Central Asia and Iran, searching for the origins of the Magyars, whom he
hopelessly considered to be of Turkish origin (Vámbéry 1865). Numerous
others, as for instance George Roerich (1902–1960), adopted syncretic forms
of theosophy which sometimes biased their scholarly fundamentals (Lopez Jr.
1999: 267).
In any case, the most damaging influence on the study of religion was the
Communist ideology that spread throughout Eastern Europe after 1945. Even
before then the Soviet linguist Nikolai J. Marr (1865–1934) had embraced
Marxist ideology in developing his theory of ‘Japhetology’, central to which
was the idea that the languages of the Caucasus region were the original
languages of Europe, now found among the oppressed lowest strata of society.
The view was condemned by linguists for its abnormal postulates and
ideological perversions and later even repudiated by Stalin as ‘non-Marxist’.
Early leading figures
Such idiosyncrasies should not lead us to overlook genuinely towering Eastern
European contributors to the study of religions in its early days. A prolific
Carmelite from Croatia, Ivan Filip (Philippus) Vezdin (Vesdin) (1746–1804),
better known as Paulinus a Sancto Bartholomaeo, travelled in India and stayed,
from 1776 to 1789, at the Court of the Maharaja of Travancore. A native of
Hof in Lower Austria (now in Croatia), he wrote the first attempt to interpret
Brahmanic religion using mainly South Asian autochthonous sources (and
J. F. Kleuker’s translation of the Avesta). Despite his knowledge of Croatian
and Magyar languages, Paulinus thought of himself as German (from Austria)
(Vogel 1996: 12–14 n. 14) and, returning from South India, taught in Italy
(Padua, Rome), where he published in Latin and Italian twenty works on things
Indian, rapidly translated (into English, French, and German) and circulated
in all Europe. All historians of religious studies accept Sir William Jones’
discourse of 1786 on the affinity of Indo-European languages as a milestone,
but they seldom recognize the sound criticism launched in 1798 by Paulinus—
nulla suae assertionis produxisset documenta(‘he provided no evidence for his
assertion’; on this phrase cf. Rocher 1961; Jauk-Pinhak 1984: 136)—who
contributed the earliest list of lexical correspondences between Sanskrit,
Avestan, Latin, and Germanic, in a work entitled De antiquitate et affinitate
linguae Zendicae, Samscrdamicae et Germanicae dissertatio(about their value,
see Van Hal forthcoming). In an appendix he also established that Avestan
was not a corrupted form, as Jones had asserted, but a linguistic cognate of
Sanskrit. Paulinus was rediscovered by Croatian Indology and comparative
religion in the twentieth century, but many of his writings are still unpublished.
The Hungarian Alexander Csoma de KŒrös (KŒrösi Csoma Sándor,
1784?–1842) is arguably the best-known and most-studied Eastern European
representative of religious studies in the nineteenth century (cf. KŒrösi Csoma
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
57
