Maurice Olender, Europe, Or How to Escape Babel

7/28/2019 Maurice Olender, Europe, Or How to Escape Babel

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EUROPE, OR HOW TO ESCAPE BABEL'

M AUR I C E OL E NDE R

ABSTRACTSince William Jones announced the kinship of Sanskrit and the European languages,a massive body of scholarship has illuminated the development of the so-called "Indo-European" language group. This new historical philology has enormous technicalachievements to its credit. But alm ost f rom the st art, it became entangled with prejudicesand m yths-with efforts to recreate not only the lost language, but also the lost-andsuperior-civilization o f th e Indo -Europea n ancestors. This drive to determine the iden-tity a nd na ture of the first language of hu manity was deeply rooted in both near easternand western traditions. T he Bible described the perfect, transparen t language of Ad amand followed its degeneration , caused by hum an sin, into the multiple, o paq ue languagesof later nations. The three sons of Noah became, fo r Jewish a nd early Christian writers,the foun ders of three distinct hum an g rou ps. By the sixth and seventh centuries, histo-rians began to magnify the deeds of certain later peoples, such as the Scythians andGoths, and to connect them with the biblical genealogy of languages and races. Andin the Renaissance, speculative historical etymology took roo t and flourished, as nationalpride led European intellectuals to assert that their own m od ern languages- for example,Flemish -either c ould be identified with th e original o ne o r offered the closest survivingapproximation to i t . Japheth , Noah's favorite son and the forefather of the Europeans,emerged as th e hero wh o had preserved th e original language in its purity . A new historyof the Euro pea n languages developed, on e which traced them back to the language ofthe barbarian Scythians an d emphasized the connections between Persian an d Europe anlanguages. It cam e to seem implausible that the Eu rop ean languages derived fr om He-brew. By the eighteenth century, in short, all the preconditions were present for adiscovery that the ancestors of the Eu ropeans, like the comm on ancestor of their lan-guages, had been independent of Semitic influence. A modern scholarly thesis whosepolitical an d intellectual consequenc es are still working themselves o ut reveals the contin -uing impact of a millennia1 tradition of speculation about language and history.

INTRODUCTION -ETYMOLOGICAL ARGUMEN TS: SEDUCTION A ND PERSUASION

When Anthony Grafton, acting with Natalie Zemon Davis and Suzanne Mar-cha nd, invited me to a session of the Davis Center colloquium o n "Proof andPersuasion," he explained that m y presentation could take the form of simply"saying a few words" t o explain the relation of m y study of "Eu rope a nd B abel"

1. Ela bora ted in the course of my seminars at the Ecole des Ha ute s Etudes en Sciences Sociales,this text was discussed at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, in acolloquium organized in Jan uar y, 1993by Natalie Zemon Davis, Suzanne Marchand, and Anthony


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6 M A U R I C E O L E N D E Rto my research in progress and to my book on Th e Langu ages o f P a r a d i~ e .~But several considerations deterred me from accepting this proposal. The textto be discussed here could have served, in chronological terms, as a sort ofpreface to my book, but the final pages make it a sort of postscript as well.Moreover, it seemed risky to "say a few words" about my current researchproject, which is necessarily still tentative, and deals with different periods, inwhich several themes related t o the topics of th e original intersect. I thereforedecided to offer several supplem entary "footnotes"-new ma terial, necessarilysubject to Gra fton's m editations o n this theme. These observations an d quot a-tions will serve to clarify a single aspect of my text: the treatment of proofsfro m etymo logy. More precisely, they dea l with a number of savants' opinionson the etymological practice that consists of examining a word at its root: oftaking the word ap art to ma ke it confess a tru th which coincides, these writershold, with a certain degree of forgetfulness.

In his 1953 essay La preuve par l'itymologie, Jean Paulhan describes theefforts of savants to show that words were always endowed with "argumentsand proof sn-o r, as he puts it, tha t one must always confront "une languem ~ t i v k e ." ~aulha n shows that etymologies an d puns are always close to oneano ther: the difference between them is a mo ral on e, "the distance that sepa ratesthe lic it f rom the il lici t, the acceptable f rom the f ~ r b i d d e n . " ~aulha n pointsou t tha t if the linguists have absolutely rejected etymolog y, they have done sorather b ecause it has suc h a seductive, deceptive appea l tha n because it has no"secrets" to offer. But that, he explains, "is a sort of esoteric aspect whichfalls outside our subject matter."5 Never mind: poets, writers, and all sorts ofdevotees of literature still know the fascination of what h as seemed, to gen era-tions of readers, a "langue motivke." Here, then, are the few footnotes I saidI would provide. I offer them t o you, subject t o the rigorous scrutiny of H ansAarsleff, au tho r some time ago of a study of etymology in Leibniz, and JosineBlok, whose thesis on Amazons begins with pages on ancient views of ety-m01ogy.~In his dissertation De l'influence des opinions sur le langage, et du langagesur les opinions of 1759, Michaelis writes:Grammarians often praise etymology lavishly [two pages later , he refers to "the immenseproductivity of etymology"]. I agree that it neverproves the truth of a proposition: butit preserves truths. It is a sort of library, whose contents include all sorts of usefulnovelties. . . . I also agree that this source of truths can become a source ofer ro rs whenthe grammarian or the philosopher tries to derive from it eitherproofs for their assertionsor real defin itions: its waves are not pure, truth s and errors are rolled about in it together.Gra fton . Part of this work was also presented to the French department of Johns H opkins Univer-sity, where I was hosted by Wilda An derso n and M ilad Doueihi. Finally, at the invitation of NicoleLoraux, these pages were the object of two seminars at the EH ES S, at the Pro gram me de RecherchesInterdisciplinaires "Modern Usage of Antiquity." I retain world rights to this article.

2. Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nine-teenth Century, transl . Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1992).3 . J . Pau lhan , La Preuvepar 1'4tymologie [I9531 (Paris, 1988), 27.

4 . Zbid., 81-82.5. Zbid., 45-46, 82.6 . For Aarsleff, see below, n. 64.


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7U R O P E , O R H O W T O E S C A P E B A BE LI would like to draw a parallel between etymological propositions and the disconnectedpropositions that are published as Pense'es, which no one thinks of supplying with arigorous proof. Each etymology shows me that someone, in a given na tion , thought ina given manner. To determine whether his idea was good or bad requires a separateinquiry which has nothing in common with etymology. To that extent etymology resem-bles libraries: there too the good and the bad are mixed together.'I consulted Michaelis's text of 1759, aw arded a prize by th e Berlin Acad em y,in the French version of 1762, published a t Bremen by Ge orge Louis Forster.This version was enlarged and corrected by the author.

At almost the same time, in 1756, Tu rgot published th e article on "Etymology"in the E n c y c l ~ p k d i e . ~ne learns from it that "etymology, like all conjecturalarts, is mad e up of two parts: the a rt of form ing conjectures or suppositions,an d the art of verifying th em -o r, in oth er wo rds, inventions an d criticism."Below, basing himself on the traditional use of analogies, Turgot states whatcould be th e rule of all etymological free assoc iation, when he advises researchersto devote themselvesto meditation, or, to put it perhaps a little better, to engage in that careless form ofrevery in which the mind seems to give up its right to summon its thoughts to pass inreview before it , and to contemplate, in the midst of this apparent confusion, a crowdof unexpected images and juxtapositions, produced by the rapid fluctuation of ideas,which are brought about, one after another, by connections as hard to discern as theyare numerous. Thus one has , not the rules of invention, but the preparations necessaryfor anyone who wants to practice any form of invention. Here we have only to applyit to etymological problems, indicating the most striking connections and the mainanalogies which can serve as a foundation for plausible conjecture^.^

Michaelis, in the passaged cited above, identifies "language" with "archivesthat flame cannot destroy, an d that cannot perish unless the nation as a wholeis destroyed." Turgot, by contrast, sees in etymology the possibility "of re-storing, to some extent, lost languages. . . . Th e weakest gleams are valuable,especially when they are th e only ones."

We will return shortly, in connection with a text by Dante, to the "lost lan-guage," which was "forgotten" because of the great confusion of Babel. Butin the nineteenth century a great many writers would see Sanskrit as one ofthe possible identities of this language, w hich was described as "incom parable ."

In his Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier of 1808, Friedrich Schlegeldrew on all th e powers of the new natu ral science to cre ate unsuspected philolog-ical visions, not for the first time. In the course of the nineteenth century,historians would understand nature as the divine incarnation of providentialrule. In Schlegel, the new sciences of nature that announce the possibility ofnew sciences of man are specifically designated as, among others, geology,mineralogy, and comparative anatomy. Eventually they would be joined by

7 . J. D. Michaelis, De l'influence des opinions sur le langage, et du langage sur les opinions(Brem en, 1762), 29-30 (italics mine ).8. 1772 edition, vol. 17.9. Ibid., 498 (italics mine).


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8 M A U R I C E O L E N D E Rthe "linguistic paleontology9' of Ado lphe Pictet.Io This appeal t o the naturalsciences served to legitimate philology, a you ng discipline which fo un d it hardto disentangle itself fr om the field of religion. N ietzsche was on the m ark whenhe said, echoing Novalis, that philology was to a great extent the heir, oftenwithout realizing it, of the interpretation of the revealed Text of the Bible.

Let us return to etymology: to th e way in which au tho rs have often questionedits legitimacy, even its effectiveness, though they continued to take it into ac-cou nt, an d even used it as a proof a nd , in any event, as one inore very ordinaryinstrument of persuasive rhetoric.

William Jones did not invent the idea of a n "Indo-Europe an" languag e, buthe signed its academic identity card in his well-known discourse of 2 February1786, in which he emphasized the affinity of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. Atthe start of his third discourse On the Hindus he proclaimed:Etymology has, n o dou bt , some use in historical researches; but it is a medium of proofso very fallacious, that, where it elucidates one fact, i t obscures a thou san d, an d m orefrequently borders on the ridiculous, th an leads to an y solid conclusion; it rarely carrieswith it an y internal power of conviction fro m a resemblance of sou nds or similarity ofletters; yet ofte n, where it is wholly unassisted by these adva ntag es, it ma y be indisputablyproved by extinsick evidence."Jones did not deprive himself of the opportunity to play with morphologicalresemblances, as he did when he drew p arallels between the names of classicaldeities and those he discovered in Hindu texts. Nonetheless, he insists hereo n the deceptive side of etymological arg um en t, which "obscures" even as it"elucidates." This chia roscu ro version of etym ology is an efficient means ofseduction. It operates as a diversion and has more th an one thing in com mo nwith the evasive movem ents of per sua sion -tha t is, the Greek pe ith o, whoseinnumerable twists, turns, and effects Marcel Detienne has described so wellin Le s Ma ttres de veritP en G rkce archaQ ue. H e points ou t that "Peitho is oneaspect, and a necessary one, of Aletheia [Truth]"; persuasion is essential forthe truth, the Greek name for which evokes forgetfulness (Lethe). "What ispersuasion, then?" asks Detienne. "In mythical thought, Peitho is a divinity,omnipotent over gods as well as men: only Death can resist her."I2 Here healludes to a fragment of Aeschylus. D etienne also shows th at Peitho has "honey-worded enchantments" at her disposal (Aeschylus, Prometheus, 172).

One might think that this has to do only with ancient, mythical ways ofthinking. But it remains to be determined if a reading of the founding textsof nineteenth-century com para tive philology and linguistics will m ak e it possibleto detect a narrow frontier between what are conventionally designated by thetwin terms logos and mythos. My research on the themes of The Languagesof Par adise tried to show tha t there was a permeable m em bran e, and that the

10. On these points see the chapters on Renan, F. Max Miiller, and Pictet in The L.anguagesof Paradise.11. W . Jones, "The T hird Discourse," Asiatic Researches [I7881 (Lo ndon , 1799); for this textand its context, see The Languages of Paradise, 6ff., 149 n. 29.

12. M. Detienne, Les M artres de v erite en Grece archahue (Paris, 1967), 62.


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9U R O P E , O R H O W T O E S C A P E B A B E Ltraffic between science and religion was continual. More important, the casesof R enan a nd M ax Miiller both reveal, tho ug h o n different levels, how scienceand religion supported one anot he r-a nd also how, in the last century, newclerical ideas enable religion to base itself on science, and vice versa.I3I close this introduction with a quotation which could serve as an epigraphto the work I carried ou t on problems of the original language in my seminarsat theE cole des Ha utes Etudes e n Sciences Sociales. A t the start of the fourteenthcentury, Dante mocked in his De vulgari eloquentia the inhabitants of tinyvillages who cherished the belief t ha t they possessed the secrets of th e lang uageof Paradise and spo ke the language of Adam . A s an example, he cited P ietra-mala, a lost hamlet somewhere between Florence and Bologna. In the samepassage, in De vulgari 1.6, Da nte, in describing the language of A da m , speaksof "the idiom which, one think s, was used by the m an w ithout a mo ther, the m anwithout milk -the ma n who experienced no childhood an d no growing up."

This morta l dream of escaping the mother's milk, this drea m of n ot havingbeen born e by a wo ma n, seems t o me to provide a n illuminating poetic formula-tion, and one that nicely illustrates the Adam itic seductions that did so muchto inspire the national, and later nationalist, search for an original language.I stop here, at the p oint where a connecting road might start-one that wouldenable us to pass f rom etymology to auto chtho ny, fro m the origin of languageto the imagined birth of a nation, from the man with no mother . . . to theman born from the ea rth, to those old myths of autochthony whose "benefits"Nicole Lo rau x has described so well.I4 Th e passage from one set of themes t othe other, the way in which etymology and autochthony can follow the sameroutes, was explicitly described by P i r e Louis Thom assin in 1690, in LaMbthoded'ktudier et d'enseigner chrestiennement et u tilement la Grammaire, ou les Languespar rapport a I'Ecriture sainte en les reduisant toutes a lJH&breu.Debates about the origin of the oldest European language have often turnedinto discussions of the primordial languages of humanity. In the garden ofEden, was an oriental o r occidental, a northe rn o r southe rn, language spoken?The answer t o this question, which was asked w ith great force during the Renais-sance, molded beliefs about the origin of a European linguistic community.Leibniz, remembering th e writings of Becanus, op ted f or Flemish, the G ermaniclanguage which had "as m any a nd m ore m arks of som ething primitive as He -brew itself."ls

In the background, orienting in various ways the questions and answers ofscholars, the Holy Scriptures tell the story of a G od w ho created the world in13. As two extreme cases one could cite those of Lou is Pasteur a nd C ardin al Nicholas W iseman.For further illustrations see the chapters on Renan, Pictet, Miiller, and Grau in The Languagesof Paradise.14. N. Loraux, "Les benefices de I'autochthonie," Le Genre humain 3-4 (1982), 238-253.15 . G. W. Leibniz, Nou veauxess aissur I'entendement humain [I7041 in Oeuvresphilosophiques

I, ed. P . Jane t (Paris, 1900), 243. For van G or p, called Go ropiu s Becanus, see below. This articlepresents an augmented version of a text published by Flammarion Press, L'Esprit de I'Europe,ed. A . Compagnon and J . Seebacher (Paris, 1993).


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10 M A U R I C E O L E N D ERsix days, speaking several words of a language which dispelled the originalchaos. G od , the efficacious W or d, bestowed speech upo n a singular creature,different from all the others, that is, huma nkind . In tur n, h um ank ind imposeda name o n the other creatures. But no one knows the language of Adam andEve anymore.16 A t Babel, confounding the sounds a nd senses, God struck hu-manity with a great amn esia, a forg etting of the first wo rds. Since then no thingcan be as it was. The plurality and opacity of idioms are substituted for theunity of an immediate and transparent language. Caught in the tempest ofconfusion, mortals in order to communicate must hereafter strive to find com mo nwords.

I. J A P H E T H I C E U R O P EFrom the Flood to Babel, another humanity is put in place; Noah is its newancestor, with his thre e sons by whom "the w hole earth was peopled" (Gen.9.1).In Genesis, the multiplication of languages corresponds t o the g eographic distri-bution of nations "after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, andafter their nations" (Gen.10.31). This great human diaspora is organized ac-cording to a geography of malediction and benediction closely associated withNoah's shameless drunkenness. H is son H am does not hesitate, according tothe C hristian exegetes inspired by Phi lo of Alexan dria," to expose publicly hisFather's obscenity by laughing and making f un of his nudity. H a m thereforesees his cursed descendants become "servant of servants . . . unto his brethren"(Gen.9.25); the Chu rch F athe rs, w ho had read Josephus,18 attribu te the peoplingof Africa to him. To his two brothers who "went backward, and covered thenakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw nottheir father's nakedness" (Gen.9.23), tradition grants two other continents.Shem, marked in Genesis by his privileged link to the e ternal Eloh im, receivesAsia. Japheth, whose Hebraic name evokes "beauty" as well as "openness,"the "wide space" of a legacy capable of "dilation" and "expansion," will be the

16. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, IX , 1, 11, ed. M . Reydellet (Par is, 1984), 39, emphasizesthe difficulty of know ing th e language that G od used "at the beginning of the world when he says:Fiat lux." And Dante, in his De Vulgari Eloquentia I , 9 , 6 , ed. G. B. Squarott i (Turin, 1983),414, writes that th e confu sion of Babel was nothing other than "the forgetting of the first language"(post confusionem illam qu e nil aliud fuit qu am prioris oblivio). If in th e Divine Comedy (Paradise,XX VI, 124), he points ou t tha t the language of Ad am a nd Ev e was entirely extinguished, elsewherein the De Vulgari (VI and VII), taking up an old argument (see below, note 28), Dante affirmsthat the original language was saved by Heber and his family. For this episode, see below andnote 42.17. Quaestionesetsolutionesin Genesim 11, 71, ed. C . Mercier (Par is, 1979), 316; Desobrietate1, 6 and 32 (Paris , 1962), 128-130, 142. On this subject, see the commentaries of M . H arl, LaBible d'Alexandrie, La GenBse (Paris, 1986), 142-143. Josephus also speaks of "laughter" and"obscenity." See note 18.

18. Flavius Josephus, Antiquite's judai'ques, I, 6, 2-3, ed. E. Nodet (P aris, 1992), 39-42. O nthe impact of this "curse," the metaphoric weight of which still informs discussions on Africatoday, see J.-L. Amselle's discussion in Cahiers d'e'tudes africaines XXXI, 1-2= 121-122 (1991),7-8 (issue entitled "La Malediction").


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11U R O P E , O R H O W T O E S C A P E B AB ELfather sf Europe. For the readers of the Septuagint, the Greek translation ofthe Old Testament, the etymological fiction of a "Euru-opa," meaning "widevision," could serve to confirm the provid ential amb ition of this continen t which"sees far" (eurus, ops). Since Hecataeus of Miletus in the sixth century B.C.the Greeks had divided the world into three parts: Africa, Asia, and Europe.From this point on , this ancient geography was christianized thank s to the newbiblical ancestors of humanity.lg

Combining these strategies of appropriation of old biblical promises withthe desire to integrate pa gan knowledge and myths in orde r t o better assimilatethem, the early Church recognized the three sons of No ah-S hem , H am , andJapheth-under the names Cronos, Titan, and JaphethaZ 0apheth, the mostbellicose of the sons of Uranus (sky) and Gaia (earth), progenitor of a line ofrebels, thereafter pu rsued his career as an energetic pioneer. Th us we encounterhim again in the Christian Eu rop e of the last centu ry at the head of a civilizationcombining two strains of memory, "Semitic" and "Aryan" or "Jap(h)ethic,"the inequality of w hose valences is exacerbated when R ena n associates the titanicfigure of Japheth with the v ictory of P r ~ g r e s s . ~ ~

In Josephus, the descendants of Shem go forth and populate "Asia to theIndian Ocean"; the sons of Japheth advance "in Asia to the river Tanaib (theDon) and in Europe to Gadeira cadi^)."^^ According to the detailed "littleGenesis" (the Boo k of Jubilee , comp osed undoub tedly in the second centu ryB.C.), "all tha t is to the north [of the D on] belongs to Japh eth and all that isto the south belongs to Shem." If it is hot in the country of Ham, the legacyof Japheth includes "a great land in the north" where it is cold. "As to thecoun try of S hem , it is neither h ot, no r cool, but tem pered by cold and heat."23

This linguistic geography inspired the church fathers. To it Cassiodorus';Histo ry of the G ot hs (sixth century)- know n only by the summary of his con-

19. A mong th e Christian texts offering interpretations of Shem a nd J ap he th, see, for example,Saint Augustine, De civitate Dei XVI, 1-111, ed B . Dombar t , A . Ka lb , G . Bardy , and G. Combes(Bruges, 1960), 176-194; Saint Jerome, Liber de nominibus hebraicis, in J . P . Migne, PatrologiaLatina (hereafter referred to as P . L.) 23 (1883), 11, col. 828: Sem, nomen, vel nominatus; col.824: Japheth, Latitudo; see also Saint Jerome, Liber Hebraicarum Questionum in Genesim, inibid., col. 998-999. Also see E . M ang eno t, "Genese, propheties m essaniques" in Dictionnaire dethdologie catholique (1920), V I, col. 1212-1213. Som e indications regarding the Greek term "Eu-r6p2" are found in the Kleine Pauly (1975), 11, col. 446-449. See also Hecataeu s of M iletus, inthe same lexicon, 11, col. 976-980.

20. Oracles Sybillins, 111, 105ff., ed. J Geffcken (Leipzig, 1903), 55ff. Books 111, IV, a n d V a reattributed t o a Jewish source. Theset o f twelve boo ks (most of whicha re written in Greek hexameter)was compiled and prefaced by an anonymous Christian author. See the modern French editionof V . Nikiprowetzky, published in La Bible: Ecrits intertestamentaires, ed. A. Dupont-Sommer andM. Philon enko (Paris, 1987), 1037-1 140.21. Ernest Renan, L'Avenirde la science, in Oeuvres compl2tes, ed. H . Psichari (Paris , 1949),111, 753.22. Josephus, Antiquitds, I , V I , 1-4, 36-43.

23. Jubilees, VIII, 10-30, transl . A. Caquot, in Ecrits Intertestamentaires, 675-678. F or th ediscrepancy in representations of the earth between Josephus and the Book of Jubilees, cf. F.Schmidt, "Naissance d'une geographie juive," in Moise gdographe: Recherches sur les reprdsenta-tions juives et chrdtienne de I'espace, ed. A. Desreumaux and F. Schmidt (Paris, 1988), 16-27.


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12 M A U R I C E O L E N D E Rtem porary Jor dan es -as well as the writings of Isidore of Seville adde d a na-tional dimension, expressed as a utopian discourse on the origins of Europe.The theoretical landscape is transformed: it is now of a great mythical islandnamed Sca ndza , "which is like the factory of th e tribes (oficina gentium ) orthe womb of nations (vagina nationum ), from which the Goths a re said to have

Cass idorus/Jo rdanes specifies, dur ing the 550s when these paragra phswere written, tha t a t "the beginning" it was fro m this island tha t th e nation ofthe Goths "burs t fo r th and swarmed like bees over European t e r r i t ~ r y . " ~ ~

A few decades later Isidore described the Goths as a primordial "nation"because he considered their tribe t o be bo rn of t he first division of peoples aft erthe Flo od. H e then assures us tha t the Scythians and Go ths "derive their origin"fro m M agog, the second son of J ap he th. Isidore stresses again that the descen-dants of Japheth "possess the middle part of Asia and all of Europe to theBritannic Ocean."26

This natio na l knowledge of peoples and their languages, this way of m agni-fying Gothic ancestors, transforming them into parents of a new biblical hu-manity, no doubt inspired more than one linguistic construction in medievaland modern Europe.

11. FROM FLEMISH T O HEBREWHe nceforth the genealogical com petition to establish ance stors is coupled withthe conceptualizing of languages over the longue d u d e . The foregrounding oflinguistic criteria, stimulating the idea of an original prototype common toEurope's various idiom s, incited certain au tho rs to rethink the ce ntral positionof Hebrew . Th e classification of languages into "families," th e atte m pt to discerntheir modes of filiation, of diversification and of alteration, also permittedDa nte to systematize a particular diachrony. In his Vulgar Eloquence, writtenat the beginning of the fou rteenth century, D ante asks his readers to "take intoconsideration9' he natu ral a nd historical transfo rm ation of dialects varying "inspace and in time."27 This kind of ob servation of the development of idiomsis accom panie d in ma ny au tho rs by theoretical speculations which seek to recog-nize, in one or an oth er regional dialect, the sublime, original langu age. (Dan tehimself deemed such speculation "obscene," ridiculing all who believed thathis or her m aternal language "is the sam e as tha t which Ada m spoke."28)

24. Jordanes, Getica, IV , 25, ed. T. Momm sen (Berlin, 1882), 60. Fo r analysis and contextualiza-tion of the se passages, see J . Svennung, Jordanes und Scandia: Kritischexegetische Stud ien (Stock-holm, 1967), 208ff.; G . Dagron a nd L. Marin, "Discours utopique et recit des origines," Annales:Pconomies, sociPtPs, civilisations 26 (March-April, 1971), 290-327. For Cassiodorus and Jordanes,see A. M omigliano, "Cassiodorus an d Italian Culture of His Time," Proceedings of the BritishAcademy 41 (1955), 207-245. K . Po mia n underlines the impo rtance of this l i terature in L'Europeet ses nations (Paris, 1990), 23ff.25. Jordanes, Getica, I , 9, 55-56.26 . Isidore of Seville, Etymologies IX , 2, 26-37. In this volume, M. Reydellet observes that

Isidore does not appear to make distinct use of gens an d natio, 42 , note 25.27 . Dante , De Vulgari eloquen tia, I , 9, 7 , 416.28 . Ibid., I , 6, 2 , 396.


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13U R O P E , O R H O W T O E S C A P E B A B E LNearly three centuries later, the Swedish author Andreas Kempe published

a treatise entitled The Languages of Paradise (1688). In this satire, Kempemocks scholarly disputations which attem pt t o determ ine the language of thefirst Edenic conversations between God, Adam, Eve, and the ~erpent.~ 'Speculations of this kind did not prevent auth ors f rom paying m inute atten-tion to the roots of words and their pronunciation. By means of an ethno-linguistics which ascertained phon etic similitudes and differences, m anipu latedterms by composing and decomposing them, and finally appealed to them toprove an ultim ate truth with th e aid of Cratylean etymologies, the scholars ofthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rewrote the history of the origins ofhuman speech in a way that would be consistent with the expectations of acontine nt in search of a fu ture . Each region of Europe30 thu s had its doctors"of Languages of Parad ise," or specialists in the study of so me of their Babelianderivatives. The Flemish "labora tory" was particula rly exemplary in these m at-ters of linguistic autochthony.

The eponymous hero of the old Japhethic continent was thus able to takeup service again under the pen of a physician, Ja n van G orp , called G oropiusBecanus (15 18-1572), wh o published his Origines Antw erpianae in 1569.31 orreasons both national an d theological, Becanus, at work in the Low Countriesriven by tensions between C atholics and P rote sta nts , reacted against the privi-leging of Frenc h an d Sp anish. In a c ountry w here the use of Flemish cou ld bea form of resistance, Becanus adopted a radical position by affirming that"Cimbrian," the ancestor of Dutch , was the primordial language from whichHebrew derived. If few scholars followed him o n this point , if a great num bercriticized his daring etym ologies, they nonetheless gran ted him so m e credit, asLeibniz was still to d o at the beginning of the eighteenth c entury. By playing withwords, Becanus contributed t o the form ation of a mode of lexical man ipulationwhich gave rise to new forms of linguistic comparativism.Tak e, fo r example, Japheth's first son, Gom er. T o associate his name inti-mately with that of the Cimbri and the Cimmerians, whom he took to be the

29. For information and bibliography on Kempe, see Olender, Languages of Paradise, 1 .30. For a "European Tour" of these questions and many others, see A. Borst, Der Turmblau

von Babel: G eschichte der Me inun gen iiber Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Volke r I-IV(Stuttgart , 1957-1963). On Pier Francesco Giambullari 's search for the "origin of the Florentinelanguage," which he links with an Etruscan language, related to the Hebraic and Chaldean lan-guages, see Giambullari, "Origine della lingua Fiorentina," in Le Leziono ed I1 Gello (1546) , inBiblioteca Scelta di Opere italiane antiche e moderne (Milan, 1827), XXII, 223-224. See also C . G .Du bois, "Posterite des langues d'Aram : I'hypothese semitique dans l 'origine imaginee de I' ttrusqueau X VIem e siecle," in L'he'breu au te mp s de la Rena issance, ed . I. Zinguer (Leiden, 1992 ), 129-1 53.

31. For information on the l ife and work of J , van Gorp, see Eduard Frederickx, IoannesGo ropiu s Becanus (1519-1573) (Louvain , 1973); G . J . Metcalf, "The Indo -European Hypothesisin the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in Studies in the Histo ry o f Linguistics: Traditionsand Paradigms, ed. Del l H. Hymes (London, 1974 ), 233-257; D. Droixhe, La linguistique etl'appel de I'histoire (1600-1800): R atio nal ism e e t re'volutions positivistes (Paris , 1978), see index;A. Grafton, "Traditions of Invention and Inventions of Tradition in Renaissance Italy: Anniusof Viterbo," in his Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science,1450-1800 (Cambridge , Mass . , 1991), 99-101.


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14 M A U R I C E O L E N DE Rancestors of the Aduatici, founde rs of An twe rp, Becanus assumed th at th e firstletter of G om er, the Hebrew girnmel, had been pronounced in the past like aGreek kappa. Then, by a play of permutations and of slippages of relatedlette rs (th e c og na ta e litte ra e of V a r r ~ ) , ~ ~e hypothesized sim ilarities authoriz inghim to establish correspondences between G om er an d C imb ri. Finally, recallingthat gime r is a conjugated form of the verb gom er which means in Hebrew "tofin ish" or " to complete ," he concluded by wri ting Gimer, id e ~ t p e r f e c i t . ~ ~hissense of a "perfect accomplishment" conform s rigorously to the role of "foundinghero" that Becanus assigns to Gomer, the Cimmerian34 on of Japheth. Re-garding this "biblical adaptation" of the mythical ancestors of Europe whichprospered in the following generations, Turgot wrote in 1756 in the article"Ctymologie" in the Encyclopkdie: "One sees all the patriarchs of the Old T esta-ment and their history, another sees only Swedish or Celtic heroes."35

Another image, another tactic. The author of the Origines Antwerpianaerecognizes in the Ph rygian becos the Flemish becker, he who ma kes bread, the"baker." He therefore gives an unexpected continuation to the tale told byHe rodotu s of a certain Psamm etichus who searched for the identity of the mostancient people. After having decreed that two newborn babies be isolated, thepharaoh enjoins the shepherd who is feeding them never to address a singleword to the m . T he story tells how the infants, reaching the age of two, "spokethe word becos." Since it is thu s tha t the Phryg ians designate "bread," Psam m eti-chus concedes the anteriority of the Phyrigians to the Egyptians, whom hepreviously ha d considered "the mo st ancient of all men." F or his par t Becanusconcluded fro m this evidence th at th e Flemish are the most ancie nt, since "theycall the men who ma ke their bread Becker. Th e King's experiment shows there-fore that the language of the inhabitan ts of Antwerp must be considered to bethe most ancient, and therefore the most noble (lingua antiquissima . . . nobi-lissima) ."36

32 . De Lingua latina, ed. P . Flaubert (P aris, 1985), VI , 3ff., where Var ro acknowledges hisdebt to Chrys ippus , Ant ipa ter , an d the Grammarians . For the cognatae litterae, P . Diderichsen,"The Found ation of Com parati ve Linguistics: Revolution or Contin uation ? ," Studies in the Historyof Linguistics, 280-281, 288-290.

33 . Origines An twerpian ae..., (Antwerp, 1569), Book IV, 375; for the cognatae litterae, 374.34. The l inks between Japheth, Gomer, and the Cimmerians developed over the centuries .Renan writes in his Priere sur I'Acropole that Ja phe th was bor n "to barbarian parents , among the

good and virtuou s Cimmerians who live on the shore of a gloomy ocean . . . ," Oeuvres comp letes(Paris , 1948), 11,755. Th e decoding of cuneiform texts "intensifies" these questions by tran sform ingthem. E. D horme, the editor of the Ancien testament (P aris , 1956-1959), writes in his classic studyon "the people born of Japheth, according to chapter 10 of Genesis," "il est incontestable queGorner correspond a Gimirri des textes cuneiformes, que les Grecs ont rendu par Kimmerioi, lesCimmeriens," E. Dhorme, Recueil. Dhorme. Etudes bibliques et orientales (Paris, 1951), 169.35. Encyclopedie, o u Dictionnaire universe1 rai so nn ide s connaissances humai nes (1 772), X VI I,5 19. Concerning m anuscripts, the attrib ution of the article "Ctymologie" to T urgo t, and the influenceof th e "President d e Brosses" o n these pages, see Oeuvres de Turg ot, ed . G. Schelle (Par is, 1913),I, 473-474, note a, an d 516-517, no te a. For t he "linguistic primitivism of Tur go t," see D. D roixhe,"Le Primitivisme linguistique de Turgot," in Primitivisme et mythes des origines dans la Francedes Lumieres (1680-1820) (Paris, 1989), 59-86.

36. Herodotus, Histoire, ed. P. E. Legrand (Paris , 1936), 11, 2, 65-67. J . van Gorp, Origines. . . Praefatio (no pagination: 11,12), and b ook V, De Indoscythica, 551-552. See also idem. ,


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15U R O P E , O R H O W T O E S C A P E B A B E LIf Becanus believed that the speech of his ancestors could be ranked with

Phrygian, he deemed otherwise for Hebrew , a younger language. H e illustratedthis by means of the term "iain," which designates the intoxicating wine ofNoah; he claimed that this Hebrew term is a derivative of "wain," Flemish"wine."37 Bu t, if Hebrew is not the oldest idiom , why then is the Bible writtenin this late dialect rather th an in the primo rdia1,lan guag e of Becanus's ances-tors -th e langua ge he calls "Thouts or Thuyts," equivalents of "Douts" w hichin Flemish designates that which is "the most an~ient"?'~ is answer: it is nomo re necessary th at th e Bible be written in t he sublim e, original langua ge thanthat Christ be born to rich parents.39

What remains to be explained is the forgetting of the original language.Whether it was Hebrew or Flemish, how c ould it escape the co nfusion of B abel,how did it transcend the punishment meted out upon the nations for their"impious pride"?40 How can th e recovery of w hat h ad been irrepa rably lost tohumanity be explained? Saint Jerom e and Saint Augustine recounted how H eber,the great gran dson of Sh em , preserved in his family "the language th at all oncespoke" and that has since been called "h e b r a i~ . " ~ 'ante similarly rememberedthe language of Heber and his sons the Hebrews: "To them alone [Hebrew]remained a fter Babel in order tha t o ur Redeemer, w ho was to be born amongthem as a man, would cause the language of grace rather than the languageof confusion to come t o fruition."42

To save the Adamic language from Babel, Becanus made another choice:he substituted Jap heth for She m, the father of the north ern languages for thatof the oriental languages. Becanus justified this transfer of linguistic competenceto Jap heth by Noah's preference fo r this son , who was also the most Euro pea nof the biblical heroes. Thus, while the other members of his numerous familyleft to construct the tower of dissension, Noah kept Japheth the beloved andhis family close to him.43 Since this time the Cimm erians and the Cimbrians,as well as the Scythians-descendants of Gom er, son of Jap he th and grandsonOpera . . . Hactenus in lucem non edita: nempe, Hermathena, Hieroglyphics . . . (Antwerp,1580), boo k IV, 62.37. Van Gorp, Origines . . . , 555 @ro Wain Jain discere).

38. Zbid., 460: "Nostre lingua hactenus dicimus Tho uts vel Thu yts, vel media littera Dou ts velDuyts, Douts autem idem est quod maximus natu . . . "; see also ibid., 463; much later, in thenineteenth century, a book by the Baron of R yckhold, Philippe d e Bounam, Flamand, langueprimordiale (Liege, 1868) praises Flemish as a primor dial langua ge. See also D. Dro ixhe, "Languesmeres, vierges folles," in Le Genre humain 21 (a volum e entitled "Langues m 6galomanes") (1990),141-148.39. Van Go rp , Origines,537: "Neque vero necesse fuit, sacra Dei ora cul a, prim o et perfectissimosermone perscribi, non magis, quam Christum et ditissimis nasci, et vestitu uti, et victu splen-didissimo."40. S aint Aug ustine, De civitate Dei, XVI, 11, 1, 222.

41. Saint Jerom e, Liber Hebraicarum Quaestionum in Genesim, P.L., 23, vol. 2 (1883), col.1004: Heber, a quo Hebraei; saint Augustine, De civitate Dei, XVI, 11, 1-2 (222-224).42. Dante, De vulgari, I , 6 , 6 , 400.43. Van Go rp, Origines, 532-534.


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17U R O P E , O R H O W T O E S C A P E B A B E L'910 nation in the world has ever made such expeditions as have the nordicpeoples, ever seeking th e sun."49 Co nsta ntly surpassing themselves in their con-quests, "they often uttered the following cry: OVER, OP, AN (over, on, to.-ward)" which van Scrieck translated in the text as "Oultre," "Plus oultre" (far-ther, farther still). Over hill and dale, crossing rivers, mountains, and valleys,their heroic cry (EU VE R-O P, UB ER -O P, OVE R-O P which finally gives EU R-OP) "is henceforth known to all peoples under the name of Europe." Themeaning of the term is transp arent an d obvious: "Europe is a Belgian an d virilename.

111. T H E I N D O - E U R O P E A N I DE AIn the company of Mylius (1612), Salmasius (1643), de Laet (1644), Boxhorn(1647), Stiernhielm (1671), Jager (16861, and many others, van Scrieck set inmo tion a labo ratory in which the scholars of the seventeenth century inventedan orig inal l inguistic community for E ~ r o p e . ~ 'aph eth was both the mythicalpatro n an d the conceptual too l, since it was he who , thanks to the confusionof Babel, permitted the conceptualizing of th e history of a m other ton gue whichtransfo rme d itself over time into innum erable dialects. For those wh o attem ptedhenceforth to co mpare a nd analyze them, to highlight their comm on structure,these idioms bear a family resemblance: they all bear the "Japhethic" stampwhich, in its scarcely historicized version, received the name "ScythianW-alanguage close to old Iranian, but about whish almost nothing else was thenknown. As for the Scythians, a barbarous people existing on the margins ofcivilized huma nity, H ero do tus only knew of them "by hearsay."52The Scythians,Asiatic nom ads who ignore the frontiers between Euro pe an d Asia- two conti-nents once entrusted t o the "western" son of N oah -were also associated withthe Caucasian provinces close to M ou nt A rar at, where the biblical Ark is sup-posed to have run agro und.53Greek and Hebrew accounts thus converge toward

49 . Ibid . , I, 38, 15: "Gheen Natien des Weerelts en hebben oyt ghedaen sulche Velt-tochtenals de Noordersche volcken, alt ij ts opclim n~e nde aer de Sonne."50. Ibid . , I, 38, 15: "Europen is een Veldegen ende mannelicken naem." For other semanticplays on the word "Europe" in van G orp's Origins, see book IX (Venetica et Hyperbo rea), 1045.51. For general information, see D. Droixhe, La Linguistique, index. See also G. J. Metcalf,

"The Ind o Eu rop ean H ypoth esis," 223ff. (on Jag er), 244-245 (on Mylius), 245-246 (on Scrieckius),246-248 (on D e Laet), 248-249 (on Stiernhielm). For Bo xhor n, see D. D roixhe, "Boxhorn's BadReputation: A Cha pter in Academic Linguistics," in Speculum. H istoriographiae linguistics. Kurz-beitrage der IV. Internationalen Konferenz sur Gechichte der Sprachwissenschaften, ed. K . D .Dutz (Miinster, 1989), 359-384. For J. de Laet, see relevant sections of G. Gliozzi, Adanlo et ilnuovo mondo. La nascita dell'antropologia come ideologia coloniale: dalla genealogie biblichealle teorie razziali (1500-1700) (Flore nce, 1976), 454-478 and index. Finally, D . Droixh e has shar edwith me his essay, which will app ear as "De La et, G rotius, les langues america ines et la tr ad iti on m is-sionaire."

52. Herodotus, Histoires (Paris, 1945), IV , 16 fo r "the imaginary Scythians"; if o ne wants ananswer to the question "where is Scythia?" see F. Hartog, Le miroir #Herodote: Essai sur larepresentation de l'autre (Par is, 19801, esp. 48-51. For a su mm ary of ou r curre nt knowledge ofScythian linguistics, see A. Christol, Des Scythes aux OssPtes (Rouen, 1986).53. Gen.8.4.


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18 M A U R I C E O L E N D E Rthese mythical heights: was not one of the f our sons of J ap he th the Prometheusof the C a u c a s ~ s ? ~ ~nd w as not the latter's son named Deucalion, the "GreekNoah" saved from a floodsSwh o, in the eyes of writers searching fo r a Euro peanlinguistic community, belonged to the same ancient context as the Scythianlegends?

Transform ed into an artifact serving the purposes of a n abstract prototype,"Scythian" therefore became, for several gene rations of scholars, a designationwhich grounded th e hypothesis of a c om mo n source; this was the case not onlyfo r Greek and Latin as well as Germ anic an d Persian, b ut also, soon thereafter,for those Indian languages in which Becanus had already found traces of the" I n d o s c y t h i a n ~ . " ~ ~

Even as J osep h Jus tus Scaliger, in his Dia triba de Europa eroru rn linguis,vigorously opposed the Scythian hypothesis and therefore also opposed theidea of a single origin for all Euro pean languages,j7 everywhere in France,England, Spain, the Low Countries, Scandanavia, the regions which wouldlater mak e up Italy an d Ge rm any, an d elsewhere as well, the debates continued.Scholars tried both to evaluate the resemblances and differences among theEuro pea n languages, and to determine the surviving elements of th e originalHebrew in the post-Babel dialects. Th us, underlining the con cordances betweenthe idioms born of Scythian, Father Thomassin justified them by "reducing"all languages to Hebrew. In his Mkthode, published in 1690, he wanted todemon strate that the proximity between Hebrew a nd Fren ch is such tha t "onecan truthfully say that they a re fundam entally the same language."s8 In thearticle entitled "langue" in the Encyclopkdie, BeauzCe, who had read Thom assincarefu lly, followed his lead when he wro te in 1765: "The mo dern languagesof Europe, which adopted analytic construction, remain much closer to theprimitive language than did Greek or Latin. . . . Thus our modern language

54. Concerning the relations between the classical myth of Prometheus and the Caucasianlegends of enchained giants, see G . Charach idze, Promdthde' ou le C aucause. Essai de m ythologiecontrastive (Paris, 1986).55. For a version of Noah assimilated to Deucalion, see, for example, Philo of Alexandria,De praemiis et poenis, 23, ed. A Beckaert (Paris, 1961), 53.56. J . van Gorp , Origines, book IV (De Zndoscythica),449-457. On paradise situated in India ,482-483.57. J. J. Scaliger, Diatriba de Europaerorum linguis (1599). Published posthumously in Opus-cula varia, antenac non edita (Paris, 1610). Thu s, f or J. J . Scaliger, "the eleven mo ther languages"of Europe are "so distinct, that they have no affinities with one another"; if, then, for him "the

dialects, . . . the branches of a mother language, have some affinity with one another," on theother h an d, "between m other languages themselves, the re is neither affinity nor correspondence."I am citing here the French edition of Des langages des peuples de I'Europe, published as anaddition t o E. Brerewood, Recherches curieuses sur la diversite des langues et religions, en touteslesprincipalesparties d u monde (P aris , 1640), 332-333, 336. This text reappears in J ean Lesnier's1662 edition of the Recherches curieuses (Saumur, 1662).

58. Louis Thom assin, La Mkthode d'etudier et d'enseigner chrestiennement et utilement la Gram-maire, ou les Langues par rapport 6 I'Ecriture sainte en les rkduisant tou tes 6 I'Hebreu 116901(Paris, 1693), 12. D. Droixhe, "Le comparatisme du P. Thomassin," to appear in FlorilegiumHistoriographiae Linguisticae, ed. P . Swiggers and J , de Clercq (Louvain, forthcoming ).


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E U R O P E , O R H O W T O E S C A P E B A B E L 19[French], as well as Spanish and English, are linked to Hebrew through C e l t i ~ . " ~ ~If Beauzee can com bine the new rigors of a history of languages with the timelesssacrality of H ebrew , if he can satisfy the dem ands of a com parativ ism attentiveto the fact th at "languages have com mon prope rties and differential charactersW6Owhile a t the sam e time affirming the infallibility of Scrip ture, it is because fo rhim "reason and revelation are, so to spea k, two different canals throu gh whichthe waters of a single source flow."61

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Leibniz cast a glance backwardand forward over linguistic scholarship. Nothing escaped him: neither "thewomb of the peoples"62of Europ e in the Histo ry of the G oths of Cassidorus/Jo rd an b , n o r th ose "strange e ty m o lo g ie ~ " ~ ~hich inspired in him the inv entionof the verb "goropiser," nor the recent hypotheses of Salmasius, Boxhorn, orStiernhielm. He certainly subscribed to their Scythian theories. For how elsecould he understand the origins "of Latin and Gr eek, which share many com mo nroots with the Germanic and Celtic languages," if not by formulating "theconjecture" of a "commo n origin of all these peoples descended fro m the Scyth-ians. . . . Fo r, all these languages of Scythia share many com mo n roots withone another and with our language^]."^^ Like his friend the semitic scholarHiob Ludolf, Leibniz did not believe that Hebrew was the origin of all lan-guages. Faced with the lingua japh ethica , ancestor of Eur ope an idiom s, it wasbetter to recognize anothe r linguistic branch stemm ing fro m the sam e "comm onfund": "the Aram aic languages," which include Ara bic, Chaldean , Syriac, Ethi-opian, and Hebrew (which in Europe has become "a sort of dialect" like anyother).(j5When Leibniz, heir to a tradition more tha n one hundred years old, assertedthe existence of a Jap(h)ethic entity66 o n th e basis of a linguistically unitedEur ope, he underlined th e demonstrative value of an explanatory model of thelinguistic affinities discernible in so many idioms separa ted by time a nd space .Speaking of the ancient "Scythians," he did not hesitate to recall that it is aquestio n of a "generic termn6' designating "these distant b arb ari an s." L ittlematter: passion for the mother tongue, so often intertwined with that for the

59. Encyclopedie(s.v. Langue), XXV, 635-636. Tho mas sin is cited on p. 619. Fo r the attribu tionof this article to Beau zee, see S. Auroux , LJEncyclopPdie: % ramma ireJ'et "Languel'au XV IIIem esi2cle (P aris , 1973), 49-50, note 1 .60 . Encyclopedie, 638.

61 . Ibid. , 619.62 . G. W. Leibniz, Brevis designatio med itationu m de Originibus Gen tium . . . , in MiscellaneaBerolinensia ad incrernentum scientiarum (Berlin, 1710), 14: "gentium vagina."63 . G. W. Leibniz, Nouveau x essais, 243.64 . G. W. Leibniz, Brevis, 14 and No uvea ux essais, 238. A lso see H. Aarsleff, "The Stud y andUse of Etymology in Leibniz," in H. Aarsleff, Frotn Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study ofLanguage and Intellectual History (Lon don , 1982), 84-100.65 . G. W. Leibniz, Brevis, 4. For H. Ludolf, see A. Borst , Der Turtnbau von Babel, 111, 2 ,

1475-1479.66. In the Brevis, Leibniz writes Japeticae and Japeticum to designate that w hich the "northern"languages have in comm on. H e restores, however, these "septentrional" idioms to Japhetum (p .4 ) ,associated in the same para grap h, it is true, with Japetum and his son , Prom etheus, both of whom"the mythologists situated" close to the Caucasus (ad Caucasum).

67. Leibniz, Brevis, 8: "Barbari illi remontiores . . . generali vocbulo."


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20 M A U R I C E O L E N D E Rnatio n, incited even Leibniz-who was otherwise quite cosmop olitan in out-lo ok - t o e qu ate in 1697 "the origin of the peoples and the languages of Eu rope"w i th " th e a r ch a ic G er man l an g ~ ag e . " ~ ~

Beginning with the sixteenth ce ntury, m ore and more systematic comparisonsbetween G ermanic and Persian term s, and the rapprochem ents of the languagesof Ind ia, Greek, an d Latin , developed in the wake of the spice trade and theprose ly tiz ing effo rts o f the J e ~ u i t s . ~ ~ne of them, produced by Father GastonCoeurdoux in investigating the structura l correspondences between G reek, Latin,and Sanskrit, proposed a Japhethic solution which henceforth brought togetherEurope and a new East. In a memoir written in 1767, known t o the membersof the Acadkm ie Royale des Inscriptions e f Belles Lettres but not publisheduntil 1808, Coeurdoux wrote:J a ph e th , eld est so n o f N o a h , left th e p lain o f S h i ~ ~ a r , ~ ~ringing with him a third ofhumanity, and headed toward the West, which was his share. His seven children nodo ub t became the heads of as ma ny great families, each on e of which mu st have spokenon e of the new original languages, such as Latin, Gre ek, Slavonic, etc. May I be permittedto add to these Sanskr i t (samskroutam);it is as deserving as any other language, givenits extensive reach, to be numbered among the primitive languages. The suppositiontha t I am making will perhaps later become a real it^."^'

68. Leibniz, Unvorgreifliche Ged anken, be treflend die Ausiiburzg u nd Verbesserung der teutschenSprache (1698), inDeutsche Sch ri f ten , e d . G . E . G uh ra ue r, (Berlin, 1838), I, 465, note 46: "Stecketalso im Teutschen Alterthum und sonderlich in der Teutschen uralten Sprache, so iiber das Alteraller Griechischen und Lateinischen Biicher hinauf steiget, der Urspr ung de r Europaischen Volkerund Sprachen, auch zum Theil des uralten Gottesdienstes, der Sitten, Rechte des Adels . . . " Inthe same text Leibniz insists in various ways on this precedence of "the German language," thestudy of which "will enlighten all of Eu rope ," 464, note 4 2. For the general historical and intellectualcontexts, see W . W. Ch ambres, "Language and Nationali ty in Ge rma n Preromantic and RomanticThought ," Modern Language Review 41 (1946), 382-392 (for Leibniz, 382-383).69. Und oub tedly one of the oldest testimonies known is the letter of the Jesuit Thom as Stephens,signed at Go a o n October 24, 1583, destined f or his brother Richard. T he document is conservedin the manuscript section of th e Bibliotheque Royale in Brussels (3353-3361, 61-63, thr ee folios,recto verso): "Linguae harum regionum sunt permultae. Pronuntiationem habent non invenustam,et compositionem latinae graecaeque similem; phrases et constructiones plane mirabiles, Literaesyllabarum vim hab ent, q ua e toties variantu r, quoties consonantes vo calibus, vel mu tae cum liquidiscombinari possunt" (on theverso of folio 63). For a presentation of this docu me nt and bibliography,see G Schurham mer, "Der M arathidichter Thomas Stephens S.I. ," Ar ch ivu m historicurn SocietatisIesu 26 (1957), 67-82. This letter, together with other documents, is mentioned by J . -C . Muller,"Quelques reptres pour l 'histoire de la notion de vocabulaire de base dans le precomparatisme,"Histoire, Ppistemologie, langage 6 (1984), 38ff. For Germano-Persian comparative work, see W .Streitberg, "Zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft," Indogermanische Forschungen 35 (1915), 182-196; D. Droixhe, Linguistiqueet I'appel, 76ff. For th eletter of May 18, 1584, whe reFr . Raphelengiusindicates to Justus Lipsius so me examples of t he affinity of G erm anic and P ersian ter ms, see M.A . Nauwelaerts , Iusti Lipsi Epistolae (Brussels, 1983), 11, 121-123, no te 349. For ge neral info rm a-tion, see W . Halbfass, India and Europe: A n Essay in Understanding (Alb any, N.Y., 1988). Forthe m ore specifically philosophical aspects, see R. P . D roit, L'oubli de I'Inde: Une am nesie philo-sophique (Paris, 1992).70. Th e valley where the confus ion of Babel takes place in Genesis (1 1.2).71. M em oires de Littdrature, tires des registres de I'Academie R oyale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Pari s, 1808), XL IX , 664. For Pkre Coeu rdou x, see S. Mu rr, "Les conditions d'emergencedu discours sur 1'Inde au Sikcle des Lum itres," Purusrtha7 (1983), 233-284; see also his thesis, L'Indephilosophique entre Bousset et Voltaire, esp. vol 2., L'indologie du Pere Coeurdoux: Strategies,apologetique et scient~j7que Paris, 1987).


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EURO PE, OR HO W TO ESCAP E BAREI. 2 1H istor iogr aph y has w illingly recognized the scientificity of this "sup position,"

this "reality," calling it "the Indo-European hypothesis" ever since WilliamJones on February 2, 1786 marvelled at the linguistic kinship between Sans krit,Gre ek, and La tin. This affinity is such, wrote Jo ne s, "that no philologer couldexamine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from somecommon source, which, perhaps, no longer exist^."'^

IV. FROM "THE (INDO-)EUROPEAN RACE" TO THE "ARYAN" MYTH"Indo-European," often considered very close to, or even identified, with thesacred language of Ind ia (Sa nskrit), too k over th e role played by tlle S cythianhypothesis for krudits of the sixteenth and severitee~ith enturies as the meansof explaining the origins and transform ations of Euro pea n la ngua gesS y3 s theIranist James Da rmesteter wrote in 1890, speak ing for "the scientific ortho do xyof Europe," the Vedas was the text thanks to which we can reach "the firstrevelation of religious though t to the Indo-E urop ean race. Th e Vedas therebyperformed the function of a sacred book which describes the religious originsof the race, t,he Aryan Bible."74

From Jones to DumCzil, by way of Bopp and Saussure, there was no shortageof "found ing fathe rs" to insist on the "algebraic" charac ter of the word "Ind o-European," which they used as a heuristic term rather than to refer to thechosen language of some ancestor of Europe. On this point, Dum~zil ,n hisLeqon inaugurale given a t the Coll8ge deFran ce on December 1,194 9, remindedhis audience that linguists and other specialists in Indo-Eu ropean issues "know9'-but p erhaps it would have been mo re judicious to say 6'should know 9'-"thatthe living, dramatic reconstruction of what the language or civilization of the

72. W. Jones, "On the Hindus. The Third Discourse," in Asiatic Researches 1 [I7881 (1799),423. French translation in "Troisikme Discours anniversaire," Recherches asiatigues o~rMdmoiresde la Societe' etabl ie azc Bengale, transl . A . La bau me , with notes by Langlks, Cuvier, Delambre,Lamarck, and Olivier (Paris, 1805), I , 508-509. For context and bibliography, see Olen der, Lan-guages, 6-7. 31; G . Can non , Th e Lif e and M ind of O riental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Fatherof M odern L inguistics (Cambridge, Eng., 1990).

73. A n especially explicit form ula tion of the Scythian hypothesis is fou nd in 1654, in the preface,signed by Georgius Ho rn ius , of the posthum ous publication of Boxhorn's Originum Gallicarum, o nth e first page of his address ad lectorem: Vidit [he means Boxhosn] innumera vocabula, G ermanis ,Latinis, Graecis et aliis per Europam nationibus, communia esse. Inde conjiciebat a communifonte eam simili tudinem profectam, id est eadem o m ni un ~llarum gentium origine . . . Quare aliavia rem aggressus, communem quandam linguam, quam scythicam vocabat, matrern graecae,latinae, germanicae et persicae statuit, ex qua illae velut dialecti, prosiciscantur. See G . Bonfa nte,"Ideas on the Kinship of Eur opea n languages from 1200 to 1800," Cahiers d'histoire mondiale 1(Janu ary, 1954), 691, who translates and comm ents this passage, as does D. Droixhe, Ln lir~guistigueet rappel, 97. For Boxhorn, see above, note 38. In his "Discours sur IVtude philosophique deslangues," read at the Academic Frangaise, the first Tuesday of December, 1819 (Paris, 1820),Volney speaks for his time by saying, "For one hun dred years, th e language of this Scythian nation,discovered by our European scholars in the sacred books of India under the name of Sanscsit, ismo re and m ore recognized to be the basis, not only of an infinity of w ords, bu t of the gramm aticalsystems of a multitude of ancient and modern languages," Volney, Oeuvres compl6tes (Paris ,1821), I , 424.

74. J . Darmesterer, "Rapport annuel," Journal Asiatigue (July-August, 1890), 25.


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22 M A U R I C E O L E N D E Rcom m on ancestors had been like is impossible , since noth ing can replace do cu-mentary evidence, and there are no document^."^^ However, tho ugh they havebeen reiterated for more tha n two centuries-if one takes into considerationthe nuanced fo rm ulati on of Jones's phras e- these calls to elementary historicalrigor have not prevented archaeologists and linguists devoted to the Indo -Europeancause fro m searching, sometimes frantically, for the "Aryan9'origins of Eu rope .Despite these longings to discover religious, linguistic, racial, a nd political prin -ciples for a W estern civilization finally libe rated f rom all Hebr aic he ritage (aswhen Renan states that "There is noth ing Jewish about J e ~ u s " ~ ~ ) ,his nostalgicsearch fo r [Aryan] origins was nonetheless inspired by a biblical para digm an dthe fascination long exercised by Hebrew, Adam's language. This point wasnot missed by the eminent Indologist Sylvain Levi who, at the beginning ofthis centu ry, observed how muc h the "old biblical prejudices," still intact, con-tinued to exert influence on theories relating to "the childhood of Aryan lan-guages," or "the primitive Aryan."77

"The Arya n my th," in its strictly academic phase, was therefore able in theChristian West of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to result in a twindevelopment, paradoxical but not necessarily contradictory. T he modern scholarswhose opinions we have surveyed represented the culmination of a historio-graphical effort aiming to discover for itself splendid ancestors in a n East purgedof all semitism; they favored the idea of a W est superior t o all other civilizations,but were nonetheless able to iden tify themselves with the a ctors of a providen tialhistory whose rules were decreed, once and for all, by biblical r e v e l a t i ~ n . ' ~

But the history of the twentieth century is marked by the searing memoryof a noth er use of the "Aryan myth,"79 when th e words "Aryan" an d "Semite"could, during the Nazi occupation of Eu rope, be made t o correspond to "jurid-ical" categories ord aini ng the death or the right to life of m illions of Euro pea ns

75. G . Dumezil , L e ~ o nnaugurale a la chaire de civilisation indo-europdenne du Collgge deFrance," December 1 , 1949 (Paris, 1950), 6-7. See the warnings of Bop p and Saussure cited inM. Olender, Languages, 13-16. O n the positions of A. M omigliano a nd C . Ginzburg, as well asthe reply of Dumezil, see the notes in M. Olender, "Georges Dumezil et les usages 'politiques' dela prehistoire indo-Europ eenne," in Les G recs, les Rom ains et nous. L'antiquitd est-elle mo dern e?,ed. R. P . Droit (Paris , 1991); D. Eribon, Faut-il brliler Dumdzil? Mythologie, science etpolitique(Pari s, 1992). Fo r a response to this article in the f orm of a supplementary analysis by C . Ginzburgand a reply by D. Eribon, see Le M onde des debuts (September and October, 1993). See also C.Malamoud, "Introduction," Histoire des religions et cornparatisme: la que stion indo -eur ope enn e,Revue de /'Histoire des Religions 208 (April-June 1991), as well as the rest of the issue.

76. In the second of four manuscript notebooks of Renan in the Bibliothkque nationale, seeNouvelles Acquisitions Fran~aises11. 484. See P . Alfaric, Les manuscrits de la "Vie de Jesus"d'Ernest Renan (Paris , 1939), 26. For other such references to R enan as "between the Aryan andthe Semite," see my chapter 4 on the subject in Languages, 51ff.77. S. LCvi, La Grand e Encyclopedie (1885-1902), IV, 46, "Aryens 11, Linguistique," Fo r textand co ntext, see Olender, Languages, 138-139.78. For the insistence on this providential vision of history in Indo-European studies of thelast century, see, for example, my chapter 6 on Ado lphe Pictet , Languages, 93ff.

79. See the classic L. Poli akov , Le M yth e aryen: Essaisur lessources du racisme et des national-ismes (Paris, 1971). Similarly, fo r an examination which covers other texts an d contexts, fro m P icodella Mira ndol s to G obin eau, see G . Gliozzi, Le teorie della razza nell'eta m ode rna (Tor ino, 1986).


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23U R O P E , O R H O W T O E S C A P E B A B E Laccording to whether one classified them under one or the other "rubric." Th eprogramm ed de ath of Jews and Gypsies-wh o spea k, afte r all, a language veryclosely resembling San skrit ! -cou ld thus be "legitimized" by discourses inspiredby old racist theories taken f rom the writings of specialists in Indo -Eu rope anstudies.

But despite this terrible use of the concept "Aryan" and the notion of anIndo-Europea n origin to E uropean language a nd th oug ht, even today, a t thisfin-de-siscle in Euro pe as in the United States , certain w riters -- linguists, mythol-ogists, prehistoria ns, archaeologists an d anthrop ologists, u niversity professo rsor journalists, pursue this type of sp eculatione80 rom the old "Aryan m yth,"devoted to the romantic quest for a paradise lost, a programmatic vision ofthe fu ture of t he West c an be derived. Exalting reaso n, the scientific spirit, andthe technical know-how that resulted from them, Michel Poniatowski attri-butes the intellectual talents and the ontological and genetic characteristicswhich trigger the great excurses of the human mind solely to the Indo-Euro-peans. In a work entitled L'Avenir n'est k r i t nulle pa rt , he wrote in 1978concerning the Indo-Europeans:Yet it is there that we find o ur t ru e sources, com mon to all of Euro pe. There our primit iveculture lies. These men, w ho directly preceded us, ar e, throug h u s, a t the origin of themo st advanced civilizations an d sciences, of the mo st refined art a nd c ulture. Th e spiritof invention, of creation , led them , over the course of 4,500 years, by a lon g, progressivemarch, fro m the shores of the Balt ic to the mo on.*'We also learn here that "linguistic studies have brought to the fore the factthat the languages of the Indo-Europeans served as an incomparable tool,perfectly adapted to abstract reasoning and to the development of the sci-e n c e ~ . " ~ ~n these same pages, finally, Poniatowski did not hesitate to clarifyhis ow n rem ark s, which, like the title of the wo rk, scram ble the time and space ofthe historian by transforming th e "Indo-Euro pean people" into the "white race"!83Like Michel Poniatowsky, Professor Jean Haudry thinks that what distin-guishes the Indo-E uropea ns is their capacity t o organize political life.84 f, re-garding those prehistoric times for which Dumezil reminded us "there are nod o c ~ m e n t s , " ~ ~aud ry concedes th at "it is difficult to trace a m oral portrait ofthe Indo-Europeans, that is, to determine the constants of their character,"he nevertheless proposes a tableau of the "Indo-European people" and of its

80. Inf orm atio n relative to the current French context (1972-1991) is in Ole nde r, "Georges Dumezil"(see no te 75, 191-228). Fo r supplem entary in for ma tio n, see my "Usages 'politiques' de la prehistoireindo-europeene," in Racisrne et modernit&, ed . M . Wieviorka (Par is, 1993), 85-97.81. Michel Poniatowsky, L'Avenir n'est Pcrit nullepart (Paris, 1979), 149.

82 . Ibid., 153.83. Ib id . , 149-150.84. Jean Haudry, Les Indo-EuropPens ("Que sais-je?' collection, no. 1965) (Paris, 1981), 11.

B. Sergent reviewed this book in Annales E. S. C. 37 (1982), 669-681: "this absurd chronicle . . .which sets us back forty years." See my summary in Archives de sciences .sociales des religions(April/June, 1983), 163-167, and further analysis in Olender, "Georges Dumezil," 208-213.

85. See note 75 above.


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24 M A U R IC E OLENDER"destiny" which leads it "to action, to effort, to the surpassing of selfena6ustas rhetorically, he both denies and affirms the legitimacy of th e use of the no tionof "race9'when he wrote: "if th e expression 'the Indo -Eu rop ean race'is im pro per,it is on th e o ther h and legitimate t o try to determ ine the physical types repre-sented by th e l o ~ ~ t o r s . ~ ' ~ ~even lines further, in the same "Que sais-je?'onthe Ind o-E uro pea ns, he wrote: "For these testimonies agree in designating theNordic race, if not as the whole people, at least as its superior stratum." Inthis same context, after having cited Tacitus's famous Germania, the authorrefers t o the writings of H. F. K. Giineher, one of the official racial scientistsof the Third Reich and the so-ca lled " 'Founder of German Racia l T h o ~ g h t . " ~ ~Haudry, of whom it is app rop riate t o recall tha t he is a member of the "Conseilscientifique du Fr on t Mationale" fou nded in 1989 to "enlighten its president,Jean-Marie Le Pe n," had already endeavored to show in 1979-against alllinguistic evidence- in ano ther work entitled Ind o-E uro pea n tha t "the (Indo -European) vocabulary of commerce is almost non-existent, which is naturalgiven the poor development of th is activ ity among the % n d o - E ~ r o p e a n s ." ~ ~husform ulate d, this assertion that com mercial vocations are reserved "by n ature"fo r certain peoples, is based up on a n ethnic presupp osition rather th an a scien-tific or historical "cause." Th e goal of this maneuver is without do ub t to distancethese illustrious a nces tors fro m all com me rcial practice which m ight sully theircivilization a n d, thus, to preserve intact the image of E urop e in the G olden Age.A corollary to the search for an Aryan paradise is the attribution to the

Indo -Euro peans and to those whom one has chosen to consider as their descen-dan ts of a m onop oly o n resources necessary fo r progress (such as "abstraction,""m e t a p h y s i ~ s , ' ~keflection," "science," "technique," and politic^,"^^) an d of alltha t the mastery of these practices supposes in planetary (and even inter-planetary)superiority for those wh o have exclusive use of them . Such a n attrib utio n wasmade already in the nineteenth century,The young Ferdinand de Saussure made no mistake in writing, in 1878: "thereis certainly, at the root of research o n the Aryans, in descriptions of this peopleof the golden age, revised and embellished by the imagination, the almostconsc ious d ream of an idea l h ~ m a n i ty . " ~ 'ore th an a century after the w riting

86. Jean Ha udry , Les Indo-EuropCens, 8, 40, 6887 . Ibid. , 122.88. The distinguished title, "Begriinder des deutschen Rassegedankens" is found on the page

presenting his works, for example, a t the end of the volume, in H . F . K. Giinther, Die nordischeRasse bei den indogermanen Asiens (Munich, 1934), cited in Jean H au dry , L'Indo-EuropCen, 124,note 40.

89. Jean Haudry, L'Indo-europCen (iQue sais-je?" collection, n o. 1798) (Paris, 1979), 120. Seethe review by J . -L . Perpillou in Bulletin de la SocietC de Linguistique de Paris, vol. 76, fasc. 2(1981), 113-114, which I cite at length in my article "Georges Dumezil," 212-213.

90. For illustrations and references for the nineteenth century, see M. Olender, Languages, 65 ,note 27; for general information, see the chapters of the same work on Renan and Pictet. Forcontemporary examples, see M . Olender, "Georges Dumizil," 206ff.

91. F. de Saussure, Journal de Geneve (17 Ap ril, 1878), 3, col. 1 , recalling the w ork of hisfirst master, A. Pictet.


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25UROPE, OR HOW TO ESCAPE BABELof this sentence, such "research" follows its uninterrup ted course. C ertain Aryan-ophiles of tod ay ad d to it the denial of th e existence of the gas chamb ers andthe kind of death suffered in the Nazi extermination camps.Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

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Maurice Olender, Europe, Or How to Escape Babel