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Between Sciences of Origins and Religions of the Future: Questions of Philology philological encounters � (�0�7) �0�-�36 brill.com/phen Between Sciences of Origins and Religions of the Future: Questions of Philology Maurice Olender École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales [email protected] Abstract The antique Christian “appropriation” of Hebrew by the Early Church Fathers was suc- ceeded historically by a kind of scholarly appropriation that resulted in the emergence of a “ready-made India” founded on a new discourse about Sanskrit. In a world gov- erned by romanticist visions undergirded with colonial aspirations, in a historical pe- riod between a Christianity weakened by Enlightenment philosophers and the advancement of scientistic secularism, certain scholarly fables about a primordial India came to resemble the fables about Hebrew. In this race toward the discovery of human origins, the new “Aryan Bible” required a new language of paradise: Sanskrit. Can one then say that India was appropriated within a scholarly environment that was being pulled between Christianity, secularism and scientism? Since our investigations have allowed us to demonstrate that this hypothesis is plausible, it is necessary to test this hypothesis through the clarification of the historical contexts, intellectual dynam- ics, and theological and political fields of action in which myth and reason mutually reinforce one another. While underlining the political stakes of the comparative meth- od of anthropology, this article also recalls that not so long ago, knowledge of ancient and modern humanities often bore the mark of racial sciences that influenced all uni- versity disciplines from the early 19th century to the late 1940s. * This essay was first delivered in French as the keynote lecture of the conference on “Semitic Philology within European Intellectual History. Constructions of Race, Religion and Language in Scholarly Practice” on the 19th of June 2013 at Freie Universität Berlin. The conference was organised by Islam Dayeh, Elizabeth Eva Johnston, Ya’ar Hever and Markus Messling. I wish to thank Ya’ar Hever for his translation of this essay. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi �0.��63/�45�9�97-��340030Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 02:54:47AM via free access 202 olender Keywords Hebrew – archives – Church Fathers – etymology – otherness – memory – oblivion The bishop of Seville, Isidore, who died in 636, contributed to the develop- ment of a mode of the representation of origins that would play a determining technical role in the history of European philology. In his famous Etymologies, conscious of the appeal exerted by the primordial mark of words, Saint Isidore warns his reader: “When you see from whence the name takes its origin, you will understand what its power is.”1 A thousand years later, Jean Bodin, one of the masters of the New History [Nouvelle histoire], took an interest in the fascination exerted on historians by “the origins of peoples.” They are “tormented” by this haunting “question” that takes hold of scholars’ reason, sinking them into “error”—both “early histori- ans” and “more recent writers.”2 On Otherness: Between Attraction and Repulsion Before examining certain ancient and modern sources that attest to structured bodies of knowledge by way of disparate representations of the indigenous, I will give some consideration to the manifold practices, especially compara- tive ones, that allow one to elucidate the notion of “Zukunftsphilologie.” Among the possible meanings (“the future” or “the forthcoming” of philology, or rather “a philology to come,” “emerging philology” or even “an anticipatory philology, sounding the alarm”), I choose to focus on a double-sided figure: simultaneously theory and careful practice, critical and self-critical, attentive to the shifts of science, techniques and supports, and attentive to the diverse forms of recomposing the past, a future-oriented philology. Being as much ar- chaeological as it is genealogical, such a “Zukunftsphilologie” would give rise to interdisciplinary perspectives where poetical analyses intersect with po- litical approaches—without forgetting that the poetic has often been able to formulate the political. One last important point: the present importance of the digital universe. Characterized notably by rapid transformation and the lability of media, the uses of digital humanities redesign our practices and 1 Isidore, Etymologiarum, 1.49, 29.2, Patr. Lat. 82, 1850, 106: Nam cum videris unde ortum est nomen, citius vim ejus intellegis. 2 For Bodin, see below n. 25 and following. philological encountersDownloaded from 2 Brill.com09/25/2021 (2017) 201-236 02:54:47AM via free access Between Sciences Of Origins And Religions Of The Future 203 our approaches to the archive, to memory and to oblivion—but without safe- guarding this revamped knowledge from old biases.3 It is thus due to the initiative of the research programme “Zukunftsphilo- logie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship” that I open the confer- ence on “Semitic Philology.” And it is customary to open a presentation on an “academic” or intellectual subject with acknowledgements.4 These are often received as a purely social game, but they are not in the least “rhetorical.” The choice of an explicit formulation is part of a researcher’s approach that takes the institutional and academic drives as various economic and intellectual in- frastructures, which are also simultaneously a system of technical constraints and a vibrant incentive for research. In a quite different context, the poet Paul Celan stressed the significant in- tellectual importance of Danken (“to thank”). In his Bremen speech, delivered in January 26, 1958 upon his reception of the prize awarded by this Hanseatic city,5 the poet begins at once with two verbs of action: Denken und Danken—to think and to thank. Two terms that, as he explains, have in German “one and the same origin.”6 In pronouncing these two terms aloud, might Paul Celan, 3 One type of intellectual mechanism that is well known in the history of science—see notes below. On archives, memory, oblivion, and “a critical way of practicing historiographic medi- tation,” see recently Maurice Olender, “Un Fantôme dans la bibliothèque,” La Librairie du XXIème siècle, Paris: Seuil, 2017, 13-89. 4 As I have done in the oral presentation of this essay, I wish to thank Joachim Küpper, the director of the Dahlem Humanities Center at the Freie Universität Berlin; Islam Dayeh, who initiated the interdisciplinary and international team of “Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship” at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Freie Universität Berlin, and Angelika Neuwirth who has been a great inspiration for new insights into philol- ogy. I extend my appreciation to my colleague Markus Messling for presenting me and my work, showing above all his generosity, the editor of a new German edition of The Languages of Paradise (Maurice Olender, Die Sprachen des Paradieses. Religion, Rassentheorie und Textkultur. Revidierte Neuausgabe, hg. und mit einem Vorwort von Markus Messling. Aus dem Französischen von Peter D. Krumme. Mit dem Vorwort zur Erstausgabe von Jean-Pierre Vernant. Mit einem Essay von Jean Starobinski. Berlin, Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2013). It is Markus Messling who, being himself a member of the board of “Zukunftsphilologie,” invited me to open this colloquium. 5 Celan, Paul. Le Méridien & autres proses, édition bilingue, traduit de l’allemand et annoté par Jean Launay, La Librairie du XXIe siècle, Paris: Seuil, 2002, 55. 6 More precisely, “Denken und Danken sind in unserer Sprache Worte ein und desselben Ursprungs.” (ibid.) We can mention here not only Heidegger, with whom Paul Celan had a complex relationship, to say the least. The affinities between denken und danken are a com- monplace in the theological tradition. This semantic pair is found in, among many others, Goethe, Husserl, and Thomas Mann. philological encounters 2 (2017) 201-236 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 02:54:47AM via free access 204 olender who knew Hebrew, have remembered that when transcribed into Hebrew or- thography without vowels, the Yiddish verbs denken7 and danken could form the very same linguistic icon, a consonantal unit: DNKN? Thus, every research endeavor bears the mark of an intellectual formation. A short word therefore on the process that led me to focus on these particular questions and on the chosen manner of formulating and defining the prob- lems. Being an archaeologist by training, after my studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, I arrived in Paris to study comparative mythology during the sev- enties of the last century. At the Ecole des hautes études, I participated in the seminars of Marcel Detienne, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and later also those of Nicole Loraux, where I met Froma Zeitlin of Princeton, who was at the Wissenschaftskolleg that year; Renate Schlesier, a professor at the Freie Universität Berlin; and Dominique Bourrel, who was later commuting between Paris, Jerusalem and Berlin. Along with many others, we found each other at the beginning of the 1980s in the company of researchers coming from disparate horizons, conducting inquiries in which the distant, both in time and in space, could elucidate the nearby. In the same years in which comparativism and interdisciplinarity guided historiographical and anthropological developments, we were mindful of the mirror games between cultures and civilizations, and the challenges of the transmission of knowledge between generations of scholars.8 Within this intel- lectual environment, Léon Poliakov, a historian of Anti-Semitism, who, going beyond the multiple types of Anti-Judaism, endeavoured to think and com- pare various forms of social exclusion, organized interdisciplinary comparative meetings at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and in Cerisy-La-Salle. Here I met, most notably, Serge Moscovici, Jacques Le Goff, Arnaldo Momigliano, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and many other friends and colleagues including biolo- gists, geneticists, and statisticians.9 These intellectual activities also gave rise to the periodical Le Genre humain [The Human Race] in 1981. 7 “To think” is also said trakhtn in Yiddish (undoubtedly related to German trachten).
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