Reminiscences from the past: Giorgio Levi Della Vida and Samuel Miklos Stern: the Islamic city

ABSTRACT

This paper depicts two great scholars who respected one another academically and culturally, moved in similar circles, and had in common a passionate though rational interest in human sciences and Arabic-Islamic Studies: Samuel Stern and Giorgio Levi Della Vida. In the first section, Fitzroy Morrissey and the author outline the intellectual and cultural life of Levi Della Vida, his critical but independent approach to faith and religion, the Italian intellectual environment that forged his character, and the Jewish cultural environment that surrounded him during his American exile. In the second section, the author recounts her personal encounters with Samuel Stern at Levi Della Vida’s house at Via Po in Rome. Stern had already begun his research on the Islamic city. Though separated by an age gap of almost thirty-five years, Stern came to Levi Della Vida for guidance. The article depicts the long meetings between the two scholars and their scholarly discussions, based on the author’s reminiscences. The final sections deal with Stern’s lecture at the international colloquium at All Souls College, Oxford in 1965 and his chapter in The Islamic City (1970). The paper concludes by discussing the influence of Stern’s work on future research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This section has been written by Fitzroy Morrissey in collaboration with the author, making use of her personal reminiscences.

2 Gabrieli, “Levi Della Vida,” 281.

3 Nallino, “Levi Della Vida”, 306.

4 Hourani, Islam in European Thought, 91.

5 Levi della Vida, “L’opera orientalistica,” 238.

6 See Levi Della Vida, “Carlo Alfonso Nallino”; Levi Della Vida, “Gerardo Meloni”. David Santillana, Gerardo Meloni, Ignazio Guidi, Michelangelo Guidi, Carlo Alfonso Nallino and other Italian orientalists have been “revived” by Levi Della Vida some years later (“Nostalgie e scorribande”), where he shares new aspects of their personality, see Levi Della Vida, Aneddoti e svaghi, 193-378.

7 Nallino, “Levi Della Vida,” 318. For Maria Nallino, see Piacentini, “Islamic Studies in Italy,” 595.

8 See in this regard G. Levi Della Vida, Aneddoti e svaghi Arabi e non Arabi.

9 Caetani, Annali Dell’Islam.

10 Levi Della Vida, Fantasmi Ritrovati, esp. 19-72.

11 Hirschfeld, “Annali Dell’Islam (review),” 234.

12 Gabrieli, “Levi Della Vida,” 283.

13 Kemp, “Croce’s Aesthetics.”

14 Caponigri, “Benedetto Croce.”

15 Girardi, “Lingua e letteratura Ebraico-Biblica,” 539; Gabrieli, “Levi Della Vida,” 285.

16 Gabrieli, “Levi Della Vida,” 286.

17 Levi Della Vida forged a close intellectual friendship with Luigi Salvatorelli, which left a strong mark on his historical and cultural horizons, and would last to the end of my uncle’s life. I was also fascinated by Salvatorelli. I recall that, after Levi Della Vida retired, every year he and Luigi used to plan a trip through some Italian region, enjoying the panoramas, visiting towns and monuments; they loved to revive memories of the past, to recall together the glories and decline of historic dynasties, family fortunes and their vicissitudes, protagonists who lavished unprecedented sums on the construction of astounding monuments, and genealogical connections. At the end, they used to “collect me” at Assisi, where I was in the habit of spending some weeks with Giorgio’s elder sister Maria. Then I would be severely examined by the two about my historical background: we had a certain divergence about cultural criteria and what they labelled “political adventures” and “ambitious adventurers”. Despite everything, I could not refrain from being a great admirer of Frederick the Second, “King of the two Sicilies” (as proclaimed in Arabic on his coinage), and Manfred and Corradino of Swabia. Levi Della Vida’s affection for Italy and its cultural tradition is reflected in his Aneddoti e svaghi, and Visita a Tamerlano. See also Martirano, Giorgio Levi Della Vida – Luigi Salvatorelli.

18 Nallino, “Levi Della Vida,” 309.

19 Levi Della Vida, Elenco; Levi Della Vida, Secondo elenco.

20 Nallino, “Levi Della Vida,” 311.

21 Ibid.

22 See also Hourani, Islam in European Thought, 92.

23 See Gabrieli, “Levi Della Vida,” 286, 291.

24 Walzer, “The Formation of a Scholar,” 164-5.

25 The lectures have been reissued in Italian and commented upon by Francesco Gabrieli and Fulvio Tessitore: see Levi Della Vida, Arabi ed Ebrei nella storia.

26 Renan, “The Share of the Semitic People,” 161.

27 Hourani, Islam in European Thought, 91.

28 Renan, “The Share,” 159.

29 Levi Della Vida, Les Sémites, 2.

30 Ibid., 25, 29-30. This issue is treated in Tessitore and Gabrieli’s introduction to their edition of Levi Della Vida’s Paris lectures. The debate continued into the post-World War Two period and was largely dissolved in the 60s by Pietro Rossi’s studies of Max Weber’s social assumptions and by historiographical approaches inspired by the human/social sciences – see Pietro Rossi’s introduction and comments to Weber, Economia e società.

31 Nallino, “Levi Della Vida,” 312.

32 Piovan, “Ancient Historians and Fascism,” 95. As Glen Bowersock has written, however, after the promulgation of the race laws and his forced exile, Momigliano was left with “an unceasing hatred of the Fascists and of those whom he suspected of actively collaborating with them”. Bowersock, “The Later Momigliano,” 197.

33 It is not clear why he chose this institution rather than the University of Pennsylvania, though his close relationship with Gustav von Grunebaum may explain his affinity for the University of California.

34 Nallino, “Levi Della Vida,” 311.

35 As Chomsky remembered: “We got to know each other pretty well later, but he pointed out to me something, just in conversation, something about Hebrew – I knew Hebrew reasonably well, and knew the Bible, he pointed out to me – I forget the context—that the first few words of the Bible were misvocalized, you know, they were – the original text of the Bible, or the texts, came down without [vowels], it had just consonants. Hebrew, you know, and Arabic, you know, are missing the vowels; they’re extra. The vowels were put in about the eighth century by the Masoretes, and they just made a mistake in putting in the vowels. And the phrase that appears is completely ungrammatical. And the translations are wrong.” Schiffmann, “The Interesting Part,” 182.

36 Rosenthal, “Gustave E. von Grunebaum,” 335.

37 Ibid., 357.

38 For a list of winners of the award – a who’s who of modern Islamic Studies – see https://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/article/14544.

39 A little anecdote: Some years ago, I was invited to give a lecture at Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. I was taken to visit the new Library and the Manuscripts Room. There, I was shown several pieces and the first two volumes of the catalogue of Arabic manuscripts in the Vatican Library. These contained hand-written comments in Arabic on one side, which made them even more precious. I was astonished, for I could make out the well-known handwriting of Levi Della Vida, which was so familiar to me. I asked where they had found these books. “On a market of ‘doubles’ (sic) in the USA,” I was told. I said: “I know this handwriting, it is certainly my uncle’s, Prof. Giorgio Levi Della Vida; I studied Arabic with him.” There was astonished silence. Then I was taken, along with the volumes, to the president of the Library. I repeated what I had said. Levi Della Vida’s handwriting in Arabic was very distinctive. Then, strict orders were given to take the books to a special shelf for “very precious books and manuscripts”. Levi Della Vida’s name was well-known and highly respected for his great contributions to the study of Arabic and Islamic culture. There, up to a few years ago, these precious “manuscripts” remained.

40 Stern, “An original document from the Fatimid chancery.”

41 A parenthesis about Kister: I used to meet him in Jerusalem, where we shared the same supermarket. He liked to talk to me on our way home: I had to face his harsh questioning on Islamic traditions! Once, talking about the 1965 Oxford colloquium on the Islamic city, he told me that he highly admired and respected Stern and his approach to Islamic Studies. Stern had read Kister’s thesis on the pre-Islamic history of the Banū Tamīm, and was deeply impressed by his project. Since then, Stern had encouraged and supported him to persevere with his plan of research and to further investigate the pre-Islamic period, working directly on manuscripts and not only on mediaeval literature – in other terms, to go deeper into the very roots of Arab society and its organisation before Islam.

42 Unfortunately, his death did not allow him to complete his comprehensive history of trade and social connections between the Occident and the Orient, though his “India Book” was published posthumously as India Traders of the Middle Ages.

43 Levi Della Vida, Fantasmi Ritrovati, 75ff.

44 Levi Della Vida, Les Sémites, 96.

45 Walzer, “Samuel M. Stern,” 6.

46 The lexicographic evolution of the term “culture” since the 18th century is eruditely explicated in Pietro Rossi, “Cultura.”

47 Unfortunately, I don’t remember which papyrus he was referring to. Significantly, Stern in his chapter on “The Constitution of the Islamic City”, mentions the papyri as one of his major sources of information about corporative associations in pre-Islamic Egypt.

48 It should be emphasized that, when speaking about “Iran” and the “Iranian world”, Stern and Levi Della Vida always used the terms as a conceptualisation of specific “cultural” patterns, without any reference to geographic or geopolitical realities. This reflects the intellectual position of Levi Della Vida and other leading intellectuals of the time vis-à-vis the ideological movements of the first decades of the century, and was linked to his political stance. As noted above, this position is discernible in Levi Della Vida’s notable lectures at the College de France.

49 Likely, under the influence of Jean Aubin and the French school of Islamic Studies (on which see below).

50 Cf. Weber, The City.

51 See Piacentini Fiorani, “Madīna/Shahr”; Piacentini Fiorani, “Practice in Mediaeval Persian Government.” I owe to Alessio Bombaci and Francesco Gabrieli and to the conversations held at via Po these two articles, which were the fruit of hard fieldwork in the Iranian province Khurāsān and of a no-less wearying fieldwork along the Makrānī seaboard in Iran. At the same time, they constituted a conceptual elaboration of Stern’s assumptions about the “non-corporative society” of mediaeval Islam.

52 At the time, I was already a young scholar aiming at the writing of history, forged at the school of political sciences and history, where the methods of the Annales school and the philosophy of history of Prof. Pietro Rossi of the University of Turin were – as they still are – at the basis of all historical enquiry. In that same sitting-room, I had discussed at length with my uncle the different historiographical schools and their (frequently diverging) conceptual positions. I was aware that Levi Della Vida’s position had been the fruit of a painstaking conceptual elaboration, so that, when the conversation with Stern came to the issue, I was really involved.

53 A key objective of the Annales School was to introduce the social sciences into the study of history, in order to construct a “global history” that was distanced from the traditional histoire événementielle and which focused instead on the causes that moved the gears of events and policy-making. As the Italian philosopher of history Pietro Rossi has recently written, “Today, the intellectual panorama is certainly changed: our historical horizon has widened thanks to an increasing integration between historiography and social sciences. An integration to which the Annales have largely contributed, as it is well-known. Historiography has largely drawn from conceptions and theories in disciplines like economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, political science and so on. And it has increasingly converged on the “material” aspects of human life, too.” P. Rossi, “La lotta di specie,” 8.

54 Levi Della Vida, Fantasmi ritrovati, 40.

55 See Hourani and Stern, The Islamic City.

56 Cf. Massignon, “Ṣinf”; Massignon, “Guilds”. See also Massignon, “Bibliographie sommaire.”

57 Lewis, “The Islamic Guilds”; Gibb, Studies on the Civilization of Islam, 19-20.

58 Stern, “The Constitution of the Islamic City,” 26.

59 Ibid., 31.

60 Ibid., 32.

61 Ibid., 36.

62 Ibid., 41.

63 Ibid., 37.

64 Ibid., 38-9.

65 Ibid., 37-8, n. 22.

66 Ibid., 42, citing Goitein, Studies in Islamic History, 267; see also Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, Vol. IV, 3-5.

67 Stern, “Constitution,” 43.

68 It is interesting to note that when questioned about the artisans in the debate following his presentation at the colloquium Stern admitted that had no solid information on them. Clearly, he subsequently sought further information on the Muslim artisans for his published paper, moving from mere speculation to a more rigorous theory based on textual sources.

69 Stern, “Constitution,” 44-5.

70 Ibid., 45-6.

71 After Levi Della Vida passed away, Francesco Gabrieli, who shared my uncle’s background in the new approach to Islamic Studies of Caetani and the philosophy of Croce, would be my mentor and counsellor for Arabic and the Arab world: with him I forged a longlasting friendship that still today I recall with great nostalgia and affection.

72 The historiographical process and its intellectual evolution have always excited my curiosity. See e.g. Piacentini, “The Contribution of Italian Historiography”; Piacentini, “Islamic Studies in Italy”; Piacentini, “Il contributo della storiografia italiana”; Piacentini “Tra Oriente e Occidente”; Piacentini, “Storiografia islamica, filologia e linguistica.”

73 Levi Della Vida, “Carlo Alfonso Nallino,” 459.

74 Gabrieli, “Levi Della Vida,” 295; Rosenthal, “von Grunebaum,” 356.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Valeria Piacentini

Valeria Piacentini was formerly Professor of the History of Iran and Central Asia at the Oriental Institute of Naples (1978-1985), and of the History and Institutions of the Muslim World at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan (1986-2010). She is a member of the scientific board of the Centre of Research on the Southern System and the Wider Mediterranean at the Catholic University of Milan, scientific director of an archaeological and historical research project at Banbhor, Pakistan, sponsored by the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, a member of the Società Nazionale di Scienze, Lettere e Arti di Napoli and the Istituto Lombardo – Accademia di Scienze e Lettere di Milano, an honorary member and patron of the International Association for Studies on Arabia (IASA), and a Cavalier of the Italian Republic. She has published more than 140 articles and notes and numerous books on the political-institutional and socio-economic systemic structures of the Levant and Middle East, Iran, Arabia, Central Asia and the subcontinent. Presently, her work is specifically focused on the Gulf, Indian Ocean, Oman, Pakistani Baluchistan, and Sindh.