During the Sukkot holidays in 1924—just a little more than a century ago—Jerusalem’s elite gathered at the Midrash Abarbanel Library, as the National Library of Israel was then known, for an uncommon celebration. Local Jewish, Muslim, and Christian notables, foreign diplomats, Zionist leaders, and British Mandate officials met to mark the opening of the Goldziher library to the public. As the name suggests, the library contained the personal research collection of the late leading European scholar of Arabic and Islam, Ignaz Goldziher. Purchased by the Zionist movement from Goldziher’s family after the Jewish-Hungarian scholar’s death in 1921, the 6,000 volumes had been shipped from Budapest to Jerusalem months before. Now, the collection was finally on display in a four-room annex, rented just for that purpose, adjoining the existing library building in the city center.
Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, Judah Magnes, soon to be appointed chancellor of the Hebrew University, and others addressed the assembled notables emphasizing how in the Goldziher library “scholars from all the races and religions of the Land of Israel would meet in a collective effort.” Goldziher’s few thousand books served as the foundation for the more than half a million volumes that make up the Islam and Middle East Collection of the National Library of Israel today.
That Jerusalem celebration capped years of intense effort. Zionist leaders in London had fought hard to buy Goldziher’s library when it was put up for sale, beating out competing bids from leading universities in Europe, America, and even as far away as Japan. Goldziher was one of the founders of the European academic study of Islam, renowned within his own lifetime, and his works are still considered essential to this day. As a world-famous Hungarian scholar, securing the permit to remove Goldziher’s books from the country required the intervention of the British embassy in Budapest, and only a last-minute transfer of funds convinced the scholar’s widow, Laura, to finally allow the books to leave.
This successful acquisition was a major coup for the growing Jerusalem library, as well as for the Hebrew University, which opened a year later in 1925. Over the course of decades, Goldziher had slowly built up his collection of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish books and manuscripts, as well as scholarly publications on Islam. This process began with an extended study and book-buying tour through the Middle East in 1873. Alongside essential works on the Qur’an, hadith, and Islamic law, literature, theology, and mysticism, Goldziher’s library also contained numerous titles on Jews and Judaism—observant throughout his life, he had served for many years as secretary of the Budapest Jewish community—philosophy, travel literature, Classics, and other topics. No private collection in Europe, and only a handful of university or public libraries, could rival the breadth and importance of Goldziher’s collection.
Goldziher made annotations, mostly in German and Arabic, in the margins of many of his books, and these notes only increased the collection’s value. It was hoped that access to his marginal corrections and private musings would be almost as instructive as having the great scholar himself at hand.
Alongside his library, Goldziher also preserved in his home in Budapest a voluminous archive of correspondence. Over the course of decades, he had exchanged letters, on topics scholarly and profane, with European students of Arabic and Islam, Muslim thinkers and theologians, Jewish scholars and writers, and other admirers. All told, Goldziher received and preserved more than 13,500 letters from 1,650 individuals in eleven languages. According to his wishes, this epistolary archive was bequeathed to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Now digitally available through a dedicated website, Goldziher’s letters are an invaluable primary source for understanding not only his own life but a whole period in the history of Hungarian Jewry and in the European engagement with and study of the Muslim world.
Even though Goldziher’s correspondence and other archival materials were meant to remain in Budapest, in 1924, when the librarians in Jerusalem opened the shipping crates and began to catalog Goldziher’s books, they discovered a surprise. Letters, notes, and memoranda were found in many volumes. While some were clearly meant to serve as additional space for commentary and reflection on an author’s argument—a kind of extension of a book’s margins—others had apparently been stuck between the pages and forgotten.
Dutifully, the librarians, chief among them David Hartwig Baneth, the Berlin-born Arabist and future director of the National Library, removed the letters and other papers from the volumes, placing them in envelopes on which were written the books’ new call numbers. These envelopes bear the Library’s name, but not in Hebrew. Instead, they are stamped with the German title Jüdische Nationalbibliothek – a sign of the institution’s European identity at the time. These envelopes, as well as offprints of articles and other documents that did not fit inside them, were then set aside to be dealt with later.
However, as is sometimes the case in the history of libraries, this “later” turned out to be not next week, next month, nor even next year, but almost a century. It was only this year, 2024, that the Goldziher archive at the National Library of Israel was finally catalogued.
After first having been reviewed by Sabine Schmidtke of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies—and with the Institute’s financial support—Goldziher’s archive was cataloged by Kinga Dévényi of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Dévényi spent two intensive weeks in the NLI’s Special Collections Reading Hall deciphering Hungarian asides and Arabic notations. The former curator of the Goldziher collection in Budapest, she is also the co-editor, along with Hans-Jürgen Becker, Sebastian Günther, and Schmidtke, of the recent book Building Bridges: Ignaz Goldziher and His Correspondents (Brill, 2024).
The fruits of her labors include a brief Hebrew-language summary of Mamonides’ epochal philosophical treatise The Guide for the Perplexed, written when Goldziher was only seventeen; notes for a planned article on Abu Mahdhura al-Jumahi (d. 678), an early convert to Islam and companion of the Prophet Muhammad who was responsible for calling the faithful to prayer in Mecca; an invitation to attend a public lecture by the American-Jewish Orientalist Richard Gottheil in Cairo on February 24, 1905, and more. Notably, among the printed items, she identified several reviews of Goldziher’s publications, a reflection of his well-known practice of collecting critiques of his work.
In cataloging the Goldziher archival material, Dévényi applied the expertise developed during her previous work with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences collection. The archive contains a diverse array of both handwritten and printed materials. The often-brittle papers, frequently consisting of loose pages, had inevitably become mixed up over the past hundred years. Therefore, her initial task was to carefully sort the material, determining which pieces belonged together. She then separated the handwritten materials from the printed ones and tried to group the documents thematically. Given the special significance of the items, she cataloged each piece individually, ensuring careful attention to detail. She took measurements and counted the folios where relevant, especially for manuscripts and other unique documents.
After the Goldziher papers in Jerusalem are scanned, we hope that they can be digitally reunited with the much larger archive in Budapest, allowing scholars and students to benefit from new perspectives on Goldziher’s life and work.
