A Conversation on Scholar of Islam, Victim of the Holocaust: The Tragic Story of Hedwig Klein (De Gruyter, 2026) by Sabine Schmidtke

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.