É. Apor , I. Ormos (ed.): Goldziher Memorial Conference, June 21–22, 2000, Budapest.

ESS, Josef van: Goldziher as a Contemporary of Islamic Reform

GOLDZIHER AS A CONTEMPORARY OF ISLAMIC REFORM II. Goldziher's diary is a separate story. When, long after his death, it was made available to the public in 1978

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, there were people who openly regretted its having been printed without any abridgments.

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4 The shock was great; nobody had expected such emotional outbursts from a well-balanced scholar such as Goldziher. The passages we have to deal with for our purpose are emotional, too, but they are so in a positive sense; they reveal unrestrained enthusiasm about the cultural environment which he came to know during his trip to the Near East. There is this famous comment about his stay in Damascus: "1 truly entered in those weeks into the spirit of Islam to such an extent that ultimately I became inwardly convinced that I myself was a Muslim and judiciously discovered that this was the only religion which, even in its doctrinal and official formulation, can satisfy philosophical minds. My ideal was to elevate Judaism to a similar rational level. Islam, my experience taught me, was the only religion in which superstition and pagan elements were proscribed, not by rationalism but by the Orthodox doctrine"."

2 Or, later on in Cairo: "My way of thinking was completely directed towards Islam; also subjectively I was drawn in this direction by my sympathies. I called my monotheism Islam, and 1 did not lie when I said that I believed in Muhammad's prophecies". '' We should not forget that all this was written in retrospection, sixteen years after the event. We have, however, an older version of it, namely the notes made by Goldziher during the journey itself. Strangely enough, he did not look them up when he formulated the introductory chapter to his later diary; he relied on his memory, and he did not realize that he was confusing certain details.

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7 His notes are sometimes very laconic and rather difficult to interpret.

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2 Moreover, they end one month after his arrival in Cairo; he had become very busy when he started attending 2

3 Ignaz Goldziher, Tagebuch. Hrsg. Alexander Scheiber, Leiden 1978. 2

4 E. Ullendorf? in his review in BSOAS 42 (1979), 553. 2

2 Tagebuch 59. 2

6 Ib. 71. "

7 This has been shown by the editor of this text: Raphael Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and his Oriental Diary. A Translation and Psychological Portrait, Detroit 1987, 65 f. 2

2 The edition is not without mistakes; Patai was not always able to interpret Arabic quotations correctly or to identify the persons mentioned in the text (cf. the article by L. I. Conrad in JRAS 1990, 105 ff.). Patai was not an Arabist. He was born in Budapest and had heard about Goldziher through the comments of his father; later on he had studied, in 1930-31, for a short time with C. Brockelmann at Breslau before moving to Jerusalem and finally to the United States (13; cf. also id., The Jews of Hungary, Detroit 1996, 394 ff.). Rich material about his own biography can be found in his books Apprentice in Budapest. Memories of a World That Is No More, Salt Lake City 1988, and Between Budapest and Jerusalem. The Patai Letters, 1933-1938, Salt Lake City 1992. His "psychological portrait" of Goldziher has been criticized by L. I. Conrad in a second article in the same volume of JRAS 1990, 225 ff. 41