Background
Ignaz Goldziher was born on June 22, 1850. Born in Szekesfehervar, where his father, a merchant, settled in 1842, he was brought up in strict Orthodox tradition.
Ignaz Goldziher was born on June 22, 1850. Born in Szekesfehervar, where his father, a merchant, settled in 1842, he was brought up in strict Orthodox tradition.
For the first five years of high school, Ignaz Goldziher was a pupil at the local Cistercian school. In 1862 he published his first booklet, Sihat Itzhak, a critical analysis of liturgical poetry (piyut), and, at his bar mitzvah, delivered an hour-long sermon from the pulpit of the synagogue.
When his father’s business did not prosper, the family moved to Budapest in 1865, and Goldziher completed his high school studies at the Calvinist school. At university he studied Arabic, Turkish, and Persian.
In 1869, Goldziher began studying Judeo-Arabic literature in Berlin. He moved to Leipzig, where he was a pupil of the cphoch’s great Arabist, H. L. Fleischer, and obtained a Ph.D with a philological thesis on the medieval Jewish Bible exegetes and authors of dictionaries who wrote in Arabic.
The happiest time of his youth was 1873-1874, when, with a Hungarian state scholarship, Ignaz Goldziher journeyed to Damascus, Jerusalem, and Cairo. His command of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian, and deep knowledge of Muslim religious and secular literature, assured him entry into the highest echelons of spiritual and political society. The Jews of Damascus suspected him of being either a convert or missionary because of his great knowledge of Talmud and Islam. He even fell in love with his Muslim host’s sister who could recite from memory Arabic poetry and the song of Deborah in Hebrew. In Cairo, he was the first European to enter the Azhar Seminary, whose principal, the convert son of a rabbi, became suspicious of this Hungarian Jew. In Cairo, he learned much about Islam and Muslimnfolklore. Wishing to experience Islam, he entered the mosque dressed as a Muslim and joined the worshiping multitudes.
On his return home, he found that a Christian theologian had been appointed to the chair promised him by the previous minister of education. This caused him great disappointment although, since 1872, he had been an assistant professor (Dozent). He became full professor only in 1904.
From 1874 to 1904 the ailing and poverty-stricken Goldziher earned his living as secretary of the Jewish community in Pest. Frustrated, he saw these years as time wasted and recalled them with great bitterness in his Diary. He despised the wealthy, uneducated, honorary officers, w'ho he felt treated him as a slave. This was in fact not so, for there is ample evidence of the high regard in which his superiors held him. His relationship with the rabbinical seminary was similar. Having participated in the preparations for its establishment in 1877, he became a member of the governing board but could not be appointed a teacher for lack of a rabbinical diploma. However from 1899 he was invited to lecture on Jewish religious philosophy.
Goldziher traveled extensively, mainly to international congresses on Oriental studies and religious history. It was at such a congress in Stockholm (1899) that King Oscar II presented him with a gold medal. He was a guest of some forty academies and learned societies and a member of eight. The universities of Cambridge and Aberdeen honored him with doctorates and numerous universities offered him positions. He refused all these offers out of his deep loyalty to Judaism and to his family, and his fervent Hungarian patriotism. From 1876, he was a corresponding member, and from 1892 a member, of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and from 1905 chairman of its First Department (philosophy). He resigned from this office in 1919 after L. Loczy’s anti-Semitic attack, refuted in a memorable address in which he declared his great Jewish pride.
Of his two sons, the elder, Miksa Adolf (1880— 1900), committed suicide and the younger, Karl (1881-1955), became a noted professor of mathematics. Karl’s marriage to the Egyptologist, Maria Freudcnberg, in 1913, caused a great change in the bitter sixty-three year old scholar. He himself literally fell in love with her, felt rejuvenated, and worked with increased vigor. In 1918, Maria victim to Spanish influenza; he was shattered and began to go into a decline.
He continued with his scholarly work, but became increasingly alienated from the world. He drew some satisfacion from the fact that he was elected dean of the philosophical faculty of Budapest University and often refers in his Diary to the pride he felt when, in his Hungarian national costume and cocked hat, he was driven in his carriage through the streets of the ghetto where he lived, with a hussar sitting next to the coachman.