Historical Studies

This volume presents critical, annotated editions of three unpublished German travel accounts of Yemen under Imām Yaḥyā Ḥamīd al-Dīn (r. 1904–1948). The first is Hermann von Wissmann's account of the expedition he undertook in the winter of 1927/28 with the geographer Carl A. Rathjens and the teacher Frieda ("Friedel") Apitz—the journey, improvised after Saudi authorities refused the party access to the interior of the Ḥiǧāz, that opened the largely closed kingdom to German scholarship and occasioned, at the Imām's own initiative, the first archaeological excavation on Yemeni soil, at al-Ḥuqqa. The second and third are Rathjens's diaries of his return journeys of 1931 and of 1937, the latter made through Palestine and Egypt in the company of the Imām's Jewish commercial agent, Israel Isḥāq Ṣubayrī. Written for private recipients and never intended for publication, the accounts offer an unusually candid, day-by-day record of Ṣanʿāʾ and the Yemeni highlands between the wars: the court of Imām Yaḥyā and his sons, the rivalries of Italian, British, Soviet, and German interests, the Jewish community of Ṣanʿāʾ, the beginnings of archaeology, meteorology, and modern cartography in the country, and—through Apitz, who traveled disguised as a man yet enjoyed unique access to the world of Yemeni women—rooms no male traveler could enter. Since the archives of the Yemeni government for those years are mostly lost, these testimonies, edited here from the typescripts in the Carl Rathjens Nachlass at the SUB Hamburg and collated against von Wissmann's original letters in Tübingen, and accompanied by von Wissmann's sketches and hand-drawn map, constitute a primary source of the first order for the history of Yemen in the first half of the twentieth century. An introduction situates the three travelers and their sharply contrasting ways of seeing within the broader history of European travel to Yemen.

This Notice presents the first detailed description of Ms. Istanbul, Köprülü Library, Mehmed Âsım Bey 1 bis, a composite Christian-Arabic manuscript hitherto known only through a minimal catalogue entry. The codex consists of numerous fragmentary units copied by different hands and brought together without a codicological plan. Its contents include multiple independent Arabic New Testament witnesses—three distinct Gospel manuscripts, fragments of Acts, Pauline Epistles, and the Minor General Epistles, in addition to a lectionary for the fourth week of Len—as well as Christian Arabic doctrinal, legal, and canonical texts, including a previously unknown textual witness to Aḥkām al-ʿAtīqa, Kitāb al-Hudā, and a canon law collection attributed to Michael of Damietta. A detailed analysis of the script, layout, chapter division systems, marginalia, and paratextual features demonstrates that the volume is an ad hoc aggregation rather than a deliberate miscellany. All identifiable Gospel witnesses belong to the Arabic Vulgate tradition (family K), though they preserve divergent chaptering systems and paratextual practices. This Notice further reconstructs the manuscript’s modern provenance through waqf stamps and ownership marks, situating its binding in the first half of the eighteenth century and its later transmission into the Köprülü Library via Mehmed Âsım Bey. Beyond its textual contents, the manuscript offers important evidence for the circulation, fragmentation, and reassembly of Christian Arabic books in the Ottoman period and for the precarious survival of Christian Arabic materials within Islamic library collections.

The following conversation focuses on Scholar of Islam, Victim of the Holocaust: The Tragic Story of Hedwig Klein (De Gruyter, 2026), a new book by Sabine Schmidtke, Professor of Near Eastern and Islamic Studies in the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Historical Studies. The book narrates the fascinating, powerful, and yet immensely tragic story of the life and career of Hedwig Klein, an exceptionally talented and potentially path-paving German Jewish scholar of Islam with a focus on Ibāḍī knowledge traditions. Klein was killed during the Holocaust in 1942 at the age of thirty-one. In this book, Schmidtke performs three tasks simultaneously: providing an intimate social and intellectual history of German Orientalism and Islamic Studies at the cusp of and during Nazi Germany, presenting a finely grained analysis of Klein’s life and her intellectual contributions to Islamic Studies, and correcting some popular and dominant misconceptions about Klein’s role in the writing and compilation of the equally well-known and controversial scholar Hans Wehr’s widely used Arabic dictionary. In many ways, the book brings together two prominent threads of Schmidtke’s recent scholarship: her work on Shī‘ī, Zaydī, and Ibāḍī knowledge traditions centered on the excavation and production of critical editions of previously lesser-known Arabic manuscripts and her long-running project of offering an in-depth intellectual genealogy of the German Orientalist tradition in Islamic Studies. Ultimately, the book not only restores a critical, silenced voice and expert of Islam but also reorients our prevailing conceptions of Orientalism while showcasing the impact of the Holocaust on the study of Islam today. In what follows, questions are posed to Schmidtke by SherAli K. Tareen, Patricia Crone Member (2024–25) in the School of Historical Studies, who is himself an expert in Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia.

The conversation below focuses on Professor of Near Eastern Islamic Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ) Sabine Schmidtke’s new book Scholar of Islam, Victim of the Holocaust: The Tragic Life of Hedwig Klein (De Gruyter, 2026). This book narrates the fascinating, powerful, and yet immensely tragic story of the life and career of Hedwig Klein, an immensely talented and potentially path paving German Jewish scholar of Islam with a focus on Ibāḍī knowledge traditions who was killed during the Holocaust in 1942 at the age of thirty-one. In this book, Schmidtke performs three tasks simultaneously: providing an intimate social and intellectual history of German Orientalism and Islamic Studies at the cusp of and during Nazi Germany, presenting a finely grained analysis of Klein’s life and her intellectual contributions to Islamic Studies, and correcting some popular and dominant misconceptions about Klein’s role in the writing and compilation of the equally well-known and controversial scholar Hans Wehr’s widely used Arabic dictionary. This book in many ways brings together two prominent threads of Schmidtke’s recent scholarship, her work on Shī‘ī, Zaydī, and Ibāḍī knowledge traditions centered on the excavation and production of critical editions of previously lesser known Arabic manuscripts and her long running project of offering an in-depth intellectual genealogy of the German Orientalist tradition in Islamic Studies. Ultimately, this book not only restores a critical silenced voice and expert of Islam. It also reorients our prevailing conceptions of Orientalism while also showcasing the impact of the Holocaust on the study of Islam today.

This article offers a contribution to the study of polemics between Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages. It presents an annotated translation of the extant fragments of a reply by an unknown Jew to the polemical tract Ifḥām al-Yahūd in which the mathematician Samawʾal al-Maghribī (d. 570/1175), who converted to Islam in 558/1163, virulently attacks his former religion. Samawʾal'stract had a significant impact both on later Muslim polemicists and on Jewish thinkers, who defended their religion against his strictures. The unique manuscript of the anonymous refutation, written in Judaeo-Arabic, is part of the Firkovitch collection kept at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg. It is included in a codex that also contains an incomplete version, in the same hand, of Samawʾal al-Maghribī's tract. While the codex can be tentatively dated to the fourteenth century and was presumably written in Egypt, we cannot know with any degree of certainty when and where the refutation itself was composed, nor whether the unknown author had access to a complete copy of Samawʾal's work. Although at times the author quotes Ifḥām al-Yahūd verbatim, paraphrases and indirect references to Samawʾal's arguments are more common. In order to contextualize the unknown author's counterarguments, we provide a running commentary, including quotations of the passages from Ifḥām al-Yahūd that are being refuted.

Classic Essays on Jews in Early Modern Europe (Routledege, 2023): Designed for both students and seasoned scholars, this volume provides an innovative guide to the study of the Jewish past from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. It makes available seventeen contributions, published between 1904 and 1984, which are veritable landmarks in the scholarship on Jewish history in early modern Europe but have so far remained little accessible. Many are here translated into English for the first time, while all but one are not currently available in English online. The editors’ introduction situates these classic essays in relation to the growing perception that the early modern period in Jewish history possesses its own distinctive features and identity. Accompanied by a rich bibliography, the volume highlights the many changes that the academic study of this vital phase of the Jewish past has undergone during the last hundred and twenty years.

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.

MS Riyadh, Maktabat Malik Fahd al-Waṭaniyya 748 is a multitext volume copied by al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. ʿAlī Ibn Abī l-ʿAshīra in 552/1157 in Ṣaʿda. It consists of doctrinal texts by Zaydī and Muʿtazilī authors, invariably Iranian. The codex is the only known extant witness of all but two of the tracts it includes (the exceptions being Ismāʿīl b. ʿAlī b. Ismāʿīl al-Farrazādhī’s K. Taʿlīq al-Tabṣira and Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Dāʿī al-Ḥasanī’s K. Ḥaqāʾiq al-aʿrāḍ wa-aḥwālihā wa-sharḥihā), and two of its tracts, K. al-Nasīm fī l-uṣūl by one Abū Jaʿfar and K. Muhaj al-ʿulūm by Muʿādh b. Abī l-Khayr al-Hamadhānī, are not even attested in the relevant biobibliographical sources. This study includes critical editions of the doctrinal tracts included in the majmūʿa as well as an additional tract preserved in a related codex that was apparently also copied by Ibn Abī l-ʿAshīra (MS Milan, Ambrosiana, ar. E 462). The edited tracts include Abū l-Faḍl al-ʿAbbās Ibn Sharwīn’s K. al-Wujūh allatī taʿẓumu ʿalayhā l-ṭāʿāt ʿinda llāh, his K. al-Yāqūta, and his Ḥaqāʾiq al-ashyāʾ, ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadhānī’s Ḥudūd al-alfāẓ, Ibn al-Dāʿī’s K. Ḥaqāʾiq al-aʿrāḍ wa-aḥwālihā wa-sharḥihā, the extant part of the K. al-Nasīm fī l-uṣūl, K. Muhaj al-ʿulūm, by Muʿādh b. Abī l-Khayr al-Hamadhānī, fragments of two theological summae by unidentified Zaydī scholars, and collections of doctrinal definitions of uncertain authorship.

This paper introduces a spelling correction system which integrates seamlessly with morphological analysis using a multi-tape formalism. Handling of various Semitic error problems is illustrated, with reference to Arabic and Syriac examples. The model handles errors vocalisation, diacritics, phonetic syncopation and morphographemic idiosyncrasies, in addition to Damerau errors. A complementary correction strategy for morphologically sound but morphosyntactically ill-formed words is outlined.