É. Apor , I. Ormos (ed.): Goldziher Memorial Conference, June 21–22, 2000, Budapest.
HOPKINS, Simon: The Language Studies of Ignaz Goldziher
THE LANGUAGE STUDIES OF IGNAZ GOLDZIHER firmly in the texts themselves, the literary traditions in which they arose and to which they led. This characteristic is already very well developed in Sichat-Jiczchak, the essay on Hebrew prayer published when he was twelve years of age. In this work he uses a large number of mediaeval sources in order to illustrate the history and practice of the Hebrew liturgy. The language of that liturgy is of much less interest to him, but when matters of Hebrew language arise in the course of the argument, Goldziher, with remarkably sure touch, gives them the philological attention they require. Thus, on p. 8 he shows how the foreign root "poet" has been integrated into the Hebrew language according to the noun patterns ( qattäl ), ICD (qatlän) and DVD (qittül). This morphological explanation of the words themselves is followed on pp. 9-11 by a criticism of the Hebrew language of the paytanim, already in 1862 based in characteristic Goldziher fashion on a generous selection of quotations from the sources. Goldziher delighted in exploiting the possibilities afforded by a rich and varied tradition of literature. For this reason, one assumes, he never showed much interest, for example, in Semitic epigraphy, a field in which much of the material is by its very nature fragmentary and which could never have given him much intellectual satisfaction. It was for the same reason that he collected Arabic vocabulary from the huge number of Arabic texts which he read, but seems not to have recorded grammatical phenomena on the same scale; the lexicon of a language is important to the historian of culture and ideas in a way that morphology and syntax are not. Goldziher followed the practice of other 19th century Arabists, e.g. Th. Nöldeke, and was accustomed to note new words and interesting vocabulary in the margins of Freytag's Lexicon Arabico-Latinum. After Goldziher's death in 1921 his copy of Freytag's Lexicon had a chequered history. For many years it was considered lost; it was unavailable to the editors of the Wörterbuch der klassischen arabischen Sprache. Goldziher's annotated copy of the four volumes of the Lexicon , however, has recently come to light in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 82 [The book did not reach Jerusalem in 1924 together with the bulk of the library, but was retained by Goldziher's widow (d. 1925) and son Károly Goldziher (d. 1955), together with interleaved copies of his own works containing profuse additions, notes and corrections for eventual revised editions. In March 1944, or shortly thereafter, with the German occupation of Hungary, the confinement of the Jews to the ghetto 8 ' and the impending approach of the battle front, Károly Goldziher delivered it to J. Somogyi, in whose custody it survived the military operations, unlike the rest of the books and documents, which were destroyed during the siege of Budapest. In all probability Károly did not present Goldziher's Freytag as a gift, but 8 2 Könyvlcltár 5761/1986 sz. Shelfmark 743.391. 8 3 [Together with a number of outstanding Jewish scholars Károly enjoyed the protection of the Regent, i.e. he did not have to move into the ghetto; see K. Frojimovics, G. Komoróczy, V. Pusztai & A. Strbik, Jewish Budapest. Monuments. Rites, History, Budapest 1999, 403. 1. O.]. 101
