alone disappeared, even with the
growth of what is now called Islamophobia. Neither the word “anti-
Semitism” nor the hatred it refers to can be said to have been transferred
from Jew to Arab.54
In the contemporary world, an overlapping between anti-Semitism and
Islamophobia cannot be denied, although it has recently been called “one of
‘the best kept secrets.’ ”55 Post-Christian societies, as it turns out, do not
seem to be quite over their obsession with Muslims and Jews.
52 On the earlier coining of the word and its original meaning, see Chapter 5 in this volume,
note 22.
53 Bernard Lewis, Semites and Antisemites (New York, London: Norton, 1986).
54 On this, see Gil Anidjar, “Te Semitic Hypothesis (Religion’s Last Word,” in his Semites:
Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 13–38.
55 See Gil Z. Hochberg, “ ‘Remembering Semitism’ or ‘On the Prospect of Re-Membering
the Semites,’ ” ReOrient 1 (2016), 192–223, esp. 211. Hochberg points to the scholarly tradition
epitomized by Renan as responsible for the deprecatory European perception of the “Semites”
Her remark that refering to the “Judeo-Christian tradition” permits to see only the Arabs, but
not the Jews, as “Semites” does not carry conviction, notwithstanding the contemporary use of
this locution among right-wing circles, which is meant to reject the idea of any Islamic dimen-
sion to European identity.
1
Varieties of Monotheism and
the Tree Rings
Te Emergence of a Concept
While the idea of Semitic monotheism only emerged in the mid-nineteenth

century as a variegated religious phenomenon, monotheism has a much
more ancient history. Te present chapter will frst briefy set forth some of
the main stages in the emergence and evolution of monotheism in ancient
religious history and discuss the origins of the modern concept of mono-
theism. It will then follow some of the major approaches to the question of
the relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the long
Middle Ages. As the new paradigm of the three monotheistic religions
refects a rejection of these medieval traditions, this concise review of
ancient evidence is necessary in order to fully understand the later
developments.
Since Constantine and the late antique creation of a cultura christiana,
Europe has identifed itself—politically and culturally, as well as reli-
giously—as belonging to the realm of the One God. Te idea of monothe-

ism appeared even earlier, however, in the ancient Near East—not only with
the emergence of Judaism from Israelite religion, but also with Akhnaton’s
religious revolution in Egypt, the prophecy of Zarathustra in Iran, and
Nabonides’ attempt to simplify the Babylonian pantheon.1 Te question
whether monotheism frst emerged fully formed or, rather, was the fruit of a
1 On the appearance of monotheism in ancient Israel, the bibliography is, of course,

immense. See, for instance, Fritz Stolz, Einführung in den biblischen Monotheismus (Darmstadt:
Wissenschafliche Buchgesellschaf, 1996); Mark S. Smith, Te Origins of Biblical Monotheism:
Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (Oxford, New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001); Tomas Römer, L’invention de Dieu (Paris: Seuil, 2014); and Bernhard Lang,
Monotheism and the Prophetic Minority (Shefeld: Almond Press, 1983), in particular
Chapter 1: “Te Yahweh-Alone Movement and the Making of Jewish Monotheism,” 13–59. On
other monotheistic trends in the ancient Near East, see Jan Assmann and Harald Strohm, eds,
Echnaton und Zarathustra: Zur Genese und Dynamik des Monotheismus (Paderborn:
Fink, 2012).
The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth. Guy G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press
(2021). © Guy G. Stroumsa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898685.003.0002
Varieties of Monotheism and the Three Rings 25
tortuous evolution of religious conceptions, remains an open one, and

beyond the present purview. Today, in any case, the scholarly consensus is
that biblical monotheism was born of a protracted historical process.
In late antiquity, monotheism won the grand battle launched against the
old Greco-Roman polytheist order. In this context, I am not referring only
to the victory of Christianity in the Empire, but also to the fact that the idea
of a supreme entity, the only one to truly merit the term “God,” had become
widespread among late antique Platonic philosophers and, more generally,
intellectual elites. Te fourth-century Neo-Platonist philosopher Proclus,
for instance, noted that all forms of religions and sects accept the existence
of a frst cause. Such a “pagan monotheism,” however, difers markedly from
the Jewish or Christian belief in the God of Abraham, and there are variet-
ies of late antique monotheism, just as there were difering forms of mono-
theism in the ancient Near East. Monotheism, it seems, must be declined in
the plural.
Te long late antiquity, roughly between the birth of Christianity and that
of Islam, was a pivotal period in the history of religions. It was this era that
witnessed the crystallization of the idea of monotheism. In the frst century,
the only religion clearly identifed as monotheistic was Judaism. Since the
seventh century, three such religions have vied for the characterization of
“true” monotheism, each presenting its rivals as incomplete or distorted
versions of the full divine revelation. Moreover, the pull of monotheism
during those centuries exerted itself far beyond Jewish and Christian com-
munities. We are witnessing a mounting scholarly recognition of the
importance of monotheistic trends among Hellenic thinkers under the

Roman Empire.2 During this period, which started as a “world full of gods,”
according to Cicero (quoting Tales of Miletus), monotheism eventually
became what one may call “the politically correct religious idiom.”3 For
2 See, in particular, three important collections of studies: Polymnia Athanassiadi and

Michael Frede, eds, Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999); Stephen
Mitchell and Peter van Nufelen, eds, One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Mitchell and van Nufelen, eds,
Monotheism between Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity (Leuven, Walpole., MA: Peeters,
2010). For a critique of the concept of pagan monotheism, see Mark Edwards, “Pagan and
Christian Monotheism in the Age of Constantine,” in Mark Edwards and Simon Swaine, eds,
Approaching Late Antiquity: Te Transformation from Early to Late Empire (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 211–234. See, further, Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, Dio unico, pluralità e
monarchia divina: esperienze religiose e teologie nel mondo tardo-antico (Brescia: Morcelliana,
2010). Te following passages make use of Guy G. Stroumsa, Te Making of the Abrahamic
Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 9–20.
3 See Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: Te Strange Triumph of Christianity (New York,
London: Plume, 2001 [1999]). Te expression is from Polymnia Athanassiadi, “From Man to
Platonic philosophers, in particular, the pyramid of beings culminated in

the One, the supreme god. Whether references to Hypsistos Teos (the
Highest God), or exclamatory inscriptions like Heis Teos! (One God!) stem
from Jewish, Christian, or pagan milieus is still being debated.4 Tis pagan
monotheism was a far cry from either Jewish or Christian monotheism, but
the Roman world was clearly moving towards monotheism, or at least
towards “henotheism” (see further on in this section). Tis might have
refected Christian prodding, as it were. What is certain is the confation of
Hellenic and Israelite forms of monotheism in the Roman Empire. Late
antique religion can be described as an intercultural system in which a
dynamic process permitted the transformation of religious conceptualiza-
tion and practice.5
Scholarly tradition follows cultural habits, inherited from Christianity, in
considering monotheism the engine of religious change in late antiquity. In
this line of thinking, monotheism constitutes the core of the great clash
between pagans and Christians. Yet, in their discussions of monotheism,
scholars tend to devalue practice in favor of discourse, and may not take
ancient perceptions sufciently into account. For Augustine, for instance, it
is forms of worship, rather than theological conceptions, that are the main
criterion of religious identity.6 Similarly, Emperor Julian writes:
. . . I wish to show that the Jews agree with the Gentiles (tois ethnesin),
except that they believe in only one God. Tat is indeed peculiar to them
and strange to us, since all the rest we have in a manner in common with
them—temples, sanctuaries, altars, purifcations, and certain precepts. For

as to these we difer from one another either not at all or in trivial
matters . . .7
God, or the Mutation of a Culture (300 bc–ad 762)”, in Anastasia Drandaki, Demetra
Papanikola-Batirtzi, and Anastasia Tourta, eds, Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from
Greek Collections (Athens: National Gallery of Art and J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013), 29–43.
4 See, for instance, Stephen Mitchell, “Further Toughts on the Cult of Teos Hypsistos,” in
Mitchell and van Nufelen, eds, One God, 167–208 and Nicole Belayche, “Hypsistos: Une voie
de l’exaltation des dieux dans le polythéisme gréco-romain,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 7
(2005), 34–55.
5 Cf. Beate Pongratz- Leisten, in her Introduction to Beate Pongratz- Leisten, ed.,
Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns,
2011), 38.
6 Augustine, De Civ. Dei, 10.1, quoted by Alfons Fürst, “Monotheism between Cult and
Politics: Te Temes of the Ancient Debate between Pagan and Christian Monotheism,” in
Mitchell and van Nufelen, eds, One God, 85.
7 Contra Galileos, 306B, 406–407 in the Loeb Classical Library (LCL).
Julian rejected the Christian god of his youth and sought to return to
Hellenic tradition. He never quite succeeded, however, in becoming a real
polytheist, and his arguments against the “Galileans” reveal him to have
remained, at heart, a monotheist. What he reproaches the God of Moses for
is not so much his uniqueness as his character: he is jealous (baskanos).8 He
is, moreover, “a particular (merikon) god,” while the Hellenes “recognize the
God of the All” (ton tōn holōn theon).9 God does not need revelation in
order for humans to recognize him, since “the human race possesses its
knowledge of God by nature and not from teaching,” a fact proved “by the
universal yearning for the divine that is in all men . . .”10
Julian represents the acme of the Hellenic reaction against Christian
monotheism. Tis reaction did not die with him. But some kind of hierar-
chy of the divine world, with the One at its summit, remains implicit in the
philosophical tradition. Even for as vocal an advocate of polytheism as
Proclus, a century later, “all forms of religions and sects accept the existence
of the very frst cause, and all men call it a helping god.” Nonetheless, not all
recognize the existence of lower gods, as “Te One shows itself with more
evidence than plurality.”11
Te late antique interface between polytheism and monotheism, how-
ever, is even more complex.12 While some pagan philosophers were not true
polytheists at heart, Christian theologians ofen appeared to believe in more
than one god—a perennial accusation found in Jewish and Muslim
anti-Christian polemics. I refer here not so much to the Trinity, a belief that
was not universal among Christians before the fourth century, as to the
hierarchy of two divine beings, namely, God the Father and Jesus Christ.
Origen’s Dialogue with Heraclides attests powerfully to the early Christian
ambivalence about monotheism.13 Tis striking dialogue demonstrates the
complicated way in which third-century Christian intellectuals grappled
with their theology, whose characterization as monotheistic may seem
questionable to the outsider. It is worth mentioning that the hierarchical or
“vertical” dualism integrating two divine persons in the Godhead was not
a Christian invention. Since Hellenistic times, a number of Jewish texts,
8 Ibid., 93 C, 326–327 LCL; translation emended.

9 Ibid., 148 C, 358–359 LCL; translation emended. 10 Ibid., 52 B, 320–321 LCL.
11 In Tim. III; Diels 153, 6–15, Festugière IV, 195.
12 On the need to study polytheist and monotheist systems together, see Guy G. Stroumsa,
“Comparer à travers champs? Polythéismes et monothéismes,” Asdiwal 14 (2019), 65–71.
13 Origen, Dialogue with Heraklides, ed. and transl. Jean Scherer, Entretien d’Origène avec
Héraclide (Sources Chrétiennes, 67; Paris: Cerf, 1967), I, 20–II, 20, 54–59.
biblical apocryphs, had referred to a second divine fgure, next to God and
beneath Him. Enoch was probably the most common such fgure. Te same
dualistic structure of the Divinity was retained in various traditions from
the rabbinic period, revolving around the fgure of Metatron (perhaps: “he
who sits near the Divine throne”) or of another archangel. Various rabbinic
sources speak of “two Powers in heaven” (shtei rashuyot ba-shamayim).14
Such entangled traditions have received some scholarly treatment, but the
signifcant split in the Divinity that they refect has not always been ade-
quately appreciated. Unsurprisingly, Jewish scholars have been loath to rec-
ognize dualistic trends within “orthodox” Judaism, which claimed to retain
the purity of monotheism while confronting Christian “bitheism,” or at least
“binarian” monotheism. It might even have been the existence of
Christianity, it could plausibly be speculated, that restrained the develop-
ment of such divine world hierarchies in late antique rabbinic literature.15
Te presence in the early Christian centuries of various stripes of dualist
heresies, globally referred to here as “Gnosticism,” probably prevented a
more precise scholarly diagnostic about the existence of a dualism within
biblical monotheism in general, and Christian theology in particular. Like
the Talmudic rabbis, the Church Fathers insisted upon the dualist nature of
many of the heresies they were fghting, whitewashing the dualist proclivi-
ties inherent within their own belief system. On the other side, Christian
apologists wished to leave the impression that they had a monopoly on
monotheism. To a great extent, modern scholarship has accepted this emic
perception of the matter.
Te ubiquity of dualist proclivities in diferent forms of late antique

monotheism merits explanation. If it seems that a dualist tension is built
into biblical monotheism, it is because this monotheism (unlike pagan
monotheism) insisted on the ethical aspect of God, and sought to ofer a
theodicy: “Unde malum?” (“Whence evil?”) is the perennial, vexed ques-
tion. Te ethical dimension, a core component of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam, might well be more signifcant than the simple idea of God’s unity.
Te Islamicist Henry Corbin has called the necessity for the One to become
14 See Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and
Gnosticism (2nd edn; Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2002) and Peter Schäfer, Zwei Götter im
Himmel: Gottesvorstellungen in der jüdischen Antike (Munich: Beck, 2017).
15 See, for instance, Menahem Kister, “Some Early Jewish and Christian Exegetical Problems
and the Dynamics of Monotheism,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 37 (2006), 548–593.
multiple in order to be worshipped “the paradox of monotheism.”16 Tere is

indeed a paradox inherent to monotheism, in addition to the so-called
“omnipotence paradox” addressed by the Islamic philosopher Averroes (the
Latinized name of the twelfh-century philosopher and legal scholar Ibn
Rushd, d. 1198). Monotheism practically entails a split in the divine, tran-
scendent unity. Tis split can take one of the many forms of dualism and
trinitarianism. Angelology, other divine hierarchies, and anthropomor-
phism are all related to this paradox.
Late antique Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, and pagan forms of monothe-
ism, then, were never truly “pure.” Tus, in practical terms, it was probably
not the desire to confess God’s unity that moved most pagans to convert to
Christianity. Pagan monotheism failed because it was at once too exclusive
(its teachings were accessible only to a select few) and too inclusive (it did
not prohibit the cult of the gods).17 Yet, it would be a mistake to think that
there was only one possible trajectory in late antiquity. Marinus of Neapolis
(the ancient Shechem and the modern Nablus, in Samaria) succeeded
Proclus as the head of the Athenian academy. His disciple Damascius
reported: “born a Samaritan, Marinus renounced their creed [doxan]
(which is anyway a deviation [kainotomian] from Abraham’s religion
[thrēskeias]) and embraced Hellenism.”
Abraham, then, was a cultural hero of sorts far afeld of Jewish and
Christian communities. In late antiquity, both Jews and Christians identi-
fed as the sole faithful followers of Abraham’s true religion. Te Koran’s
claim that Jews and Christians diverged from Abraham’s pure inheritance
seems to turn back on its authors the early Christian claim that Jews had
perverted Abraham’s true religion.18 Abraham’s religion, indeed, was in late
aantiquity broadly perceived as true monotheism—almost as natural
religion.19
From Herodotus and Megasthenes on, a long list of Greek authors
expressed intellectual curiosity about Eastern peoples with ancient cultures,
such as the Egyptians, the Persians, the Indians, and the Jews. In late antiq-
uity, some Hellenic intellectuals, in particular those from the Eastern
16 See Henry Corbin, Le paradoxe du monothéisme (Paris: Herne, 1981), 181: “Le
monothéisme est impossible sans l’angélologie.”
17 See Damascius, Te Philosophical History, text, transl., notes by Polymnia Athanassiadi
(Athens: Apameia, 1999), 236–237.
18 See, for instance, Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, a text written before the
mid-second century.
19 See Guy G. Stroumsa, “From Abraham’s Religion to the Abrahamic Religions,” Historia
Religionum 3 (2011), 11–22.
provinces of the Roman Empire, knew that wisdom could be found not only
in the writings of Greek philosophers, but also among the “barbarian” peo-
ples of the East. Te sages of these nations were the keepers of old wisdom
traditions every bit as respectable as those of the Greek philosophers. Tese
limes intellectuals, as one may call them, such as Numenius of Apamea in
the late second century and Iamblichus of Chalcis in the early fourth, knew
to look eastward for traditions of wisdom unknown to the Greeks.20 Te
priests of the Eastern nations preserved those traditions, which were reli-
gious by nature. From now on, and particularly across European intellectual
history, the Eastern origin of religious truth would be an accepted truism.
Tis notion, that religion comes from the East, re-emerges in early moder-
nity. John Selden’s work De Dis Syris (1617) springs to mind, but one fnds
this idea in many other texts as well.
It is in the modern resurgence of the Eastern-roots-of-religious-truth
theme that we fnd a key to the whole Orientalist adventure. For early mod-
ern scholars, such as John Selden, the roots of religious truth were obviously
to be found in the lands of the Bible, and “the East” essentially referred to
the Near East. Te Enlightenment did much to weaken the value of the bib-
lical reference, and from now on, although one would keep looking East in
search of these roots, it would be a broader kind of East, much more inclu-
sive. Te biblical East had to share the privilege of representing the original
locus of religious truth, frst, with Egypt and Iran, and then with India.
China was a diferent case, as it represented in the Enlightenment the possi-
bility of a major civilization and wisdom tradition not established upon
religion. European scholars study Oriental languages because texts in those

(to Western ears) obscure idioms retain a primal relationship with a pri-
mordial Christian revelation. Johann Gottfried Herder, whom we shall meet
in later chapters, is perhaps the most eloquent expositor of this long tradi-
tion. By Herder’s time, its horizon had been extended through Asia. It is
only later, with the Romantic movement in the early nineteenth century,
that India became the locus classicus of the Eastern tradition of wisdom,
dropping, as it were, the biblical Near East. Here, as we shall see in
Chapter 3, Friedrich Schlegel is the main actor.
Like all religious systems, monotheism is structurally unstable, given to
fux, and even susceptible to radical change. Late antique Abrahamic mono-
theism was either universalist (Christianity and Islam) or particularist
20 See Guy G. Stroumsa, “Eastern Wisdoms,” in his Te Scriptural Universe of Ancient

Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 97–107 and notes.
(Judaism). For Christians, as well as for Muslims, the same religious truth is
shared by all humanity—all individuals and all peoples. Jews, by contrast,
thrived on the paradox of a universal God and a chosen people. Early on,
the God of Israel had entered into a contractual relationship with His peo-
ple, Abraham’s true ofspring, transformed by the covenant into a priestly
nation and a saintly people. While their national God soon became univer-
sal, the Jews insisted on retaining, throughout the ages, the national identity
of their religion.
With the coming of Islam, the spectrum of possible forms of monothe-
ism was broadened. Muslim polemics against Christianity stressed the
ambiguities of Christian Trinitarian monotheism. Indeed, the topic of
monotheism was one of the most striking points of agreement in Muslim
and Jewish anti-Christian polemics during the Middle Ages. For both
Muslims and Jews, Trinitarian doctrine contradicted notions of “pure”
monotheism, making the Christians idolaters in disguise.
Notably, while the phenomenon of monotheism has a rather long history,
this is not the case regarding the concept itself. It was only in the modern
age, just prior to the early nineteenth century, that many concepts dealing
with diferent models of divinity were formulated, preparing the stage for
the idea of Semitic monotheism. Te age of reason is also when all manner
of religious phenomena started to be investigated seriously. Tis investiga-
tion was at frst philological, with the edition of texts in the original lan-
guages, soon to be augmented by the groundbreaking ethnological work of
Catholic missionaries. It makes sense, then, that key terms for the taxonomy
of religions were coined in the same period and gained traction during the
Enlightenment. Let us briefy review the evidence.
Te term “polytheism” (polytheismos), introduced by Philo in the frst
century ce, was brought into modern usage in 1580 by Jean Bodin. Tis
was followed by Samuel Purchas, who used the word in his 1614 compen-
dium on the religions of the world, Purchas, his Pilgrimage. Te frst appear-
ance of the term “atheism” dates from the sixteenth century,21 and the term
“monotheism” frst occurs in the seventeenth century. Te latter word was
coined by Henry More, a philosopher generally counted among the
“Cambridge Platonists.”22 More also published, in 1653, a work entitled
21 See Francis Schmidt, ed., L’impensable polythéisme: Etudes d’historiographie religieuse

(Paris: Editions des archives contemporaines, 1988); see further Stroumsa, A New Science. On
“atheism,” see David Wooton in Michael Hunter and David Wooton, eds, Atheism from the
Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
22 Henri More, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (London, 1660), 62.
Conjectura Cabbalistica. According to this text, the frst three chapters of

Genesis represent a summation of all wisdom. Yet More does not seem to
have been familiar with any Kabbalistic work. As Dmitri Levitin has pointed
out, like other early modern philosophers, the Cambridge Platonists were
preoccupied “with one central religio-philosophical problem: that of pagan
monotheism and its relationship with animism and pantheism.” Levitin fur-
ther notes that none of the Cambridge Platonists “believed in any great
Mosaic wisdom, and all were skeptical of the Cabbala and similar stories of
transmission from Jews to Greeks.”23 Together with More, the Dutch ration
alist theologian Balthasar Bekker (1634–1698) was one of the frst authors
to speak of “monotheism.”24
It is only in the eighteenth century, thanks to France’s philosophes, that
the term “monotheism” gained any real traction, and this in earnest only at
the end of the century.25 Te German Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834)
was responsible for incorporating the term into Christian theology. His
Glaubenslehre (1830–1831) identifes three main stages of religious evolu-
tion, from fetishism to polytheism, and from the latter to monotheism, best
expressed in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Te term “theism” was coined by another Cambridge Platonist, the theo-
logian and Hebraist Ralph Cudworth, in his book Te True Intellectual
System of the Universe (1678). At about the same time, in 1677, the English
theologian Edward Stillingfeet published A Letter to a Deist, the frst sus-
tained attack on Deism in the English language. For its part, the term “dual-
ism,” both in French and in English, makes its appearance in the
mid-eighteenth century. In the study of religion, it was then used for the
description of Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, and Manichaeism, in particular
by the Huguenot scholar Isaac de Beausobre, in the frst half of the eight
eenth century.26
23 See Dmitri Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of a New Science: Histories of Philosophy in
England, c. 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 126–138.
24 See Balthasar Bekker, De betoverde weereld (1691) [English translation Te World
Bewitched (1695)]; cf. Borgeaud, La pensée européenne des religions (Paris: Seuil, 2021) and
Jonathan Israel, Te Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 925–930.
25 Of the long bibliography on the topic, see, e.g. Bernhard Lang, “Monotheismus,”
Handbuch der religionsgeschichtlicher Grundbegrife, Vol. IV, (1998), 148–165; Åke V. Ström,
“Monotheismus I (religionsgeschichtlich),” Teologische Realenzyklopädie 23 (1994), 233–237,
which scans the history of scholarship from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.
26 On de Beausobre and the birth of Manichaean studies, see, for instance, Stroumsa, A New
Science, 113–123.
Te term “pantheism” frst appears, in Latin, at the end of the seventeenth

century.27 Pantheism, as an idea, would have a striking Nachleben among
the German Idealist philosophers in the fnal decades of the eighteenth cen-
tury. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, for example, ignited a scandal about
Lessing’s Spinozism, when he claimed that Lessing had told him in conver-
sation, in 1780:
Te orthodox concepts of the Divinity are no longer for me; I cannot

stomach them. Hen kai pan! I know of nothing else . . . Tere is no other
philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza.28
Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) took the next step in the classifcation of

the notions of God when he introduced the concept of “henotheism” in his
Philosophie der Mythologie (1842). By Henotheismus, he was referring to a
rudimentary form of monotheism, the cult of one ethnic god, which did not
insist that there were no other gods. For Schelling, henotheism signaled a
historical step, since history as a whole represents the “progressive, gradu-
ally self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute.”29 “Henotheismus” was then
adopted by the classical philologist Friedrich Gottlieb Welker (1784–1868)
to describe an assumed early kind of monotheism among the Greeks.30
It was Friedrich Max Müller, however, who, under Schelling’s infuence,
truly popularized “henotheism,” a term referring to an intermediary stage
between polytheism and monotheism, which he thought ft to describe the
early religion of Israel, before the exile and the appearance of monothe-
ism.31 Müller also proposed to apply the term “kathenotheism” to Vedic

religion, where each god in its turn is considered to be supreme—a term he
later abandoned, acknowledging in 1882 that it had not caught on.32 Te
27 In Joseph Raphson, De spatio reali seu ente infnito (1697), pantheismus refers to Spinoza’s
doctrine. Te term frst appears in English three years later. See Anne Tomson, Bodies of
Tought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 54.
28 Friedrich H. Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinozas (1785). See Dieter Henrich with
David S. Paccini, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism (Cambridge, MA,
London: Harvard University Press, 2003).
29 See Johannes Zachhuber, Teology as Science in Nineteenth- Century Germany:
From F. C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 69.
30 Friedrich G. Welker, Griechische Götterlehre (three vols; Göttingen: Dietrich, 1857–1862).
31 See Müller’s 1860 review of Renan’s Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémi-
tiques, “Semitic Monotheism?,” reprinted in Max Müller, Chips from a German Workshop (New
York: Scribner, 1869), 337–374, esp. 347.
32 See Robert Mackintosch, “Monolatry and Henotheism,” in the Encyclopedia of Religion
and Ethics, Vol. VIII (Edinburgh 1915), 810b–811b, for whom the two terms are essentially
identical.
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Weary of the dispute, and seeing that I was quite decided not to
return to the village, the messenger from the chief now left. Our old
guide was in despair, for he had boasted so much to us of his
influence over the chief of Bussa. “I must have become blind or
stupid,” he said, “for he cannot really have been telling lies all the
time.”
I tried to persuade Amadu to accompany us at least, but he
confessed that though it was true he had passed the rapids, it was
twenty years ago. Still he did not like to refuse straight out. He would
land now, and then he would see.
Night had now fallen, and a quarter of an hour after our guide had
left we heard loud cries and the noise of people running. We seized
our weapons, but it was only old Amadu coming back out of breath.
Four or five pieces of stuff which I had given him as payment had
been stolen from him. Some men had fallen on him about half-way to
the village.
Seeing that they meant to take his life, or at least to deprive him of
liberty, he had drawn his sword (it was only a bit of iron from an old
cask), resolved to defend himself to the last. The Bussa bravos, five
against one poor old man, had at first run away, and Amadu had
profited by their alarm to take to his own legs. Then they ran after
him again, but he managed to get safely back to us on board our
boat without further adventures.
These silly natives had thus secured us a guide on whom I had
certainly not counted, for Amadu would not leave our boats now. I
asked him if he wanted to go down as far as Leba, to which he
replied “Dolé,” or needs must.
For the whole night I pondered on the situation, whilst a continual
watch was kept on board. My first idea was to bombard the village of
Bussa at daybreak, and thus give its people a severe lesson. There
really had been a flagrant and successful attack made on the person
of a member of my expedition.
Further reflection, however, brought me to a better mind, for, truth
to tell, I did not know how matters stood with regard to the questions
of delimitation between the French and the English. The latter claim
Bussa in virtue of treaties made with the Royal Niger Company, but
Commandant Toutée denies that these treaties are valid. Who is
right? Who is wrong? I am sure I don’t know. The chief of Bussa
acted towards me as if he were quite independent, and perhaps he
is the one to speak the truth after all.
If, however, the actual or implicit assertions of the English be true,
it results that one of their protégés had committed an aggression on
one of our party, the odium and responsibility of which rests with
them. Either they have effective power and real influence at Bussa,
which would make them accomplices, or they have not, and in the
latter case their assertions are lies. The dilemma appears to me to
be one difficult to elude, and I leave to French diplomatists the task
of deducting from it the practical consequences.
I think I must have scented mischief when I refrained from
accepting the chief’s last invitation. That at least was the opinion of
our guide, for he is convinced that if he had not made his escape the
evening before, his head would have been no longer on his
shoulders.
I learnt later that when the attack took place on the director
Fonssagrives at Yangbassu, the people of Bussa had sent
reinforcements to the assailants. Once more a mere chance had
saved us from a great danger, and from falling into the trap set for
us.
AMONG THE RAPIDS.
The 7th and 8th of this month will ever remain in our memories
two of the most terrible of the whole journey. Just because we had in
them to meet the last dangers of our eventful journey down the
Niger, at least of those dangers for which Nature alone was
responsible, the anxiety they caused seemed almost unbearable.
At first the river was easily navigable enough, but we soon came
to the first rapid. This we crossed successfully, however, the Davoust
in one great rush, the Aube after being compelled to anchor just
above it, till Digui returned for her with a reinforcement of rowers.
We anchored at Malali for breakfast, and Digui went to
reconnoitre the rapid below that village. We were just finishing our
meal when some messengers arrived from the chief of Bussa. Yet
again we are to hear from him!
The messengers explained that although a nominal ruler, the chief
had really less influence than any one in his village. He had done his
very utmost to overcome the indifference of those about him to our
wishes, but it had all been in vain. “We were relations!” he added,
and he did not wish us to go away angry with him. To this I replied
that one of our men had been molested and robbed, and I would not
add a syllable to anything which was said until the objects stolen
from him had been restored and the guilty men punished. The
messengers swore that the chief knew nothing about the outrage,
and, after all, this may have been true, for this poor down-trodden
demi-god of a chief had none but venal courtiers about him, and
unless we interfere to save it, Bussa is a prey marked down for the
big teeth of perfidious Albion.
Digui returned wet through; he had tried to shoot the rapid, but the
canoe was swamped, and he had only just time to save himself by
running her into the bank. In fact, it was quite impossible to
reconnoitre here as we had hitherto done. We had to make
examining the river from the banks do. Such was the violence of the
current, so narrow were the passes and so big the waves, that
canoes could only pass the rapids by shooting through little channels
quite impracticable to our barges.
A dreary prospect truly! But one way was open to us, and not
even the natives knew anything about it. We walked along the bank,
and an eager discussion took place at each eddy we came to. Were
there rocks beneath them or were they merely whirlpools? At last,
thanks be to God, we came to the end of them.
We managed, after all, to pass them all in our boats, and they
were indeed enough to terrify any one; but they were really more
alarming than dangerous, for there was plenty of water above most
of the rocks. In one pass, some 54 yards wide, shut in between two
large reefs, a good half of the waters of the Niger flings itself over
with a tremendous roar.
The immense velocity of the current is such that the water dashes
up the banks like the waves of the sea, and there is one paradoxical
thing about it: the level is at least three feet higher near the banks
than in midstream, where a kind of trough is formed.
It is along this trough that we have to steer, and it is really very
dreadful to see the large masses of water piled up on either side,
looking as if they were ready to rush together and engulf us between
them.
Digui made a very sensible speech to his crew.
“Attention,” he cried, “no one is to look out of the boat; every one
must put out all his strength; but I’ll break the head of the first man
who looks beyond the deck.”
Then ensued thirty seconds of mortal agony; there was a kind of
flash like lightning, and the current had seized the barge in its grip,
hugging it tightly. The vessel seemed about to break beneath the
masses of water flung back from the banks to the centre of the
stream, but it was over; we had got safely through the pass.
I estimate the speed of the current at from twelve to fourteen
miles, and if the boat had struck on an unnoticed rock as it rushed
along, we knew that it must have been split open from stem to stern.
On the right of the pass is a group of little islands where the
current is broken up, and its strength lessened. It is amongst them
that canoes are able to get through, turning the quieter water to
account; but, as I said before, the passes there were too narrow for
our boats.
We were soon flung on to a second rapid, less majestic and
terrible in appearance, but perhaps more dangerous than the first. To
pass it safely, we had to steer to the left to begin with, and then bear
to the right as much as possible to avoid the waves driven back in
that direction by a great rock over which the water fell like a huge
moustache; only the utmost care and skill saved the boats from
being flung upon a bank of sharp flints near the left bank. In fact, it
was an even more delicate manœuvre to achieve than to describe!
THE RAPIDS BELOW BUSSA.
Beyond this rapid the water was boiling and seething as in some
huge caldron; whirlpools and waves met and clashed into each
other, and even between the rapids, in comparatively calm water,
there was such a swell on that the boats were lifted high up and
rolled about as if at sea.
We anchored off Garafiri, whilst above and below us roared the
rapids.
The next day, the 8th, we started early and passed without
difficulty the Kandji rapid, which is comparatively easy. We
breakfasted at Konotasi; at least, that is the way the natives seem to
me to pronounce the name marked Kpatachi on maps.
Digui again went to reconnoitre, and came back with the gloomy
face of old difficult days. The trading canoes which had left Bussa
during our stay there had not yet gone, but were about to discharge
their cargoes. They would take a little channel on the right, but it was
too narrow for us. Moreover, there was not yet water enough even
for native boats, and they would have to wait for an inundation. We
must again follow the main stream, and we went along the banks to
look for the pass.
Malali was nothing to what we had now to encounter, for the only
pass was by an opening not as big as that of the sluice of a canal.
“Can we pass, Digui?” we asked.—“Yes, perhaps,” he replied, “if it
is the will of Allah!”
With this assurance we had to be content, and I gave the order
“Forward!”
When my old guide saw us steering towards the left to take the
course impracticable even to native canoes he was terrified. “Laol
alla! Laol alla!” he cried, “there is no pass there!” I put my hand over
his mouth to make him hold his tongue, and flinging himself upon the
deck he hid his head in his cloak.
I got my camera ready for taking a photograph, but Digui said to
me. “It is not worth while!”—“Why?” I asked.—“Because you will not
be able to look. You will be afraid!”
Yet Digui had seen me look at places still less attractive than this
pass, which was no pass.
I proved him wrong to some extent, for I did succeed in getting
two photographs of the banks we were passing. I don’t deny,
however, that I felt a slight shudder pass over me, and I hope I am
not more of a coward than any one else would have been under the
circumstances.
AMONG THE RAPIDS.
This time we experienced a peculiar sensation such as we had

never had before; when the boat passed over the whirlpools,
everywhere intersecting each other, it seemed to be alternately
sucked in and flung out again by the masses of water.
One instant of calm, then a second rapid, and we anchored in a
little creek; Digui then went back to fetch the Aube and the Dantec,
and we found ourselves all once more safely together.
We had still two more rapids to cross, the first easy, the second
more difficult, on account of a very violent current flowing towards a
channel on the left encumbered with flints.
According to the maps, we should now come to a stretch of calm
water. I hoped to anchor above the Auru pass, which would be the
last, and to attempt its passage the next day.
At Auru the Niger makes a bend to the right of ninety degrees,
and the main channel is so terribly encumbered with rocks and
impedimenta of all kinds, whilst the current is at the same time so
fearfully strong, that it would not do to attempt to go down it in the
night. However, there is an arm which cuts across the bend, and
though still very difficult, makes it possible to shoot the rapid.
All of a sudden, as we were quietly going along, the river in front
of us seemed to turn abruptly to the right.
I began to suspect that there was a mistake on the maps, and that
we were much nearer to Auru than we had thought. Still I hesitated
for a minute. However, there was a little channel on the right with a
hill rising above it on which was perched a village. It must be Auru.
Just then the main current, which grew rapidly stronger, seized us,
and we were on the point of being swept down by it and swamped.
“To the bank! To the bank, Digui!” I shouted; “quick, quick!”—“All
right, all right,” was the reply, and he tried to wring an explanation out
of the guide, who could give none. Ten seconds wasted in
discussion, and it would be too late. We were too late; we had
passed the practicable channel.
“Anchor! anchor!” I shouted. Yes, the anchors hold, and for the
moment we are saved!
On our starboard the banks consisted of half-submerged flints,
from which grew some small aquatic trees. It was this vegetation
which had misled our guide, for when he was here twenty years
before it did not exist.
We now had to make our way against the current to get back to
the good channel. It was simply impossible to do so by rowing. The
only thing to be done was to lengthen our ropes, and fastening them
to trees, tow ourselves along, so to speak, from place to place. It
took us about three hours and a half to do it.
Somehow or another, however, we did achieve the difficult task of
getting safely into the right course again.
The Dantec, which had anchored behind the Davoust, had only a
light load now, and I thought it would take less time for her to cross
the river and go up along the left bank, where the current was less
violent.
Unfortunately, however, the manœuvre was not executed as
quickly as it should have been, for the Dantec drifted a good way in
making the crossing, and it was just all she could do to get up-
stream again.
We moored the two big boats to trees, and Digui went once more
to reconnoitre. We now had to slip as best we could through the
narrow channels between the rocks, before we attempted the
shooting of the rapid itself.
We should have had time to pass before night, but I would not
leave the Dantec behind, and I sent Digui in his canoe to her with
extra rowers. We remained moored to our trees, and fortunately
found near our stopping-place a little bit of nearly dry ground, where
we were able to light a fire.
At first we could see the Dantec slowly making her way up-
stream, then she became hidden by trees. Two whole hours of
suspense passed by, and it was now quite dark. We shouted as loud
as we could to make ourselves heard above the noise of the rapids,
but no answer came for a long time. All of a sudden we heard Digui’s
voice crying: “We are swamped!” A momentary lull in the roar of the
water had enabled us to hear these far from reassuring words, but
the rest died away in the darkness of the night. Was our barge then
at the bottom of the river? What had become of our coolies? Were
they drowned or clinging to some bushes on the bank? There was
no way of helping them, for Digui had taken the canoe. It was a cruel
moment for us all, and our anxiety was redoubled when we presently
saw the canoe coming back with only three men in her.
But after all every one was safe and the barge uninjured. As she
was going up-stream the Dantec had got her mast caught in a tree,
and had been tilted over so that she filled with water; in fact was, as
Digui had cried, swamped for the moment. Fortunately, however,
some roots kept her up, and our coolies had managed to get rid of
the water and float her again. She was not able to join us yet, but
she was moored to some trees quite close to us.
That night was anything but pleasant to any of us. We were wet
through, and anxiety about the morrow kept us awake. After a time
the perpetual noise of the water surging about the rocks and round
the trunks of the trees produces a peculiar effect on the mind, an
effect alike strange and depressing, for one fancies one hears the
moaning of the spirits of the water, which the natives believe haunt
the river.
Our guide told us that the Auru rapids are inhabited by demons,
whose voices are heard at night. They are said to have a passion for
everything of a red colour, so that those who navigate the river have
to hide anything of that hue, lest the demons should swamp their
boats for the sake of getting possession of it.
I never saw the devils of Auru, but I can honestly say that I heard
them; in fact, that we all heard them. All through the night one or the
other of us was constantly being woke up by peculiar noises,
amongst which we certainly fancied we could distinguish voices.
In this frame of mind, and unable as we were to communicate with
the Dantec, we kept thinking that some misfortune had befallen her,
and that the strange voices were those of our coolies clinging
perhaps to trees as they called for help, or consulting together what
they could do to save themselves.
But day dawned at last, and we succeeded in towing back the
Dantec, on which we found our men all well, though very cold and
weary. We now held a consultation and decided that the Davoust
should pass first and anchor opposite the point of the island between
the two arms of the river. Digui and some coolies would then go back
from there to help in bringing down the Aube and the Dantec.
We threaded our way carefully amongst the rocks to keep in the
right channel, and then the Dantec simply fell into the rapids. There
was less swell with fewer waves than there had been at Garafiri or at
Konotasi, but I think there was also less depth of water. On the right
and the left were countless rocks over which the river dashed
foaming and seething. We found it impossible to anchor as we had
intended off the end of the island, for the current swept us into the
village of lower Auru on the right bank.
I therefore sent Digui back by land with some of the men. We
waited for two hours without hearing anything. At last we saw one of
the coolies running back to us, and he brought the bad news that in
trying to cross the small arm of the river to take the second master
pilot on board, the canoe had capsized, and the Aube had now no
means of communicating with the land. Baudry had sent to ask me
to try and get a boat from the village. I went there, and with the aid of
our guide Amadu I made my request. Very great unwillingness to
grant it was at first shown, followed by a formal refusal on the ground
that the villagers had been forbidden to help us. Who had forbidden
it? I could not find out. I drew forth my revolver and held it to the
chief’s forehead. It was the first and last time I ever had recourse to
such an argument as this, but it had the desired effect. A canoe was
sent off from the village with two rowers, and I went along the bank
to the place where the Aube was anchored.
When I got there, I found that the canoe was righted again. Our
coolies had plunged into the very rapid itself, and clinging to
submerged roots they had succeeded in passing ropes under her
keel and floating her. The water where she had gone down was
more than nine feet deep. Brave fellows, indeed, were these coolies
of mine! They may have their faults; they are gluttons and liars; they
are often lazy enough; but on any dangerous emergency these
scions of the noble Sarracolais race rise to the occasion, and their
devotion may be depended upon under whatever strain.
Baudry now informed me that the rudder of the Dantec was
broken, so that it was impossible to steer her. “Take the crew off and
abandon her? No! I hope to take her on by towing her!”
I watched everything made ready for the difficult manœuvre. The
Dantec was towed along from tree to tree, to the very edge of the big
rapid, whilst behind her came the canoe with a rope passed twice
round a trunk, as her bow plunged into the foam. On the stern of the
Aube stood Samba Demba, our best coolie, with a coiled rope in his
arms, ready to fling it to the Dantec as she went over the rapid. One
second’s hesitation, and everything would go wrong, and I was on
the very point of shouting to Baudry to give up his plan, but it was
really such a splendid piece of daring, such a thoroughly sailor-like
thing to do, that I refrained. Yet once more, thank God, we
succeeded, coming off with flying colours.
Slowly the Aube loosened her moorings, and the current at first
took her gently down, then quicker and ever quicker she rushed
along as she crossed the Dantec. Bravo! the rope, flung with
unerring aim, fell right into her bow. “Let go all!” and the Aube and
Dantec plunged into the rapid. Will they be able to shoot it in safety?
The shouts of the excited coolies reach me above the roar of the
water. The doctor and Bluzet have each taken an oar. For a moment
I thought all the boats would be flung against the rocks on the left,
which would have been their complete destruction; but the next I saw
them gradually bearing to the right. At last they were through, all
danger past!
The Aube, swept on by the current, could not stop near the
Davoust, and there was yet another rapid, quite a small one, below
the village. She passed it without difficulty, and went to anchor some
hundred yards down-stream, where we hastened to join her.
We had done with the rapids now, and not one of us was missing,
not one of our boats had been lost. We clasped each other’s hands
without a word.
But our excitement gradually subsided, and we shouted, “Filey,
get us some breakfast; and mind you do your best!”
We started again about two o’clock, and half-an-hour later we
were opposite Leba, where floats the white flag of the Royal Niger
Company, with its ship and the circle cut across by three rays,
bearing the motto, Pax, Jus, Ars. Here we had to meet our last
danger. What would the English do? I awaited them with composure,
for it is we who have the whip hand now, and to begin by showing
them that I was not going to submit to a compulsory halt, we passed
on without stopping at Leba. There was a good deal of bustle at the
station, however, and eleven riflemen came out and took up their
position on the bank. Certainly there was effective occupation here,
not a doubt of it; only every one will admit that no such effective
occupation has taken place higher up-stream. My difficulties at
Bussa may perhaps be renewed here, indeed increased. Lower Auru
is about a mile and three-quarters from Leba. Either the English rule
here or they do not; in the former case, it was they who had told the
natives not to give us any help when two of our boats were in the
greatest danger. In the second case, this effective occupation is very
precarious and limited at the only point where there are any troops,
and for the very best of reasons it does not extend to Bussa, which,
from the European point of view, remains rex nullius.
A tornado compelled us to anchor about four o’clock near the left
bank, and we kept as strict a watch as we had done in the Tuareg
country. We took care to be on our guard against a blow from the
Tatanis, such as had succeeded so well in the case of Mizon.
For the sake of those who have forgotten that incident I will add
here that Mizon was attacked at the mouth of the Niger by Patanis,
when he was entering it in his vessel, the René Caillé. When he
complained, the Niger Company replied: “We were not aware that
you were there.” Those very Patanis, his enemies of the day before,
brought him wood for burning, by order of the English agent.
At about eight o’clock on October 10 we passed Badjibo, or rather
Guadjibo, where Captain Toutée had built Fort Arenberg. After he
had evacuated it the English took possession of it, finding it in
perfect repair. There is no doubt that as the Company already had a
station at Leba, above Guadjibo, the French occupation of the latter
place was open to discussion.
I once started a conversation in a meeting at the Sorbonne, which
at one moment seemed likely to become acrimonious, for I quoted a
remark of Baron d’Haussy, Naval Minister in the time of Charles X.,
as a base of the policy to be followed in dealing with the English. It is
well known that in a talk with the English ambassador, d’Haussy,
irritated at the off-hand manner of the latter, said: “If you want a
diplomatic answer, the President of the Council will give it to you; as
for me, I say, setting aside official language, that nous nous f . . . de
vous.”[11]
The remark was certainly not couched in diplomatic terms, but it
represented the only way to treat the English. When, however, we
act upon the principle applied we must take every care to be well
within our rights. If, through any imprudence at the beginning, you
lay yourself open to have to withdraw a single step later, your rivals
know how to turn it to account by making you go back ten.
The village of Guadjibo is situated on the left bank. Fort Arenberg,
the name of which the Royal Niger Company has changed into
Taubman-Goldie, is opposite to it on the right bank. A guard of
riflemen came to do us the honours of the pass, and then a few
minutes later two canoes put off from the bank to follow us, but we
gained rapidly upon them.
Without having stopped at either of the first two English posts we
reached Geba, having thus asserted our right to navigate the river
without any compulsory halt or any interference on the part of the
Company.
As Geba is approached the scenery becomes more and more
picturesque. Peaks hundreds of feet high dominate the almost
precipitous verdure-clad hills, the bases of which are bathed by the
river.
At last at four o’clock, suddenly rounding a headland, and steering
from west to east, we found ourselves opposite a group of
magnificent jagged rocks, whilst further on we could see the
corrugated roofs and the piles of casks on the bank with the flag of
the Royal Niger Company, belonging to the English station.
GEBA.
At Geba, as at Auru, the Niger is haunted by evil spirits, who are

fond of red, so instead of advising us to follow the deep but narrow
main channel between the lofty rocks, our guide wanted us to pass
the rapid where the Morning Star, the boat of Richard Lander, the
first explorer who had passed Bussa, had been wrecked.
To the great disappointment of our adviser, however, we insisted
upon going between two large pillars of rock where there was no
danger whatever. The rocks hid all the red on board our boats,
except that in our flag.
Our boats came up one after the other, and anchored off the bank
near the station of Geba.
A negro of Sierra Leone, a commercial agent, now came and
placed himself at our disposal, pending the arrival of the Governor of
the station, who, he informed us, had gone inland, and would not be
back till near nightfall. Naturally I refused all offers of help until the
Governor should return. An hour later we saw two canoes being
paddled down-stream, and recognized them as those which had
followed us since we left Guadjibo. In them were the Governor of the
station, Captain Carrol, and some English soldiers in the service of
the Company.
Having heard at Lakodja, the Governor told us, of our
approaching arrival at Bussa, he had started at once with a strong
escort, and by forced marches had gone up the banks of the river,
knocking up two horses and getting fever, all for the sake of helping
us in the name of the Company, and he had come back after all with
an empty bag! At Leba he had heard of our passage, and had gone
back, covering some seventy miles in twenty-four hours, to Fort
Goldie, where he had waited for us to breakfast with him. Not having
seen any whites there, however, he concluded we had passed, so
that by chance, and chance is responsible for a good many things, it
was I, who had come down from Timbuktu to his station, who
welcomed him at his own post with the words, “How do you do?”
This was really one of the most amusing incidents of our journey.
To a cynical observer the episode would have appeared truly unique.
The situation, amusing as it was, was however just a little
strained. I confess too that with the memory fresh in my mind of all
the difficulties I had had at Bussa and at Ilo, and which might easily
have led to the loss of our boats, I did nothing to relieve the tension
between us.
“Before I talk about anything else,” I said to Carrol, “I must tell you
what happened at Bussa and at Auru, a few miles from your post at
Leba. I will not accept the offers of service from the Company, nor
from its agents, nor from its officers, until I know that you had nothing
to do with those difficulties.”
Quite upset by what I said, he gave me his word, the word of a
soldier, that he knew absolutely nothing about them. The same
assurance was given to me later by Major Festing, military
Commandant, and by the civilians Messrs. Drew and Wallace.
The ice was now broken, and we were able inter pocula to allow
ourselves the pleasure of chatting about European affairs with the
Governor. He was the first European we had seen for a year. Ah, if
only he had been a Frenchman!
Carrol was an Irishman, who spoke French well, and he lent us
some English and French newspapers. He told us—without any
details however—of the death of Mores, and of the massacre of a
French expedition in the west on the Nikki side. We at once
compared dates. This expedition consisted perhaps of our comrades
sent to bring us the famous orders we had waited for at Say for five
months. On hearing this sad news, I became eager to hasten our
march to tell the people at Dahomey of the disturbed condition of the
districts round Say. Later, Taburet was able to ascertain by carefully
reading the English newspapers, that the expedition referred to was
that led by Fonssagrives.
Captain Carrol, who was really a very good fellow and a capital
companion, put everything he possessed at our disposal, and that
meant a very great deal to us, though really he did not own much, for
though the Royal Niger Company houses its officers well, it treats
them shabbily, and makes them pay dearly for the few comforts they
have.
We responded to Carrol’s hospitality by inviting him to dinner the
next evening. Fortunately the chief of Ilo had not drunk all our
champagne. We had plenty too of the wine we had brought as part
of our rations, which in the course of all its travels had become very
good claret, and with some mutton, for which of course we paid very
dearly on principle, we managed to give our guests a very
respectable meal. The English officers were a good deal surprised at
finding us so well supplied with everything.
We were taking our coffee after dinner when we heard the whistle
of one of the Company’s steamers. They were expecting the Sudan,
I was told, an old cargo-boat which was to take Mr. Drew, executive
officer of the district of Geba, to Lakodja. It turned out, however, not
to have been the Sudan’s whistle, but that of a mere launch called
the Bargu, which had disturbed us.
Carrol sent word to Major Festing, who was on board, by a canoe,
and a few minutes afterwards the military Commandant appeared in
immaculate linen clothes, the evening dress of the colonies. We
drank a glass of champagne together, the officer, who seemed very
worried, tossing it off rapidly. As Carrol had done, he declared he
had had nothing whatever to do with the Bussa affair, and I readily
believed him. I still, however, felt some distrust of the agents of the
Company, and I thought it my duty to decline the offer of Major
Festing to tow our boats with his Bargu as far as Lokodja. I thought I
had better first have an explanation with the agents of the Company
properly so called. I was told that Mr. Wallace, the general agent,
was expected soon, and as he was on his way up the river, we were
sure to meet him.
Still this did not prevent our fraternizing with Carrol and Festing;
they spoke French, and we could jabber English after a fashion,
though Taburet was the only one who knew it pretty well. In the
morning two other officers arrived, one to replace, at Leba, a
lieutenant who had lately died, and the other on his way to Geba or
Guadjibo. Both had recently been wounded with poisoned arrows in
a fight with the natives. The officers of the Royal Niger Company
evidently have rather a rough time of it.
Taburet went to see the sick at the station, where there were
neither medicine nor other remedies to be had. Just as we were
leaving we saw some negroes approaching, loaded with a supply of
beer and whisky for us. This delicate attention from Festing and
Carrol was the better appreciated as we had been entirely deprived
of these luxuries ever since we had left Kayes.
As a return gift we left the little organ at Geba, which had been
our great joy at Say. It now belongs to Carrol’s successor, for we
hear that the good Captain has returned safe and sound to his native
country, rescued at last from the hands of the Royal Niger Company.
At about one o’clock in the afternoon of the 12th we left Geba,
exchanging salutes with our flags with the station. Our old guide
Amadu remained there, but Major Festing lent us a man in the
service of the Company, who was, however, quite useless to us, as
navigation here, difficult enough for large vessels, was perfectly easy
for us now the water was so high. We had but to let ourselves go,
and we went fast enough.
We reached Rabba, which seemed an unimportant factory, about
five o’clock. This is the nearest point to Bidda, the capital of Nupé,
which we knew to be at open war with the Company.
There are no whites at the factory of Rabba, and we did not have
any dealings with the Sierra Leonese who is in charge of it.
We had been anchored for an hour, when the steam launch
Bargu, with Major Festing on board, joined us. These launches, of
which it is a pity there are not more on the Niger, are little steamers
armed with a machine-gun. They carry an officer and some ten
riflemen, who act as the river police only, and have nothing to do with
transporting merchandise. Their office is by no means a sinecure.
RABBA.
The voyage began to tell very much on our men now. It was not
only that they were very tired, but the rain was continuous all night,
and sometimes also in the day, so that we had to put up the tents on

The Idea of Semitic Monotheism The Rise and Fall of A Scholarly Myth Guy Stroumsa Full Chapter

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The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The

Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth Guy

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Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for a Fellowship

I am beholden to Rajeev Bhargava (CSDS, Delhi), Corrine Bonnet

ers, who called my attention to a number of serious problems in the original

Introduction: Te Study of Religion and the Spirit of Orientalism 1

6. A Jesus of White Marble or a Jesus in the Flesh? 131

9. Semitic Religion and Sacrifcial Ritual 191

Laufe meines Lebens.

Tis book is a sequel to A New Science: Te Discovery of Religion in an Age of

atic of the Semitic peoples, in contrast to the purportedly polytheistic sys-

1 Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: Te Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason

2 See Jürgen Osterhammel, Te Transformation of the World: A Global History of the

In A New Science: Te Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason, I sought

Te modern study of religion developed during the nineteenth century,

consequences in the twentieth century would amount to teleological rea-

11 Maurice Olender, Te Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the

Christianity remained paradoxically peripheral to the development of

gions that now came to be perceived as distinctly alien to Christian Europe.

processes of secularization. On the one hand, with the industrial revolution

formation, or Aufebung, of Christianity in the fully fedged Geist.18

of disparaging attitudes to foreign peoples and their cultures lef an imme-

In one of the paradoxical consequences (and most insidious aspects) of

poles of Indo-­European cultural and religious creativity. To be sure, schol-

preference for Indo-­European religious systems and cultural traditions over

perspective of the present book, a crucial dimension of the study of religion

30 Te theory of cultural transfers, developed, in particular, in France in the 1980s, at frst

so, he explicitly sets out to reintroduce the category of “history” into

34 Tomoko Masuzawa, Te Invention of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism

lizations. Tis inquiry also stands at the confuence of diferent disciplines

another. For example, some of them aimed to apply philological and

remain even more marked than that of Islam.

break-­up was fnalized by the combined impact of a traditional scorn

racially and ethnically determined religions.41

personal adventure of gifed and idiosyncratic individuals, from the

42 See further ibid.

­ itfalls. What do we do when we compare? Te answer depends, of course,

Contemporary historiography of the discipline tends to take as its main

Te common misperception that the nineteenth-­century study of reli-

the major importance of the transmission of knowledge between diferent

the purview of humanistic behavior.

throughout Europe, and beyond, a burst of Islamophobia and an animated,

While the idea of Semitic monotheism only emerged in the mid-­nineteenth

giously—as belonging to the realm of the One God. Te idea of monothe-

1 On the appearance of monotheism in ancient Israel, the bibliography is, of course,

tortuous evolution of religious conceptions, remains an open one, and

importance of monotheistic trends among Hellenic thinkers under the

2 See, in particular, three important collections of studies: Polymnia Athanassiadi and

Platonic philosophers, in particular, the pyramid of beings culminated in

them—temples, sanctuaries, altars, purifcations, and certain precepts. For

8 Ibid., 93 C, 326–327 LCL; translation emended.

Te ubiquity of dualist proclivities in diferent forms of late antique

multiple in order to be worshipped “the paradox of monotheism.”16 Tere is

religion. European scholars study Oriental languages because texts in those

20 See Guy G. Stroumsa, “Eastern Wisdoms,” in his Te Scriptural Universe of Ancient

21 See Francis Schmidt, ed., L’impensable polythéisme: Etudes d’historiographie religieuse

Conjectura Cabbalistica. According to this text, the frst three chapters of

Te term “pantheism” frst appears, in Latin, at the end of the seventeenth

Te orthodox concepts of the Divinity are no longer for me; I cannot

Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) took the next step in the classifcation of

ism.31 Müller also proposed to apply the term “kathenotheism” to Vedic

This time we experienced a peculiar sensation such as we had

poles of Indo-European cultural and religious creativity. To be sure, schol-

preference for Indo-European religious systems and cultural traditions over

break-up was fnalized by the combined impact of a traditional scorn

itfalls. What do we do when we compare? Te answer depends, of course,

Te common misperception that the nineteenth-century study of reli-

While the idea of Semitic monotheism only emerged in the mid-nineteenth