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172 Engberts
Chapter 7 Orientalists at War Personae and Partiality at the Outbreak of the First World War
Christiaan Engberts
1 Introduction
“I don’t feel hate, only a deep sadness, because I have revered and loved Snouck. He was an ideal of scholarly personality to me. A wonderful illusion has been shattered.”1 Carl Heinrich Becker, professor for Oriental philology in Bonn, wrote these disappointed words to his colleague Theodor Nöldeke in February 1915. Two days later Nöldeke would pass them on to the scholar Becker used to revere and love, the Leiden professor for Arabic, Christiaan Snouck Hurgron- je.2 Before the outbreak of the First World War these highly-respected Semi- tists had always appreciated each other’s company and scholarly output. By early 1915, however, the relation between Snouck and Becker seemed to have incurably deteriorated and Nöldeke seemed to be caught up between the two unforgiving antagonists. The war had worked as a catalyst in disclosing a wide range of misunderstandings and disagreements about scholarly honesty, pro- fessional cooperation and political attitudes. In this chapter I will explore how the concept of scholarly personae may allow us a better understanding of both Becker’s and Snouck’s mutual recriminations as well as their eventual careful reconciliation. In order to do this, I will first shortly introduce the adversaries. Subsequently I will look into the wide range of disagreements between them. This overview will allow me to close with a reflection on how the analytical tool of the scholarly persona may be helpful to our understanding of this and other conflicts. Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje was born in 1857 in the Dutch village of Ooster- hout.3 He studied Semitic languages with Michael Jan de Goeje in Leiden. After
1 Carl Heinrich Becker to Theodor Nöldeke, 24 February 1915, Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen (hereafter UBT): Md 782 A 16. 2 Nöldeke to Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, 26 February 1915, Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden (hereafter UBL), Or. 8952 A: 757. 3 A more extensive biographical sketch of Snouck Hurgronje can be found in Arnoud Vrolijk and Richard van Leeuwen, Arabic Studies in the Netherlands: A Short History in Portraits, 1580- 1950, trans. Alastair Hamilton (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 117-150.
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Orientalists at War: Personae and Partiality 173
receiving his doctor’s degree cum laude in 1880 he further added to his linguis- tic knowledge by studying with Nöldeke in Strassburg. Nöldeke would later look back at him as “surely his most significant student.”4 Though Snouck’s first job was as a lecturer at the municipal Leiden college for the training of East Indian civil servants, De Goeje and Nöldeke had good reason to fear that their best student would turn his back on a scholarly career. In 1884 and 1885 he visited Jeddah and Mecca and in 1889 he accepted a position as an adviser to the colonial government in the Dutch East Indies. “It is a shame that Snouck attaches himself so much to the tropics,” Nöldeke complained, “but when [he] really wants something, nobody can talk him out of it.”5 His scholarly reputa- tion, however, grew steadily, both through his scathing criticisms of contempo- rary scholarship and through his highly regarded books, the most famous of which were Mekka (Mecca, 1888-1889), De Atjehers (The Acehnese, 1893-1894), and Het Gajōland en zijne bewoners (The Gajoland and Its Inhabitants, 1903). In 1905 he returned to the Netherlands. One year later he would succeed his teacher De Goeje as professor of Arabic in Leiden, while maintaining his func- tion as an advisor to the Dutch colonial authorities and assuming an important role in the establishment of a new school for the training of East Indian civil servants.6 Snouck died in 1936, but his personal life and the entanglement of his scholarly and political legacy have continued to cause controversy amongst later generations of scholars.7 Carl Heinrich Becker was born in a German merchant family in Amsterdam in 1876. He studied Oriental languages in Heidelberg with Carl Bezold. Bezold had been friends with Snouck ever since the time they both studied with Nöldeke in the early eighteen-eighties.8 After Becker received his doctor’s de- gree cum laude in 1899, he traveled through Egypt, Turkey, and Syria where he
4 Nöldeke to Eduard Meyer, 28 March 1928, in: Der Briefwechsel zwischen Theodor Nöldeke und Eduard Meyer (1884-1929), ed. Gert Audring,