Abstract
In this chapter, Simon Wiesgickl shows how, by the end of the eighteenth century, new epistemologies and a new Wissenschaftlichkeit were forming part of the colonial set-up in Germany. He discusses German identity by drawing comparisons between German and foreign cultures, with a focus on the theological discussions that were so central to many debates on German identity. He explains how Johann Gottfried Herder extolled the beauty and value of the Hebrew language and used new ideas and notions of India in his innovative interpretation of the Hebrew Bible as an introduction to the Orient. Herder identified the spirit of poetry and the ‘childhood of mankind’ with the Orient, especially India. By ‘reading in an Indian way’, Herder inspired the German debate about its origin and paved the way for a new ethnographic understanding of the Hebrew Bible. Eventually, he also helped to craft a picture of Indians as noble savages who were mild, close to nature, and fully sensuous.
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There are three basic questions for scholars of religion: ‘How is knowledge about religion and religions produced?’ ‘How is that knowledge authenticated?’ And, ‘how is that knowledge circulated?’ (Chidester 2014: xii). David Chidester, who raises those questions, showed how, by the end of the nineteenth century, comparative imperial religion was formed through connections and networks between the centre and periphery. Scholars of religion agree that our present-day understanding of religion can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Within these processes, entangled histories between the centres of the academic world and its peripheries played a vital role and, in such discussions, identities were formed and boundaries transgressed. Needless to say, there are different ways of addressing the various global perspectives on global religious history.
I intend to use a global perspective, specifically on interrelations between India and Germany, to reflect on a particular historical production of knowledge (Maltese and Strube 2021: 230–5). Entanglements between Germany and India can be understood as specific sites in which interdependencies played out and rationalities began to mingle with larger power structures (Manjapra 2014: 288). The aim of looking deeper into such specific entanglements is ‘to write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and ironies that attend it’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 42).
German interest in Eastern religions does not start in the nineteenth century but can be traced back to the eighteenth century. In the period between 1750 and 1820, some European intellectuals saw Germany as backward. Germans felt inferior to other European nations and, to overcome this deficit, would read travel literature and explore the world extensively. Interestingly, this period of critical self-enquiry was intellectually extremely fruitful for the formation of German culture. In fact, Germany’s close connection to the Orient was a core theme in this quest.
Decades later, Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), a founding father of comparative religion, made use of German critical methods, which had been developed and designed by the end of the eighteenth century, and established them in Great Britain (Chidester 2014: 65). Philology, universal history, and so-called higher criticism can be understood as having emerged from global entanglements.
Here, I shall highlight some peculiarities of German Orientalism, showcase how Old Testament studies especially have been used as spaces for colonial imagination and connect those findings with new epistemologies paving their way around 1800. I will focus especially on some works of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and his broader network in theology and Orientalism.
My central argument is that theology and cultural debates on German origins can illustrate perfectly how a colonial mindset and its attitudes have been at work, even before formal imperialism took place. Old Testament studies were reinvented in those years in Germany, and German methods, wordings, and style took a lead in outrunning every other language. That is why postcolonial approaches might benefit from looking at the years between 1780 and 1820 (Wiesgickl 2018). Discussions and arguments were still fluid and vast at this particular time, but years later they became the amalgam of a fixed imperial set-up.
The historian Iris Schröder sketches changes in the methodology and understanding of scientific practice from 1800 to 1900: She wrote that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, many had been busy forming epistemologies and knowledge. Eventually, we would see how specialization, the formation of disciplines and the loss of cooperative knowledge production had shaped science (Schröder 2013). In this volume, concentrating on the so-called materialism controversy, Mathias Thurner shows the epistemic shifts and turns in the nineteenth century. To look back at times when epistemologies were still in the making promises to mark an important turning point.
Within those epistemic changes, imperial religion can be understood as the endeavour to promote ‘a science of religion that generated global knowledge and power’ (Chidester 2014: 62). In contrast, I will use ‘colonial’ in a wider sense to mark certain power constellations and specific colonial mindsets in scientific and public discourses. A colonial mindset or desire can exist even without formal colonialism. As Kris Manjapra (2014: 285) put it, ‘it is possible both to be a colonizer and, simultaneously, to feel small or inferior’. Some scholars argue that we can speak of German colonial fantasies (Zantop 1997).
In my case, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak inspired this way of handling historical and systematic ideas. In Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak (1999) writes about Germany’s ability to produce scientific representations of the world and the self. She uses cultural critique Raymond Williams’s (1961) concept of ‘pre-emergence’ to illustrate how ideas about classifying and conquering the world were shaped even before the time of imperialism. My aim in this chapter is to show how certain perspectives and intellectual positions were already established in Germany by the end of the eighteenth century and later became part of the imperial production of knowledge we call Eurocentrism.
My interest in the books of the Hebrew Bible and how they are studied is by no means accidental. When around 1900 German intellectuals remembered their first and authentic love of cultures of the so-called East, they were always drawn to the Bible. As Hermann Brunnhofer (1841–1916) put it, ‘the longing for the Orient accompanies the Occidental from the cradle to the grave … The Bible is the book through which the world of the West, even in times of the most melancholy isolation, remains persistently tied to the Orient’ (Brunnhofer 1907: 25). By reinventing the Hebrew Bible around 1800, German intellectuals mirrored their own colonial desires and gaze. Johann Georg Hamann’s (1968: 129) famous ‘pilgrimages to the East’ were the foremost explorations into German identity. If Johann Gottfried Herder spoke about ‘reading in an Indian way’, we can learn almost nothing about India and almost everything about an intense and mind-blowing quarrel over the intellectual formation of German identity.
In Search of the Entanglement: German Orientalism, a Specific Understanding of Wissenschaft, and Their Relationship to Colonialism
Before going back in time, let us start with the question of entanglement. By the end of the eighteenth century, what sorts of entanglements could be found in the contact zone between Germany and India? What is the broader picture in academe, culture, and society?
Of course, such questions are far from being answered in the limited space of this chapter. Nevertheless, I would like to sketch some ideas about this specific entanglement, which is a subject that has already been explored.
German intellectuals were undoubtedly interested in India during the period of Romanticism.Footnote 1 Probably best-known is Friedrich Schlegel’s (1808) Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Interestingly, his first readers and authors like Goethe, Heine, and Schleiermacher were already criticizing his book for being more about Catholicism than Hinduism. This is also the main argument of Nicholas Germana, who claims that around 1800 scholars were using India to illustrate the increasing centrality of German identity (Germana 2009). The eighteenth century saw the Turkish influence diminishing in Europe through the growing number of European colonies, especially the British Empire, which was expanding its control. Culturally, the image of the ‘terrible Turk’ was being replaced by a corrupt and oversexed Ottoman, as in Mozart’s (1782) The Abduction from the Seraglio. At the same time, however, an interest in others’ translations of scriptures was growing. Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) translated his Zend Avesta in 1771, and within a few years German translations followed. In 1785, Charles Wilkins’s (1749–1836) Bhagavadgītā was published and, in 1789, William Jones (1746–1794) translated the Śakuntalā. British scholars benefited greatly from the East India Company’s network and used its influence to contact local scholars, writers, and language teachers. In Germany, those networks and the shared experience of empire had been missing.
Building on Edward Said’s argument that colonizers and the colonized share the same experience of empire, Peter van der Veer undertook a detailed study of British–Indian encounters. He argued that there was a shared colonial experience, which both shaped national cultures and was centred on notions of religion and secularity (van der Veer 2001: 3). If we take the theoretical concept of entanglement, this is a site of entanglement par excellence. If we search for such sites of entanglement between Germany and India, things get more complicated. For anybody knowing anything about the scientific history of Orientalism and the science of religion in Britain, it is no wonder that van der Veer touches the person of Max Müller. Although admired in India, the British are unsure about him for the simple reason that, not only his person, but also his science—Orientalist philology—are considered ‘foreign’, namely German. In his famous inaugural lecture as professor of comparative philology at the University of Oxford on 27 October 1868, Max Müller recalled the German understanding of Wissenschaft running down to Humboldt and emphasized the need for reforms in Oxford. One can argue that Müller’s understanding of religion and his philological approach mirror the earlier tradition of William Jones and the like, as does van der Veer (2001: 106–16). Interestingly, he shows how Indian scholars took up those methods in the Bengali Renaissance and applied them to Hindu scriptures. If we want to scrutinize this form of entanglement, it can be simplified as German Wissenschaft applied in India through an English middleman. My interest here is to look deeper at the roots of Müller’s German understanding of Wissenschaft.
As already noted, the beginnings of Orientalism in Germany are closely related to the German quest to define its identity. More than forty years after Said’s (1978) Orientalism, it seems as if all aspects of his work have been scrutinized, a whole branch of study reorganized, and all its shortcomings criticized. It is hoped that a new interest in a public debate on German colonialism will help to yield a deeper study of its historical background.
In its early years, German colonialism can be understood as ‘second-order colonialism’ in that it reached Germany via a scholarly revolution that failed to register its significance in far-away colonies (Berman 1998). Instead, German colonialism altered the discourses in Germany’s scientific circles insofar as they were now directed towards imaginative communities and the social order in society. Colonialism, to Germans around 1800, was a thrilling literary experience of thus far unreached places and a mixture of adventure and education (Berman 1998: 1).
Let us illustrate this a little: by comparing two different accounts of the same journey—Captain Cook’s second circumnavigation—Russell A. Berman shows how the German colonial discourse had been different from those of its European counterparts and mirrored a particularly German position, often called a Sonderweg, or special way. In those days, Germany did not occupy a central place in Europe. Instead, Germans were often looked upon as ‘others’, or outsiders, as somewhat backward and less advanced than other Western societies (Manjapra 2014: 284). German intellectuals expressed this perception through their low self-esteem, in a search for their roots, and by turning to other European societies. There are many poems or stories in which one can pinpoint German writers identifying with subaltern others (Goldmann 1985). British writers would frequently discuss whether Germany bordered the Oriental in political, economic, and cultural terms. It is no wonder that Karl Marx spoke about the ‘incompleteness of development’ regarding the German question and gave voice to a widely debated and often felt German deficit (Manjapra 2014: 285). Georg Forster (1754–94), who wrote the German travel narrative on Captain Cook’s expedition to the South Pacific, established a kind of hermeneutics that led to a strong tendency to identify with the colonized other (Berman 1998: 10). The specific entanglement described here opened up new ways of understanding alterity.
As a result of this specific form of colonialism, one can see how innovations were fostered in different branches, and how the Jews were excluded symbolically and literally. German Orientalism took the shape of a ‘linguistic turn’, with uncountable new translations, and new forms of literacy and flagship biblical studies (Polaschegg 2005). In her book on German Orientalism, Suzanne Marchand concentrates on ‘the practice of Oriental scholarship’ and refuses to write a book on ‘Orientalism’ (Marchand 2010: xx). Although it seems to be a sophisticated difference at first glance, it makes quite an important impact. By focusing on techniques and, through her refusal to create a single and shared discourse, Marchand’s study provides a brighter picture of the different German ways of dealing with alterity and different religions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of her key findings is that ‘the cultural politics of Orientalistik were defined much less by “modern” concerns—such as how to communicate with or exert power over the locals—than by traditional, almost primeval, Christian questions, such as (1) what parts of the Old Testament are true, and relevant, for Christians? (2) How much did the ancient Israelites owe to the Egyptians, Persians, and Assyrians?’ (Marchand 2010: xxiv). Studying how German Wissenschaftlichkeit in general, and Orientalistik in particular, were formed means concentrating on theology, geography, and philology.
With respect to the special relationship between Germany and India, one can see how, after 1760, Indophilia in Germany was growing more powerful. The key event in the public’s love of India was the publication of Georg Forster’s translation from English of the Sanskrit play Sakuntala in 1791. Johann Gottfried Herder wrote a preface to the second edition of the translation and praised its spiritual worth and classic beauty with the warmest words. This topos was widely shared. Many German intellectuals in those days complained about modern times, French society and culture, and the fragmented way of thinking. The Orient, which seemed to provide a counterpart, was praised for its primordial unity. German nationalists dreamed of a German rebirth and were forever looking for new pieces of folk poetry and collecting universal histories. As Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) put it, ‘the only way for us to become great, and, if indeed it is possible, inimitable, is through the imitation of the ancients’ (Winckelmann 2013: 32). Since the mid-eighteenth century, a new fashion of writing history had been becoming more meaningful. Montesquieu set a yardstick with his De l’esprit des loix (1748) and inspired other writers and historians to think about civilizations and cultures and how they changed through the ages. In Germany, Johann Joachim Winckelmann helped to popularize this new form of historization and, in 1764, he not only wrote a history of ancient art but also produced new epistemologies, of which some were full of ambiguities. For example, he wrote about a region to which he had never travelled yet claimed it as a first-hand experience. He polemicized against knowledge through books alone yet relied on books alone to substantiate his arguments and infused the intellectual debate of his time with a longing for origins (Martus 2015: 688–96). With three civilizations—Persian, Greek, and Indian—mainly sparking German interest, Schlegel’s (1808) Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier can be seen as a contribution to this cultural war, as an attempt to decentre the Greeks in the Germanic and Christian cultural history of humankind. One can interpret these struggles over the history of the past as forerunners to the discussion on the ‘history of the future’.Footnote 2
Any summary of a specific German connection with the wider world by the end of the eighteenth century will reveal the central role of religion and, in his contribution to this volume, Tilman Hannemann outlines such developments during the nineteenth century. Although comparative religion did not exist as a discipline as early as 1800, its methods and epistemology were being shaped at that time. Interestingly, it was mainly Protestant theologians who took the lead in that process, which is why I want to focus on the role of the Hebrew Bible and how the picture of a historic community like the Israelites was designed anew at that time.
Hebrew People as Role Models: Theology in a New Era of Ethnography
There is a broad consensus that important innovations in biblical studies that took hold during the long nineteenth century had already been established by the end of the eighteenth century. Many of the ideological movements and new ideas that shaped liberal thinking can be traced back to those years (Reventlow 1995). In the eighteenth century, one can observe how German theologians and intellectuals began to change their way of looking at the Israelites. In previous centuries, they had largely been considered as forerunners in faith and founding fathers of orbis Christianus. Now scholars started to study Hebrews as a distinct group of people. Reinhart Koselleck (1979: 63) showed how a basic eighteenth-century advance had been the idea of a linear time frame giving rise to a universal history of mankind. German biblical scholars started to place Hebrews in the universal history of mankind and, on reading biblical stories, they, as did Ofri Ilany (2014: 19) in his mind-blowing In Search of the Hebrew People, started to ask questions such as:
Where has this people come from? What stage in its development had humanity reached during the period in which they lived? What parallels might be drawn between them and other peoples? … The question of this people’s origins is a highly charged one, as it holds the key to the Hebrew people’s ‘fundamental’ characteristics.
The biblical figure of Abraham, for example, undertook a genuine change from father of faith, to father of a clan or nation. Johann David Michaelis (1717–91), a key researcher and networker in those days, addressed the Royal Society of Science in Göttingen in 1756 with a talk on ‘The Wandering Shepherds of Ancient Palestine’. Michaelis stands for what today we would call an ethnographic turn in the study of the Old Testament. With his colleagues, he collected more than a hundred detailed questions for the first scientific German endeavour in history, sponsored by Frederick V of Denmark, the famous Arabia Felix mission (1761–67) to Yemen (Ilany 2014: 17–39).
Of course, Michaelis selected and taught Arabic and church history to the members of the expedition team, but eventually stayed back in Göttingen to found the notorious armchair traveller’s tradition to which Friedrich Max Müller also belonged. In 1800, the ethnographic way of reading the Bible had become so prominent that Georg Lorenz Bauer (1755–1806) wrote about Abraham in the following terms (Bauer 1800: 108):
He was an upper Asian Man, an Emir or head of a wandering clan, who first meandered from Chaldea to Mesopotamia, and from there moved with his herds to Palestine, where he sought pasture. He was no different from any other inconsequential Bedouin or Arab Sheikh of his time but was to become, if we look at the peoples, that originated from him and the revolutions they brought about in both spirit and matter, a very important man in history.
To understand the dynamic and relevance of this change, we can reduce it to the notion that the chosen people of God had become a simple natural folk. They had been assembled in the booming genre of universal history and represented a stage of infancy, only a little better than the notorious Hottentots.
One can easily see how theological studies were linked to intellectual debates by looking at the new perspective on the Mosaic Law. In 1775, when Johann David Michaelis published Mosaisches Recht, he wanted to establish a new kind of investigation and to lift the mainly historical and biblical argument to a new level. He thus addressed not only theologians but also lawyers, politicians, and philosophers. His aim was to make a strange Asian text accessible to the European public. Hence, he explained, for example, the laws on blood revenge by national character, ancient traditions, and untouched closeness to the state of nature. Michaelis thus distinguished between universal principles at work in the Mosaic Law and particular elements of Hebrew custom (Ilany 2014: 43–62). According to the political thinking of his contemporaries, every state should be regarded as a creation of the Volk. Consequently, his colleague Johann Stephan Pütter (1725–1807) drew on original German law (Gewohnheitsrecht), which was clear and close to the people and which he separated from abstract, formal Roman law.
The University of Göttingen had become one of the leading universities in history and theology during the time of Michaelis. One might even say it saw the German invention of Völkerkunde, as Han F. Vermeulen (2006) puts it. German scholars caught up during the second half of the eighteenth century and eventually even took the lead over French and other scholars. In fact, the University of Göttingen was one of the epicentres of a new and innovative approach hosting most of the prominent scholars in the field (Vermeulen 2015: 12). Historian August Ludwig Schlözer (1735–1809) summarized the new ethnographic method as a history of the world presented through different people. It related to the history of mankind (anthropology) and had been in line with the upcoming universal histories. Schlözer used the descriptive studies of his time, carried out in Siberia and Swabia, and moved on to universal categories, including newly-discovered people from faraway places such as Oceania, or far back in time such as the Romans or Hebrews (Vermeulen 2006: 129–31). Since the new method distinguished sharply between people who made up a state and wrote historical accounts, and those who failed to do so, new questions had been asked of the historical Hebrews. In the words of Ofri Ilany (2014: 146), ‘the Hebrew people, as a historical entity, became an object of study – and even a national model – in their own right’. This Hebrew model was not only of interest to theologians but it also presented an alternative political paradigm. Searching for their own national spirit (Nationalgeist), writers, scholars, and intellectuals used the Hebrew tradition both as a source and a space to be fashioned. In other words, the very particular national spirit that Enlightenment philosophers had mocked and ridiculed, received the highest attention in the German debate.
The Old Testament as a Space for the German Colonial Imagination and Johann Gottfried Herder as an Intermediary
Biblical scholars agree that Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1782) On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry can be described as a watershed in theology. Christoph Bultmann commented that this book shaped his image as ‘a leading figure of the break in biblical studies … through which the Bible changed from a book of revelation to a book of antiquity’ (Bultmann 1999: 6). This is why I want to concentrate on Johann Gottfried Herder and scrutinize his role as an intermediary between different cultures and contexts. Herder took up the ideas of the English Bishop Robert Lowth (1710–87), who presented the poetry of the Hebrews as the original poetry of natural Oriental people. This simple but powerful and noble expression was read against the backdrop of the Enlightenment philosophers, who declared Hebrew poetry to be an unclear and filthy product of hot climes (Ilany 2014: 90–1). G. E. Lessing (1729–81) reduced the beginnings of history as the small starting points of the ‘human race’ on its way to the high standards of moral education. In stark contrast, Herder did not see the development of humankind throughout history as a one-way track but concentrated on its origins and half-forgotten traditions. The new aesthetic sensibility swept from England and Scotland to Germany, where it became part of the quest for a new national literature. Herder was not interested in artificial readings of the Bible, but wanted to foster an understanding of the Hebrew Bible as folk literature with a view to paving the way to a better understanding of Germany’s own national literature and soul (Sheehan 2005: 171).
Johann Gottfried Herder was a keen collector of folk tales, stories, and pieces of literature from as many different communities and peoples as he could find. His programme was meant to ‘set apart the frontiers of foreign peoples from our own’ and make us ‘more familiar with the beauty and the genius of a nation that we had viewed quite askance’ (Sheehan 2005: 171). The Hebrews provided an interesting contrast to the classical Greeks: Greek mythology concentrated on gods and heroes, whereas the stories in the Hebrew Bible were about normal people with flesh and bones. In this respect, the Hebrews fitted his cultural programme wonderfully in that it concentrated on simple people, folk tales, and stories of everyday life. He also added a whole programme on ethnology, which most Enlightenment scholars often neglect. Concepts like organic growth or terms such as ‘national spirit’ (Volksgeist) and ‘national identity’ (Nationalcharakter) were powerfully embedded in discourses of philosophy, history, or the origins of language (Vermeulen 2015: 322–3).
Herder believed that this kind of literature preserved the feelings and soul of a people much better than treaties, historical documents, or any other official records. Instead, he was looking for the poetry and the ‘little traditions’. For him, Hebrew was the perfect language for poetry and an antidote to any abstract or cold language. At the beginning of his Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, there is a famous imagined dialogue in which Alciphron describes Hebrew as a ‘poor barbaric tongue’ and even compares it with the language of the native Americans (Herder 1782: 1–6). His counterpart Euthyphron, who echoes Herder’s voice, compares it with ‘a poor but beautiful and pure country girl’ and states how fresh, vibrant, and poetic the Hebrew language is (Ilany 2014: 91). His laudation (Herder 1833: 30) culminates with:
Even should I admit that for an abstract reasoner the Hebrew language may not be the best, still it is, in regard to this active form of it so much the more favourable to the poet. Everything in it proclaims ‘I live and move and act.’ The senses and the passions not abstract reasoners and philosophers were my creators. Thus I am formed for poetry, nay my whole essence is poetry.
This new understanding of the Hebrew language found its way into the heart of what Jürgen Fohrmann called the ‘quarrel of nations’, the intellectual debate between France and Germany on cultural hegemony at the end of the eighteenth century (Ilany 2014: 89). In this controversy, Herder reshaped the understanding of mythology. Inspired by the Göttingen school of ethnology and deeply influenced by biblical stories and texts, he went even further east to find new sources in pursuit of his aim to revitalize German national literature. As we have seen, the Hebrews became part of the Orient and the Orient was looked upon as Germany’s fountain of youth. In Germany, more and more printing presses were distributing more and more books and magazines to a growing number of readers, which produced a backdrop for intellectuals in fear of losing their imagination and vitality. In Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773), Herder used a fourfold dichotomy to highlight the contrasts between primitive/modern, oral/written, feelings/form, and nature/art (Kontje 2004: 66). Interestingly, this phonocentrism of his also led to ethnocentrism. In Abhandlungen über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), for example, he criticized Jewish and rabbinical traditions for overemphasizing the consonants in the Hebrew language and thus losing essential vowels, yet this is exactly what German intellectuals did through trying to gain control of the Hebrew Bible, make themselves part of the Orient, construct their own national literature, and establish alternatives to French cultural hegemony (Martyn 2002: 59).
The Orient as the origin of poetry and religion was central to Johann Gottfried Herder’s thinking and a key element in German Orientalism. German Orientalists devised a new way of studying and founded a kind of Wissenschaft for which they were widely admired. Philological and ethnographic knowledge helped them to reinvent the study of theology, especially the Old Testament. Johann Gottfried Herder’s approach can best be described as historicism, although not the kind that merely tries to muddle its way through the difficult strands of historic knowledge. Instead, he tried to build some kind of ‘vivid historicism’ (Kraus 1982: 120). He advocated transcending a dogmatic view of the scriptures and replacing it with a deep connection with other people—become a farmer with farmers or a shepherd with shepherds, so literally breathing the ‘air of origin’ (Kraus 1982: 117). Herder associated the spirit of poetry and ‘childhood of mankind’ with the Orient, especially India (Germana 2009: 19) and equated childhood, and hence the Orient, with innocence, nature, and purity. It is now time to see how Herder made use of a certain imagined India, which he not only found at hand but also helped to freeze for the years to come.
To Read in an Indian Way: The Romanticized Orient
In striving for authenticity, Herder constructed an essentialized Orient and, at the very beginning of Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts (1806: 21), shouted out:
Leave behind the sticky scientific cabins of the West and enter the free air of the Orient, where this play is instructed. And for not getting out of tune and just imagining the meaning, let us circumnavigate the noble words, we will meet, just like islands, and prove their reference to the Morns.
In that Herder wants to see a philological shift in the study of the Hebrew Bible, his philological zeal cannot be discounted. Nevertheless, he continues by stating that people in the Orient are closer to nature, simpler in mind, and their stories and legends are filled with God, since the Orientals ‘feel God’ (Herder 1806: 21–5). There is no doubt that he is reproducing the core Orientalist stereotypes (Loop 2008: 176) and his interest in the Orient did not end with the Hebrews. Instead, his Orient was getting bigger and bigger and included India, China, and the Persians. He constructs a difference between the languages of his contemporaries and so-called modern nations in the West and the original and authentic Morns, who were closer to the infancy of humankind. Modern European languages appeared to him more precise and exact, whereas ancient languages like Arabic and Hebrew were richer and more playful to him. To Herder, languages were not only interesting to study but were also his way of digging into the soul of a people. Comparing different languages with national characters and ideas fascinated him, which is why I want to come back to the Sakontala (1791). Herder praises the work in his preface as outstanding among the rich Indian mythological and spiritual, as well as poetical works. He compares it with any Greek poetry and ponders: ‘you will find a bundle of sublime and tender notions, unknown to the Greek: the Indian spirit of the world and man itself infused it to the landscape, the nation, the poet’ (Herder 1803: xxxi). He goes on to describe a whole set of Indian mysticism that he believed to have found in that very play (Herder 1803: xxxxi–ii):
You must read the Sakontala in an Indian, not a European way, as well. The idyllic scenes for instance, with meekness and love of nature, so typical for this people. Everything is animated in the Indian cosmos; plants, trees, the whole creation is speaking and feeling… All of creation is an epiphany of one God or the other, in ever-changing metamorphosis… Behold that those fortunes of soul and spirit of the most peace-loving people on our globe, including its language, are entrusted to a nation of merchants.
It is no wonder that Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) drew on this romanticized picture of India and could establish a direct link between his vision of a German renewal and a model to counter contemporary European societies (Dusche 2011: 2). The only difference seemed to be that Friedrich Schlegel argued against sophisticated Frenchmen, and Johann Gottfried Herder mocked the English. In his foreword (Herder 1803: xxx), he also argues that the German translation is better than the English original.
How should one understand the introductory phrase of ‘reading in an Indian way’? There is a tradition of connecting Herder’s understanding of Indian Volk with the bigger debate on ‘Oriental despotism’. The Indians as a people were too mild and too humble to resist the Mughals and later the European colonists (Tzoref-Ashkenazi 2013: 305). Herder wants other people to inspire his Germans and to preserve what he identified as their German identity. It is also a perfect example of second-order colonialism. Herder criticizes the barbaric Englishmen and the way they colonized and robbed other cultures and nations. As a German, he identifies with the noble and innocent Indian. Unlike other Europeans, the Germans should understand and defend the rights and customs of Indians. Hence, the image is fashioned here of a brave nation standing up for other subalterns. Their own weakness is transformed and covered by moral strength (Germana 2009: 43–50).
My argument here is a little different. I see the idea of reading in an Indian way as a summary of Herder’s approach to indigenizing the study of the Old Testament by establishing an ethnographic method. Every folk tale is inspired, in Herder’s thinking, by the nature of the land, the context, and the tradition from which it stems. Hebrew poetry, like any other Oriental tradition, is close to its origin and authentic spirituality. It is not art, but nature, as Robert Lowth had formulated for Hebrew poetry (Fritz 2011). Herder followed his lead and saw the genuine revelation in the Hebrew language. The newly discovered Zend Avesta and other scriptures from the East gave him the strong belief that God was first incarnated in light and revealed himself through the mythical and ‘child-like’ stories of Eastern religion, and not in the rational language of a modern, and hence European, worldview (Marchand 2010: 45). To him, the Indian religion was a ‘sensuous religion’, as was the Hebrew one (Germana 2009: 31). Herder continued to mark the strong impetus on feelings as the authentic expression of the Orient—‘where our religion still makes room for sensuous representations, where it accommodates poetic imagery, there it is – Oriental’ (Herling 2006: 51). As Weidner (2005: 170) put it:
We must read the Bible in a human way, since it is a book written by man for man: the language is human, it was written and preserved through human means, and the sense, in which one can understand it, the whole purpose, for which it may be used, is human.
This famous quote by Herder should not lead us to the wrong supposition that he points to secularization. Instead, he tried to go back to what he identified as the origins of the Hebrew worldview and Hebrew culture (Weidner 2005), and the Indian lens helped him to grasp that very much clearer idea. The mystical Morgenland marked for Herder the ‘golden age of mankind in its infancy’ (Herling 2006: 55), at a stage when humankind had been closer to the realm of gods. By focusing on India as an ancient civilization and framing its image as having a ‘flowery’, mild, and poetic nature, Herder helped to establish a certain romantic picture of India (Herling 2006: 85).
Interlude: India as Method?
On Johann Gottfried Herder’s attempt to establish ‘reading in an Indian way’ as a means of understanding the Bible and establishing new epistemic regimes, one could be tempted to engage in recent debates on ‘Asia as method’. In his book Asia as Method, Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) revisited an older debate between Takeuchi Yoshimi and Mizoguchi Yuzo, who were among a group of Japanese intellectuals trying to make sense of Japan’s role in Western modernization by comparing it with that of China. They were refusing to buy into one of the bigger models of Japanization, or of emulating Euro-American modernity. Instead, they tried to analyse the Chinese way and look for analogies and features they might have in common (Morris: 2017: 15). In Asia as Method, Chen attempts to combine different methodologies and epistemologies to overcome the hegemony of a monothetic Western way of conceptualizing the other.
Interestingly, one can read Herder and his move to open up alternative spaces against the backdrop of a modern French worldview and ancient Greek culture as just such an attempt. Isaiah Berlin and others praised Johann Gottfried Herder for his ‘pluralism’ (Germana 2009: 18) and for countering the Eurocentric Enlightenment by coming up with new ways of understanding and formulating plurality and different modes of understanding and reading the world. The idea of reading in an Indian way was inspiring other cultures to foster a cosmopolitan national identity.
However, this was only an uninformed first move because, as Chen (2010: 215) elucidated:
Asia as method recognizes the need to keep a critical distance from uninterrogated notions of Asia, just as one has to maintain a critical distance from uninterrogated notions of the nation-state. It sees Asia as a product of history and realizes that Asia has been an active participant in historical progress.
Johann Gottfried Herder uses his reference to India as neither a historical progression nor a site of entanglement, for these might shackle or twist his worldview and perceptions of the Hebrew people, but as we have seen instead perpetuates Oriental stereotypes mainly as rhetorical tropes to make his point. The ‘childlike Indian’ with his exclusive taste for allegories, tales, and mystical images, as one who paints in a language like that of the Hebrew and other Morns, is not a real figure.
Nevertheless, we might be tempted to revert to the openness of historical and epistemological debates from around 1800. There had been a window of opportunity to realize other modernities and new ways of conceptualizing scriptures and religions. The end of Western academic hegemony might offer chances of developing ways of reading in an Indian way, not to formulate a rebirth of Germany, but to strengthen entanglements in space and time.
Summary
Building on an understanding of German colonialism as second-order colonialism, I showed how new epistemologies and a new Wissenschaftlichkeit became part of the colonial set-up. Questions of German identity were discussed by comparing German culture with various other cultures. Many intellectuals believed that a German rebirth could happen by looking to the Orient. The end of the eighteenth century saw not only the beginning of universal histories in Germany, but also a whole array of new methods and disciplines. Theological discussions were central to many debates, and biblical Israelites were both historicized and integrated into the history of humankind. Johann Gottfried Herder was among the most important extollers of the beauty and worth of the Hebrew language. The Oldest Document of the Human Race (1774) was, to him, the sublime, poetic, and tender language of the Israelites. His new interpretation of the Hebrew Bible as an introduction to the Orient used new ideas and notions of India. Herder identified the spirit of poetry and the ‘childhood of mankind’ with the Orient, especially India. By reading in an Indian way, Johann Gottfried Herder inspired the debate on Germany’s origins and paved the way for a new ethnographic understanding of the Hebrew Bible. Eventually, he also helped to craft a picture of Indians as noble savages who were mild, close to nature, and extremely sensuous. His understanding of organic growth was infused with metaphors of nature and flowers, and it was this floral heritage of the eighteenth century that began to bloom by the end of the nineteenth century.
Notes
- 1.
For a broader discussion on this relationship, see Tilman Hannemann’s Chap. 10 in this volume.
- 2.
See the contribution of Mathias Thurner in this volume and his discussion on the ‘religion of the future’ around 1900.
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Wiesgickl, S. (2023). ‘To Read in an Indian Way’ (Johann Gottfried Herder): Pre-Emergent Colonial Epistemologies in Indian–German Entanglements, Showcased in Protestant Theology c.1800. In: Schwaderer, I., Jonker, G. (eds) Religious Entanglements Between Germans and Indians, 1800–1945. Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40375-0_2
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