Ignác Goldziher's report on the books brought from the orient for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

© The author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of Manchester. All rights reserved.This paper contains the English translation of Ignác Goldziher's Hungarian essay Report on the Books Brought from the Orient for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences with Regard to the Conditions of the Printing Press in the Orient (1874). The introduction provides the historical and scholarly context of the article. The Arabic printed books Goldziher bought in Egypt reflect his understanding of a specialized Arabic Studies library in the 1870s. The general argument is that Goldziher connected the Arab nation and Arabic texts based on the Hungarian and German concepts of liberal nationalism. This connection instrumentalized religious texts for a non-religious goal.

Materials for a history of Hungarian academic orientalism: The case of Gyula Germanus

This article provides materials for an institutional history of academic Hungarian Orientalism through the life of Gyula Germanus (1884-1979). Using hitherto unexploited archives, this text explores his education, integration into academia, and career up to 1939. I argue that Germanus was an assimilated Hungarian of Jewish origin with a strong loyalty to the state. His two conversions - to Calvinism in 1909 and to Islam in 1930 - also transformed him from a minor Turkologist into a popularly acclaimed Arabist. This study demonstrates that academic Orientalism as a national science was a contested vehicle of social mobility in the Hungarian transition from an imperial to a nation-state setting.© 2014 koninklijke brill nv, leiden.