Pigeons, Telegraphy and World News: Paul Julius Reuters

European Diary, 25.2.2021: 122 years ago today, Paul Julius Reuter, the founder of the “Reuters Telegraphic Company” news agency, died in Nice. Paul Julius Reuter was born under the name Israel Beer Josaphat on July 21, 1816 in Kassel, where he grew up as the son of Samuel Levi Josaphat, a merchant and rabbi from Witzenhausen. However, he was drawn to science and journalism. In Göttingen, he met the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who was involved in the experiments that led to the invention of the electric telegraph.
In 1845 he converted to Lutheran Protestantism in London, took the name Paul Julius Reuter and married the banker’s daughter Ida Maria Magnus in Berlin. A short time later, he became a partner in a new publishing house with a bookshop, which published not least democratic writings under the name “Reuters und Stargardt” in 1848. After the failure of the revolution, Reuters had to flee to Paris. “Reuters and Stargardt” became “Stargardt,” still a leading antiquarian bookstore in Germany today.
But Reuters remained true to his convictions and now became involved in the field of press freedom and transnational communication. In 1850, he founded a news agency in Aachen, which initially closed the gap between Brussels and Aachen in the connection Paris – Berlin with carrier pigeons that traveled much faster than the stagecoach. In 1851, telegraphy replaced this link as well, eventually connecting Great Britain to the continent.
Messages arriving by ship from the U.S. were soon expedited from Cork in Ireland to London faster than the ship itself could get there. Reuters news transmission secured the decisive time advantage. Not least, the stock market reports were worth their weight in gold in the truest sense of the word. Soon he was able to deploy correspondents in all the world’s major cities, and his joint-stock company Reuters Telegraphic Comp. Incorporated had a news monopoly.
In 1872, Reuters, who had by then been ennobled a baron, also received a concession from Persian Shah Naser al-Din to develop Persia economically. This included exclusive rights to build railroads and dams, to regulate rivers and to exploit mineral resources, with the exception of gold and silver mines. But his ambitious plans soon failed for lack of capital, and just a year later the Shah revoked the concession after Russia protested. Reuters was compensated with the concession for establishing the Imperial Bank of Persia, which also served as Persia’s central bank until the establishment of the Central Bank of Iran. Reuters adventurous life was filmed in 1940 by William Dieterle starring Edward G. Robinson, “A Dispatch from Reuters.” The German version, which was broadcast on television in 1963, was given the title “Ein Mann mit Phantasie” (“A Man of Imagination”).

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

“Allah will help”. The Arabist Hedwig Klein

European Diary 19.2.2021: 110 years ago today, Hedwig Klein was born in Antwerp. Soon after, the family moved to Hamburg.
She loses her father, the merchant Abraham Wolf Klein, when she is not even five years old. He dies as a soldier on the Eastern Front for the German Reich. Hedwig Klein enrolled at the university to study in 1931. Her choices: Islamic Studies, Semitistisk and English Philology. In 1937, her doctoral thesis is written: the critical edition of an Arabic manuscript on early Islamic history. But Jews are no longer allowed to sit for the doctoral examination from the spring of 1937.
Hedwig Klein is persistent, she convinces the university administration to allow an exception. Her thesis is given the top grade of “Excellent,” and her supervisor Arthur Schaade attests to her “a degree of diligence and perspicacity that one would wish on many an older Arabist.”

Hedwig Klein

In 1938, the thesis is to be printed, and the doctoral certificate is also already drawn up, but then the imprimatur is withdrawn. The ban on Jews earning doctorates is now enforced with all thoroughness.
Now Hedwig Klein plans her emigration. But she does not succeed in obtaining a visa, neither in France nor in the USA. With the help of the Hamburg economic geographer Carl August Rathjens, she finally receives an invitation from an Arabic professor in Bombay. And on August 19, her steamer sets sail from Hamburg. Two days later, she writes Rathjen a hopeful postcard. “Allah will help already…”
But in Antwerp, the ship receives orders to return and call at a German port. By then the German invasion of Poland is already in preparation, and with it the next world war.

Once again, Arthur Schaade helps her. Klein is recommended to Hans Wehr, an Arabist who has just joined the NSDAP. The Reich government, Wehr demands, should make “the Arabs” its allies, against France and England, and against the Jews in Palestine. And the Foreign Office, in turn, sees in Hans Wehr the right man to compile a German-Arabic dictionary. For this is now urgently needed, not least for a successful translation of “Mein Kampf” into Arabic.
Her collaboration on the German-Arabic dictionary initially saves Hedwig Klein from deportation to Riga in December 1941, which Schaade is just able to prevent with an intervention. Klein was irreplaceable.
But on July 11, 1942, the time had come. The first deportation train leading from Hamburg directly to the Auschwitz extermination camp also takes Hedwig Klein to her murderers. Just as her sister, her mother and her grandmother are murdered.
In 1947, Carl August Rathjen succeeds in getting Hedwig Klein’s dissertation printed after all, and she is declared a doctor of philosophy in “absentia”.
After the war, Hans Wehr was classified as a mitläufer and used Klein’s collaboration to exonerate himself. The German-Arabic dictionary appears in 1952, and in the preface Wehr thanks a “Fräulein Dr. H. Klein” for her cooperation. Without a word about her fate.
“Der Wehr” is still the most widely used German-Arabic dictionary, with the 5th edition last published in 2011.

Thanks to Stefan Buchen, who vividly describes Hedwig Klein’s story in his essay on the Quantara.de website.

https://en.qantara.de/content/hedwig-klein-and-mein-kampf-the-unknown-arabist

Flashback, 19.2.2020: In Hanau, Hesse, a 43-year-old German shoots nine people of “foreign origin,” in two shisha bars and on the open street, and injures six others, some seriously. Finally, he shoots his mother and himself at home. Before the attack, the perpetrator had spread a right-wing extremist appeal on the Internet, characterized by anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, misogynistic and racist conspiracy theories: a “message to the entire German people.”

The perpetrator apparently also had psychological problems, which later prompted representatives of the right-wing AFD to deny that the crime was politically motivated. Josef Schuster, the representative of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, on the other hand, states that it can be “assumed that the perpetrator deliberately wanted to hit people with an immigrant background” and accuses the police and judiciary of having “poor eyesight” in the “right eye. Among the victims of the attack are Germans with Turkish, Kurdish, Bosnian and Afghan background, German and Romanian Roma. The perpetrator attacked them all deliberately, or shot them blindly through the door of a shisha bar.

Lew Nussimbaum alias Essad Bey: Border Crossing Between All Worlds

European Diary, 20.10.2020: Hardly anyone has crossed so many borders as he has, and this under many different names. 115 years ago today he was born in Baku or in Kiev: Lev Abramovich Nussimbaum alias Essad Bey alias Kurban Said alias Mohammed Essad-Bey. His father was a Georgian Jewish oil industrialist, his mother a Russian Jewish revolutionary in addition to my own. A German nanny took care of young Lev, who attended high school in Baku, until the family fled the Bolsheviks across the Caspian Sea in 1918.

His odyssey led the 15-year-old Lew to the German colony of Helenendorf in Georgia in 1920, and from there via Tbilisi, Istanbul, Paris, and Rome to Berlin. In 1922 Nussimbaum converted to Islam there, renamed himself Essad Bey and began to be active in the Berlin Islamic community. He studied Turkish, Arabic and Islamic history and became acquainted with the literary scene in Berlin, with Else Lasker-Schüler, Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Pasternak. As a journalist he wrote about the “Orient” and Islam for German newspapers, and in 1929 he made his debut as a literary author with an autobiographical novel, Oil and Blood.

Memorial Plaque at the Mansion Essad Bey lived in at Fasanenstraße 72 in Berlin, Fasanenstraße 72. Without any reference to his Jewish background…

This was followed in 1932 by a biography of Mohammed that is still considered a reference work today. His anti-Communist writings, on the other hand, and the fact that his Jewish origins were not an issue in Berlin at first, also gave him access to the Reichsschrifttumskammer in 1934. But in 1936, Essad Bey, who was now living in Vienna, was banned from publishing in Nazi Germany. He published his next novel, Ali and Nino, under his new pseudonym, Kurban Said. And the book became a great success in Germany as well. (New editions followed till 2000 and 2002). In 1938, Essad Bey, who by then had come to admire Italian fascism, traveled via Switzerland to Italy, presumably to write a biography of Mussolini. Under growing physical pain he reached Positano in southern Italy, where he was diagnosed with Raynaud’s disease. His German nanny from Baku cared for him during the last months of his life, in which he completed his last, so far unpublished novel, The Man Who Understood Nothing about Love. In 1942 Lew Nussimbaum alias Essad Bey alias Kurban Said died in Positano.

The American journalist Tom Reiss wrote Nussimbaums weird biography: The Orientalist. Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life.

The Orientalist

Lew Nussimbaum’s biography may be one of the most extreme examples of the borderline crossings that led many Jews to a keen interest in Islam and its history as early as the 19th century – starting with the representatives of the “scholarship of Judaism”, such as Abraham Geiger, who was to be one of the founders of modern Oriental and Islamic Studies.

The tale of the “Christian-Jewish Occident”

European Diary, 28.9.2020: Do you know this joke? Mayer, a Viennese Jew, wants to travel. At the train station in Vienna, already on the platform, he realizes that he still has to go to the toilet. He asks around: “Excuse me, can you tell me, are you anti-Semitic?” “Me? Well, that’s an insinuation. I love the Jews.” “Okay, You obviously can’t help me.” And he turns to the next one: “Excuse me, are you anti-Semitic?” “Well, really, not at all. I love Israel, such a wonderful country, fighting against those…” “Let it go.” And again he turns to the next one. “Please, can you tell me, are you anti-Semitic?” “How not! Of course, Jews rule everywhere, even the weather…” “Thank you, you are at least honest. Can you watch my suitcase for a minute?”

Austria’s “Integration Minister” Susanne Raab loves it, Germany’s AfD loves it, Viktor Orbán loves it, Identitarians love it, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz loves it, the German CSU loves it, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and Martin Engelberg love it: the “Christian-Jewish Occident”. HC Strache even loves the “Christian-Jewish-Aramaic heritage”. But hardly anyone is interested in that anymore.

I don’t remember exactly when the Jewish-Christian dialogue, that began in the 1950s under the impression of the Shoah – and the critical reflection among Christians – was taken up by the slogan of the “Christian-Jewish Occident”.

In Germany, this was already being talked about more and more often in the late 1990s. The Enlightenment and the Greek heritage were also frequently invoked. The only thing missing in this talking was Islam. As if it had not been Islamic philosophers in the Middle Ages who had a decisive contribution to Europe’s rediscovering of its Greek heritage in the Middle Ages. One could not avoid the impression that this void in public identity rhetoric was the only real thing about this discourse.

In 2010 the slogan of “Christian-Jewish Occident” also arrived in Vienna. Martin Engelberg, editor of a “Jewish” magazine and now a conservative (that is – in Austria – for the time being right wing populist) member of the Parliament and “Israel expert” of the Chancellor, invoked the “Judeo-Christian heritage” and the notion of a “common Jewish-Christian community of values” (after 1000 years of Christian persecution of Jews). And he warned against Muslim immigrants.

In the meantime, talk of “imported anti-Semitism” has become commonplace and serves not at least as justification for racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic asylum and migration policies.

And it serves as a distraction from everything that does not fit into this world view of essentialist identities. The greatest danger for Jews in Austria and Europe in fact still emanates from right-wing extremists, even if many Islamists make a successful effort to learn from them. Even in the everyday life of the middle classes and bourgeois circles, the so-called middle of society, Jews still have to listen to cultivated resentment about Jewish influence on this or that.

More than ever before, the most intimate friends of Israeli politics – from Victor Orbán and Matteo Salvini to Marie le Pen, to the right-wing populists of the Netherlands, Belgium, and most Eastern European countries – are always capable of rough-caliber anti-Semitic rides. That is in effect, when it is not about Israel, the Jews in the Middle East, who, as vanguard of the “Occident,” are expected do the dirty work for Europe and the United States, and are supposed to receive the blows for it.

Jews all over the world instead defend their right to live in open societies, in which it is not ethnicity or religion that decides whether one enjoys civil, political or social rights.

Thus, as a Jew, one has to deal with the fact that Israel, of all countries, as a “Jewish state” is now being misused by the nationalists of this world as a justification for their own racism, and is happy to be used.

And thus one now is faced with a strange constellation of ardent anti-Semites and fanatical “friends” of Israel: more and more often the same people.

The “fight against anti-Semitism”, which the current Austrian government has written in full in its program, and even more so the commitment to Israel as a “Jewish state”, is in reality not directed against anti-Semitism at all, but against everything that can be interpreted as “too far-reaching” criticism of Israel. Is it Austria actually that decide whether Israel defines itself in terms of ethnic-religious or secular pluralism?

In the name of the “Christian-Jewish Occident”, this naturally affects not only Muslims, who – like Christian fundamentalists – get stirred up to the “fight for Jerusalem”, but at least as often it is directed against Jews, i.e. the “right ones”. Cosmopolitan Jewish Intellectuals, or even critically minded Israelis. Orbán has demonstrated this most vividly. Advised by his friend Benjamin Netanyahu, he cemented his power with a campaign against the “Jewish world conspiracy” of George Soros, who would try to flood Europe with Muslim immigrants.

In Germany, one can observe the beneficial activity of a state sponsored “commissioner against anti-Semitism” for quite some time. In the meantime, he denounces so-called “left-wing liberal” critics of his politics (most of them Jewish and Israeli intellectuals) as latently violent “anti-Semites”. We will certainly get such specialists in Austria soon.

Europe’s “Other”

Installation Europe’s “Other”. Photo: Dietmar Walser

In the European search for the “other,” the attempt to find Europe’s “counterpart” in the Orient, the academic discipline of Oriental Studies came into being already in the 18^th century. Among those driving forward linguistic and historical research of the entire Orient in the 19^th century were also many representatives of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) , such as Lion Ullmann, Salomon Munk, Gustav Weil, Moritz Steinschneider, David Samuel Margoliouth, Felix Peiser, Josef Horovitz, and Eugen Mittwoch. Unlike the history- and philology-oriented Oriental Studies, Islamic Studies mainly dealt with Muslim religion and culture. The initial impulse to establish such field of study came from the pioneer of the Jewish reform movement in Germany, Abraham Geiger. However, the father of modern Islamic studies was—together with Theodor Nöldeke—Ignaz Goldzieher. Lew Nussimbaum (1905-1942) who converted to Islam and Hedwig Klein (1911-1942) also wanted to follow in the footsteps of these scholars. Klein studied Islamic and Semitic studies in Hamburg and completed her doctoral thesis in 1937 on a manuscript about the “History of the people of ‘Omān from their adoption of Islam until their dissensus”. Since she was Jewish, her PhD was not approved. After a failed attempt to escape Germany, she was still able to collaborate until mid-1942 on today’s most widely used Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic by Hans Wehr. Eventually she was deported and murdered in Auschwitz. In 1947, she was posthumously awarded her PhD degree. Was Hedwig Klein’s interest in the Orient and in Islam founded, like that of her male predecessors and colleagues, in the affinity between Hebrew and Arabic or else in the fact that both Judaism and Islam are considered to be law based monotheistic religions?

< Den Orient im Herzen: Lew Abramowitsch Nussimbaum alias Essad Bey alias Kurban Said, Berlin 1921

In any case, research carried out by European Jews on Islam was not motivated by the exoticism widespread in the 19^th and early 20^th century, by the superficial fascination with the “alien.” Nor was it prompted by the goal to use Orientalism as an ideology of difference and—as so often happens these days as well— to define the Orient as the negation of the Occident. On the contrary: Jews—themselves perceived as Europe’s “other”—were able to approach the Islamic world with much more insight and understanding than many Christians. Although the return to fundamentalism can be observed in all religions, these days, populist agitation expresses itself mainly in the promotion of the enemy stereotype of “Islam”: the image of the Orient as a counterdraft to the Occident, as Europe’s eternal adversary.

Brian Klug (London) about the inner and outer “other” of Europe and the heritage of Colonialism: