For Lust of Knowing by Robert Irwin

Author:Robert Irwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2006-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE BELATED REVIVAL OF OXFORD ORIENTALISM

The appointment of William Robertson Smith to the Thomas Adams Professorship in 1870 had established a great intellectual tradition in Arabic studies at Cambridge that would include Edward Palmer and then the twentieth-century professors, Browne, Nicholson, A. J. Arberry and Malcolm Lyons. But the first intellectually commanding figure to hold the Laudian Chair of Arabic in Oxford since the seventeenth century, Margoliouth, was appointed only in 1889.36 David Samuel Margoliouth (1858–1940), the son of a Jewish rabbi who had converted to Christianity, was born in Bethnal Green. He won a scholarship to Winchester and later read classics at Oxford and was awarded a first. Although he was to make a name for himself as an Arabist, he was first a classicist and he taught Latin and Greek to, among others, the future Regius Professor of Greek Gilbert Murray and the historian H. A. L. Fisher. Murray thought that Margoliouth lectured on Pindar not because he particularly liked the Greek poet’s works, but because they raised difficult textual problems. Margoliouth was an eccentric genius in several languages, including Persian, Hebrew and Sanskrit. He was also striking in appearance. An Italian maid exclaimed on seeing him, ‘Questo bel animale feroce!’

Having tutored the classics for most of the 1880s and published some fairly dry stuff about scholia (classical commentaries), he took up Arabic and was appointed Laudian Professor at the age of thirty – a post which he held until his retirement in 1937. He became ordained and gained a reputation as a great preacher. During the First World War he lectured in India. After the war, he spent a lot of time in Baghdad. The travel writer and influential political figure Gertrude Bell, who was in Baghdad in 1918, wrote home to England about Margoliouth’s appearance there and how he lectured for fifty minutes by the clock on the ancient splendours of Baghdad in classical Arabic and without a note. ‘It is the talk of the town. It’s generally admitted that he knows more of Arabic language and history than any Arab here.’ But in another letter she noted that at a later lecture given by Margoliouth, a brave member of the audience asked, ‘How do you say in Arabic – Do you drive a motor car?’, which angered the classically erudite professor.37 According to The Times’s obituary of Margoliouth, he ‘spoke the vernacular with scholarly precision; but the accent and intonation were not very much like any Arab’, and the general consensus seems to have been that he spoke an Arabic that was so pure that ordinary Arabs could not understand it.

In the year he became professor he published Analecta Orientalia ad Poeticam Aristoteleam (1887), a collection of translations of Arabic and Syriac texts that might be used for textual criticism of the Greek text of Aristotle’s Poetics. Margoliouth, who was brilliant at crosswords and anagrams, had the kind of beautiful mind that could see patterns where none existed. Among other things he conducted eccentric investigations into possible anagrams and chronograms in the Iliad and Odyssey.

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