Schmidtke, SabineSabineSchmidtkeTareen, SherAli K.SherAli K.Tareen2026-03-272026-03-272026-03-27A Conversation on "Scholar of Islam, Victim of the Holocaust: The Tragic Story of Hedwig Klein" with Sabine Schmidtke and SherAli K. Tareen, Ideas (blog), 27 March 2026, https://www.ias.edu/ideas/conversation-scholar-islam-victim-holocaust-tragic-story-hedwig-kleinhttps://www.ias.edu/ideas/conversation-scholar-islam-victim-holocaust-tragic-story-hedwig-kleinhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12111/10275A Conversation on "Scholar of Islam, Victim of the Holocaust: The Tragic Story of Hedwig Klein" with Sabine Schmidtke and SherAli K. Tareen, Ideas (blog), 27 March 2026, https://www.ias.edu/ideas/conversation-scholar-islam-victim-holocaust-tragic-story-hedwig-kleinThe 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.en-USHedwig KleinHolocaustBlog0000-0002-6181-5065