INTRODUCTION
In December 1863, Karl Marx paid a visit to his Dutch uncle Lion Philips in Zaltbommel. One of the striking things he discovered during his stay in this Dutch city was that biblical criticism made quite a furor in the Netherlands, not only among academic theologians, but also among liberal Protestant pastors who welcomed biblical criticism as a means for liberating religious practice from what they perceived as the “chains” of dogma and tradition.Footnote 1 “Here in Holland,” Marx wrote in January 1864 to Friedrich Engels, “the German critical-theological tendency is so very much à l’ordre du jour that the parsons acknowledge it openly from the pulpits.”Footnote 2 At that time, the Protestant pastor in Zaltbommel was J. G. R. Acquoy, a future professor of church history at Leiden University, who was wholeheartedly committed to the liberal cause and did not hesitate, indeed, to share his views with his congregation.Footnote 3 More remarkable, however, was the case that Marx reported to Engels just a couple of months later. The Leiden orientalist Reinhart Dozy had dared to publish a book in which he relegated the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to the realm of fancy, portrayed the ancient Israelites as archaic idolaters, treated the first five books of the Bible as religious mythology, and on top of that equated the famous Black Stone of the Kaaba with a stone god originally worshipped by the Israelite tribe of Simeon. They write from Holland, Marx added, “that the book has caused a great uproar among theologians there, particularly since Dozy is the most learned Dutch orientalist—and a professor in Leiden to boot!”Footnote 4
The heated debate sparked by Dozy's book De Israëlieten te Mekka (The Israelites in Mecca) (1864) among Dutch and foreign scholars alike—German, French, and English voices quickly joined the discussion—was not only a theological dispute. Although both admirers and opponents treated the book as a specimen of modern biblical criticism with implications for the study of Islam, the debate was also an extensive reflection on the extent to which Dozy's bold suggestions and hazardous inferences were compatible with standards of serious scholarship. Dozy's book became a cause célèbre, well beyond academic circles,Footnote 5 not merely because of its iconoclastic agenda, but also because a senior scholar with a well-established reputation for philological accuracy was suddenly being criticized, often in remarkably strong language, for violating elementary scholarly standards. Interestingly, Dozy's critics, as well as his supporters, discussed these standards almost invariably in terms of virtues and vices. Was Dozy a model of “frankness,” as the Leiden Old Testament scholar Abraham Kuenen asserted? Or was Dozy guilty of “prejudice” and “dogmatism,” as other critics maintained, because he adapted sources to his own purposes and hardly considered alternative interpretative strategies? Was his “shrewdness” to be applauded or did it come too close to “recklessness” and “rashness” to deserve endorsement? One wonders: what did these virtues and vices mean? And why were categories of virtue and vice so important in evaluating De Israëlieten te Mekka?
The Dozy affair has, of course, not gone unnoticed by historians of nineteenth-century orientalism. Most notably, Ran HaCohen has examined how German Jewish intellectuals responded to Dozy's provocative study, mapping their praise and blame for De Israëlieten te Mekka on a confessional map between “orthodoxy” and “liberalism.”Footnote 6 Additionally, Arnoud Vrolijk and Richard van Leeuwen have argued that personal factors, such as Dozy's fondness for polemics, fueled the debate no less than did clashing political and religious agendas.Footnote 7 None of these authors, however, have paid more than cursory attention to the language of virtue and vice that Dozy and his colleagues employed. From a disciplinary-historical perspective, this is perfectly understandable. The catalogues of virtues and vices on which Dozy's critics drew in evaluating De Israëlieten te Mekka are likely to reflect, in one way or another, the political, religious, and methodological fault lines that divided European orientalists in the 1860s. These lines of division, in turn, have been extensively analyzed by Suzanne Marchand, Sabine Mangold, and other historians of nineteenth-century orientalism.Footnote 8 If the “shrewdness,” “frankness,” and “rashness” attributed to Dozy merely offer further illustrations of this by now familiar diversity—the “house divided against itself,” as Robert Irwin calls itFootnote 9 —then historians of orientalism have little reason to subject discourses of virtue and vice to special scrutiny.
If I embark on such a project nonetheless, I do so with the rather different purpose of making a methodological contribution to an emerging field of intellectual history known as “historical epistemology.” Although this label can refer to different lines of inquiry,Footnote 10 I follow Lorraine Daston in understanding historical epistemology to be a form of intellectual history focused on “the history of categories that structure our thought, pattern our arguments and proofs, and certify our standards for explanation.”Footnote 11 Daston's study Objectivity, co-authored with Peter Galison, illustrates this line of research by examining in detail the changing meanings that nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars attributed to “objectivity.” Daston historicizes this virtue by showing, among other things, that late nineteenth-century accounts of “mechanical objectivity” differed significantly from objectivity in an early nineteenth-century sense of “truth to nature.”Footnote 12 Following Daston's example, other historians have examined what virtues such as “impartiality,” “curiosity,” and “humility” meant in different times and places.Footnote 13 This contextualizing approach is a welcome challenge to the often rather universal terms in which contemporary virtue epistemologists, among others, speak about the role of “epistemic virtues” in scholarly inquiry.Footnote 14
Historicizing single virtues, however, is only a first step towards understanding what it meant for a scholar such as Dozy to be accused of “rashness” and “dogmatism” or to be praised for his “shrewdness” while simultaneously being criticized for “inaccurate” historical statements. Daston and her colleagues hardly, if ever, examine to what extent nineteenth-century authors saw virtues as mutually dependent, in the sense that both the meaning and the relative significance of a virtue depended on those of other complementary or contrasting ones. While Daston's historical epistemology convincingly shows that virtues must always be situated in time and place, it contributes only little to answering such questions as: how important was “accuracy” in relation to “fruitfulness”? To what extent did “impartiality” imply “transparency”? What was a “talent for conjecture” worth without “carefulness”? And was it regarded as legitimate for scholars to excel in some virtues (say, frankness) at the cost of others (say, precision)?Footnote 15
These are no hypothetical questions. As I will argue in what follows, nineteenth-century scholars such as Dozy's critics did not define their work in terms of single virtues, but conceived of scholarly performances in terms of weighing and balancing multiple virtues. The debate on Dozy's De Israëlieten te Mekka even suggests four ways in which virtues were seen as depending on each other. The extent to which scholars appreciated Dozy's “shrewdness” and “frankness” was dependent on (1) the degree to which Dozy practiced these virtues, (2) the extent to which they were kept in balance by other virtues, (3) the extent to which they were balanced by other scholars’ virtues, and (4) the extent to which it was expected that they would be balanced by future scholars’ work. If this is, in one way or another, representative of how nineteenth-century scholars more generally conceived of virtues, vices, and their mutual relations, then historians have good reason for abandoning the single-virtue focus that has dominated historical epistemology so far in favor of the broader, more open-ended question of what sort of constellations of virtues scholars appealed to in defining scholarly standards and in evaluating each other's work. Historical epistemology may then enter a new phase in which balances, hierarchies, and other dependency relations between such virtues as “accuracy,” “frankness,” and “shrewdness” move to the center of attention.
DOZY AND HIS BOOK
Who, first of all, was the man who created such a stir with De Israëlieten te Mekka?Footnote 16 Reinhart Dozy's biography conformed almost seamlessly to the narrative template of a nineteenth-century scholarly life.Footnote 17 Born in 1820, Dozy studied at Leiden University with the Arabic scholar Hendrik Engelinus Weijers. He won a gold medal of the Royal Institute at Amsterdam for his Dictionnaire détaillé des noms des vêtements chez les Arabes (1843, published 1845) and obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1844 with a study on the Abbadid dynasty in Muslim Spain. Two years later, Dozy was made assistant curator of the collection of oriental manuscripts in Leiden's university library (adiutor interpretis legati Warneriani). After publishing his Recherches sur l’histoire politique et littéraire de l’Espagne pendant le moyen âge in 1848, he was appointed to a special chair in “general history” at Leiden, which allowed Dozy to teach not only on his beloved medieval Spain, but also, following his fascination for all things French, on Napoleon and on French poetry.Footnote 18 In 1857, he received a full professorship, which he kept until his death in 1883, shortly after the completion of a two-volume Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes (1881). Together with Dozy's four-volume Histoire des Musulmans d’Espagne (1861), this is regarded as his best and most influential work.Footnote 19
These monographic studies, as well as the source editions Dozy published—he undertook editions of Abdelwahid al-Marrakushi's history of the Almohades (1847) and Ibn Idhari's Al-Bayan al-Mughrib (1848–51), among other titles—testify to the “philological ethos” that dominated the study of history, languages, and religion in mid-nineteenth-century Leiden. It was an ethos in which source criticism stood in higher regard than historical synthesis, accuracy counted as more important than originality, and a healthy skepticism, especially vis-à-vis traditional authority, was seen as the beginning of all wisdom (“I am nothing if not critical” was a favorite Shakespeare quotation in nineteenth-century Leiden).Footnote 20 Dozy's source editions also furnished the author with a solid reputation among European Arabists. Such a reputation mattered, because trust played an important role in philological scholarship. To no small degree, scholars guaranteed the reliability of a transcript or an inference with their own good name.Footnote 21 This explains why Dozy's reputation was frequently invoked in the debate prompted by De Israëlieten te Mekka, as a reason why the book generated much interest,Footnote 22 as a guarantee that it could not be entirely wrong-headed,Footnote 23 as a reason why it deserved serious study,Footnote 24 or as a cause of surprise (that “a man of such first-rate manly learning” was able to produce such “wild, youthful leaps and bounds”).Footnote 25 Dozy's reputation was also seen as deserving respectful treatment. Thus when the German rabbi Ludwig Philippson expressed his doubts about the soundness of Dozy's mind after reading De Israëlieten te Mekka,Footnote 26 the German Jewish scholar Raphael Kirchheim rebuked him, under reference to the author's reputation, not to write “in such a rejecting, dismissive tone” about the famous Dutch orientalist, “as if he has was dealing with one of the savants of the Mainzer Kladderadatsch.”Footnote 27
Philological virtuosity, however, was only one aspect of Dozy's reputation. Like many of his generation, Dozy was “caught between romanticism and historicism, between its grand political and aesthetic dreams and its desire to be counted wissenschaftlich.”Footnote 28 Despite his commitment to the minuteness and exactness favored by the philological ethos, Dozy preferred to model himself after such Romantic French historians as Prosper de Barante and Augustin Thierry. He also valued a well-polished writing style over masses of learned footnotes and did not shrink, to the astonishment of some of his Leiden colleagues, from using poetry as a historical source.Footnote 29 Additionally, Dozy had a sharp tongue, judging by his letters, some of which were punctuated with Arabic curses,Footnote 30 and by his sometimes ruthlessly critical reviews, through which he alienated several colleagues near and abroad.Footnote 31 In his Recherches, most notably, Dozy lashed out so harshly at the Spanish orientalist José Antonio Conde that he acquired the dubious reputation of being “a merciless controversialist.”Footnote 32
The proverbial whirlwind that Dozy had to reap after this wind came with De Israëlieten te Mekka. This book emerged out of Het islamisme (Islamism) (1863), a popular introduction to the history of Islam that Dozy contributed to a series on The Most Important Religions published by A. C. Kruseman.Footnote 33 During his preparations for this work of synthesis, Dozy arrived at what he called revolutionary insights into the origins of Islam. As he wrote to Kruseman, his publisher, in November 1862, “The result at which I have now arrived is, I think, rather surprising, also for biblical theology; it is also important, because it puts the origin of Islam in a new light.”Footnote 34 Although in Het islamisme Dozy did not yet present his changed views, he promised his readers a more detailed exposition of what he had discovered:
In this way, I have obtained a result that has utterly surprised me, but that cannot be communicated in just a few pages, given that it is closely related to many other, arguably even more important, results; it is entirely at odds with reigning views; it sounds very strange, and given that in the realm of scholarship no one can demand to be taken on his word, it requires a lengthy, scholarly demonstration of proof . . .Footnote 35
Dozy's closest pupil, Michaël Jan de Goeje, who followed the project from nearby, had the exciting feeling of accompanying a discoverer: “Almost every day brought something new. Everywhere new perspectives revealed themselves, one riddle after another came to a solution.”Footnote 36 Also, Dozy's correspondence shows that colleagues impatiently begged for quick dispatch of the results.Footnote 37 When these were eventually published, De Goeje declared in superlatives, “In this book, we receive a series of revelations regarding the darkest and most enigmatic issues; it provides a key to penetralia which one had never hoped to behold; it has removed obstacles that one perceived to be insurmountable as if by magic.”Footnote 38
Dozy's most revolutionary hypothesis was that the Kaaba stone in Mecca had originally been an ancient Israelite stone god that the Israelite tribe of Simeon had exported to Arabia in the days of King Saul. On etymological grounds, Dozy supposed that the famous “Meccan festival” had been established by these Simeonites after the example of the Baal feasts in ancient Israel, long before the introduction of Jewish monotheism in the time of Ezra. If ancient tradition was right to identify the Baal in Mecca with a stone in a hole, then Dozy believed this to correspond quite neatly to Israel's ancient history. For in Dozy's view, Abraham and Sarah had not been historical figures, but Hebrew designations for “stone” and “hole,” respectively, referring to a stone god and the pit in which this deity resided. The Leiden professor had no difficulty explaining why Genesis personified this stone and this pit as a patriarch and matriarch: this had been the work of editors in the days of Ezra, who rejected such primitive stone worship from the monotheistic perspective to which Israel had converted after the Babylonian exile. Accordingly, for Dozy, the entire ancient history of Israel, as described in the Pentateuch, had been an invention of tradition by “Ezra and his helpers.”Footnote 39
AN INTERNATIONAL DEBATE
Although some of Dozy's speculative conjectures raised many an eyebrow, it was actually not very surprising to find a Leiden professor in the 1860s applying techniques of modern biblical criticism to questions related to the origins of Islam. First of all, by 1864, the Leiden theological faculty had a reputation for being at the forefront of Old Testament scholarship. It was here that students from all over the world came to study with Abraham Kuenen, whose work contributed significantly to the “documentary hypothesis” often associated with the names of Karl Heinrich Graf (on whom more below) and Julius Wellhausen (a great admirer of Kuenen).Footnote 40 For much the same reason, orthodox Calvinists in the Netherlands as well as abroad distrusted all that came from Leiden, lamenting the faculty's betrayal of Reformed orthodoxy.Footnote 41 As a former South African student reported back to Kuenen in 1863, “For me, my stay in Leiden has become a cause of much sorrow . . . Even before my return to the Cape, I had acquired the reputation of being a heretic teacher [dwaalleeraar].”Footnote 42 Second, by the early 1860s the origins of Islam had been capturing the fascination of orientalists for some decades already, as evidenced by Abraham Geiger's and Gustav Weil's much-discussed studies in this area.Footnote 43 Of crucial importance, however, was the 1860 publication of Theodor Nöldeke's Geschichte des Qorâns. Building on Geiger and Weil, among others, Nöldeke radicalized their “historical-critical” treatment of the Islamic holy book by separating Medina-era and Mecca-era texts as radically as Old Testament scholars distinguished between “J” (Jahwist) and “P” (Priestly Code) elements in the Pentateuch.Footnote 44 Dozy repeatedly referred to this book, most notably in Het islamisme from 1863.Footnote 45 It is this combination of factors that helps explain why a book like De Israëlieten te Mekka could emerge from Leiden's theological faculty: its theme was timely and its method consistent with biblical studies as practiced by Kuenen.
Given the contested character of both, it is also not surprising that, as Marx correctly noticed, De Israëlieten te Mekka drew responses from far and wide, often in the form of journal articles that sometimes ran to dozens of pages.Footnote 46 Authors with a penchant for dramatic generalization used Dozy's book as an occasion for lament over the sorry state of modern science, Leiden oriental scholarship, or liberal theology in the Netherlands, while others, more focused on the sum and substance of Dozy's arguments, wrote lengthy reviews to subject one or more of Dozy's ideas to critical scrutiny. Judging by translations that appeared both in the Netherlands and abroad, some of these pieces reached a readership beyond the academy. The highly critical response by Heinrich Ewald, “the pope of Göttingen,”Footnote 47 for example, almost immediately appeared in Dutch translation, while John William Colenso, the Bishop of Natal who in the mid-1860s was engaged in bitter controversy over his own contributions to biblical scholarship, kept an English-language audience informed with a translation of Henricus Oort's brochure De dienst der Baälim in Israël (The Worship of Baalim in Israel) (1864).Footnote 48 The most widely discussed response, in the Netherlands as well as abroad, was a long review by Karl Heinrich Graf, the German Old Testament scholar, who issued the devastating judgment that Dozy's research, “carried out with so much acuteness and learning,” had a scholarly worth of “nothing, absolutely nothing.”Footnote 49 Both the German original and the Dutch translation of this review were frequently quoted.Footnote 50
At first sight, the debate over De Israëlieten te Mekka seemed to develop more or less along confessional lines. Thus words of appreciation and admiration came primarily from the liberal side; that is to say, from authors who expected biblical scholars to treat the Old and New Testaments in the same way that an ancient philologist would treat the Iliad or the Odyssey: with historical questions, philological methods, and a sound amount of skepticism vis-à-vis everything resembling myth or legend. It was no accident that many of these sympathizers had been trained or were employed at Leiden's theological faculty. Even if these authors had not necessarily been accustomed to scholarly iconoclasm during their Leiden student years, they had all appropriated, in smaller or larger degrees, an ethos in which candid questions and bold hypotheses did not count as bad things per se. Apart from that, one suspects that the appreciation that these Leiden scholars and alumni expressed for Dozy and his work reflected their personal acquaintance with the orientalist.Footnote 51
Criticism, by contrast, came primarily from Calvinists in the Netherlands Reformed Church as well as from orthodox Jews in both the Dutch- and German-language realms. The Reformed pastor H. A. Leenmans, for example, translated Graf's critical review into Dutch in order to contribute, in his own words, to a battle against “a falsely named scholarship” (eene valschelijk genaamde wetenschap) that did not shrink from laying violent hands on God's holy Word.Footnote 52 The revivalist magazine De Heraut also recommended this review, because Graf's judgment nicely illustrated “how men of scholarship [wetenschap] in Germany treat the sort of products that are adored in this country with frantic applause.”Footnote 53 Lambertus Tinholt, a Reformed pastor in Haarlemmermeer, even tried to produce a reductio ad absurdum of Dozy's critical method with a humorous parody that exposed Charles V as a fictional character and suggested a new dating for the entire Greek and Roman literary canon, which Erasmus was said to have fabricated on the basis of Aztec sources—complete with turns of phrases that seemed to have walked right out of Dozy's book (“These assertions are strange, but I will demonstrate that they are not unfounded”).Footnote 54 As Ran HaCohen has pointed out, the praise and blame of German Jewish reviewers also showed a clear correlation to their position in the spectrum between orthodoxy and Reformjudentum.Footnote 55
This confessional topography, however, offers only a partial explanation of the variety of responses that Dozy's book elicited. Despite their common liberal agenda, theologians such as Kuenen, Oort, J. P. N. Land, and J. C. Matthes judged De Israëlieten te Mekka very differently. This divergence was not only caused by philological differences of insight (how plausible was it to read the Hebrew baalath-beer as baal-habeer?). At least as decisive were different assessments of the virtues that scholars were supposed to display in their work. How important, for instance, was the boldness that Dozy had exhibited by proposing, in Kuenen's words, “a complete revolution in the field of Old Testament studies”?Footnote 56 And how did this frankness relate to the accuracy and reliability required by the philological ethos?
DOZY’S VIRTUES
Although Dozy's critics had many grounds for disagreeing with each other, they shared at least one conviction: Dozy's argument was “very ingenious.”Footnote 57 Friends and foes alike praised Dozy's “shrewdness” (scherpzinnigheid in Dutch or Scharfsinn in German)—the first of three virtues that were frequently referred to in the debate.Footnote 58 No matter how they evaluated Dozy's revisionist dating of the Pentateuch or his etymology of “Abraham” and “Sarah,” almost all participants in the debate agreed that the author had a “sharp eye” and that he excelled in “sagacity,” “sound criticism,” and “penetration.”Footnote 59 Philologically oriented historians often presented this virtue of shrewdness as a necessary condition for critical source examination: it was considered indispensable for disentangling layers of meaning in historical texts and for unraveling textual dependencies.Footnote 60 Although shrewdness could, of course, overstep its bounds—some scholars warned against the danger of excessive, “hair-splitting shrewdness,”Footnote 61 just as others worried that “criticism” could degenerate into “hyper-criticism”Footnote 62 —it was regarded as a key virtue, provided the right dose was maintained.
This applies to a lesser extent to a second quality that was ascribed to Dozy: the “talent for conjecture” (gave van combinatie) that allowed scholars to discern patterns in their source material and to make a story out of them.Footnote 63 Both Kuenen and Graf praised Dozy's “gift for conjecture” (Combinationsgabe) and “ability to conjure” (Combinationsfertigkeit)Footnote 64 —an ability that “organizes the data into fruit-bearing results,” as the German historian Ernst Bernheim would explain in his Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (1889).Footnote 65 Unlike shrewdness, which was primarily regarded as important for source criticism, this talent for conjecture was regarded as needed especially for what Bernheim called “interpretation” (Auffassung): the formulation of hypotheses and the making of causal inferences. Not everyone, however, was equally charmed by this aspect of historical scholarship. Influenced by the philological ethos that made its impact felt also on the German Altertumswissenschaften,Footnote 66 some held that “interpretation” was not possible before “criticism” had done its work. Hypotheses, moreover, required a “creative intuition” that was difficult to codify by methodological means and therefore sat relatively uncomfortably with a view of scholarship that put a premium on methodological control.Footnote 67 Praise for Dozy's “talent for conjecture” therefore amounted to taking a stance in debates over the nature and priorities of geisteswissenschaftliche research.
The joy with which Hendrik Pierson, a Reformed pastor in Heinenoord, welcomed De Israëlieten te Mekka provides a telling example of this. In Pierson's assessment, the priority that biblical scholars had long been assigning to “criticism” had led to an overabundance of negative results:
she made everything empty, barren, many a flower she had torn apart, many an illusion she had destroyed and even though we had to endorse that she eradicated foreign plants, which had been proven not to be at home in the garden, we did not receive anything in return and witnessed how everything was gradually turned into a wasteland.Footnote 68
Consequently, “our soul thirsts for positive results,” as Pierson wrote with an allusion to Psalm 42. Even if Dozy's hypotheses turned out not to be correct, it was a relief to see a senior scholar mustering the courage to draw firm lines through the ancient history of Israel.Footnote 69
Accordingly, a third virtue attributed to Dozy was “frankness” (vrijmoedigheid) or “boldness” (koenheid). Dozy's “bold hypothesis,” wrote Kuenen in 1870, six years after publication of De Israëlieten te Mekka, had provided a “salutary shock” to many in the fields of biblical and oriental studies and stimulated a greater amount of “frankness.”Footnote 70 In Kuenen's vocabulary, “frankness” could mean two things. On the one hand, it was the courage required for launching a hypothesis in the absence of indisputable proofs or logically compelling inferences.Footnote 71 On the other, it was the bravery to defy the power of religious traditionsFootnote 72 —a virtue that Kuenen appreciated not only in Dozy, but also in Colenso, who in spite of much opposition published one critical study of the Pentateuch after another.Footnote 73 Likewise, the Amsterdam philosopher and orientalist Jan Pieter Nicolaas Land characterized Dozy as a “stout-hearted” (stoute) scholar, who like a brave general “ventures a campaign deeply into a country of which he possesses only very general maps.”Footnote 74
Land realized that not every reader would classify this daredevilry as a virtue conducive to historical understanding. He therefore added that Dozy's deficiencies were nothing but “les défauts de ses qualités”: every achievement, after all, comes with a price.Footnote 75 This price, however, divided Dozy's critics, too. Each of the three virtues mentioned so far was contested, although on different grounds. In the Jewish Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad (New Israelite Weekly), the future Amsterdam chief rabbi Joseph Hirsch Dünner, for example, agreed that Dozy's criticism was ingenious. He added, however, that Dozy had not been critical enough, given that he had disregarded the “first requirements of true criticism,” namely a thorough knowledge of the Hebrew language.Footnote 76 Apparently, criticism could be practiced to different degrees, so that the question was not whether Dozy was critical, but to what extent he was so. Further, more did not always count as better. Kuenen, for instance, warned that “frankness” could easily turn to “recklessness.”Footnote 77 This shows that the Old Testament scholar was indebted to an Aristotelian understanding of virtue as a juste milieu between two vices—cowardice and recklessness in the case of frankness. In this line of thought, it was not sufficient to observe that Dozy displayed shrewdness, a talent for conjecture, and frankness or boldness. Decisive was rather the question whether he practiced these virtues to an extent that prevented them from degenerating into vices.
DOZY’S VICES
This brings us to the storm of criticism that De Israëlieten te Mekka elicited. Whereas scholarly praise was often formulated in terms of virtues, critics usually focused on vices. And whereas supporters frequently spoke in terms of “light” and “darkness”—about the dark origins of Islam, for instance, which Dozy's book supposedly helped clarifyFootnote 78 —opponents preferred to employ architectural metaphors. They called De Israëlieten te Mekka an assemblage of “groundless” or “unfounded” hypotheses, an edifice without proper foundations, or a vault resting on “such mutually supporting rib stones . . . the most profitable lesson one can draw from the book is how dangerous such edifices are.”Footnote 79 In Graf's wording,
Everyone else would regard the results that are presented here with great confidence as indisputably proven historical facts as a web of light-hearted hypotheses, daring and adventurous inferences and conjectures, and be surprised at the rashness with which the most far-reaching conclusions are often drawn from unproven assumptions . . . Everything floats in the air; nothing rests on a firm, scholarly smoothed ground; everywhere the lack of solid critical rules is manifested in a most strident manner.Footnote 80
As this diatribe illustrates, “rashness” (lichtvaardigheid) or “levity” (lichtzinnigheid) was the first vice that was held responsible for the fragility of Dozy's edifice. According to Ewald, Dozy's lack of serious study was evidenced by the “vast number of continuously new and continuously more far-reaching errors” to which the author treated his readers.Footnote 81 Especially Dozy's etymological inferences elicited fierce criticism. As Meijer Roest declared in the Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad: “These hypotheses rest on textual conjectures that teach us a Hebrew which would make an Isaiah's hair stand on end.”Footnote 82 To be sure, the point was not that Dozy made factual errors, although some Jewish critics were eager to point out that Dozy's command of the Hebrew language did not surpass that of a “Jewish school boy.”Footnote 83 The point was rather that the way for such errors was paved by what Ludwig Philippson called the “levity” of Dozy's working manners.Footnote 84
In this context, Dozy was also found guilty of other vices. Critics seeking to express a greater sense of indignation spoke about intellectual “audacity.” According to the Dutch Jewish critic Philip Elte, for example, it was an “insolence” (aanmatiging) and “impudence” (brutaliteit) to present far-reaching hypotheses without a proper awareness of complications and alternatives.Footnote 85 Others qualified Dozy's findings as “premature” (voorbarig), given that they ran ahead of more thorough and detailed study.Footnote 86 This accusation stemmed from the belief (briefly referred to above) that all relevant “facts” had to be established before a scholar could hazard an “interpretation.” As the Leiden historian Robert Fruin recommended in 1865, “Do not begin with the building before the material has been gathered and prepared.”Footnote 87
Finally, Dozy was accused of “prejudice” and “dogmatism,” because of his tendency to explain difficult passages in order to make them fit his purposes. Whoever translates gilgal as “round heap of stones,” wrote the Reformed pastor C. H. van Herwerden, does not do so on etymological grounds, but out of “love for his theory.”Footnote 88 Likewise, J. P. N. Land declared, “Captivated by the idea that Jahwist scribes had reworked the older history in their own manner, [Dozy] is often satisfied with particularly weak arguments as long as these contribute to portraying ancient Israel as thoroughly pagan.”Footnote 89 Accordingly, Henricus Oort, the future Leiden professor of theology, concluded that Dozy had succumbed to a classic temptation:
If one thinks one has found a track that yields surprising results, one is easily temped to follow that track, to put in the forefront whatever seems to prove its correctness, and to close the eye to everything that speaks against it. One quickly finds what one hopes to find; this leads many an acute man of learning astray.Footnote 90
As a matter of fact, not only Dozy, but also his crowd of enthusiastic followers, was accused of such dogmatism. As the Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad declared in a biting comment on the debate,
Professor Dozy writes “The Israelites in Mecca” and all liberal theologians, headed by Prof. De Goeje, look on amazed and struck dumb by those heavenly revelations from Sinai, no at Leiden. They are inexhaustible in their cheers, they dance and shout with joy like the Egyptians when Apis honors them with a visit. Kuenen writes “The Religion of the Israelites” [in the same series, The Most Important Religions, in which Dozy's Het islamisme had appeared] and the entire choir of liberal theologians sings Hallelujah, yea is seized with convulsion caused by joy. So it is hardly possible for our pastors not to vow on the oracles of the great masters who, for the benefit of their loyal, credulous disciples, are busily brewing brand new revelations.Footnote 91
Dozy for his part complained about the vices of his critics. In correspondence with his publisher, he accused the Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider of “dishonesty” (oneerlijkheid) in summarizing his arguments,Footnote 92 and Meijer Roest of systematically “distorting” his position and wrenching words from their context—abuses that he attributed to “helpless anger” (magtelooze woede) and “theological hatred.”Footnote 93 In Dozy's view, Ewald also collected vices by the dozen by taking “the celebrity of any opinion not emanating from himself” as a “sufficient reason for condemning and contradicting it.”Footnote 94 So, at first sight, it seems as if Dozy and his critics all proceeded from the assumption that scholarship would flourish as long as virtues were practiced and vices avoided.
CONSTELLATIONS OF VIRTUES
Crucial, however, was that unanimity about the relative importance of these virtues and vices did not exist. We already noted that “frankness” was considered a virtue only as long as it was practiced to a right extent. This explains why Graf could condemn excessive “stout-heartedness” as “adventurousness”Footnote 95 and why Kuenen did not complain about Dozy's method as such, but rather about its exaggeration: “So between Dozy and myself, only a difference as between more and less exists.”Footnote 96 What mattered, therefore, was a right dose of frankness. But what counted as such a proper dose? Whereas some believed that the Leiden orientalist was guilty of “pretentious” and “insolent” conduct, others appreciated his “bold” and “daring” ideas.
This divergence, in turn, was related to the degree to which the critics saw Dozy's virtues as being kept in balance by other virtues. If shrewdness is not checked by accuracy, wrote Graf, an etymologist can “make anything out of everything.” And if the “sense of detection” that comes with well-developed shrewdness is not to deteriorate into phantasy, it has to be restrained by methodical “rules and laws.”Footnote 97 In a similar vein, Philippson sighed,
For a long time, experience has taught that learning and shrewdness are not sufficient for practicing true criticism, but that it also takes a dose of common sense. One knows what kind of absurdities have been put forward these days by very learned and shrewd critics, because they were just learned and shrewd, but did not possess sufficient common sense to set a limit to their critical nonsense.Footnote 98
In this view, then, historical research required constellations of virtues; that is, well-balanced combinations of, say, shrewdness and reliability, or frankness and skepticism vis-à-vis adventurousness. Scholars were, in other words, not supposed to practice single virtues at the expense of others. This has an important implication for the study of virtue language in nineteenth-century scholarship. If relations between virtues were as important as the passages just quoted suggest, then a key element of this virtue discourse is ignored as long as historical epistemologists focus just on individual virtues.
There are two further reasons why questions like “did Dozy possess a talent for conjecture?” and “what did accuracy mean in the 1860s?” are misleading in their simplicity. One is that several participants in the debate believed in scholarly divisions of labor and, consequently, in differentiated requirements for individual scholars. Pierson, for example, declared with an allusion to Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (12:4) that there are “diversities of spirits”: “it is another that criticizes and another that makes conjectures. The special intellectual gifts of the shrewd critic [den scherpzinnigen beoordelaar] are not easy to reconcile with the ability to conjure [het vermogen om te combineren] that is the first requirement for forming hypotheses.”Footnote 99 Following this line of reasoning, Dozy could allow himself one-sidedness in order to correct the one-sidedness of others. In a debate that tended to get bogged down in details, an overdose of frankness was, in Pierson's view, less inappropriate than in a debate that badly needed cautious testing of wild hypotheses.
Varying on this argument, other reviewers mentioned the stimulus provided by Dozy's intervention. The German Jewish orientalist Gustav Weil, for example, expected that, despite or precisely because of its forced inferences and unlikely hypotheses, De Israëlieten te Mekka would give a major impetus to new research, “which will further scholarship.”Footnote 100 Matthes, too, stated that “this work stimulates one's thought and inspires new, serious research.”Footnote 101 Pierson even wondered what was wrong with periodical eruptions of shrewdness and creativity like Dozy’s. “As long as we do not value our phantasies as positive proofs and regard them tentatively as nothing more than experiments, I do not think there is any objection against making them public.”Footnote 102 Although this might have been said out of politeness, the words just quoted express a view of scholarship that assigned more worth to contributions that individuals make to ongoing scholarly conversations than to those individuals' own results. In so far as Weil, Matthes, and Pierson endorsed this view, they assigned less weight to an individual's ability to achieve a balance of virtues than to a balance achieved over time, by the collective efforts of the scholarly community.Footnote 103
In sum, then, the debate prompted by Dozy's book reveals no less than four reasons why virtues in nineteenth-century scholarly discourse cannot be studied in isolation from each other. The extent to which oriental and biblical scholars in the 1860s welcomed accuracy, shrewdness, and frankness depended on (1) the extent to which these virtues were practiced, (2) the extent to which they were kept in balance by other virtues, (3) the extent to which they were balanced by other scholars’ virtues, and (4) the extent to which it was expected that they would be balanced by future scholars’ work.
A DIVIDED HOUSE
The fact that all these variables figured in the debate prompted by De Israëlieten te Mekka does not, of course, imply that all participants assigned equal importance to them. We have observed that Dozy's critics did not agree on the criteria for measuring (1); that they differed on the relative importance of (2); and that, for authors such as Ewald and Philippson, (3) and (4) hardly played a role at all. In other words, Dozy's critics employed different standards of inquiry and, consequently, arrived at different judgments about the scholarly value of Dozy's book. While Land evaluated it as a scholarly contribution par excellence,Footnote 104 Ewald and Philippson concluded that De Israëlieten te Mekka had nothing whatsoever to do with “true scholarship.”Footnote 105 The French orientalist Gustave Dugat therefore hit the nail on the head: “This book is, according to some, the best and, according to others, the worst of all [Dozy] has written.”Footnote 106
As Ran HaCohen has shown, confessional divisions contribute much to explaining this divergence of views.Footnote 107 By and large, orthodox Jews were more skeptical of modern biblical criticism than were their liberal fellow believers, just as Calvinist voices in the controversy over De Israëlieten te Mekka were, with some exceptions, more dismissive of Dozy's methodology than were liberal ones. However, not all difference with regard to variables (1) to (4) can so easily be explained by reference to religious positions on a spectrum between orthodoxy and liberalism. Constellations of virtues also depended on methodological beliefs, two of which need to be signaled here in order to explain the mixed responses that Dozy drew even among scholars with broadly similar theological views.
One matter in dispute was the question whether biblical or oriental scholarship still lived up to its wissenschaftliche vocation if it left the realm of philological detail in order to engage in work of synthesis. As Sabine Mangold and others have shown, among German orientalists in the mid-nineteenth century the prestige of philological precision as advocated by Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer and his numerous pupils was such that their philological ethos came close to being identified with Wissenschaft as such.Footnote 108 This left little room for the more ambitious view expounded by Kuenen, among others, that narrative synthesis was the end of all scholarship—even though it might take a lifetime, or even generations, to prepare a proper, critical “foundation” for it.Footnote 109 The more, indeed, Dozy's critics identified philological precision with scholarship as such, the sharper was their verdict about “the witty, cheerful Dozy,” as the Swedish orientalist Carlo Landberg put it condescendingly in 1886.Footnote 110
In the years following the publication of De Israëlieten te Mekka, a second methodological fault line emerged among orientalists in Europe. While Dozy belonged to a generation that considered classical texts as their most important objects of study, during the 1880s this approach increasingly met with opposition from ethnographically oriented modes of study that paired texts to other kinds of source material and used these texts not as worthwhile in themselves, but as means for addressing non-philological questions. Dismissive of the philologische Kleinarbeit embodied by Fleischer and, especially, his students, a younger generation of orientalists, which included such future heavyweights as Ignác Goldziher and Martin Hartmann, deliberately focused on historical and anthropological questions, which required more than the philological methods that had dominated orientalism in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 111 Unsurprisingly, such protests against the philological ethos of the Fleischer school emerged not only in Europe. Ottoman scholars, too, complained about European professors who pretended to be specialists in Arabic without ever having taken the trouble of leaving their study or library. From Beirut, for example, Ibrahim al-Yaziji made this judgment about Dozy:
In spite of all research proficiency, in spite of the high ambitions, in spite of all patience in observing and writing, the man lacked the best means for understanding the Arabic language, the classical and the modern alike, because, to our knowledge, he has never traveled to one of the Arabic-speaking countries, such as Egypt or Syria, and conversed orally with only few Arabs, but learned the language solely from books, with help of people among his fellow-countrymen whom are called orientalists.Footnote 112
Near the time of Dozy's death, similar criticisms came to be heard at Leiden. In 1880, De Goeje's most talented pupil, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, did not devote his doctoral dissertation to old Arabic texts, but to the still-existing “Meccan festival.” Moreover, among the sources Snouck consulted for this study were such unconventional ones as travelogues of recent Western visitors to Mecca.Footnote 113 A few years later, in 1884, Snouck would even undertake an expedition to Mecca in order to see the center of Islam with his own eyes. With such “fieldwork,” usually on behalf of, and/or with financial means provided by, the Dutch colonial administration, Snouck embarked on a new type of research. Some polite words about his Doktorgroßvater notwithstanding, Snouck's scholarship of the 1880s displayed very little affinity with Dozy's work in the 1860s. Not only Dozy's “speculation,” but also his philological “groundwork” was called into question.Footnote 114
If methodological fault lines, apart from confessional dividing lines, help explain the different views that Dozy's critics adopted vis-à-vis variables (1) to (4) identified above, can the same be said about their academic affiliations, or the lack thereof? Nineteenth-century orientalism was, after all, a field in which academics found themselves accompanied by what Lawrence Conrad calls “a broad range of explorers, adventurers, and travelers: missionaries, theologians, and preachers; eccentrics, frauds, and crackpots; social reformers, political advocates, soldiers, spies, and diplomatic representatives of various European regimes.”Footnote 115 Although not all of these intervened in the debate over De Israëlieten te Mekka, the company of Dozy's critics indeed included quite a few nonacademic scholars, such as rabbis, pastors, and journalists. It would be mistaken, however, to assume that those with university positions distinguished themselves en bloc from those without. One reason is that pastors could be future professors, or eager to present themselves as such, as illustrated by Henricus Oort (who obtained a chair after twelve years of pastoral service).Footnote 116 Another is that academic affiliation as such did not make a serious conversation partner: the Göttingen professor Heinrich Ewald was depicted in the blackest possible terms by several of his colleagues (“a self-deifying man [Selbstvergötterer] who is more or less ripe for the madhouse,” Fleischer judged in 1865).Footnote 117
Robert Irwin therefore rightly concludes that “there was hardly an Orientalist type or a common Orientalist discourse” in Europe, especially once the heyday of the Fleischer school was over.Footnote 118 In religious, methodological, and institutional respects, diversity seemed the norm. Perhaps this makes it all the more significant that none of Dozy's critics judged De Israëlieten te Mekka by the standard of a single virtue, but weighed the author's virtues and vices, even while putting forward different catalogues of virtue. If even Orientalists of the most varied stripe agreed that constellations of virtues mattered more than accuracy or shrewdness as such, should this insight not be taken to heart by historical epistemologists working on virtues and vices in nineteenth-century scholarly discourse?
CONCLUSION
My primary purpose in examining the reception history of De Israëlieten te Mekka has not been to develop new insight into mid-nineteenth-century orientalism. Instead, I have examined the controversy surrounding Dozy's book in order to raise a methodological issue regarding the study of what Lorraine Daston calls “the history of categories that structure our thought.”Footnote 119 Although it is widely recognized that these categories include virtues and vices, historical epistemologists and intellectual historians more generally have studied these virtues and vices almost exclusively on an individual basis, without sufficiently recognizing that the meaning and significance of such virtues and vices in actual scholarly practice depended to no small degree on their relation to other competing, complementary, and/or overlapping virtues and vices. More specifically, the 1864 controversy analyzed in this article suggests that what qualified as virtues in the context of mid-nineteenth-century biblical and oriental studies depended on (1) the extent to which shrewdness, frankness, and so forth were practiced; (2) the extent to which these virtues were kept in balance by other virtues; (3) the extent to which they were balanced by other scholars’ virtues; and (4) the extent to which it was expected that they would be balanced by the work of future scholars. Even though some orientalists, such as Ewald, rejected variables (3) and (4), the fact that they deemed it irrelevant to judge Dozy's work in the light of other scholars’ contributions reveals that they had taken a stance on these issues with implications for what they recognized as proper, “virtuous” scholarly conduct.
Second, the controversy examined in this article reveals that orientalists and biblical scholars in the 1860s subscribed to different catalogues of virtues and, consequently, failed to reach agreement on standards of “virtuous” scholarly conduct. I have argued that this disagreement did not merely exist between “professionals” and “amateurs,” or between scholars in and outside the academy, but within the worlds of biblical and oriental studies themselves. This divergence increased, moreover, when in the 1880s a younger generation of orientalists began to rebel against the philological inheritance of the Fleischer school. This implies that constellations of virtues, as I have called them, were fragile in at least two respects. Not only were scholars supposed to keep a delicate balance between a number of different virtues, but also the equilibrium itself was unstable, given that the assumptions defining what constituted a constellation of virtues were subject to change.
In order to give such constellations of virtues the attention they deserve, historical epistemology as currently practiced needs more than just expansion of its focus on individual virtues. It also needs to supplement the study of ideals of virtue such as are articulated in programmatic texts (inaugural addresses) and codifying manuals (educational textbooks) with detailed examination of how virtues and vices actually functioned in the context of scholarly debates, controversies, and polemics. For the relative significance of “impartiality” or “shrewdness” was nowhere as apparent as when catalogues of virtues and vices clashed. What noble ideals of virtue were worth in day-to-day scholarly practice became nowhere as clear as when they were challenged by competing ideals.Footnote 120 So if historical epistemologists or intellectual historians more generally want to understand how and to what extent virtues and vices “structured” scholarly research and “patterned” scholarly discourse, these virtues and vices are best studied in such concrete historical settings as a journal's book review section or a scholarly debate on the origins of Islam.
