Tag Archives: Islamic manuscript

A French Haggadah in Muslim Garb: Whose Book is it?

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Braginsky Collection 315 (Photograph by Ardon Bar-Hama)

Well, the legal part of my question is easily answered: This Haggadah manuscript is owned by René Braginsky, a Swiss collector, and belongs to his outstanding collection of Hebrew manuscripts and printed books.  All pages can be seen on the website which accompanies A Journey through Jewish Worlds, an exhibition of his treasures that between 2009 and 2012 traveled from Amsterdam to New York City, Jerusalem, and Zurich.

Unfortunately I missed the exhibition when it was on view in the Yeshiva University Museum in the spring of 2010.  But on April 19, 2012, Emile Schrijver, the curator of the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), showed a picture of the Bouton Haggadah during his talk at the Book History Colloquium at Columbia University.  Dr. Schrijver also serves as the curator of the Braginsky collection, and was one of the exhibition curators.

On the website of the Braginsky collection, one finds the following details about the Passover Haggadah:
The undated parchment manuscript of 33 leaves (35.5 x 23.5 cm) was written and decorated by Victor M. Bouton (b. 1819).  It is dated to the second half of the 19th century (ca. 1870?), and includes ritual instructions in French.  The textblock is protected by a burgundy-red velvet binding with metal clasps on leather straps.  The manuscript was sold by Sotheby’s New York in 2007, lot 197.

After his talk on “Defining a Field: Jewish Books in the Age of Print,” I emailed Dr. Schrijver whether it be possible that the lavishly illuminated margins, whose design changes every few pages, were chromolithographed and then finished by hand.  The idea presented itself since Dr. Schrijver had quite forcefully questioned the strict separation between manuscripts and printed books by showing eighteenth-century examples of prayer books that combined printed frames with hand-written texts.  In his catalog note (as available on the internet), Schrijver mentioned that Bouton was mostly known as a heraldic painter.  Bouton’s achievements as a scribe and illustrator of Hebrew manuscripts had been overlooked until Sharon Mintz linked his Haggadah to a similarly decorated, though a bit smaller Seder Hatefilot (parchment, 26.8 x 17.5 cm) from 1876, inscribed by Edmond James de Rothschild (1845-1934) to his mother Bronita (1805-1886) and today owned by the  Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme (MAHJ inv. D.99.04.001.CP) in Paris.  A search in OCLC/WorldCat revealed that more information about Bouton’s work may be gleaned from the files of the publishing house Firmin-Didot (OCLC/WorldCat 32257680) which are nowadays owned by by the Newberry Library in Chicago.  I find the possible but not yet confirmed connection with Firmin-Didot noteworthy as the company is famous for its production of deluxe editions of prints and books.

In his talk Dr. Schrijver had argued that in Europe the production of Jewish books since the early modern period need be contextualized as Jews lived cheek by jowl with non-Jews.  For me, as a historian of Islamic books, the Haggadah shows that in the second half of the nineteenth century Jewish patrons, wherever they lived in Europe, shared the taste of mainstream society for artifacts with Islamic design.  Like other wealthy families, the Rothschilds collected Islamic art, and in 1922 the Louvre’s Islamic holdings were significantly increased by a large bequest from the Rothschild family.  Luxury objects with an Islamic design such as rugs, textiles, ceramics, metalwork or illustrated manuscripts have circulated in Christian Europe since the Middle Ages, while scholars were searching for Middle Eastern books to learn about the Quran, Islam, and Middle Eastern history.  In the course of the nineteenth century the increased interest in all matter Muslim and Oriental preceded the emergence of art history as an academic discipline and the acknowledgment of non-Western art as an art in its own right.  But despite the sustained interest in the study of European Orientalism since the early 1980s, European books with an Islamic design have not yet received any sustained attention; at least I am not aware of any published research on Islamic books printed in Europe.  Most of the printed books with a chromolithographed Islamic design that I have found during the last years are works of Islamic literature in Arabic script, often accompanied by translations or commentaries in French, German or Latin, and the printers were primarily working in Paris or Vienna.  At this point of my research it seems that from the 1840s onward publishing houses that had taken up chromolithography experimented with books whose decoration drew on elements of Islamic design.

In 2012 when Jewish-Muslim and Israeli-Palestinian relations are so fraught and difficult, I find it inspiring that the Bouton Haggadah presents a Hebrew-French guide to the celebration of Passover in the style of an illustrated Islamic manuscript.  It is so much easier to acknowledge complexity and depth in beautiful objects, and this Hebrew-French-Islamic Haggadah demonstrates that something as seemingly simple as the classification of objects can be as intricate as the identities of the men and women who made and used them.

Corrected, 17 May 2012

PS – In March 2015 a digital surrogate of the Bouton Haggadah was made available Open-Access via e-codices at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5076/e-codices-bc-b-0315

Updated, 28 March 2016

Quran Manuscripts from the Library of Abraham Hinckelmann

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This winter a small manuscript exhibition with the title Faszination Handschrift: 2000 Jahre Manuskriptkulturen in Asien, Afrika und Europa (18 Nov. 2011 – 8 Jan. 2012), in the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SUB) Hamburg featured five Arabic and three Persian manuscripts. The exhibition was organized by the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 950: Manuskriptkulturen in Asien, Afrika und Europa, Asien-Afrika-Institut (AAI) of the Universität Hamburg, and the SFB has published the German-English exhibition catalog Manuskriptkulturen (ed. Jörg B. Quenzer, Newsletter Manuscript Cultures 4, Hamburg: AAI, 2011). The Arabist Tilman Seidensticker was in charge of the Arabic manuscripts (pp. 78-92), while the Persian manuscripts were the responsibility of the Islamic art historian Claus-Peter Haase (pp. 93-100). Their respective chapters in the exhibition catalog offer new commentaries on an Islamic manuscript collection which was last cataloged in its entirety by Carl Brockelmann (1868-1956) in Die arabischen, persischen, türkischen, malaiischen, koptischen, syrischen und äthiopischen Handschriften (Hamburg: Meissner, 1908; repr., Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1968; to my knowledge, a digitized version of the 1908 edition is not available on the internet).

Among the eight manuscripts there were two Qurans from the library of Abraham Hinckelmann (1652-1695; cf. Carl Bertheau, “Hinkelmann, Abraham,“ in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 12, 1880, pp. 460-462; Georg Behrmann, Hamburgs Orientalisten: Dem XIII. Internationalen Orientalistenkongress überreicht von der Averhoff- Stiftung, Hamburg: Persiehl, 1902, pp. 51-55).

MS collection of Abraham Hinckelmann

SUB Hamburg MS arab. Orient. 28.
35 x 24 cm.
The colophon is dated 30 Rajab 1058/20 Aug. 1648, during the reign of Jashan (?) Khān.
The place of copying ديكلورا is not identified, and the reading of the scribe’s nisbah
االمكتابالبورى (sic in Brockelmann) is not established.
Published: Brockelmann, p. 3 s.v. no. 2; Seidensticker, pp. 90-91 s.v. Arab. 5.

MSS collection of Abraham Hinckelmann

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SUB Hamburg MS arab. Orient. 36 = Cod. in scrin. 45a.
22.5 x 12 cm.
Undated and unplaced.
Published: Brockelmann, p. 5 s.v. no. 10; Seidensticker, pp. 86-87 s.v. Arab. 3.

Hinckelmann was a Protestant theologian and Orientalist, and in 1694 his critical Quran edition was published in Hamburg (for bibliographical descriptions and sample pages of his Al-Coranus, see the Verzeichnies der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienen Drucke des 17. Jahrhunderts (VD 17) s.v. 39:139712T, 3:314172A, 32:680463E, and 7:707063Q). Hinckelmann’s version was the second edition of the complete text to be typeset in Christian Europe, after the Venetian Quran of 1537/1538 (for the reproduction of a page from this very rare book, see Sprachen des Nahen Ostens und die Druckrevolution, eds. Eva Hanebutt-Benz et al., Westhofen: WVA Verlag Skulimus, 2002, p. 153 fig. 2), and it was immediately followed by Luigi Marracci’s superior Alcorani textus universus (2 vols., Padua, 1698) which dominated European Quran scholarship until the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Seidensticker’s discussion of the two Quran manuscripts from Hinckelmann’s library reflects the traditional focus of Arabic Studies on the Arabic language and the central Arab lands. Seidensticker mentions of course that these manuscripts were listed as sources in the preface of Hinckelmann’s Quran edition, but it is left to the art historian Hans-Walter Stork, who is not an Arabist, to situate Hinckelmann’s Islamic manuscript collection (pp. 9-11) within the history of the Oriental manuscript holdings in the SUB Hamburg (pp. 8-15). Seidensticker notes that both Quran manuscripts, though written in Arabic, were probably produced outside the central Arab lands (pp. 86, 90). Yet he does not specify the geographical meaning of “ostarabisch” (p. 86: tr. as “east Arabian”) and “arabischer Osten (p. 86: tr. as “eastern Arabia”). I suspect that the awkward English translations escaped the attention of proof readers and copy editors because the eastern lands of the Islamic world were seen through an Arabic Studies lens. Since the extraordinary geographical range of Arabic manuscript culture (p. 81) followed the eastern expansion of Muslim rule from the Arab Peninsula across the Iranian Plateau into Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent after 650 CE, Arabic is one of the dominant languages of the Islamic civilization and Arabic manuscripts were produced east of the central Arab lands.

The Arabic bias of Arabic Studies is brought into relief by the following chapter on the manuscript culture of Iran (pp. 93-100). Seidensticker locates the emergence of a new and independent Arabic manuscript culture in the flowering Muslim cities in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt during the eighth century CE (p. 78), and so there is no reason to explore the influence of Byzantine and Sasanian manuscript cultures on the design of the first Quran manuscripts copied between the late seventh and the early eighth centuries CE (cf. François Déroche, Le livre manuscrit arabe: Préludes à une historie, Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2004, pp. 15-18). Since Seidensticker presupposes the emergence of a completely new manuscript culture with the rise of Islam, it is only logical that he chose five Quran manuscripts, copied between the ninth and seventeenth centuries CE (pp. 82-92), to illustrate the wide range of Arabic manuscript culture between North Africa and India, from the Balkans to Central Asia. In contrast, Haase considers the Iranian Plateau the heartland of the Iranian civilization, but he has little interest in a shared language or a shared religion. The manuscripts of Islamic Iran are perceived as a continuation of the manuscript cultures of Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Christian, and Buddhist communities in pre-Islamic Iran (pp. 93-94). Haase selected as representative Iranian examples three manuscripts copied between the early 1700s and 1818 outside the central Arab lands. Two manuscripts contain Arabic works of astronomy (pp. 97-98) and ḥadīth (p. 100) accompanied by a Persian commentary or translation, and only the third manuscript is a monolingual volume of Persian poetry (p. 99).

What would Hinckelmann have thought about this twenty-first century distinction between an Arabic-Islamic and an Iranian-Persian manuscript culture? After Hinckelmann’s unexpected death in 1695, his library was dispersed when his family auctioned off the valuable collection of manuscripts and printed books (pp. 10-11 esp. notes 11-12). Still, some information about the contents of his Oriental manuscript collection has been preserved in sales catalogs and findings aids, supplementing the data gleaned from the manuscripts themselves and the introduction to the 1694 Quran edition. In his 1908 catalog Brockelmann suggested that 121 of Hamburg’s Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts had once been owned by Hinckelmann (p. IV, cf. pp. 198-199). Even this incomplete inventory documents that Hinckelmann’s manuscript collection was not limited to Quran scholarship and Arabic literature. Born a few years after the end of Thirty Years’ War in 1648, Hinckelmann was raised in a society which only slowly recovered from the long war’s terrible devastation. As a highly educated man he could not only switch between informal and formal linguistic registers but had also mastered Latin, German, and French as the languages of academia, everyday life, and high culture. The linguistic diversity of Muslim societies must have been familiar to Hinckelmann who studied Islam’s written revelation while he and his Protestant colleagues were confronted with the rise of Pietism.

It was a lovely surprise to find two of Hinckelmann’s Qurans in this small exhibition, as Hinckelmann had seemed completely forgotten at the AAI.  He is not mentioned in the AAI’s memorial volume Vom Kolonialinstitut zum Asien-Afrika-Institut: 100 Jahre Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften in Hamburg (ed. Ludwig Paul, Deutsche Ostasienstudien 2, Gossenberg: Ostasien Verlag, 2008). Neither Michael Friedrich’s short Geschichte der Hamburger Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften (available on the AAI homepage, Universität Hamburg: https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/Geschichte.html) nor Jörg B. Quenzer’s introduction to the 2011 exhibition catalog (pp. 2-7) includes any reference to Hinckelmann’s work. The lack of interest in this late seventeenth-century pioneer of Quran Studies may reflect concerns with defending our contemporary scholarship in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies against charges of Islamophobia and Orientalism. In early modern Europe, Oriental Studies originated in a political environment in which Islam was primarily understood as a Christian heresy, and not as an independent monotheistic faith in its own right. Still, I find it very curious that, despite the growing interest in Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal history, research on the European history of Oriental Studies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seems to be of so little merit, even though an analysis of its epistemological foundations has the potential to initiate critical reflection on our own research practices. Outside the confines of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, research on early modern Europe and the Americas is the prestigious pursuit of illuminating the makings of our modern world within the larger context of a globally conceived Renaissance, which nowadays comprises much more than the varied achievements of the Italian city states between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. It remains to be seen how the recently opened Center for the History of Arabic Studies in Europe (CHASE) at the Warburg Library in London will impact further research in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.

Working with Manuscripts in the Digital Age

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The importance of Islamic manuscripts as the most important resource for research about all aspects of Islamic civilization is widely recognized.  Walid Saleh describes the medieval Muslim Middle East as “one of the most bookish of pre-modern cultures” (Formation of the Classical Tafsīr Tradition, Leiden: Brill, 2004, p. 207), and Tilman Seidensticker observes that “the medium of the manuscript was intrinsic to the Islamic-Arabic culture” (in Manuscript Cultures, ed. Jörg B. Quenzer, Hamburg: SFB 950 Manuskriptkulturen Asien, Afrika und Europa, 2011, p. 78).  Scholars and institutions worldwide have heartily embraced digitization to facilitate access to the texts of manuscripts, as well as rare printed books, since the field of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies is still a discipline focused on the study of written texts.  The use of digitized sources has almost become best practice, and we routinely complain if sources are not digitally available with a good full-text search.  It is therefore noteworthy that the transformation of a three-dimensional physical object into a two-dimensional image on a screen has not ushered in a debate on whether the medium in which we encounter written texts impacts our understanding of their meaning.

One of the unintended side effects of the vigorously championed digitization of Islamic books is the proliferation of a seemingly decorative use of manuscript pages on academic websites and publications, since the widespread use of digitization has made it so much easier to obtain affordable high-quality scans.  I hasten to add that it is of course not particular to Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies to treat beautiful manuscript pages as eye candy.   Moreover, I myself am guilty as charged, though on this blog I will provide identifying information about all featured images (NB – for the blog’s masthead, please see this page).  But I suspect that the use of undocumented images as illustrations most likely reflects a learned lack of interest for the materiality of written texts.  As long as graduate education in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies is centered on teaching scholars how to base their arguments on the meaning of words only, the text’s embodiment in any particular medium is perceived as secondary and illustrations, as nice as they may be, are accidental.  This logocentric attitude explains why we have moved with relative ease from books on paper to microfilms and e-books.

The following two examples of undocumented manuscript pages illustrate that in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies our scholarly appreciation of Islamic manuscripts has not initiated a turn to bibliography or material history.  Despite the immense potential of digital media for the study of images, it is the word that stands at the center of contemporary research in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.

In Yemen, one of poorest Arab countries, the preservation of public and private manuscript collections presents a serious challenge, and digitization has long been used to address this challenge.  In 2011, Sabine Schmidtke and Jan Thiele of the Research Unit of the Intellectual History of the Islamicate World (Institut für Islamwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin) published an English-Arabic pamphlet about their department’s Yemen Manuscript Digitization Project.  The cover of the English version shows part of a rubricated table of content, set into a red frame, with a note on the margin:

As I wanted to know more about the formal manuscript to which this page belongs, I emailed Sabine Schmidtke and promptly received from Jan Thiele a very kind note with the available bibliographical details:  The illustrated leaf belongs to an undated copy of Taysīr al-maṭālib min Amālī Abī Ṭālib by Jaʿfar b. Aḥmad al-Buhlūlī (d. 1177 or 1178), written by Jābir b. Fatḥ Allāh al-Ghaffārī.  The work is preserved as part of a miscellany, which includes another work dated 1029 (began 8 Dec. 1619).  Although the miscellany is uncatalogued and its current owner unknown, the miscellany can be consulted, as it has been digitized by the Imam Zayd b. Ali Cultural Foundation (CD 450:3).  It is intriguing that Schmidtke and Thiele chose for the cover of a printed pamphlet a manuscript that at the moment is only accessible as a digital copy.   Their decision may first and foremost reflect that the work of Jaʿfar b. Aḥmad al-Buhlūlī is important to the department’s research project on theological rationalism.  But what is the ontological status of a digital manuscript copy, for which any knowledge about its original’s size, paper, ink etc. can no longer be ascertained?

The second example concerns the 2008 website of the research project on the Rational Sciences in Islam (Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University).  A very beautiful illustration of two kinds of kabīkaj plant (Lat. ranunculus asiaticus) – and the word kabīkaj is clearly legible on the top of the right column – is prominently displayed on the homepage and the related three project pages.     The illustration (MS arab., fol. 277a) belongs to a mid-thirteenth-century fragment of the Kitāb al-adwiyah al-mufradah by Abū Jaʿfar Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Ghāfiqī (d. 1165), which is owned by McGill’s Osler Library of the History of Medicine.  In 1989, Adam Gacek published the manuscript’s description in “Arabic Calligraphy and the ‘Herbal’ of al-Ghâfiqî” (Fontanus 2, pp. 49-51 and figs. 8-9).  Pharmacology is not directly related to philosophy and the mathematical sciences which are at the heart of the McGill research project.  Yet the kabīkaj presents a fascinating case of the rational sciences in premodern Islam.  What is the status of material evidence for any research on medieval Islam?  As Gacek had shown in an earlier article about “The Use of ‘kabīkaj‘  in Arabic Manuscripts” (Manuscripts of the Middle East1, 1986, pp. 49-53), the kabīkaj plant and the jinn Kabīkaj who protects books from pests are clearly related.  But Gacek’s research on invocations of the Kabīkaj has nonetheless been adduced to argue that the jinn Kabīkaj has been an Orientalist misreading; for example in the description of an Arabic manuscript (dated 1202/began 13 Oct. 1785) of the Kitāb tanbīh al-hādī wa’l-muhtadī by Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī (fl.1020) in the Institute of Ismaili Studies.  In a final twist to this reflection on working with manuscripts in the Digital Age, the title page with the invocation “yā Kabīkaj,” though explicitly mentioned in the description, is not among the four pages shown on its website.

PS.  On February 15, 2012 Tim Parks published “E-books Can’t Burn” on the blog of the New York Review of Books.  Parks’ paean to the many benefits of e-books has generated a lively debate on how the medium in which literature is read and enjoyed is related to its meaning and understanding.

Updated, 21 February 2012.