Exhibition about Jewish researchers of Islam in Hohenems | EUROtoday

The dialogue between Jews and Muslims today can’t be mentioned to be neutral. Hostility and blockages are the rule, openness and curiosity are uncommon. But even a small change in location can work wonders. You go to the exhibition “The Orientalists. Jewish researchers and adventurers in search of their own in the foreign” within the Jewish Museum Hohenems, within the second room you stand in entrance of a portrait of the Jewish orientalist Ignaz Goldziher (1850 to 1921), who continues to be extremely regarded academically at the moment, and are greatly surprised by the data that he was the primary non-Muslim to have attended lectures at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University in 1873, reads the superb catalog essays devoted to him by Susannah Heschel and Markus Kirchhoff and leads to a world that straightens one’s head, preoccupied with the current.

Instead of at the moment’s present speak concerning the Christian-Jewish West, which is in any case not very legitimate after centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, we come throughout Goldziher’s concept of ​​a “Jewish alliance with Islam” (Heschel). Against the Christian studying that noticed Judaism as a mere precursor to Christianity, he opposed a view that marginalized Christianity. He accepted solely Judaism and Islam as true monotheistic, rational and moral religions. He considered Christianity as an irrational faith decided by dogmas, miracles and the supernatural.

Jewish curiosity about Islam within the nineteenth century went again to the rabbi and Arabist Abraham Geiger (1810 to 1874), who was additionally prominently featured within the exhibition and catalog. At the tender age of 23, he revealed the groundbreaking work “What did Mohammed absorb from Judaism?” in Bonn, wherein he demonstrated that the Koran is usually and infrequently actually decided by Jewish sources.

Goldziher adopted Geiger in some ways, however he didn’t observe him in a single factor: he didn’t think about Mohammed to be an epigone of Judaism, however slightly the creator of an impartial faith, on which he, as a reform Jew, additionally had hopes: “My ideal was,” he famous in his diary, “to raise Judaism to a similar rational level” as Islam. The indisputable fact that he led an adventurous analysis life in each respect could have contributed to his boldness. In Cairo he additionally attended the service of his Muslim colleagues: “In the midst of thousands of pious people, I rubbed my forehead on the floor of the mosque. Never in my life was I more pious, truly more pious than on that sublime Friday.” And in 1883, when Ernest Renan and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani argued about whether or not Islam was anti-science, Goldziher jumped to al-Afghani’s facet.

Make no mistake: what appears like a stale philological dispute truly had sensible penalties and nonetheless has political penalties at the moment. Without the curiosity of German Jews who searched the Orient for what was “their own in the foreign,” the Berlin museums wouldn’t be what they’re at the moment. Ludwig Borchardt, who excavated Nefertiti, Max von Oppenheim, who found Tell Halaf, and James Simon, who financed numerous of those excavations, have been Jews with “longings for Egypt.” Like Otto Rubensohn, who unearthed elephantine papyri on the Nile island, which surprisingly pointed to a Jewish temple that competed with the official one in Jerusalem.

The exhibition, subtly curated by Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek and clearly organized by Martin Kohlbauer, helps you to see and discover out what she is speaking about. In the principle corridor you’re surrounded by Johann Kautsky’s stage design for Carl Goldmark’s opera “The Queen of Sheba” (Vienna 1875), a testomony to the curiosity within the Queen of Sheba that unfold from tutorial to common on the time. You learn previous passports, marvel at cylinder seals, amulets and miniaturized facial steles till you come throughout an object within the heart of the corridor that’s maybe essentially the most lovely and evocative of all the exhibition: a big silver Seder centerpiece designed by the Frankfurt silversmiths Leo and Felix Horovitz in 1920. On Seder night, Jews commemorate the liberation from Egypt. What is outstanding is how the essay intertwines Jewish and Egyptian components. Encompassing it on the high and backside is a Hebrew inscription with the Aramaic textual content of the Seder Haggadah, which incorporates the phrase “next year in Jerusalem.” In between there are illustrations of slave labor and the exodus, which, piquantly, are modeled on the traditional Egyptian wall work that Carl Richard Lepsius delivered to Berlin from his Egyptian expedition in 1845.

This is the place issues get fascinating. This mixture of Jewish and Arabic discovered a spectacular continuation within the Frankfurt rabbi household. Josef Horovitz, son and brother of rabbis and himself a revered Talmudist, turned to the traditional Arabic scholar al-Wāqidī in his Berlin doctorate, taught as a professor on the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligargh, India from 1907 to 1914, which made him a satisfied anti-colonialist, and in 1925 turned the “foreign director” of the primary Orientalist Institute on the newly based Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In his institute idea, the Jewish-Arab coexistence of the household Seder lives on, so to talk.

As a consultant of Cultural Zionism, which has such a nasty hand at the moment, he envisaged a bilingual institute the place scientists and imams would train in Arabic and Hebrew. “Perhaps the planned institute is primarily intended to initiate a rapprochement by uniting Jews and Arabs for the common cultivation of Arabic literature and for research into Islamic civilization and the history of the Orient,” he wrote within the “Frankfurter Zeitung” on August 16, 1925. Horovitz’s plans failed, however he impressed his associates in Palestine to kind the Brit Shalom motion, which known as for a binational, democratic state for Jews and Arabs. And his scholar Fritz Goitein, the nice Geniza researcher who made aliya in 1923 in the identical ship as Gershom Scholem, inherited Horovitz. In a polemic in 1946 he wrote: “Learning the Arabic language is an integral part of Zionism. We wish that our children, when they go out into the world, can feel like children of the Orient.”

You can not help however be stunned whenever you stroll by this fabulously composed exhibition. Who knew the pictures that Erich Brauer, Scholem’s much-maligned buddy, used to analysis the on a regular basis tradition of Jewish communities in Jerusalem? Who does his ethnographic analysis on the Jewish communities of Yemen and Kurdistan? Who Vambéry, who paved the best way for Theodor Herzl to turn into Sultan? Who Leopold Weiss, who transformed to Islam in Berlin in 1926 and, as Muhammad Assad, labored for years on an annotated English translation of the Koran? Who is the ostracized Berlin Egyptologist Hedwig Fechheimer, who was in a relationship with Carl Einstein for a very long time, and whose work “The Sculpture of the Egyptians,” revealed by Cassirer in 1914, impressed not solely Alberto Giacometti? She dedicated suicide in 1942 to keep away from deportation.

Who knew the Hamburg Arabist Hedwig Klein, with out whose information “The Arabic Dictionary for the Written Language of Today” wouldn’t be the traditional that it’s? She was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942, and her work was solely severely acknowledged by the writer in 2020.

With the exhibition “The Tomorrowlanders” Hanno Loewy says goodbye to the Jewish Museum Hohenems after virtually 22 years as director – it could not have occurred in a extra dignified approach. Exhibition after exhibition, he challenged his and our view of Judaism, and, so far as is conceivable, he gave Hohenems again a chunk of the Jewish spirit that it had for greater than 300 years earlier than the Shoah. What stays on this small city, together with many different nice Jewish buildings, is the villa of the textile producer Anton Rosenthal, which has now been revived by the Jewish Museum. And his brother Isak’s villa, which since this yr has housed the Literaturhaus Vorarlberg, essentially the most lovely one round.

The Orientals. Jewish researchers and adventurers in the hunt for their very own within the international. Jewish Museum Hohenems, till October 4, 2026. The catalog revealed by Wallstein prices 28.80 euros.