"Though they tended to religious radicalism and political liberalism, most mid-century orientalists did not, as had Montesquieu and Voltaire, contrast rational oriental sages with western intolerance and cruelty — though there were a few philosophers, like Arthur Schopenhauer and Marx’s friend Karl Friedrich Koeppen, who continued this tradition. A few picked up Friedrich Schlegel’s suggestions about affinities between medieval Germans and Indians or Persians, and speculation intensified on the question of the ‘‘Indo-German” homeland."