religious studies in her or his own cultural history than that of her or his
neighbors. One implication of this diversity is that states already integrated
within the European Community, such as Poland, the Czech Republic, and
Hungary, all have a slightly different scholarly standard even in a discipline
like religious studies, which combines philological and historical expertise with
a hermeneutic flavor.
Prehistory of the study of religions
At the end of his life, Max Müller saw but a very little Eastern European interest
in the newborn, decidedly comparative and vigorously encyclopedic science of
religion, in spite of his Easternmost European connections and enthusiastic
readers (van den Bosch 2002 and, on Hasdeu, infra). When Henri Hubert added
a chapter on the European science of religion to the French translation of
Chantepie de la Saussaye’s (1904) manual, he included only the chief Western
schools. That has continued to be the view from outside the region. Scholars
in Eastern Europe are present in encyclopedias, manuals, readers, and global
presentations of history of religions and religious studies only with contri-
butions on their own religious culture; the two editions of The Encyclopedia
of Religion(1987 and 2005) are no exception, but the situation is far better
than in Hastings’ century-old encyclopedia.
Historically, outsiders have struggled to conceptualize this region. Buhara,
Bucharest, Budapest—for many ancient travelers and scholars these were
almost the same name (Culianu 1995; Timus,2005). Significantly enough,
Central Eastern Europe and Central Asia were paralleled as early as eleventh-
century Arab historical geography (Göckenjan and Zimonyi 2001). In the
eighteenth century ‘[t]he designation of Scythians was extended... to cover
all of Eastern Europe, until Herder appropriated another identification from
among the barbarians of ancient history, and gave Eastern Europe its modern
identity as the domain of the Slavs’ (Wolff 1994: 11). When Jeremy Bentham
discovered in the Bucharest of 1786 ‘four or five disciples of Helvetius’, that
was a rare instance of a shared pan-European culture. More general was the
isolation reflected by the eighteenth century Wallachian chronicler, Radu
Popescu: ‘the new world is unknown to us and our world is unknown to it’
(Dut,u 1998: 322).
In this environment, Eastern European views on world religions developed
comparatively late, were indisputably deficient, and found little resonance with
academics elsewhere. Nevertheless, despite the poor circulation of ideas, the
region saw some splendid individual achievements prior to the emergence of
a study of religion per se.
Afanasii Nikitin (d. 1472), a merchant from Tver who joined the embassy
sent to Shirwan by Tsar Ivan III, wrote a pioneering memoir of his Journey
1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1
2
3
4
35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
411
EASTERN EUROPE
53
