Sabine Schmidtke

Paul Ernst Kahle (1875–1964) was one of the most prominent representatives of Semitic, Islamic, and Biblical studies in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century. Besides his own scholarly achievements in those fields, Kahle had superb organizational skills and a unique ability to collaborate and foster collaborative work. During the 1920s and 1930s, since his appointment to a professorial position in Bonn on 1 October 1923, which was followed by his appointment as Geschäftsführer of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft and eventually Herausgeber of its publications, until the fall of 1938, when he was suspended and eventually dismissed from his position in Bonn and stripped of his responsibilities at the DMG, Kahle was the most influential personality among German Orientalists. During World War II, he was based in Oxford and London where he was commissioned to catalogue the Chester Beatty manuscript collection, which opened up entirely new vistas to him. Although Kahle's detailed partial catalog was never published, many of his publications during the 1940s and 1950s are based on material from the Chester Beatty collection. Kahle’s scholarly legacy, consisting of his study notes and materials, including his unpublished catalog of the Chester Beatty manuscript collection, his correspondence, and his collection of about 11,000 books and 300 manuscripts, was acquired in 1966 by Turin University (Fondo Paul Kahle; http://www.paulkahle.unito.it/index.php). This special issue focusses on Kahle’s scholarly legacy and his rich correspondence with colleagues from different countries, addressing aspects of the history of the disciplines as seen through the material. Papers examining specific aspects of Kahle’s contributions to Islamic, Semitic, and Biblical studies from a wider point of view are also most welcome. Abstracts should be submitted until July 15, 2022 to Uta Nitschke (nitschke@ias.edu). Final submissions are due by December 31, 2022. All submissions will undergo a double blind peer-review. Historical Interactions of Religious Cultures is a new journal published by Mohr Siebeck (Tübingen), and edited by Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann (Zürich), Alexander Fidora (Barcelona), Markus Friedrich (Hamburg), Thomas Kaufmann (Göttingen), Volker Leppin (New Haven), Sabine Schmidtke (Princeton), and Rebekka Voß (Frankfurt).

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.

Here we are at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton on the 28th of March 2019. I am Ed Hayes, and I have here Prof Etan Kohlberg with me. I am very glad to have this opportunity. Before we talk specifically about Shiʿi Studies, I thought it would be nice to hear about your intellectual formation ...

Like other parts of the Middle East, Iran is considered one of the cradles of civilization. With a written history that stretches over more than 7,000 years, it constitutes one of the most variegated and richest cultures of the region, if not the world. The significance of Iran's cultural heritage and history finds its expression in the twenty-four sites that are included among the UNESCO World Heritage Sites, with another fifty-six properties tentatively listed. For more than 400 years, the Sasanian Empire constituted one of the leading world powers prior to the rise of Islam, and the significance of Iran for the formation of Islamic thought and culture can hardly be overestimated, as over the centuries the country was home to the leading centers of philosophical and other intellectual activity. The panel "Iran at the Crossroads of Civilizations: Scholars and Lawyers Speaking about Iranian History and Cultural Heritage" hopes to make a contribution to showcase the incredibly rich cultural heritage of Iran beyond political considerations. It is sponsored by Sabine Schmidtke, Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ. "Iran at the Crossroads of Civilizations" will feature presentations by Irina Bokova, former UNESCO Director General Touraj Daryaee, Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies and Culture and Director of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine Ani Honarchiansaky, Mary Seeger O'Boyle Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University Rudi Matthee, Distinguished Professor of Middle East History at the University of Delaware, and President of the Persian Heritage Foundation Matthew Thomas Miller, Assistant Professor of Persian Literature and Digital Humanities at Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park Alexander Nagel, Assistant Professor, History of Art, Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York Thomas G. Weiss, Presidential Professor of Political Science at The CUNY Graduate Center and Co-Chair, Cultural Heritage at Risk Project, J. Paul Getty Trust https://video.ias.edu/icc/2020/0127

Ms Istanbul, Köprülü 813 is a unique manuscript (as it seems) of a polemical work directed against all those who negate the prophethood of the Prophet Muḥammad—entitled Daqāʾiq al-naẓar fī ḥaqāʾiq al-bašar of ʿUmar b. Ḫiḍr b. ʿUmar al-Iṣfahānī—which seems to have largely escaped the attention of scholars up until now. The manuscript is undated and next to nothing is known about its author, except that he also wrote another work entitled Taʿǧīz al-mustaʿǧiz which seems to be preserved in (at least) two manuscripts, copied in the 9th/15th and 10th/16th century respectively. The talk will discuss the work's structure and contents as well as its author and then focus on the rich biblical material (Hebrew Bible and New Testament) it contains, as well as the quotations gleaned from the Mishnah, with an analysis of the author's exegetical approach to those materials.