S. T. Lee Lecture with Dorothea Weltecke
S. T. Lee Public Lecture Dorothea Weltecke: “The characteristic of the Syrians is a certain mediocracy”: Western pioneers of Syriac studies and their contempt European Aramaicists regarded the second half of the nineteenth century, up to about the First World War, as a particularly fruitful period—indeed, the beginning of scientific Syriac studies. They themselves attributed this explosion of research to the growth of manuscript collections, particularly in London and Paris, but also in Berlin and Cambridge. Curiously, the same pioneers in London, Paris, and Berlin often showed little respect for the cultures of Christians of the Syriac tradition and their written heritage. Scholars such as William Wright, Ruben Duval, and Theodor Nöldeke made no secret of their contempt for their subject. The Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Barsaum, a contemporary witness and himself an eminent Syriac scholar, protested in vain. This lecture will present the current state of the debate about these pioneers of modern Syriac studies, and trace the attitudes of some of them in the context of the changing international landscape and European academia.
