It required great erudition and immense knowledge acquired through the
reading of the original sources, and a creative use of the categories of the history
of religions, to reconstruct the architecture of the history of Islamic religion
as he did.’ His influential studies included (in German) Hebrew Myth and Its
Historical Development(1876), two volumes of Muslim Studies(1889–1890),
and Lectures on Islam(1910). Goldziher’s collected papers were posthumously
edited by Joseph de Somogyi, one of his Hungarian pupils (1967–1973).
Moses Gaster (1856–1939), a Romanian Jew of Ashkenazi ancestry, studied
at the Rabbinic Seminary of Breslau (now Wroc∏aw) and then taught, as a
colleague of Hasdeu, Romanian language and literature at the University of
Bucharest. Expelled from Romania in 1885, he made his home in England,
where he was the first Jew to teach at Oxford (Gaster 1887) and, as haham
of English Sephards, was active in promoting Zionism. A noted contributor
to Hastings’ Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Gaster’s scholarship included
such topics as the apocrypha, folklore, and magic, primarily in ancient and
medieval Judaism (an unique, still valuable collection is Gaster 1925–1928).
His son, Theodore Herzl Gaster (1906–1992), who taught in the United States,
made a one-volume abridgment of James George Frazer’s massive Golden
Boughand wrote famously on myth, ritual, and drama in ancient West Asia
(1950). Both Gaster and Goldziher, combining a strong traditional Jewish
background with the finest scholarship of their time, united ‘theological’
involvement in their communities in Bucharest and Budapest and the finest
Wissenschaft des Judentumswith scholarly objectivity. In this respect they
resembled very closely Sylvain Lévi and his œuvreas president of Alliance
israéliteup to 1935—a parallel already noted by Eliade in 1936.
Somewhat less well known internationally today than either Goldziher or
the Gasters, father and son, was the Hungarian scholar Lajos Ligeti (1902–
1987). After being educated in the József Eötvös College in Budapest, he went
to Paris (EPHE and Collège de France), where he became a true disciple of
Henri Maspéro, Jean Bacot, and Paul Pelliot. Later he pursued his education
and research in Mongolia, China, Afghanistan, and Japan. He is revered as
the founder of the Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, and
edited for many years the international monograph series Bibliotheca Orientalis
Hungarica, popularizing the religions of Asia through the Magyar Csoma de
KŒrös Pocket Library. He was the vice-president of the Hungarian Academy
of Sciences for two decades. He published mainly in Hungarian (and mainly
on philology), but some of his researches in French are very valuable for
comparative scholars (cf. especially Ligeti 1942–1944, 1971, 1978, 1981, and
1984).
One of the best scholars of Indian religions was Stanislas Schayer
(1899–1941), remembered nowadays especially for his synthesis on axial
questions of early Buddhism (for Bengali, Dravidian, and Hindi religious
studies in Warsaw, as well as for an exhaustive bibliography of Schayer, see
1111
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2
3111
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20111
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30111
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35
6
7
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9
40111
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EASTERN EUROPE
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