“What is the object of these labors in distant, inhospitable, and dangerous lands? To what end this costly work of rummaging in mounds many thousands of years old, of digging deep down into the earth where no gold or silver is to be found? Why this rivalry among nations for the purpose of securing, each for itself, these desolate hills—and the more the better—in which to excavate? . . . To either question there is one answer, which, if not exhaustive, nevertheless to a great extent tells us the cause and aim: it is the Bible. The names Nineveh and Babylon, the stories of Belshazzar, and of the Wise Men who came from the East, have been surrounded, from our childhood up, by a mysterious charm . . . With these recollections of our childhood, however, is associated in riper years the struggle for a conception of the world which shall satisfy equally the understanding and the heart—a struggle which in the present day occupies the mind of every thinking man.
The opening lines of Franz Delitzsch's Babel und Bibel (1902, 195) offer an unusually frank confession of the personal and psychological motives that animated German orientalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Delitzsch and countless others like him, orientalist scholarship provided an opportunity not just to expand their knowledge of the Near East and India, but also to explore the world of the Bible and, in doing so, effect a reckoning with the religious beliefs of their childhoods. In German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, Suzanne Marchand opens up this scholarly world, exploring the criss-crossing forces and interests that shaped it, while effecting her own reckoning with orientalism as a historical and historiographical phenomenon.
German orientalism has long been recognized as a subject in need of a historian. Even Edward Said, who famously left the Germans out of his path-breaking Orientalism, admitted as much: “Any work that seeks to provide an understanding of academic orientalism and pays little attention to scholars like Steinthal, Müller, Becker, Goldziher, Brockelmann, Nöldeke—to mention only a handful—needs to be reproached, and I freely reproach myself.”Footnote 1 Yet Said went on to justify his omission on the ground that, in contrast to Great Britain or France, Germany lacked the material basis for a sustained “national” engagement with the Orient. As a result, “the German Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly, or at least classical, Orient, but it was never actual.”Footnote 2 Over the past thirty years, numerous scholars have attempted to fill this lacuna while attempting to demonstrate that the German Orient was “actual” after all. But most of these works have focused on either the literary reception and appropriation of “oriental” (mostly Indian or Near Eastern) texts or on particular aspects of orientalist scholarship. Until Suzanne Marchand, no one had attempted to take on the full range of German orientalist scholarship in all of its misery and glory.Footnote 3
The result is a tour de force of scholarship and erudition, a tome as weighty as the Egyptian columns that adorn its cover. Indeed, like one of the archaeologists whose travails she chronicles, Marchand has dug deep into the soil of German scholarship in order to unearth a host of unknown or little-known episodes, strange individuals, and forgotten artifacts, weaving them into a narrative that begins in the Renaissance and ends only after World War II. In the process, she considers almost every conceivable field of orientalist scholarship, including Indology, Egyptology, Assyriology, sinology, biblical studies, Islamic studies, art history, and comparative linguistics, as well as such sub-academic contributions to orientalist knowledge as travel narratives, published letters, museum exhibitions, and popular novels. This obviously involved mastering a huge number of sources, both published and unpublished, but it also required deciphering arcane debates that can seem impenetrable to a nonspecialist (as they were indeed intended to be). Not content merely to reconstruct these debates, however, she attempts to link them to the institutional and material conditions in which they emerged. As a historian, Suzanne Marchand has always been particularly sensitive to the constraints imposed on scholars by access (or lack of access) to money, jobs, sources, and publication venues, and this trait serves her well in a study dedicated to individuals who often spent their entire academic careers feeling underappreciated and undercompensated. If the philhellenists of Marchand's Down from Olympus were the shining golden children of German academic life, then the orientalists were their awkward little brothers, struggling for recognition and, when that was not forthcoming, plotting revenge.Footnote 4 Yet when orientalism suddenly became “relevant,” it did so in a way that few early practioners of the discipline would have recognized or appreciated.
With the publication of this book, there can be little doubt about the significance of German scholarship for the orientalist enterprise as a whole: even if Britain and France offered more direct access to colonial territories in India and the Middle East, by the late nineteenth century British and French scholars were mostly working along paths established in German universities and academies. But Marchand's goal is not simply to recover Germany's vast contribution to orientalism as an academic field: she also seeks to challenge Said on two crucial issues of interpretation. First, she rejects his argument that orientalist scholarship was bound up intrinsically with the needs and practices of European colonialism. On the contrary, Marchand argues, most German orientalists had only infrequent and sporadic contact with colonies and colonialism, and this remained true even after Germany acquired an overseas empire. Even more fundamental, however, is her disagreement with the Foucauldian underpinnings of Said's study and others like it:
In general, I find presumptuous and rather condescending the conception, so common to [recent] readings of cultural history, that all knowledge is power, especially since the prevailing way of understanding this formulation suggests that power is something sinister and oppressive, something exerted against or over others. Of course, knowledge can be used in this way, but knowledge as understanding can also lead to appreciation, dialogue, self-critique, perspectival reorientation, and personal and cultural enrichment. (xxv)
The implications of Marchand's epistemological standpoint for her interpretation of German orientalism are immediate and obvious. Rather than treating orientalism as a monolithic discourse, in which the contributions of particular scholars matter relatively little, she emphasizes the diversity of perspectives and approaches to be found within German orientalism, highlighting the role of individual careers and, in many cases, individual choices in shaping the history of an academic discipline.
This requires a certain leap of empathy, because from the present perspective there can seem something ridiculous and absurd about men (and they were mostly men) devoting their lives to dead languages and lost grammars. In Orientalism, Said cites Flaubert's unpublished novel Bouvard et Pécuchet (1880), which tells the story of two stenographers who become wealthy enough to retire to a country estate but eventually decide that they want to spend their days endlessly copying text from one book to another. Said views this tale as an allegory of nineteenth-century scholarship, and one that applies a fortiori to the work of the orientalists. But this is not Marchand's approach. With apologies to E. P. Thompson, Marchand can been as rescuing the underpaid linguist, the grammar-book editor, the weaver of obsolete etymologies, the utopian archaeologist, and even the deluded followers of Joseph Strzygowski (see below) from the enormous condescension of Said and posterity. After all, these scholars not only reproduced the known world—they expanded it. “I have sought,” she writes, “to plunge the reader into the world of those who labored, largely unsung, at orientalism's philological face . . . in order to understand not only how indebted they were to past traditions, but how much, decade by decade, their world changed” (xxix).
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If there is a red thread running through the history of German orientalist scholarship, Marchand argues, it is not colonialism but religion. German orientalism, of course, could trace its roots to the post-Reformation study of the Old Testament (Orientalistik). But the emancipation of orientalism from theology was never complete, as concerns about the status and origins of ancient religious texts continued to shape debates in the field well into the early twentieth century. By highlighting this religious dimension, Marchand departs once again from Edward Said, who treated nineteenth-century orientalism as basically secular and as primarily oriented toward the modern world.Footnote 5 Instead, she joins a growing chorus of intellectual historians who have emphasized the persistence of religious or, more specifically, theological concerns not only in the writings of “ideological entrepreneurs” like Arthur Drews (author of the hugely provocative Christusmythe (1909)) but also in the work of seemingly sober-minded scholars and scientists.Footnote 6
This emphasis on religion also determines the book's chronological structure, which opens with a description of the longue durée of orientalist research. Early modern orientalism was as diverse and multivalent as its nineteenth- and twentieth-century counterparts and so it defies easy characterization. Still, the overriding concern of most orientalists in this era remained the study of the Hebrew Bible. As Hans Frei noted some time ago, the Reformation principle of sola scriptura led to a new emphasis among Protestant theologians on the actuality of the Old Testament world and its relevance for present-day Christians, who saw themselves as the heirs of the ancient Israelites. At the same time, however, scholarly efforts to identify the original text of the Bible and to discern the true meaning of the scriptures eventually gave rise to a dynamic of criticism and historicization that presented profound challenges to Protestant orthodoxy.Footnote 7 Already by the sixteenth century, however, interest in ancient “Eastern” wisdom such as that found in Gnosticism, Kabbalah, or the Corpus Hermeticum had spawned the heterodox notion that underlying all the religions was an original (Neoplatonic) philosophy, which subsequently had been distorted through the machinations of priests and religious officials.
One of major themes of German Orientalism is the way that the traditions of Christian humanism and philosophia perennis shaped the writings and self-identity of orientalist scholars and writers well into the contemporary era. In particular, these traditions gave orientalism a theological valence that, on the one hand, served Christian apologetics but, on the other, helped destabilize Christian orthodoxy. At the same time, they reinforced an emphasis within this scholarship on issues of chronology. Quoting Anthony Grafton's study of Joseph Scaliger, Marchand notes that for modern orientalists, too, “priority in time implied superiority in doctrine.”Footnote 8 Thus identifying the oldest language, mythology, or religion became a matter of profound importance, not least during the early twentieth century, when racialist and diffusionist theories suggested that all the really creative work had been done in the Urzeit and that even the Greeks were mere epigones of their ancient Aryan forefathers.
A consequence of Marchand's beginning her study in the early modern era is that this relativizes the significance of what Raymond Schwab termed the “the Oriental Renaissance,” which he located roughly in the Romantic era.Footnote 9 To be sure, these years witnessed the translation into French and English of numerous ancient Persian and Indian texts, including the Zend-Avesta (1771), the Bhagavadgita (1785), Sakuntala (1789), and the Laws of Manu (1794). Moreover, the discovery by the British colonial official William Jones that Sanskrit was related to Latin, Greek, German, and other European languages helped inspire the forays by Friedrich Schlegel and, later, Franz Bopp into comparative linguistics. But whereas Schwab saw the Orient displacing the neoclassicism of the Enlightenment, Marchand emphasizes the simultaneity, at least in the German realm, of the Oriental Renaissance with the rise of philhellenism and classical philology. From c.1780 to c.1820, she writes, “two hearts” beat in the breast of German philology, as educated elites looked to antiquity for models and inspiration for a cultural renewal that would unfold independently of the orthodox clergy and in conjunction with an enlightened state. Indeed, for a brief moment it appeared that orientalism might challenge philhellenism, since it seemed to provide useful material for a narrative of national and Christian origins that would validate Germany's “world-historical mission”—a program that the orientalist works of Friedrich Schlegel, Joseph Görres, and Friedrich Creuzer seemed to endorse (55). In the end, however, philhellenism won the day, a victory that was secured during the controversy over Creuzer's Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (1st ed. 1810–12), which traced the myths of Homer and Hesiod to an oriental symbolism (another version of the philosophia perennis). Creuzer's defeat signaled the marginalization not only of orientalist philology but also of the kind of speculative scholarship that had characterized Romanticism in general. What took its place, in both oriental and classical philology, was a narrower, supposedly more wissenschaftlich, and certainly more gründlich form of scholarship.
Between 1820 and 1870, however, orientalists found themselves pushed to the sidelines of German scholarly life: texts were difficult to access, jobs in the field were practically nonexistent, and book publication was largely self-financed. In an academic system in which everyone received a Gymnasium education and classical philology reigned supreme, it was a rare soul who was willing to add Hebrew, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Coptic, Turkish, and Armenian to his linguistic repertoire in the hope of launching a career as a professional orientalist. Yet, as Marchand emphasizes in two wonderfully evocative chapters on the “lonely orientalists,” these fields of study continued to attract talented individuals. By and large these were Protestant men, including a disproportionate number of pastors’ sons and converted Jews. Most shared a commitment to the liberal Protestant project of “purifying” the scriptures via higher criticism, as well as a desire to recover the deep origins (linguistic, religious, racial) of the German nation. As a result, their scholarship tended to focus almost exclusively on ancient texts, languages, and religions, while the modern world barely merited mention. The search for German–Christian origins also influenced which cultures and époques were considered worthy of academic study (ancient Egypt, India, Israel, Persia) and which neglected (China and Japan, post-Quranic Islam, post-Hellenistic Judaism), with the latter topics consigned to individuals working either outside the academy (such as Ferdinand von Richthofen, who wrote about China) or at its margins (such as the scholars associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums). Still, for all of their institutional weakness and lack of prestige, German orientalists were already considered the international leaders in their field, a distinction that was achieved—Marchand hastens to add—without benefit of colonial territories or possessions.
By the late nineteenth century, however, a series of shifts in German political and cultural life and in the institutional parameters of orientalist research created the conditions for what Marchand calls the “Second Oriental Renaissance.” First and foremost, the economic growth of the German Empire meant that there was more money, from both state and private sources, to fund museums, purchase artifacts, and establish professorships in diverse fields of oriental philology: the life of the orientalist still wasn't easy, but prospects for academic advancement were somewhat less bleak than they had been at mid-century. Second, orientalists benefitted from the more aggressive imperialism of the late nineteenth century, which created unprecedented access to artifacts, ancient texts, and other cultural treasures of Asia. “German scholars were emboldened and enriched by the intrusions and extortions of other Europeans,” Marchand notes:
Those conquests allowed them to travel newly opened routes and stay with colonial officials stationed abroad, to consult oriental texts bought cheaply when indigenous elites were compelled to sell, or robbed of their cultural goods, and to learn new languages and sacred secrets from local religious figures no longer able to sustain their practices in the modernizing and Europeanizing world. (157–8)
Among the artifacts that Germans managed to plunder in these years were the bust of Nefertiti (1913) and the less-known but equally impressive finds in the Turfan region of China (1902–14), where aggressive excavators sawed murals right off the walls so that they could be shipped to Berlin as quickly as possible.
Of perhaps more immediate significance for orientalist scholarship, however, was the increased availability and scholarly acceptance of new texts from Asia itself. Although Jean-François Champollion first published his translation of the hieroglyphs in 1822, it was not until the 1870s and 1880s that hieroglyphs became the basis for a full-blown (and disappointingly mundane) cultural history of ancient Egypt. Likewise, while English and French scholars had already deciphered the Assyrian cuneiform script in 1857, it was not until the discovery of the Tell el Amarna tablets in 1886 that scholars concluded they were dealing with a people more ancient than either the Egyptians or the Hebrews whose artifacts had the potential to overturn received accounts of ancient civilization. Here, as elsewhere, scholars were able to use indigenous sources to challenge the authority of biblical and classical sources, a textual turn that distinguished this phase of orientalist scholarship from its predecessors.
The rise to prominence of orientalist scholarship paralleled broader shifts in German culture, which Marchand outlines in some detail. By the 1890s, for example, neither the Christian clergy nor the classical philologists possessed the cultural authority that they had enjoyed earlier in the century. While cultural critics like Nietzsche and Langbehn worried that liberal theology was too intellectual to meet the spiritual needs of the German people, they also complained that the Gymnasiums and universities, geared as they were to the autopsy of classical texts, had lost their ability to inspire the nation's youth. This created the opening for a new generation of scholars, whom Marchand calls the “furious orientalists,” who were not satisfied merely to publish sound scholarship but wanted to overturn the authority of the Greek Classics and the Bible. Delitzsch's Babel und Bibel (delivered originally as a public lecture to an audience that included Kaiser Wilhelm II) was a classic specimen of the Furor Orientalis. By highlighting parallels between biblical accounts of the Flood and the Tower of Babel and those found on cuneiform tablets, Delitzsch attempted to present ancient Assyrian mythology as more original and thus more venerable than the religion of the ancient Hebrews. But the scholars associated with the “history of religions” (Hermann Gunkel, Wilhelm Bousset, Carl Clemen) went even further in their heterodoxy, seeking to locate the origins of Christianity itself in a broader context of Near Eastern paganism. In this regard, the furious orientalists revived Creuzer's efforts to derive Western religion and philosophy from the Orient, an agenda that had been abandoned in the wake of the Symbolik controversy (the 1890s, Marchand notes, were like the 1820s in reverse). The difference was that this generation of scholars had a bevy of new sources, many derived from recent archaeological excavations, on which to base their claims. Moreover, they supplemented their scholarship with an aggressive campaign of popularization that was designed to convey these discoveries to as wide a swath of the public as possible. Nor did they lack for success. The Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher, which featured short and inexpensive works by Bousset, Gunkel, Pfleiderer, and Johannes Weiss, sold 500,000 copies between 1903 and 1913. Meanwhile, Gustav Frenssen's bestselling novel Hilligenlei (1905) featured a hero who abandons the New Testament after reading the works of Harnack, Wrede, and the history of religions school.
Marchand is fully aware of the deeply problematic nature of this strain of orientalist scholarship. Much of it constituted a rather transparent (and often blatantly anti-Semitic) attempt to demote the Hebrew Bible from its traditional status in Christian culture by showing that its narratives were derived from a supposedly more ancient civilization and that Christianity itself was a product of Hellenistic mystery cults, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, or some other (non-Jewish) religion. “The quest for origins tended to be played as a winner-take-all game,” Marchand notes, particularly at a time when diffusionist models of cultural influence were making a comeback and the opposition between Aryan and Semitic was hardening into a firm racial division (266). Many of the “furious orientalists” relied on material artifacts to back up their claims, and while this type of evidence allowed them to fill in gaps in the historical record, it was inevitably less conclusive than textual evidence and more subject to manipulation by scholars seeking a certain result.
Yet if there was much in this scholarship that reinforced religious and racial prejudices, there were other, more commendable, aspects of the Second Oriental Renaissance. For one thing, scholars in this era were far more likely than their predecessors not only to travel to Asia but also to interact with actual Asians. The Indologist Paul Deussen, who in many ways embodied some of the most noxious tendencies of the era, voyaged to India in 1892–3 and befriended a number of anticolonial intellectuals, who honored him with a Sanskrit name: Devasena. At the same time, orientalism was becoming less exclusive of both Jews and women, who found more opportunities for study and work than ever before. One of Marchand's real heroes is the Hungarian Jewish scholar Ignaz Goldziher. In Der Mythos bei den Hebräern (1876), Goldziher attempted to refute Ernest Renan's claim that the ancient Hebrews had lacked a mythology, while addressing early accusations that they had borrowed their religious ideas from the Assyrians. By the 1880s, however, he had become an expert in Islam, publishing a series of studies in which he sought to demonstrate that the Hadith represented a living body of interpretation akin to the Talmud and that the Muslim faith could not be reduced to the Qur'an any more than Judaism could be reduced to the Bible. As the example of Goldziher demonstrates, not all fin de siècle orientalists were “furious”; many, and probably most, remained committed to philological accuracy and sober scholarship. Indeed, while Delitzsch created much sound and fury during the “Babel und Bibel” controversy, his theses were ultimately rejected by most of the German academic community. Here, as elsewhere in Wilhelmine culture, orientalism represented not a unitary discourse but a rich and highly contested field, in which no single school attained dominance and in which diversity seemed to yield even more diversity.
Indeed, if there is an overriding theme (and methodology) in this book, it is the recovery of German orientalism in all of its wonderful, terrible multifaceted glory. Marchand certainly has important things to say about the evolution and development of this field, but any summary cannot capture the richness and variety of either her material or her presentation of it. Leafing back and forth through the pages of German Orientalism, this reviewer is embarrassed by what he has been forced to omit: the career of Arminius Vambéry, who spent two years traveling across the Ottoman Empire disguised as a dervish and the rest of his career hiding behind one mask or another; Paul de Lagarde's attempt to reconstruct the Septuagint using non-Hebrew sources, a project that, Marchand rightly suspects, was designed to discredit the orthodox Masoretic text; the career of the Austrian art historian Joseph Strzygowski, who developed a fully racialized account of ancient art but who nonetheless attracted many younger scholars to the study of Byzantine, Islamic, Indian, and Iranian art history while winning a large following in Turkey, Armenia, and Croatia; and so on and so on, on and on. Many of the figures discussed in the book probably deserve article- or book-length studies of their own. Indeed, several of them don't really fit into any of Marchand's central arguments or narratives: they simply make their appearance, say their lines, and leave the stage. But this, too, is part of her point.
* * *
Another, more complicated presence in the book is Edward Said himself. After a short discussion of Orientalism in the preface, Marchand declares, “Said's work will, from this point forward, scarcely be mentioned” (xxv). Yet this statement is not entirely true. Many of Marchand's rhetorical asides, notably those highlighting the non-monolithic nature of orientalism or the disconnect between German orientalist scholarship and colonialism, are clearly aimed at Said or at least at the Saidian way of looking at things. But because they are delivered as asides, such comments tend to address more the specter of Said than the actual text or arguments of Orientalism. In addition, Marchand overlooks several lines of post-Saidian scholarship that have critical implications for the argument she develops in German Orientalism. As a result, the reader is left with lingering questions about the interplay between colonialism and German orientalist scholarship.
This is true most notably in the case of religion, which in some ways serves the same explanatory function for Marchand that colonialism did for Said. Yet it is unclear to what degree religion and colonialism can be disentangled from each other once one enters the modern era. Jonathan Hess and Susannah Heschel have argued that from the eighteenth century onwards the Christian–Jewish encounter in Germany became increasingly bound up with colonialist metaphors and colonial-style projects. Hess, for example, highlights the links between Dohm's call for a “civil improvement” of the Jews and various schemes to colonize eastern Prussia.Footnote 10 Heschel, meanwhile, portrays Abraham Geiger's emphasis on the “Jewish” Jesus as a postcolonialist move against the Christian colonization of Jewish history.Footnote 11 Indeed, even those Christian scholars who wanted to “purify” the Christian–German narrative by disconnecting it from Judaism or the Hebrew Testament invoked what they considered the foreign or “colonial” presence of Jews and Jewishness in German history and German religious self-identity. In other words, religion itself was reshaped in and through the colonial experience, even in Germany, although this often occurred at the level of rhetoric and metaphor and without a specific territorial project in mind.
From another perspective, however, one might argue that Marchand is too beholden to Said, at least when it comes to conceiving the possible connections between orientalism and nineteen-century imperialism. In Orientalism, Said posits a clear, functional relationship between the orientalist “cultural project” and the colonial ventures of Great Britain and France. On this basis, he concludes that the Germans, whose overseas empire was small and relatively short-lived, produced a type of orientalist scholarship that was largely disconnected from the colonial experience.Footnote 12 But perhaps what is needed in this instance is a more expansive conception of the ways that colonialism had the potential to shape the object of orientalist research, which would account for both the repulsion and the attraction (often unconscious) that orientalist scholars felt toward the objects of their investigations. As Marchand demonstrates, it was colonialism that supplied the texts, the artifacts, the “stuff” on which modern orientalist research was based, which was then used (by Protestant scholars at least) to continue the project of purifying the biblical narrative. In addition, however, this Protestant project (along with the earlier notion of “informed evangelization”) also provided a religious incentive that fed back into colonialism – if not necessarily at the level of state actors, then certainly at a more diffuse, cultural level. In the above-cited passage from Babel und Bibel, Delitzsch mentions the heightened “rivalry among nations” as one of the consequences of orientalism's quest for the Bible, and it would be interesting to see to what degree German scholarship contributed not only to this aspect of the colonial rivalry, but also to the broader self-conception among imperialists that they were acting on behalf of a certain civilization or race. In the end, Marchand's decision not to pursue this line of investigation reflects not only a legitimate wariness of blurring the distinction between colonialism as metaphor and colonialism as an actual project of territorial expansion, but also her methodological preference for treating scholars as individuals, with very different motives and agendas, as opposed to seeing their texts as contributing to a broader discourse, whether monolithic or otherwise.Footnote 13
When Marchand does turn to the relationship between orientalist scholarship and late nineteenth-century imperialism (in the book's eighth chapter), it becomes clear just how marginal the German Empire's brief colonial experience was for the overall development of German orientalist scholarship. As Marchand notes, there was a strong disconnect between the type of scholarship that was valued in the German academy and the type of scholarship that might have been useful to the officials responsible for overseeing the Kaiserreich's penetration of Asia. Sinology, for example, was a discipline with potentially enormous practical benefits for Germany's efforts to exploit the Qingdao concession, yet it had little presence (and less prestige) in German universities. Otto Franke, Germany's only professor of East Asian languages, remarked bitterly in 1911 that “if Sinology only had to do exclusively with a long finished, ruined and then re-excavated culture, then perhaps there would be a possibility of finding grace in the eyes of the philological right-thinkers” (Franke quoted at 346). The Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen, established in 1888 in order to train individuals in modern Asian languages, was viewed with hostility by professors at the University of Berlin. Franke compared their reaction to that of “an honest woman, who had had a bastard put in her crib” (Franke quoted at 354). On the other hand, it was almost impossible to plan a career as an orientalist with the goal of serving the imperialist project, since in the end the colonial office had little use for scholars, whatever the potential relevance of their knowledge and expertise.
This situation only changed with the outbreak of World War I, when the diplomatic and military exigencies of Germany's alliance with the Ottoman Empire meant that work was available for almost anyone who knew one of the relevant oriental languages. Meanwhile, established orientalists like Carl Becker became involved in a rather cynical attempt to stylize the Ottoman war against Britain and France as a “jihad” (which, according to Marchand, was as much a Turkish project as a German one). While the call for “jihad” failed to inspire the Arab peoples to rise up against the British and French, it ended up providing a certain cover for Turkish atrocities against the Armenians. Likewise, Reich officials publicly supported Zionist efforts in the hopes of winning Jewish support in Poland, Russia, and the USA. But any public-relations benefit Germany might have reaped was lost when its Ottoman allies began deporting Jews from Palestine in the spring of 1917. Well before then, however, German orientalists realized that the barbarism of World War I, both at home and in the colonies, meant the end of Europe's influence over the Orient. A third oriental renaissance was on the horizon, but this one would be led by the Orientals themselves.
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It is not difficult to identify lines of influence between certain strains of nineteenth-century German orientalism and those that rose to prominence during the Third Reich, and this Marchand does in the latter sections of the book. But even here her emphasis is on the possibilities within orientalist scholarship not only for cultural domination but also for intercultural connection and understanding. In particular, she devotes considerable space to Richard Wilhelm, who traveled to China in 1899 as a Protestant missionary but quickly became convinced that when it came to religion the Chinese had plenty to teach Europeans. With the help of Chinese scholars he translated the I Ching (1924) and became an outspoken defender of both Confucius and the entire tradition of Chinese spirituality, which he saw as a necessary antidote to the West's ever-expanding materialism. There is much to critique in this stance, including its primitivism and neo-Romanticism, but Marchand argues that this should not blind us to a key truth about the career of Richard Wilhelm, as well as of German orientalism as a whole, which is that in addition to moments of distortion and domination, it also produced moments of genuine understanding, both at the level of textual hermeneutics and between individual human beings, and that such moments often arose from within the very religious traditions that elsewhere proved so noxious and destructive.
It is because of such moments, which anticipate the multiculturalism that we like to associate with the present scholarly moment, that Marchand refuses to issue a blanket condemnation of the German orientalist enterprise or to reject its scholars as a whole. Instead, she has chosen to take a generous, empathetic approach to the subjects of her study, to treat them not like Flaubert's mindless copyists but as the ingenious, ambitious, limited, and fallible human beings that they actually were. At the same time, she freely acknowledges that hers is not the last word on this subject and that there is much more to be said and done. (Again, that is part of her point.) Whatever their outlook or approach, however, future scholars of German orientalism and of intellectual history more broadly will owe an enormous debt to Suzanne Marchand and to what she has achieved in this magnificent book.
