Oriental studies

"Oriental studies have never been so intensive.... In the century of Louis XIV one was a Hellenist, today one is an Orientalist.... The Orient has become a sort of general preoccupation.... We shall see great things. The old Asiatic barbarism may not be as devoid of higher men as our civilization would like to believe."

"Intellectually, too, we can say that without the Reformation’s sanctioning and abetting of the idea of recovering the original meaning of God’s word, it is doubtful that many specialized orientalists would have been needed, wanted, or welcomed in European society."

"Finally, there is another cultural-political contingency. that shaped German oriental studies in its formative years, and that is, ironically, the inability, or unwillingness, of Central European states to control the spread of radical religious ideas. Had the Protestant churches been able to contain the spread of the Higher Criticism or to exert more power over university appointments, the text-threshing power of philological-historical criticism might have been broken and oriental studies might have been sidelined entirely. But the churches failed."

"Old Testament criticism was never bound by the same rules and prejudices as the study of China or of India, and vice versa."

"Hereafter, we will have to reckon again and again with Japan, indeed, with the Orient as a whole. Orientalistik will become a practical field of study, no longer what it was previously, a scrupulously avoided domain of dry as dust pedants. A chair for Japanology will soon be created [actually, the first came in 1914]. But chairs are not the only thing — and they are not the most important thing in the world. In hundreds and thousands of canals the life blood of the peoples is flowing back and forth. From now on will it circulate in a totally different, powerful way, between the Orient and Occident ... and not only will the Occident act on the Orient, but the Orient will also act on the Occident."

"...the anachronistic conception that Greece and Rome alone should be considered sources of culture for us, and that therefore they must remain for all time the focal point of historical-philological research. [Classicists] still practice that orthodox philology, which claims and possesses an influence, which it has not for a long time deserved, [and] that intolerant onesidedness which only accords the oriental sciences a hearing in so far as they are related to the history and culture of Greece, but otherwise are blind and want to be blind to the enormous field of Asian knowledge, which has brought us into contact with the modern world. [They are still beholden to] that real “unworldliness” in the scholarly sense, which takes no part in the widened historical conceptions of our day. Those are the forces with which Orientalistik has always had to struggle, and which today too block Sinology’s path ..."