Josef Horovitz

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Josef Horovitz ( July 26, 1874 in Lauenburg in Pomerania - February 5, 1931 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German orientalist . His academic focus was on early Arabic poetry and the research of the diverse Jewish, Christian and other influences on early Islam, on the Islamic prophet Mohammed and the Koran .

Origin, youth and studies, academic career

Josef Horovitz was born as one of eleven siblings to the orthodox Frankfurt rabbi Markus Horovitz (1844-1910). He grew up in a traditionally Jewish milieu in Frankfurt. Even before his studies he had acquired a thorough knowledge of Hebrew and traditional Jewish literature. After attending the philanthropist , he enrolled at the University of Berlin in 1892 to study oriental languages ​​and literature and studied with Eduard Sachau .

In 1898 Josef Horovitz completed his studies with a dissertation on the Arab historian al-Wāqidī . With Eduard Sachau he edited the writings of the Arab historian Muhammad ibn Saʿd . From 1902 Josef Horovitz worked as a lecturer at the University of Berlin . In order to develop early Arabic manuscripts, he traveled to Turkey, Egypt, Palestine and Syria. In 1904 he submitted his habilitation thesis, a commentary on the writings of the Shiite poet Kumait.

In 1907 Josef Horovitz married Laura Schleier, shortly before he was the first European to accept a professorship at the Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental College of Aligarh (later Aligarh Muslim University ), founded in India in 1878 , where he taught Arabic and was curator for Islamic inscriptions on behalf of the Indian Council . In this capacity he edited the Epigraphia Indo-Moslemica , the collection of Islamic inscriptions from India (1909–1912). As a German he lost his job when the First World War broke out in 1914 and was briefly interned.

On his return to Germany he was from 1915 until his death professor of Semitic languages at the Oriental Institute of the University of Frankfurt , where among other Shlomo Dov Goitein , Richard Ettinghausen , Ilse light townspeople and Heinrich Speyer were among his students. His chair was an endowed chair of the Jewish banker Jakob Heinrich Schiff . To set up the Oriental Seminar at the University of Frankfurt, Horovitz acquired the library of the Orientalist Jakob Barth (1851-1914) and part of the library of the Orientalist Hermann Reckendorf (Orientalist, 1863) from the funds of the Jakob Heinrich Schiff Foundation . During the First World War, Horovitz was consulted for assessments of the anti-British revolutionary potential in India. His statements made in this context influenced German war propaganda.

Horovitz has been a member of its board of trustees since the foundation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1918. He founded the Department of Oriental Studies at the Hebrew University and became its “Visiting Director”, as he headed the department until his death. Since 1925 he lectured at the Hebrew University.

Scientific work, death, inheritance

At first Josef Horovitz devoted himself to the study of historical Arabic literature . Then he founded the concordance of early Arabic poetry as a collective project, for which he let the printed divans get bogged down. To this day, the one and a half million entries recorded under Horovitz's direction are a centerpiece of Jerusalem's oriental studies and a magnet for researchers from all over the world.

In his Koranische investigations (1926) he used his method of detailed analysis of the language of Mohammed and his followers as well as historical knowledge from the study of the early texts themselves. In his treatise Jewish Proper Names and Derivatives in the Koran as well as in Das Koranische Paradies he examined the relations between Islam and Judaism. His work India under British rule extends from the time of the first Islamic dynasty in Delhi to the appearance of Gandhi .

His main work was a commentary on the Koran , which remained unfinished because Josef Horovitz died unexpectedly on February 5, 1931 in Frankfurt am Main as a result of a stroke before a planned research trip. His work The World View of the Koran and the critical edition of the writings of the Arab historian al-Balādhurī also remained unfinished .

On February 8, 1931, Josef Horovitz was buried in the Israelite cemetery in Frankfurt. His older brother, Rabbi Jakob Horovitz, gave the funeral oration. Among the guests at the funeral were representatives of the Turkish Embassy in Berlin who thanked the deceased “in the name of the Islamic peoples” for his services to international understanding, as well as representatives of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Judaism .

Laura Horovitz had decreed in her will that the academic estate of her husband should belong to the Oriental Seminar of the University of Frankfurt under the supervision of Gotthold Weil . Weil was asked by the Philosophical Faculty to examine the estate and in a letter dated February 16, 1934 expressed his concerns about the inheritance. On this basis, the university's board of trustees decided to reject the inheritance. Weil only listed factual reasons for rejecting the estate in his report, although it should have already been clear to him at the time that the scientific legacy of a Jew would not be safely kept in the hands of the National Socialists and would not be properly evaluated. What happened to Horovitz's estate is therefore unknown.

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Footnotes

  1. ^ Gudrun Jäger: The Jewish Islamic scholar Josef Horovitz and the chair for Semitic philology at the University of Frankfurt am Main 1915-1949 . In: Jörn Kobes, Jan-Otmar Hesse (Ed.): Frankfurt scientists between 1933 and 1945 . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2008. pp. 61–79, here p. 71, note 29.
  2. Two of the eight volumes were edited by Josef Horovitz: Volume II, Part 1: The Campaigns of Muhammad and Volume III, Part 2: Biographies of the Medinian fighters of Muhammad in the battle of Bedr .
  3. The Hāšimijjāt of the Kumait . EJ Brill, Leiden 1904.
  4. Baruch Horovitz: Horovitz, Josef . In: Neue Deutsche Biographie 9 (1972), p. 641 f.
  5. Gudrun Jäger: The Jewish Islamic scholar Josef Horovitz and the chair for Semitic Philology at the University of Frankfurt am Main 1915-1949 . In: Jörn Kobes, Jan-Otmar Hesse (Ed.): Frankfurt scientists between 1933 and 1945 . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2008. pp. 61–79, here p. 66.
  6. ^ Rainer Herbster: Libraries of the Institute for Oriental and East Asian Philologies . In: Sabine Wefers , Eve Picard (edit.): Handbook of historical book stocks in Germany. Volume 5: Hessen (A - L) . Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim 1992. ISBN 3-487-09579-3 . Pp. 168–171, here p. 168.
  7. ^ Heike Liebau: "Enterprises and Aufwiegelungen": The Berlin Indian Independence Committee in the files of the Political Archive of the Foreign Office (1914–1920) . In: MIDA Archival Reflexicon . 2019, p. 2 ( projekt-mida.de ).
  8. ^ In: Hebrew Union College Annual , Cincinnati, Vol. 2 (1925).
  9. Scripta Universitatis atque Bibliothecae Hierosolymitanarum. Orientalia et iudaica , Vol. 1.2, Jerusalem 1923.
  10. ^ BG Teubner Verlag , Leipzig 1928.
  11. ^ Gudrun Jäger: The Jewish Islamic scholar Josef Horovitz and the chair for Semitic philology at the University of Frankfurt am Main 1915-1949 . In: Jörn Kobes, Jan-Otmar Hesse (Ed.): Frankfurt scientists between 1933 and 1945 . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2008. pp. 61–79, here p. 77.
  12. ^ Gudrun Jäger: The Jewish Islamic scholar Josef Horovitz and the chair for Semitic philology at the University of Frankfurt am Main 1915-1949 . In: Jörn Kobes, Jan-Otmar Hesse (Ed.): Frankfurt scientists between 1933 and 1945 . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2008. pp. 61–79, here p. 71.

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