Joseph Halévy, Racial Scholarship and the “Sumerian Problem”
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philological encounters 2 (2017) 321-345 brill.com/phen Joseph Halévy, Racial Scholarship and the “Sumerian Problem” Netanel Anor Freie Universität Berlin [email protected] Abstract This article deals with the different racial approaches that influenced the academic debate known as “The Sumerian problem”. The so-called “problem” under discussion was the racial affiliation of the inventors of the first writing system, the cuneiform script. The notion of ‘race’, which tied religion, language and culture into one essence, played a key role here. Some scholars were eager to prove the “non-Semitic character” of such a major invention. Others were convinced that only “Semites” inhabited an- cient Babylonia and thus were the only possible inventors of writing. The focus of this paper is Joseph Halévy, who was the determined leader of the “anti-Sumerist” camp. This article will show that Halévy shared many essentialist views with his anti-Semitic protagonists. He did this by applying a ‘pro-Semitic’ approach to the ‘Sumerian-problem’. * I owe thanks to Nathan Wasserman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who first intro- duced me to this topic. Thanks are also due to Steven Aschheim of the Hebrew University and Udi Greenberg, now at Dartmouth College, who gave me important guidelines in this field of fin du siècle intellectual history. Some of the ideas here were published in the Hebrew review Hayo Haya in 2008. Since then, many new sources have become available to me. In this regard, I owe thanks to Markham J. Geller of the Freie Universität Berlin who directed me to some of Halévy’s correspondence kept in the collection of Irving L. Finkel, whom I also wish to thank for allowing me to publish parts of it here. Finally, I wish to express my grati- tude to the organisers of the 2013 conference “Semitic Philology within European Intellectual History: Constructions of Race, Religion and Language in Scholarly Practice”, Islam Dayeh, Ya’ar Hever, Elizabeth Eva Johnston and Markus Messling, who gave me the opportunity to present the subject. I greatly profited from the different papers and fruitful comments given there. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi �0.��63/�45�9�97-��340033Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 01:07:51PM via free access 322 Anor Keywords Semites – cuneiform race – Joseph Halévy – Sumerian Introduction During the nineteenth-century, Western scholars showed increasing interest in the civilizations of the Ancient Near East. At first, it was the ancient Egyptian kingdoms that were the focal point of attention of Oriental academic research, as a result of Napoleon’s campaign to Egypt in 1799-1800. The enterprise of de- ciphering the language and ancient scripts used on the shores of the Nile was completed by 1824. It was considered to be an enormous scientific breakthrough at the time, since for the first time in western history, a language and script lost and unknown for thousands of years was made a subject of modern scholar- ship. In the middle of the nineteenth century an opening to yet another Ancient Near Eastern civilization was cracked. As the excavations in the Assyrian tells revealed impressive findings, and after the Behistun inscription was deciphered, a door to the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia was finally opened. Both the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations intrigued Western scholars, as well as the wider public, but the type of interest each civilization drew was very distinct. The study of Mesopotamian civilization generated se- vere polemics and disputes, whereas in the case of the ancient civilization of the Nile it was more its aesthetics and visual imagery that drew the attention and imagination of the West.1 Western discourse spawned a dichotomy where- by the study of ancient Mesopotamia was much more related to inner issues of western identity, while the interest in ancient Egyptian civilization was driven by the urge to discover the alien and unknown.2 This does not mean that the dawn of Egyptology was not engaged to some level with cultural appropriation of Egypt’s past in the West,3 but that the debates in that field were never as 1 For this difference in reception, see: נתן וסרמן, "מדוע לא נסע טין-טין לבבל? אשורולוגיה ,פוליטיקה ותרבות במאה ה19- ובמהלך המאה ה20-" קשת החדשה 13 (סתיו 2005): 149-163. 2 For the process of alienation of non-Western roots in the modern perception of the Classical world, see Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1987). See especially Ibid., 281-336, for the period under discussion in the current study. See also Ibid., 189-280, which discusses the complexity of the process that first included hostility towards Egypt, then, mixed emotions, and fascination, only later leading to alienation driven by racial world views. 3 Edward Said, Orientalism (New-York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 42. philological encountersDownloaded from 2 Brill.com09/27/2021 (2017) 321-345 01:07:51PM via free access Joseph Halévy, Racial Scholarship and the “Sumerian Problem” 323 fierce as those held in Assyriology, and never reached the amplitude of contro- versies such as “The Sumerian Problem” or “Babel und Bible”.4 In the mid-nineteenth-century, scholars commonly employed the concept of race. This was done in a manner completely unknown to the ancient cul- tures they examined. They divided human species into distinct rival groups. They openly argued that some races were superior to others, evaluated their “linguistic advantages” and “disadvantages” or defined them as “dynamic” or “degenerate”. This attitude was driven by an essentialist approach that as- sumed a primordial and indispensable link between language, religion, cul- ture, technological abilities, and human spirit. This application of the term ‘race’ became more and more prominent in the context of the quest for the origins of language. This topic was already important among intellectuals of the 16th and 17th century, but it was especially developed throughout the 18th century. First, by the idea that “Schythian” (the original Aryan language) is at the origin of the languages of Europe, and hence also of its nations. The idea gained increasing support through new methods of linguistic comparatism de- veloped by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.5 Subsequently, this type of knowledge was developed further by scholars of the later 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, such as William Jones and Friedrich von Schlegel and, then after that, by their successors, Franz Bopp and F. Max Müller.6 Subjecting the newly discovered cultures of ancient Babylonia to racial ter- minology in this academic environment was almost inevitable. Hence, we find that the attribution of terms such as “Semites”, “Scythians” or “Aryans” are ap- plied in this context, not only to the language groups of ancient Babylonia, but also to it’s different political entities, cultural tendencies, and mytho- logical traditions. The dichotomy “Semites” vs. “Aryans” played an especially prominent role in this discourse that shaped the cultures of the past according to the molds of nineteenth-century terms.7 4 For more information about this polemic, see Reinhard G. Lehmann, Friedrich Delitzsch und der Babel-Bibel-Streit (Freiburg (Schweitz): Universitäts Verlag Freiburg Schweitz, 1994). For the impact of this controversy within Jewish scholarship see Yaacov Shavit and Mordechai Eran, The Hebrew Bible Reborn: From Holy Scripture to the Book of Books; A History of Biblical Culture and the Battles over the Bible in Modern Judaism (Berlin, New-York: Walter De Gruyter, 2007). 5 Maurice Olender, Les langues du Paradis: Aryens et Sémites, un couple providentiel (Paris: Le Seuil, 1989), 14. 6 Ibid., 20-23. See also a more recent account of the role of these scholars in the construction of a racial world history on the basis of language by Tuska Benes, In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology, and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), especially 207-250. 7 Olender, Les langues du Paradis. philological encounters 2 (2017) 321-345 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 01:07:51PM via free access 324 Anor These were the circumstances in which “the Sumerian Problem” emerged.8 The question was whether a non-Semitic language existed in Mesopotamia prior to Akkadian. The present article focuses on the position taken in this debate by Joseph Halévy, one of the most prominent scholars of Semitic lan- guages at that time. I argue here that Halévy’s stance in the debate was driven by his “pro-Semitic” perspective, which enabled him to take an active part in the racial discourse common in nineteenth-century European universities. In other words, it is shown here that Halévy served as a propagating agent of ra- cial ideas, without which the debate about the Sumerian language would not have been possible. The Birth of Assyriology: “Who Invented Cuneiform?” In the year 1842, the French consul in Mosul, Paul-Émile Botta, started his exca- vations at Kuyunjik (ancient Nineveh) and Khorsabad (ancient Dur-Sharrukin). Some three years later an English traveler and orientalist, Sir Austen Henry Layard started his digging in Kuyunjik and dug the modern tell of Nimrud (an- cient Kalhu). It was he who identified Kuyunjik as part of the large complex of the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh. These discoveries initiated the inter- est of the West in the ancient culture of Mesopotamia. A first notion concerning the nature of the languages spoken in this region came only later, as a result of the decipherment of the Behistun inscription. This inscription was mostly discovered by Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, an English officer and later colonial statesman. As a first step, he had to accom- plish, by 1936, the complex enterprise of copying it from the high cliff on which it was engraved.9 He then approached the task of deciphering the inscription.