Johann Jakob Reiske - Achievements

Achievements

Reiske certainly surpassed all his predecessors in the range and quality of his knowledge of Arabic literature. It was the history, the realia of the literature, that always interested him; he did not care for Arabic poetry as such, and the then much praised Hariri seemed to him a grammatical pedant. He read the poets less for their verses than for such scholia as supplied historical notices. Thus for example the scholia on Jarir furnished him with a remarkable notice of the prevalence of Buddhist doctrine and asceticism in Iraq under the Omayyads. In the Adnotationes historicae to his Abulfeda (Abuif. Annales Moslemici, 5 vols., Copenhagen, 1789-91), he collected a veritable treasure of sound and original research; he knew the Byzantine writers as thoroughly as the Arabic authors, and was alike at home in modern works of travel in all languages and in ancient and medieval authorities. He was interested too in numismatics.

To comprehensive knowledge and very wide reading he added a sound historical judgment. He was not, like Schultens, deceived by the pretended antiquity of the Yemenite Kasidas. Errors no doubt he made, as in the attempt to ascertain the date of the breach of the dam of Ma'rib.

Though Abulfeda as a late epitomator did not afford a starting point for methodical study of the sources, Reiske's edition with his version and notes certainly laid the foundation for research in Arabic history, and a historical criticism of Oriental numismatics with his letters on Arabic coinage (in Eichhorn's Repertorium, vols. ix.-xi.). The foundation of Arabic philology, however, was laid not by him but by De Sacy. Reiske's linguistic knowledge was great, but he used it only to understand his authors; he had no feeling for form, for language as language, or for metre.

In Leipzig Reiske worked mainly at Greek, though he continued to draw on his Arabic stores accumulated in Leiden. Yet his merit as an Arabist was sooner recognized than the value of his Greek work. Reiske the Greek scholar has been rightly valued only in recent years, and it is now recognized that he was the first German since Sylburg who had a living knowledge of the Greek tongue. His reputation does not rest on his numerous editions, often hasty or even made to booksellers' orders, but in his remarks, especially his conjectures. He himself designates the Animadversiones in scriptores Graecos as flos ingenii sui, and in truth these thin booklets outweigh his big editions.

Closely following the author's thought he removes obstacles whenever he meets them, but he is so steeped in the language and thinks so truly like a Greek that the difficulties he feels often seem to us to lie in mere points of style. His criticism is empirical and unmethodical, based on immense and careful reading, and applied only when he feels a difficulty; and he is most successful when he has a large mass of tolerably homogeneous literature to lean on, whilst on isolated points he is often at a loss. His corrections are often hasty and false, but a surprisingly large proportion of them have since received confirmation from manuscripts And, though his merits as a Grecian lie mainly in his conjectures, his realism is felt in this sphere also; his German translations especially show more freedom and practical insight, more feeling for actual life, than is common with the scholars of that age.