The Other Half of a Republic of Letters Locating, Reuniting, and Publishing the Scattered Letters of Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921): A Programmatic Statement

When Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921) died, he left to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences an extraordinary corpus of more than 13,500 letters from some 1,650 correspondents in eleven languages—but this represents only the incoming half of his scholarly conversation. The several thousand letters Goldziher himself wrote lie dispersed, uninventoried, across archives on at least four continents. This programmatic statement, by Kinga Dévényi and Sabine Schmidtke, revives an idea first floated by Hellmut Ritter in the 1920s and partly attempted by the Hungarian Academy in 1933: to reunite the two halves of Goldziher's correspondence. The authors survey Goldziher's foundational role in the making of Islamwissenschaft, describe the now-cataloged and digitized Budapest Nachlass, and argue that the outgoing letters yield qualitatively new insight wherever both sides survive. They map what is known to survive in Germany, Israel, Italy, Spain, Britain, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, France, Russia, and the Arab world. Finally, they propose an international infrastructure—led by the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences—to identify, document, reproduce, study, and publish these scattered letters, integrating them into the existing Budapest platform, and issue an open invitation to scholars and holding institutions to participate.