Ignaz Goldziher as a Jewish Orientalist by Tamás Turán

Author:Tamás Turán
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2023-04-03T09:27:42.777000+00:00

If someone is compelled by his religious conscience to abandon a worn-out religion, he should not join another, but should return to God. From lies there is only one refuge: truth, which is with God. God has no temple in this world. Incense is brought to Satan, and the organ is played for the honor of Satan; his servants ascend to the pulpit to profane God’s name. A servant of God keeps himself away from them. (T 170; February 4, 1894).

This meditation (or outburst of desperation) bears the mark of the “Fleeing from God to God” motif; it also echoes pious medieval non-denominational or anti-denominational trends in mystical Islam (Sufism), which, as Goldziher observed, had some intersections with freethinking.886

“Truth” was for Goldziher the tertium comparationis between religion and modern historical-critical scholarship. There is only one truth, and if a “truth” about a particular religion and a “truth” of that religion (i. e., a part of its traditional beliefs) contradict one another, then one of the two must yield to the other. Goldziher was a man of una veritas, not of duplex veritas. He gave precedence to scientific truth about religion—at least this was his declared principle or “policy.” Yet he always criticized both Orthodoxy and Neologs from a scientific-rationalist as well as from a pietistic perspective. In that respect he had (or developed) a dual, philosophical and pietistic-mystical approach not unlike that of al-Ghazali and Baḥya ibn Paquda, and seemingly under their influence, partly at least. As a middle position, or implicit “mediating theology” [Vermittlungstheologie] of sorts—which is liable to “fall between two stools,” as Goldziher writes about the Ash‘arites887—his approach was fragile and ungrateful. It was a peculiar kind of mediating position between Jewish faith and science, diverging considerably from the spectrum of positions within the Hungarian progressive Jewish camp (the Neologs)—which itself was built on a different kind of mediating theology that was criticized by him.

Purity of faith and inner coherence and harmony of worldview, which he admired in people like Mór Kármán and Gustav Bickell (a Catholic scholar of the Bible and Semitic languages),888 resonated strongly with Goldziher, who grew up on Baḥya ibn Paquda’s mystical-ethical treatise. He gave expression to his own aspiration already in 1874, hailing Ghazali for “internalizing” law and for “creating a unified world view from a pile of external laws.”889 He persistently confronted his Jewish audiences with the same ideal. “People of those times,” he remarks on the era and impact of medieval Jewish philosophers in his lecture series, “had a harmonious soul; they still did not have a talent for that bifurcation of the soul [lelkület] which accompanies, as a rule, periods of religious decline”; and stresses, turning to his audience, that “[…] ethics is impossible where there is no truth; a religious soul is unthinkable without a harmonious soul.”890

However, demanding “one truth” (harmony between faith and reason, between science and theology), is easier said than done. In Chapter VI we compared Goldziher’s penchant for religious authenticity, and its tension with his evolutionist-scientific approach to religion, to Renan’s seemingly similar attitudes.

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