“God’s Chosen Land”: The Bible, the Emergence of Indology and Constructions of “the Orient”

Tracing the imagined relations between Israel and India in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European thought, this article shows how the notion of an “Indian origin” emerged within German Bible scholarship. It argues that since the late eighteenth century, these two spaces have been bound together: The search for the Indian origin of culture and spirituality always refers to the biblical source.
Johann Gottfried Herder’s perception of the Morgenland (Orient) does not distinguish between the biblical Orient and Asia – that is, India and the Far East. The poetic ideology of early romantic writers such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Schlegel and Joseph Görres fused the traditional image of the East as the place of Revelation with the longing for Asia as the motherland of culture. The search for the roots of the German language and the German people, together with other developments in linguistics, compelled German intellectuals of the nineteenth century to search for the authentic roots of their people’s mythology farther east, in India.