Sándor 1984; Ligeti 1942–1944, 1984/2000; Csetri 1989; Bethlenfalvy
1989–1990; Le Calloc’h 2000–2006). He concentrated on the Tibetan world,
but his entire career was a splendid ideological accident. Informed by a
Romantic background, his researches and travel were first and foremost built
upon the false supposition that the origins of the Magyars was Hunic or Central
Asian or even Tibetan. A successor of Csoma de KŒrös, F. Anton von Schiefner
(1817–1879), published in German in the French-titled Russian journal of the
St Petersburg Imperial Academy (inter aliaSchiefner 1851), before translating
and commenting upon TÇranÇtha’s history of Buddhism in India, written in
1608 (Schiefner 1869). He also edited Nordische Reisen und Forschungen(St
Petersburg, 1853–1862), the posthumous milestone of Finno-Ugrian studies
by its founder, the Finn Matthias Alexander Castrén (1813–1852).
The Russian Prince Sergei Nikolaevitch Trubetskoi (1862–1905) and his
brother Evgenii Nikolaevitch (1863–1920) were instrumental in introducing
an Orthodox Christian-based philosophy of religion. A friend of the Russian
philosopher Vladimir Soloviov, who was known for his interests in Indian
and Gnostic religions (Kitzel 1996), Sergei Trubetskoi wrote in 1897 an
introduction to the then just published Auguste Barth’s Religions of India
(French edition 1879), thus introducing to the Russian publicRevue de l’histoire
des religionsand one of the forgotten syntheses, first published in 1879, of the
complex French Indologist Barth (1834–1916). He offered an additional
bibliography to the Russian translation of another classic, Manual of the
History of Religions(2nd German edition of 1897) of Pierre Daniel Chantepie
de la Saussaye (1848–1920). A generation later, scholars such as Sergei F.
Oldenburg (1863–1934) and Otto O. Rozenberg (1888–1919) continued this
trend with works of impeccable erudition and insight, of fundamental interest
and wide circulation across Europe (Bongard-Levin et al.2002).
The Romanian Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu (1838–1907), who became
professor of philology at the University of Bucharest in 1878, did pioneering
work in the study of the Romanian language and Romanian history. He was
also the first Romanian to write on the biblical apocrypha. Covering a large
range of disciplines and combining a variety of comparative methods, from
comparative philology to the typology of religious folklore, Hasdeu, a model
for the young Eliade, was praised by members of the Romanian Academy such
as Max Müller (a member since 1875): ‘I often regret that you should hide
your excellent work under the bushel of the Romanian language’; ‘How I wish
I could read Roumanian instead of having to guess its meaning!’ (letters from
1880–1881, cf. Hasdeu 1982: 392–94).
The Hungarian scholar Ignácz (or Ignaz) Goldziher (1850–1921) was the
first Jewish scholar to teach at the University of Budapest. According to Jacques
Waardenburg (2005: 3634), he ‘may be said to have laid the foundation of
Islamic studies as a scholarly discipline based on the literary and historical
study of texts, most of which were at the time available only as manuscripts.58
EUGEN CIURTIN