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Sebastian Tengnagel, the Imperial Library in Vienna, and Knowledge of the Orient in Early Modern Europe
This book explores the life of Sebastian Tengnagel, the imperial librarian who established Vienna's first major collection of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Hebrew manuscripts. By examining his correspondence and interactions with European scholars and Ottoman subjects, it sheds light on his pursuit of knowledge. Highlighting the significance of his manuscript collection and his political and religious positions, this book provides fresh insights into seventeenth-century Vienna as a center for the acquisition and dissemination of Oriental scholarship.
Sebastian Tengnagel, the Imperial Library in Vienna, and Knowledge of the Orient in Early Modern Europe
This book explores the life of Sebastian Tengnagel, the imperial librarian who established Vienna's first major collection of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Hebrew manuscripts. By examining his correspondence and interactions with European scholars and Ottoman subjects, it sheds light on his pursuit of knowledge. Highlighting the significance of his manuscript collection and his political and religious positions, this book provides fresh insights into seventeenth-century Vienna as a center for the acquisition and dissemination of Oriental scholarship.
Leadership, Charity, and Literacy
Author:
This book is a history of Ottoman Jews that challenges prevailing assumptions about Jews’ arrival in the empire, their relations with Muslims, and the role of religious and lay leaders. The book argues that rabbis played a less prominent role as communal and spiritual leaders than we have thought; and that the religious community was one of several frameworks within which Ottoman Jews operated. A focus on charitable and educational communal practices shows that with time Jews preferred to avoid the scrutiny of rabbis and the community, leading to private initiatives that undermined rabbinical and lay authority.
Leadership, Charity, and Literacy
Author:
This book is a history of Ottoman Jews that challenges prevailing assumptions about Jews’ arrival in the empire, their relations with Muslims, and the role of religious and lay leaders. The book argues that rabbis played a less prominent role as communal and spiritual leaders than we have thought; and that the religious community was one of several frameworks within which Ottoman Jews operated. A focus on charitable and educational communal practices shows that with time Jews preferred to avoid the scrutiny of rabbis and the community, leading to private initiatives that undermined rabbinical and lay authority.
Jerusalem 1918–1926
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Addressing Zionists in 1923, the British artist C. R. Ashbee spoke of “that preposterous Balfour Declaration whose Arabic tail you people perpetually ignore, but the lash of which you will some day feel.” His warnings received no attention at the time, nor has his radical pro-Arab Palestinian political position been researched since. One hundred years later, this art historical study asks what possibilities individual colonial actors had to influence official colonial policy. In the example of Jerusalem under British rule, Moya Tönnies analyses how three members of the British administration, Ashbee, architect Ernest Tatham Richmond, and governor Ronald Storrs, all three identifying with the International Arts and Crafts Movement, used art as a diplomatic sphere for their British colonial anti-Zionist interventions.
Jerusalem 1918–1926
Author:
Addressing Zionists in 1923, the British artist C. R. Ashbee spoke of “that preposterous Balfour Declaration whose Arabic tail you people perpetually ignore, but the lash of which you will some day feel.” His warnings received no attention at the time, nor has his radical pro-Arab Palestinian political position been researched since. One hundred years later, this art historical study asks what possibilities individual colonial actors had to influence official colonial policy. In the example of Jerusalem under British rule, Moya Tönnies analyses how three members of the British administration, Ashbee, architect Ernest Tatham Richmond, and governor Ronald Storrs, all three identifying with the International Arts and Crafts Movement, used art as a diplomatic sphere for their British colonial anti-Zionist interventions.
Abstract
This article offers a contribution to the study of polemics between Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages. It presents an annotated translation of the extant fragments of a reply by an unknown Jew to the polemical tract Ifḥām al-Yahūd in which the mathematician Samawʾal al-Maghribī (d. 570/1175), who converted to Islam in 558/1163, virulently attacks his former religion. Samawʾal’s tract had a significant impact both on later Muslim polemicists and on Jewish thinkers, who defended their religion against his strictures. The unique manuscript of the anonymous refutation, written in Judaeo-Arabic, is part of the Firkovitch collection kept at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg. It is included in a codex that also contains an incomplete version, in the same hand, of Samawʾal al-Maghribī’s tract. While the codex can be tentatively dated to the fourteenth century and was presumably written in Egypt, we cannot know with any degree of certainty when and where the refutation itself was composed, nor whether the unknown author had access to a complete copy of Samawʾal’s work. Although at times the author quotes Ifḥām al-Yahūd verbatim, paraphrases and indirect references to Samawʾal’s arguments are more common. In order to contextualize the unknown author’s counterarguments, we provide a running commentary, including quotations of the passages from Ifḥām al-Yahūd that are being refuted.
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Abstract
The dispute between science and religion evolved into diverse forms in the early modern period. Among the advocates of science, not all manifested anti-religious sentiments, and in some instances, religious authorities even supported scientific methods in resolving secular and sacred problems. Sixteenth-century Persia, under the Safavid monarchy, witnessed disputes between proponents and opponents of scientific methods in addressing religious and civic matters. In this article, I will present two polemics between scholars and jurists who served the Safavid shahs concerning the relevance of astral sciences in resolving religious matters. The first dispute concerns determining the orientation of the prayer niche direction (qibla). The second concerns legalizing the practice of astral sciences in general. For the matter of the prayer niche, I will discuss a dispute that occurred at the court of Ṭahmāsb I (r. 1524–76) between ʿAlī ibn Ḥusayn al-Karakī (d. 1534), the first chief jurisconsult (shaykh al-islām) at the Safavid court, and Ghiyāth al-Dīn Manṣūr Dashtakī (1461–1542), which proved to be a failure for science and a success for tradition. For the case of the astral sciences, I will examine two attempts by Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī (1547–1621), the successor to al-Karakī at the court of ʿAbbās I (r. 1587–1629), to justify the permissibility of scientific methods in addressing matters of jurisprudence. I will discuss ʿĀmilī’s opinion on the prayer niche in four of his works, and will introduce and examine his Crescent Garden (al-Ḥadīqa al-hilāliyya), a commentary on a prayer for crescent sighting. I will further show that although the first attempt failed to establish scientific credibility for astronomy and astrology at the court, the second proved successful both in the royal and civic realms.
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Abstract
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, southern Italy experienced a period of relative political stability and economic prosperity under the Normans as well as the Hohenstaufen dynasty that succeeded them. These cultural conditions fostered a cultural resurgence, which included the composition of Greek poetry. Poets in Sicily wrote from within a multicultural context, including the presence of Arabic- and Latin-speaking communities. Many of their poems illustrate the generative intersections between the Byzantine-Constantinopolitan, Latin, and Arabic traditions. Later in Salento, poetry was written in a rather closed Greek-speaking, Orthodox society. Comparing Greek poetry from Sicily and Salento shows some differences between composition in the two regions. Whereas Sicilian poetry includes especially creative narrative poems, composed for the rich and sophisticated courts of the island, the Salentine poetry bears the stamp of the schoolroom. In fact, most poems from both Sicily and Salento survive in manuscripts that can be traced to a pedagogical environment. While the circulation of these poems was limited to their surrounding regions, their literary sophistication betrays remarkable creativity and the multicultural conditions of composition, further evidence of the vitality of Greek literary culture far from the heartland of the Byzantine Empire.