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brill.com/phen
Between Sciences of Origins and Religions of the
Future: Questions of Philology
Maurice Olender
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
olender@ehess.fr
Abstract
The antique Christian “appropriation” of Hebrew by the Early Church Fathers was suc-
ceeded historically by a kind of scholarly appropriation that resulted in the emergence
of a “ready-made India” founded on a new discourse about Sanskrit. In a world gov-
erned by romanticist visions undergirded with colonial aspirations, in a historical pe-
riod between a Christianity weakened by Enlightenment philosophers and the
advancement of scientistic secularism, certain scholarly fables about a primordial
India came to resemble the fables about Hebrew. In this race toward the discovery of
human origins, the new “Aryan Bible” required a new language of paradise: Sanskrit.
Can one then say that India was appropriated within a scholarly environment that was
being pulled between Christianity, secularism and scientism? Since our investigations
have allowed us to demonstrate that this hypothesis is plausible, it is necessary to test
this hypothesis through the clarification of the historical contexts, intellectual dynam-
ics, and theological and political fields of action in which myth and reason mutually
reinforce one another. While underlining the political stakes of the comparative meth-
od of anthropology, this article also recalls that not so long ago, knowledge of ancient
and modern humanities often bore the mark of racial sciences that influenced all uni-
versity disciplines from the early 19th century to the late 1940s.
* This essay was first delivered in French as the keynote lecture of the conference on “Semitic
Philology within European Intellectual History. Constructions of Race, Religion and Language
in Scholarly Practice” on the 19th of June 2013 at Freie Universität Berlin. The conference was
organised by Islam Dayeh, Elizabeth Eva Johnston, Ya’ar Hever and Markus Messling. I wish
to thank Ya’ar Hever for his translation of this essay.
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Keywords
Hebrew – archives – Church Fathers – etymology – otherness – memory – oblivion
The bishop of Seville, Isidore, who died in 636, contributed to the develop-
ment of a mode of the representation of origins that would play a determining
technical role in the history of European philology. In his famous Etymologies,
conscious of the appeal exerted by the primordial mark of words, Saint Isidore
warns his reader: “When you see from whence the name takes its origin, you
will understand what its power is.”1
A thousand years later, Jean Bodin, one of the masters of the New History
[Nouvelle histoire], took an interest in the fascination exerted on historians by
“the origins of peoples.” They are “tormented” by this haunting “question” that
takes hold of scholars’ reason, sinking them into “error”—both “early histori-
ans” and “more recent writers.”2
On Otherness: Between Attraction and Repulsion
Before examining certain ancient and modern sources that attest to structured
bodies of knowledge by way of disparate representations of the indigenous,
I will give some consideration to the manifold practices, especially compara-
tive ones, that allow one to elucidate the notion of “Zukunftsphilologie.”
Among the possible meanings (“the future” or “the forthcoming” of philology,
or rather “a philology to come,” “emerging philology” or even “an anticipatory
philology, sounding the alarm”), I choose to focus on a double-sided figure:
simultaneously theory and careful practice, critical and self-critical, attentive
to the shifts of science, techniques and supports, and attentive to the diverse
forms of recomposing the past, a future-oriented philology. Being as much ar-
chaeological as it is genealogical, such a “Zukunftsphilologie” would give rise
to interdisciplinary perspectives where poetical analyses intersect with po-
litical approaches—without forgetting that the poetic has often been able to
formulate the political. One last important point: the present importance of
the digital universe. Characterized notably by rapid transformation and the
lability of media, the uses of digital humanities redesign our practices and
1 Isidore, Etymologiarum, 1.49, 29.2, Patr. Lat. 82, 1850, 106: Nam cum videris unde ortum est
nomen, citius vim ejus intellegis.
2 For Bodin, see below n. 25 and following.
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our approaches to the archive, to memory and to oblivion—but without safe-
guarding this revamped knowledge from old biases.3
It is thus due to the initiative of the research programme “Zukunftsphilo
logie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship” that I open the confer-
ence on “Semitic Philology.” And it is customary to open a presentation on an
“academic” or intellectual subject with acknowledgements.4 These are often
received as a purely social game, but they are not in the least “rhetorical.” The
choice of an explicit formulation is part of a researcher’s approach that takes
the institutional and academic drives as various economic and intellectual in-
frastructures, which are also simultaneously a system of technical constraints
and a vibrant incentive for research.
In a quite different context, the poet Paul Celan stressed the significant in-
tellectual importance of Danken (“to thank”). In his Bremen speech, delivered
in January 26, 1958 upon his reception of the prize awarded by this Hanseatic
city,5 the poet begins at once with two verbs of action: Denken und Danken—to
think and to thank. Two terms that, as he explains, have in German “one and
the same origin.”6 In pronouncing these two terms aloud, might Paul Celan,
3 One type of intellectual mechanism that is well known in the history of science—see notes
below. On archives, memory, oblivion, and “a critical way of practicing historiographic medi-
tation,” see recently Maurice Olender, “Un Fantôme dans la bibliothèque,” La Librairie du
XXI ème siècle, Paris: Seuil, 2017, 13-89.
4 As I have done in the oral presentation of this essay, I wish to thank Joachim Küpper, the
director of the Dahlem Humanities Center at the Freie Universität Berlin; Islam Dayeh, who
initiated the interdisciplinary and international team of “Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the
Canons of Textual Scholarship” at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Freie Universität
Berlin, and Angelika Neuwirth who has been a great inspiration for new insights into philol-
ogy. I extend my appreciation to my colleague Markus Messling for presenting me and my
work, showing above all his generosity, the editor of a new German edition of The Languages
of Paradise (Maurice Olender, Die Sprachen des Paradieses. Religion, Rassentheorie und
Textkultur. Revidierte Neuausgabe, hg. und mit einem Vorwort von Markus Messling. Aus
dem Französischen von Peter D. Krumme. Mit dem Vorwort zur Erstausgabe von Jean-Pierre
Vernant. Mit einem Essay von Jean Starobinski. Berlin, Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2013). It is
Markus Messling who, being himself a member of the board of “Zukunftsphilologie,” invited
me to open this colloquium.
5 Celan, Paul. Le Méridien & autres proses, édition bilingue, traduit de l’allemand et annoté par
Jean Launay, La Librairie du XXIe siècle, Paris: Seuil, 2002, 55.
6 More precisely, “Denken und Danken sind in unserer Sprache Worte ein und desselben
Ursprungs.” (ibid.) We can mention here not only Heidegger, with whom Paul Celan had a
complex relationship, to say the least. The affinities between denken und danken are a com-
monplace in the theological tradition. This semantic pair is found in, among many others,
Goethe, Husserl, and Thomas Mann.
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who knew Hebrew, have remembered that when transcribed into Hebrew or-
thography without vowels, the Yiddish verbs denken7 and danken could form
the very same linguistic icon, a consonantal unit: DNKN?
Thus, every research endeavor bears the mark of an intellectual formation.
A short word therefore on the process that led me to focus on these particular
questions and on the chosen manner of formulating and defining the prob-
lems. Being an archaeologist by training, after my studies at the Université Libre
de Bruxelles, I arrived in Paris to study comparative mythology during the sev-
enties of the last century. At the Ecole des hautes études, I participated in the
seminars of Marcel Detienne, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and
later also those of Nicole Loraux, where I met Froma Zeitlin of Princeton, who
was at the Wissenschaftskolleg that year; Renate Schlesier, a professor at the
Freie Universität Berlin; and Dominique Bourrel, who was later commuting
between Paris, Jerusalem and Berlin. Along with many others, we found each
other at the beginning of the 1980s in the company of researchers coming from
disparate horizons, conducting inquiries in which the distant, both in time and
in space, could elucidate the nearby.
In the same years in which comparativism and interdisciplinarity guided
historiographical and anthropological developments, we were mindful of the
mirror games between cultures and civilizations, and the challenges of the
transmission of knowledge between generations of scholars.8 Within this intel-
lectual environment, Léon Poliakov, a historian of Anti-Semitism, who, going
beyond the multiple types of Anti-Judaism, endeavoured to think and com-
pare various forms of social exclusion, organized interdisciplinary comparative
meetings at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and in Cerisy-La-Salle. Here
I met, most notably, Serge Moscovici, Jacques Le Goff, Arnaldo Momigliano,
Pierre Vidal-Naquet and many other friends and colleagues including biolo-
gists, geneticists, and statisticians.9 These intellectual activities also gave rise
to the periodical Le Genre humain [The Human Race] in 1981.
7 “To think” is also said trakhtn in Yiddish (undoubtedly related to German trachten). But in
the Yiddish of my Antwerpian childhood, one said denken—perhaps under the influence of
Flemish?
8 For an uncompromising view on the emergence of these comparative practices, see Marcel
Detienne, Comparer l’incomparable (Paris: Le Seuil, 2000), along with relevant references in
the notes, 129-136. For the operations of these studies, see especially: Marcel Detienne and
Gilbert Hamonic (eds., with Georges Charachidzé, Charles Malamoud and Carlo Severi),
La Déesse Parole. Quatre figures de la langue des dieux (Paris: Flammarion, 1995); Marcel
Detienne (ed.), Qui veut prendre la parole?, intr. Pierre Rosanvallon (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003).
9 For additional information and bibliography on these comparativist moments, between
Cerisy la Salle and the Maison des Sciences de l’homme à Paris, see Maurice Olender, Race
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At the same time, Momigliano published a book calling to mind to what
extent the Hellenistic period, the great initiator of European philology, marked
a major turning point in the intellectual modes, the ways of seeing others,
the manners of conceiving, inventing, and imagining new alterities. In this
work of 1975, Alien Wisdom, translated by Pierre Vidal-Naque for his collec-
tion, Textes a l’appui, published by the François Maspero publishing house,
Momigliano, after noting “that Hellenism still affects our attitude towards an-
cient civilizations,”10 is astonished by the fact that between the 3rd century BC
and the 20th century AD, learned men have not renewed their stock imagery
and representations related to India. Momigliano insists on this point:
The average knowledge of an educated modern man about India is not
superior to that which is to be found in Greek and Roman writers. Even
now there is no obligation in our traditional curriculum to know any-
thing about China, since the Greeks and the Romans knew nothing or
almost nothing about it. The eighteenth century performed the greatest
rescue operation of forgotten civilizations that humanity had ever wit-
nessed. The Chinese, the Indians and the Celts were the most important
beneficiaries. But the consequences were felt only by professors, philoso-
phers, poets and cranks.11
In the same years, 1970-1980, at the margins of the great academic institutions,
the intellectual milieu of the Hautes études could be characterized, at least
for certain scholars, by a sociability or friendship as loyal as it was rigorous,
fearing neither contradictions nor intellectual tensions. Inspired by the new
anthropological approaches (notably those of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-
Strauss), the analysis of historical representations looked for “sensible” forms
of intelligence.12
In the period after the book of Momigliano was published in France by his
friend Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jean-Pierre Vernant had asked me to review it for
and Erudition, trans. J. M. Todd (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 122-127. See
also Maurice Olender (ed.), Pour Léon Poliakov. Le Racisme. Mythes et sciences (Brussels:
Complexe, 1981).
10 Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: the Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1975), 11. I make free use here of Maurice Olender, “Quelques captations
érudites”, in L’Inde des Lumières. Discours, histoire, savoirs (XVIIe-XIXe siècle), Purusartha
31, ed. M. Fourcade and I. G. Zupanov (Paris: EHESS, 2013), 135-161.
11 Momigliano, Alien Wisdom, 12.
12 Maurice Olender, “Le sensible et l’intelligible. Entretien avec Claude Lévi-Strauss (1976)”,
La Règle du jeu 44 (2010): 609.
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the first issue of a forthcoming journal, Le temps de la Réflexion, created at
Gallimard in 1980 by the Psychoanalyst J.-B. Pontalis. The ideal of interdiscipli-
narity, more often proclaimed than practiced, has sometimes mobilized edi-
torial dynamics in interaction with areas of scholarly research. Enumerating
the “barbaric wisdoms” as conceived by the Greeks, Momigliano recalled that
the Jews could be considered as admirable philosophers in comparison to the
sages of India.13
It is worthwhile to re-read these fragments of Greek texts that are well-known
to epigraphists and classical philologists. Take, for example, Megasthenes. As
the ambassador of Seleucus I in India at the very beginning of the 3rd cen-
tury BCE, he notes in his History of India the affinities between “the Brahmans
of India” [Indoîs hupo tôn Brachmanôn] and those that in “Syria are called
Ioudaîoi, the Jews.” Megasthenes thus constitutes them as a category of privi-
leged strangers who, despite being “outside of” Greece [exô tes hellados], are
nevertheless “philosophers.”14
In a lengthy passage attributed to “a disciple of Aristotle,”15 Clearchus of Soli
points out the genealogical affinities between Jewish philosophers and Indian
sages: the former are the descendants of the latter. In this Hellenistic sketch,
where Aristotle is summoned to testify for his encounter with a Jewish sage,
Clearchus affirms that to signify “philosopher” one says Kalanoi in India and
Ioudaîoi in Syria. This Clearchus, conscious of the gateway between Indian and
Judeo-Syrian philosophy, has been identified in 1968 in an uncertain though
plausible manner by the eminent epigraphist Louis Robert in an inscription
of Bactria.16
The passages of Clearchus were copied and then printed through the gen-
erations for over two millennia17 before reaching, at present, philological web-
sites. In his Against Apion, written to denounce “the hateful slanders” of those
who, through “malice, deliberate lies […] or ignorance,” slander the Jews by
13 Momigliano, Alien Wisdom, 85-86.
14 Flavius Josephus, Contre Apion, trans. Léon Blum, ed. and notes Théodore Reinach
(Paris: Les Belles-lettres, 2012), 1, 144. For these Indica, known only through fragments,
cf. Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, 2 vols (Jerusalem: The
Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1976), vol. 1, VI, no. 14, 45-46.
15 Stern, Greek and Latin Authors, vol. 1: VII, no. 15: 49. See also ibid., vol. 1, VI, 45; Momigliano,
Alien Wisdom, 86.
16 See Louis Robert, “De Delphes à l’Oxus: Inscriptions grecques nouvelles de la Bactriane”,
Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 12,3 (1968): 466-453. See also
Stern, Greek and Latin Authors, vol. 1, VI, 45; Momigliano, Alien Wisdom, 86.
17 For a critical discussion of this matter, Théodore Reinach, preface to the Against Apion,
VIII-XI; XVI.
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refusing to recognize their antiquity, Flavius Josephus chose to collect these
words of Aristotle, which he read, as he specifies, in a monograph On Sleep by
Clearchus of Soli. It is in this dreamlike text that Aristotle takes the opportu-
nity to speak of his encounter with a Judeo-Syrian sage:
This man was a Jew of Coele-Syria; these people are descended from the
Indian philosophers. The philosophers, they say, are in India called Calani
[Kalanoi], in Syria by the territorial name of the Jews; for the district
which they inhabit is called Judaea.” He therefore adds, being surprised
by a word in an unknown language, that “their city has a remarkably odd
name [panu skolion]; they call it Hierusaleme.18
The semantic spectrum of the adjective skolios is broad but topical: from
“skewed” to “devious,” passing through “bizarre.” It indicates that which is dif-
ficult to understand due to its strangeness, that which can make one queasy,
awaken unease but also curiosity, the desire to know, or even that in the figure
of the other which can fascinate and seduce; a semantic universe that is char-
acterized by its tensions between attraction and repulsion.
Let us turn back to the Indian philosophers that are called kalanoi.19 In a
monograph On Education, Clearchus, speaking of the gymnosophists, offers a
joint presentation of these Indian sages and the Jews. They have here as their
common ancestors the Persian magicians. This is formulated as follows by the
supposed disciple of Aristotle: “the gymnosophists are also the descendants of
the Magicians; some say that the Jews also descend from them.”20
Before proceeding, let us emphasize that the cited texts are neither “origi-
nal,” nor even copies of originals, but are rather the product of a long tradition.
Luciano Canfora is correct in insisting on a commonplace which can never
be recalled too often: in such a tradition, “the frontiers are erased: between
the author and the copyist, between the copyist and the philologist, between
the direct tradition and the indirect tradition, between the transmission of the
18 Flavius Josephus, Contre Apion, 1, 179. The translation used here is Josephus, The Life.
Against Apion. trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), 235.
19 For the meanings of Kalanos, see concisely in Konrat Ziegler/ Walther Sontheimer (eds.),
Der Kleine Pauly. Lexikon der Antike in fünf Bänden (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1979), vol. 3, 53-54, as well as W. Halbfass, Indien und Europa: Perspektiven ihrer
geistigen Begegnung (Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1981), 25-26; 43-44 and in the expanded
edition of 1988: 12-13; 29.
20 Diogenes Laertius I, 9 (Diogenes Laertius, Vies et doctrines des philosophes illustres,
ed. M.-O. Goulet-Cazé, Paris: Pochotèque, Le Livre de Poche, 1999), 70).
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texts and their retrospective history, between the ancient texts and the modern
ones …”21 From this perspective, “there is no thing in itself, because the original
is a monotheistic illusion.”
It should be recalled here that the work of Jean Bollack seeks to clarify the
possible meaning of the stratifications and the interlockings that have fash-
ioned a philological tradition from the Presocratics to Paul Celan.22
Concerning the Greek fragments, the following should be kept in mind: our
sources, whose validity was reinforced by generations of historiographers, an-
cient and modern, affirm that the “barbarians,” by language and geography,
are not necessarily deprived of the wisdom that the Greeks call “philosophy.”
These writings still evoke a kinship between the Indian sages and the Jewish
philosophers—forming together a genealogical trio through their common
ancestors: the Persian magicians.23
Indigeneity and Etymology: A Functional Couple
A millennium after Isidore of Seville, the uses of his Etymologies attest to
the poetic, political and theological influence exerted by the powers of the
indigenous.24 One of the masters of historical thinking of the 16th century is
concerned with the fascination of “the origin of the peoples,” which inspired
the “historians,” his contemporaries.
His name was Jean Bodin. He died in 1596. Economist, philosopher, ju-
rist, and lawyer at the parliament of Paris, he is also one of the theorists of
the modern “New History” [Nouvelle Histoire]. In his Method for the Easy
Comprehension of History, published in Latin in 1566, Bodin dedicates his ninth
chapter to the following problem: “By what method can one know the origins
of the peoples?” From the outset, he specifies:
21 Luciano Canfora, Le Copiste comme auteur, trans. L. Calvié and G. Cocco, intr. L. Calvié
(Toulouse: Anacharsis, 2012), 8-9.
22 To cite only two ‘general’ volumes of this scholar of philology, see Jean Bollack, La Grèce de
personne (Paris: Seuil, 1997), passim, and his posthumous book, Au jour le jour (Paris: PUF,
2013).
23 For other barbaric “inventories” between Egypt, Greece and Rome, see François Hartog,
Mémoire d’Ulysse. Récits sur la frontière en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
24 See above, note 1.
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No question has tormented the historians more than that of the ori-
gin of the people […]. Those who do not know their first origin or who
conceal it from the eyes of a hated stranger declare themselves to be born
of the mother-soil, indigenous or geogenic. […] because they [imagine
that they] do not come from somewhere else but that they have their
origin in the earth itself, mother of all gods. Furthermore, this error is
not the privilege of ancient historians, as we find it equally among more
recent writers. It is thus that some affirm that “the Bretons embedded in
the midst of the land have not come from anywhere else, but are born
right there […].”25
Thus, Bodin poses the linguistic fact at the core of his argumentation. He
considers that in order to be instructed “in the subject of our origins,” noth-
ing is more certain than the “linguistic roots that are the best argument that
can be produced to establish” the genealogy and the geographic location of a
population.26
The history of science can be enriched through the analysis of the conceptu-
al frame that Bodin puts forth when he calls for the recognition of a functional
couple formed by “indigeneity” and “etymology;” he establishes this by means
that are at the same time archaeological, theological, historical, juridical, and
finally—linguistic. The concept of indigeneity, structurally related here to that
of the original language, is manifested by its political effectiveness, notably
in terms of a rejection of the other and an erosion of the social bond. Let us
emphasize that Bodin puts forth an explicit criticism of the cult of origins. He
questions the praise comprising of idolatry of origins, and seeks to undermine
any reference of indigeneity as a mark of superiority over the other—a critical
attitude that is not necessarily found always or everywhere in his work.
Let us follow Bodin:
[…] those who boast to be the true indigenous, do they do anything but
break the link of the human community […]. How much more appropri-
ate, on the contrary, to join with strangers along the lines of blood and
cohabitation rather than to reject proudly by taunt any idea of kinship
and of common origin.27
25 Jean Bodin, “Méthode pour faciliter la connaissance de l’histoire” (revised edition of 1572
edition), in Œuvres philosophiques, trans. Pierre Mesnard, vol. 5, 3 (Paris: PUF, 1951), 448.
26 Ibid., 450.
27 Ibid., 448-449.
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These sentences should be taken in their historical context. We are in the 16th
century. The author responds to a burning current event: the war of religions.
In his eyes, praising indigeneity amounts to denying what Moses said of the or-
igins of the peoples “in our sacred books.” Furthermore, he writes, the “promot-
ers” of this idea of indigeneity, “not acknowledging any other origin to these
nations but that of the native soil, retreat at the same time from the society and
the companionship of the rest.”28
Three years after the report of Bodin, in a different political and sociolin-
guistic context, a Flemish scholar, Jan van Gorp, wished to demonstrate, with
the aid of the linguistic techniques of his time, that the language of Paradise is
his mother tongue. Who would have remembered this proposition, had Leibniz
not ensured its long reception, affirming that van Gorp was “not too wrong in
claiming that the Germanic language […] has equally and more marks of some-
thing primitive than Hebrew itself.”29 Being a ground-breaking scholar of his
era, Leibniz (with others) thus dismissed the clerical orthodoxy of the Church
Fathers, the majority of whom wished to recognize Hebrew as the universal
mother tongue. This choice situates Leibniz among those who wished to pro-
mote the idea of the regional and then of the national in Europe. It is undoubt-
edly also the passion of the mother tongue, so often coupled with the nation,
that prompts Leibniz, who was otherwise rather a “cosmopolitan,” to identify
in his Deutsche Schriften (1697) “the origin of the peoples and the languages of
Europe” in “the archaic Germanic language,” which he formulates thus: Stecket
also im Teutschen Alterthum und sonderlich in der Teutschen uralten Sprache,
[…] der Ursprung der Europäischen Völker und Sprachen […]30 “It is therefore
28 Ibid., 448. In a speech in the presence of Nicole Loraux, in November 2001, during a final
journey that was offered to her at the Ecole des hautes études, less than a year before
her death on the 5th of April 2003, I presented the hypothesis of this functional couple,
etymology/indigeneity, extending her work to Greek indigeneity. I cited Bodin but also
a drama of modern indigeneity that Elfriede Jelinek has composed in Wolken. Heim—
Clouds, Home, a play published in 1990 at Rowohlt.
29 Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise. Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth
Century, Foreword by Jean-Pierre Vernant, trad. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2008), 2.
30 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Unvorgreifliche Gedanken, be-
treffend die Ausübung und Verbesserung der teutschen Sprache, in Deutsche Schriften,
vol. 1, ed. G. E. Guhrauer, Berlin 1838, 465, No. 46. And for the rest: 464, No. 42. There is a
bilingual edition of these pages of Leibniz, in L’Harmonie des langues, ed. Marc Crépon
(Paris: Seuil, 2000). Concerning the historical and intellectual contexts, see rather exten-
sively W. W. Chambers, “Language and Nationality in German Preromantic and Romantic
Thought”, The Modern Language Review 41, 4 (1946): 382-392 (for Leibniz, 382-383).
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in Germanic antiquity and specifically, in the ancient Germanic language […]
that the origins of the European peoples and their languages lie.” It is for this
reason that Leibniz adds that “the study of the Germanic language brings light
not only to us […] but to all of Europe” [die Untersuchung der Teutschen Sprach
nicht nur ein Licht vor uns, sondern auch vor ganz Europa].
The testimony of Leibniz is valuable in several respects. It allows one to see
to what extent the prehistory of the Indo-European idea—called at the time
Scythian or Japhetic—could convey operational models. Here, the reference
becomes a theoretical abstraction: we might even speak of a “scientific icon”—
that which the Indo-European hypothesis has eventually become, constantly
disputed nowadays without being invalidated in the least.31
This type of abstraction opens hitherto unseen perspectives on the knowl-
edge of the time in which it arose. One can observe that this knowledge, while
innovative, is inextricably intertwined with religious and national conceptions
haunted by a quest for the “archaic language” [uralte Sprache]. Science and
religion, technicity and ideology can thus, in certain historical contexts, be as-
sociated and developed to support each other.
Before the Flood: A Solitary and Anonymous Language
A historiographical perspective contributes to the uncovering of issues of cul-
tural appropriation and scholarly captivation, and to the determination of
how Sanskrit came to replace Hebrew. The background of the Hebrew founda-
tion that bears the linguistic traits of a faceless God with an unpronounceable
name, who created the universe by uttering certain vowels, has often occu-
pied the memory of theologians, poets, and later philologists. For the emerging
Church, the opening scene takes place in the three holy languages, Hebrew,
Greek and Latin: Bereshit, En Archè, In principio.
Evoking the primordial biblical verb, the creative power of speech in count-
less cultures should not be underestimated; it could even be transformed into
the Speech Goddess. Charles Malamoud sheds light on this matter in his study
of Vac in the ancient Sanskrit texts of the Vedas—this sounding word, as it is
revealed, authorizes the knowledge of all things.32
31 Recently: Jean-Paul Demoule, Mais où sont passés les Indo-Européens? Le Mythe d’origine
de l’Occident, (Paris: Seuil, 2014).
32 See notably the pages of Charles Malamoud in Detienne and Hamonic, La Déesse Parole,
especially 10ff.; Charles Malamoud, Le jumeau solaire (Paris: Le Seuil, 2002), 144-145.
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Let us proceed with the biblical text. One of the particularities of the mate-
rial history of this corpus is undoubtedly derived from the fact that the Divine
Word, uttered in Hebrew, finds its new way in and through a Christian Word,
born from a translation. The Hebrew Bible, having become Christian, results
therefore from the Word of a Father whose divine word is incarnated as a Son
who, without being exactly a god of translation, despite the miracle of the
Pentecost, is hallowed as the Great Mediator. Anyone who looks at the theology
of Mediation can easily see to what extent our culture, known as a “media” cul-
ture, is fueled by a discourse of this Christian anthropology of the Mediation,
which harks back to the passages in Paul where Christ is the Mediator between
God and men: mediator of a New Alliance and Redeemer for all.33
Keeping in mind the two crucial points (“Translation” and “Mediation”), it
is worth pursuing certain aspects of this divine speech in order to “hear” the
primordial language of which God made use in Genesis, creating a Universe
of representations that became that of the cultures modeled by the biblical
stories.34
The following question is therefore posed. This primordial language, is it
really unique? The response of Augustine is explicit: Before the Flood, there
is only one human language. Saint Augustine calls it humana lingua vel hu-
mana locutio35—“the human language” or “the human parlance.” Isolated and
anonymous, this language is devoid of nomen proprium. What good is a proper
name? Why would it be necessary to name it? A proper name is meant to char-
acterize in order to designate through differentiation. Thus, the lingua humana
shone in its solitude, splendid and unparalleled, and anonymous. It was sola,
without nomine proprio.
This language has been very often—but not always—identified by the
Church Fathers as the Hebrew of Adam in the Garden of Eden.
One can never stress enough the importance given to the parlance or the
language, to the attention directed at the divine word, Adamic, paradisiacal
and human, in these biblical exegeses. The historian of linguistic ideas is there-
fore right to investigate these texts, as he would other theoretical narratives,
scholarly fictions, or mythical or theological poems.
33 Epistle to the Hebrews, IX 15ff.
34 Certain paragraphs here carry forward the developments proposed in Maurice Olender,
“Des aléas de la Parole divine au Verbe performatif”, in Genèses de l’acte de parole dans
le monde grec, romain et médiéval, ed. B. Cassin and C. Lévy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011),
243-244.
35 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XVI, XI, 1.
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If Isidore of Seville asked himself, “what was the nature of the language
in which God spoke in the beginning of the world when he said: Fiat lux,”36
Augustine raises the same question no less than fifteen times in the space of
three pages, in his first book The Literal Interpretation of Genesis.37 He con-
trasts the double nature, corporal and spiritual, of the vox Dei and lux, the di-
vine light: “should one think […] that the voice of God resounded materially
when he said fiat lux […] If it is so, in what language resounded that voice
when God said fiat lux? …”38
Augustine pursues his scholarly inquiry on the origins of the divine and
the human word, on the analogies between the exercise of divine speech and
words pronounced by mortals.39 He starts from the initial formula of Genesis,
the Hebrew Bereshit that opens the Gospel according to John: En arché in
Greek; in Latin In Principio. Starting from this crucial passage, Augustine writes
in his Homilies on the Gospel of John:
The words that we speak are fleeting and transient: as soon as your word
has sounded from your mouth, it passes away; it makes its noise, and
passes away into silence [transit in silentium]. […] When God spoke, did
He give out a voice [vocem], or sounds [sonos], or syllables [syllabas]? If
He did, in what tongue spoke He? Hebraea, an graeca, an latina? Tongues
are necessary where there is a distinction of nations. But there none can
say that God spoke in this tongue, or in that.”40
A development follows that leads to the mystery of the “God who gave birth to
the Word,” his Son.
That the Word of God is thus inscribed in the language of the Faith and of the
Symbol (the title of another treatise),41 did not prevent a succession of eminent
Christian exegetes from condemning Augustine for failing to make the effort to
learn the two holy languages—Hebrew and Greek. Richard Simon, the founder
of biblical criticism, wrote in 1678 that “if he had the knowledge of the Greek
36 Etymologiarum, IX, I, 11, bilingual edition M. Reydelet, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1984, 39:
Cuiusmodi autem lingua est Deus in principio mundi dum diceret: “Fiat lux” […].
37 Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram II, 4—III, 8.
38 Ibid., II, 5.
39 Augustine, De Fide et symbolo III, 3-4.
40 Augustine, In Johannis Evangelium, XIV, 7.
41 Augustine, De fide et symbolo I, 1ff.; see also Enchiridion, X, 34.
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and Hebrew languages, he would have succeeded much better”42—he thinks
here of a literal exegesis rather than an allegorical reading. Insistent, he speci-
fies again a few years later that “it would be difficult to excuse the negligence”
of Augustine.43
Augustine had responded in advance to such grievances,, when he said
that he learned the name of Christ “in the milk” of his mother.44 In Book XI
of Confessions, desiring to understand the first verse of Genesis, Augustine
exclaims:
Let me hear and understand how in the beginning thou madest heaven
and earth. Moses wrote of this; he wrote and passed on […]. If he were
[here], I would lay hold on him and ask him and entreat him solemnly
that in thy name he would open out these things to me, and I would lend
my bodily ears to the sounds that came forth out of his mouth. If, how-
ever, he spoke in the Hebrew language [si hebraea voce loqueretur], the
sounds would beat on my senses in vain […]; but if he spoke in Latin, I
would understand what he said […].
Indeed, within me, deep inside the chambers of my thought, Truth
itself—neither Hebrew, nor Greek, nor Latin, nor barbarian [nec hebraea
nec graeca nec latina nec barbara], without any organs of voice and
tongue, without the sound of syllables—would say, ‘He speaks the truth’45
May we understand here the “Truth” of Augustine as a mediating Pentecost,
where each one grasps the Divine Word in his own language, where the mul-
tiplicity of alterities are joined in catholicity, One and Universal? Being subli-
mated, the ancient repealed Law is incarnated in a new Faith. From this point
on, the Church marches toward the conversion of the world. The particular is
called to be joined in a universal, borne by the Faith of a Christ whose “philo-
logical” vocation is to establish a unique “Truth” for all.
42 Richard Simon, Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament (Rotterdam: Reinier Leers, 1678), 398.
And further that “he [Augustine] knew but very little Greek, and that he was entirely
ignorant of the Hebrew Language” (ibid.). On Richard Simon, his text and context, as well
as bibliographical references, see Olender, Languages of Paradise, 23-28; 79-81.
43 Richard Simon, Histoire critique des principaux commentateurs du Nouveau Testament
(Rotterdam: Reinier Leers, 1693), 286.
44 Augustine, Confessionum. III, IV, 8 […] nomen salvatoris […] lacte matris. See also ibid., VI,
IV, 5.
45 Ibid., XI, III, 5. I wish to extend my gratitude to Milad Doueihi. He has long drawn my at-
tention to more than one “linguistic” page of Augustine.
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Proving by Forgetting
The primordial Hebrew, which has long been for Christian erudition the lan-
guage of Paradise, could be replaced, at the end of the 18th century, by Sanskrit,
which had recently been discovered by the scholars and artists of the Occident.
One should remember that since the Renaissance, one could encounter in
Europe a multiplication of languages of Paradise. Every population took its own
idiom as Edenic: Flemish here, Tuscan there, then Swedish, German or French.
Everyone imagined they spoke the language infused by God into Adam.46 In
addition, since the 16th century, Sanskrit words migrated to Europe in the wake
of the spice trade, and thanks to the correspondences of some Jesuits.47 These
transfers of words or vocables led to comparisons of Sanskrit linguistic roots
to those of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic. Between the 16th and the 18th
century, resulting from new comparative methods, a “prehistory of the Indo-
European idea” would hasten the burial of Hebrew, the language of Paradise.48
Between theological ruts and poetic sparks, renewing centuries of Christian
discourses on Hebrew, Herder, the father of romanticism, would still make an
apology for that “language of paradise”49 in Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie
in 1782-83. In his statements on that which could be described as “Christian
Hebrew,” ancient oriental philology could motivate certain modern occiden-
tal representations of a primordial Sanskrit, which was transformed rather
into an originary “Aryan.” It is worth re-reading the pages of Herder as he
makes the ultimate praise of Hebrew in the 1780s, then, a few decades later,
to see how Sanskrit has come to replace Hebrew in the first celebrations of an
“Aryan bible.”50
Other sources also have their importance here for elucidating the mech-
anisms of substitution and transfer, between theology and original ideas.
Father Coeurdoux,51 a contemporary of Voltaire, wrote in 1767 a mémoire in
46 Maurice Olender, “Europe, or How to Escape Babel”, History and Theory 33 (1994): 12-17;
Maurice Olender, “Les mots voyageurs”, in Les royaumes intermédiaires. Autour de J.-B.
Pontalis, Colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, Folio essais (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 29-32. And, fur-
ther, regarding Dante, in footnote. 113.
47 Olender, “Europe, or How to Escape Babel”, 20 and n. 69.
48 Maurice Olender, “L’idée indo-européenne. Histoire et préhistoire du comparatisme”, in
Annuaire de l’EHESSS. Comptes rendus des cours et conférences 1991-1992, 136-139.
49 Olender, Languages of Paradise, 32 and 159, n. 27. (“Die Sprache des Paradieses.”).
50 Ibid., 36 and later n. 91.
51 Sylvia Murr devoted the second volume of her dissertation to Father Coeurdoux. Sylvia
Murr, L’Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et Voltaire. Vol. 2: L’Indologie du Père Cœurdoux,
stratégies, apologétique et scientificité (Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve, 1987).
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India, where he subsequently stayed. It is to be noted that the essay of the
Jesuit, an excellent linguist and Indologist, despite being known by members
of the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, would not
be published until 40 years later, in 1808—an editorial delay that was not with-
out consequence for the history of what would become the reception of the
Indo-European hypothesis. While extending the ancient exegesis of Genesis,
Coeurdoux renews it when he writes:
Japhet, the elder son of Noah, left the plains of Sennaar [the valley where
the confusion of Babylon is situated in Genesis, 11:2], bringing with him
a third of the men towards the occident. His seven children were with-
out doubt of equally large families, of which each one had to speak one
of the new original languages such as Latin, Greek, Slavic, and if I may
be allowed to add, samskoutam; It merits to be mentioned among the
primitive languages more than any other language, in view of its scope.
The supposition that I make at present, may perhaps later become a
reality […].52
We are in 1767. Historiography recognizes the “reality” and linguistic validity
of this “supposition,” known as the Indo-European hypothesis, beginning from
February 2nd 1786, when William Jones marvelled at the relation between
Sanskrit, Greek and Latin: this “affinity [is] so strong, indeed, that no philolo-
ger could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from
some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”53 Jones makes the
hypothesis no longer of a primordial language but of its plausible oblivion.
This proposition of “no longer exists,” this usage of an oblivio as a concept, this
relation between an affirmation of oblivion along with the conditions of a pos-
itive knowledge—I have explored elsewhere, underlining the importance, in
different eras, of the linguistic hypotheses resulting from the supposition of an
oblivion, perhaps of a partial or total disappearance, of the original language.54
52 Coeurdoux 1808: 664, cited in Sylvia Murr, L’Indologie du Père Cœurdoux, 29; 35-39; 176-178.
For further illuminations on this matter in an unpublished work of Father Coeurdoux
(1777), see Sylvia Murr, L’Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et Voltaire. Vol. 1: Mœurs et cou-
tumes des Indiens (1777). (Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve, 1987), 20-21.
53 William Jones, “On the Hindus. The Third Discourse”, Asiatic Researches 1 (1788): 45-47. For
this entire passage, see Olender, Languages of Paradise, 6-7.
54 I have emphasized the technical importance of the conception (including the theologi-
cal one) of an oblivio, occupying the space of an original without memory, in the his-
tory of social sciences, in particular for the emergence of linguistics in Olender (1997).
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We find here, in a manner of speaking, an affirmation that wishes to prove
through oblivion.
“A Page of the Origins of the World”55
Among the controversies for and against Hebrew at the origins of the Christian
religion and of intelligent humanity, Voltaire dots the i’s from the first words
of the article Brachamnes, Brames in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764).
Against other scholars who consider Hebrew and French to be “essentially the
same language,”56 or who derive the name of the Brachmane “from a Jewish
word barac with a C […] or barak with a K, which means to bless or rather
to pray,”57 Voltaire asks the following question, which illustrates well the uses
that were then made of India to weaken the biblical chronology: “Is it not likely
that the Brahmans were the first legislators of the earth, the first philosophers,
the first theologians? […]. The Hebrews, who were known so late, never men-
tion the Brahmans: they did not know India until the conquests of Alexander
[…].”58 In these conflicts concerning the oldest origins of humanity, Voltaire
chose to have Adam come from India:
The first man was created of the Indies […], he was called Adimo which
means the engenderer and his wife was called Procriti which signifies life.
[…]; The sect of the Brahmans is incontestably more ancient than that
of the Jews; […] The Indians were always inventors, and the Jews always
imitators.59
Since then, see the beautiful book of Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalies. Essai sur l’oubli des
langues (Paris: Le Seuil, 2007).
55 Eugène Burnouf, see below n. 60.
56 Following the phrase of Father Thomassin (1619-1695), which Voltaire recalls here. For
a look at the linguistic practices of Louis Thomassin, see Olender,“Les mots voyageurs”,
30-32.
57 Voltaire, “Dictionnaire philosophique et portatif”, 102 (s.v. “Brachmanes, Brames”).
58 Ibid. 102-103.
59 Voltaire, “Dictionnaire philosophique et portatif”, 104 (s.v. Adam section II). For other sim-
ilar texts and some sources of Voltaire, see notably, Daniel S. Hawley, “L’Inde de Voltaire”,
in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. T. Besterman, vol. 120 (1974), 139-178,
the whole article, and for what concerns us here, 156f.; and Partha Mitter, Much Maligned
Monsters. History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 191f.
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The “barbarian knowledges” of India, imagined through Hellenistic erudition,
were succeeded by new philological usages, both Christian and anti-Christian,
which were more or less secularized. These modern approaches to India have
contributed to a transfer of one ancestrality to another, from the myth of bibli-
cal origin to the new Indo-European hypothesis: from Hebrew to Sanskrit.
If in 1833 Eugène Burnouf affirms that “the fundamental identity of Sanskrit,
Greek and Latin is already an established fact,”60 he also says that as to what
concerns the “mother language of the European dialects, it [i.e., Sanskrit] is
nothing but the sister;” strictly speaking, “the historical question would have
to remain insoluble.” Being primordial, this idiom remains “impenetrable,
because it escapes the memories of history.” He insists on this, while speci-
fying that the time for even an “outline” has not yet come.61 In his Discours
d’Ouverture à la chaire de Langue et Littérature sanscrites at the Collège de
France, after recalling how everything remains open and uncertain, Eugène
Burnouf ends his lecture by exalting a philology of the human spirit that takes
its sources from India. It is worth citing his conclusion in extenso:
Let us nonetheless dare to say: if this course should be devoted to philol-
ogy, we shall not ban the study of facts and ideas for that reason. We shall
not close our eyes to the brightest light that would ever come from the
Orient, for we seek to understand the great spectacle offered to our eyes.
It is India, with its philosophy and its myths, its literature and its laws,
that we study through its language. It is more than India, Gentlemen, but
a page of the origins of the world, of the primitive history of the human
spirit, that we try to decipher together. […] In us there is a deep convic-
tion that as much as the study of the words alone is useless and frivolous,
if it is possible to conduct it without that of the ideas, so is the study of the
words, considered as the visible signs of thought, solid and fruitful. There
is no real philology without philosophy and without history. The analysis
of the processes of language is also a science of observation; and if it is
not the science itself of the human spirit, it is at least that of the most
astonishing faculty by aid of which it was possible of being produced.62
60 Eugène Burnouf, “De la Langue et de la Littérature sanscrite. Discours d’Ouverture pro-
noncé au Collège de France”, Revue des deux Mondes, 1 February 1833: 3-4, and the follow-
ing citations.
61 Ibid., 14.
62 Ibid., 15.
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In his principle, his methodological intention, which associates philology, his-
tory and certain aspects of a new anthropological linguistics, Eugène Burnouf,
a scholar whose austerity is recognized by his contemporaries,63 manages the
concepts with equal intellectual prudence and audacity, which does not pre-
vent him from formulating his knowledge as a man of his time. Nevertheless,
when he proclaims that “we are not afraid to affirm, that Sanskrit will become
the instrument of the most beautiful discoveries,”64 Burnouf does not exalt, it
seems to me, the old quarrels over the Adamic language that are about to take
place throughout the 19th century, and even beyond.65 In these debates, we
find the duo—in certain cases, the duel—Hebrew-Sanskrit, enrolled in a new
race towards origins, animated by a theological and political tandem, mobi-
lized by the colonial component.
Among the students of Eugène Burnouf, it was Ernest Renan who dedicated
to him in 1849 L’avenir de la science [The future of science]—the opus of his life,
published in 1890, two years before his death. The impact of Burnouf’s work
gives rise here to an “enthusiastic” vision,66 which was able to influence its
reception when, at the opening of his book, Renan addresses Eugène Burnouf:
It is not a banal thought, sir, that leads me to address this essay to you. It
is in your presence that I have considered it. […] In hearing your lectures
on the most beautiful of languages and literatures of the primitive world,
I have reached the realization of that which formerly I could only dream:
science becomes philosophy and the highest results arise from the most
scrupulous analysis of details. […] The science of the human spirit must
be, above all, the history of the human science, and this history is only
possible through a patient and philological study of the works that it has
produced in its different ages.67
63 Ernest Renan, in his article written on the day following Eugène Burnouf’s death, pub-
lished on the 13th of June 1852 in Moniteur Universel, reprinted in “Three professors at the
Collège de France”, in Questions contemporaines 1868, Ouevres Complètes, vol. I, 123, and
further, E. Renan, “The primitive grammar of India”, in Mélanges d’Histoire et de Voyage
1868, Oeuvres, op. cit., vol. 2, 647.
64 Burnouf, “De la langue”, 4.
65 “Quête des origin” [Quest for the origins], see Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, L’Archive des
origines. Sanscrit, philologie, anthropologie dans l’Allemagne du XIX ème siècle, preface by
Charles Malamoud, Paris, Cerf, 2008, 178-181 (cf. also the index).
66 For another form of “enthusiasm”, see the description by Sylvain Lévi, “Aryens II.
Linguistique”, in La Grande Encyclopédie, vol. 4, 1885-1902, 45-47.
67 Ernest Renan, L’Avenir de la science (1848, 1890), Oeuvres, vol. 3, 731-732. In the wake of this
dedication, it is not without merit to note a “loyalty” that is recorded in another register:
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Is it the inspiration of this new “science of the human spirit” that authorizes
Renan,68 citing at the same time Burnouf, Lassen and other scholars of his time,
to discern “a certain affinity” between the biblical Eden and “the kingdom of
the Oudiyâna, or garden, situated near Kashmir”?69 Be that as it may, the ob-
jective seems to be achieved. Here we are in a “kingdom,” meaning “garden,”
that designates at the same time a religious and a linguistic position within a
geography of paradise: from primordial Hebrew towards an originary Sanskrit
we witness the transfer of Eden from one Orient to another, from the paradise
of Christian biblical exegesis to the philological sciences of an Aryan garden.
There are abundant texts of the 19th century that tell of these transfers, re-
lated to the prestige of the primordial: from the ancient Semitic Orient to a
new Aryan Orient.
Emile-Louis Burnouf (not to be confused with Eugène Burnouf, his cous-
in) seeks to view Christianity founded in the Vedas, in the ancient religion of
Brahma. Less known than the famous formulation of Renan, “essentially, Jesus
has nothing Jewish about him,”70 here are two short citations of Emile-Louis
Burnouf, to be read in his Science des religions of 1870: “Christianity is in its en-
tirety an Aryan doctrine and as a religion, has almost nothing in common with
Judaism.” And furthermore: “It is in the hymns of the Veda and not in the Bible
that we should seek the primordial source of our religion.”71
Voltaire, as we have seen, conceived a new genesis for humanity when he
wrote that “the first man (named Adimo) was created in the Indies.”72 Without
less than two years after the death of Eugène Burnouf, in January 14th 1854, Renan wrote
to his widow to express “the wish that I could have the hand of Miss Laure” (150). And, in
February 14th of the same year, insisting: “I would add that my union with the daughter
of Eugène Burnouf would be my primary concern to an immediate amelioration” and to
“an advancement to which this union itself would contribute effectively” (157). (Renan,
vol. 10, Correspondance, p. 150-152; p. 156-157). 33 years old, in the Autumn of 1856, Renan
married Cornélie Scheffer, daughter and niece of the painters Henry and Ary Scheffer.
68 Ibid. For a new approach, see Goldstein, Jan E., “Toward an Empirical History of Moral
Thinking: The Case of Racial Theory in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France”, American
Historical Review 120, 1 (2015): 1-27, the entirety of this study and, for us here, 20-21.
69 Renan 1855, vol. 8, 566-567.
70 In the manuscripts of the Vie de Jésus of Renan, this sentence is taken from the second
booklet: BNF (Nouv. Acq. Franç., 11. 484) in Prosper Alfaric, Les Manuscrits de la “Vie de
Jésus” d’Ernest Renan (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1939), 26. For a historical contextualization
of this phrase, that Renan disclaims in several ways, see the chapter “The Hebrews and
the Sublime. Ernest Renan” in Olender, Languages of Paradise.
71 Émile-Louis Burnouf, La Science des religions (Paris: Maisonneuve et Cie, 1876), 120; and
for the rest: 217.
72 Voltaire, “Dictionnaire philosophique et portatif”, 104 (s.v. Adam section II).
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