This study traces the prolonged efforts of scholar Abraham Shalom Yahuda to recover his personal library, manuscripts, antiquities, and study materials from Berlin after his departure in 1913. Yahuda, a British national teaching at the Lehranstalt (Hochschule) für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, left for Madrid on a lecture invitation and never returned, as World War I broke out and he was classified as an enemy alien. His property—books, manuscripts received from his brother in Cairo, and Egyptological research notes—remained stored at the Lehranstalt's library and attic. During the war, Yahuda mobilized an extraordinary diplomatic network including British, French, and Spanish ambassadors to retrieve his scientific materials from the Spanish Embassy in Berlin via Switzerland. After the war, his former colleague Ismar Elbogen assisted him but faced severe obstacles including export bans, customs regulations, and high export levies on books and manuscripts leaving Germany. The Lehranstalt's caretaker Josef Hirsch managed the physical storage, cataloguing, and eventual dispatch of the boxes between 1923 and 1931. The paper documents how portions of the collection were gradually retrieved—some shipped to Madrid in 1915, others during the 1920s—while the final seventeen boxes were dispatched to London only on 29 October 1930. It further notes that Yahuda's later account to collector Alfred Chester Beatty overstated the disorder of his materials and understated how much had already been recovered. The study draws on four categories of primary sources: Yahuda's German-language diary, correspondence with Elbogen, letters with caretaker Hirsch, and diplomatic correspondence in English and French. Overall, the paper illuminates the intersection of wartime displacement, scholarly property rights, bureaucratic obstruction, and the personal anxieties of an academic fearing intellectual theft of his unpublished discoveries.

Over the past decade or two, the formation, provenance, and history of manuscript collections around the world has become a focus of scholarly attention. This trend has prompted numerous studies of the Jerusalem-born cosmopolitan Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877–1951), arguably the most important seller of Islamic manuscripts to Western collectors and libraries during the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. One area that has not been studied is Yahuda's assistants, whom he employed over the years to write descriptions of the manuscripts in his possession. No attempt has been made to identify the individuals who worked for Yahuda at different times or to distinguish between the various languages (Arabic, German, English, French) and hands in which the extant catalog slips were written. It appears that Yahuda employed a number of Egyptian and German scholars over the years, some of whom worked for him longer than others. Among them were Hans Kindermann (1902–1979) and Hans Ludwig Gottschalk (1904–1981). The surviving evidence of their respective work for Yahuda is discussed in this study, as is the unsuccessful attempt of Hedwig Klein (1911–1942) to enter into Yahuda’s service in 1938.

An undated letter by Abraham Shalom Yahuda to Robert Garrett has long resisted precise dating. A fresh look at Yahuda’s correspondence with Enno Littmann now allows us to place it firmly in the years 1904–1906.

This study examines the role of Muḥammad Amīn al-Khānjī (1865–1938) in the early twentieth-century trade in Arabic and Islamic manuscripts, drawing on previously unstudied documentary materials preserved in the Abraham Shalom Yahuda Archive at the National Library of Israel. It takes as its focal point the 1913 transaction in which Isaac Benjamin Yahuda (1863–1941) sold seventy Arabic codices to the Royal Library in Berlin through the mediation of his brother, Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877–1951). While the institutional records of the Royal Library present the acquisition as a straightforward sale by Abraham Shalom Yahuda, the descriptive slips written in Isaac Benjamin Yahuda’s hand reveal a far more complex structure, documenting a network of local dealers, intermediaries, and sources of supply within Cairo’s manuscript market. The slips exhibit a consistent organizational structure, recording bibliographical, codicological, and commercial data at once — purchase prices, provenance, dates of dispatch, and references to standard bibliographical tools such as Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur and, occasionally, Ḥājjī Khalīfa’s Kashf al-ẓunūn. Among the figures documented in them, al-Khānjī occupies a distinctive position. Nineteen of the seventy codices were purchased from him — 27 per cent of the items but 57 per cent of the recorded outlay — and unlike any other dealer in Isaac Benjamin Yahuda’s network he is named as the source of bibliographical description, of codicological observation, of judgments on script and on rarity, and of assessments of the market value of individual copies, including for codices he had not himself sold. By reading these acquisition-stage documents against the administrative records of the Berlin library and the correspondence between the Yahuda brothers, this study argues that al-Khānjī should be understood not merely as a supplier but as an intermediary actor who participated in producing the preliminary knowledge that accompanied manuscripts as they moved from local markets to European institutional collections. His disappearance from the final cataloguing record reflects not the marginality of his contribution but the reductive conventions of institutional documentation.

On 25 January 1930, the Cairene book dealer and publisher Muḥammad Amīn al-Khānjī (1865–1938) set out from Cairo on his journey to Iraq, via Haifa and Beirut, arriving in Baghdad on 1 February 1930. The purpose of the trip was to purchase books and manuscripts, most of which would eventually be sold to Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877–1951), al-Khānjī’s principal client during those years. Al-Khānjī kept a notebook, including a detailed account of his trip until August 1930, his excursions to Najaf, Karbala, al-Hilla, Mosul, Kirkuk etc., his expenses for books and manuscripts, food (incl. coffee and tobacco) and accommodation, postal services (parcels, letters, telegrams), and the sums he paid for the various merchandise and products. Most important perhaps, he records the titles of manuscripts and printed books he purchased from his various interlocutors, library owners and brokers (and occasionally their respective sources), thus adding another layer to the study of the provenance of manuscripts that later on reached mostly Western libraries through Yahuda. The notebook is part of the Maktabat al-Khānjī Archive that has recently been purchased by a consortium of North American academic institutions and is now kept at the American University of Cairo. During his sojourn in Najaf in April 1930, al-Khānjī records his “acquisitions” from two descendants of the renowned scholar Jaʿfar b. Khaḍir b. Yaḥyā al-Janāḥī al-Ḥillī al-Najafī “Kāshif al-Ghiṭāʾ” (1743–1812), namely Muḥammad al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī b. Muḥammad Riḍā b. Mūsā b. Jaʿfar Kāshif al-Ghiṭāʾ (1877–1954) and his cousin Muḥammad Riḍā b. Hādī b. ʿAbbās b. ʿAlī b. Jaʿfar Kāshif al-Ghiṭāʾ (1887/88–1946/47). Their transactions with al-Khānjī are the focus of the present essay. As will be seen, in some cases at least, it turns out that al-Khānjī did not “purchase” the manuscripts in question ...

This book explores the lives and contributions of prominent scholars in Oriental studies during the early 20th century, many of whom faced profound challenges due to the rise of Nazism. Through detailed chapters, it examines figures like Friedrich Kern, Eugen Mittwoch, and Abraham Shalom Yahuda, highlighting their groundbreaking research, personal struggles, and the impact of their forced migrations. The narrative also delves into the transformation of Islamic studies, the loss of German leadership in the field, and the internationalization of scholarship. A poignant reminder of resilience, this work sheds light on the enduring legacy of these scholars in shaping modern Oriental studies.

Alfred Wiener (1885–1964) is best known as the founding director of the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. Less well known is that he studied with the renowned Orientalist Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877–1951) during the latter’s tenure at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Entirely unknown until now is that from October 1907 until May 1909, Wiener worked for close to two years in Cairo as an assistant to Abraham Shalom’s brother, the book dealer Isaac Benjamin Yahuda (1863–1941). It was largely thanks to Wiener’s efforts that Isaac Benjamin began advertising his services among potential clients more systematically, a practice the book dealer himself detested. This hitherto unexplored chapter of Wiener’s early career can be reconstructed from his correspondence with Abraham Shalom Yahuda, who was himself instrumental in promoting his brother’s book trade. Beyond shedding light on Wiener’s role in the Yahuda firm, the correspondence also illuminates how Abraham Shalom and Isaac Benjamin divided responsibilities, and how sharply they disagreed about the way the business should be run.

That two scholars—al-Qabbānī in Cairo and Yahuda in Strasbourg and then Berlin—were simultaneously preparing editions of the same text on the basis of the same single manuscript, neither aware of the other’s labors, vividly encapsulates the challenges that beset the recovery and publication of rare Arabic texts at the turn of the twentieth century. It also throws into relief the crucial, if largely invisible, role played by intermediary figures such as Aḥmad Zakī and Ḥāmid Wālī, whose mediation between European repositories and Middle Eastern editors made such ventures possible in the first place.