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 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.

On Tuesday, September 17, 2024, a team of librarians from the American University in Cairo (AUC) arrived at the al-Khanji Bookstore in downtown Cairo to oversee the transfer of a rare archive documenting the al-Khanji family's role in the cultural life of the region for nearly a century. This transfer was the result of a cooperation between AUC and five North American academic institutions—the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ; Princeton University; New York University; the University of Michigan; and the College of Charleston—to purchase the archive, preserve it, and make it available to researchers. The al-Khanji archive consists of several thousand documents of various types produced by the well-known Syrian-Egyptian al-Khanji family of booksellers and publishers. Completely unique as the only known surviving archive of a manuscript seller in the region, the archive documents the book-selling and publishing business established by Muhammad Amin al-Khanji after immigrating to Cairo from Aleppo in the 1890s to the 1960s, when the business was run by his sons Sami Amin (d. 1966) and Najib (d. 1980). An exceptionally rich source, the archive promises to open numerous new lines of research into print history, manuscript studies, and Muslim and Orientalist intellectual networks in the first half of the twentieth century. ...

This list aims to provide an overview of Abraham Shalom Yahuda’s (1877–1951) academic work and its reception. There are certainly gaps at this point, and I would be grateful for any additional titles missing from the list in its current form.

Am 20. August 1939 bestieg die 28-jährige jüdische Arabistin Hedwig Klein in Hamburg den Dampfer Rauenfels mit Kurs auf Indien. Sie hatte ein Visum. Sie hatte eine Zukunft. Vier Tage später, in Antwerpen, wenige Stunden vor dem Ausbruch des Zweiten Weltkriegs, erhielt das Schiff den Befehl, nach Deutschland zurückzukehren—mit Hedwig Klein an Bord. Sie saß in der Falle ...

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.

Hedwig Klein's life and scholarship were cut short by the Holocaust in 1942. In her new book, Sabine Schmidtke traces Klein's intellectual legacy and sets the record straight on her involvement in Hans Wehr's Arabic dictionary. Interview by SherAli K. Tareen

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 ...

When in 2022 I published the correspondence between the two German scholars Paul Kahle (1875–1964) and Rudolf Strothmann (1877–1960), I included an appendix devoted to Kahle’s exchange with his former student, the Indian Islamic scholar Muhammad Hamidullah (1908–2002), revolving around the latter’s 1936 publication, “Islamic Studies and Modern Europe” that was based on a paper read by Hamidullah at the Eighth All-India Oriental Conference held in Mysore in December 1935. At the time, I did not have access to Hamidullah’s 1936 paper, which was not included in the proceedings volume of the conference, but had rather appeared in the second issue of volume 2 of The Quranic World: A Quarterly Journal of the Quranic Movement (Hyderabad), a bibliographical rarity. Nor was I aware of the whereabouts of the information Paul Kraus (1904–1944) had shared with Hamidullah on the topic and that evidently served as the foundation for section three of Hamidullah’s 1936 publication. In the meantime, I was able to trace those missing items. The present paper includes annotated editions of Kraus’s unpublished account “La part des Juifs dans les études islamiques” and Hamidullah’s published but hard to find 1936 publication “Islamic Studies and Modern Europe”.

This piece recounts a four-day research trip (7–10 September 2026) to Budapest and its surroundings in pursuit of the archival legacy of the Islamicist Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921). Although the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (LHAS) has cataloged, digitized, and made freely accessible its 13,430 letters addressed to Goldziher, consulting materials in situ restores relations of scale, materiality, provenance, and custodial history that no digital surrogate can convey. Five stations are described: the LHAS Oriental Collection, Goldziher's former home on Holló utca 4, the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives (MILEV, holding his writing desk), the Avicenna Institute at Piliscsaba (holding his 660-page autograph Tagebuch), and the Jewish Theological Seminary–University of Jewish Studies with its looted and partly restituted library. A central theme is an initiative, discussed with LHAS staff, to digitally reunite Goldziher's dispersed correspondence—especially his scattered, largely uninventoried outgoing letters—so his scholarly life can be read as dialogue rather than monologue. Interwoven with commemorative sites such as the Shoes on the Danube memorial, the account insists that the history of the discipline and the catastrophes of the twentieth century cannot be told apart, making the reassembly of these dispersed archives a form of restitution.

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.