The Languages of Paradise

Michel Foucault observed that "the birth of philology attracted far less notice in the Western mind than did the birth of biology or political economy". In this exploration of the origins of the discipline, Maurice Olender shows that philology - the comparative study of languages - left an indelible mark on Western visions of history and contributed directly to some of the most horrifying ideologies of the 20th century. The origins of philology were inspired by Renaissance debates over what language was spoken in the Garden of Eden. By the 18th century scholars were persuaded that European languages shared a common ancestor. With the adoption of positivist, "scientific" methods in the 19th century, the hunt for language of Eden and the search for a European "Ursprache" diverged. Yet the desire to reconcile historical causality with divine purpose remained.
Because the Indo-European languages clearly had a separate line of descent from the biblical tongues, the practitioners of the new science of philology (many of whom had received their linguistic training from the Church), turned their scholarship to the task of justifying the ascendance of the European Christianity to the principal role in Providential history. To accomplish this they invented a pair of concepts - Aryan and Semitic - that by the end of the century had embarked on ideological and political careers far outside philology. Supposed characteristics of the peoples who spoke them: thus the Semitic peoples (primarily the Jews) were, like their language, passive, static, and immobile, while the Aryans (principally Western Europeans) became the active, dynamic Chosen People of the future. Olender traces the development of these concepts through the work of J.G. Herder, Ernest Renan, Friedrich Max Muller, Adolphe Pictet, Rudolph Grau, and Ignaz Goldziher. He shows that, despite their different approaches, each of these men struggled more or less purposefully "to join romanticism in an effort to preserve a common allegiance to the doctrines of Providence".