The paper will present a survey of the scholarly correspondence
of over 13,000 letters of the founder of European studies of Islam,
Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), which is freely available in digitized
form in the repository of the Library and...
Letters are considered some of the most valuable sources for
historical research. Not only does their content cover a variety of
different themes, events, persons, etc., but letters also depict
networks between people. Yet due to editorial and...
The German born American scholar Leo Strauss has become a
lasting influence on US foreign policy as well as the ideological
discourse of the Chinese Communist Party. But at his times he was
in quest of classic political philosophy, by which he...
Gilles Ménage said of Louis Picques, the seventeenth-century
Paris librarian and orientalist, that “to be his friend, one had to
know Coptic, Egyptian, or Samaritan, or at least speak Arabic”.
Picques’s letters show that he had many such friends...
This talk will sketch the history of academic study of China in
the U.S., beginning in 1920, with attention to how it differed from
European Sinology. I see it as a story with intersecting
trajectories, including U.S.-China relations and...
The history of “Oriental studies” especially during in the late
modern period is still a largely neglected field. This gap is
astonishing, given the vibrant scholarship on the “Science of
Judaism” (“Wissenschaft des Judentums”) during the same...
The claim is absurd: everybody knows that the order of value
goes the other way. By many commonly-cited criteria, physics is
better than sociology. On their side, the natural sciences have
Method, experiment, and quantification; they progress and...
This presentation will explore the nature of the Elijah
traditions in rabbinic literature and their connection to the
wisdom tradition. By examining the diverse Elijah traditions in
connection to the wisdom and apocalyptic traditions, I aim to
shed...
For a political scientist, the contradictory themes surrounding
the Arabs and their region before the coming of Islam often seem
strange and incomprehensible. Although there are no major barriers
posed by rivers or mountain ranges, numerous...
