List of books donated from my personal library to the HS/SS library of the Institute for Advanced Study (since 2018)

The "Medieval Imāmī Thought Collection" comprises surrogates of the manuscript material that has been consulted during the preparation of Hassan Ansari and Sabine Schmidtke, Al-Šarīf al-Murtaḍā's Oeuvre and Thought in Context: An Archaeological Inquiry into Texts and their Transmission, 2 vols, Cordoba: UCOpress, 2022 (see also https://albert.ias.edu/handle/20.500.12111/6508). The Historical Studies–Social Science Library of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, kindly agreed to make available those surrogates under the file name "Medieval Imāmī Thought Collection." These may be consulted by scholars by appointment in the Library (https://www.ias.edu/library/hs).

The library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, holds the Moritz Steinschneider Papers under the shelfmark ARC 108, consisting of correspondence, miscellaneous notes, research materials, offprints, catalogs etc. Between 2-5 October 2023, the present writer together with Reimund Leicht visited the JTS library and consulted the entire Moritz Steinschneider Papers with the aim of preparing a detailed inventory of the materials they include. The present dataset constitutes a preliminary result, listing all of Steinschneider’s correspondents in alphabetical order. The correspondence that is found among the Moritz Steinschneider Papers consists of letters and postcards Steinschneider had received since the 1840s until his death on 24 January 1907. While Steinschneider did not keep copies of his own correspondence to others, he noted, in red ink, on the letters and postcards he had received the dates when he had responded to them. Moreover, Steinschneider recorded his correspondence from 1855 through 1907 in three small notebooks, whose entries, arranged according to year, month, and day, list the letters and postcards he received and replied to on each day. They also indicate the dates given on the letters sent to him. The Moritz Steinschneider Papers also include some documentation relating to the transfer of Steinschneider’s Nachlass to the JTS. The aim of the present inventory is to provide a first comprehensive overview of those from whom Steinschneider received letters that are included today among the Moritz Steinschneider Papers. Since the material is still largely in disorder, letters and postcards from the persons listed below are found in numerous locations of the Nachlass. Names that are rendered in green could be verified, names rendered in purple might refer to the same person.

In 2003, Sabine Schmidtke (Princeton, then Berlin) and David Sklare (Jerusalem) founded the “Mu’tazilite Manuscripts Project Group” with the purpose of collecting all hitherto unpublished Mu‘tazilite manuscripts (Muslim and Jewish), of identifying these materials and of preparing critical editions, in order to set the scientific research of the Mu‘tazilite movement on a broader basis. They have since been the coordinators of the group and were able to receive substantial research grants from the Thyssen Foundation (2003-06), the Henkel Foundation (2005) and Yad Hanadiv (2006). The “Mu’tazilite Manuscripts Project Group” consisted of about fifteen active members from the West, the Islamic world and Israel who come from both Islamic Studies and Jewish Studies. Together with Wilferd Madelung (Oxford), Schmidtke also applied successfully for and coordinated a research group of eight scholars (plus five guests), “Mu’tazilism in Islam and Judaism”, at the IAS (nowadays IIAS), Jerusalem (2005-06). The work of the Mu'tazila Manuscripts Project Group were lateron (2009-2013) continued as part of the research project "Dediscovering Theological Rationalism in the Medieval World of Islam", funded by an ERC Advanced Grant granted to Schmidtke.

A major desideratum in contemporary Genizah scholarship relates to the still largely untapped holdings of the Abraham Firkovitch collection of the National Library of Russia (NLR) in St. Petersburg (with a total number of around 15,000 items) which was inaccessible to scholars from outside the Soviet Union for most of the twentieth century (with few exceptions). The large majority of Firkovitch manuscripts was taken from the Geniza of the Karaite synagogue, Dar ibn Sumayh, in Cairo, which originated with the synagogue’s former library. The Firkovitch collection consist of fragments of literary works that cover virtually all disciplines of medieval learning, such as Bible exegesis, theology, philosophy and logic, law and legal theory, medicine, astronomy and other sciences, belles lettres, and so forth. Many of the Firkovitch manuscripts are quite large, containing hundreds of folios, and a significant percentage of the material can be dated to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Arabic manuscripts, the large majority of which are written in Hebrew characters, are extremely important. Most of the works they contain are completely or virtually unknown to scholarship. A considerable number are unique manuscripts, among them numerous works by Muslim authors. Even though many of the fragments are rather large in size, almost all of them are in poor condition, as is typical for Geniza material. They are fragmentary and jumbled, usually without a title page or colophon that would identify the text they contain. Since the 1990s, microfilms of most sections of the collection have been available at the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts (IMHM) at the National Library of Israel (NLI) in Jerusalem. These include the Arabic material written in Hebrew characters that is part of the Second Firkovitch Collection, which consists of manuscripts belonging to the so-called First Series (RNL Yevr.-Arab. I) and to the Second, or New, Series (RNL Yevr.-Arab. II or NS). Excluded from microfilming was the section of the collection that consists of Arabic writings written in Arabic characters ("Arabski-Arabski"), which is equally rich in material pertinent to the "rational sciences". In 2015, the NLR and NLI signed an agreement that allows the NLI to digitize those microfilms and provide online open access to the images. Over the past ten years, there have been several initiatives to seek funding to produce a full catalog of the Firkovitch collection, none of which have been successful, the principal reason being the uncertainty about the full accessibility of the manuscript materials during the lifetime of the respective proposed projects. Among the initiatives, mention should be made of an earlier grant application by David Sklare and Sabine Schmidtke (2011), and another application to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities by Sarah Stroumsa and Sabine Schmidtke (with Shaul Shaked for the Persian materials in the Firkovitch collection) which was first submitted in 2012, followed by a full version submitted in 2014. In the meantime, enormous progress in uploading manuscripts from the Firkovitch Collection (YA II) unto the National Library of Israel’s digital repository has been made [http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLIS/he/ManuScript/] and the accessibility of the bulk of the material is thus no longer an issue. It is to be hoped that others will take up the past initiatives to advance this important field of inquiry. The BBAW application in its final version (April 2014) is included in this bundle for interested scholars to use.

The purpose of the "Rudolf Strothmann Archive" which comprises digital surrogates of his published work is to bring Rudolf Strothmann's (1877-1960) pioneering role in the scholarly exploration of Shiʿi Islam into focus and to render his writings, much of which are still relevant, more easily accessible. From 1909 onwards, Strothmann worked intensively on the Glaser manuscript collection held by the State Library Berlin, which from 1910 onwards resulted in a number of pathbreaking publications on the Zaydiyya. Thereafter, he increasingly delved into Twelver Shiʿism and his major publications in this area appeared during the third decade of the twentieth century. During the later decades of his life, Strothmann primarily focussed on various strands of Ismaʿilism. Rudolph Strothmann was the teacher of Wilferd Madelung, another major scholar of Shiʿi studies who in turn trained the next generation of scholars in this field. Among his students, mention should be made of Martin J. McDermott, Hossein Modarressi, Sabine Schmidtke, and Bernard Haykel, all of whom continued in one way or another to work on different aspects of Shiʿi Islam. A bibliography of his writings has been published as "Rudolf Strothmann (1877-1960): Publications. Compiled by Sabine Schmidtke," Shii Studies Review 4 (2019).

The Strothmann Family Archive was discovered in 2011 by Gaby Strothmann in the attic of Inselstraße 29, Hamburg, where Rudolf and Marga Strothmann had lived since 1927. The material was kept in boxes, and a first chronological arrangment was made by Gaby Strothmann. In 2021 Sabine Schmidtke rearranged the material, and the present inventory reflects this most recent arrangment.

Dévénvi, Kinga, and Sabine Schmidtke, "The Published Correspondence of Ignaz Goldziher: A Bibliographical Guide," Building Bridges: Ignaz Goldziher and His Correspondents. Islamic and Jewish Studies Around the Turn of the Twentieth Century, ed. Hans-Jürgen Becker, Kinga Dévényi, Sebastian Günther, and Sabine Schmidtke, Leiden: Brill, 2024, pp. 411–425 (with Addenda)

The Wilferd Madelung Papers were gathered on 24-25 February 2023 from Wilferd Madelung's former Oxford apartment (21 Belsyre Court, Observatory Street) and on 14 March 2023 from the Madelung family residence in River Forest, Illinois (547 Keystone Avenue). Over the course of 2023, the material was brought together and sorted, and the present, still incomplete, inventory reflects this arrangment. The remaining materials will be added over the coming months.