Il contributo di Salomon Munk alla trasformazione delle categorie storiografiche della storia della filosofia nell’Ottocento

Salomon Munk (1803-1867), Jewish orientalist who was born in Glogau, Prussia, and fled to France at a very young age in order to study Oriental languages, is the pioneer of the modern study of Jewish and Arabic philosophy. In his famous book Orientalism Eduard Said did not consider the original and seminal contribution that scholars of Jewish origin like Munk made to the study of the so called Oriental languages and especially of Arabic and Islamic thought in the Middle Ages by helping to transform the historiographical categories on which both orientalism and the history of philosophy of the nineteenth century were based. The aim of the present essay is to consider this contribution and to reconstruct the dialogue which took place in the first half of the XIX century between Munk and other orientalists of non-Jewish origins, such as August Schmölders and Ernest Renan. It thereby aims to fill a fundamental gap in the history of modern historiography of Arabic and Jewish philosophy.