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The Project
- An old idea, revived. Within a few years of Goldziher's death, Hellmut Ritter proposed to Carl Heinrich Becker that Goldziher's most significant letters be gathered and made accessible. In 1933 the Hungarian Academy borrowed his letters to Theodor Nöldeke from Tübingen and had them transcribed; Duncan Black Macdonald sent the 79 letters he had received to Budapest. Then the effort stalled.
- The Nachlass in Budapest. Since 1951 the collection has formed part of the Oriental Collection of the LHAS. Between 2012 and 2013 the entire correspondence—13,430 cataloged items and more than 28,000 digital images—was described item by item and made available online. In 2021 the LHAS launched a memorial website bringing together Goldziher's more than 900 publications in open access.
- Why the outgoing letters matter. Wherever both sides of a correspondence survive, the gain is not additive but qualitative: the genesis of publications, the circulation of manuscripts, and the negotiation of intellectual positions become visible in a way impossible from one side alone. Where Goldziher's side is lost, the loss is felt concretely.
- A program, not a monument. The LHAS has resolved to embark on an international project devoted to Goldziher's correspondence. Rights remain with the holding institutions; the LHAS receives PDF surrogates, not high-resolution masters; digitization costs are to be covered by external funding. The work falls into five kinds: identification, documentation, reproduction, study and publication, and the pursuit of the same aim for Goldziher materials that are not letters.