From the bazaars of Cairo to the Holy Mountain in Andechs. By Carsten Walbiner
Channel: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Date: 2022-08-15

From the bazaars of Cairo to the Holy Mountain in Andechs – the story of a mostly forgotten collection of Oriental manuscripts kept in a Bavarian monastery

Among the collections of Oriental manuscripts kept in German institutions that of St Boniface’s Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Munich, holds a special place. It’s not only one of the few collections that owes its establishment to an initiative of the Catholic church, but also until today owned and maintained by an ecclesiastical body. The collection comprises 137 codices, mostly written in Arabic but there are also texts in Turkish, Persian, Ethiopian, Coptic and Syriac. Most of the works belong to the Islamic literature in its different branches; a sub-collection of three dozen manuscripts is of Eastern Christian provenience. The core constituents of the collection are the slightly more then 100 manuscripts the Franciscan Father Arsenius Rehm (1738-1808) had purchased – most likely in preparation of a teaching post in Germany – while being between 1769 and 1776 chaplain of the French embassy in Cairo. The collection was first housed at the Franciscan monastery Frauenberg in Fulda. In the middle of the 19th century, it was sold at the instigation of the Orientalist and Theologian Daniel Bonifaz (von) Haneberg (1816-1876) to St Boniface’s Abbey in Munich Haneberg was a member of. In Haneberg’s time the collection grew to 133 volumes. During World War II the manuscripts were brought to Andechs monastery outside Munich where they are kept until today.
The paper will mainly focus on the history of the collection and the efforts to document and study it. This process started with Rehm who provided part of the manuscripts he had purchased with short comments on their content. Shortly before the transfer of the collection to Munich, the Orientalist Johann Gildemeister (1812-1890) created a so far unpublished “Verzeichniß” (register) of the 107 manuscripts when being for a short time in Fulda. It’s rather a concise handlist than a comprehensive description but contains nevertheless valuable information on several works. Haneberg later added a couple of mainly bibliographical notes to Gildemeister’s catalogue and briefly documented the additions to the collection. Furthermore, he exploited a handful of the manuscripts for his research work. After his death the collection fell widely into oblivion. Only recently, actively supported by the owning institution, the scientific exploration of the collection in Andechs has started thanks to the efforts of the Research Center for the Christian Orient at the Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. The results of these activities achieved so far will shortly be referred to.

Dr Carsten Walbiner is currently working for the DAAD in Beirut/Lebanon. He is a member of the Research Center Christian Orient at the University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.