Language:
English
Year of publication:
2018
Titel der Quelle:
Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts
Angaben zur Quelle:
17 (2018) 425-446
Keywords:
Horovitz, Josef, Archives
;
Plessner, Martin, Archives
;
National Library of Israel.
;
Personal archives
;
Jewish scholars
;
Jews, German
;
Middle East Study and teaching 20th century
;
History
Abstract:
The School of Oriental Studies was established at the newly founded Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1926 by scholars of Oriental studies who had been trained at German universities and immigrated to Palestine, transforming their textual encounter with the Orient into a physical one. In recent years, their archival collections at the National Library of Israel – many of them previously unknown or forgotten – were discovered, restored, and catalogued. This personal and scholarly transformation left its mark on the scholars’ estates, whose provenance and arrangement are a representation – or rather, a refraction – of the Orientalist knowledge migration process, especially after the Nazi rise to power in 1933. The scholarly estate of the Frankfurt-based professor of Semitic languages Josef Horovitz (1874–1931), founder and first director of the School of Oriental Studies in Jerusalem in absentia, was rejected by the University of Frankfurt, and consequently sent to Jerusalem, where it was somewhat reluctantly accepted and then forgotten for many years. The Arabic teacher and historian of science in Islam Martin Meir Plessner (1900–1973), who found the separation of science and politics utterly crucial (and difficult for an Arabic and Islam expert at the heart of the Arab-Jewish conflict), had his estate divided between two archival institutions for this reason. The stories of these archives are stories of rejection, exile, struggle, and neglect – and possibly, eventual redemption.
DOI:
10.13109/9783666370809.425
URL:
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