Friedrich Schlegel's Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder (1808) has long been recognized as a crucial text in the history of German Orientalism. It included one of the first attempts to demonstrate the historical relationship between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and German not simply on the basis of individual words but through a structural comparison of the languages themselves. In this regard, it contributed significantly to the idea of an “Indo-Germanic” language group and to the foundation of comparative linguistics as a scholarly discipline. In addition, however, Schlegel offered a systematic analysis of ancient Indian religious ideas, which he traced to an “original revelation” that had degenerated over time into pantheism and other philosophical distortions. Lastly, he attempted to show, based on linguistic and other evidence, that the origins of the German people lay in India.

Despite the positive reengagement with Schlegel's early romantic writings over the past two decades, his orientalist scholarship has retained a rather dubious reputation. Léon Poliakov, in particular, saw Über die Sprache und Weisheit as one of the key texts in the formation of the “Aryan myth,” a view that was carried over, more or less directly, into Edward Said's Orientalism (New York, 1979) and Martin Bernal's Black Athena (New Brunswick, 1987). One of the aims of Chen Tzoref-Ashkenazi's new study is to challenge this interpretation through a reading of Schlegel's Indological project that locates it in the intellectual and political contexts of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. In this way, he seeks to draw a line between Schlegel's “romantic myth” of German origins and the “Aryan myth,” which he sees as emerging only in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The book divides roughly into two halves. The first five chapters are devoted to elucidating the historical context in which Schlegel became attracted to India, first as an abstract aesthetic ideal and then as an object of serious scholarly investigation. Individual chapters examine the evolution of attitudes toward India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the emergence of Sanskrit studies in Europe, the influence of Georg Forster's translation of the drama Sakuntala (1791), the role of India in the early romantics' search for a new mythology and, later, the attempt by Schlegel and others to promote a national culture that would be anticlassical and anti-French. Much of this material will be familiar to those who have read the literature on German romanticism and the contemporary “Oriental Renaissance.” Nonetheless, these chapters provide a useful account of the role of India in the thinking of Herder, the early romantics, and their contemporaries before the onset of more rigorous scholarship in the early nineteenth century.

The second half of the book focuses more closely on Schlegel's study of the Persian and Sanskrit languages in Paris in 1802–1804 and the evolution of the arguments about Indian language, religion, and history that appeared in Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder. Schlegel's most intense engagement with India coincided with a turn in his thinking away from modernity, as embodied by the Enlightenment and the absolutist state, and toward the political and religious ideals of the Catholic Church and the Middle Ages. Tzoref-Ashkenazi shows that although Schlegel's new intellectual orientation fed into his Indological project, it also created complications for it. For example, while Schlegel initially exalted the religious ideas of the Indians, his embrace of Catholicism led him to take an increasingly negative stance toward the doctrines of emanation, dualism, and pantheism, which he presented in Über die Sprache und Weisheit as resulting from a corruption of the original revelation by human reason. In addition, Schlegel's increased familiarity with the historical record forced him to back away from his contention that the origins of the German people lay in India. As early as 1810, he had shifted the site of origin to a more generalized “Asia.” At the same time, he began to emphasize the “national” and autochthonous nature of German culture, downplaying its borrowings from other peoples and civilizations. In this sense Schlegel's “romantic myth” of German origins collapsed almost as quickly as it appeared.

Although this book sheds a useful light on Schlegel's shifting attitudes toward ancient India, it suffers from several shortcomings. One of these is a certain looseness when it comes to describing intellectual movements, contexts, or situations. It is unsettling to see shifts in ideology explained with reference to a change in the “general atmosphere” (p. 224) or to see unqualified generalizations about what “the romantics” thought or believed (pp. 75, 82). This sense of looseness is reinforced by the author's handling of the secondary literature. Carl Schmitt is repeatedly invoked as an authority on the romantics, while numerous other works, many with a direct bearing on this topic, are absent from the bibliography. These include major studies by Ernst Windisch, Ulrich Wyss, Jochen Fried, Sabine Mangold, Suzanne Marchand, and Stefan Arvidsson, just to name a few.

A second problem relates to the author's attempt to distance Schlegel's Indology from both the Aryan myth described by Poliakov and the colonial interests that Edward Said has emphasized. Tzoref-Ashkenazi notes that while Schlegel excluded Hebrew from the “organic” (Indo-European) language group, he still elevated it to the top of the “mechanical” (non-Indo-European) language group and thus cannot really be seen as denigrating it. Likewise, he points out that Schlegel's account of German origins did not assume racial purity: instead, he postulated that the wandering Indians were able to assimilate other peoples into their migration before they arrived in Germany. These are legitimate points and could be used as the basis for a more nuanced analysis than that offered by Poliakov. But Tzoref-Ashkenazi goes too far when he declares baldly that the Aryan myth was “a result of the strengthening in antisemitism in the late 19th century, rather than a logical development of the Indo-German idea” (p. 230). Beyond the dubious assumption of a quantitative increase in antisemitism, the author fails to consider the multiple functions (not all of them strictly scholarly) that the Indo-German idea was meant to serve. In particular, one of the key motives behind Schegel's “Indian” account of German linguistic, ethnic, and religious origins (and others like it) was to develop an alternative to the orthodox Protestant and Catholic narrative of origins, which had treated Hebrew as the original language and the Old and New Testaments as the source of all religious truth. In this sense, there was an anti-Hebraic, anti-biblical thrust to Schlegel's Indological project from the very beginning. These impulses were combined, in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, with a desire to contribute to German empire building, or what Schlegel called Weltherrschaft, that led him to incorporate motifs and ideas (and not simply texts) drawn from the experience of European colonialism. To be sure, Schlegel's scholarship was empirically grounded and was more than just a projection of his religious or political ideology, but these factors surely complicate the attempt to draw a firm line between his brand of Orientalism and the more explicitly racialist Orientalisms of the late nineteenth century. In sum, while this book contributes to our understanding of the origins and contexts of Schlegel's Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder, it leaves the reader feeling that there is much more that can and should be said about this topic.