Sabine Schmidtke
Permanent URI for this collection
Sabine Schmidtke is Professor of Islamic Intellectual History in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6181-5065.
For a full curriculum vitae and list of publication, see here.
For my Collection of Manuscript Surrogates (the list is continuously being expanded), see here.
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Recent Submissions
- The Visual Scribe: Tables and Diagrams in Middle Eastern Manuscripts Workshop(2025-04-10)“The Visual Scribe: Tables and Diagrams in Middle Eastern Manuscripts Workshop,” Institute for the History of Knowledge in the Ancient World at Freie Universität Berlin, April 10-11, 2025, convenors: Sonja Brentjes, George A. Kiraz, Mathieu Ossendrijver, Sabine Schmidtke
13 35 - Moritz Steinschneider Correspondence at the JTSA (ARC. 108): An Inventory(2024)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.
42 52 - Eugen Mittwoch’s Biography As Seen Through His Scholarly Correspondence, 1898 through 1940(2024)Eugen Mittwoch (1876–1942) was one of the most prominent representatives of German Orientalism during the first decades of the twentieth century that are credited with having initiated a new direction in Islamic studies within Orientalism. Trained as an Arabist and a Semitist, Mittwoch was at the same time a specialist in Ethiopian and Amharic studies, and was particularly interested in the study of Islamic medicine. Mittwoch was also engaged in the study of the Geniza, epigraphy, and Southern Arabian studies, and in addition worked on topics relevant to the Science of Judaism (“Wissenschaft des Judentums”). Mittwoch’s academic career ended abruptly when he was dismissed from his professorial position at the end of 1935 and eventually forced into exile in 1938. As a result, only portions of his professional and personal Nachlass have come to us. Insights into his personality and development as a scholar can be gained from his correspondence. The book presents a critical annotated edition of Eugen Mittwoch’s correspondence with Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907), Theodor Nöldeke (1836–1930), Wilhelm von Bode (1845–1929), Friedrich Carl Andreas (1846–1930), Leopold Landau (1848–1920), Markus Brann (1849-1920), Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), Immanuel Löw (1854–1944), Hans von Cranach (1855–1929), Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936), Hermann Burchardt (1857–1909), Carl Bezold (1959–1922), Georg Jacob (1862–1937), Richard Gottheil (1862–1936), Ludwig Borchardt (1863–1938), Cyrus Adler (1863–1940), Hubert Grimme (1864–1942), Aby Warburg (1866–1929), Adolf Büchler (1867–1939), Victor Aptowitzer (1871–1942), Arthur Lehman (1873–1936), Abraham Kahana (1874–1946), Max Meyerhof (1874–1945), Paul E. Kahle (1875–1964), Enno Littmann (1875–1958), Carl Heinrich Becker (1876–1933), Emil Gratzl (1877–1957), Rudolf Strothmann (1877–1960), Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877–1951), Judah L. Magnes (1877–1948), Martin Buber (1878–1965), Jacob Nahum Epstein (1878–1952), Eugenio Griffini (1878–1925), Eugen Täubler (1879–1953), Gotthold Weil (1882–1960), Arthur Schaade (1883–1952), Rudolf Tschudi (1884–1960), Carl Rathjens (1887–1966), Hellmut Ritter (1892–1971), Shlomo Dov Goitein (1900–1985), Joseph Schacht (1902–1969), Paul Kraus (1904–1944), and Walter Henning (1908–1967). Arranged in chronological order, the letters (German for the most part, some in Arabic, Hebrew, and English) present to the reader an impression of Mittwoch’s life as a scholar, a proponent of Zionism, a father and a husband.
43 - Asterisms: The Relations among their Verbal, Numerical, and Visual Representations across Cultures in Research and Public Outreach(2024-02)Asterisms: The Relations among their Verbal, Numerical, and Visual Representations across Cultures in Research and Public Outreach, An International Conference, Princeton, Institute for Advanced Study, 14-15 February 2024, Sponsor: Sabine Schmidtke (IAS), Convenor: Sonja Brentjes (MPIWG, IAS), Funding for this event provided by the Otto Neugebauer Fund
65 70 - Paul Kahle and His Catalog of the Arabic Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford(2024)Although Paul Kahle’s involuntary exile from Germany during the Second World War caused him considerable economic hardship, it also opened up entirely new scholarly horizons for him, as his principal occupation during the years 1939 through 1947 was the preparation of a catalog of the manuscripts of the Chester Beatty Collection and a catalog of the Arabic manuscripts of the Bodleian Library that had been acquired since 1835. Neither catalog was ever published. This paper analyzes Kahle’s relationship with the Bodleian Library in this period and his unpublished catalog of the library’s Arabic manuscripts.
28 9 - عالم أفكار ابن أبي جمهور الأحسائي، عِلمُ الكلام والفلسفة والعرفان في الإسلام الشيعي الإثنى عشري في القرن 9 ه - 15 م(مؤسسة ابن أبي جمهور الأحسائي لإحياء التراث, 2024)
47 - Literary Snippets: A Colophon Reader(Gorgias Press, 2024)This companion volume to Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time (Gorgias Press, 2023) gives examples of colophons from the Ancient Near East up to the pre-modern world, from different traditions – Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Persian. Colophons typically provide their readers with the historical context in which the scribe produced his or her work: Who was the scribe? When and where was the manuscript produced? For whom was it produced and who paid for it? But colophons are far more rich. They are literary works in their own right, having a style and rhetoric independent of the main literary text of the manuscript. Some are assertive, providing contextual data about the scribe/publisher and manuscript/book; others are expressive, demonstrating the scribe’s feelings and wishes. Some are directive, asking the reader for an action; others declarative, providing all sorts of statements about the scribe/publisher or even the reader. The latter sometimes provide historical facts otherwise lost to history: wars, earthquakes, religious events, and legal agreements. Through the colophons and translations in this volume we hope to present the colophon as a literary genre, and as literature to be studied, read and enjoyed.
28 18 - A Jewish Refutation of Samawʾal al-Maghribī's Ifḥām al-Yahūd: An Annotated Translation(2024)This article offers a contribution to the study of polemics between Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages. It presents an annotated translation of the extant fragments of a reply by an unknown Jew to the polemical tract Ifḥām al-Yahūd in which the mathematician Samawʾal al-Maghribī (d. 570/1175), who converted to Islam in 558/1163, virulently attacks his former religion. Samawʾal'stract had a significant impact both on later Muslim polemicists and on Jewish thinkers, who defended their religion against his strictures. The unique manuscript of the anonymous refutation, written in Judaeo-Arabic, is part of the Firkovitch collection kept at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg. It is included in a codex that also contains an incomplete version, in the same hand, of Samawʾal al-Maghribī's tract. While the codex can be tentatively dated to the fourteenth century and was presumably written in Egypt, we cannot know with any degree of certainty when and where the refutation itself was composed, nor whether the unknown author had access to a complete copy of Samawʾal's work. Although at times the author quotes Ifḥām al-Yahūd verbatim, paraphrases and indirect references to Samawʾal's arguments are more common. In order to contextualize the unknown author's counterarguments, we provide a running commentary, including quotations of the passages from Ifḥām al-Yahūd that are being refuted.
46 - Under the Hammer: Trafficking,Trading, and Salvaging the Middle Eastern and North African Written Heritage(2023-11-02)The trade in written artifacts of Middle Eastern and North African origin is flourishing and its dimensions are growing particularly in areas experiencing militaryconflict and/or extreme poverty. Yemen is one such area: given the ongoing war, manuscripts are being clandestinely taken out of the country. Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya are similarly affected. Islamic, Christian, and Jewish manuscripts originating in the MENASA region are regularly offered for sale by Western auction houses, and many thus end up in private hands. The provenance ofthe objects sold often remains obscure or is at least not mentioned in the relevant sales catalogs. Additionally, artifacts of Middle Eastern origin are increasingly being offered and sold through social media, for the most part clandestinely. Such transactions not only are frequently illegal but also deprive the people living in conflict-ridden regions of their cultural heritage. Moreover, experts have made the case that the illegal trafficking of artifacts may be related to a variety of criminal activities that affect war-zones or regions experiencing instability due to armed conflict. Finally, scholarship, too, is impacted, since artifacts that are purchased by private collectors generally become inaccessible to scholars. While recent military conflicts and the pandemic appear to have exacerbated the situation, there are also many initiatives and actors who are involved in protecting and salvaging MENA’s cultural heritage on the ground. Our panel showcases the fate of individual manuscripts or written artifacts, and entire collections of such materials, that have been auctioned or otherwise sold during recent decades. The contributions address both problems and concrete initiatives aimed at preventing the phenomenon, creating awareness of the artifacts' cultural value among policy makers, customs and police authorities, and auctioneers, and at providing appropriate training to stop illegal trafficking. Moreover, we consider the question of survival and accessibility of written artifacts from the MENASA region, which is connected to the thorny issue ofthe possible restitution of written artifacts. Participants: Luise Loges (University of Glasgow), Josh Mugler (HMML), Cecilia Palombo (Chicago University), Nasser O. Rabbat (MIT), Valentina Sagaria Rossi (University of Rome Tor Vergata), Sabine Schmidtke (IAS)
67 54 - A Manual of Zaydī Muʿtazilī Dogmatic Texts from Early Sixth/Twelfth-Century Iran(Shii Studies Review (Brill), 2023)MS Riyadh, Maktabat Malik Fahd al-Waṭaniyya 748 is a multitext volume copied by al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. ʿAlī Ibn Abī l-ʿAshīra in 552/1157 in Ṣaʿda. It consists of doctrinal texts by Zaydī and Muʿtazilī authors, invariably Iranian. The codex is the only known extant witness of all but two of the tracts it includes (the exceptions being Ismāʿīl b. ʿAlī b. Ismāʿīl al-Farrazādhī’s K. Taʿlīq al-Tabṣira and Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Dāʿī al-Ḥasanī’s K. Ḥaqāʾiq al-aʿrāḍ wa-aḥwālihā wa-sharḥihā), and two of its tracts, K. al-Nasīm fī l-uṣūl by one Abū Jaʿfar and K. Muhaj al-ʿulūm by Muʿādh b. Abī l-Khayr al-Hamadhānī, are not even attested in the relevant biobibliographical sources. This study includes critical editions of the doctrinal tracts included in the majmūʿa as well as an additional tract preserved in a related codex that was apparently also copied by Ibn Abī l-ʿAshīra (MS Milan, Ambrosiana, ar. E 462). The edited tracts include Abū l-Faḍl al-ʿAbbās Ibn Sharwīn’s K. al-Wujūh allatī taʿẓumu ʿalayhā l-ṭāʿāt ʿinda llāh, his K. al-Yāqūta, and his Ḥaqāʾiq al-ashyāʾ, ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadhānī’s Ḥudūd al-alfāẓ, Ibn al-Dāʿī’s K. Ḥaqāʾiq al-aʿrāḍ wa-aḥwālihā wa-sharḥihā, the extant part of the K. al-Nasīm fī l-uṣūl, K. Muhaj al-ʿulūm, by Muʿādh b. Abī l-Khayr al-Hamadhānī, fragments of two theological summae by unidentified Zaydī scholars, and collections of doctrinal definitions of uncertain authorship.
124 46 - Building Bridges: Ignaz Goldziher and His Correspondents. Islamic and Jewish Studies around the Turn of the Twentieth Century(Brill, 2024)The scholarship of Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), one of the founders of Islamic studies in Europe, has not ceased to be in the focus of interest since his death. This volume addresses aspects of Goldziher’s intellectual trajectory together with the history of Islamic and Jewish studies as reflected in the letters exchanged between Goldziher and his peers from various countries that are preserved in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and elsewhere. The fourteen contributions deal with hitherto unexplored aspects of the correspondence addressing issues that are crucial to our understanding of the formative period of these disciplines.
94 117 - Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time(Gorgias Press, 2023)Late antique scholars and medievalists who work on manuscripts as primary sources are very much familiar with the art of the colophon. But the history of the colophon dates back much further than late antiquity, to ancient history when scribes in ancient Mesopotamia chiseled colophons on cuneiform tablets as early as the third millennium BCE. At their inception, colophons were writing production records: who wrote what, when and where? Ancient colophons even provide statistics: how many lines were written in a particular work? As we enter late antiquity, colophons take on a life of their own and begin to acquire literary properties—snippets but nevertheless literary objects. They developed into an art form with distinctive formulaic phraseology. In some traditions, scribes began to record historical events that occurred just before or during the production of a manuscript, events that otherwise would be lost to history. Readers and users also began to insert colophons in existing manuscripts, creating a plethora of colophon types. How are we to approach the study of colophons and what can they tell us about communities at large, or about individual scribes? And what of the colophon itself as an object? One can drill into its text as any other piece of literature, studying various aspects of its literary style and function, as well as linguistic features that distinguish colophon texts from the main text found in a manuscript. This is particularly interesting in multilingual environments, or when the scribe’s mother tongue is connected to the primary text of the manuscript in a diglossic relationship. Here, the colophon is an essential linguistic source into how the scribe’s native tongue interacts with the higher literary register of the manuscript text. This edited volume brings together scholars from various disciplines to study colophons in various languages and traditions across space and time. Whatever you would like to get out of colophons, we hope that there will be at least one paper here that will draw your attention. If not, there are enough literary snippets quoted to keep you entertained.
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