Introduction

ABSTRACT

This introduction gives an overview of Stern's career, summarizes his prolific and field-shaping work on Jewish and Islamic subjects, and looks ahead to the articles in this special issue. Surveying Stern's scholarly network, and noting his resemblance to his great compatriot and coreligionist Ignaz Goldziher, it also proposes that academic orientalism has been an important element of modern Jewish activity in Europe, the USA, and Israel.

KEYWORDS:

• Jewish education
• Budapest
• Hebrew
• Hungarian

This special issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies arises out of a conference held at All Souls College, Oxford, on 7 October 2019, to commemorate the life and work of the Hungarian-Jewish orientalist Samuel Miklos Stern (1920–1969) on the fiftieth anniversary of his untimely death (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Institute of Jewish Studies, Manchester 1950s. Stern is second from right, standing.⁶

Stern was born in 1920 in Tab, a small Hungarian town located about 100 miles south-west of Budapest.¹ His father died when he was very young, and his mother raised him on her own, teaching him the Hebrew alphabet before he could read Latin characters. As a boy he received a traditional Jewish education and attended a local Benedictine school, before being sent to Budapest to attend what his friend Richard Walzer² described as a “‘Gymnasium’ of the pre-war German-Austrian type, based on the Greek and Roman classics and a vast amount of Hebrew and Rabbinic subjects”.³ The school’s director was Rabbi Bernát Heller,⁴ a disciple of the great Hungarian-Jewish orientalist Ignaz Goldziher,⁵ whom Stern (as we shall see below) would later take as his model.

In 1939, in the face of the Nazi threat, Stern was sent by his mother (who would herself perish in the Holocaust) to Jerusalem. There he enrolled as a student of Arabic, Hebrew, and Romance Languages and Literatures at the Hebrew University, which by that time had become one of the leading centres of Oriental Studies in the world, its faculty having been bolstered by many illustrious European scholars who had come to Palestine on account of their Zionist commitments or to escape Nazi anti-Semitism. These scholars were, for the most part, orientalists in the time-honoured (though not the Saidean) sense, philologists who had mastered a dazzling array of oriental languages and mainly concentrated on the pre-modern history, literatures, and religions of the Middle East. Among Stern’s teachers were the Judeo-Arabic philologist D.H. Baneth,⁷ the historian of Islam S.D. Goitein,⁸ the historians of philosophy Julius Guttmann⁹ and Leon Roth,¹⁰ and the scholar of Romance and Renaissance literature Hiram Peri (Pflaum).¹¹ Hebrew was taught by N.H. Torczyner (Tur-Sinai),¹² M.H. Segal,¹³ Umberto Cassuto,¹⁴ and David Yellin,¹⁵ Arabic by Gotthold E. Weil¹⁶ and H.J. Polotsky (who also taught Syriac, Ethiopic, and Egyptology),¹⁷ Talmudic Aramaic by J.N. Epstein,¹⁸ Islamic art and archaeology by L.A. Mayer,¹⁹ the Qur’an by Yoel Rivlin,²⁰ and modern Arabic literature by Yizhak Shamosh.²¹ Beyond the School of Oriental Studies, students could attend lectures on Jewish mysticism and philosophy given by the great Gershom Scholem²² and Martin Buber.^23,24

The young Stern flourished in this hallowed environment. His contemporary, the Semiticist Edward Ullendorff,²⁵ remembered him as “by general consent, the most gifted” among the students of his generation,²⁶ and while still an undergraduate he published several articles in Hebrew orientalist journals. These demonstrated remarkable command of the subject at hand for a scholar so young, and also signalled Stern’s mastery of a wide range of fields. Much of Stern’s early work focused on medieval Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic literature and the crossover between the Arab-Islamic and Hebrew-Judaic literary traditions, a field in which, as Raymond Scheindlin observes in his contribution to the present volume, he retained an interest throughout his career. While serving in the British censorship service in Port Sudan during the Second World War, meanwhile, Stern met Paul Kraus,²⁷ who encouraged his burgeoning interest in the Ismā‘īlī branch of Shī‘ī Islam. The immediate result was a seminal article on the secret society of medieval Ismā‘īlī intellectuals known as the Brethren of Purity. The long-term effect was Stern’s field-defining work on the history and doctrines of the early Ismā‘īlīs, which, along with that of Wilferd Madelung,²⁸ helped to correct longstanding misconceptions about Ismā‘īlī Shī‘ism and to place the field of Ismā‘īlī Studies on a scientific footing, as Farhad Daftary details in his contribution to the present volume.

On receiving his degree from the Hebrew University, in 1948 Stern went to Oxford to begin work on a DPhil on the Arabic and Hebrew strophic poetry of Islamic Spain, a topic on which he had already by that time published a groundbreaking article in the journal Al-Andalus; as Alan Jones relates in his contribution to this special issue, the article “caused an immediate sensation, particularly amongst the Spanish establishment but also among scholars of Romance throughout the western world”. Stern’s thesis on “The Old Andalusian Muwashshaḥ”, which was submitted in 1950, was written under the supervision of the great British orientalist H.A.R. Gibb,²⁹ who would remain an important source of inspiration for Stern throughout his career.³⁰

In 1950, at the recommendation of Gibb, Stern was appointed Assistant Editor of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, to which he contributed numerous entries and, in the words of Walzer, “laid the foundation of this our most important and valuable companion of Islamic Studies”.³¹ It was around this time that Stern encountered Giorgio Levi Della Vida,³² a leading Italian orientalist of Jewish background, who had stood up to the Fascist regime in Italy and, as Valeria Piacentini details in her contribution to the special issue, guided Stern in his field-shaping work on Islamic history. In 1957, Stern took a part-time role in the coin room of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, filling gaps in the Museum’s collection of oriental coins with some astute purchases – the subject of Helen Mitchell-Brown’s contribution.

In 1958, Stern was elected to a Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, where he would remain until his death from a severe asthma attack in October 1969. All Souls then as now was a specialist research college, meaning that its Research Fellows were able to concentrate on scholarship, free of excessive administrative burdens or onerous teaching obligations. Stern’s output over the final decade of his life was accordingly prolific, consisting of several books, countless articles in English and Hebrew, and numerous book reviews, on everything ranging from Judeo-Arabic philosophy to Islamic heresiography, Islamic documentary and numismatic history to the Hebrew poetry of medieval Sicily and the autograph manuscripts of Maimonides. This work was not just prolific; it was also transformative: as Richard Walzer put it, he was blessed with “a kind of magic touch which finds something new wherever it manifests itself”,³³ and in this way was able, in the words of Marina Rustow, to transform “five or six fields of medieval studies” during his short career.

In this regard, Stern’s work bears a striking resemblance to that of his compatriot and coreligionist Ignaz Goldziher. Widely regarded as the founder of modern Islamic Studies, Goldziher wrote field-defining works on the literalist Ẓāhirī madhhab (school of law), the construction of the Hadith corpus (the sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad), the veneration of saints in Islam, and the exegesis of the Qur’an, along with many other studies of Arabic, Islamic, and Jewish topics.³⁴ A disciple of Abraham Geiger,³⁵ the father of Jewish Reform and pioneer of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, he also regarded Islam as an ideal religion of reason and ethical monotheism, and therefore as a model to which modern Judaism could aspire.³⁶ Though he eschewed Goldziher’s interest in Jewish reform, Stern nevertheless seems to have regarded himself as the great orientalist’s heir, translating his seminal Muhammedanische Studien into English,³⁷ and continuing several of Goldziher’s lines of enquiry through his work on Ismā‘īlī Shī‘ism,³⁸ the Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic literature of Muslim Spain,³⁹ Jewish and Muslim Neoplatonism,⁴⁰ and Persian national sentiment in medieval Islam.⁴¹

Furthermore, several aspects of Stern’s general scholarly approach and intellectual outlook bear a close resemblance to those of Goldziher. Like his predecessor, he was a polymath: “In a period of topical and disciplinary specialization,” wrote the scholar of Islamic history John Wansbrough,⁴² “Stern was a polymath, and his part in the continuing progress of our studies may be likened to that of the pioneers and founders of Islamkunde in the nineteenth century,”⁴³ by which Wansbrough presumably had Goldziher, in particular, in mind. “I know no one who is competent to assess every aspect of his work,” agreed the medieval historian R.W. Southern.⁴⁴ “ … His knowledge extended over every century and every country from Spain to India, and it was always read for use,”⁴⁵ a comment that could equally have been made of Goldziher. Consistent with this, like Goldziher and his teachers at the Hebrew University, Stern had mastered a remarkable array of languages. As John Sparrow⁴⁶ recalled in the memorial address which he delivered in the All Souls College chapel on 22nd November 1969:

When he put in for Research Fellowship at All Souls, Stern submitted certain particulars in support of his application. They revealed the range of linguistic knowledge and at the same time his modesty with regard to it. He firmly claimed “complete professional knowledge” of Arabic and Hebrew; no more than “knowledge” of Persian, Turkish, and Syriac; merely “working knowledge” of classical Ethiopian; and – with a modesty quite devoid of irony – “command, or reading knowledge”, of French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Hungarian, Greek, and Latin.⁴⁷

Stern was able to master these diverse subjects and languages thanks not only to inborn ability and training in the German philological tradition, but also to his remarkable capacity for hard work, another trait which he shared with Goldziher, most of whose prodigious output was written in his summer vacations from his work as secretary to the Neolog community.⁴⁸ Recalling their student days at the Hebrew University, Edward Ullendorff wrote:

Already as a student he stood out in his single-minded devotion to his studies, constantly reading and working and never engaging in idle student chat. In an ambush on the university bus, or in a lesser shooting affray, when we were enjoined to lie on the floor of the bus, Stern would sit upright at the back of the vehicle reading pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, unperturbed by what was going on around him.⁴⁹

He retained this single-minded devotion to his studies in later years. As John Sparrow put it:

The College meant more to him than the Common Room, the Library than the Hall; when one met him in the quad he had always the air of being on his way to work. And so he probably was. There lay the secret that explained any apparent contradictions in his personality: his work came first, he lived for it.⁵⁰

There was perhaps something of his Jewish background in this, a faint echo of the talmudic notion of study as piety that Goldziher, too, had embraced and transformed into the guiding principle of his orientalist scholarship.⁵¹ Indeed, Ilai Alon,⁵² who was in attendance at Warden Sparrow’s memorial address, has noted how he “thought at the time that such a description [that is, that Stern lived for his work] would not be made in Yeshivas, because that would be the rule rather than an exception”.⁵³

Stern’s Jewish background may also have informed another of his notable qualities, namely, his great fondness for teaching, a trait recalled with fondness by several contributors to the present volume (David Bryer, Vivian Brown, Etan Kohlberg, Alfred Ivry, Noam Stillman, and Valeria Piacentini). In addition to his fellowship at All Souls, from 1964 Stern held a university lectureship in the history of Islamic civilization, a title broad enough to cover his wide range of academic interests, Jewish as well as Islamic. When he died, he had no fewer than twelve postgraduate students under his supervision.⁵⁴ He also played a key role in reforming the Oxford history curriculum through his efforts to introduce the study of early Islam into a new module on Byzantine history, as Peter Brown remembers in his contribution to this special issue. All in all, as Vivian Brown puts it, Stern “embodied a tradition of the scholar as learner and teacher”, reflecting an era when university teaching and research could be primarily driven by a scholar’s love of their subject and passion for the truth rather than bureaucratic performance metrics.

Stern’s two decades in Oxford were defined to a great extent by his close personal relationship with Richard and Sofie Walzer. Richard, a Fellow of the newly established St. Catherine’s College, was a noted historian of Islamic philosophy, of German-Jewish origin. His wife Sofie (née Cassirer), the daughter of the Jewish publisher Bruno Cassirer and cousin of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer,⁵⁵ was a historian of Islamic art. Stern lived with them, as a kind of adoptive son, at their house in Bladon Close, North Oxford. As several contributors (David Bryer, Vivian Brown, Helen Mitchell-Brown) to the present volume remember, the house was an important centre of Oxford intellectual and cultural life, notable for its Biedermeier furniture, the Impressionist paintings which lined its walls, and the colourful cast of characters (many of them, like the Walzers, of German-Jewish background) who came through its doors.

Stern’s relationship with the Walzers was academic and intellectual as well as personal. Along with D.S. Richards⁵⁶ and Albert Hourani,⁵⁷ Stern and Walzer were key members of the Near Eastern History Group at Oxford, which organized important international colloquia in Oxford on the Islamic city (1965) – the subject of Valeria Piacentini’s piece – and Islam and the trade of Asia (1967). Stern co-edited Greek into Arabic (1962), Richard Walzer’s seminal collection of essays on Islamic philosophy,⁵⁸ and, at the time of his death, was working with Sofie Walzer on a book on the Arabic version of three anecdotes from the Buddhist legend of Balawhar and Būdāsf,⁵⁹ and with Albert Hourani on a Festschrift for Richard Walzer.⁶⁰ Most of Stern’s own books were published by Cassirer, the publishing house founded by Sofie Walzer’s father.

Another with whom Stern was very close was the scholar of Jewish mysticism Joseph Weiss.⁶¹ Like Stern, Weiss was a Hungarian Jew who had studied at the Hebrew University, in his case under Gershom Scholem, and had subsequently settled in England, becoming professor of Jewish Studies at the University of London. As Marina Rustow noted in her contribution to the Stern conference, Weiss and Stern were frequent correspondents, exchanging letters with one another in English, Hungarian, Hebrew, and even Latin. They also used to conduct what have been referred to as “intellectual” Passover Seders at Weiss’ London home.⁶² They also shared a tragic fate: Weiss died of suicide just a few weeks before Stern’s own sudden death, Richard Walzer’s obituaries for both men appearing in the same issue of the Journal of Jewish Studies.⁶³

Stern’s relationships with the Walzers, Weiss, and many other Jewish scholars of his generation, the marked influence of Goldziher upon him, his experiences at the Hebrew University, and his overlapping work in Islamic and Jewish Studies, go some way to explaining why readers of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies should be interested in a scholar whose main specialism was medieval Islamic history. In a famous 1968 article titled “The Pro-Islamic Jews”, the orientalist Bernard Lewis⁶⁴ noted that, “in the development of Islamic studies in European and, later, American universities, Jews, and in particular Jews of Orthodox background and education, play an altogether disproportionate role”.⁶⁵ This, Lewis suggested, was “more than coincidental”.⁶⁶ With their background in the Hebrew language and biblical and talmudic studies, Jewish scholars were well-prepared to master Arabic (like Hebrew, a Semitic language) and the study of the Qur’an and Islamic law (both of which draw heavily on Jewish precedents). As Lewis, a Jewish historian of Islam who himself benefited from his boyhood study of Hebrew,⁶⁷ would put it in another essay, “A Jew, particularly a learned Jew, had a head start over his Christian colleagues in the study of Islam, and an immediacy of understanding which they could not easily attain.”⁶⁸

One effect of this is that academic orientalism has been an important element of modern Jewish activity in Europe, the U.S.A., and Israel; indeed, as I suggest in my own contribution to this special issue, the orientalist scholarship and teaching of Stern’s teachers and mentors, and even, as already suggested, of Stern himself, can be regarded as an expression of Jewish thought in the modern, secular age. The work of scholars such as Goldziher, Levi Della Vida, Goitein, Kraus, Walzer, Lewis, and Stern, and the networks that they formed among themselves and with other Jewish scholars, in other words, are important not only for our understanding of the pre-modern Islamic world, but also for our understanding of modern Judaism.

This special issue, which consists of longer articles on various aspects of Stern’s life and work as well as shorter tributes and reminiscences written by those who knew him personally, has been a labour of love for all involved. My sincere thanks go to all of the contributors, especially to those who have shared their personal memories of Stern. I am deeply grateful, too, to Glenda Abramson for supporting the project and recognizing its relevance to modern Jewish studies. I must pay special tribute to Ronald L. Nettler, who first suggested the idea of publishing the conference proceedings in JMJS, and who has taken on a huge amount of work in assisting with the editing of all of the contributions in addition to making helpful suggestions for my own contribution; without him, none of this would have been possible. Finally, I would like to dedicate this volume to two late Fellows of All Souls who knew and admired Stern and supported the project from its inception: Sir Fergus Millar, who sadly died in the months before the conference, and Edward Mortimer, who attended the conference, and passed away in the months before the publication of this special issue. May their life and work, like Stern’s, continue to be honoured and remembered.

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Notes on contributors

Fitzroy Morrissey

Fitzroy Morrissey is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he researches Islamic intellectual history and the history of orientalism. He is the author of Sufism and the Perfect Human: from Ibn ‘Arabī to al-Jīlī (2020), Sufism and the Scriptures: Metaphysics and Sacred History in the Thought of ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Jīlī (2021), and A Short History of Islamic Thought (2021).

Notes

1 This biographical summary is based on Walzer, “Stern in Memoriam,” 2–4.

2 For Richard Walzer (1900–1975), see my contribution to the present volume.

3 Ibid., 2.

4 Rabbi Bernát (Bernard) Heller (1871–1943), director of Jewish High School, Budapest, from 1919; teacher of the Hebrew Bible at the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest (1922–31), author of Die Bedeutung des arabischen Antar-Romans fuer die vergleichende Literaturkunde (1931), translator into Hungarian of Goldziher’s Vorlesungen über den Islam, editor of Festschrift in honour of Goldziher’s 60th birthday, and compiler of Goldziher’s bibliography.

5 For Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), see below.

6 While we have made every effort to trace the copyright holder of this picture, we have been unsuccessful and no copyright holder could be found. if anyone is able to supply any relevant information, please contact the editor of this journal.

7 For Baneth (1893–1973), see my contribution to the present volume.

8 For Goitein (1900–1985), see my contribution to the present volume.

9 Julius Guttmann (1880–1950), son of historian of Jewish philosophy Jacob Guttmann (1845–1919); professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin (1919–1934) and at the Hebrew University from 1934; author of Die Philosophie des Judentums (1933).

10 Leon Roth (1896–1963), brother of the historian Cecil Roth (1899–1970); lecturer in philosophy at Manchester (1923–7), first holder of the Ahad Ha’Am Chair of Philosophy at the Hebrew University (from 1928), Rector of the Hebrew University (1940–43); author of Spinoza, Descartes, & Maimonides (1924), Hebrew translations of Aristotle, and God and Man in the Old Testament (1955).

11 Hiram Peri (Pflaum) (1900–1962), assistant librarian at the Jewish National and University Library from 1927, lecturer in Romance languages and literature at the Hebrew University from 1928, professor from 1948; author of Die Idee der Liebe (1926) and Der Religionsdisput der Barlaam-Legende (1959).

12 Napthali Herz Tur-Sinai (1886–1973), lecturer in Semitic languages at Vienna (1910–1919), in Bible and Semitic philology at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin (1919–1933), of Hebrew language at the Hebrew University from 1933; founding president of the Academy of the Hebrew Language from 1953; author of Die Heilige Schrift: Neu ins Deutsche übertragen (1954–9) and The Book of Job: A New Commentary (1957).

13 Moses Hirsch Segal (1876–1968), rabbi at Oxford, Newcastle, Swansea, and Bristol (c. 1900–1925); tutor in Biblical and Semitic Languages at Oxford (1906–9); member of the Zionist Commission to Palestine (1918–19); lecturer (later professor) of Hebrew Bible at the Hebrew University from 1926; winner of the Israel Prize in 1954.

14 Umberto Cassutto (1883–1951), rabbi and director of the Rabbinical Seminary in Florence (1922–5); professor of Hebrew language and literature at Florence (1925–1933), at Rome (1933–38), and at the Hebrew University (1939–51); author of Storia della letteratura ebraica postbiblica (1938), Perush al Sefer Bereshit (1944–9) and Perush al Sefer Shemot (1942).

15 David Yellin (1864–1961), son of the Zionist pioneer Yehoshua Yellin (1843–1924); founding principal of the Hebrew Teachers’ Seminary, member of the Hebrew Language Committee, member of the Jerusalem Town Council and deputy mayor (1920–1925), chairman of the National Committee (1920–1928); professor of Andalusian Hebrew poetry at the Hebrew University from 1926; author of Torat ha-Shirah ha-Sefaradit (1941).

16 Gotthold E. Weil (1882–1960), professor of Jewish history and literature at Berlin (1920–1931), professor of Semitic languages at Frankfurt (1931–1934), head of the National and University Library in Jerusalem (1935–1946), professor of Turkish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1935–1952); author of Die Stellung der mündlichen Tradition in Judentum und im Islam (1948), and Grundriss und System der altarabischen Metren (1958).

17 Hans Jakob Polotsky (1905–1991), instructor in Egyptology at the Hebrew University (1935–1949), then professor of Egyptian and Semitic Linguistics, founder of Department of Linguistics (1953), and Dean of Humanities (1954–59); winner of the Israel Prize (1966); author of Collected Papers (1971) and Grundlagen des koptischen Satzbaus (1987).

18 Jacob Nahum Epstein (1878–1952), lecturer at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (1923–5), professor of talmudic philology at the Hebrew University from 1925; author of Mavo le-Nusaḥ ha-Mishnah (1948).

19 Leo Ary Mayer (1895–1959), lecturer in Islamic art and archaeology at the Hebrew University from 1925, professor from 1932, first local director of the School of Oriental Studies from 1935, rector of the Hebrew University (1943–45); author of Saracenic Heraldry (1933), Mamluk Costume (1952), and Islamic Architects and Their Works (1956).

20 Yosef Yoel Rivlin (1889–1971), research assistant (later professor) at the Hebrew University from 1927; member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language; chairman of the Hebrew Teachers’ Union (1930–41); author of Hebrew translations of the Qur’an (1936) and The Arabian Nights (1947–71); father of Reuven Rivlin (b. 1939), the 10th President of Israel.

21 Yizhak Shamosh (1912–1968), lawyer in Aleppo and Damascus, then lecturer in Arabic at the Hebrew University.

22 Gershom Scholem (1898–1982), lecturer (later professor) of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University (1925–65); author of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (Hebrew ed., 1957), Ursprung und Anfänge der Kabbala (1962).

23 Martin Buber (1878–1965), professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University (1938–1951); author of Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (1906), Die Legende des Baalschem (1908), Ich und Du (1923), Königtem Gottes (1932), and, with Franz Rosenzweig, a German translation of the Bible.

24 See Ullendorff, The Two Zions, 51–2; Milson, “Beginnings,” 177.

25 Edward Ullendorff (1920–2011), lecturer, then Reader, in Semitic Languages at St Andrews (1950–1959), professor of Semitic Languages at Manchester (1959–1964), professor of Ethiopic at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) (1964–1979) and then professor of Semitic Studies at the same institution from 1979 to 1982; author of The Semitic Languages of Ethiopia: A Comparative Phonology (1955) and The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People (1966).

26 Ullendorff, The Two Zions, 52–3.

27 For Paul Kraus (1904–1944), see my second contribution to the present volume.

28 Wilferd Madelung (b. 1930), assistant professor, then professor, of Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago (1964–78); Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford (1978–98); Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London; author of Religious Schools and Sects in Mediaeval Islam (1985), Religious Trends in Early Islamic Iran (1988), Religious and Ethnic Movements in Mediaeval Islam (1992), The Succession to Muhammad (1997).

29 Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb (1895–1970), lecturer (later professor) in Arabic literature at the School of Oriental Studies, London (1921–37), Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford (1937–55), James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard from 1955; author of the English translation of the travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Modern Trends in Islam (1947), Mohammedanism (1949), and (with Harold Bowen), Islamic Society and the West (1950–7).

30 See e.g. the references to Gibb in Stern’s edition of Goldziher, Muslim Studies, I:12, 147, 179, 188, 189.

31 Walzer, “Stern in Memoriam,” 4.

32 For Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886–1967), see Valeria Piacentini’s contribution to the present volume.

33 Walzer, “Stern in Memoriam,” 2.

34 See esp. Goldziher, The Ẓāhirīs; Goldziher; Muslim Studies; Goldziher, Introduction; Goldziher, Schools of Koranic Commentators.

35 Abraham Geiger (1810–1874), rabbi at Wiesbaden, Breslau, Frankfurt, and Berlin; founding editor of Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift fuer juedische Theologie (1835–39) and Jüdische Zeitschriftfuer Wissenschaft und Leben (1862–75); author of Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen (1833), Urschrift und Uebersetzungen der Bibel in ihrer Abhaengigkeit von der innern Entwickelung des Judenthums (1857), and Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte (1865–71).

36 See esp. Dabashi, “Ignaz Goldziher,” xxiii–xiv.

37 Goldziher, Muslim Studies.

38 See esp. Stern, “Authorship of the Epistles”; Stern, “New Information”; Stern, “Fāṭimid propaganda among Jews.”

39 See Stern, “The Arabic origin”; Stern, “Imitations of Arabic muwashshaḥ”; Stern, “Two Medieval Hebrew Poems.”

40 See Stern and Altmann, Isaac Israeli.

41 Stern, “Ya‘qūb the Coppersmith.”

42 John Wansbrough (1908–2002), lecturer, reader, professor and vice-chancellor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (1960–1992); author of Qur’anic Studies (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu (1978).

43 Wansbrough, “Samuel Miklos Stern,” 599.

44 R.W. Southern (1912–2001), Chichele Professor of Modern [= Medieval] History at Oxford (1961–1969) author of The Making of the Middle Ages and Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages.

45 Southern, “Samuel Miklos Stern.”

46 John Hanbury Angus Sparrow (1906–1992), Warden of All Souls College, Oxford (1952–77).

47 Sparrow, “Samuel Stern,” 70–1.

48 Schorsch, “Beyond the Classroom,” 135.

49 Ullendorff, Two Zions, 52–3.

50 Sparrow, “Samuel Stern,” 70.

51 Turán, “Academic Religion,” 264.

52 Ilai Alon, emeritus professor of Islamic philosophy and Middle Eastern politics at Tel Aviv University; author of Socrates in Medieval Arabic Literature (1991) and Al-Fārābī’s Philosophical Lexicon (2001).

53 Personal communication from Ilai Alon to the author, 14 January 2021.

54 Sela, “The Interaction,” 263. See also David Bryer’s, Vivian Brown’s, and Etan Kohlberg’s contributions to the present volume.

55 For Bruno (1872–1941) and Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), see my contribution to the present volume.

56 Donald Sidney Richards (b. 1935), University Lecturer in Arabic at Oxford (1960–2000), Fellow of St. Cross (1967–2000), editor of Islam and the Trade of Asia (1970) and Islamic Civilization 950–1150 (1973), translator of Ibn Shaddād’s The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin (2001) and The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athīr for the Crusading Period (2006–8).

57 Albert Habib Hourani (1915–1993), lecturer and reader in the modern history of the Middle East at Oxford (1958–80), author of Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (1962), Islam in European Thought (1991), and A History of the Arab Peoples (1991).

58 Walzer, Greek into Arabic.

59 Stern and Walzer, Three Unknown Buddhist Stories.

60 Hourani, Stern, and Brown, Islamic Philosophy.

61 Joseph Weiss (1918–1969), teacher at Oxford, Leeds, Manchester, and London from 1951, head of the Institute of Jewish Studies at University of London from 1959 and professor from 1967; editor of the Journal of Jewish Studies author of Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism and Hasidism.

62 Sela, “Interaction,” 270, n. 19.

63 Walzer, “In Memoriam Joseph Weiss.”

64 Bernard Lewis (1916–2018), assistant lecturer, then lecturer, then professor at SOAS (1938–74), Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton from 1947; author of Origins of Isma'ilism (1947), The Arabs in History (1950), The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982), The Jews of Islam (1984).

65 Lewis, “The Pro-Islamic Jews,” 395.

66 Ibid., 400.

67 Lewis, Notes on a Century, 18–24.

68 Lewis, “The Study of Islam,” 11–12.