The Other Half of a Republic of Letters
When Ignaz Goldziher died in Budapest on 13 November 1921, he left behind a body of scholarly correspondence unparalleled in the history of Islamic and Jewish studies: more than 13,500 letters and cards from some 1,650 correspondents, written in eleven languages. This material passed to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where it has since been cataloged in its entirety, digitized, and made freely accessible through the Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (LHAS).
Yet the Budapest collection preserves only one half of a conversation: the letters Goldziher received. The several thousand letters he himself wrote over half a century lie dispersed across the personal papers of his correspondents in libraries and archives on at least four continents—or have perished with them. No inventory of what survives exists, and in most cases these letters remain unaccounted for altogether.
This project, hosted by the LHAS and led by Kinga Dévényi (Budapest) and Sabine Schmidtke (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), sets out to change that. Its aim is to identify Goldziher's outgoing letters wherever they survive, to document them in a shared census, to integrate digital surrogates into the existing Budapest platform—where each outgoing letter can be linked to the incoming letters it answers or provokes—and to encourage their study and publication. The idea is not new: Hellmut Ritter proposed it in the 1920s, and the Hungarian Academy made a first attempt in 1933. A century later, the conditions for realizing it have finally arrived.
Scholars who encounter a letter by Goldziher—in a Nachlass they are cataloging, in a footnote, in a dealer's catalog, in a family's possession—are asked to report it. Libraries and archives that hold such letters, or suspect they might, are invited to join as partners. The letters are out there. It remains to find them, to reunite them, and to read them.