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The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century. By MAURICE OLENDER. Translated by ARTHUR GOLDHAMMER. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1992. Pp. xiii + 193.
In a book that should be of great interest to a broad spectrum of JAOS readers, Maurice Olender examines how, during the golden age of comparative philology, Europe attempted to reconcile its newly-discovered Indo-European ethnolinguistic heritage with its Christian, thus ultimately Semitic, religious tradition. The project sought a return to Eden via India, a journey that sanctioned the marginalization of the Semites, explained the triumph of European technology and science, and justified the European colonial enterprise. Bemused, we watch great and otherwise reasonable minds waffle and contradict themselves as their motivating concerns become less scientific and philological, and more moral, metaphysical, and theological. But by the end of the book many of us will feel a bit uneasy in the certainty that our own scholarship and that of our colleagues is no less colored by prejudice and hidden or unconscious agendas than was the work of our illustrious nineteenth-century predecessors.
How, then, to explain why the Indo-Europeans, who originated and perfected metaphysics, philosophy, mathematics, and all branches of science, were denied the spiritual revelation granted to the otherwise unremarkable Semites? After setting the scene with a look back to the seventeenth century, Olender presents the answers to this and related questions as found in the works of the philosopher J. G. Herder (1744-1803); the philologists Ernest Renan (1823-92), F. Max Muller (1823-1900), and Adolphe Pictet (1799-1875); the theologian R. F. Grau (1835-93); and the Islamicist Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921).
Herder, author of a monograph on biblical Hebrew poetry and the only one of these figures to work in the eighteenth century, was a cultural relativist who believed that any culture is shaped not by physical racial characteristics but by language, climate, and geography. Every culture must be understood and appreciated on its own terms. "No man, no country, no people, no people's history, no state is the equivalent of any other. Thus the true, the beautiful, and the good also are not identical for them" (p. 41). So Herder as quoted by Olender. And further: "Neither the pongo nor the gibbon is your brother, but the
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