In a thoughtful and incisive Preface which he contributed to the reissue in 2012 of Paul Wittek's The Rise of the Ottoman Empire, Evrim Binbaş observed that “[w]e are still at the beginning of understanding Wittek's oeuvre. There are still many unanswered questions, especially relating to his London years [1948–61]”.Footnote ¹ There are also many unanswered questions relating to Wittek's Brussels years (1933/4–40) when, as Evrim Binbaş has cogently remarked, Wittek thought (as late as the mid-1960s, when he wrote his seminal article on ‘The Taking of Aydos Castle’) that in the 1930s he was “in a pit, dreaming about the Messiah, or the super-ghâzî”.Footnote ² Materials that will allow us to reconstruct Wittek's life and the history of his scholarly endeavours in those years, when the growing threat posed by the rise of Nazi Germany cast a deepening shadow over all of Europe, are not plentiful. There is no self-standing Wittek archive, and the historian must search for and collect materials wherever he may find them, scattered across disparate small deposits in the archival strata of the period. This task, which is one which has occupied me at various times, and in various places, during the past fifty years, occasionally brings with it the unalloyed pleasure of finding a new deposit which allows one to illuminate hitherto obscure aspects of Wittek's career.Footnote ³

Documents from Wittek's Brussels years are not exactly plentiful, particularly for the three years (three years exactly!) which bridge his delivery in the University of London, in May 1937, of the ‘course of three lectures’ on the ‘Rise of the Ottoman Empire’, and his flight from Brussels to England in the dark days of May 1940. During these years Wittek continued to work, teaching small groups of students at the Université Libre.Footnote ⁴ One of these was a young American graduate student by the name of Sydney Nettleton Fisher, who studied with Wittek for some months in 1938. Sydney Fisher, as the documents published here will show, was able to establish a close personal relationship with Wittek during his months in Brussels, and was later to play a part in heroic but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to bring Wittek, a refugee twice over, from England to America.

Sydney Fisher went on to enjoy a long and distinguished academic career in the United States. He died in 1987. Now, many years down the line, and recalling the events of eighty years ago and more, I have to express my gratitude and thanks to my old friend, colleague, and contemporary, Professor Alan Fisher, formerly of Michigan State University, for his kindness in presenting me recently with several valuable letters written by Wittek to Alan's father Sydney in these dark years of the late 1930s and subsequently, down to 1949, together with a number of associated and hitherto unknown documents.Footnote ⁵ Taken together, they show Wittek not as the remote and austere scholar of legend and anecdote, but in a more human light. This is demonstrated in the letters published here, both in Wittek's support of (and by) a young American scholar, and in his agonised reaction both to the growing Nazi threat to the peace of Europe (and to his own status as a political refugee in Belgium) and to the austerities and hardships of his situation in Brussels in the immediate postwar era.

1.

Paul Wittek to Sydney Fisher, Brussels, 2 January 1938. Cream paper, 21 x 27.5 cm. One page, holograph, signed. [Plate I]

Paul Wittek

16, r. Léon de Lantsheere

Bruxelles    January 2^nd, 1938

Dear Mr. Fisher

I am very pleased by your announcement that you have the intention to study with me from March 19 to June. There is no difficulty with formalities of inscription: you will follow my lectures and the seminary-exercises as my personal guest. The academic year is finishing here the 1st of June, but I am ready to work with you as long as you stay here. Your French will <//>Footnote ⁶ surely be sufficient – and in our private conversations, which will be of greater importance as the lectures, we can speak English or German or Turkish.

I am glad by the prospect to have such a well prepared young scholar as you are for some time with me for common work.

Do you know my friend Professor Arthur Salz who is teaching at your university? He is a most valuable scholar and a wonderful man.Footnote ⁷

If you meet him, please give him my best greetings.

Sincerely yours,

Paul Wittek

2.

Paul Wittek to Sydney Fisher, Brussels, January 5th, 1939. Cream laid paper 20.8 x 27.3 cm. Three pages, holograph, signed.

P. Wittek

73 av. E. Verhaeren

Bruxelles III.     January 5th, 1939

Dear Mr. Fisher,

It is really great time for me to answer your so kind letter of June! But first of all let me give you my warmest wishes for your marriage – may you be as happy as I have been with my late wife and as I am now in my second married life. The summer has been for me a very agitated time. First our moving and the organization of our new household, and then the congress which took all my time for two months. And after that the political events which absorbed all our feelings and thoughts and left us at last disgusted and without hope (“peace” of Munich!). Finally the terrible anxiety for my jewish friends in Germany whose situation is cruel, and our despairing attempts to help them to escape the Nazi-hell, occupied me entirely. I hope all this will assure me your pardon.

And now, dear Mr. Fisher, let me say that it was also for me a real pleasure and satisfaction to work with such a serious and zealous student as you have been, not to forget the human qualities I easily discovered in you. That you consider your stay in Brussels [f.1v] as having been useful and that you find such nice words for me as your teacher and friend, makes me glad. Many thanks for this.

I have read your dissertation with interest and even with profit; it is not as bad as you think – but naturally you will re-write it better after a deeper study of the sources. I hope you received the photograph of the table top; the piece is an impertinant falsification made in Italy, France or Switzerland in order to be sold in oriental bazars to travellers – the “inscriptions” have naturally no sense. I sent the photograph together with two offprints; unfortunately I cannot send a copy of my The Rise of the Ott. Emp. (= Royal Asiatic Society Monographs, vol. XXIII), having got aFootnote ⁸ very small number of it.

My situation here has become less agreeable as it was in summer. My Austrian passport has no more value and the Belgians refuse to give me a paper which would supply it. The constant growth of Hitler's power makes me wish to have a little ocean between me and my dear compatriot. Also I have no more students – one has, as you know, become my wife and the others have deserted. Etc. etc. You can well imagine how glad I was to get just at Xmas a telegram from Mr. Mortimer Graves,Footnote ⁹ inviting me to send [f.2r] to the American Association of Learned Societies my curriculum vitae and the list of my publications. It is a light from West just in the right moment, because in autumn my contract with Brussels comes to an end. I gave to Mr Graves your name for information about my qualities as teacher. Judge your-self if it is better to wait till asked or to write immediately to him by your own initiative.

I hope this last new [development?] will be regarded as a good one also by you. A success of this attempt would indeed bring us the possibility to continue working together and will doubtless stimulate the Turkish studies in U.S.A.

My wife and I wish you and Mrs. Fisher a very happy New Year. I hope to have soon good news from you and remain,

Sincerely yours,

Paul Wittek

Wittek's hoped-for rescue to America, in which Sydney Fisher was involved as an advocate in his cause, eventually came to nothing. At the beginning of 1941 there still appeared to be some hope of success. Significant in this regard is a letterFootnote ¹⁰ to Fisher dated 6 January 1941 from his namesake Edgar J. Fisher, Assistant Director of the Institute of International Education, which was based in New York. Sydney Fisher, who by this time was a member of the Department of History at Ohio State University (OSU), had taken time out to attend the December 1940 meeting of the American Historical Association in New York City. There he had clearly lobbied on Wittek's behalf. Edgar Fisher wrote in his follow up to Sydney's visit to New York—“[w]e … were very happy indeed that you could be with us even for such a brief time”—that

Edgar Fisher, adding that “[w]e hope so, and that he will arrive here safely”, also informed Sydney that he had written to Professor Anderson at Dartmouth College, and had mentioned Sydney in a letter to “another Eastern college” [unspecified, CH], where “there might be the possibility of an opening”.

Sydney Fisher had already been active on Wittek's behalf, not only in the months following his visit to New York in December 1940, but earlier in that year. Amongst Sydney Fisher's papers there is a letterFootnote ¹² from the Arabist and Islamist scholar H.A.R. Gibb, dated at Oxford, 2 August 1940, and sent to Fisher at an unknown address in America. It merits quotation in full:

Dear Mr Fisher,

I am writing this letter to you at the instance of Dr. Paul Wittek, who has reached England after a perilous flight from Brussels, in the course of which he was separated from his wife and children. It is probable that they have gone back to the home of his father-in-law, M. Frédéric De Jongh, 73 Avenue E. Verhaeren, Brussels III. He is desperately anxious to have the news conveyed to his wife that he is alive, well, and in good hands, and he asks me to give you this message, so that you may, if you think it advisable, cable it to her or to her father. It would perhaps be undesirable to menton in your communication—whether you cable or write—that Paul Wittek is in England, since this information might be used against them by the German authorities, unless you may possibly find some means to convey this through diplomatic channels.

I am,

Yours truly,

H. A. R. Gibb

A further informative letterFootnote ¹³ from Gibb to Fisher, written in May 1941, confirms the above testimony, and shows that Fisher was still in contact with Wittek: “Your letters arrived this afternoon”, he wrote, “and I have already sent them on to Dr. Wittek, to whom they will be very precious and welcome”. Wittek, after his release from internment on the Isle of Man, had stayed with Gibb in Oxford; however, some time before May 1941 he had left Oxford “to stay in the suburbs of London”. Gibb added that since his departure from Oxford Wittek had been unwell, but was gradually recovering: “[p]artly because of his illness partly because my visits to London are occupied with business engagements that rarely leave time for social meetings”, it was some time since Gibb had seen him—“[b]ut we correspond frequently, and in spite of his illness he seems to be cheerful”.

Gibb's view was that “[t]he question of his”—i.e., Wittek's—“passage is by no means settled yet, I understand”, adding that in the meantime Wittek was “continuing to recreate some of the scholarly materials which had to be left behind when he came over”. Gibb was sympathetic: “[I]t is not an easy task, especially in the absence of a specialized library, and with the uncertainties that surround him on all sides. But he has borne it all very gallantly and deserves to come through”.Footnote ¹⁴

In the end, however, the attempt to get Wittek to America foundered, little more than a year later, at the beginning of 1942. On 13 January that year Mortimer Graves wrote to Sydney Fisher to thank him for sending a reprint of his recent articleFootnote ¹⁵ on ‘Civil Strife in the Ottoman Empire’, which had appeared in the Journal of Modern History.Footnote ¹⁶ Graves was writing to admit defeat:

Thereafter, for several years, there was silence. Sydney Fisher saw war service; Paul Wittek remained for the duration of the war in England. But, eventually, the war ended. Fisher returned to Columbus, Ohio, and to academic life at OSU; Wittek returned to Brussels. A letter from Wittek to Fisher, dated 20 June 20 1946, sent from his father-in-law's address at 73, av. E. Verhaeren, is of considerable value for our knowledge of Wittek's life in the immediate post-war period:

3.

Paul Wittek to Professor Sydney N. Fisher, Brussels, June 20, 1946. 21.3 x 27.2 cm., thin, ‘onion-skin’ paper. One page, typewritten with Ms. corrections and holograph signature.

My dear Professor Fisher:

I am very much ashamed that this letter has not been written already many months ago. I had returned home in the end of August last and found my wife safely back from a German concentration camp, rescued by the Swiss Red Cross in the most critical moment in April 1945. I also found my three children in a good state of health, the eldest one already demobilized and back to his studies. Also my belongings, my books and papers were complete and untouched. All this was very good, overwhelmingly good – too strong a medicine for my body, heart, and mind worn down in the frightful years. I soon fell seriously ill, and the situation with which I met at Brussels was not at all encouraging. GrégoireFootnote ¹⁸ had not returned (he is still over thereFootnote ¹⁹) and PirenneFootnote ²⁰ was (and is) absorbed by politics—thus the very existence of our Institute was in question and for six months I was without job and income.

SusanFootnote ²¹ saved the situation by taking over a post as history teacher in a girl[s’] school, a few months only after her return from captivity. Fortunately she had quickly recovered, though later on she began to feel it difficult to stand the strain of her new activity. In January [1946]. first aid was given by the Rockefeller Foundation with a grant for the two years 1946–47, and in March the affairs of the Institute began to be settled and finally also my own position was arranged in a satisfactory way. Also my health has slowly but steadily improved since. I now dare hope that I shall definitely overcome what the war has done to me. I also begin to enjoy again my work which, however, is earnestly hampered by the lack of books. You know the appalling state of our libraries. But now also all what has been published in the last seven years in Turkey, Europe and U.S.A. is missing. I shall have at first to remedy to [sic] this.

I hope you will be able to send me your article on DjemFootnote ²² and all the other articles you may have published. Have you got my Turkish Reader, London, Percy Lund Humphries, 1945?Footnote ²³ The publischer [sic] promised to send you a copy. Unfortunately I have no copy anymore of my article The Turkish documents in Hakluyt's Voyages, in Bull. of the Institute of Historical Research, Vol. XIX, Nr 57 (Nov. 1942, issued in jan. 1944);Footnote ²⁴ I had got 6 copies only.

I hope you are back to academic life, after having so conscientiously and energetically contributed to your country's war effort. I therefore direct these lines to your old university trusting that they will be good enough to forward them. I also hope that Mrs. Fisher is well and that you both are enjoying the thriving growth and development of your two boys. Please let me have soon your news. I promise to be from now on a faithful correspondent. Once I know your right address I should be delighted to exchange regularly with you views on our work and projects and even on politics.

I once more remember all the important help you most kindly have given to me and to my wife during the war; I assure you again of our warmest gratitude. From us both to you and to your family all the best wishes and greetings.

Ever yours,

Paul Wittek

Professor Sydney N. Fisher

Department of History.

Ohio State University.

Columbus, Ohio.

Wittek was a perhaps less than faithful correspondent than he had hoped, although for very valid reasons, as this letter from him to Sydney Fisher, written more than two years later, would appear to demonstrate:

4.

Paul Wittek to ‘Professor Fisher’, Brussels, 15 September 1948. 14.8 x 19.7 cm. Poor quality, thin yellowish paper, torn from a pad. Two pages, holograph, signed.

My dear Professor Fisher,

You may be surprised to hear from me again, after this long period of silence. I just have discovered in my files your letter of October 1946 and it bears no sign that it has been answered. I am deeply ashamed. The lastFootnote ²⁵ two years had been especially tiring – it made itself increasingly felt how unsatisfactory in every respect my position here was and I had to try to find something acceptable elsewhere. The problem has now been given the best imaginable solution: in a few days I start as Professor of Turkish at the University of London. My address is from now on School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, London, W.C.1, or: 49, Princes Park Ave., London, N.W.11.Footnote ²⁶

This is not the right moment for a letter—I am awfully busy and a bit nervous. I can, however, not leave Brussels without having thanked you—late enough—for your kind letter, your article and all the correspondence which you so faithfully had kept for me during the war. What a help has your friendship been to me and to my family!

I read with the greatest interest what you wrote about your activities during the seven laborious years 1940–1946. You can be proud of your work and I hope the strain was not too much for you. Could you not get some leave so that you were able to [f.2] devote one year entirely to scientific work? London would offer you splendid working conditions and I should be only too glad to have you there and to give you every possible assistance. Of course, you would badly miss your family. As to me, I have to leave my family once more. My children are all university students by now, two have chosen the medical studies (which take here at least seven years) and the youngest studies classical philology. They want to stay here and my wife will stay with them until I shall have found in London a flat whereto we can move.Footnote ²⁷

There has just appeared Byzantion XVIII with my “Notes on the Ottoman tughra”.Footnote ²⁸ I send you the article as soon as I have received the offprints. I hope that also some other articles of mine will soon be printed. In London I shall have to write my contribution to La Monte's History of the Crusades: “The Ottoman state until the conquest of Egypt”.Footnote ²⁹ What has become [of] your book on the “foreign relations of Turkey, 1481–1512”? If it has appeared I shall certainly see it in London.Footnote ³⁰ 1946/47 I had here as studentFootnote ³¹ Mr. Lewis V. Thomas, who is now Assistant Professor at Princeton. He is a very gifted and extremely well prepared young scholar (he has spent some years in Turkey) and his book on Na‘ima can be expected to be a valuable achievement. I shall soon see the manuscript.Footnote ³²

Once more, dear friend, my sincerest thanks. To you and your family the very best wishes from us all.

Ever yours,

Paul Wittek

What appears for the time being to be the final surviving letter from Wittek to Sydney Fisher was written five months later, on 25 February 1949:

5.

Paul Wittek to ‘Dear Friend’, i.e. Sydney N. Fisher. [London], 25 February 1949. British Post-Office Air-letter form with sender's and recipient's addresses on verso. 20 x 24.5 cm. Bluish paper, with imprinted 6d. postage stamp. Postmarked ‘London W.C. 26 Feb. 1949’ and ‘Columbus, O, Mar. 3, 1949’ (letter forwarded to Daytona Beach, Fla.). One page, holograph, signed.

25 February 1949

Dear Friend,

Here just a few lines to thank you for your book “The foreign relations of Turkey 1481–1512”. It came yesterday and so I have given it only a first glance but I shall not fail to read it soon with all the care and attention it deserves. For this I have already noticed: it is the result of immense labours. And wherever I started reading I found it clear, sound and honest. Thus I can congratulate youFootnote ³³ already now, and I shall send more ‘substantial’ congratulations as soon as I have studied the book.

I also thank you very much for the kind words which you have said concerning my assistance in the preface and for the friendly dedication you have written into my copy. The short time of our common studies remains in my memory as a light spot – I dare hope that we shall meet again in a not too far future.

Once more thanks and congratulations and all the best wishes for you and your family.

Very sincerely yours,

Paul Wittek

P.S. I hope you have received my Notes sur la Tughra.Footnote ³⁴ In a few days I shall have to send you the off-print of an article about 3 old firmans concerning the Athos-monasteries.Footnote ³⁵