Hermann Brunnhofer

"The longing for the Orient accompanies the Occidental from the cradle to the grave. When the young farmer’s wife of the Far West, deep in the most remote forest valley of the Rocky Mountains, holds her first-born child on her lap and imparts to him the elements of the Christian faith, she tells him about the shepherds of Bethlehem in the land of Judea, far, far on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. She tells him about the star, which the wise men from the land of Chaldaea followed, and then of the rivers of the Nile and the Euphrates, of Mount Ararat on which Noah’s ark came to rest after the Flood, of Mount Sinai from which Moses brought the earliest tables of the law to the people of Israel, of the great cities of Nineveh, Babylon, Tyre and Sidon, of the world conquerors Cyrus of Persia and the Pharoah in Egypt-land."

"... The Bible is the book through which the world of the West, even in times of the most melancholy isolation, remains persistently tied to the Orient. Even when one ignores its character as a sacred book of revelation, and examines it from a historical and geographical standpoint, the Bible can be seen as a world-historical book of wonders, as the book which ever again reawakens in the Aryans of the West, who have deserted their homeland, that longing for the Orient which binds peoples together..."

"It was also religious need which in the educated circles of the West provided the most powerful impetus for the study of the Orient. The world of the West was captivated in its inner being by the information that it received through the Bible about the peoples of the Orient. But that which sufficed to please the taste did not satisfy the curiosity, which was afterward awakened. The Bible’s accounts of language, morals and religions of the Egyp- tians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Medes and Persians were too scant not to inspire the desire, in the era of the renascence of the sciences, for richer and more trust- worthy information about the lives of the peoples of the East. So arose, at first, in closest connection to the Biblical scholarship inspired by the Reformation, an oriental philology and archaeology. These [sciences] limited themselves for many centuries to the study of the language and religion of the Semitic people. But towards the end of the previous century the languages and literatures of the Sanskrit-Indians and the Zoroastrian Persians were redis- covered, and then arose, quickly and at the same time as the philological study of Semitic languages and religions, Sanskrit and Zend philology, to which soon too Egyptology and Sinology were added."

"But it was Sanskrit, not Hebrew, whose pure linguistic forms were lovingly cultivated by many of the late romantics, and it was the ethical wisdom of the Rig Veda, Hermann Brunnhofer claimed, which represented the ‘‘ethno-psychological foundation’”’ of the Germans, Celts, Slavs, Greeks, and Indians; “in reading the Vedas,” he wrote in 1893, “‘tat tvam asi, ‘that art thou’ resounds in our racial subconsciousness and fills us with pride. ...”"