Philhellenism, Germanophilia, and Max Meyerhof’s (1874–1945) Greco-Arabic ‘Tradition’ of Science

The idea that medieval Islamicate science is part of a linear, unified ‘tradition’ linking Greco-Roman antiquity and European modernity owes its popularization to the Jewish orientalist Max Meyerhof’s essay “From Alexandria to Baghdad”, originally delivered in German to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1930. Although under-theorized by Meyerhof himself and his later critics, the “fairly unbroken Tradition” (Tradition…ziemlich lückenlos) of Greco-Arabic science articulated in his paper has precipitated instrumentalist approaches to Islam that value this cultural complex for its service to the ‘West’ – however capaciously defined. Drawing on sociological theorizations of ‘tradition’, this lecture considers how Meyerhof places Islamicate science in a retrograde temporality that removes Islam from the slipstream of science’s professed forward trajectory, or progress. I give rhetorical texture to Meyerhof’s essay by reading it in light of his clinical rivalry with other local practitioners in Cairo, to which he had emigrated as a newly minted ophthalmologist. Furthermore, my examination of the political orientation of Meyerhof’s Prussian Academy audience will show that “From Alexandria to Baghdad” offers an apologetic for not just his medical but also historical expertise as a German Jew at the disciplinary margins of the academic center of Weimar Germany.