Auch wenn die Gelehrten Ostjuden waren, hatten sie alle eine Dissertation an einer deutschsprachige Universität geschrieben. Dort hatten sie die deutsche Wissenschafts- und Forschungsmethode gelernt. In Jerusalem wurde die Tradition lange Zeit wachgehalten auch dann, als neue Universitäten gegründet wurden (Tel Aviv, Haifa und Bar Ilan). Obwohl man heute das Wort Symbiose nicht ohne Weiteres verwenden darf, ist die Wissenschaft des Judentums ebenso wie die Arabistik eines der schönsten Produkte der deutsch-jüdischen Leidenschaftsgeschichte.
Salomon Munk and the Historiography of Medieval Arabic and Jewish Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
Chiara Adorisio
Ce qu’il (l’homme) doit surtout chercher a connaître c’est lui même,
afin d’arriver par là à connaître les autres choses qui ne sont pas lui même […]
(Salomon Ibn Gabirol, The Source of Life, Book 1, transl. in french by Salomon Munk)
In a recent study in which she examines the history of the reception of medieval philosophy in the modern era, Catherine König-Pralong observes that the emergence of the idea of a common European philosophical culture between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries engendered the view of Arabic and Jewish medieval philosophy as the ‘other’ – i.e., as a foreign element external to this European philosophical tradition.1 This idea can be better grasped in terms of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century concept of the history of philosophy as a history of the genesis and development of modern reason. The rational, and therefore universalistic, component of modern European culture was identified with philosophical reason, whose birthplace was ancient Greece. As König-Pralong writes: “There is no philosophy other than Greek philosophy, [and philosophy belongs to Europe]. In the nineteenth century, this conception imposes itself on the imagination of the European nations. In the twentieth century, it is still an unquestioned premise of philosophical historiography.”2
This view, which had been adopted already before Hegel – by Herder, who had acknowledged the role of the Arabs in the development of European science and culture while at the same time denying the existence of an original Arabic philosophical tradition – was first challenged at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the German-Jewish scholars of the Science of Judaism who had engaged in the rediscovery and comparative study of the Arabic language manuscripts containing the works of the most important Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophers.
Among this group of scholars, the most outstanding was Salomon Munk, a German Jewish Arabist and historian of philosophy, who emigrated from Germany to Paris in 1828 and who, exactly two decades later, published the first complete edition and french translation of Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed, in addition to other pioneering studies on medieval Arabic and Jewish philosophy. In the following article I will examine Munk’s critique to the German Orientalists, on the one hand, and historians of philosophy, on the other, in order to show to what extent Munk’s work was seminal for the recognition of the existence and importance of Arabic and Jewish medieval philosophy. German historians of philosophy, such as Heinrich Ritter, who were not able to recognize the importance and originality of Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophy and their influence on Christian thought, changed their mind, and acknowledged the existence of a whole new field of studies.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, Paris was the capital of Arabic and Oriental Studies. German Orientalists in particular flocked to study with renowned scholars like Sylvestre de Sacy, whom they saw as having emancipated philology from theology. The German scholars brought with them their tradition of Altertumswissenschaft and the fruits of their research at their respective theological faculties in Germany or at the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, founded in Leipzig in 1845. They published their studies in French academic journals: the Journal Asiatique, for example. In this journals Salomon Munk published also several of his own studies, thereby initiating a debate with prominent German Orientalists and historians of philosophy such as the German Orientalist and philologist Franz August Schmölders [and the French historian and Orientalist Amable Jourdain, whose 1843 work, Recherches critiques sur l’âge et l’origine des traductions latines d’Aristote, was considered seminal for the study of the Latin translations of Aristotle]. Munk’s critique of Schmölders – which appears in his discussions of the Islamic philosophical currents in the preface to his Mélanges de philosophie juive et arabe3 and in the first chapter of his essay on Salomon Ibn Gabirol4, deserves special attention. Schmölders, a student of Silvestre de Sacy and later professor in Breslau, known for his editions of Al-Farabi and Avicenna, had provoked Munk’s indignation with statements he made in an essay on the schools of Arabic philosophy, which Munk quotes as proof of his ignorance of the philosophical doctrines of these thinkers. Schmölders maintained that Arabic philosophers were devoid of originality – Arabic philosophy being, in his view, merely a repetition of Aristotle’s philosophy. Munk, in response, deplored what he saw as Schmölders’s ignorance of the very sources on which he had based his “exaggerated” judgments:
La vérité est que M. Schmölders n’a point abordé la lecture des principeaux philosophes arabes, dont les écrits originaux sont excessivement rares, mais dont nous possédons des versions Hébraïques très fidèles. Quant à Ibn-Roschd, cet nom même lui est peu familier, et il écrit constamment Abou-Roschd. Par ce qu’il dit sur le Téhâfot, ou la Desctruction des philosophes, d’Al-Gazali, on reconnait qu’il n’a jamais vu cet ouvrage, comme nous le montrerons encore plus loin. Il n’a pas toujours jugé à propos de nous faire connaître les autorités sur lesquelles il base ses assertions et ses raisonnements, et par là il n’inspire pas toujours la confiance nécessaire.5
In criticizing Schmölders, Munk sided with one of Schmölders own former rivals, the historian of philosophy Heinrich Ritter. The debate between Ritter and Schmölders reflected a more general clash between two opposing camps of nineteenth-century German Oriental scholarship: that of the historians of philosophy, who professed a relative interest in Islamic and Jewish philosophy (especially the Arabic Aristotelian tradition) on the one hand, and that of the Orientalists, who refused to recognize the significance of the Islamic (not to mention the Jewish) philosophical tradition, on the other. Ritter, the author of a twelve-volume History of Philosophy, was aware of his insufficient knowledge of Arabic and Jewish sources, and was thus – as a disciple of Schleiermacher rather than of Hegel – relatively open to Munk’s criticism. Therefore the relationship between Munk and Ritter, as it emerges from Munk’s critique of Ritter’s History of Philosophy, constitutes a central chapter in the history of the nineteenth-century debate between German Orientalists and German-Jewish scholars.
The polemic between Schmölders, Munk and Ritter on Islamic philosophy took place in the context of a broader debate surrounding Schmölders’s theory of cultures – a debate in which Victor Cousin and Ernest Renan were also involved. Schmölders’s thesis regarding the lack of originality of Islamic philosophy and its role as a mere custodian of knowledge that had been “temporarily deposited” with the Arabs had its roots in the notion, common at the time, of the inferiority of Semitic culture with respect to that of the Indo-European or Aryan race, which Schmölders identified with the speakers of the ancient Greek and Indic languages.6
In Ritter, a prominent representative of the German historical school associated with Ranke and Schleiermacher, Munk saw a fellow adversary of Hegel potentially disposed to accept (even if only in part) his vision of Islamic and Jewish philosophy, and a potentially in fighting Schmölders’s theories. In fact, in 1843, a year after the publication of the Schmölders’s controversial book on the History of Philosophy among the Arabs, Ritter, instructed by Munk, would have publicly challenged the latter’s thesis before the Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen.
Significantly, it was from Munk’s work and from their debate over the history of philosophy that Ritter drew inspiration