Welcome to Albert - The Digital Repository of the IAS
Albert is a digital repository for scholarly work created by faculty and emeriti. By offering a central location for depositing research or other scholarly work (including datasets, working papers, pre-publication scholarship, and published papers), the digital repository makes research available to a wider audience, helps ensure its long-term preservation, and can be used to fulfill grant-funded mandates.
Recent Additions
- One Century of “Oriental” and Semitic Studies, 1830 through 1933: Scholarly Networks, Trajectories and Concepts (S.T. Lee Conference and Lecture, 11-12 December 2025)(2025-12-11)In the course of the long nineteenth century, “Oriental studies”—an umbrella term for the scholarly exploration of Middle Eastern and Semitic languages and cultures writ large, from antiquity up to the contemporary period—evolved as an academic discipline in its own right. Over this period, it gained its independence from theology and its constraints, thus shifting its focus from Old Testament studies and pertinent languages towards other fields and philologies. This process resulted in the establishment of specifically designated university chairs and seminars all over Germany, Central Europe, and beyond, as well as the foundation of professional associations, such as the American Oriental Society in the United States (1842), or the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft in Germany (1845), and a growing number of specialized publication venues. Only a few scholars involved in this process were engaged in the study of Christianity and the history of Christian communities in the Near and Middle East, while the focus shifted gradually towards Islamic civilization and history, eventually leading to the new independent field of Islamic studies. While these developments primarily involved scholars who identified as Christians, Jewish scholars developed around the same time a critical historical/philological approach towards the Jewish literary tradition and its history, an approach that became known as Wissenschaft des Judentums. The protagonists of the Wissenschaft des Judentums strove to have Jewish studies established within the academic structures of mainstream Christian society, a goal that had only limited success. Their contribution to Orientalism and the gradually evolving field of Islamic studies was nonetheless significant. The aim of the conference is to look closely into the period between the mid-nineteenth century and the end of the Weimar period through selected case studies within the context outlined above that are based on hitherto unexplored archival materials and correspondences. These may focus, for example, on pertinent scholars and their trajectories, newly evolving concepts and methodological approaches, or national and/or international networks.
42 - "Wie die Dinge liegen, bin ich nicht imstande, mir selbst zu helfen": A Tribute to the Hungarian-German Jewish Arabist Hedwig Klein (1911–1942)(2024)The tragic case of the Hungarian-German Jewish Arabist Hedwig Klein (1911-1942) is well known—formerly a student of Islamica and Semitica at Hamburg with Rudolf Strothmann (1870-1960), Arthur Schaade (1883-1952) and and Walter Windfuhr (1878-1970) as her principal teachers, Hedwig Klein passed her final doctoral exam in December 1937. Both the dissertation and the oral exam were marked with the highest possible grade (“ausgezeichnet”). When she handed in the revised dissertation in 1938, she was refused the imprimatur and hence the doctoral degree. With the support of her former teachers and of other friends, Klein searched during 1937 and 1938 for ways to leave Germany. An opportunity to emigrate to India opened up during the summer of 1939 but eventually failed. Klein only made it to Antwerpen from where she had to return to Hamburg. For a few months (1941/42), Klein worked for the Harrassowitz project of a Neu-arabisches Wörterbuch. On 11 July 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered. Thanks to Carl A. Rathjens’ (1887-1966) efforts after the war, Klein was eventually granted in 1947 her doctoral degree, posthumously. A first article about Hedwig Klein’s sad fate was published in 1991 by Peter Freimark, and in 2015 Stefan Buchen devoted an essay to her that was made accessible in German, English, and Arabic—it was the latter publication that was widely read and that prompted a veritable outpour of shorter essays and blogs. This study revisits the available archival material pertinent to Hedwig Klein from Basel, Göttingen, Halle, Hamburg, Jerusalem, Leiden, London, New Haven, Nürnberg, and elsewhere in an attempt to reconstruct her biography, and especially the events of the years 1937 through 1942. With respect to her scholarly trajectory, her contributions to Ibadi studies are investigated, as well as the early history of the Neu-arabisches Wörterbuch and Klein’s contribution to it. In the second part of the book, annotated editions of all relevant correspondences and documents will be provided.
98 3 - The Visual Scribe: Tables and Diagrams in Middle Eastern Manuscripts Workshop(2025-04-10)“The Visual Scribe: Tables and Diagrams in Middle Eastern Manuscripts Workshop,” Institute for the History of Knowledge in the Ancient World at Freie Universität Berlin, April 10-11, 2025, convenors: Sonja Brentjes, George A. Kiraz, Mathieu Ossendrijver, Sabine Schmidtke
38 57 - Andrew Alfoldi, 1895-1981(Institute for Advanced Study, 1982)Pamphlet honoring Andrew Alföldi which documents a memorial held on October 16, 1981. The pamphlet includes a memoirs by J. F. Gilliam, Frank P. Kolb, and Pierre Bastien, as well as a bibliography of Alföldi by Geza Alföldy, Elisabeth Alföoldi-Rosenbaum, and J. F. Gilliam
8 42
Most Viewed
- Albert Einstein, Yukawa, Wheeler, and Bhaba(The Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA, 1954)
3710 4688 - Institute for Advanced Study Board of Trustees: Certificate of Incorporation and By-Laws(Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA, 1977)
2892 118 - المرجع في تاريخ علم الكلام(Namaa Center for Research and Studies, 2018)المرجع في تاريخ علم الكلام» هو عمل ضخم أصدرته جامعة أكسفورد، تَوفَّرَ على كتابته سبعة وثلاثون باحثًا، مع مقدمة مسهَبة بقلم زابينه شميتكه، التي قامت بتحريره. وقد كان الطابَعُ المرجعيُّ لهذا الكتاب هو الباعثَ لـ«مركز نماء للدراسات والبحوث» على نقله إلى العربية عبر ترجمة أنجزها الأكاديمي المعروف أسامة شفيع السيد، وحصل لقاءها على جائزة حمد للترجمة. يستقصي هذا الكتاب آخرَ ما انتهى إليه البحث العلمي الحديث في تطور علم الكلام، مقترحًا اتجاهات بحثية جديدة، كما يتضمن تأريخًا للمذاهب الكلامية المختلفة من قدرية، وجهمية، ومعتزلة، وأشعرية، وماتُريدية، وشيعة، وإباضية، وكرَّامية، وغيرها. وفي الكتاب أيضًا طائفةٌ من الدراسات التي تعالج قضايا كلامية معينة، كنظرية الأحوال لأبي هاشم الجُبَّائي، وفكرة الاقتران في نظرية السببية. ولم يقتصر الكتاب على تاريخ علم الكلام دون حاضره، بل قام برصد الاتجاهات الحديثة الرئيسة، ذات النزعة التجديدية، التي عرفت في العموم بـ«الكلام الجديد
2374 1401 - Prince Baysunghur, Before & After: Timurid Manuscripts in Context(2021)The inaugural symposium of the Persian Manuscripts Association, celebrates the 600th anniversary of the first manuscript produced at the royal library-atelier of the Timurid Prince Baysunghur (1399-1433) in Herat. Prince Baysunghur, Before and After: Timurid Manuscripts in Context, is a two-day international symposium, held on 5-6 November 2021, and hosted by the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Baysunghur’s patronage of manuscript production is significant for exhibiting a high artistic refinement in the arts of the book, but the patron was also actively involved in the scholarly aspect of the works to be reproduced. He commanded editions and the preservation of texts in a variety of fields, notably history, ethics and literature. This symposium brings together scholars and international experts in a number of disciplines to explore the connoisseurship and patronage undertaken by the prince, the aesthetic of his atelier’s output, their antecedents in the Jalayirid period, and the production of literary editions in his library.
2236 1618 - International Conference: Islamic and Jewish Studies around the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Ignaz Goldziher and his Correspondents(2020)When Ignaz Goldziher passed away on November 13, 1921, he left behind a corpus of scientific correspondence of over 13,000 letters from about 1,650 persons, in ten languages. His Nachlass, including the letters as well as his hand-written notes and works, was bequeathed to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The corpus, which is freely accessible in its entirety in digital form (https://konyvtar.mta.hu/index_en.php?name=v_3_2_1_goldziher and https://amirmideast.blogspot.com/2018/06/ignaz-goldziher-correspondence-archive.html?m=1) constitutes the single most important source informing about the history of Arabic, Jewish, and Islamic studies and cognate fields during Goldziher‘s time. Selected portions of the Goldziher correspondence are available in critical editions, while other portions have been consulted for studies on the history of the field, but the bulk of the material has as yet remained untapped. The conference aims to focus on the correspondence between Ignaz Goldziher and colleagues from different countries preserved in the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, addressing aspects of the history of the discipline as seen through the letters. Papers examining specific aspects of Goldziher’s contributions to Islamic and Jewish studies from a wider history of science point of view are also welcome.
1906 4060