Feb 2, 2019
About the Chaldaeans: August Ludwig von Schlözer and the Discovery of Semitic
Charles Haberl
Time: 11am - 12noon
Venue: Hunter College, West Building, 904 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10065
The subject of this talk, the 18th century Orientalist August Ludwig
von Schlözer, stands right at the nexus of the science and the art of
modern linguistic speculation, and it was his philosophical investigations
that laid the foundation for both to flourish. In what is probably the most
widely cited, but proportionately least read, article in the field of
historical and comparative Semitics, his lengthy 1781 study von der Chaldäer
or "About the Chaldaeans," which he published in Johann Gottfried Eichhorn's
Repertorium für biblische und morgenländische Literatur,
he coins the term "Semitic" and proposes it as a substitute for "Oriental
Languages," the category under which these languages were formerly subsumed.
In doing so, he constructed a genealogical framework for these languages
(and indeed languages more generally) for the very first time in the literature,
with attendant effects in their study. The category of "Chaldaean" that he addresses is a useful one to trace,
as generations of scholars had formerly situated a real nation,
with a real language (Chaldaic), a real religion (Chaldaism), and a real
territory (Chaldaea) within it, but from the turn of the 20th century
onward the category has become increasingly deprecated, and these constructs
have largely disappeared from recent scholarship, thanks in some part to the
concerns that Schlözer raises in his study. As a consequence, the term
"Chaldean" has been inherited exclusively by a certain community of Christians
primarily from Iraq. This gives me the opportunity to discuss issues of the
study of the Semitic languages more generally, including (but not limited to)
their classification, and reveal to what extent these things are
"found objects" and to what extent they are art rather than science,
which is to say that their value and meaning are constructed and imposed
upon them by communities such as ours.