Religious Studies: A Global View

with different academic milieux, from the late colonial to the early global, and

as a result how fragmented their legacies are. Integrated within broader

scholarly communities, they were nevertheless isolated in their own cultures.

This sharp disparity combined a local lack of continuity with the necessity of

emigration and adoption of other cultural styles.

For an impression of this diversity, consider just a few scholars and writers.

Pettazzoni invited the Polish scholar Aleksander Brückner (1856–1939) to

translate his work on Slavic and Polish mythology (Brückner 1918/1980) into

Italian, in his ‘Biblioteca di storia delle religioni’ (Bologna, 1923), a valuable

enterprise considered for many years by Eliade an example to emulate. Martin

Buber (1878–1965), born and educated in Vienna, cannot be understood as a

scholar of religion apart from the Hasidic ambience of Eastern Europe, which

was at the origin of many of his meditative and scholarly works. Angelo Brelich

(1917–1973), the successor of Pettazzoni in the Rome chair for the history of

religions (1958) was born in Hungary and educated in Budapest. The Pole

Constantin Regamey (1907–1982), was born in Kiev into a bourgeois family

from Lausanne that had moved to imperial Russia and was educated in

Warsaw. He became a scholar of Slavic and Buddhist studies, as well as a gifted

musician and pianist. In 1945 he became professor at the University of

Lausanne, reorganizing the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Other notable Polish

scholars include Jean Przyluski (1885–1945) in Paris, Helena Willman-

Grabowska in Paris, and Maryla Falk in Italy and India. Ludwik Sternbach

(1909–1981), who was born in Krakow and died in Paris, was after World

War II a researcher and later director of the Akhila Bharatiya Sanskrit Parishad

at Lucknow, India.

The influx of scholars from Western Europe to the region also contributed

to the porosity of its boundaries and the diversity of its academic styles. An

example of the latter is Franz Babinger (1891–1967), who held the chair in

Turkish studies at the University of Munich. Invited to Romania by the famous

historian Nicolae Iorga, he spent almost ten years there, first within the Institute

for South-Eastern European Studies (1934–1939) at the University of Bucharest,

then at the University of Jassy, where he directed the newly founded Institute

for Turkish studies and implemented Islamic studies until political circum-

stances forced him to leave in 1943.

Major ideas and problems

As elsewhere, in Eastern Europe disciplinary terminology is a matter of

discussion and disagreement. The Romanian expression, Istoria religiilor, is a

direct and accurate translation of ‘history of religions’. Conceptually, it

expresses a global sense, as it also does in the name of the IAHR, as illustrated

by the late Ugo Bianchi. But other terms are also found in Eastern Europe,

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EUGEN CIURTIN