Between language, philosophy and politics: Salomon Munk, the "Wissenschaft des Judentums" and the oriental studies in Paris

My contribution focuses on the German-Jewish Orientalist Salomon Munk and his influence on the development of French Oriental studies. Language and politics were strikingly intertwined in Munk’s cholarship during the first half of the nineteenth century. The paper attempts to shed light on this feature of Munk’s work, which caused his pioneering scholarship to be forgotten for many years after his death. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part considers an example of Munk’s reflections on language and on Hebrew in particular, and analyzes portions of his book Palestine: description géographique, historique et archéologique, published in 1845. The second part shows that these reflections, influenced by Munk’s Enlightenment ideas and concept of science, are not yet structured in a political discourse, as are the studies of his French successors in the second half of the nineteenth century. This fact could be one reason why Munk was completely forgotten after his death in 1867, although he was one of the most productive Orientalists and historians of philosophy in the first half of the nineteenth century. His legacy was reconsidered during the twentieth century by Jewish philosophers and historians of Jewish philosophy, but his work still merits further rediscovery