Paul Kraus and Muhammad Hamidullah on the Contributions of European Jewish Scholars to the Study of Islam

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 The present paper includes annotated editions of Kraus’s unpublished account “La part des Juifs dans les études islamiques” and Hamidullah’s published but hard to find 1936 publication “Islamic Studies and Modern Europe”.